Gorzval seemed apprehensive at encountering his erstwhile employees. He had begun to recover his spirits during the morning’s voyage, but now he grew tense and withdrawn as the trimaran entered the lagoon. Carabella was the first off, splashing through the shallow water to embrace Sleet; Valentine followed close behind. Gorzval lurked to the rear, eyes lowered.
"How did you find us?" Sleet asked.
Valentine indicated Deliamber. "Sorcery. How else? Are you well?"
"I thought I’d die of seasickness getting here, but I’ve had a day or two to recover." With a shudder he said, "And you? I saw you sucked under, and believed all was over."
"So it seemed," said Valentine. "A strange story, which I’ll tell you another time. We are all together again, eh, Sleet? All but Gibor Haern," he added mournfully, "who perished in the wreck. But we’ve taken on Gorzval as one of our companions. Come forward, Gorzval! Aren’t you pleased to see your men again?"
Gorzval muttered something indistinct and looked between Valentine and the others, meeting no one’s eyes. Valentine comprehended the situation and turned to the crew people, meaning to ask them to hold no ill will toward the former captain for a disaster far beyond mortal control. He was taken aback to discover the five of them groveling at his feet.
Sleet said, abashed, "I thought you were dead, my lord. I couldn’t resist telling them my tale."
"I see," said Valentine, "that the news is apt to spread more rapidly than I wish, no matter how solemnly I swear you all to silence. Well, it’s pardonable, Sleet." To the others he said, "Up. Up. This crawling in the sand does none of us any good."
They rose. Their contempt for Gorzval was impossible for them to hide; but it was overshadowed by the astonishment they felt at being in the presence of the Coronal. Of the five, Valentine quickly learned, two — the Hjort and one of the humans — chose to remain on Kangrisorn in the hope of finding, eventually, some way to return to Piliplok and resume their trade. The other three begged to accompany him on his pilgrimage.
The new members of the rapidly expanding band were two women — Pandelon and Cordeine, a carpenter and a sailmender — and a man, Thesme, one of the winchwinders. Valentine bade them be welcome, and accepted pledges of allegiance from them, a ceremony that stirred vague discomfort in him. Yet he was growing accustomed to taking on these trappings of rank.
Grigitor and his children had paid no attention to the kneelings and hand-kissings among the passengers. Just as well: until he had conferred with the Lady, Valentine wished not to spread news across the world of his return to self-awareness. He was still uncertain of his strategy and unsure of his powers. Besides, if he advertised his existence he might draw the attention of the present Coronal, who was not likely to stay his hand if he discovered that a pretender was journeying toward Castle Mount.
The trimaran resumed its voyage. From isle to golden isle it went, staying well within the coastal channels and only occasionally venturing into deeper, bluer waters. Past Lormanar and Climidole they sailed, and Secundail, Blayhar Strand, Garhuven, and Wiswis Keep; past Quile and Fruil; past Dawnbreak, Nissemhold, and Thiaquil; past Roazen and Piplinat; and past the great crescent sand-spit known as Damozal. They stopped at the island of Sungyve for fresh water, at Musorn for fruit and leafy vegetables, at Cadibyre for casks of the young pink wine of that island. And after many days of traveling through these small sun-blessed places they pulled into the spacious harbor of Rodamaunt Graun.
This was a large lush island of mountainous origin, surrounded by black volcanic beaches and equipped along its southern shore with a splendid natural breakwater. Rodamaunt Graun was dominant in the Archipelago, by far the largest in the chain, with a population, so Grigitor asserted, of five and a half million. Twin cities spread out like wings from both sides of the harbor, but the flanks of the island’s looming central peak were also well populated, with dwellings of rattan and skupik-wood rising in neat ranks almost to mid-point. About the last line of houses the slopes were thickly covered with jungle, and at the highest level rose a plume of thin white smoke, for Rodamaunt Graun was an active volcano. The last eruption, said Grigitor, had occurred less than fifty years before. But that was hard to believe, when one looked at the impeccable houses and the unbroken forest growth above them.
Here the Pride of Mardigile would turn back for home, but Grigitor arranged for the voyagers to shift to a trimaran even more noble, the Rodamaunt Queen, which would carry them to the Isle of Sleep. Her skipper was one Namurinta, a woman of regal poise and bearing, with long straight hair as white as Sleet’s and a youthful, unlined face. Her manner was fastidious and quizzical: she studied her assortment of passengers closely, as if trying to determine what pull had drawn such a mixture into an off-season pilgrimage, but she said only, "If you are refused at the Isle, I will return you to Rodamaunt Graun, but there will be extra costs for your upkeep in that event."
"Does the Isle often refuse pilgrims?" Valentine asked.
"Not when they come at the proper time. But the pilgrim-ships, as I suppose you know, don’t sail in autumn. There may not be facilities ready for receiving you."
"We’ve come this far with only minor difficulties," said Valentine jauntily. He heard Carabella snicker and Sleet make stagy coughing sounds. "I feel confident," he went on, "that we’ll meet no obstacles greater than those we’ve already encountered."
"I admire your determination," Namurinta said, and signaled to her crew to prepare for departure.
The Archipelago in its eastern half hooked somewhat to the north, and the islands here were generally unlike Mardigile and its neighbors, being mainly the tops of a submerged mountain chain, not flat coral-based platforms. Studying Namurinta’s charts, Valentine concluded that this part of the Archipelago had once been a long tail of a peninsula jutting out of the southwest corner of the Isle of Sleep, but had been swallowed by some rising of the Inner Sea in ancient times. Only the tallest peaks had remained above water; and between the easternmost island of the Archipelago and the coast of the Isle there now lay some hundreds of miles of open sea — a formidable journey for a trimaran, even so well equipped a trimaran as Namurinta’s.
But the voyage was uneventful. They stopped at four ports — Hellirache, Sempifiore, Dimmid, and Guadeloom — for water and victuals, sailed on serenely past Rodamaunt Ounze, the last island of the Archipelago, and entered Ungehoyer Channel, which separated the Archipelago from the Isle of Sleep. This was a broad but shallow seaway, richly endowed with marine life and heavily fished by the island folk, all but the easternmost hundred miles, which formed part of the holy perimeter of the Isle. In these waters were monsters of a harmless kind, great balloon-shaped creatures known as volevants that anchored themselves to deep rocks and lived by filtering plankton through their gills; these creatures excreted a constant stream of nutrient matter, which sustained the enormous population of life-forms about them. Valentine saw dozens of volevants in the next few days: swollen globular sacks of a deep carmine hue, fifty to eighty feet across at their upper ends, plainly visible just a few feet below the calm surface. They bore dark semicircular markings on their skins, which Valentine imagined were eyes and noses and lips, so that he saw faces peering gravely up from the water, and it seemed to him that the volevants were beings of the deepest melancholy, philosophers of weight and wisdom reflecting eternally on the ebb and flow of the tides. "They sadden me," he told Carabella. "Forever hovering there, tied by their tails to hidden boulders, swaying slowly as the currents move them. How thoughtful they are!"
"Thoughtful! Primitive gasbags, no cleverer than a sponge!"
"But look carefully at them, Carabella. They want to fly, to soar — they look up at the sky, at the whole world of the air, and long to encounter it, but all they can do is hang below the waves, and sway, and fill themselves with invisible organisms. Just in front of their faces lies another world, and it would be death to them to enter it. Are you untouched by that?"
"Silly," Carabella said
.
On the second day in the channel the Rodamaunt Queen came upon five fishing-boats that had uprooted a volevant, brought it to the surface, and slit it into gores; they clustered about the huge outspread skin of it, cutting it into smaller sections and stacking them like hides on their decks. Valentine was appalled. When I am Coronal again, he thought, I will prohibit the killing of these creatures, and then he looked at the thought in amazement, asking himself if it was his intention to promulgate laws on the basis of sympathies alone, without study of the facts. He asked Namurinta what use was made of volevant-skin.
"Medicinal," she replied. "For the comfort of the very old, when their blood flows sluggishly. One of them provides enough of the drug for all the islands for a year or more: what you see is a rare event."
When I am Coronal again, Valentine resolved, I will reserve judgment until I am in full possession of the truth, if such a thing is ever possible.
Nevertheless, the imagined solemn profundity of the volevants haunted him with strange emotions, and he was relieved to pass beyond their zone, and into the cool waters that bordered the Isle of Sleep.
—7—
THE ISLE NOW LAY CLEARLY in view to the east, growing perceptibly larger every hour. Valentine had seen it only in dreams and fantasies, and those based on nothing but his own imaginings and whatever residue of remembered reality still encrusted his mind; and he was not at all prepared for the actuality of the place.
It was immense. That should not have been surprising on a planet itself gigantic, and where so many things were in a scale with the planetary dimensions. But Valentine had misled himself into thinking an island necessarily was something of convenient and accessible scope. He had expected something perhaps two or three times as big as Rodamaunt Graun, which was foolishness: the Isle of Sleep, he saw now, spanned the entire horizon and looked as large from this distance as had the coast of Zimroel when they were a day or two out of Piliplok. An island it was, but by that token so too were Zimroel and Alhanroel and Suvrael; and the only reason the Isle was not called a continent, as were they, was that they were colossal, and the Isle merely very big.
And the Isle was dazzling. Like the promontory across the mouth of the river from Piliplok, it was ramparted by cliffs of pure white chalk that blazed brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight. They formed a wall hundreds of feet high and perhaps hundreds of miles in length across the western face of the Isle. Atop that wall spread a dark-green crown of forest, and, so it seemed, there was a second wall of chalk inland at a higher elevation, topped also by forest, and then a third yet farther from the sea, so that the Isle from this side gave an appearance of tier upon tier of brightness, rising to some unknown and perhaps inaccessible central fastness. He had heard of the terraces of the Isle, which he gathered were artificial constructs of great age, symbolic markers of the ascent toward initiation. But the island itself seemed a place of terraces, natural ones, that enhanced its mystery. Small wonder that this place had become the abode of the sacred on Majipoor.
Namurinta said, pointing, "That notch in the cliff is Taleis, where the pilgrim-ships land. It’s one of the Isle’s two harbors; the other’s Numinor, over around Alhanroel side. But you must know all this, being pilgrims."
"We have had little time to study," said Valentine. "This pilgrimage came on us suddenly."
"Will you pass the rest of your lives here in the service of the Lady?" she asked.
"In the service of the Lady, yes," Valentine said. "But I think not here. The Isle is only a way-station for some of us, on a much greater journey."
Namurinta looked puzzled at that, but she asked no further questions.
The wind blew briskly from the southwest here, and carried the Rodamaunt Queen easily and swiftly toward Taleis. Soon the great chalk wall altogether filled the view, and the opening in it was revealed as no mere notch, but a harbor of heroic size, a huge gouge in the whiteness. With sails full, the trimaran entered. Valentine, in the bow, hair streaming in the breeze, was awestruck by the scope of the place, for within the sharp-angled V that was Taleis the cliffs descended almost vertically toward the water from a height of a mile or more, and at their base was a flat strip of land bordered by a broad white beach. At one side were wharfs and piers and docks, everything dwarfed by the scale of this gigantic amphitheater. It was hard to imagine how one could get from this port at the foot of the cliffs to the interior of the island: the place was a natural fortress.
And it was silent. There were no vessels in the harbor and an eerie echoing quietness prevailed, against which the sound of the wind or the screeching of an occasional gull took on magnified significance.
"Is there anyone here?" Sleet asked. "Who will greet us?"
Carabella closed her eyes. "To have to go around to the Numinor side now — worse, to return to the Archipelago—"
"No," Deliamber said. "We will be met. Fear nothing."
The trimaran glided toward the shore and came to rest at a vacant pier. The grandeur of the surroundings was overwhelming here, deep in the V of the harbor, with the cliffs rising so high they seemed to be on the verge of toppling. A crewman made the boat fast and they stepped forth.
Deliamber’s confidence seemed misplaced. There was no one here. Everything remained still, a silence so mighty that Valentine wanted to put his hands to his ears to shut it out. They waited. They exchanged uncertain glances.
"Let’s explore," he said finally. "Lisamon, Khun, Zalzan Kavol — examine the buildings to our left. Sleet, Deliamber, Vinorkis, Shanamir — down that way. You, Pandelon, Thesme, Rovorn — to that curve of the beach, and look beyond it. Gorzval, Erfon—"
Valentine, with Carabella and the sailmender Cordeine, went straight ahead, to the foot of the titanic chalk cliff. Some sort of pathway began there, and angled upward at an impossible slope, close to vertical, toward the upper reaches of the cliff, where it vanished between two white spires. Climbing that path would require the agility of a forest-brother and the gall of a tandy-prancer, Valentine decided. Yet no other place of exit from the beach was apparent. He peered into the small wooden shack at the base of the path and found nothing but a few floater-sleds, presumably used in riding the path. He hauled one out, set it on the thrusting-pad at ground level, and mounted it; but he saw no way of activating it.
Baffled, he returned to the pier. Most of the others had come back already. "The place is deserted," said Sleet.
Valentine looked toward Namurinta. "How long would it take you to carry us around to the Alhanroel side?"
"To Numinor? Weeks. But I would not go there."
"We have money," said Zalzan Kavol.
She looked indifferent. "My trade is fishing. The time of harvest for the thorn-fish is at hand. If I take you to Numinor, I will miss it, and half the gissoon season as well. You could not recompense me for that."
The Skandar produced a five-royal piece, as though by its glitter alone he could change the captain’s mind. But she shook it away.
"For half of what you paid me to bring you from Rodamaunt Graun to here, I’ll return you to Rodamaunt Graun, but that’s the best I can do for you. In a few months the pilgrim-ships will be sailing again and this harbor will come to life, and then, if you wish, I’ll bring you here again for the same half fee. However you decide, I am at your service. But I will sail from this place before it grows dark, and not for Numinor."
Valentine considered the situation. This was a greater nuisance than being swallowed by the sea-dragon; for he had quickly enough been set free from that, but this unexpected obstacle threatened to delay him well into winter, or even beyond, and all this while Dominin Barjazid ruled at Castle Mount, new laws went forth, history was altered, the usurper consolidated his position. But what then? He glanced at Deliamber, but the wizard, though he looked bland and untroubled, offered no suggestions. They could not climb this wall. They could not fly it. They could not leap in mighty bounds to the unreachable, infinitely desirable forest groves that cloaked its shoul
ders. Back to Rodamaunt Graun, then?
"Will you wait with us here a day?" Valentine asked. "For an additional fee, that is? Possibly in the morning we’ll find someone who—"
"I am far from Rodamaunt Graun," Namurinta replied. "I yearn to see its shores again. Waiting here another hour, even, would gain you nothing and me even less. The season is wrong; the people of the Lady expect no one to arrive at Taleis, and will not be here."
Shanamir tugged tightly at Valentine’s sleeves. "You are Coronal of Majipoor," the boy whispered, "Command her to wait! Reveal yourself and force her to her knees!"
Smiling, Valentine said softly, "I think the trick might not work. I’ve left my crown elsewhere."
"Then have Deliamber witch her into yielding!"
That was a possibility. But Valentine disliked it: Namurinta had taken them on in good faith, and by rights was free to leave, and probably was correct that waiting here another day or two or three was pointless. Compelling her to yield by Deliamber’s powers was distasteful to him. On the other hand—
"Lord Valentine!" a woman’s voice called, far away.
"Here! Come!"
He looked toward the far end of the harbor. It was Pandelon, Gorzval’s carpenter, who had gone with Thesme and Rovorn to inspect what lay around the curve. She was waving, beckoning. He sprinted down toward her, the others following after a moment.
When he reached her she led him through the shallow water around a jutting fold of rock that concealed a much smaller beach. There he saw a single-story structure of pink sandstone that bore the triangle-within-triangle emblem of the Lady and was perhaps some sort of shrine. In front of it was a garden of flowering shrubs arranged in symmetrical patterns of red, blue, orange, and yellow blossoms. Two gardeners, a man and a woman, were tending it. They looked up without interest as Valentine approached. Awkwardly he made the sign of the Lady at them, and they returned it more adeptly.
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