The Book of Changes m-9

by Robert Silverberg

  Lord Sangamor had caused his tunnels to be constructed in a long coiling ramp that wound upward through the interior of that elongated stony spire. In the forges of the secret chambers of the royal artisans, deep beneath the Castle of the Coronal, Sangamor’s workmen had devised the radiant synthetic stone out of which the tunnels were to be built, and smelted it into big dazzling slabs; then, under the Coronal’s personal direction, teams of masons had shaped those raw slabs of glowing matter into rectangular paving blocks of uniform size, which they fastidiously mortared into the walls and roofs of each chamber according to a carefully graded sequence of colors. As one walked along, one’s eyes were bombarded with throbbing, pulsing emanations: sulphur yellow in this room, saffron in the next, topaz in the one after that, emerald, maroon, and then a sudden staggering burst of urgent red, with quieter tones beyond, mauve, aquamarine, a soft chartreuse. It was a symphony of colors, an unfailing outpouring of glowing light every moment of the day. Furvain spent two hours there, moving from room to room in mounting fascination and pleasure, until suddenly he could take no more. Some unexpected eruption was taking place within him. Sensations of vertigo and nausea swept through him. His mind felt numbed by the tremendous power and intensity of the display. He began to tremble, and there was a pounding in his chest. Obviously a quick retreat was necessary. He rushed toward the exit. Another half minute within those tunnels, Furvain realized, and he would have been forced to his knees.

  Once outside, Furvain clung to a parapet, sweating, dazed, until in a little while something like calmness returned. The strength of his reaction perplexed him. The physical distress was over, but something else still remained, some sort of free-floating disquiet, at first hard to comprehend, but which he came quickly to understand for what it was: the splendor of the tunnels had kindled in him at first a sense of admiration verging on awe, but that had gone moving swiftly onward through his soul to become a crushing, devastating sensation of personal inadequacy.

  He had always regarded this thing that the old man had built as nothing much other than a pleasant curiosity. But today, apparently having entered once more into that strangely oversensitized, almost neurasthenic state that had been typical of his recent moods, he had been overwhelmed by a new awareness of the greatness of his father’s work. Through Furvain now was running a surge of something he was forced to recognize as humility, an emotion with which he had never been particularly well acquainted. And why should he not feel humble? His father had achieved something rare and wonderful here. Amidst all the exhausting cares and distractions of state, Lord Sangamor had found the strength and inspiration to create a masterpiece of art.

  Whereas he himself- whereas he-

  The impact of the tunnels was still reverberating in him that evening. Rather than going on to the library afterward he arranged to dine with an old lover, the Lady Dolitha, in the airy restaurant that hung just above the Grand Melikand Court. She was a delicate-looking woman, very beautiful, dark-haired, olive-skinned, keen-witted. They had had a tempestuous affair for six months, ten years before.

  Eventually a certain unfettered sharpness about her, an excessive willingness to utter truths that one did not ordinarily utter, an overly sardonic way in which she sometimes chose to express her opinions, had cooled his desire for her. But Furvain had always prized the companionship of intelligent women, and the very quality of terrifying truthfulness that had driven him from her bed had made her appealing to him as a friend. So he had taken pains to preserve the friendship he had enjoyed with Dolitha even after the other sort of intimacy had been severed. She was as close as a sister to him now.

  He told her of his experience in the tunnels. “Who would have expected such a thing?” he asked her. “A Coronal who’s also a great artist!”

  The Lady Dolitha’s eyes sparkled with the ironic amusement that was her specialty. “Why do you think the one should exclude the other? The artistic gift’s something an artist is born with. Later, perhaps, one can also choose the path that leads toward the throne. But the gift remains.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Your father sought power, and that can absorb one’s entire energies. But he also chose to exercise his gift.”

  “The mark of his greatness, that he had breadth enough of soul to do both.”

  “Or confidence enough in himself. Of course, other people make different choices. Not always the right ones.”

  Furvain forced himself to meet her gaze directly, though he would rather have looked away. “What are you saying, Dolitha? That it was wrong of me not to go into the government?”

  She put the back of her small hand to her lips to conceal, only partly, her wry smile.

  “Hardly, Aithin.”

  “Then what? Come on. Spell it out! It isn’t much of a secret, you know, even to me. I’ve fallen short somewhere, haven’t I? You think I’ve misused my gift, is that it? That I’ve frittered away my talents drinking and gambling and amusing people with trivial little jingling rhymes, when I should have been closeted away somewhere writing some vast, profound philosophical masterpiece, something somber and heavy and pretentious that everybody would praise but no one would want to read?”

  “Oh, Aithin, Aithin-”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “How can I tell you what you should have been writing? All I can tell you is that I see how unhappy you are, Aithin. I’ve seen it for a long time. Something’s wrong within you — even you’ve finally come to recognize that, haven’t you? — and my guess is it must have something to do with your art, your poetry, since what else is there that’s important to you, really?”

  He stared at her. How very characteristic of her it was to say a thing like that.

  “Go on.”

  “There’s very little more to say.”

  “But there’s something, eh? Say it, then.”

  “It’s nothing that I haven’t said before.”

  “Well, say it again. I can be very obtuse, Dolitha.”

  He saw the little quiver of her nostrils that he had been expecting, the tiny movement of the tip of her tongue between her closed lips. It was clear to him from that that he could expect no mercy from her now. But mercy was not the commodity for which he had come to her this evening.

  Quietly she said, “The path you’ve taken isn’t the right path. I don’t know what the right path would be, but it’s clear that you aren’t on it. You need to reshape your life, Aithin. To make something new and different out of it for yourself. That’s all. You’ve gone along this path as far as you can, and now you need to change. I knew ten years ago, even if you didn’t, that something like this was going to come.

  Well, now it has. As you finally have come to realize yourself.”

  “I suppose I have, yes.”

  “It’s time to stop hiding.”

  “Hiding?”

  “From yourself. From your destiny, from whatever that may be. From your true essence. You can hide from all those, Aithin, but you can’t hide from the Divine. So far as the Divine is concerned, there’s no place where you can’t be seen. — Change your life, Aithin. I can’t tell you how.”

  He looked at her, stunned.

  “No. Of course you can’t.” He was silent a moment. “I’ll start by taking a trip,” he said. “Alone. To some distant place where there’ll be no one but myself, and I can meet myself face to face. And then we’ll see.”

  In the morning, dismissing all thought of the royal library and whatever maps it might or might not contain — the time for planning was over; it was the time simply to go — he returned to Dundilmir and spent a week putting his house in order and arranging for the provisions he would need for his journey into the east-country. Then he set out, unaccompanied, saying nothing to anyone about where he was going. He had no idea what he would find, but he knew he would find something, and that he would be the better for it. This would be, he thought, a serious venture, a quest, even: a search for the interior life of Aithin Furvain, which someho
w he had misplaced long ago. You have to change your life, Dolitha had said, and, yes, yes, that was what he would do. It would be a new thing for him. He had never embarked on anything serious before. He set out now in a strangely optimistic mood, alert to all vibrations of his consciousness. And was barely a week beyond the small dusty town of Vrambikat when he was captured by a party of roving outlaws and taken to Kasinibon’s hilltop stronghold.

  That there should be anarchy of this sort in an outlying district like the east-country was something that had never occurred to him, but it was no major surprise. Majipoor was, by and large, a peaceful place, where the rulers had for thousands of years ruled by the freely given consent of the governed; but the distances were so vast, the writ of the Pontifex and Coronal so tenuous in places, that quite probably there were many districts where the central government existed only in name. When it took months for news to travel between the centers of the administration and remote Zimroel or sun-blasted Suvrael in the south, was it proper to say that the arm of the government actually reached those places? Who could know, up there at the summit of Castle Mount, or in the depths of the Labyrinth, what really went on in those distant lands? Everyone generally obeyed the law, yes, because the alternative was chaos: but it was quite conceivable that in many districts the citizens did more or less as they pleased most of the time, while maintaining staunchly that they were faithful in their obedience to the commandments of the central government.

  And out here, where no one dwelled anyway, or hardly anyone, and the government did not so much as attempt to maintain a presence — what need was there for a government at all, or even the pretense of one?

  Since leaving Vrambikat Furvain had been riding quietly along through the quiet countryside, with titanic Castle Mount still a mighty landmark behind him in the west but now beginning to dwindle a little, and a dark range of hills starting to come into view ahead of him. Every prospect before him appeared to go on for a million miles. He had never seen open space such as this, with no hint anywhere that human life might be present on this world. The air was clear as glass here, the sky cloudless, the weather gentle, springlike. Broad rolling meadows of bright golden grass, short-leaved, fleshy-stemmed, dense as a tightly woven carpet, stretched off before him. Here and there some beast of a sort unknown to Furvain browsed on the grass, paying no heed to him. This was the ninth day of his journey. The solitude was refreshing. It cleansed the soul. The deeper he went into this silent land, the greater was his sense of inner healing, of purification.

  He paused at noon at a place where little rocky hills jutted from the blunt-stalked yellow grass to rest his mount and allow it to graze. He had brought an elegant beast with him, high-spirited and beautiful, a racing-mount, really, not perfectly suited for long plodding marches. It was necessary to halt frequently while the animal gathered its strength.

  Furvain did not mind that. With no special destination in mind, there was no reason to adopt a hurried pace.

  His mind roved ahead into the emptiness and tried to envision the marvels that awaited him. The Viper Rift, for example: what would that be like, that colossal cleft in the bosom of the world? Vertical walls that gleamed like gold, so steep that one could not even think of descending to the rift floor, where a swift green river, a serpent that seemed to have neither head nor tail, flowed toward the sea. The Great Sickle, said to be a slender, curving mass of shining white marble, a sculpture fashioned by the hand of the Divine, rising in superb isolation to a height of hundreds of feet above a tawny expanse of flat desert, a fragile arc that sighed and twanged like a harp when strong winds blew across its edge: an account dating from Lord Stiamot’s time, four thousand years before, said that the sight of it, limned against the night sky with a moon or two glistening near its tip, was so beautiful it would make a Skandar drayman weep. The Fountains of Embolain, where thunderous geysers of fragrant pink water smooth as silk went rushing upward every fifty minutes, day and night — and then, a year’s journey away, or perhaps two or three, the towering cliffs of black stone, riven by dazzling veins of white quartz, that guarded the shore of the Great Sea, the unbroken and unnavigable expanse of water that covered nearly half of the giant planet—

  “Stand,” a harsh voice suddenly said. “You are trespassing here. Identify yourself.”

  Furvain had been alone in this silent wilderness for so long that the grating sound ripped across his awareness like a blazing meteor’s jagged path across a starless sky. Turning, he saw two glowering men, stocky and roughly dressed, standing atop a low outcropping of rock just a few yards behind him. They were armed. A third and a fourth, farther away, guarded a string of a dozen or so mounts roped together with coarse yellow cord.

  He remained calm. “A trespasser, you say? But this place belongs to no one, my friend! Or else to everyone.”

  “This place belongs to Master Kasinibon,” said the shorter and surlier looking of the two, whose eyebrows formed a single straight black line across his furrowed forehead. He spoke in a coarse, thick-tongued way, with an unfamiliar accent that muffled all his consonants. “You’ll need his permission to travel here. What is your name?”

  “Aithin Furvain of Dundilmir,” answered Furvain mildly. “I’ll thank you to tell your master, whose name is unknown to me, that I mean no harm to his lands or property, that I’m a solitary traveler passing quickly through, who intends nothing more than—”

  “Dundilmir?” the other man muttered. The thick eyebrow rose. “That’s a city of the Mount, if I’m not mistaken. What’s a man of Castle Mount doing wandering around in these parts? This is no place for you.” And, with a guffaw: “Who are you, anyway, the Coronal’s son?”

  Furvain smiled. “As long as you ask,” he said, “I might as well inform you that in point of fact I am the Coronal’s son. Or I was, anyway, until the death of the Pontifex Pelxinai. My father’s name is—”

  A quick backhand blow across the face sent Furvain sprawling to the ground. He blinked in amazement. The blow had been a light one, merely a slap; it was the utter surprise of it that had cost him his balance. He could not remember any occasion in his life when someone had struck him, even when he was a boy.

  “—Sangamor,” he went on, more or less automatically, since the words were already in his mouth. “Who was Coronal under Pelxinai, and now is Pontifex himself—”

  “Do you value your teeth, man? I’ll hit you again if you keep on mocking me!”

  In a wondering tone Furvain said, “I told you nothing but the simple truth, friend. I am Aithin of Dundilmir, the son of Sangamor. My papers will confirm it.” It was beginning to dawn on him now that announcing his royal pedigree to these men like this might not have been the most intelligent possible course to take, but he had never given any thought before this to the possibility that there might be places in the world where revealing such a thing could be unwise. In any case it was too late now for him to take it back. He had no way of preventing them from examining his papers; they plainly stated who he was; it was best to assume that no one, even out here, would presume to interfere with the movements of a son of the Pontifex, mere fifth son though he might be. “I forgive you for that blow,” he said to the one who had struck him. “You had no idea of my identity. I’ll see that no harm comes to you for it. — And now, if you please, with all respect to your Master Kasinibon, the time has come for me to continue on my way.”

  “Your way, at the moment, leads you to Master Kasinibon,” replied the man who had knocked him down. “You can pay your respects to him yourself.”

  They prodded him roughly to his feet and indicated with a gesture that he was to get astride his mount, which the other two — grooms, evidently — tied to the last of the string of mounts that they had been leading. Furvain saw now what he had not noticed earlier, that what he had taken for a small hummock at the highest ridge of the hill just before him was actually a low structure of some sort; and as they went upward, following a steep path that was hardly a path at all,
a mere thin scuffing of hoofprints through the grass, all but invisible at times, it became clear to him that the structure was in fact a substantial hilltop redoubt, virtually a fortress, fashioned from the same glossy gray stone as the hill itself. Though apparently only two stories high, it spread on and on for a surprising distance along the ridge, and, as the path they were following began to curve around to the side, giving Furvain a better view, he saw that the structure extended down the eastern front of the hill for several additional levels facing into the valley beyond. He saw, too, the red shimmer of the sky above the valley, and then, as they attained the crest, the startling red slash of a long narrow lake that could only be the famed Sea of Barbirike, flanked by parallel rows of dunes whose sand was of the same brilliant red hue. Master Kasinibon, whoever he might be, this outlaw chieftain, had seized for the site of his citadel one of the most spectacular vantage points in all of Majipoor, a site of almost unworldly splendor. One had to admire the audacity of that, Furvain thought. The man might be an outlaw, yes, a bandit, even, but he must also be something of an artist.

  The building, when they finally came over the top of the hill and around to its front, turned out to be a massive thing, square-edged and heavyset, designed for solidity rather than elegance, but not without a certain rustic power and presence. It had two long wings, radiating from a squat central quadrangle, that bent forward to reach a considerable way down the Barbirike Valley side of the hill. Its designer must have had impregnability in mind more than anything else. There was no plausible way to penetrate its defenses. The building could not be approached at all from its western side, because the final stretch of the hillside up which Furvain and his captors had just come was wholly vertical, a bare rock face impossible to ascend, and the building itself showed only a forbidding windowless facade on that side. The path from below, once it had brought them to that point of no ascent, made a wide swing off to the right, taking them over the ridge at the hill’s summit and around to the front of the building, where any wayfarer would be fully exposed to the weaponry of the fortress above. Here it was guarded by watchtowers. It was protected also by a stockade, a portcullis, a formidable rampart. The building had only one entrance, not a large one. All its windows were constricted vertical slits, invulnerable to attack but useful to the defenders in case attack should come.