Its fields were charred and blackened, its people silent, stoic, stunned. “We were growers of lusavender and rice,” said Valentine’s host, a planter named Nitikkimal, who seemed to be the district mayor. “Then came the lusavender smut, and everything died, and we had to burn the fields. And it will be two years more, at least, before it is safe to plant again. But we have remained. Not one of us from Prestimion Vale has fled, your majesty. We have little to eat—and we Ghayrogs need very little, you understand, but even we do not have enough—and there is no work for us to do, which makes us restless, and it is sad to look at the land with these ashes upon it. But it is our land, and so we stay. Will we ever plant here again, your majesty?”
“I know that you will,” said Valentine. And wondered if he were giving these people false comfort.
Nitikkimal’s house was a great manor at the head of the valley, with lofty beams of black ghannimor wood, and a roof of green slate. But it was damp and drafty within, as though the planter no longer had the heart to make repairs as they became necessary in Prestimion Vale’s rainy and humid climate.
That afternoon Valentine rested alone for a while in the huge master suite that Nitikkimal had turned over to him, before going to the municipal meeting-hall to speak with the citizens of the district. A thick packet of dispatches from the east had caught up with him here. Hissune, he learned, was deep within Metamorph country, somewhere in the vicinity of the Steiche, searching for New Velalisier, as the rebel capital was known. Valentine wondered if Hissune would have better luck than he himself had had in his quest for the wandering city of Ilirivoyne. And Divvis had assembled a second and even greater army to raid the Piurivar lands from the other side. The thought of a warlike man like Divvis in those jungles troubled Valentine. This is not what I had intended, he thought—sending armies marching into Piurifayne. This was what I had hoped to avoid. But of course it had become unavoidable, he knew. And the times called for Divvises and Hissunes, not for Valentines: he would play his proper role, and they would play theirs, and—the Divine willing—the wounds of the world would someday begin to heal.
He looked through the other dispatches. News from Castle Mount: Stasilaine was Regent now, toiling over the routine tasks of government. Valentine pitied him. Stasilaine the splendid, Stasilaine the agile, sitting now at that desk scribbling his name on pieces of paper—how time undoes us all! Valentine thought. We who thought life on Castle Mount was all hunting and frolic, bowed now under responsibilities, holding up the poor tottering world with our backs. How far away the Castle seemed, how far away all the joys of that time when the world apparently governed itself, and it was springtime all the year round!
Dispatches from Tunigorn, too—moving through Zimroel not far behind Valentine, handling the day-by-day chores of relief activities: the distribution of food, the conservation of remaining resources, the burial of the dead, and all the other various anti-famine and anti-plague measures. Tunigorn the archer, Tunigorn the famous slayer of game—now did he justify, now do we all justify, Valentine thought, the ease and comfort of our playful boyhoods on the Mount!
He shoved the dispatches away. From the case in which he kept it, now, he drew forth the dragon’s tooth that the woman Millilain had so strangely put into his hand as he entered Khyntor. From his first moment of contact with it he had known that it was something more than a mere bizarre trinket, an amulet for the blindly superstitious. But it was only as the days unfolded, as he devoted time to comprehending its meaning and uses—secretly, always secretly, not letting even Carabella see what he was doing—that Valentine had come to realize what kind of thing it was that Millilain had given him.
Lightly he touched its shining surface. It was a delicate-looking thing, so thin as to be nearly translucent. But it was as hard as the hardest stone, and its tapered edges were sharp as fine-honed steel. It was cool in his hand, but yet it seemed to him there was a core of fire within it.
The music of the bells began to resound in his mind.
A solemn tolling, slow, almost funereal, and then a more rapid cascade of sound, a quickening of rhythm that swiftly became a breathless mixing of melodies, one rushing forth so hastily that it covered the last notes of the one that preceded it, and then all the melodies at once, a complex mind-baffling symphony of changes: yes, he knew that music now, understood it for what it was, the music of the water-king Maazmoorn, the creature that land dwellers knew as Lord Kinniken’s dragon, that was the mightiest of all this huge planet’s inhabitants.
It had taken Valentine a great while to realize that he had heard the music of Maazmoorn long before this talisman had come into his possession. Lying asleep aboard the Lady Thinn, so many voyages ago, as he was first crossing from Alhanroel to the Isle of Sleep, he had dreamed a dream of a pilgrimage, white-robed worshipers rushing toward the sea, and he had been among them, and in the sea had loomed the great dragon known as Lord Kinniken’s, with its mouth yawning open so that it might engulf the pilgrims as they were drawn toward him. And from that dragon as it came near the land and clambered even onto the shore had emanated the pealing of terrible bells, a sound so heavy it crushed the air itself.
From this tooth came the same sound of bells. And with this tooth as his guide, he could, if he drew himself to the center of his soul and sent himself forth across the world, bring himself into contact with the awesome mind of the great water-king Maazmoorn, that the ignorant had called Lord Kinniken’s dragon. That was Millilain’s gift to him. How had she known what use he and he alone could make of it? Or had she known at all? Perhaps she had given it to him only because it was holy to her—perhaps she had no idea he could use it in this special way, as a focus of concentration.…
—Maazmoorn. Maazmoorn.
He probed. He sought. He called, Day after day he had come closer and closer to actual communication with the water-king, to a true conversation, a meeting of individual identities. He was almost there now. Perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow or the day after that…
—Answer me, Maazmoorn. It is Valentine Pontifex who calls you now.
He no longer feared that vast terrifying mind. He was beginning to learn, in these secret voyages of the soul, how greatly the land-dwellers of Majipoor had misunderstood these huge creatures of the sea. The water-kings were fearsome, yes; but they were not to be feared.
—Maazmoorn. Maazmoorn.
Almost there, he thought.
“Valentine?”
Carabella’s voice, outside the door. Startled, he broke from his trance with a jump that nearly threw him from his seat. Then, regaining control, he slipped the tooth into its case, calmed himself, went to her.
“We should be at the town hall now,” she said.
“Yes. Of course. Of course.”
The sound of those mysterious bells still tolled in his spirit.
But he had other responsibilities now. The tooth of Maazmoorn must wait a little while longer.
At the municipal meeting-hall an hour later Valentine sat upon a high platform and the farmers filed slowly before him, making their obeisance and bringing him their tools to be blessed—scythes, hoes, humble things like that—as though the Pontifex could by the mere laying on of hands restore the prosperity that this blight-stricken valley formerly had known. He wondered if that were some ancient belief of these rural folk, nearly all of them Ghayrogs. Probably not, he decided: no reigning Pontifex had ever visited Prestimion Vale or any other part of Zimroel before, and there was no reason why any would have been expected to. Most likely this was a tradition that these people had invented on the spur of the moment, when they had learned that he would pass their way.
But that did not trouble him. They brought him their tools, and he touched the handle of this one and the blade of that one and the shaft of another, and smiled his warmest smile, and offered them words of heartfelt hope that sent them away glowing.
Toward the end of the evening there was a stirring in the hall and Valentine, glancing up, saw a str
ange procession coming toward him. A Ghayrog woman who, judging by her almost colorless scales and the drooping serpents of her hair, must have been of the most extreme old age, was walking up the aisle slowly between two younger women of her race. She appeared to be blind and quite feeble, but yet she stood fiercely erect, and advanced step by step as though cutting her way through walls of stone.
“It is Aximaan Threysz!” whispered the planter Nitikkimal. “You know of her, your majesty?”
“Alas, no.”
“She is the most famous lusavender planter of them all—a fount of knowledge, a woman of the highest wisdom. Near to death, so they say, but she insisted on seeing you tonight.”
“Lord Valentine!” she called out in a clear ringing tone.
“Lord Valentine no longer,” he replied, “but Valentine Pontifex now. And you do me great honor by this visit, Aximaan Threysz. Your fame precedes you.”
“Valentine—Pontifex—”
“Come, give me your hand,” said Valentine.
He took her withered, ancient claws in his, and held them tightly. Her eyes met his, staring straight into them, although he could tell from the clearness of her pupils that she saw nothing.
“They said you were a usurper,” she declared. “A little red-faced man came here, and told us you were not the true Coronal. But I would not listen to him, and went away from this place. I did not know if you were true or false, but I thought he was not the one to speak of such things, that red-faced man.”
“Sempeturn, yes. I have met him,” Valentine said. “He believes now that I was the true Coronal, and am the true Pontifex these days.”
“And will you make the world whole again, true Pontifex?” said Aximaan Threysz in a voice of amazing vigor and clarity.
“We will all of us make it whole together, Aximaan Threysz.”
“No. Not I, Pontifex Valentine. I will die, next week, the week after, and none too soon, either. But I want a promise from you that the world will be what it formerly was: for my children, for my children’s children. And if you will promise me that I will go on my knees to you, and if you promise it falsely may the Divine scourge you as we have been scourged, Pontifex Valentine!”
“I promise you, Aximaan Threysz, that the world will be entirely restored, and finer than it was, and I tell you that this is no false promise. But I will not have you go on your knees to me.”
“I have said I would, and I will do it!” And, amazingly, brushing aside the two younger women as if they were gnats, she dropped herself down in deep homage, although her body seemed as rigid as a slab of leather that has been left in the sun a hundred years. Valentine reached down to lift her, but one of the women—her daughter, certainly her daughter—caught his hand and pulled it back, and then stared at her own hand in horror, for having dared to touch a Pontifex. Slowly but unaided she stood again, and said, “Do you know how old I am? I was born when Ossier was Pontifex. I think I am the oldest person in the world. And I will die when Valentine is Pontifex: and you will restore the world.”
It was probably meant as a prophecy, Valentine thought. But it sounded more like a command.
He said, “It will be done, Aximaan Threysz, and you will live to see it done.”
“No. No. Second sight comes upon us when first sight goes. My life is almost over. But the course of yours unfolds clearly before me. You will save us by doing that which you think is impossible for you to do. And then you will seal your deed by doing that which you desire least to do. And though you do the impossible and then you do the undesirable, you will know that what you have done is right, and you will rejoice in it, Pontifex Valentine. Now go, Pontifex, and heal us.” Her forked tongue flickered with tremendous force and energy. “Heal us, Pontifex Valentine! Heal us!”
She turned and proceeded slowly back the way she had come, disdaining the help of the two women beside her.
It was an hour more before Valentine was able to disengage himself from the last of the Prestimion Vale folk—they crowded round him in a pathetically hopeful way, as though some Pontifical emanation alone would transform their lives, and magically return them to the condition of the years prior to the coming of the lusavender blight—but at last Carabella, pleading fatigue on his behalf, got them out of there. The image of Aximaan Threysz continued to glow in his mind on the journey back to Nitikkimal’s manor. The dry hissing of her voice still resonated in his mind. You will save us by doing that which you think is impossible for you to do. And then you will seal your deed by doing that which you desire least to do. Go, Pontifex, and heal us. Yes. Yes. Heal us, Pontifex Valentine! Heal us!
But also within him there resounded the music of the water-king Maazmoorn. He had been so close, this time, to the ultimate breakthrough, to the true contact with that inconceivably gigantic creature of the sea. Now—tonight—
Carabella remained awake for a while to talk. That ancient Ghayrog woman haunted her, too, and she dwelled almost obsessively on the power of Aximaan Threysz’s words, the eerie compelling force of her sightless eyes, the mysteries of her prophecy. Then finally she kissed Valentine lightly on the lips and burrowed down into the darkness of the enormous bed they shared.
He waited a few endless minutes. Then he took forth the tooth of the sea dragon.
—Maazmoorn?
He held the tooth so tightly its edges dug deep into the flesh of his hand. Urgently he centered all the power of his mind on the bridging of the gulf of thousands of miles between Prestimion Vale and the waters—where? At the Pole?—where the sea-king lay hidden.
—Maazmoorn?
—I hear you, land brother, Valentine-brother, king-brother.
At last!
—You know who I am?
—I know you. I knew your father. I knew many before you.
—You spoke with them?
—No. You are the first for that. But I knew them. They did not know me, but I knew them. I have lived many circlings of the ocean, Valentine-brother. And I have watched all that has occurred upon the land.
—You know what is occurring now?
—I know.
—We are being destroyed. And you are a party to our destruction.
—No.
—You guide the Piurivar rebels in their war against us. We know that. They worship you as gods, and you teach them how to ruin us.
—No, Valentine-brother.
—I know they worship you.
—Yes, that they do, for we are gods. But we do not support them in their rebellion. We give them only what we would give anyone who comes to us for nourishment, but it is not our purpose to see you driven from the world.
—Surely you must hate us!
—No, Valentine-brother.
—We hunt you. We kill you. We eat your flesh and drink your blood and use your bones for trinkets.
—Yes, that is true. But why should we hate you, Valentine-brother? Why?
Valentine did not for the moment reply. He lay cold and trembling with awe beside the sleeping Carabella, pondering all that he had heard, the calm admission by the water-king that the dragons were gods—what could that mean?—and the denial of complicity in the rebellion, and now this astounding insistence that the dragons bore the Majipoori folk no anger for all that had been committed against them. It was too much all at once, a turbulent inrush of knowledge where before there had been only the sound of bells and a sense of a distant looming presence.
—Are you incapable of anger, then, Maazmoorn?
—We understand anger.
—But do not feel it?
—Anger is beside the point, Valentine-brother. What your hunters do to us is a natural thing. It is a part of life; it is an aspect of That Which Is. As am I, as are you. We give praise to That Which Is in all its manifestations. You slay us as we pass the coast of what you call Zimroel, and you make your uses of us; sometimes we slay you in your ships, if it seems to be what must be done at that moment, and so we make our uses of you; and all that is That Which Is
. Once the Piurivar folk slew some of us, in their stone city that is now dead, and they thought they were committing a monstrous crime, and to atone for that crime they destroyed their own city. But they did not understand. None of you land-children understand. All is merely That Which Is.
—And if we resist now, when the Piurivar folk hurl chaos at us? Are we wrong to resist? Must we calmly accept our doom, because that too is That Which Is?
—Your resistance is also That Which Is, Valentine-brother.
—Then your philosophy makes no sense to me, Maazmoorn.
—It does not have to, Valentine-brother. But that too is That Which Is.
Valentine was silent once again, for an even longer time than before, but he took care to maintain the contact.
Then he said:
—I want this time of destruction to end. I mean to preserve the thing that we of Majipoor have understood as That Which Is.
—Of course you do.
—I want you to help me.
6
“We have captured a Shapeshifter, my lord,” Alsimir said, “who claims he bears an urgent message for you, and you alone.”
Hissune frowned. “A spy, do you think?”
“Very likely, my lord.”
“Or even an assassin.”
“That possibility must never be overlooked, of course. But I think that is not why he is here. I know that he is a Shapeshifter, my lord, and our judgments are all risky ones, but nevertheless: I was among those who interrogated him. He seems sincere. Seems.”
“Shapeshifter sincerity!” said Hissune, laughing. “They sent a spy to travel in Lord Valentine’s entourage, did they not?”
“So have I been told. What shall I do with him, then?”
“Bring him to me, I suppose.”
“And if he plans some Shapeshifter trick?”
“Then we will have to move faster than he does, Alsimir. But bring him here.”
There were risks, Hissune knew. But one could not simply turn away someone who maintains he is a messenger from the enemy, or put him to death out of hand on mere suspicion of treachery. And to himself he confessed it would be an interesting diversion to lay eyes on a Metamorph at last, after so many weeks of tramping through this sodden jungle. In all this time they had not encountered one: not one.
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