Lord Valentine's Castle

by Robert Silverberg

  Of all the beasts of Majipoor, the sea-dragons were by far the largest. Newborn, they were tiny, no more than five or six feet in length, but through all their lives they continued to grow, and their life spans were long, although no one knew just how long. Gorzval, who let his passengers share his table and proved to be a talkative man now that his anxieties were behind him, was fond of telling tales of the immensity of certain sea-dragons. One that had been taken in the reign of Lord Malibor was a hundred and ninety feet in length, and another, of Confalume’s time, two hundred and forty, and in the era when Prestimion was Pontifex and Lord Dekkeret the Coronal, they had caught one thirty feet longer than that. But the champion, said Gorzval, was one that had boldly appeared almost in the mouth of Piliplok harbor in the reign of Thimin and Lord Kinniken, and had reliably been measured at three hundred and fifteen feet. That monster, known as Lord Kinniken’s dragon, had escaped unharmed because the entire fleet of dragon-ships was then far out to sea. Allegedly it had been sighted again several times by hunters in succeeding centuries, most recently in the year Lord Voriax became Coronal, but no one had ever laid a harpoon on it, and among hunters it had a baleful reputation. “It must be five hundred feet long by now,” said Gorzval, “and I pray that some other captain is given the honor of encountering it when it returns to our waters.”

  Valentine had seen small sea-dragons, pithed, gutted, salted, and dried, sold in marketplaces all over Zimroel, and on occasion he had tasted their meat, which was dark, tangy, and tough. Dragons less than ten feet long were the ones prepared in this way. The meat of larger ones, up to fifty feet or so, was butchered and sold fresh along the eastern coast of Zimroel, but difficulties of transportation kept it from finding markets far from the sea. Beyond that length the dragons were too old to be edible, but their flesh was rendered into oil that had many purposes, petroleum and other fossil hydrocarbons being scarce on Majipoor. The bones of sea-dragons of all sizes had their uses in architecture, for they were nearly as strong as steel and far more readily obtained, and there was medicinal value in the unborn dragon-eggs, found in quantities of many hundreds of pounds in the abdomens of mature females. Dragon-skin, dragon-wings, dragon this and dragon that, everything was put to some benefit and nothing wasted. “This, for example, is dragon-milk,” said Gorzval, offering his guests a flask of a pale bluish liquid. “In Ni-moya or Khyntor they’d pay ten crowns for a flask like this. Here, taste it.”

  Lisamon Hultin took a hesitant sip and spat it on the floor. “Dragon-milk or dragon-piss?” she demanded.

  The captain smiled frostily. “In Dulorn,” he said, “what you spat out would cost you at least a crown, and you’d count yourself lucky to find some.” He pushed the flask toward Sleet, who shook his head, and then to Valentine. After a moment’s pause Valentine put it to his lips.

  “Bitter,” he said, “and a musty taste, but not entirely terrible. What’s the secret of its appeal?”

  The Skandar patted his thighs. “Aphrodisiac!” he boomed. “Stirs the juices! Heats the blood! Prolongs the life!” He pointed jovially at Zalzan Kavol, who, unasked, had taken a robust swig of the stuff. “See? The Skandar knows! The man of Piliplok doesn’t need to be begged to drink it!”

  Carabella said, “Dragon-milk? These are mammals?”

  “Mammals, yes. The eggs are hatched within, so, and the young born alive, ten or twenty in a litter, rows of nipples all up and down the belly. You think it’s odd, milk from dragons?”

  “I think of dragons as reptiles,” said Carabella, “and reptiles give no milk.”

  “Think of dragons as dragons, better. You want to taste?”

  “Thank you, no,” she replied. “My juices need no stirring.”

  The meals in the captain’s cabin were the best part of the voyage, Valentine decided. Gorzval was good-natured and outgoing, as Skandars went, and he set a decent table, with wine and meats and fish of various sorts, including a good deal of dragon-flesh. But the ship itself was creaky and cramped, poorly designed and even more poorly maintained, and the crew, a dozen Skandars and an assortment of Hjorts and humans, was uncommunicative and often downright hostile. Obviously these dragon-hunters were a proud and insular lot, even the crew of a bedraggled vessel like the Brangalyn, and resented the presence of outsiders among them as they practiced their mysteries. Only Gorzval seemed at all hospitable; but he clearly felt grateful to them, for their fare was all that had allowed him to get his ship seaworthy.

  They were far from land now, in a featureless realm where pale blue ocean met pale blue sky to obliterate all sense of place and direction. The course was south-southeasterly, and the farther they got from Piliplok the warmer grew the wind, hot now and dry as ever. “We call the wind our sending,” said Gorzval, “because it comes straight from Suvrael. The little gift of the King of Dreams, it is, as delightful as all his others.” The sea was empty: no islands, no drifting logs, no sign of anything, not even dragons. The dragons had gone far past the coast this year, as they sometimes did, and were basking in the tropical waters close by the fringes of the Archipelago. Occasionally a gihorna-bird passed far overhead, making its autumn migration from the islands to the Zimr Marsh, which was not near the Zimr at all but on the coast five hundred miles south of Piliplok; these long-legged creatures must have made tempting targets, but no one took aim at them. Another tradition of the sea, it seemed.

  The first dragons manifested themselves the second week out from Piliplok. Gorzval predicted their arrival a day in advance, having dreamed that they were near. “Every captain dreams dragons,” he explained. “Our minds are attuned to them: we feel their souls approaching us. There’s a captain, a woman with some teeth out, Guidrag’s her name, who can dream them a week away, sometimes more. Heads right to them and they’re always there. Me, I’m not that good, can’t do better than a day’s distance. But nobody’s as good as Guidrag, anyway. I do my best. We’ll have dragons off the bow in another ten, twelve hours—that’s a guarantee.”

  Valentine had little confidence in the Skandar captain’s guarantees. But in mid-morning the lookout high in the mast sang out, “Hoy! Dragons ho!”

  A great many of them, forty, fifty, maybe more, swarmed just off the Brangalyn’s bow. They were big-bellied ungraceful beasts, broad in cross-section like the Brangalyn itself, with long thick necks, heavy triangular heads, short tails terminating in flat flaring flukes, and prominent ridges of bony projections running the length of their high-vaulted backs. Their wings were the strangest feature of all—fins, really, for it was inconceivable that these huge creatures should ever take to the air, but they looked far more like wings than fins, batwings, dark and leathery, sprouting from massive stumpy bases below the sea-dragons’ necks and sweeping down half the lengths of their bodies. Most of the dragons kept their wings folded like cloaks, but some had them fully outspread, fanning them out along the axes provided by long fragile-looking finger-bones, and with them they covered the water about them for astonishing spreads, unfurling them like black tarpaulins.

  Most of the dragons were young, twenty to fifty feet in length, but there were many newborn ones, six-footers or thereabouts, swimming and splashing freely or else gripping the nipples of their mothers, who tended to be of mid-size range. But among the school drifted a few monsters, half submerged and somnolent, their spine-ridges rising high above the water like the central hills of some floating island. They were unimaginably bulky. It was hard to judge their full magnitude, for their hindquarters tended to droop out of sight, but two or three of them looked at least as large as the ship. As Gorzval passed him on the deck Valentine said, “We don’t have Lord Kinniken’s dragon out there, do we?”

  The Skandar captain chuckled indulgently. “Nay, the Kinniken’s three times the size of those, at least. Three? More than three! Those are hardly hundred-fifty-footers. I’ve seen dozens bigger. So will you, friend, before long.”

  Valentine tried to imagine dragons three times the size of the biggest out ther
e. His mind rebelled. It was like trying to visualize the full scope of Castle Mount: one simply could not do it.

  The ship moved in for the kill. It was a smoothly coordinated operation. Boats were lowered, with a lance-wielding Skandar strapped upright in the bow of each. Among the nursing dragons the boats quietly moved, the lancer spearing one here, one there, apportioning the kill among the mothers so that none was aroused by total loss of her young. These young dragons were lashed by their tails to the boats; and as the boats returned to the ship, nets were lowered to hoist the catch. Only when some dozen young dragons had been taken did the hunters go for bigger game. The boats were retracted and the harpooner, a giant Skandar with a naked dull blue swath across his chest where the fur had long ago been ripped away, took his place in the cupola. Unhurriedly he selected his weapon and nocked it into its catapult while Gorzval maneuvered the ship to give him a good shot at the chosen victim. The harpooner took aim; the dragons grazed on, heedless; Valentine discovered that he was holding his breath and intently squeezing Carabella’s hand. Then the gleaming somber shaft of the harpoon was released.

  It buried itself to its haft in the blubbery shoulder of a dragon some ninety feet long and instantly the sea came alive.

  The wounded dragon lashed the surface with its tail and unfurled its wings, which beat against the water in a titanic fury, as though the animal meant to burst into the air and soar off, dragging the dangling Brangalyn behind it. At that first frantic outburst of pain the mother-dragons opened their wings as well, gathering their nurslings into a protective shield, and with powerful strokes of their tails began to move away, while the largest of the herd, the utter monsters, simply sank from view, letting themselves glide into the depths with scarcely a ripple of energy. This left a dozen or so adolescent dragons, who knew that something disturbing was happening but were not sure how to react; they swam in wide circles around their wounded comrade, holding their wings tentatively half-spread and slapping lightly at the water with them. Meanwhile the harpooner, still choosing his weapons in absolute tranquillity, put a second and a third into his prey, close by the first.

  “Boats!” cried Gorzval. “Nets!”

  Now began a strange proceeding. Once more the boats were lowered, and the hunters rowed forth. Toward the ring of excited dragons they headed, and hurled into the water grenades of some sort that exploded with dull booming sounds, spreading a thick coating of bright yellow dye. The explosions and, it seemed, the dye sent the remaining dragons into a frenzy of terror. With wild thrashings of wings and tails they swam swiftly out of sight. Only the victim remained, very much alive but held fast. It too was swimming, in a northerly direction, but it towed the entire mass of the Brangalyn along behind it, and it was visibly weakened moment by moment by the effort. The boatmen, with their dye-grenades, attempted to force the dragon closer to the ship; at the same time the netmen lowered a colossal webwork of fabric which by some interior mechanism opened and spread out over the water, and closed again when the dragon had entangled itself in its meshes.

  “Winches!” Gorzval roared, and the net rose from the water.

  The dragon dangled in midair. Its enormous weight caused the huge ship to list alarmingly. Far above, the harpooner rose in his cupola for the coup de grace. He gripped the catapult with all four hands and let fly. A ferocious grunt came from him as he released the weapon and an instant later came an answering sound, hollow, agonized, from the dragon. The harpoon penetrated the dragon’s skull at a point just behind the great saucerlike green eyes. The mighty wings raked the air in one last terrible convulsion.

  The rest was mere butchery. The winches did their work, the dragon was hoisted to the slaughter-block, the stripping of the carcass began. Valentine watched awhile, until the gory spectacle palled: the flensing of the blubber, the securing of the valuable internal organs, the severing of the wings, and all the rest. When he had had enough he went below, and when he returned a few hours later the skeleton of the dragon rose like a museum exhibit over the deck, a great white arch topped by that bizarre spiny ridge, and the hunters were at work disassembling even that.

  “You look grim,” Carabella said to him.

  “I lack appreciation of this art,” he answered.

  It seemed to Valentine that Gorzval could entirely have filled the hold of his vessel, large as it was, with the proceeds of this one school of dragons. But he had chosen a handful of young and only one adult, not by any means the largest, and had deliberately driven the others away. Zalzan Kavol explained that there were quotas, decreed by Coronals in centuries past, to prevent overfishing: herds were to be thinned, not exterminated, and a ship that returned too soon from its voyage would be called to account and subjected to severe penalties. Besides, it was essential to get the dragons quickly on board, before predators arrived, and to process the flesh swiftly; a crew that hunted too greedily would be unable to handle its own catch in an effective and profitable way.

  The season’s first kill seemed to make Gorzval’s crew more mellow. They nodded occasionally at the passengers, even smiled now and then, and went about their own tasks in a relaxed and almost cheerful way. Their sullen silence melted; they laughed, joked, sang on deck:

  Lord Malibor was fine and bold

  And loved the heaving sea,

  Lord Malibor came off the Mount,

  A hunter for to be.

  Lord Malibor prepared his ship,

  A gallant sight was she,

  With sails of beaten gold.

  And masts of ivory.

  Valentine and Carabella heard the singers—it was the squad barreling the blubber—and went aft to listen more closely. Carabella quickly picking up the simple robust melody, quietly began to finger it on her pocket-harp, adding little fanciful cadenzas between the verses.

  Lord Malibor stood at the helm

  And faced the heaving wave,

  And sailed in quest of the dragon free,

  The dragon fierce and brave.

  Lord Malibor a challenge called,

  His voice did boom and ring.

  “I wish to meet, I wish to fight,”

  Quoth he, “the dragon-king.”

  “I hear, my lord,” the dragon cried,

  And came across the sea.

  Twelve miles long and three miles wide

  And two miles deep was he.

  “Look,” Carabella said. “There’s Zalzan Kavol.”

  Valentine glanced across the way. Yes, there was the Skandar, listening at the far side near the rail, all his arms folded, a deepening scowl on his face. He did not seem to be enjoying the song. What was the matter with him?

  Lord Malibor stood on the deck

  And fought both hard and well.

  Thick was the blood that flowed that day

  And great the blows that fell.

  But dragon-kings are cold and sly,

  And rarely are they beaten.

  Lord Malibor, for all his strength,

  Eventually was eaten.

  All sailors bold, who dragons hunt,

  Of this grim tale take heed!

  Despite all luck and skill, you may

  End up as dragon-feed.

  Valentine laughed and clapped his hands. That brought an immediate fierce glare from Zalzan Kavol, who strode toward them looking huffy with indignation.

  “My lord!” he cried. “Will you tolerate such irreverent—”

  “Not so loud on the my lord,” Valentine said crisply. “Irreverent, you say? What are you talking about?”

  “No respect for a terrible tragedy! No respect for a fallen Coronal! No respect for—”

  “Zalzan Kavol!” Valentine said slyly. “Are you such a lover of respectability, then?”

  “I know what is right and what is wrong, my lord. To mock the death of Lord Malibor is—”

  “Be more easy, my friend,” Valentine said gently, putting his hand on one of the Skandar’s gigantic forearms. “Where Lord Malibor has gone, he is far beyond matte
rs of respect or disrespect. And I thought the song was a delight. If I take no offense, Zalzan Kavol, why should you?”

  But Zalzan Kavol continued to grumble and bluster. “If I may say it, my lord, you may not yet be returned to a full sense of the rightness of things. If I were you, I would go to those sailors now and order them never to sing such a thing again in your presence.”

  “In my presence?” Valentine said, with a broad grin. “Why should they care dragon-spittle for my presence? Who am I but a passenger, barely tolerated at all? If I said any such thing, I’d be over the rail in a minute, and dragon-feed myself the next. Eh? Think about it, Zalzan Kavol! And calm yourself, fellow. It’s only a silly sailor-song.”

  “Nevertheless,” the Skandar muttered, walking stiffly away.

  Carabella giggled. “He takes himself so seriously.”

  Valentine began to hum, then to sing:

  All sailors bold, who dragons hunt,

  Of this—

  Of this sad tale?—

  Of this sad tale take heed!

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Love, will you do me a service? When those men are through with their work, draw one of them aside—the red-bearded one, I think, with the deep bass voice—and have him teach you the words. And then teach them to me. And I can sing it to Zalzan Kavol to make him smile, eh? How does it go? Let’s see—”

  “I hear, my lord,” the dragon cried,

  And came across the sea.

  Twelve miles long and three miles wide

  And two miles deep was he—

  A week or thereabouts passed before they sighted dragons again, and in that time not only Carabella and Valentine learned the ditty, but Lisamon Hultin as well, who took pleasure in bellowing it across the decks in her raucous baritone. But Zalzan Kavol continued to growl and snort whenever he heard it.