“And will you fight, then? And will you take lives with your own hand?”
Valentine peered closely at her, wondering if she were somehow trying to goad him; but no, her face was gentle as ever, her eyes were loving. He said, “You know I will never shed blood. But there are other ways of waging war. I have fought one war already, with you beside me: did I take life then?”
“But who were the enemies then?” Sleet demanded impatiently. “Your own dearest friends, misled by Shapeshifter deception—Elidath—Tunigorn—Stasilaine—Mirigant—all of them took the field against you. Of course you were gentle with them! You had no wish to slay such as Elidath and Mirigant: only to win them to your side.”
“Dominin Barjazid was no dear friend of mine. I spared him also: and I think we will be glad of that now.”
“An act of great mercy, yes. But we have a different sort of enemy now—Shapeshifter filth, cruel vermin—”
“Sleet—!”
“That is what they are, my lord! Creatures that have vowed to destroy all that we have built on our world.”
“On their world, Sleet,” said Valentine. “Remember that: this is their world.”
“Was, my lord. They lost it to us by default. A mere few million of them, on a planet large enough for—”
“And shall we have this tired dispute one more time, then?” Carabella burst out, making no effort to disguise her irritation. “Why? Is it not hard enough to breathe the blowtorch stuff that comes out of Suvrael, without straining our lungs in such futile talk as this?”
“I only mean to say, my lady, that the war of restoration was such a war as could be won by peaceful means, by open arms and a loving embrace. We have a different kind of enemy now. This Faraataa is consumed with hatred. He will not rest until we are all dead: and will he be won by love, do you think? Do you, my lord?”
Valentine looked away. “We will use whatever means are appropriate,” he said, “to make Majipoor whole again.”
“If you are sincere in what you say, then you must be prepared to destroy the enemy,” replied Sleet darkly. “Not merely pen them up in the jungle as Lord Stiamot did, but to exterminate them, to eradicate them, to end forever the threat to our civilization that they—”
“Exterminate? Eradicate?” Valentine laughed. “You sound prehistoric, Sleet!”
“He does not mean it literally, my lord,” Carabella said.
“Ah, he does, he does! Don’t you, Sleet?”
With a shrug Sleet said, “You know that my loathing of Metamorphs is not entirely of my own making, but was laid upon me in a sending—a sending out of that very land that lies ahead of us. But apart from that: I think their lives are forfeit, yes, for the damage they have already done. I make no apology for believing that.”
“And you would massacre millions of people for the crimes of our leaders? Sleet, Sleet, you are more than a threat to our civilization than ten thousand Metamorphs!”
Color surged to Sleet’s pale fleshless cheeks, but he said nothing.
“You are offended by that,” Valentine said. “I meant no offense.”
In a low voice Sleet said, “The Coronal need not ask the pardon of the bloodthirsty barbarian who serves him, my lord.”
“I had no desire to mock you. Only to disagree with you.”
“Then let us disagree,” said Sleet. “If I were Coronal, I would kill them all.”
“But I am Coronal—at least in some parts of this world. And so long as I am, I will search for ways of winning this war that fall short of exterminations and eradications. Is that acceptable to you, Sleet?”
“Whatever the Coronal wishes is acceptable to me, and you know it, my lord. I tell you only what I would do if I were Coronal.”
“May the Divine spare you from that fate,” said Valentine, with a faint smile.
“And you, my lord, from the need to meet violence with violence, for I know it is not in your nature,” responded Sleet, smiling even more faintly. He offered a formal salute. “We will be arriving shortly in Tolaghai,” he said, “and I must make a great many arrangements for our accommodations. May I have leave to withdraw, my lord?”
As Sleet moved off down the deck, Valentine stared after him a moment; then, shading his eyes against the harsh blaze of the sun, he stared into the wind at the southern continent, now a dark massive shape sprawling on the horizon.
Suvrael! The name alone evoked a shiver!
He had never expected to come here: the stepchild among Majipoor’s continents, forgotten, neglected, a sparsely populated place of barren and forbidding wastelands, almost entirely bleak and arid, so little like the rest of Majipoor as to seem almost like a slice of some other planet. Though millions of people dwelled here, clustered in half a dozen cities scattered through the least uninhabitable regions of the place, Suvrael for centuries had maintained only the most perfunctory of ties with the two main continents. When officials of the central government were sent off for a tour of duty there, they regarded it virtually as a penal sentence. Few Coronals had ever visited it. Valentine had heard that Lord Tyeveras had been there, on one of his several grand processionals, and he thought that Lord Kinniken once had done the same. And of course there was the famous exploit of Dekkeret, roaming the Desert of Stolen Dreams in the company of the founder of the Barjazid dynasty, but that had happened long before he had become Coronal.
Out of Suvrael came only three things that impinged on the life of Majipoor in any important way. One was wind: out of Suvrael at all months of the year poured a torrent of searing air that fell brutally upon the southern shores of Alhanroel and Zimroel and rendered them nearly as disagreeable as Suvrael itself. Another was meat: on the western side of the desert continent, mists rising from the sea drifted inland to sustain a vast grassland where cattle were raised for shipment to the other continents. And the third great export of Suvrael was dreams. For a thousand years now the Barjazids had held sway as Powers of the realm from their great domain inland of Tolaghai: with the aid of thought-amplifying devices, whose secret they jealously guarded, they filled the world with their sendings, stern and troublesome infiltrations of the soul that sought and found anyone who had done injury to a fellow citizen, or even was merely contemplating it. In their harsh and austere way the Barjazids were the consciences of the world, and they long had been the rod and the scourge by which the Coronal and the Pontifex and the Lady of the Isle were able to sustain their more benign and gentle mode of government.
The Metamorphs, when they made their first abortive try at insurrection early in Valentine’s reign, had understood the power of the King of Dreams, and when the head of the Barjazids, old Simonan, had fallen ill, they had cunningly substituted one of their own in the place of the dying man. Which had led then to the usurpation of Lord Valentine’s throne by Simonan’s youngest son Dominin, though he had never suspected that the one who had urged him into that rash adventure was not his true father but a Metamorph counterfeit.
And yes, Valentine thought, Sleet was right: how strange indeed that the Coronal now should be turning to the Barjazids almost as a suppliant, when his throne was once more in jeopardy.
He had come almost accidentally to Suvrael. In making their retreat from Piurifayne, Valentine and his party had taken a sharp southeasterly route toward the sea, for it would clearly have been unwise to go northeast to rebellious Piliplok, and the central part of the Gihorna coast was without cities or harbors. They emerged finally close by the southern tip of eastern Zimroel, in the isolated province known as Bellatule, a humid tropical land of tall saw-edged grasses, spice-muck swamps, and feathered serpents.
The people of Bellatule were Hjorts, mainly: sober, glum-faced folk with bulging eyes and vast mouths filled with rows of rubbery chewing-cartilage. Most of them earned their livelihoods in the shipping trade, receiving manufactured goods from all over Majipoor and forwarding them to Suvrael in return for cattle. Since the recent worldwide upheavals had caused a sharp drop in manufacturing ou
tput and a nearly total breakdown in the traffic between provinces, the merchants of Bellatule were finding their trade greatly diminished; but at least there had been no famines, because the province was generally self-sufficient in its food supply, depending largely on its bountiful fisheries, and such little agriculture as was practiced there had been untouched by the blights afflicting other regions. Bellatule seemed calm and had remained loyal to the central government.
Valentine had hoped to take ship there for the Isle, in order to confer on matters of strategy with his mother. But the shipmasters of Bellatule warned him sternly against making the voyage to the Isle just now. “No ship’s gone north from here in months,” they told him. “It’s the dragons: they’re running crazy out there, smashing anything that sails up the coast or across toward the Archipelago. A voyage north or east while that’s going on would be suicide and nothing else.” It might be six or eight months more, they believed, before the last of the dragon swarms that lately had rounded the southeastern corner of Zimroel had completed their journey into northern waters and the maritime lanes were open again.
The prospect of being trapped in remote and obscure Bellatule appalled Valentine. Going back into Piurifayne seemed pointless, and making any sort of overland trek around the Metamorph province into the vast middle of the continent would be risky and slow. But there was one other option. “We can take you to Suvrael, my lord,” the shipmasters said. “The dragons have not entered the southern waters at all and the route remains untroubled.” Suvrael? At first consideration the idea was bizarre. But then Valentine thought, Why not? The aid of the Barjazids might be valuable; certainly it ought not be scorned out of hand. And perhaps there was some sea route out of the southern continent to the Isle, or to Alhanroel, that would take him beyond the zone infested by the unruly sea dragons. Yes. Yes.
So, then: Suvrael. The voyage was a swift one. And now the fleet of Bellatule merchantmen, gliding steadily southward against the scorching wind, began its entry into Tolaghai harbor.
The city baked in the late afternoon heat. It was a dismal place, a featureless clutter of mud-colored buildings a story or two high, stretching on and on along the shore and interminably back toward the ridge of low hills that marked the boundary between the coastal plain and the brutal interior desert. As the royal party was escorted ashore, Carabella glanced at Valentine in consternation. He offered her an encouraging smile, but without much conviction. Castle Mount seemed just then to be not ten thousand miles away, but ten million.
But five magnificent floaters ornamented with bold stripes of purple and yellow, the colors of the King of Dreams, waited in the courtyard of the customs house. Guards in livery of the same colors stood before them; and, as Valentine and Carabella approached, a tall, powerful-looking man with a thick black beard lightly flecked with gray emerged from one of the floaters and began to walk slowly toward them, limping slightly.
Valentine remembered that limp well, for it once had been his. As had the body that the black-bearded man once wore: for this was Dominin Barjazid, the former usurper, by whose orders Lord Valentine had been cast into the body of some unknown golden-haired man so that the Barjazid, taking Valentine’s own body for his own, might rule in Valentine’s guise on Castle Mount. And the limp was the doing of the young Valentine of long ago, when he had smashed his leg in a foolish accident while riding with Elidath in the pygmy forest by Amblemorn on the Mount.
“My lord, welcome,” said Dominin Barjazid with great warmth. “You do us a high honor by this visit, for which we have hoped so many years.”
Most submissively he offered Valentine the starburst gesture—with trembling hands, the Coronal observed. Valentine was far from unmoved himself. For it was a strange and disturbing experience once again to see his first body, now in the possession of another. He had not cared to undergo the risk of having that body back, after the defeat of Dominin, but all the same it stirred a mighty confusion in him to see another’s soul looking outward through his eyes. And also it stirred him to see the onetime usurper now so wholly redeemed and cleansed of his treasons and so genuine in his hospitality.
There had been some who had wanted Dominin put to death for his crime. But Valentine had never been willing to countenance such talk. Perhaps some barbarian king on some remote prehistoric world might have had his enemies executed, but no crime—not even an attempt on a Coronal’s life—had ever drawn so severe a penalty on Majipoor. Besides, the fallen Dominin had collapsed into madness, his mind wholly shattered by the revelation that his father, the supposed King of Dreams, was in truth a Metamorph impostor.
It would have been senseless to impose any sort of punishment on such a ruined creature. Valentine, upon resuming his throne, had pardoned Dominin and had had him handed over to emissaries of his family, so that he might be returned to Suvrael. There he slowly mended. Some years afterward he had begged leave to come to the Castle to ask the Coronal’s forgiveness. “You have my pardon already,” Valentine had replied; but Dominin came anyway, and knelt most humbly and sincerely before him on audience day in the Confalume throne-room, and cleared the burden of treason from his soul.
Now, thought Valentine, the circumstances are greatly altered once again: for this is Dominin’s own domain, and I am little more than a fugitive in it.
Dominin said, “My royal brother Minax has sent me, my lord, to convey you to Palace Barjazid, where you are to be our guest. Will you ride with me in the lead floater?”
The palace lay well outside Tolaghai, in a cruel and doleful valley. Valentine had seen it now and then in dreams: an ominous, menacing structure of dark stone, topped with a fantastic array of sharp-tipped towers and angular parapets. Clearly it had been designed to intimidate the eye and inspire dread.
“How hideous!” Carabella whispered, as they neared it.
“Wait,” said Valentine. “Only wait!”
They passed within the great gloomy portcullis and entered a place that on the inside displayed no kinship to its forbidding and repellent exterior. Airy courtyards resounded to the gentle music of splashing fountains, and cool, fragrant breezes replaced the bitter heat of the outer world. As Valentine dismounted from the floater with Carabella on his arm, he saw servitors waiting with iced wines and sherbets, and heard musicians strumming on delicate instruments. In the midst of all waited two figures clad in loose white robes, one soft-faced and pale and round-bellied, the other lean, hawk-faced, tanned almost black by the desert sun. About the forehead of the hawk-faced one rested the dazzling golden diadem that marked him as a Power of Majipoor. Valentine scarcely needed to be told that this was Minax Barjazid, now King of Dreams in his late father’s place. The other and softer man was his brother Cristoph, in all likelihood. Both made the starburst gesture, and Minax came forward to offer Valentine a bowl of chilled blue wine with his own hands.
“My lord,” he said, “these are stark times in which you come calling on us. But we greet you in all joy, no matter how somber the moment seems. We are mightily in your debt, my lord. All that is ours is yours. And all that we command is at your service.” It was obviously a speech he had prepared with care, and the resonance and smoothness of his delivery showed careful rehearsal. But then the King of Dreams leaned forward until his hard and glittering eyes were only inches from the Coronal’s own, and in a different voice, deeper, more private, he said, “You may have refuge here as long as you wish.”
Quietly Valentine replied, “You misunderstand, your highness. I have not come here to take refuge, but to seek your aid in the struggle that lies ahead.”
The King of Dreams seemed startled by that. “Such aid as I can give is yours, of course. But do you truly see any hope that we can fight our way free of the turmoil that assails us? For I must tell you, my lord, that I have looked at the world very closely through this”—he touched his diadem of power—“and I see no hope myself, my lord, none, none at all.”
2
An hour before twilight the chanting
started again down in Ni-moya: thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of voices crying out with tremendous force, “Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thallimon! Thallimon! Thallimon!” The sound of that fierce jubilant outcry came rolling up the slopes of the outlying Gimbeluc district and swept over the quiet precincts of the Park of Fabulous Beasts like a great unstoppable wave.
It was the third day since the demonstrations in honor of the newest of the new Coronals had begun, and tonight’s uproar was the most frenzied so far. Very likely it was accompanied by rioting, looting, widespread destruction. But Yarmuz Khitain scarcely cared. This had already been one of the most terrifying days he had experienced in all his long tenure as curator of the park, an assault on everything that he considered proper and rational and sane: why should he now be perturbed over a little noise that some fools were making in the city?
At dawn that day Yarmuz Khitain had been awakened by a very young assistant curator who told him timidly, “Vingole Nayila has come back, sir. He is waiting at the east gate.”
“Has he brought much back with him?”
“Oh, yes, sir! Three transport floaters full, sir!”
“I’ll be right down,” said Yarmuz Khitain.
Vingole Nayila, the park’s chief field zoologist, had been exploring for the past five months in the disturbed areas of north central Zimroel. He was not a man of whom Yarmuz Khitain was greatly fond, for he tended to be cocky and overly self-satisfied, and whenever he exposed himself to deadly peril in the pursuit of some elusive beast he made sure that everyone knew just how deadly the peril had been. But professionally he was superb, an extraordinary collector of wild animals, indefatigable, fearless. When news had first begun to arrive that unfamiliar and grotesque creatures were causing havoc in the region between Khyntor and Dulorn, Nayila had lost no time mounting an expedition.
And a successful one, evidently. When Yarmuz Khitain reached the east gate he saw Nayila strutting busily about on the far side of the energy field that kept intruders out and the rare animals in. Beyond that zone of pink haze Nayila was supervising the unloading of a vast number of wooden containers, from which came all manner of hisses and growls and buzzes and drones and yelps. At the sight of Khitain, Nayila looked across and yelled:
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