Robert Silverberg - Valentine Pontifex

Valentine Pontifex

by

Robert Silverberg

ARBOR HOUSE

New York

COPYRIGHT ~ 1983 BY AGBERG, LTD.

OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR

IN PART IN ANY FORM. PUBLISHED IN THE

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY

ARBOR HOUSE PUBLISHING COMPANY AND IN

CANADA BY FITZ HENRY &

WHITE SIDE LTD.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF

AMERICA

For

KAREN

SANDRA

CATHERINE

JERRY

CAROL

ELLEN

DYANNE

HILARY

DIANA

bulwarks in a season of stormy weather

. I LIVE IN MIGHTY FEAR THAT ALL THE

UNIVERSE WILL BE BROKEN INTO A

THOUSAND FRAGMENTS IN THE GENERAL

RUIN, THAT FORMLESS CHAOS WILI. RETURN

AND VANQUISH THE GODS AND MEN, THAT

THE EARTH AND SEA WILL BE ENGULFED

BY THE PLANETS WANDERING IN THE

HEAVENS.... OF ALL THE GENERATIONS, IT IS

WE WHO HAVE BEEN ( HO SEN TO MERIT

THIS BITTER FATE, TO BE CRUSHED BY THE

FALLING PIECES OF THE BROKEN SKY.

Seneca, "yes yes

Valentine Pontifex

On.e:

THE BOOK OF THE

CORONAL

Valentine swayed, braced himself with his free hand against the table,

struggled to keep himself from spilling his wine.

This is very odd, he thought, this dizziness, this confusion. Too much

wine the stale air maybe gravity pulls harder, this far down below the

surface

"Propose the toast, lordship," Deliamber murmured. "First to the

Pontifox, and then to his aides, and then "

"Yes. Yes, I know."

Valentine peered uncertainly from side to side, like a steetmoy at bay,

ringed round by the spears of hunters.

"Friends " he began.

"To the Pontifex Tyeveras!" Deliamber whispered sharply.

Friends. Yes. Those who were most dear to him, seated close at hand.

Almost everyone but Carabella and Elidath: she was on her way to meet

him in the west, was she not, and Elidath was handling the chores of

government on Castle Mount in Valentine's absence. But the others were

here, Sleet, Oeliamber, Tunigorn, Shanamir. Lisamon and Ermanar,

Tisana, the Skandar Zalzan Kavol, Asenhart the Hjort yes, all his dear

ones, all the pillars of his life and reign

"Friends," he said, "lift your wine-bowls, join me in one more toast.

You know that it has not been granted me by the Divine to enjoy an easy

time upon the throne. You all know the hardships that have been thrust

upon me, the challenges that had to be faced, the tasks required of me,

the weighty problems still unresolved."

"This is not the right speech, I think," he heard someone behind him

say.

Deliamber muttered again, "His majesty the Pontifex! You must offer a

toast to his majesty the Pontifex!"

Valentine ignored them. These words that came from him now seemed to

come of their own accord.

"If I have borne these unparalleled difficulties with some grace," he

went on, "it is only because I have had the support, the counsel, the

love, of such a band of comrades and precious friends as few rulers can

ever have claimed. It is with your indispensable help, good friends,

that we will come at last to a resolution of the troubles that afflict

Majipoor and enter into the era of true amity that we all desire. And

so, as we make ready to set forth tomorrow into this realm of ours,

eagerly, joyously, to undertake the grand processional, I offer this

last toast of the evening, my friends, to you, to those who have

sustained me and nurtured me throughout all these years, and who "

"How strange he looks," Ermanar murmured. "Is he ill?"

A spasm of astonishing pain swept through him. There was a terrible

droning buzz in his ears, and his breath was as hot as flame. He felt

himself descending into night, a night 50 terrible that it obliterated

an light and swept across his soul like a tide of black blood. The

wine-bowl fell from his hand and shattered; and it was as if the entire

world had shattered, flying apart into thousands of crumbling fragments

that went tumbling crazily toward every corner of the universe. The

dizziness was overwhelming now. And the darkness that utter and total

night, that complete eclipse

"Lordship!" someone bellowed. Could that have been Hissune?

"He's having a sending!" another voice cried.

"A sending? How, while he is awake?"

"My lord! My lord! My lord!"

Valentine looked downward. Everything was black, a pool of night

rising from the floor. That blackness seemed to be beckoning to him.

Come, a quiet voice was saying, here is your path, here is your

destiny: night, darkness, doom. Yield. Yield, Lord Valentine, Coronal

that was, Pontifex that will never be. Yield. And Valentine yielded,

for in that moment of bewilderment and paralysis of spirit there was

nothing else he could do. He stared into the black pool rising about

him, and he allowed himself to fall toward it. Unquestioningly,

uncomprehendingly, he plunged into that all-engulfing darkness.

I am dead, he thought. I float now on the breast of the black river

that returns me to the Source, and soon I must rise and go ashore and

find the road that leads to the Bridge of Farewells; and then will I go

across into that place where all life has its beginning and its end.

A strange kind of peace pervaded his soul then, a feeling of wondrous

ease and contentment, a powerful sense that all the universe was joined

in happy harmony. He felt as though he had come to rest in a cradle,

where now he lay warmly swaddled, free at last of the torments of

kingship. Ah, how good that was! To lie quietly, and let all

turbulence sweep by him! Was this death? Why, then, death was joy!

You are deceived my lord Death is the end of joy.

Who speaks to me here?

You know me, my lord

Deliamber? Are you dead also? Ah, what a safe kind place death is,

old friend!

You are safe, yes. But not dead

It feels much like death to me.

And have you such thorough experience of death, my lord, that you can

speak of it so knowingly?

What is this, if it is not death?

Merely a spell, said Deliamber.

One of yours, wizard."

No, not mine. But I can bring you from it, if you will permit. Come:

awaken. Awaken.

No, Deliamber! Let me be.

You must, my lord

Must, Valentine said bitterly. Must! Always mush Am I never to rests

Let me stay where I am. This is a place of peace. I have no stomach

for war, Deliamber.

Come, my lord

Tell me next that it is my duty to awaken.

I need not tell you what you know so well. Come.

He opened his eyes, and found himself in midair, lying limply in

Lisamon Hultin's arms. The Amazon carried him as though he were a

doll, nestling against the vastness of her breasts. Small wonder he

had imagined himself in a cradle, he thought, or floating down the

black river! Beside him was Autifon Deliamber, perched on Lisamon's

left shoulder. Valentine perceived the wizardry that had called him

back from his swoon: the tips of three of the Vroon's tentacles were

touching him, one to his forehead, one to his cheek, one to his

chest.

He said, feeling immensely foolish, "You can put me down now."

"You are very weak, lordship," Lisamon rumbled.

"Not quite that weak, I think. Put me down."

Carefully, as though Valentine were nine hundred years old, Lisamon

lowered him to the ground. At once, sweeping waves of dizziness rocked

him, and he reached out to lean against the giant woman, who still

hovered protectively close by. His teeth were chattering. His heavy

robes clung to his damp, clammy skin like shrouds. He feared that if

he closed his eyes wanly an instant, that pool of darkness would rise

up again and engulf hire. But he forced himself toward a sort of

steadiness, even if it were only a pretence. Old training asserted

itself: he could not allow himself to be seen looking dazed and weak,

no matter what sort of irrational terrors were roaring through his

head.

He felt himself growing calmer after a moment, and looked around. They

had taken him from the great hall. He was in some brightly lit

corridor inlaid with a thousand intertwined and overlapping Pontifical

emblems, the eye-baffling Labyrinth symbol repeated over and over. A

mob of people clustered about him, looking anxious and dismayed:

Tunigom, Sleet, Hissune, and Shanamir of his own court, and some of the

Pontifex's staff as well, I lornkast and old Dilifon and behind them

half a dozen other bobbing yellow-masked heads.

"Where am 1?" Valentine asked.

"Another moment and we'll be at your chambers, lordship," Sleet said.

"Have I been unconscious long?"

"Two or three minutes, only. You began to fall, while making your

speech. But Hissune caught you, and Lisamon."

"It was the wine," Valentine said. "I suppose I had too much, a bowl

of this and a bowl of that--"

"You are quite sober now," Deliamber pointed out. "And it is only a

few minutes later."

"Let me believe it was the wine," said Valentine, "for a little while

longer." The corridor swung leftwardand there appeared before him the

great carved door of his suite, chased with gold inlays of the

starburst emblem over which his own LVC monogram had been engraved.

"Where is Tisana?" he called.

"Here, my lord," said the dream-speaker, from some distance.

"Good. I want you inside with me. Also Deliamber and Sleet. No one

else. Is that clear?"

"May I enter also?" said a voice out of the group of Pontifical

ofllcials.

It belonged to a thin-lipped gaunt man with strangely ashen skin, whom

Valentine recognized after a moment as Sepulthrove, physician to the

Pontifex Tyeveras. He shook his head. "I am grateful for your

concern. But I think you are not needed."

"Such a sudden collapse, my lord it calls for diagnosis "

"There's some wisdom in that," Tunigorn observed quietly.

Valentine shrugged. "Afterward, then. First let me speak with my

advisers, good Sepulthrove. And then you can tap my kneecaps a bit, if

you think that it's necessary. Come Tisana, Deliamber "

He swept into his suite with the last counterfeit of regal poise he

could muster, feeling a vast- relief as the heavy door swung shut on

the bustling throng in the corridor. He let out his breath in a long

slow gust and dropped down, trembling in the release of tension, on the

brocaded couch.

"Lordship?" Sleet said softly.

"Wait. Wait. Just let me be."

He rubbed his throbbing forehead and his aching eyes. The strain of

feigning, out there, that he had made a swift and complete recovery

from whatever had happened to him in the banquet hall had been

expensive to his spirit. But gradually some of his true strength

returned. He looked toward the dream-speaker. The robust old woman,

thick bodied and strong, seemed to him just then to be the fount of all

comfort.

"Come, Tisana, sit next to me," Valentine said.

She settled down beside him and slipped her arm around his shoulders.

Yes, he thought. Oh, yes, good! Warmth flowed back into his chilled

soul, and the darkness receded. From him rushed a great torrent of

love for Tisana, sturdy and reliable and wise, who in the days of his

13

exile had been the first openly to hail him as Lord Valentine, when he

had been still content to think of himself as Valentine the juggler.

How many times in the years of his restored reign had she shared the

mind-opening dream-wine with him, and had taken him in her arms to draw

from him the secrets of the turbulent images that came to him in sleep!

How often had she given him ease from the weight of king ship!

She said, "I was frightened greatly to see you fall, Lord Valentine,

and you know I am not one who frightens easily. You say it was the

wine?"

"So I said, out there."

"But it was not the wine, I think."

"No. Deliamber thinks it was a spell."

"Of whose making?" Tisana asked.

Valentine looked to the Vroon. "Well?"

Deliamber displayed a tension that Valentine had only rarely seen the

little creature reveal: a troubled coiling and weaving of his

innumerable tentacles, a strange glitter in his great yellow eyes,

grinding motions of his birdlike beak. "I am at a loss for an answer,"

said Deliamber finally. "Just as not all dreams are seedings, so too

is it the case that not all spells have makers."

"Some spells cast themselves, is that it?" Valentine asked.

"Not precisely. But there are spells that arise spontaneously from

within, my lord, within oneself, generated out of the empty places of

the soul."

"What are you saying? That I put an enchantment on myself,

Deliamber?"

Tisana said gently, "Dreams spells it is all the same thing, Lord

Valentine. Certain auguries are making themselves known through you.

Omens are forcing themselves into view. Storms are gathering, and

these are the early harbingers."

"You see all that so soon? I had a troubled dream, you know, just

before the banquet, and most certainly it was full of stormy omens and

auguries and harbingers. But unless I've been talking of it in my

sleep, I've told you nothing of it yet, have 1?"

"I think you dreamed of chaos, my lord."

Valentine stared at her. "How could you know that?"

Shrugging, Tisana said, Because chaos must come. We all recognize the

truth of that. There is unfinished business in the world, and it cries

out for finishing."

~4

"The shape shifters you mean," Valentine muttered.

"I would not presume," the old woman said, "to advise you on matters of

state "

"Spare me such tact. From my advisers I expect advice, not tact."

"My realm is only the realm of dreams," said Tisana.

"I dreamed snow on Castle Mount, and a great earthquake that split the

world apart."

"Shall I speak that dream for you, my lord?"

"How can you speak it, when we haven't yet had the dream-wine?"

"A speaking's not a good idea just now," said Deliamber firmly. "The

Coronal's had visions enough for one night. He'd not be well served by

drinking dream-wine now. I think this can easily wait until "

"That dream needs no wine," said Tisana. "A child could speak it.

Earthquakes? The shattering of the world? Why, you must prepare

yourself for hard hours, my lord."

"What are you saying?"

It was Sleet who replied: "These are omens of war, lordship."

Valentine swung about and glared at the little man. "War?" he cried.

"War? Must I do battle again? I was the first Coronal in eight

thousand years to lead an army into the field; must I do it twice?"

"Surely you know, my lord," said Sleet, "that the war of the

restoration was merely the first skirmish of the true war that must be

fought, a war that has been in the making for many centuries, a war

that I think you know cannot now be avoided."

"There are no unavoidable wars," Valentine said.

"Do you think so, my lord?"

The Coronal glowered bleakly at Sieet, but made no response. They were

telling him what he had already concluded without their help, but did

not wish to hear; and, hearing it anyway, he felt a terrible

restlessness invading his soul. After a moment he rose and began to

wander silently around the room. At the far end of the chamber was an

enormous eerie sculpture, a great thing made of the curved bones of sea

dragons, interwoven to meet in the form of the fingers of a pair of

clasped upturned hands, or perhaps the interlocking fangs of some

colossal demonic mouth. For a long while Valentine stood before it,

idly stroking the gleaming polished bone. Unfinished business, Tisana

had said. Yes. Yes. The Shapeshifters. Shapeshifters, Metamorphs,

Piurivars, call them by whatever name you chose: the true natives of

Majipoor, those from whom this wondrous world had been stolen by the

settlers from the stars, fourteen thousand years before. For eight

years, Valentine thought, I've struggled to understand the needs of

those people. And I still know nothing at all.

He turned and said, "When I rose to speak, my mind was on what Homkast

the high spokesman just had said: the Coronal is the world, and the

world is the Coronal. And suddenly I became Majipoor. Everything that

was happening everywhere in the world was sweeping through my soul."

"You have experienced that before," Tisana said. "In dreams that I

have spoken for you: when you said you saw twenty billion golden

threads sprouting from the soil, and you held them all in your right

hand. And another dream, when you spread your arms wide, and embraced

the world, and "

"This was different," Valentine said. "This time the world was falling

apart."

"How so?"

"Literally. Crumbling into fragments. There was nothing left but a

sea of darkness into which I fell "

"Homkast spoke the truth," said Tisana quietly. "You are the world,

lordship. Dark knowledge is finding its way to you, and it comes

through the air from all the world about you. It is a sending, my

lord: not of the Lady, nor of the King of Dreams, but of the world

entire."

Valentine glanced toward the Vroon. "What do you say to that,

Deliamber?"

"I have known Tisana fifty years, I think, and I have never yet heard

foolishness from her lips."

"Then there is to be war?"

"I believe the war has already begun," said Deliamber.

Hissune would not soon forgive himself for coming late to the banquet.

His first official event since being elevated to Lord Valentine's

staff, and he hadn't managed to show up on time. That was

inexcusable.

Some of it was his sister Ailimoor's fault. All the while he was

trying to get into his fine new formal clothes, she kept running in,

fussing with him, adjusting his shoulder chain, worrying about the

length and cut of his tunic, finding scuff marks on his brilliantly

polished boots that would be invisible to anyone's eyes but hers. She

was fifteen, a very difficult age for girls~ ll ages seemed to be

difficult for girls, Hissune sometimes thought and these days she

tended to be bossy, opinionated, preoccupied with trivial domestic

detail

So in her eagerness to make him perfect for the Coronal's banquet she

helped to make him late. She spent what felt to him like a good twenty

minutes simply fiddling with his emblem of office, the little golden

starburst epaulet that he was supposed to wear on his left shoulder

within the loop of the chain. She moved it endlessly a fraction of an

inch this way or that to center it more exactly, until at last she

said, "All right. That'll do. Here, see if you like it."

She snatched up her old hand-mirror, speckled and rusty where the

backing was wearing away, and held it before him. Hissune caught a

faint distorted glimpse of himself, looking very unfamiliar, all pomp

and splendor, as though decked out for a pageant. The costume felt

theatrical, stagy, unreal. And yet he was aware of a new kind of poise

and authority seeping inward to his soul from his clothing. How odd he

thought, that a hasty fitting at a fancy Place of Masks tailor could

produce such an instant transformation of personality no longer Hissune

the ragged hustling street-boy, no longer Hissune the restless and

uncertain young clerk, but now Hissune the popinjay, Hissune the

peacock, Hissune the proud companion of the CoronaL

And Hissune the unpunctual. If he hurried, though, he might still

reach the Great Hall of the Pontifex on time.

But just then his mother Elsinore returned from work, and there was

another small delay. She came into his room, a slight, dark-haired

woman, pale and weary-looking, and stared at him in awe and wonder as

though someone had captured a comet and set it loose to whirl about her

dismal flat. Her eyes were glowing, her features had a radiance he had

never seen before.

"How magnificent you look, Hissune! How splendid!"

He grinned and spun about, better to show off his imperial finery "It's

almost absurd, isn't it? I look like a knight just down from Castle

Mount!"

"You look like a prince! You look like a Coronal!"

"Ah, yes, Lord Hissune. But I'd need an ermine robe for that, I think,

and a fine green doublet, and perhaps a great gaudy starburst pendant

on my chest. Yet this is good enough for the moment, eh, mother?"

They laughed; and, for all her weariness, she seized him and swung him

about in a wild little three-step dance. Then she released him and

said, "But it grows late. You should have been off to the feast by

this time!"

"I should have been, yes." He moved toward the door. "How strange all

this is, eh, mother? To be going off to dine at the Coronal's table to

sit at his elbow to journey with him on the grand processional to dwell

on Castle Mount "

"So very strange, yes," said Elsinore quietly.

They all lined up Elsinore, Ailimoor, his younger sister Maraune and

solemnly Hissune kissed them, and squeezed their hands, and sidestepped

them when they tried to hug him, fearing they would rumple his robes;

and he saw them staring at him again as though he were some godlike

being, or at the very least the Coronal himself. It was quite as if he

were no longer one of this family, or as if he never had been, but had

descended from the sky to strut about these dreary rooms for a little

while this afternoon. At times he almost felt that way himself that he

had not spent these eighteen years of his life in a few dingy rooms in

the first ring of the Labyrinth, but indeed was and always had been

Hissune of the Castle, knight and initiate, frequenter of the royal

court, connoisseur of all its pleasures.

Folly. Madness. You must always remember who you are, he told

himself, and where you started from.

But it was hard not to keep dwelling on the transformation that had

come over their lives, he thought, while he was making his way down the

endless spiraling staircase to the street. So much had changed. Once

he and his mother both had worked the streets of the Labyrinth, she

begging crowns from passing gentry for her hungry children, he rushing

up to tourists and insistently offering to guide them, for half a royal

or so, through the scenic wonders of the underground city. And now he

was the Coronal's young protege, and she, through his new connections,

was steward of wines at the cafe of the Court of Globes. All achieved

by luck, by extraordinary and improbable luck.

Or was it only luck? he wondered. That time so many years back, when

he was ten and had thrust his services as a guide upon that tall

fair-haired man, it had been convenient indeed for him that the

stranger was none other than the Coronal Lord Valentine, overthrown and

exiled and in the Labyrinth to win the support of the Pontifex in his

reconquest of the throne.

But that in itself might not have led anywhere. Hissune often asked

himself what it was about him that had caught Lord Valentine's fancy,

that caused the Coronal to remember him and have him located after the

restoration, and be taken from the streets to work in the House of

Records, and now to be summoned into the innermost sphere of his

administration. His irreverence, perhaps. His quips, his cool, casual

manner, his lack of awe for coronals and pontifexes, his ability, even

at ten, to look out for himself. That must have impressed Lord

Valentine. Those Castle Mount knights, Hissune thought, are all so

polite, so dainty-mannered: I must have seemed more alien than a

Ghayrog to him. And yet the Labyrinth is full of tough little boys.

Any of them might have been the one who tugged at the Coronal's sleeve.

But I was the one. Luck. Luck.

He emerged into the dusty little plaza in front of his house. Before

him lay the narrow curving streets of the Guadeloom Court district

where he had spent all the days of his life; above him rose the

decrepit buildings, thousands of years old and lopsided with age, that

formed the boundary palisade of his world. Under the harsh white

lights, much too bright, almost crackling in their electric intensity

all this ring of the Labyrinth was bathed in that same fierce light, so

little like that of the gentle golden-green sun whose rays never

reached this city the flaking grey masonry of the old buildings

emanated a terrible weariness, a mineral fatigue. Hissune wondered if

Robert Silverberg - Valentine Pontifex

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