Robert Silverberg - Valentine Pontifex

“For the time being I permit you to retain your office, but I warn you to make no treasonous approaches to the enemy. As for the holy Lord Valentine, his life is forfeit to me. His blood will serve to cleanse the Tables of the Gods on the day of the rededication of Velalisier. Be wary, Danipiur. Or I will use yours for the same purpose.”

“The Coronal Lord Valentine is with his mother the Lady at Inner Temple,” said the hierarch Talinot Esulde. “He asks you to rest here this night at the royal lodging-place in Numinor, Prince Hissune, and to begin your journey toward him in the morning.”

“As the Coronal wishes,” said Hissune.

He stared past the hierarch at the vast white wall of First Cliff rising above Numinor. It was dazzling in its brightness, almost painfully so, nearly as brilliant as the sun itself. When the Isle first had come into view some days before on the voyage from Alhanroel, he had found himself shading his eyes against that powerful white glare and wanting to look away altogether, and Elsinome, standing beside him, had turned in terror from it, crying, “I have never seen anything so bright! Will it blind us to look at it?” But now, at close range, the white stone was less frightening: its light seemed pure, soothing, the light of a moon rather than of a sun.

A cool sweet breeze blew from the sea, the same breeze that had carried him so swiftly—but not nearly swiftly enough to still the impatience that day after day mounted and surged in him—from Alaisor to the Isle. That impatience still rode him now that he had arrived in the Lady’s domain. But yet he knew he must be patient, and adapt himself to the unhurried rhythms of the Isle and its serene mistress, or he might never be able to accomplish the things he had come here to accomplish.

And indeed he felt those gentle rhythms settling over him as he was conducted by the hierarchs through the small quiet harbor town to the royal lodging known as the Seven Walls. The spell of the Isle, he thought, was irresistible: it was such a tranquil place, serene, peaceful, testifying in every aspect of itself to the presence of the Lady. The turmoil now wracking Majipoor seemed unreal to him here.

That night, though, Hissune found it far from easy to get to sleep. He lay in a magnificent chamber hung with splendid dark-hued fabrics of an antique weave, where, for all he knew, the great Lord Confalume had slept before him, or Prestimion, or Stiamot himself; and it seemed to him that those ancient kings still hovered nearby, speaking to one another in low whispers, and what they were saying was in mockery of him: upstart, popinjay, peacock. It is only the sound of the surf against the rampart below, he told himself angrily. But still sleep would not come, and the harder he sought it the wider awake he became. He rose and walked from room to room, and out into the courtyard, thinking to rouse some servitor who might give him wine; but he found no one about, and after a time he returned to his room and closed his eyes once again. This time he thought he felt the Lady lightly touch his soul, almost at once: not a sending, nothing like that, merely a contact delicate as a breath across his soul, a soft Hissune, Hissune, Hissune, which calmed him into a light sleep and then into a deeper one beyond the reach of dreams.

In the morning the slender and stately hierarch Talinot Esulde came for him and for Elsinome, and led them to a place at the foot of the great white cliff, where floater sleds were waiting to carry them to the high terraces of the Isle.

The ascent of the vertical face of First Cliff was awesome: up and up and up, as though in a dream. Hissune did not dare open his eyes until the sled had come to rest in its landing pad. Then he looked back, and saw the sun-streaked expanse of the sea stretching off to distant Alhanroel, and the twin curving arms of the Numinor breakwater jutting out into it directly below him. A floater-wagon took them across the heavily wooded tableland atop the cliff to the base of Second Cliff, which sprang upward so steeply it seemed to fill all the sky; and there they rested for the night in a lodge at a place called the Terrace of Mirrors, where massive slabs of polished black stone rose like mysterious ancient idols from the ground.

Thence it was upward once more by sled to the highest and innermost cliff, thousands of feet above sea level, that was the sanctuary of the Lady. Atop Third Cliff the air was startlingly clear, so that objects many miles away stood out as though magnified in a glass. Great birds of a kind unknown to Hissune, with plump red bodies and enormous black wings, circled in lazy spirals far overhead. Again Hissune and Elsinome traveled inward over the Isle’s flat summit, past terrace after terrace, until at last they halted at a place where simple buildings of whitewashed stone were scattered in seeming randomness amidst gardens of a surpassing serenity.

“This is the Terrace of Adoration,” said Talinot Esulde. “The gateway to Inner Temple.”

They slept that night in a quiet secluded lodge, pleasant and unpretentious, with its own shimmering pool and a quiet, intimate garden bordered by vines whose thick ancient trunks were woven into an impenetrable wall. At dawn, servitors brought them chilled fruits and grilled fish; and soon after they had eaten, Talinot Esulde appeared. With her was a second hierarch, a formidable, keen-eyed, white-haired woman. She greeted them each in a very different way: offering Hissune the salute befitting a prince of the Mount, but doing it in a strangely casual, almost perfunctory manner, and then turning to Elsinome and clasping both of her hands in her own, and holding them a long moment, staring warmly and intently into her eyes. When at last she released Elsinome she said, “I bid you both welcome to Third Cliff. I am Lorivade. The Lady and her son await you.

The morning was cool and misty, with a hint of sunlight about to break through the low clouds. In single file, with Lorivade leading and Talinot Esulde to the rear, no one uttering a word, they passed through a garden where every leaf was shimmering with dew-sparkles, and crossed a bridge of white stone, so delicately arched that it seemed it might shatter at the most gentle of footfalls, into a broad grassy field, at the far end of which lay Inner Temple.

Hissune had never seen a building more lovely. It was constructed of the same translucent white stone as the bridge. At its heart was a low flat-roofed rotunda, from which eight long, slender, equidistant wings radiated like starbeams. There was no ornamentation: everything was clean, chaste, simple, flawless.

Within the rotunda, an airy eight-sided room with an octagonal pool at its center, Lord Valentine and a woman who was surely his mother the Lady were waiting for them.

Hissune halted at the threshold, frozen, overcome by bewilderment. He looked from one to the other in confusion, not knowing to which of these Powers he should offer the first obeisance. The Lady, he decided, must take precedence. But in what form should he pay his homage? He knew the sign of the Lady, of course, but did one make that sign to the Lady herself, as one made the starburst sign to the Coronal, or was that hopelessly gauche? Hissune had no idea. Nothing in his training had prepared him for meeting the Lady of the Isle.

He turned to her, nevertheless. She was much older than he had expected her to be, face deeply furrowed, hair streaked with white, eyes encircled by an intricate network of fine lines. But her smile, intense and warm and radiant as the midday sun, spoke eloquently of the vigor and force that still were hers: in that astonishing glow Hissune felt his doubts and fears swiftly melting away.

He would have knelt to her, but she seemed to sense what he intended before he could make the gesture, and halted him with a quick little shake of her head. Instead the Lady held forth her hand to him. Hissune, somehow comprehending what was expected of him, lightly touched the tips of his fingers to hers for an instant, and took from her a startling, tingling inrush of energy that might have caused him to leap back if he had not been holding himself under such taut control. But from that unexpected current he found himself gaining a surge of renewed assurance, strength, poise.