Valentine Pontifex m-3

by Robert Silverberg

  “The blights will disappear when the crops they feed on, which are mainly not anything of any use to us, have perished. The new animals are few and the world is large, and the scientists assure me that they are unable to reproduce themselves, so we will be rid of them once their work is done. And I am less fearful of those decaying corpses than you. The scavenger birds will feed as they have never fed before, and we will build temples out of the mounds of bones that remain. Victory is ours, Danipiur. The world has been regained.”

  “You are too confident. They have not yet begun to strike back at us—but what if they do, Faraataa, what if they do? I ask you to remember, Faraataa, what Lord Stiamot accomplished against us.”

  “Lord Stiamot needed thirty years to complete his conquest.”

  “Yes,” said the Danipiur, “but his armies were small. Now the Unchanging Ones outnumber us greatly.”

  “And now we have the art of sending plagues and monsters against them, which we did not have in Lord Stiamot’s time. Their very numbers will work in their disfavor, once their food supplies run out. How can they fight us for thirty days, let alone thirty years, with famine pulling their civilization apart?”

  “Hungry warriors may fight much more fiercely than plump ones.”

  Faraataa laughed. “Warriors? What warriors? You speak absurdities, Danipiur. These people are soft.”

  “In Lord Stiamot’s day—”

  “Lord Stiamot’s day was eight thousand years ago. Life has been very easy for them ever since, and they have become a race of simpletons and cowards. And the biggest simpleton of all is this Lord Valentine of theirs, this holy fool, with his pious abhorrence of violence. What do we have to fear from such a king as that, who has no stomach for slaughter?”

  “Agreed: we have nothing to fear from him. But we can use him, Faraataa. And that is what I mean to do.”

  “In what way?”

  “You know that it is his dream to come to terms with us.”

  “I know,” said Faraataa, “that he entered Piurifayne foolishly hoping to negotiate with you in some way, and that you wisely avoided seeing him.”

  “He came seeking friendship, yes. And yes, I avoided him. I needed to learn more about your intentions before I could enter into any dealings with him.”

  “You know my intentions now.”

  “I do. And I ask you to cease spreading these plagues, and to give me your support when I meet with the Coronal. Your actions threaten my purposes.”

  “Which are?”

  “Lord Valentine is different from the other Coronals I have known. As you say, he is a holy fool: a gentle man, with no stomach for slaughter. His loathing of warfare makes him pliant and manipulable. I mean to win from him such concessions as no previous Coronal would grant us. The right to settle once again in Alhanroel—possession once more of the sacred city Velalisier—a voice in the government—complete political equality, in short, within the framework of Majipoori life.”

  “Better to destroy the framework entirely, and settle where we choose without asking leave of anyone!”

  “But you must see that that is impossible. You can neither evict twenty billion people from this planet nor exterminate them. What we can do is to make peace with them. And in Valentine lies our opportunity for peace, Faraataa.”

  “Peace! What a foul lying word that is! Peace! Oh, no, Danipiur, I want no peace. I am interested not in peace but in victory. And victory will be ours.”

  “The victory you crave will be the doom of us all,” the Danipiur retorted.

  “I think not. And I think your negotiations with the Coronal will lead you nowhere. If he grants such concessions as you mean to ask, his own princes and dukes will overthrow him and replace him with a more ruthless man, and then where will we be? No, Danipiur, I must continue my war until the Unchanging Ones have vanished entirely from our world. Anything short of that means our continued enslavement.”

  “I forbid it.”

  “Forbid?”

  “I am the Danipiur!”

  “So you are. But what is that? I am the King That Is, of whom the prophecies spoke. How can you forbid me anything? The Unchanging Ones themselves tremble before me. I will destroy them, Danipiur. And if you oppose me, I will destroy you as well.” He rose, and with a sweep of his hand he knocked aside his untouched wine-bowl, spilling its contents across the table. At the door he paused and looked back, and briefly allowed his shape to flicker into the form known as the River, a gesture of defiance and contempt. Then he resumed his own form. “The war will continue,” he said.

  “For the time being I permit you to retain your office, but I warn you to make no treasonous approaches to the enemy. As for the holy Lord Valentine, his life is forfeit to me. His blood will serve to cleanse the Tables of the Gods on the day of the rededication of Velalisier. Be wary, Danipiur. Or I will use yours for the same purpose.”

  6

  “The Coronal Lord Valentine is with his mother the Lady at Inner Temple,” said the hierarch Talinot Esulde. “He asks you to rest here this night at the royal lodging-place in Numinor, Prince Hissune, and to begin your journey toward him in the morning.”

  “As the Coronal wishes,” said Hissune.

  He stared past the hierarch at the vast white wall of First Cliff rising above Numinor. It was dazzling in its brightness, almost painfully so, nearly as brilliant as the sun itself. When the Isle first had come into view some days before on the voyage from Alhanroel, he had found himself shading his eyes against that powerful white glare and wanting to look away altogether, and Elsinome, standing beside him, had turned in terror from it, crying, “I have never seen anything so bright! Will it blind us to look at it?” But now, at close range, the white stone was less frightening: its light seemed pure, soothing, the light of a moon rather than of a sun.

  A cool sweet breeze blew from the sea, the same breeze that had carried him so swiftly—but not nearly swiftly enough to still the impatience that day after day mounted and surged in him—from Alaisor to the Isle. That impatience still rode him now that he had arrived in the Lady’s domain. But yet he knew he must be patient, and adapt himself to the unhurried rhythms of the Isle and its serene mistress, or he might never be able to accomplish the things he had come here to accomplish.

  And indeed he felt those gentle rhythms settling over him as he was conducted by the hierarchs through the small quiet harbor town to the royal lodging known as the Seven Walls. The spell of the Isle, he thought, was irresistible: it was such a tranquil place, serene, peaceful, testifying in every aspect of itself to the presence of the Lady. The turmoil now wracking Majipoor seemed unreal to him here.

  That night, though, Hissune found it far from easy to get to sleep. He lay in a magnificent chamber hung with splendid dark-hued fabrics of an antique weave, where, for all he knew, the great Lord Confalume had slept before him, or Prestimion, or Stiamot himself; and it seemed to him that those ancient kings still hovered nearby, speaking to one another in low whispers, and what they were saying was in mockery of him: upstart, popinjay, peacock. It is only the sound of the surf against the rampart below, he told himself angrily. But still sleep would not come, and the harder he sought it the wider awake he became. He rose and walked from room to room, and out into the courtyard, thinking to rouse some servitor who might give him wine; but he found no one about, and after a time he returned to his room and closed his eyes once again. This time he thought he felt the Lady lightly touch his soul, almost at once: not a sending, nothing like that, merely a contact delicate as a breath across his soul, a soft Hissune, Hissune, Hissune, which calmed him into a light sleep and then into a deeper one beyond the reach of dreams.

  In the morning the slender and stately hierarch Talinot Esulde came for him and for Elsinome, and led them to a place at the foot of the great white cliff, where floater sleds were waiting to carry them to the high terraces of the Isle.

  The ascent of the vertical face of First Cliff was awesome: up and up and up
, as though in a dream. Hissune did not dare open his eyes until the sled had come to rest in its landing pad. Then he looked back, and saw the sun-streaked expanse of the sea stretching off to distant Alhanroel, and the twin curving arms of the Numinor breakwater jutting out into it directly below him. A floater-wagon took them across the heavily wooded tableland atop the cliff to the base of Second Cliff, which sprang upward so steeply it seemed to fill all the sky; and there they rested for the night in a lodge at a place called the Terrace of Mirrors, where massive slabs of polished black stone rose like mysterious ancient idols from the ground.

  Thence it was upward once more by sled to the highest and innermost cliff, thousands of feet above sea level, that was the sanctuary of the Lady. Atop Third Cliff the air was startlingly clear, so that objects many miles away stood out as though magnified in a glass. Great birds of a kind unknown to Hissune, with plump red bodies and enormous black wings, circled in lazy spirals far overhead. Again Hissune and Elsinome traveled inward over the Isle’s flat summit, past terrace after terrace, until at last they halted at a place where simple buildings of whitewashed stone were scattered in seeming randomness amidst gardens of a surpassing serenity.

  “This is the Terrace of Adoration,” said Talinot Esulde. “The gateway to Inner Temple.”

  They slept that night in a quiet secluded lodge, pleasant and unpretentious, with its own shimmering pool and a quiet, intimate garden bordered by vines whose thick ancient trunks were woven into an impenetrable wall. At dawn, servitors brought them chilled fruits and grilled fish; and soon after they had eaten, Talinot Esulde appeared. With her was a second hierarch, a formidable, keen-eyed, white-haired woman. She greeted them each in a very different way: offering Hissune the salute befitting a prince of the Mount, but doing it in a strangely casual, almost perfunctory manner, and then turning to Elsinome and clasping both of her hands in her own, and holding them a long moment, staring warmly and intently into her eyes. When at last she released Elsinome she said, “I bid you both welcome to Third Cliff. I am Lorivade. The Lady and her son await you.

  The morning was cool and misty, with a hint of sunlight about to break through the low clouds. In single file, with Lorivade leading and Talinot Esulde to the rear, no one uttering a word, they passed through a garden where every leaf was shimmering with dew-sparkles, and crossed a bridge of white stone, so delicately arched that it seemed it might shatter at the most gentle of footfalls, into a broad grassy field, at the far end of which lay Inner Temple.

  Hissune had never seen a building more lovely. It was constructed of the same translucent white stone as the bridge. At its heart was a low flat-roofed rotunda, from which eight long, slender, equidistant wings radiated like starbeams. There was no ornamentation: everything was clean, chaste, simple, flawless.

  Within the rotunda, an airy eight-sided room with an octagonal pool at its center, Lord Valentine and a woman who was surely his mother the Lady were waiting for them.

  Hissune halted at the threshold, frozen, overcome by bewilderment. He looked from one to the other in confusion, not knowing to which of these Powers he should offer the first obeisance. The Lady, he decided, must take precedence. But in what form should he pay his homage? He knew the sign of the Lady, of course, but did one make that sign to the Lady herself, as one made the starburst sign to the Coronal, or was that hopelessly gauche? Hissune had no idea. Nothing in his training had prepared him for meeting the Lady of the Isle.

  He turned to her, nevertheless. She was much older than he had expected her to be, face deeply furrowed, hair streaked with white, eyes encircled by an intricate network of fine lines. But her smile, intense and warm and radiant as the midday sun, spoke eloquently of the vigor and force that still were hers: in that astonishing glow Hissune felt his doubts and fears swiftly melting away.

  He would have knelt to her, but she seemed to sense what he intended before he could make the gesture, and halted him with a quick little shake of her head. Instead the Lady held forth her hand to him. Hissune, somehow comprehending what was expected of him, lightly touched the tips of his fingers to hers for an instant, and took from her a startling, tingling inrush of energy that might have caused him to leap back if he had not been holding himself under such taut control. But from that unexpected current he found himself gaining a surge of renewed assurance, strength, poise.

  Then he turned to the Coronal.

  “My lord,” he whispered.

  Hissune was astonished and dismayed by the alteration in Lord Valentine’s appearance since he last had seen the Coronal, so very long ago in the Labyrinth, at the beginning of his ill-starred grand processional. Then Lord Valentine had been in the grip of terrible fatigue, but even so his features had displayed an inner light, a certain irrepressible joyousness, that no weariness could altogether dispel. Not now. The cruel sun of Suvrael had darkened his skin and bleached his hair, giving him a strangely fierce, almost barbaric look. His eyes were deep and hooded, his face was gaunt and lined, there was no trace whatever of that amiable sunniness of spirit that was his most visible trait of character. He seemed altogether unfamiliar: somber, tense, remote.

  Hissune began to offer the starburst sign. But Lord Valentine brushed it away impatiently and, reaching forward, seized Hissune’s hand, gripping it tightly a moment. That too was unsettling. One did not shake hands with Coronals. And at the contact of their hands Hissune again felt a current flowing into him: but this energy, unlike that which had come from the Lady, left him disturbed, jangled, ill at ease.

  When the Coronal released him Hissune stepped back and beckoned to Elsinome, who was standing immobile by the threshold as though she had been turned to stone by the sight of two Powers of Majipoor in the same room. In a thick, hoarse voice he said, “My lord—good Lady—I pray you welcome my mother, the lady Elsinome—”

  “A worthy mother for so worthy a son,” said the Lady: the first words she had spoken, and her voice seemed to Hissune to be the finest he had ever heard: rich, calm, musical. “Come to me, Elsinome.”

  Breaking from her trancelike state, Elsinome advanced across the smooth marble floor, and the Lady advanced also toward her, so that they met by the eight-sided pool at the room’s center. There the Lady took Elsinome in her arms, and embraced her closely and with great warmth; and when finally the two women parted, Hissune saw that his mother seemed like one who has for a long while been in darkness, and who now has emerged into the full brightness of the sun. Her eyes were shining, her face was flushed, there was no sign of timidity or awe about her.

  She looked now toward Lord Valentine and began to make the starburst sign, only to have the Coronal reject it as he had from Hissune, holding out the palm of his hand to her and saying, “That is not necessary, good lady Elsinome.”

  “My lord, it is my duty!” she replied in a firm voice.

  “No. No longer.” The Coronal smiled for the first time that morning. “All that gesturing and bowing is stuff designed for public show. There’s no need of such pomp in here.”

  To Hissune then he said, “I would not have recognized you, I think, had I not known it was you who was coming here today. We have been apart such a long time that we have become strangers, or so it feels to me.”

  “Several years, my lord, and not easy years,” Hissune replied. “Time always works changes, and years like these work great changes.”

  “So they do.” Leaning forward, Lord Valentine studied Hissune with an intensity that he found disconcerting. At length the Coronal said, “Once I thought that I knew you well. But the Hissune I knew was a boy who hid shyness behind slyness. The one who stands here today has become a man—a prince, even—and there is a little shyness left in him, but not much, and the slyness, I think, has turned into something deeper—craftiness, perhaps. Or even statesmanship, if the reports I have of you are true, and I would believe that they are. I think I still can see the boy I once knew, somewhere within you. But recognizing him is far from easy.”

 
“And it is hard for me, my lord, to see in you the man who hired me once to be his guide through the Labyrinth.”

  “Am I changed that much, then, Hissune?”

  “You are, my lord. I fear for you.”

  “Fear for Majipoor, if you must fear. Waste none on me.”

  “I do fear for Majipoor, and greatly. But how can you ask me not to fear for you? You are my benefactor, my lord. All I am I owe to you. And when I see you grown so bleak, so wintry—”

  “These are wintry times, Hissune. The weather of the world is reflected on my face. But perhaps there is a springtime ahead for us all. Tell me: what is the news from Castle Mount? I know the lords and princes have been hatching great plans there.”

  “Indeed, my lord.”

  “Speak, then!”

  “You understand, my lord, that these schemes are put forth subject to your ratification, that the Council of Regency would not presume to undertake—”

  “So I assume. Tell me what the Council proposes.”

  Hissune drew his breath in deeply. “First,” he said, “we would situate an army encircling all borders of Piurifayne, so that we may prevent the Metamorphs from exporting any further plagues and other horrors.”

  “To encircle Piurifayne, did you say, or to invade it?” asked Lord Valentine.

  “Primarily to encircle it, my lord.”

  “Primarily?”

  “Once we have established control of the borders, the plan is to enter the province in search of the rebel Faraataa and his followers.”

  “Ah. To capture Faraataa and his followers! And what will be done to them if they are captured, which I very much doubt they will be, considering my own experiences when I wandered in that jungle?”

  “They will be confined.”

  “Nothing more? No execution of ringleaders?”

  “My lord, we are not savages!”