"I ask only that you send my message to the Lady," Valentine said quietly.
They surrounded him and, moving in formation, walked him briskly along the forest path to a place where three floaters were parked and a number of younger acolytes waited. Evidently they had been prepared for serious trouble. Lorivade gestured to one of the acolytes and issued brief orders; then the five hierarchs boarded one of the floaters and were borne away.
Acolytes moved toward Valentine. None too gently they caught him and propelled him toward a floater. He smiled and indicated he would make no resistance, but they held him firmly and pushed him roughly into a seat. The floater rose to full hover and, at a signal, the mounts tethered to it began to trot toward the nearby terrace.
It was a place of wide, low buildings and great stone plazas, this Terrace of Shadows, and the shadows that gave it its name were black as the darkest ink, mysterious all-engulfing pools of night that stretched in strangely significant patterns over the abstract stone statuary. But Valentine’s tour of the terrace was brief. His captors halted outside a squat stark building without windows; a cunningly fashioned door slid open on silent hinges at the lightest of touches; he was ushered inside.
The door closed and left no trace in the wall. He was a prisoner.
The room was square, low-ceilinged, and bleak. A single dim glow-float cast a mellow greenish light. There was a cleanser, a sink, a commode, a mattress. Beyond that, nothing.
Would they send his message to the Lady? Or would they leave him here to grow dusty, while they investigated the irregularities of his advent on Third Cliff, rummaging for weeks in the island bureaucracy?
An hour passed, two, three. Let them send an interrogator, he prayed, an inquisitor, anyone, only not this silence, this boredom, this solitude. He counted paces. The room was not precisely square: one pair of walls was a pace and a half longer than the other pair. He searched for the outlines of the doorway, and could not find them. The fit was seamless, a marvel of design that gave him little cheer. He invented dialogues and silently embellished them: Valentine and Deliamber, Valentine and the Lady, Valentine and Carabella, Valentine and Lord Valentine. But it was an amusement that soon palled.
He heard a faint whining sound and whirled to see a slot open in the wall and a tray come sliding into his cell. They had given him baked fish, a cluster of ivory-colored grapes, a beaker of cool red juice. "For this repast I thank you kindly," he said out loud. His fingers probed the wall, seeking the place where the tray had entered: no trace.
He ate. He invented more dialogues, conversing in his mind with Sleet, with the old dream-speaker Tisana, with Zalzan Kavol, with Captain Gorzval. He asked them about their childhoods, their hopes and dreams, their political opinions, their tastes in food and drink and clothing. Again the game wore thin after a while, and he stretched out to sleep.
Sleep was thin too, a shallow doze, broken half a dozen times by white dreary spells of wakefulness. His dreams were patchy ones; through them drifted the Lady, Farssal, the King of Dreams, the Metamorph chieftain, and the hierarch Lorivade, but they offered only muddled and murky words. When he woke, finally, a tray of breakfast had appeared in the room.
A long day passed.
He had never known a day so interminable. There was nothing at all to do, nothing, nothing whatever, an endless stretch of gray nothingness. He would have juggled his dishes, but they were light and flimsy things and it would have been like juggling feathers. He tried to juggle his boots, but he had only two of those and juggling things in twos was a fool’s sport. He juggled memories instead, reliving all that had befallen him since Pidruid, but the prospect of an infinity of hours doing that dismayed him. He meditated until there was a dull buzz of fatigue between his ears. He crouched in the center of the room, trying to anticipate the moment when the next meal would arrive, but the tension he generated out of that yielded only feeble entertainment.
On the second night Valentine made an attempt to communicate with the Lady. He prepared himself for sleep, but as his mind began to release itself from consciousness he endeavored to slip into an intermediate place between waking and sleeping, a trance-state of sorts. It was a ticklish business, for if he concentrated too intently he would tip himself back into full wakefulness, and if he relaxed too thoroughly he would fall asleep; he balanced there a long time, at the floating-point, wishing he had taken the opportunity in some quiet part of his Zimroel journey to have Deliamber train him in these matters.
At last he sent forth his spirit.
— Mother?
He imagined his soul coursing high over the Terrace of Shadows and drifting inward, inward, past terrace after terrace, to the core of Third Cliff, to Inner Temple, to the chamber where the Lady of the Isle rested.
— Mother, it’s Valentine. It’s your son Valentine. I have so much to tell you, mother, and so much to ask! But you have to help me reach you.
Valentine lay still. He was wholly calm. A pure white radiance seemed to glow in his mind.
—Mother, I’m on Third Cliff, in a prison cell in the Terrace of Shadows. I’ve come so far, mother. But now I’m stopped. Send for me, mother!
—Mother—
—Lady—
—Mother—
He slept.
The radiance still glowed. He perceived the first tingling music of the dream-state, the overture, the initial sensations of contact. Visions came. No longer was he imprisoned. He lay beneath the cool white stars on a great circular platform of finely polished stone, as though an altar, and to him came a white-robed woman with lustrous dark hair, who knelt beside him and touched him lightly, saying in a tender voice, "You are my son Valentine, and I do acknowledge you before all Majipoor to be my son, and I summon you now to my side."
That was all. When he woke he could recall nothing of the dream but that.
There was no breakfast tray for him that morning. Was it truly morning, then, or had he awakened in the middle of the night? Hours passed. No tray. Had they forgotten him? Did they plan to starve him to death? He felt a twinge of terror: was that an improvement over boredom? He thought he preferred boredom to terror, but not by much. He called out, but he knew it was useless. This place was sealed like a tomb. Like a tomb. Glumly Valentine looked at the accumulation of old trays, stacked against the far wall. He remembered the wonders and joys of food, the sausages of the Liiimen, the fish that Khun and Sleet had grilled on the banks of the Steiche, the flavor of dwikka-fruit, the potent tang of fireshower wine in Pidruid. His hunger was growing intense. And he was frightened. Not bored at all now, but frightened. They had held a meeting, perhaps, and condemned him to death for overwhelming folly.
Minutes. Hours. Half a day gone now.
Folly to think he could touch the Lady’s mind in sleep. Folly to think he could float effortlessly into Inner Temple and win her aid. Folly to think he could regain Castle Mount, or that he had ever had it at all. He had propelled himself halfway around the world on no force other than folly, and now, he thought bitterly, he would have the reward of his presumption and his foolishness.
Then at last he heard the familiar faint whine. But it was not the food-slot opening: it was the door.
Two white-haired hierarchs entered the cell. They favored him with a look of bleak and sour bafflement.
"Have you come to deliver my breakfast?" Valentine asked.
"We have come," said the taller one, "to conduct you to Inner Temple."
—11—
H` feed him first — a wise move, for the trip proved to be a lengthy one, all the rest of the day by swift mount-drawn floater-wagon. The hierarchs sat flanking him in chilly silence throughout. When he asked a question — the name of some terrace through which they were passing, for example — they would reply in the fewest possible words; otherwise they offered no chatter.
Third Cliff had many terraces — Valentine lost count after about seven — and they were much closer together than those of the outer cliffs, with only token
strips of forest separating them. This central zone of the Isle seemed a busy and populous place.
At twilight they came to the Terrace of Adoration, a domain of serene gardens and rambling low buildings of whitewashed stone. Like all the other terraces it was circular in outline, but it was much smaller than the others, here at the innermost part of the island, a mere ringlet that probably could be walked in all its circumference in an hour or two, whereas it might take months to complete the circuit of a First Cliff terrace. Ancient gnarled trees with close-set oval leaves rose at regular intervals along its rampart. Bowers of richly blossoming vines coiled between the buildings; small courtyards were everywhere, decorated with slender pillars of polished black stone and bedecked with flowering shrubs. In twos and threes the servants of the Lady moved quietly through these peaceful precincts. Valentine was conducted to a chamber far more gracious than his last, with a broad sunken bath, an inviting bed, windows facing into a garden, baskets of fruit on the table. The hierarchs left him here. He bathed, nibbled fruit, waited for the next event. That was some time in arriving, an hour or more: a knock on the door, a soft voice asking if he wished dinner, a cart rolled into the room bearing more substantial fare than he had had since coming to the Isle — grilled meats, blue gourds artfully stuffed with minced fish, a beaker of something cold that might almost have been wine. Valentine ate eagerly. Afterward he stood by his windows a long time, studying the darkness. He saw nothing; he heard no one. He tested his door: locked. So he was still a prisoner, although in far more pleasing surroundings than before.
He slept a dreamless sleep. A flood of golden sunlight cascading into his room awakened him. He bathed; the same discreet servitor appeared outside, with a breakfast of sausages and stewed pink fruit; and a short while after he was done the two somber hierarchs came to him, saying, "The Lady has summoned you this morning."
They led him through a garden of marvelous beauty and across a slender bridge of pure white stone that rose in a gentle arch above a dark pond in which golden fish swam in sparkling patterns. Ahead lay a wondrously manicured green-sward. At the center of it was a one-story building of great size, extraordinarily delicate in form, with long narrow wings radiating in the form of starbeams from the circular center.
This could only be Inner Temple, Valentine thought.
Now he trembled. He had journeyed, for more months than he could remember, toward this very spot, toward the threshold of the mysterious woman whose realm this was, whom he fancied to be his mother. At last he was here; and what if it proved all to be foolishness, or fantasy, or terrible error, what if he was no one in particular, a yellow-haired idler from Zimroel, bereft of his memory through some stupidity and filled by trifling companions with nonsensical ambitions? The thought was unbearable. If the Lady repudiated him now, if she denied him—
He entered the temple.
The hierarchs still close at his sides, Valentine marched endlessly down an impossibly elongated entrance hall that was guarded every twenty feet by a grim-faced rigid warrior, and into an interior room, octagonal in shape, with walls of the finest white stone and a pool, octagonal also, at its center. Morning light entered through an open eight-sided skylight. At each corner of the room stood a stern figure in hierarchical robes. Valentine, a little dazed, looked from one to the next and saw no welcome on their faces, only a sort of pursed-lip disapproval.
There was a single note of music, softly swelling, then dying away, and when it was gone the Lady of the Isle was in the room.
She seemed much like the figure Valentine had seen so often in dreams: a woman of middle years and ordinary height, dusky of skin, with glossy black hair, warm soft eyes, a full mouth that hovered always at the edge of a smile, a silver band at her brow, and, yes, a flower behind one ear, with many thick green petals. It seemed, though, that there was an aura about her, a nimbus, a radiance of force and authority and majesty, such as befitted the Power of Majipoor that she was, and he had not been prepared for that, expecting as he had been only the warm motherly woman, and forgetting that she was a queen, a priestess, almost a goddess, as well. He stood speechless before her, and for a long moment she studied him from the far side of the pool, her gaze resting lightly but penetratingly on his face. Then she waved one hand sharply in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal. Not of him: of the hierarchs. Their glacial calm was broken by that. They looked to one another, obviously confused. The Lady repeated the gesture, a mere shallow snap of the wrist, and something imperious flashed in her eyes, a look of almost terrifying strength. Three or four of the hierarchs left the room; the others dawdled, as if not believing that the Lady proposed to be left alone with the prisoner. For an instant it seemed that a third wave of her hand might be necessary, as one of the oldest and most imposing of the hierarchs extended a quivering arm toward her in a motion of obvious protest. But at a glance from the Lady the Hierarch’s arm dropped back to his side. Slowly the last of them went out of the room.
Valentine fought the impulse to fall to his knees. He said in a barely audible voice, "I have no idea of the proper obeisance to make. Nor do I know, Lady, how I should address you, without giving offense."
Calmly she replied, "It will be enough, Valentine, if you call me mother."
The quiet words stunned him. He took a faltering few steps toward her, halted, stared.
"Is it so?" he asked in a whisper.
"There can be no doubt of it."
He felt his cheeks ablaze. He stood helpless, numbed by her grace. She beckoned to him, the tiniest movement of her fingertips, and he shook as though he were caught in an ocean gale.
"Come close," she said. "Are you afraid? Come to me, Valentine!"
He crossed the room, went round the pool, drew near her. She put her hands into his. Instantly he felt a jolt of energy, a tangible, palpable throbbing, somewhat akin to what he had felt when Deliamber touched him to do wizardry-work, but enormously more powerful, enormously more awesome. He would have withdrawn his hands at that first throb of force, but she held him, and he could not, and her eyes close by his seemed to be seeing through him, entering all his mysteries.
"Yes," she said finally. "By the Divine, yes, Valentine, your body is strange but your soul is of my own making! Oh, Valentine, Valentine, what have they done to you? What have they done to Majipoor?" She tugged at his hands, and pulled him close to her, and then he was in her arms, the Lady straining upward to embrace him, and he felt her trembling now, no goddess but only a woman, a mother holding her troubled son. In her grasp he felt such peace as he had not known since his awakening in Pidruid, and he clung to her, praying she would never release him.
Then she stood back and surveyed him, smiling. "You were given a handsome body, at least. Nothing like what you once were, but pleasing to the eye, and strong as well, and healthy. They could have done much worse. They could have made you something weak and sickly and deformed, but I suppose they lacked the courage, knowing that eventually they would be repaid tenfold for all their crimes."
"Who, mother?"
She seemed surprised at his question. "Why, Barjazid and his brood!"
Valentine said, "I know nothing, mother, except what has come to me in dreams, and even that has been befogged and muddled."
"And what is it that you know?"
"That my body has been taken from me, that in some witchery of the King of Dreams I was left outside Pidruid as you see me, that someone else, I think it may be Dominin Barjazid, rules now from Castle Mount. But I know all this only in the most untrustworthy of ways."
"It is all true," the Lady replied.
"When was it that this happened?"
"In early summer," she said. "When you made the grand processional in Zimroel. I have no knowledge of how it was done; but one night as I lay sleeping I felt a wrenching, a tearing, as of the heart of the planet being ripped loose, and I awakened knowing that something evil and monstrous had occurred, and I sent out my soul toward you and was unable to reach you. There
was only a silence where you had been, a void. Yet it was different from the silence that struck me when Voriax was slain, for I still felt your presence, but beyond my reach, as if behind a thick sheet of glass. I asked at once for news of the Coronal. He is in Til-omon, my people told me. And is he well? I asked. Yes, they said, he is well, he sails today toward Pidruid. But I could make no contact, Valentine. I sent forth my soul as I had not done in years, to every part of the world, and you were nowhere and somewhere, both at once. I was frightened and confused, Valentine, but I could do nothing but seek and wait, and news came to me that Lord Valentine had reached Pidruid, that he was guest in the mayor’s grand house, and I had a vision of him across all this distance and his face was the face of my son. But his mind was other, and it was closed to me. I attempted a sending, and I could not send to him. And at last I began to understand."
"Did you know where I was?"
"Not at first. They had witched your mind so well it was altogether changed. Night after night I cast my soul forth into Zimroel in search of you — neglecting everything else here, but this was no trifling matter, this substitution of Coronals — and I thought I felt glimmers, a shard of your true self, a fragment — and after a time I was able to determine that you were alive, that you were in northwestern Zimroel, but there was still no reaching you. I had to wait until you had awakened more to yourself, until their witcheries had faded a bit and your true mind was restored at least in part."
"It is still far from whole, mother."
"I know that. But that can be remedied, I believe."
"When did you finally reach me?"
She paused a moment in thought. "It was near the Ghayrog city, I think, Dulorn, and I saw you first through the minds of others who were dreaming the truth about you. And I touched their minds, I refined and clarified what was in them, and I saw that your soul had imprinted its stamp on them and that they knew better than you did yourself what had befallen you. I circled about you in this way, and then I was able to enter you. And from that moment on you have gained in knowledge of your former self, as I have labored across so many thousands of miles to heal you and to draw you to me. But none of it was easy. The world of dreams. Valentine, is a difficult and shifting place, even for me, and to attempt to control it is like writing a book in the sand beside an ocean: the tide returns and obliterates nearly everything, and you must write it again, and again and again. But at last you are here."
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