Robert Silverberg: Valentine Pontifex

“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—”

“Hornkast 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— all 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 Elsinome 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 Elsinome quietly.

They all lined up—Elsinome, 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 gray masonry of the old buildings emanated a terrible weariness, a mineral fatigue. Hissune wondered if he had ever noticed before just how bleak and shabby this place was.