Fourteen million people dwelled in Dulorn, making it one of the larger cities of Majipoor, although by no means the largest. On the continent of Alhanroel, so Valentine had heard, a city of this size would be nothing remarkable, and even here on the more pastoral continent of Zimroel there were many that matched or surpassed it. But surely no place could equal its beauty, he thought. Dulorn was cold and fiery, both at once. Its gleaming spires insistently claimed one’s attention, like chill, irresistible music, like the piercing tones of some mighty organ rolling out across the darkness of space.
"No country inns for us here!" Carabella cried happily. "We’ll have a hotel, with fine sheets and soft cushions!"
"Will Zalzan Kavol be so generous?" Valentine asked.
"Generous?" Carabella laughed. "He has no choice. Dulorn offers only luxury accommodations. If we sleep here, we sleep in the street or we sleep like dukes: there’s nothing between."
"Like dukes," Valentine said. "To sleep like dukes. Why not?"
He had sworn her, that morning before leaving the inn, to say nothing to anyone about last night’s events, not to Sleet, not to any of the Skandars, not even, should she feel the need to seek one, to a dream-speaker. He had demanded the oath of silence from her in the name of the Lady, the Pontifex, and the Coronal. Furthermore he had compelled her to continue to behave toward him as though he had always been, and for the rest of his life would remain, merely Valentine the wandering juggler. In extracting the oath from her Valentine had spoken with force and dignity worthy of a Coronal, so that poor Carabella, kneeling and trembling, was as frightened of him all over again as if he were wearing the starburst crown. He felt more than a little fraudulent about that, for he was far from convinced that the strange dreams of the previous night were to be taken at face value. But still, those dreams could not lightly be dismissed, and so precautions must be taken, secrecy, guile. They came strangely to him, such maneuvers. He swore Autifon Deliamber also to the oath, wondering as he did so how much he could trust a Vroon and a sorcerer, but there seemed to be sincerity in Deliamber’s voice as he vowed to keep his confidence.
Deliamber said, "And who else knows of these matters?"
"Only Carabella. And I have her bound by the same pledge."
"You’ve said nothing to the Hjort?"
"Vinorkis? Not a word. Why do you ask?"
The Vroon replied, "He watches you too carefully. He asks too many questions. I have little liking for him."
Valentine shrugged. "It’s not hard to dislike Hjorts. But what do you fear?"
"He guards his mind too well. His aura is a dark one. Keep your distance from him. Valentine, or he’ll bring you trouble."
The jugglers entered the city and made their way down broad dazzling avenues to their hotel, guided by Deliamber, who seemed to have a map of every corner of Majipoor engraved in his mind. The wagon halted in front of a tower of splendid height and awesome fantasy of architecture, a place of minarets and arched vaults and shining octagonal windows. Descending from the wagon, Valentine stood blinking and gaping in awe.
"You look as though you’ve been clubbed on the head," Zalzan Kavol said gruffly. "Never seen Dulorn before?"
Valentine made an evasive gesture. His porous memory said nothing to him of Dulorn: but who, once having seen this city, could forget it?
Some comment seemed called for. He said simply, "Is there anything more glorious on all of Majipoor?"
"Yes," the gigantic Skandar replied. "A tureen of hot soup. A mug of strong wine. A sizzling roast over an open fire. You can’t eat beautiful architecture. Castle Mount itself isn’t worth a stale turd to a starving man." Zalzan Kavol snorted in high self-approbation and, hefting his luggage, strode into the hotel.
Valentine called bemusedly after him, "But I was speaking only of the beauty of cities!"
Thelkar, usually the most taciturn of the Skandars, said, "Zalzan Kavol admires Dulorn more than you would believe. But he’d never admit it."
"He admits admiration only for Piliplok, where we were born," Gibor Haern put in. "He feels it’s disloyal to say a good word for anyplace else."
"Shh!" cried Erfon Kavol. "He comes!"
Their senior brother had reappeared at the hotel door. "Well?" Zalzan Kavol boomed. "Why are you standing about? Rehearsal in thirty minutes!" His yellow eyes blazed like those of some beast of the woods. He growled, clenched his four fists menacingly, and vanished again.
An odd master, Valentine thought. Somewhere far beneath that shaggy hide, he suspected, lay a person of civility and even — who could tell? — of kindness. But Zalzan Kavol worked hard at his bearishness.
The jugglers were booked to perform at the Perpetual Circus of Dulorn, a municipal festivity that was in progress during every hour of the day and on every day of the year. The Ghayrogs, who dominated this city and its surrounding province, slept not nightly but seasonally, for two or three months at a time mainly in winter, and when they were awake were insatiable in their demand for entertainment. According to Deliamber they paid well and there were never enough itinerant performers in this part of Majipoor to satisfy their needs.
When the troupe gathered for the afternoon practice session, Zalzan Kavol announced that tonight’s engagement was due to take place between the fourth and sixth hours after midnight.
Valentine was unhappy about that. This night in particular he was eager for the guidance that dreams might bring, after last night’s weighty revelations. But what chance could there be for useful dreams if he spent the most fertile hours of the night on stage?
"We can sleep earlier," Carabella observed. "Dreams come at any hour. Or do you have an appointment for a sending?"
It was a sly teasing remark, for one who had trembled in awe of him not so much earlier. He smiled to show he had taken no offense — he could see self-doubt lurking just beneath her mockery of him — and said, "I might not sleep at all, knowing that I must rise so early."
"Have Deliamber touch you as he did last night," she suggested.
"I prefer to find my own path into sleep," he said.
Which he did, after a stiff afternoon of practice and a satisfying dinner of wind-dried beef and cold blue wine at the hotel. He had taken a room by himself here, and before he entered the bed — cool smooth sheets, as Carabella had said, fit for a duke — he commended his spirit to the Lady of the Isle and prayed for a sending from her, which was permissible and frequently done, though not often effective. It was the Lady now whose aid he most dearly needed. If he was in truth a fallen Coronal, then she was his fleshly mother as well as his spiritual one, and might confirm him in his identity and direct him along his quest.
As he moved into sleep, he tried to visualize the Lady and her Isle, to reach out across the thousands of miles to her and create a bridge, some spark of consciousness over that immense gap, by which she could make contact with him. He was hampered by the empty places in his memory. Presumably any adult Majipooran knew the features of the Lady and the geography of the Isle as well as he did the face of his own mother and the outskirts of his city, but Valentine’s crippled mind gave him mainly blanks, which had to be filled by imagination and chance. How had she looked that night in the fireworks over Pidruid? A round smiling face, long thick hair. Very well. And the rest? Suppose the hair is black and glossy, black like that of her sons Lord Valentine and dead Lord Voriax. The eyes are brown, warm, alert. The lips full, the cheeks lightly dimpled, a fine network of wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. A stately, robust woman, yes, and she strolls through a garden of lush floriferous bushes, yellow tanigales and camellias and eldirons and purple thwales, everything rich with tropical life; she pauses to pluck a blossom and fasten it in her hair, and moves on, along white marble flagstones that wind sinuously between the shrubs, until she emerges on a broad stone patio set into the side of the hill on which she dwells, looking down on the terraces upon terraces descending in wide sweeping curves toward the sea. And she looks westward to far-off Zimroel, sh
e closes her eyes, she thinks of her lost wandering outcast son in the city of the Ghayrogs, she gathers her force and broadcasts sweet messages of hope and courage to Valentine exiled in Dulorn — Valentine slipped into deep sleep.
And indeed the Lady came to him as he dreamed. He encountered her not on the hillside below her garden, but in some empty city in a wasteland, a ruined place of weather-beaten sandstone pillars and shattered altars. They approached one another from opposite sides of a tumbledown forum under ghostly moonlight. But her face was veiled and she kept it averted from him: he recognized her by the heavy coils of her dark hair and by the fragrance of the creamy-petaled eldiron flower beside her ear, and knew that he was in the presence of the Lady of the Isle, but he wanted her smile to warm his soul in this bleak place, he wanted the comfort of her gentle eyes, and he saw only the veil, the shoulders, the side of her head. "Mother?" he asked uncertainly. "Mother, it’s Valentine! Don’t you know me? Look at me, mother!"
Wraithlike she drifted past him, and disappeared between two broken columns inscribed with scenes of the deeds of the great Coronals, and was gone.
"Mother?" he called.
The dream was over. Valentine struggled to make her return, but could not. He awakened and lay peering into the darkness, seeing that veiled figure once more and searching for meaning. She hadn’t recognized him. Was he so effectively transformed that not even his own mother could perceive who lay hidden in this body? Or had he never been her son, so that there was no reason for her to know him? He lacked answers. If the soul of dark-haired Lord Valentine was embedded in the body of fair-haired Valentine, the Lady of the Isle in his dream had given no sign of it, and he was as far from understanding as he had been when he closed his eyes.
What follies I pursue, he thought. What implausible speculations, what madnesses!
He eased himself back into sleep.
And almost at once, so it seemed, a hand touched his shoulder and someone rocked him until he came reluctantly into wakefulness. Carabella.
"Two hours after midnight," she told him. "Zalzan Kavol wants us down by the wagon in half an hour. Did you dream?"
"Inconclusively. And you?"
"I remained awake," she answered. "It seemed safest. Some nights one prefers not to dream." She said timidly, as he began to dress, "Will I share your room again, Valentine?"
"Would you like to?"
"I have given oath to act with you as I acted before — before I knew — Oh, Valentine, I was so frightened! But yes. Yes, let’s be companions again, and even lovers. Tomorrow night!"
"What if I am Coronal?"
"Please. Don’t ask such questions."
"What if I am?"
"You’ve ordered me to call you Valentine and to regard you as Valentine. This I’ll do, if you’ll let me."
"Do you believe I’m Coronal?"
"Yes," she whispered.
"It no longer frightens you?"
"A little. Just a little. You still seem human to me."
"Good."
"I’ve had a day to get used to things. And I’m under an oath. I must think of you as Valentine. I swore by the Powers to that." She grinned impishly. "I swore an oath to the Coronal that I would pretend you are not Coronal, and so I must be true to my pledge, and treat you casually, and call you Valentine, and show no fear of you, and behave as though nothing has changed. And so I can share your bed tomorrow night?"
"Yes."
"I love you, Valentine."
He pulled her lightly to him. "I thank you for overcoming your fear. I love you, Carabella."
"Zalzan Kavol will be angry if we’re late," she said.
—2—
THE PERPETUAL CIRCUS was housed in a structure altogether opposite from those most typical of Dulorn: a giant flat unadorned drum of a building, perfectly circular and no more than ninety feet high, that stood by itself on a huge tract of open land on the eastern perimeter of the city. Within, a great central space provided an awesome setting for the stage, and around it ran the seating ring, tier upon tier in concentric circles rising to the roof.
The place could hold thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Valentine was startled to see how nearly full it was, here at what was for him the middle of the night. Looking outward into the audience was difficult, for the stage-lights were in his eyes, but he was able to perceive enormous numbers of people sitting or sprawling in their seats. Nearly all were Ghayrogs, though he caught sight of the occasional Hjort or Vroon or human making a late night of it. There were no places on Majipoor entirely populated by one race — ancient decrees of the government, going back to the earliest days of heavy non-human settlement, forbade such concentrations except on the Metamorph reservation — but the Ghayrogs were a particularly clannish lot, and tended to cluster together in and around Dulorn up to the legal maximum. Though warm-blooded and mammalian, they had certain reptilian traits that made them unlovable to most other races: quick-flicking forked red tongues, grayish scaly skin of a thick, polished consistency, cold green unblinking eyes. Their hair had a medusoid quality, black succulent strands that coiled and writhed unsettlingly, and their odor, both sweet and acrid at once, was not charming to non-Ghayrog nostrils.
Valentine’s mood was subdued as he moved out with the troupe onto the stage. The hour was all wrong: his body-cycles were at low ebb, and though he had had enough sleep, he had no enthusiasm for being awake just now. Once again he carried the burden of a difficult dream. That rejection by the Lady, that inability to make contact with her, what did it signify? When he was only Valentine the juggler, significance was insignificant to him: each day had a path of its own, and he had no worries about larger patterns, only to increase the skill of hand and eye from one day to the next. But now that these ambiguous and disturbing revelations had been visited upon him he was forced to consider dreary long-range matters of purpose and destiny and the route on which he was bound. He had no liking for that. Already he tasted a keen nostalgic sorrow for the good old times of the week before last, when he had wandered busy Pidruid in happy aimlessness.
The demands of his art quickly lifted him out of this brooding. There was no time, under the glare of the spotlights, to think of anything except the work of performing.
The stage was colossal, and many things were happening on it at once. Vroon magicians were doing a routine involving floating colored lights and bursts of green and red smoke; an animal-trainer just beyond had a dozen fat serpents standing on their tails; a dazzling group of dancers with grotesquely attenuated bodies sprayed in many-faceted silver glowstuff did austere leaps and carries; several small orchestras in widely separated regions played the tinny and tootling woodwind music beloved of the Ghayrogs; there was a one-finger acrobat, a high-wire woman, a levitator, a trio of glassblowers engaged in fashioning a cage for themselves, an eel-eater, and a platoon of berserk clowns, along with much more beyond Valentine’s range of vision. The audience, slouching and lounging out there in the half-darkness, had an easy time watching all this, for, Valentine realized, the giant stage was in gentle motion, turning slowly on hidden bearings, and in the course of an hour or two would make a complete circuit, presenting each group of performers in turn to every part of the auditorium. "It all floats on a pool of quicksilver," Sleet whispered. "You could buy three provinces with the value of the metal."
With so much competition for the eyes of the onlookers, the jugglers had brought forth some of their finest effects, which meant that the novice Valentine was largely excluded, left to toss clubs to himself and occasionally to feed knives or torches to the others. Carabella was dancing atop a silver globe two feet in diameter that rolled in irregular circles as she moved: she juggled five spheres that glowed with brilliant green light. Sleet had mounted stilts, and rose even taller than the Skandars, a tiny figure far above everyone, coolly flipping from hand to hand three huge red-and-black-speckled eggs of the moleeka-hen, that he had bought at market that evening. If he dropped an egg from so great a height,
the splash would be conspicuous and the humiliation enormous, but never since Valentine had known him had Sleet dropped anything, and he dropped no eggs tonight. As for the six Skandars, they had arranged themselves in a rigid star-pattern, standing with their backs to one another, and were juggling flaming torches. At carefully coordinated moments each would hurl a torch backward over his outer shoulder to his brother at the opposite side of the star. The interchanges were made with wondrous precision, the trajectories of the flying torches were flawlessly timed to create splendid crisscrossing patterns of light, and not a hair on any Skandar’s hide was scorched as they casually snatched from the air the firebrands that came hurtling past them from their unseen partners.
Round and round the stage they went, performing in stints of half an hour at a stretch, with five minutes to relax in the central well just below the stage, where hundreds of other off-duty artists gathered. Valentine longed to be doing something more challenging than his own little elementary juggle, but Zalzan Kavol had forbidden it: he was not yet ready, the Skandar said, though he was doing excellently well for a novice.
Morning came before the troupe was allowed to leave the stage. Payment here was by the hour, and hiring was governed by silent response-meters beneath the seats of the audience, monitored by cold-eyed Ghayrogs in a booth in the well. Some performers lasted only a few minutes before universal boredom or disdain banished them, but Zalzan Kavol and his company, who had been guaranteed two hours of work, remained on stage for four. They would have been kept for a fifth if Zalzan Kavol had not been dissuaded by his brothers, who gathered around him for a brief and intense argument.
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