Lord Valentine's Castle

by Robert Silverberg

  Alhanroel, too, meant the Six Rivers that spilled down from the slopes of Castle Mount, and the creature-plants of the Stoinzar that he soon would see again, and the tree-houses of Treymone, and the stone ruins of Velalisier Plain, said to be older than the advent of humankind on Majipoor. Looking eastward at that faint line, growing larger but still barely perceptible, Valentine sensed all the vastness of Alhanroel unrolling like a titanic scroll before him, and the tranquillity that had governed his frame of mind during the voyage melted at once. He was eager to be ashore, to commence his march to the Labyrinth.

  To Asenhart he said, “When will we reach land?”

  “Tomorrow evening, my lord.”

  “We’ll have feasting and games tonight, then. The best wines broken out, all hands to share. And afterward a performance deckside, a small jubilee.”

  Asenhart regarded him gravely. The admiral was an aristocrat among Hjorts, more slender than most of his kind, though with the coarse and pebbled skin that was their mark, and he had an odd sobriety of manner that Valentine found a bit offputting. The Lady held him in the highest regard.

  “A performance, my lord?”

  “A little jugglery,” said Valentine. “My friends feel a nostalgic need to practice their art again, and what better moment than to celebrate the safe conclusion of our long voyage?”

  “Of course,” said Asenhart with a formal nod. But obviously the admiral disapproved of such goings-on aboard his flagship.

  Zalzan Kavol had suggested it. The Skandar was plainly restless aboard ship; he could often be seen moving his four arms rhythmically in the gestures of juggling, though no objects were in his hands. More than anyone he had had to adapt to circumstances in this trek across the face of Majipoor. A year ago Zalzan Kavol had been a prince of his profession, master among masters of the juggling art, traveling in splendor from city to city in his wondrous wagon. Now all that was gone from him. The wagon was ashes somewhere in the forests of Piurifayne; two of his five brothers lay dead there too, and a third at the bottom of the sea; no longer did he growl orders to his employees and have them leap to obey; and instead of performing nightly before wonder-struck audiences that filled his pouch with crowns, he wandered now from place to place in Valentine’s wake, a mere subsidiary. Unused strengths and drives were accumulating in Zalzan Kavol. His face and demeanor showed it, for in the old days his temper had been churlish and he vented it freely, but now he seemed repressed, almost meek, and Valentine knew that must be a sign of severe inner distress. The agents of the Lady had found Zalzan Kavol still at the Terrace of Assessment at the outer rim of the Isle, at work at his menial pilgrim-tasks in a shambling, sleepwalking way, as if he had resigned himself to spending the rest of his life pulling weeds and pointing masonry.

  “Can you do the routine with torches and knives?” Valentine asked him.

  Zalzan Kavol brightened instantly. “Of course. And do you see those pins there?” He pointed to some huge wooden clubs, nearly four feet long, stowed in a rack near the mast. “Last night Erfon and I practiced with those, when everyone slept. If your admiral has no objections, we’ll use them tonight.”

  “Those? How can you juggle anything so long?”

  “Get me the admiral’s permission, my lord, and tonight I’ll show you!”

  All afternoon the troupe rehearsed in a large vacant chamber down in the hold. It was the first time they had done such a thing since Ilirivoyne, what seemed like half a lifetime ago. But, using the improvised array of objects that the Skandars had quietly gathered, they fell swiftly into the rhythm of it.

  Valentine, watching, felt a warm glow at the sight of them—Sleet and Carabella furiously passing clubs back and forth, Zalzan Kavol and Rovorn and Erfon devising intricate new patterns of interchange to replace those that had been destroyed with the death of their three brothers. For a moment it was like the innocent old times in Falkynkip or Dulorn, when nothing mattered except getting hired on at the festival or the circus, and the only challenge life offered was the one of keeping hand and eye coordinated. There was no going back to those days. Now that they had been swept up into high intrigue, the making and unmaking of Powers, none of them would ever be as they had been before. These five had dined with the Lady, had shared lodgings with the Coronal, were sailing onward toward a rendezvous with the Pontifex; they were already a part of history, even if Valentine’s campaign came to nothing. Yet here they were juggling again as though juggling were all there was in life.

  It had taken many days to bring his people together at Inner Temple. Valentine had imagined that the Lady or her hierarchs had merely to close their eyes and they could reach any mind on Majipoor, but it was not that simple; communication was imprecise and limited. They had located the Skandars first, in the outermost terrace. Shanamir had reached Second Cliff and in his youthful guileless way was advancing swiftly inward; Sleet, neither youthful nor guileless, had likewise wangled advancement to Second Cliff, and so had Vinorkis; Carabella was just behind them, at the Terrace of Mirrors, but through an error she was sought elsewhere at first; finding Khun and Lisamon Hultin had been no great task, since they were so much unlike all other pilgrims in appearance, but Gorzval’s three former crewmen, Pandelon, Cordeine, and Thesme, had vanished into the population of the island as though they were invisible, so that Valentine would have had to abandon them had they not turned up at the last moment. Hardest of all to track down was Autifon Deliamber. The Isle had many Vroons, some of them as diminutive as the little wizard, and all efforts at tracing him led to mistakes of identity. With the fleet ready to sail, Deliamber had still been unfound, but on the eve of departure, Valentine desperately torn between the need to move onward and the unwillingness to part from his most useful counselor, the Vroon appeared at Numinor, offering no explanations of where he had been or how he had crossed the Isle undetected. So all were united, those who had survived the long trek from Pidruid.

  On Castle Mount, Valentine knew, Lord Valentine had had his own ring of intimates, whose faces and names now had been restored to his knowledge, princes and courtiers and officials close to him since childhood, Elidath, Stasilaine, Tunigorn, the dearest comrades he had; and yet, though he still felt loyalty to those people, they had become terribly distant from his soul, and this random assortment of companions acquired during his time of wanderings now stood nearest to him. He wondered how it would be when he returned to Castle Mount and had to reconcile one group with the other.

  On one score, at least, he had reassured himself out of his newly regained memories. No wife awaited him at the Castle, nor intended bride, nor even an important lover to contest Carabella’s place at his side. As prince and as young Coronal he had lived a carefree and unattached life, the Divine be thanked. It would be difficult enough, imposing on the court the notion that the Coronal’s beloved was a commoner, a woman of the lowland cities, a wandering juggler; but it would be altogether impossible if his heart had already been given, and now he were to claim to have given it again.

  “Valentine!” Carabella called.

  Her voice broke him free of reverie. He looked toward her and she giggled and tossed him a club. He caught it as they had taught him so long ago, between thumb and fingers with the club’s head pointing at an angle. An instant later came a second one from Sleet, and then a third from Carabella. He laughed and sent the clubs whirling above his head in the old familiar pattern, throw and throw and catch, and Carabella clapped her hands and sent another one his way. It was good to be juggling again. Lord Valentine—a superb athlete, quick of eye and skilled at many games, though hampered somewhat by a slight limp from an old riding injury—had not known juggling. Juggling was the art of the simpler Valentine. Aboard this ship, wearing now the aura of authority that had come upon him by his mother’s healing of his mind, Valentine had felt his companions holding him at arm’s length, try as they might to regard him as the old Valentine of the Zimroel days. So it gave him special pleasure to have Carabella so irreveren
tly fling a club his way.

  And it gave him pleasure, too, to be handling the clubs—even when he dropped one, and, stooping for it, was hit on the head by another, provoking a snort of contempt out of Zalzan Kavol.

  “Do that tonight,” the Skandar called, “and you’ll forfeit your wine for a week!”

  “Have no fear,” Valentine retorted. “I drop the clubs now only for practice in recovering them. You’ll see no such blunders this evening.”

  Nor were there any. The ship’s entire company gathered at sundown on the deck for the entertainment. To one side, Asenhart and his officers occupied a platform where they would have the best view; but when the admiral beckoned to Valentine, offering him the chair of honor, he declined with a smile. Asenhart looked puzzled at that, but his expression was not nearly so strained as it became a few moments later, when Shanamir and Vinorkis and Lisamon Hultin began to pound on drums and tootle on coilpipes, and the jugglers emerged from a hatch in a gleeful sprint, and as they began to perform their wonders the figure of Lord Valentine the Coronal appeared among them, blithely hurling clubs and dishes and pieces of fruit like any vulgar entertainer.

  2

  If Admiral Asenhart had had his way, there would have been a grand celebration in Stoien to mark Valentine’s arrival, something at least as splendid as the festival held in Pidruid at the time of the visit of the false Coronal. But Valentine, as soon as he got word of Asenhart’s plan, put a stop to it. He was not yet ready to claim the throne, to make public accusations against the individual who called himself Lord Valentine, or to ask for any sort of homage from the citizenry at large. “Until I have the support of the Pontifex,” Valentine told Asenhart sternly, “I mean to move quietly and gather strength without attracting attention. There will be no festivals for me in Stoien.”

  So it was that the Lady Thiin made a relatively inconspicuous landfall at that great port at the southwestern tip of Alhanroel. Even though there were seven ships in the fleet—and ships of the Lady, though common enough in the harbor at Stoien, did not generally arrive in such numbers—they came in quietly, flying no fancy banners. The port officials asked few questions: obviously they traveled on the business of the Lady of the Isle, and her doings were beyond the purview of customs-clerks.

  To reinforce this, Asenhart sent purchasing agents through the wharfside district the first day, buying quantities of glue and sailcloth and spices and tools and the like. Meanwhile Valentine and his company covertly took lodgings in an unassuming commercial hotel.

  Stoien was predominantly a maritime city—export-import, warehousing, shipbuilding, all the occupations and enterprises that go with a prime coastal location and a superb harbor. The city, of some fourteen million souls, spread for hundreds of miles along the rim of the great promontory that divided the Gulf of Stoien from the main body of the Inner Sea. It was not the mainland port closest to the Isle—that was Alaisor, far up Alhanroel’s coast, thousands of miles to the north—but at this season, prevailing winds and currents being what they were, it was quicker to make the long journey down to Stoien than to brave the shorter but rougher crossing due east to Alaisor.

  After pausing here to restock the ships, they would sail the placid Gulf, going along the north shore of the huge Stoienzar Peninsula in tropic ease to Kircidane and then up to Treymone, the coastal city nearest the Labyrinth. It would be a relatively short overland trek from there to the abode of the Pontifex.

  Valentine found Stoien strikingly beautiful. The entire peninsula was altogether flat, hardly twenty feet above sea level at its highest point, but the city-dwellers had devised a wondrous arrangement of platforms of brick faced with white stone to provide the illusion of hills. No two of these platforms were of identical height, some providing an elevation of no more than a dozen feet, others looming hundreds of feet in the air. Whole neighborhoods rose atop giant pedestals several dozen feet high and more than a square mile in area; certain significant buildings had platforms of their own, standing as if on stilts above their surroundings; alternations of high platforms and low ones created eye-jiggling vistas of startling contour.

  What might have been an effect of sheerly mechanical whimsy, rapidly coming to seem brutal or arbitrary or fatiguing to behold, was softened and mellowed by tropical plantings unrivaled in Valentine’s experience. At the base of every platform grew dense beds of broad-crowned trees, interlaced branch by branch to form impenetrable cloaks. Leafy vines cascaded over the platform walls. The wide ramps that led from street level to the higher platforms were bordered by generous concrete tubs housing clusters of bushes whose narrow tapered leaves were marked with astonishing splashes of color, claret and cobalt and vermilion and scarlet and indigo and topaz and sapphire and amber and jade hues all mixed together in irregular patterns. And in the great public places of the city were the most startling displays of all, gardens of the famous animate plants that grew wild a few hundred miles to the south, on the torrid coast that looked toward the distant desert continent of Suvrael. These plants—and plants they were, for they manufactured their food by photosynthesis and lived their lives rooted to a single place—had a fleshy look to them, with arms that moved and coiled and grasped, eyes that stared, tubular bodies that undulated and swayed, and though they derived nourishment enough from sunlight and water, they were quite willing and able to devour and digest any small creature rash enough to come within their reach. Elegantly arranged groups of them, bordered by low stone walls that served as warnings as well as decorations, were planted everywhere in Stoien. Some were as tall as small trees, others short and globular, still others bushy and angular. All were in constant motion, reacting to breezes, odors, sudden shouts, the voices of their keepers, and other stimuli. Valentine found them sinister but fascinating. He wondered if a collection of them might not be brought to Castle Mount.

  “Why not?” Carabella said. “They can be kept alive as sideshow displays in Pidruid. There ought to be a way to keep them in good health at Lord Valentine’s Castle.”

  Valentine nodded. “We’ll hire a staff of keepers out of Stoien. We’ll find out what they eat and have it shipped up to the Mount regularly.”

  Sleet shuddered. “These creatures give me a creepy feeling, my lord. Do you find them so lovely?”

  “Not exactly lovely,” said Valentine. “Interesting.”

  “As I suppose you found the mouthplants, eh?”

  “The mouthplants, yes!” Valentine cried. “We’ll bring some of them to the Castle too!”

  Sleet groaned.

  Valentine paid little notice. His face glowed with sudden enthusiasm. Taking Sleet and Carabella by the hands, he said, “Each Coronal had added something to the Castle: an observatory, a library, a parapet, a battlement of prisms and shields, an armory, a feasting-hall, a trophy-room, reign by reign the Castle growing, changing, becoming richer and more complex. In my short time I had no chance even to think about what I would contribute. But listen: what Coronal has seen Majipoor the way I have? Who has traveled so far, in so turbulent a fashion? To commemorate my adventures I’ll collect the weirdities I’ve seen, the mouthplants and these animate plants and the bladdertrees and a good-sized dwikka or two and a grove of fireshower palms and sensitivos and those singing ferns, all the wonders of our journey. There’s nothing like that at the Castle now, only the little glassed-in plant-houses that Lord Confalume built. I’ll do it grandly! Lord Valentine’s garden! How do you like the sound of that?”

  “It will be a marvel, my lord,” said Carabella.

  Sleet said sourly, “I would not care to stroll among the mouthplants of Lord Valentine’s garden, not for three dukedoms and the revenues of Ni-moya and Piliplok.”

  “We excuse you from garden tours,” said Valentine, laughing.

  But there would be no garden tours, nor any garden, until Valentine dwelled again in Lord Valentine’s Castle. For an interminable week he idled in Stoien, waiting for Asenhart to complete his provisioning. Three of the ships were going
to return to the Isle, bearing the goods bought here for island use; the other four would continue on as Valentine’s surreptitious escort. The Lady had provided him with more than a hundred of her sturdiest bodyguards, under the command of the formidable hierarch Lorivade: not warriors, exactly, for there had not been violence on the Isle of Sleep since the Metamorphs last invaded it thousands of years ago, but these were competent and fearless men and women, loyal to the Lady and ready to give their lives if need be to restore the harmony of the realm. They were the nucleus of a private army—the first such military force, so far as Valentine knew, organized on Majipoor since ancient times.

  At last the fleet was ready to depart. The Isle-bound ships left first, early on a warm Twoday morning, heading north-northwest. The others waited until Seaday afternoon, when they sailed on the same course, but swung about after dark to head due east into the Gulf of Stoien.