Robert Silverberg: Valentine Pontifex

“Where am I?” 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 leftward and 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 officials.

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 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 kingship!

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 sendings, 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 I?”

“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.”

“The shapeshifters, 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 Sleet, 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 Hornkast 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.”