Valentine Pontifex

by Robert Silverberg

  The golden-haired woman who had been visiting him said, “Shall I stay here until you come back?”

  He shook his head. “There’s no telling how long this will take. If the Pontifex has died—”

  The woman made the Labyrinth sign. “The Divine forbid!”

  “Indeed,” said Hornkast drily.

  He went out. The Sphere of Triple Shadows, rising high above the gleaming obsidian walls of the plaza, was in its brightest phase, casting an eerie blue-white light that obliterated all sensations of dimensionality or depth: the passersby looked like mere paper dolls, floating on a gentle breeze. With the messengers beside him and hard pressed to keep up with his pace, Hornkast hastened across the plaza to the private lift, moving, as always, with a vigor that belied his eighty years.

  The descent to the imperial zone was interminable.

  Dead? Dying? Inconceivable. Hornkast realized that he had never taken into account the contingency of an unexpected natural death for Tyeveras. Sepulthrove had assured him that the machinery would not fail, that the Pontifex could be kept alive, if need be, another twenty or thirty years, perhaps as much as fifty. And the high spokesman had assumed that his death, when it came, would be the outcome of a carefully arrived at political decision, not something awkwardly happening without warning in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning.

  And if it had? Lord Valentine must be summoned at once from the westlands. Ah, how he would hate that, dragged into the Labyrinth before he had fairly begun his processional! I will have to resign, of course, Hornkast told himself. Valentine will want his own high spokesman: that little scar-faced man Sleet, no doubt, or even the Vroon. Hornkast considered what it would be like to train one of them in the duties of the office he had held so long. Sleet full of contempt and condescension, or the wizardy little Vroon, those huge glittering eyes, that beak, those tentacles—

  That would be his last responsibility, to instruct the new high spokesman. And then I will go away, he thought, and I suspect I will not long survive the loss of my office. Elidath, I suppose, will become Coronal. They say he is a good man, very dear to Lord Valentine, almost like a brother. How strange it will be, after all these years, to have a real Pontifex again, actively working with his Coronal! But I will not see it, Hornkast told himself. I will not be here.

  In that mood of foreboding and resignation he arrived at the ornately embellished door to the imperial throne room. He slipped his hand into the recognition glove and squeezed the cool yielding sphere within; and at his touch the door slid back to reveal the great globe of the imperial chamber, the lofty throne upon the three broad steps, the elaborate mechanisms of the Pontifex’s life-support systems, and, within the bubble of pale blue glass that had held him for so many years, the long-limbed figure of the Pontifex himself, fleshless and parched like his own mummy, upright in his seat, jaws clenched, eyes bright, bright, bright still with inextinguishable life.

  A familiar crew of grotesques stood beside the throne: ancient Dilifon, the withered and trembling private secretary; the Pontifical dream-speaker, the witch Narrameer; and Sepulthrove the physician, hawk-nosed, skin the color of dried mud. From them, even from Narrameer, who kept herself young and implausibly beautiful by her sorceries, came a pulsing aura of age, decay, death. Hornkast, who had seen these people every day for forty years, had never before perceived with such intensity how frightful they were: and, he knew, he must be just as frightful himself. Perhaps the time has come, he thought, to clear us all away.

  “I came as soon as the messengers could reach me,” he said. He glanced toward the Pontifex. “Well? He’s dying, is he? He looks just the same to me.”

  “He is very far from dying,” said Sepulthrove.

  “Then what’s, going on?”

  “Listen,” the physician said. “He’s starting again.”

  The creature in the life-support globe stirred and swayed from side to side in minute oscillations. A low whining sound came from the Pontifex, and then a kind of half-whistled snore, and a thick bubbling gurgle that went on and on.

  Hornkast had heard all these sounds many times before. They were the private language the Pontifex in his terrible senility had invented, and which the high spokesman alone had mastered. Some were almost words, or the ghosts of words, and within their blurred outlines the original meanings were still apparent. Others had evolved from words over the years into mere noise, but Hornkast, because he had observed those evolutions in their various stages, knew what meanings were intended. Some were nothing but moans and sighs and weepings without a verbal content. And some seemed to have a certain complexity of form that might represent concepts that had been perceived by Tyeveras in his long mad sleepless isolation, and were known to him alone.

  “I hear the usual,” said Hornkast. “Wait.”

  He listened. He heard the string of syllables that meant Lord Malibor—the Pontifex had forgotten Malibor’s two successors, and thought Malibor was Coronal still—and then a skein of other royal names, Prestimion, Confalume, Dekkeret. Malibor again. The word for sleep. The name of Ossier, who had been Pontifex before Tyeveras. The name of Kinniken, who had preceded Ossier.

  “He rambles in the remote past, as he often does. For this you called me down here with such urgent—”

  “Wait.”

  In growing irritation Hornkast turned his attention again to the inchoate monolog of the Pontifex, and was stunned to hear, for the first time in many years, a perfectly enunciated, completely recognizable word:

  “Life.”

  “You heard?” Sepulthrove asked.

  Hornkast nodded. “When did this start?”

  “Two hours ago, two and a half.”

  “Majesty.”

  “We have made a record of all of this,” said Dilifon.

  “What else has he said that you can understand?”

  “Seven or eight words,” Sepulthrove replied. “Perhaps there are others that only you can recognize.”

  Hornkast looked toward Narrameer. “Is he awake or dreaming?”

  “I think it is wrong to use either of those terms in connection with the Pontifex,” she said. “He lives in both states at once.”

  “Come. Rise. Walk.”

  “He’s said those before, several times,” Dilifon murmured.

  There was silence. The Pontifex seemed to have lapsed into sleep, though his eyes were still open. Hornkast stared grimly. When Tyeveras first had become ill, early in the reign of Lord Valentine, it had seemed only logical to sustain the old Pontifex’s life in this way, and Hornkast had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the scheme that Sepulthrove had proposed. It had never happened before that a Pontifex had outlived two Coronals, so that the third Coronal of the reign came into power when the Pontifex was already in extreme old age. That had distorted the dynamics of the imperial system. Hornkast himself had pointed out at that time that Lord Valentine, young and untried, barely in command of the duties of the Coronal, could not be sent on to the Labyrinth so soon. By general agreement it was essential that the Pontifex remain on his throne a few more years, if he could be kept alive. Sepulthrove had found the means to keep him alive, though quickly it was apparent that Tyeveras had lapsed into senility and dwelled in hopeless lunatic death-in-life.

  But then had come the episode of the usurpation, and then the difficult years of restoration, when all the Coronal’s energies were needed to repair the chaos of the upheaval. Tyeveras had had to remain in his cage year after year. Though the continued life of the Pontifex meant Hornkast’s own continuance in power, and the power he had amassed by default of the Pontifex by now was extraordinary, nevertheless it was a repellent thing to watch, this cruel suspension of a life long since deserving of a termination. Yet Lord Valentine asked for time, and more time, and yet more time still, to finish his work as Coronal. Eight years, now: was that not time enough? With surprise Hornkast found himself almost ready now to pray for Tyeveras’s deliverance from this captivity. If
only it were possible to let him sleep!

  “Va—Va—”

  “What’s that?” Sepulthrove asked.

  “Something new!” whispered Dilifon.

  Hornkast gestured to them to be quiet.

  “Va—Valentine—”

  “This is new indeed!” said Narrameer.

  “Valentine Pontifex—Valentine Pontifex of Majipoor—”

  Followed by silence. Those words, plainly enunciated, free of all ambiguities, hovered in the air like exploding suns.

  “I thought he had forgotten Valentine’s name,” Hornkast said. “He thinks Lord Malibor is Coronal.”

  “Evidently he does not,” said Dilifon.

  “Sometimes toward the end,” Sepulthrove said quietly, “the mind repairs itself. I think his sanity is returning.”

  “He is as mad as ever!” cried Dilifon. “The Divine forbid that he should regain his understanding, and know what we have done to him!”

  “I think,” said Hornkast, “that he has always known what we have done to him, and that he is regaining not his understanding but his ability to communicate with us in words. You heard him: Valentine Pontifex. He is hailing his successor, and he knows who his successor ought to be. Sepulthrove, is he dying?”

  “The instruments indicate no physical change in him. I think he could continue this way for some long while.”

  “We must not allow it,” said Dilifon.

  “What are you suggesting?” Hornkast asked.

  “That this has gone on long enough. I know what it is to be old, Hornkast—and perhaps you do also, though you show little outer sign of it. This man is half again as old as any of us. He suffers things we can scarcely imagine. I say make an end. Now. This very day.”

  “We have no right,” said Hornkast. “I tell you, I feel for his sufferings even as you. But it is not our decision.”

  “Make an end, nevertheless.”

  “Lord Valentine must take responsibility for that.”

  “Lord Valentine never will,” Dilifon muttered. “He’ll keep this farce running for fifty more years!”

  “It is his choice,” said Hornkast firmly.

  “Are we his servants, or the servants of the Pontifex?” asked Dilifon.

  “It is one government, with two monarchs, and only one of them now is competent. We serve the Pontifex by serving the Coronal. And—”

  From the life-support cage came a bellow of rage, and then an eerie indrawn whistling sound, and then three harsh growls. And then the words, even more clearly than before:

  “Valentine—Pontifex of Majipoor—hail!”

  “He hears what we say, and it angers him. He begs for death,” said Dilifon.

  “Or perhaps he thinks he has already reached it,” Narrameer suggested.

  “No. No. Dilifon is right,” said Hornkast. “He’s overheard us. He knows we won’t give him what he wants.”

  “Come. Rise. Walk.” Howlings. Babblings. “Death! Death! Death!”

  In a despair deeper than anything he had felt in decades, the high spokesman rushed toward the life-support globe, half intending to rip the cables and tubes from their mountings and bring an end to this now. But of course that would be insanity. Hornkast halted; he peered in; his eyes met those of Tyeveras, and he compelled himself not to flinch as that great sadness poured out upon him. The Pontifex was sane again. That was unarguable. The Pontifex understood that death was being withheld from him for reasons of state.

  “Your majesty?” Hornkast asked, speaking in his richest, fullest tone. “Your majesty, do you hear me? Close one eye if you hear me.”

  There was no response.

  “I think, nevertheless, that you hear me, majesty. And I tell you this: we know what you suffer. We will not allow you much longer to endure it. That we pledge to you, majesty.”

  Silence. Stillness. Then:

  “Life! Pain! Death!”

  And then a moaning and a babbling and a whistling and a shrieking that was like a song from beyond the grave.

  “—AND THAT IS the temple of the Lady,” said Lord Mayor Sambigel, pointing far up the face of the astonishing vertical cliff that rose just east of his city. “The holiest of her shrines in the world, saving only the Isle itself, of course.”

  Valentine stared. The temple gleamed like a solitary white eye set in the dark forehead of the cliff.

  It was the fourth month of the grand processional now, or the fifth, or perhaps the sixth: days and weeks, cities and provinces, everything had begun to blur and merge. This day he had arrived at the great port of Alaisor, far up the northwestern coast of Alhanroel. Behind him lay Treymone, Stoienzar, Vilimong, Estotilaup, Kimoise: city upon city, all, flowing together in his mind into one vast metropolis that spread like some sluggish many-armed monster across the face of Majipoor.

  Sambigel, a short swarthy man with a fringe of dense black beard around the edge of his face, droned on and on, bidding the Coronal welcome with his most sonorous platitudes. Valentine’s eyes felt glazed; his mind wandered. He had heard all this before, in Kikil, in Steenorp, in Klai: never-to-be-forgotten occasion, love and gratitude of all the people, proud of this, honored by that. Yes. Yes. He found himself wondering which city it was that had shown him its famous vanishing lake. Was it Simbilfant? And the aerial ballet, that was Montepulsiane, or had it been Ghrav? The golden bees were surely Beilemoona, but the sky-chain? Arkilon? Sennamole?

  Once more he looked toward the temple on the cliff. It beckoned powerfully to him. He yearned to be there at this very moment: to be caught on the fingertip of a gale; and swept like a dry leaf to that lofty summit.

  —Mother, let me rest with you awhile!

  There came a pause in the lord mayor’s speech, or perhaps he was done. Valentine turned to Tunigorn and said, “Make arrangements for me to sleep at that temple tonight.”

  Sambigel seemed nonplussed. “It was my understanding, my lord, that you were to see the Tomb of Lord Stiamot this afternoon, and then to go to the Hall of Topaz for a reception, followed by a dinner at—”

  “Lord Stiamot has waited eight thousand years for me to pay homage to him. He can wait one day more.”

  “Of course, my lord. So be it, my lord.” Sambigel made a hasty flurry of starbursts. “I will notify the hierarch Ambargarde that you will be her guest tonight. And now, if you will permit, my lord, we have an entertainment to offer you—”

  An orchestra struck up some jubilant anthem. From hundreds of thousands of throats came what he did not doubt were stirring verses, though he could not make out a syllable of them. He stood impassively, gazing out over that vast throng, nodding occasionally, smiling, making contact now and then with the eyes of some awed citizen who would never forget this day. A sense of his own unreality came over him. He did not need to be a living man, he thought, to be playing this part. A statue would do just as well, some cunning marionette, or even one of those waxworks things that he had once seen in Pidruid on a festival night long ago. How useful it would be to send an imitation Coronal of some such sort out to these events, capable of listening gravely and smiling appreciatively and waving heartily and perhaps even of delivering a few heartfelt words of gratitude—

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Carabella watching him worriedly. He made a little gesture with two fingers of his right hand, a private sign they had between them, to tell her he was all right. But the troubled look did not leave her face. And it seemed to him that Tunigorn and Lisamon Hultin had edged forward until they stood oddly close to him. To catch him if he fell? Confalume’s whiskers, did they think he was going to collapse the way he had in the Labyrinth?

  He held himself all the more erect: wave, smile, nod, wave, smile, nod. Nothing was going to go wrong. Nothing. Nothing. But would this ceremony ever end?

  There was half an hour more. But at last it was over, and the royal party, leaving by way of an underground passage, quickly made its way toward the quarters set aside for the Coronal in the lord mayor’s palace on t
he far side of the square. When they were alone Carabella said, “It seemed to me you were growing ill up there, Valentine.”

  He said as lightly as he could, “If boredom is a malady, then I was growing ill, yes.”

  She was silent a moment. Then she said, “Is it absolutely essential to continue with this processional?”

  “You know I have no choice.”

  “I fear for you.”

  “Why, Carabella?”

  “There are times I scarcely know you any longer. Who is this brooding fretful person who shares my bed? What has become of the man called Valentine I knew once in Pidruid?”

  “He is still here.”

  “So I would believe. But hidden, as the sun is hidden when the shadow of a moon falls upon it. What shadow is on you, Valentine? What shadow is on the world? Something strange befell you in the Labyrinth. What was it? Why?”

  “The Labyrinth is a place of no joy for me, Carabella. Perhaps I felt enclosed there, buried, smothered—” He shook his head. “It was strange, yes. But the Labyrinth is far behind me. Once we began to travel in happier lands I felt my old self returning, I knew joy again, love, I—”

  “You deceive yourself, perhaps, but not me. There’s no joy in it for you, not now. At the beginning you drank in everything as if you couldn’t possibly get enough of it—you wanted to go everywhere, behold everything, taste all that is to be tasted—but not anymore. I see it in your eyes, I see it on your face. You move about like a sleepwalker. Do you deny it?”

  “I do grow weary, yes. I admit that.”

  “Then abandon the processional! Return to the Mount, which you love, where you always have been truly happy!”

  “I am the Coronal. The Coronal has a sacred duty to present himself to the people he governs. I owe them that.”

  “And what do you owe to yourself, then?”

  He shrugged. “I beg you, sweet lady! Even if I grow bored, and I do—I won’t deny it, I hear speeches in my sleep now, I see endless parades of jugglers and acrobats—nevertheless, no one has ever died of boredom. The processional is my obligation. I must continue.”