Robert Silverberg - Valentine Pontifex

For that matter no one could comprehend the presence of a Pontifex aboard a ship, exposed to the brisk winds and the bright warm sunlight. The Pontifex was an emperor shrouded in mystery. The Pontifex belonged out of sight. The Pontifex, as everyone knew, should be in the Labyrinth.

I will not go, Valentine thought.

I have passed along my crown, and someone else now has the privilege of putting “Lord” before his name, and the Castle now will be Lord Hissune’s Castle, if ever he has the chance to return to it. But I will not bury myself in the ground.

Carabella, emerging on deck, said, “Asenhart asks me to tell you, my lord, that we will be within range of Piliplok in twelve hours, if the wind holds true.”

“Not ‘my lord,’ ” Valentine said.

She grinned. “I find that so hard to remember, your majesty.”

“As do I. But the change has been made.”

“May I not call you ‘my lord’ even so, when we are in private? For that is what you are to me, my lord.”

“Am I? Do I order you about, and have you pour my wine for me, and bring me my slippers like a servant?”

“You know I mean otherwise, Valentine.”

“Then call me Valentine, and not ‘my lord.’ I was your king, and I am your emperor now, but I am not your master. That has always been understood between us, so I thought.”

“I think perhaps it has—your majesty.”

She laughed, and he laughed with her, and drew her close and held her against him. After a moment he said, “I have often told you I feel a certain regret, or even guilt, for having taken you away from a juggler’s free life, and given you in its place all the heavy responsibilities of Castle Mount. And often you have told me, No, no, nonsense, there is nothing to regret, I came of my own will to live by your side.”

“As in all truth I did, my lord.”

“But now I am Pontifex—by the Lady, I say those words, and they sound like another language in my mouth!—I am Pontifex, I am indeed Pontifex, and now I feel once more that I must rob you of the joys of life.”

“Why, Valentine? Must a Pontifex give up his wife, then? I’ve heard nothing of that custom!”

“A Pontifex must live in the Labyrinth, Carabella.”

“You come back to that again!”

“It never leaves me. And if I am to live in the Labyrinth, why, then you must live there also, and how can I ask that of you?”

“Do you ask it of me?”

“You know I have no wish to part from you.”

“Nor I from you, my lord. But we are not in the Labyrinth now, and it was my belief you had no plan for going there.”

“What if I must, Carabella?”

“Who says must to a Pontifex?”

He shook his head. “But what if I must? You know as well as I how little love I have for that place. But if I must—if for reasons of state I must—if the absolute necessity of it is forced upon me, which I pray the Divine will not happen, but if indeed there comes a time when I am compelled by the logic of government to go down into that maze—”

“Why, then I will go with you, my lord.”

“And give up all fair winds, and bright sunny days, and the sea and the forest and the mountains?”

“Surely you would find a pretext for coming forth now and then, even if you found it necessary to take up residence down there.”

“And if I can’t?”

“You pursue problems too far beyond the horizon, my lord. The world is in peril; mighty tasks await you, and no one will shove you into the Labyrinth while those tasks are undone; there is time later to worry about where we will live and how we will like it. Is that not so, my lord?”

Valentine nodded. “Indeed. I foolishly multiply my woes.”

“But I tell you this, and then let us talk no further of it: if you find some honorable way of escaping the Labyrinth forever, I will rejoice, but if you must go down into it I will go with you and never give it a second thought. When as Coronal you took me as consort, do you imagine I failed to see that Lord Valentine must one day become Valentine Pontifex? When I accepted you, I accepted the Labyrinth: just as you, my lord, accepted the Labyrinth when you accepted the crown your brother had worn. So let us say no more on these matters, my lord.”

“’Your majesty,’” said Valentine. He slipped his arm again about her shoulders, and touched his lips lightly to hers. “I will promise to do no more brooding about the Labyrinth,” he said. “And you must promise to call me by my proper title.”

“Yes, your majesty. Yes, your majesty. Yes, your majesty!”

And she made a wondrous sweeping salutation, swinging her arms round and round in a flamboyantly exaggerated mockery of the Labyrinth symbol.

After a time Carabella went below. Valentine remained on deck, studying the horizon through a seeing-tube.

What kind of reception, he wondered, would he have in the free republic of Piliplok?

There was hardly anyone who had not opposed his decision to go there. Sleet, Tunigorn, Carabella, Hissune—they all spoke of the risk, the uncertainty. Piliplok, in its madness, might do anything—seize him, even, and hold him hostage to guarantee its independence. “Whoever enters Piliplok,” Carabella said, as she had said months before in Piurifayne, “must do so at the head of an army, and you have no army, my lord!”

From Hissune had come the same argument. “It was agreed on Castle Mount,” he said, “that when the new armies are organized, it is the Coronal who should lead troops against Piliplok—while the Pontifex directs the strategy at a safer remove.”

“It will not be necessary to lead troops against Piliplok,” said Valentine.

“Your majesty?”

Valentine said, “I had much experience during the war of restoration in pacifying rebellious subjects without bloodshed. If you were to go to Piliplok—a new Coronal, untried, unknown, with soldiers at his back—it would be sure to stir armed resistance in them. But if the Pontifex himself appears—who can remember a time when a Pontifex was seen in Piliplok?—they will be awed, they will be cowed, they will not dare to raise a hand against him even if he enter the city alone.”

Though Hissune had continued to voice strong doubts, in the end Valentine overruled him. There could have been no other outcome, Valentine knew: this early in his Pontificate, having only just handed over the temporal power of the Coronal to the younger man, he could not yet relegate himself wholly to the kind of figurehead position that a Pontifex might be expected to assume. Power, Valentine was discovering, was not easily relinquished, not even by those who once thought they had little love for it.

But it was not wholly a matter of contending for power, Valentine realized. It was a matter of preventing bloodshed where bloodshed was needless. Hissune plainly did not believe that Piliplok could be retaken peacefully; Valentine intended to demonstrate that it could be. Call it part of the new Coronal’s education in the arts of government, Valentine thought. And if I fail, he thought—well, then, call it part of mine.

In the morning, as Piliplok burst into view high above the dark mouth of the great river Zimr, Valentine ordered his fleet to form two wings, with his flagship, the Lady Thiin, at their apex. And he placed himself, clad in the richly hued Pontifical robes of scarlet and black that he had had made for himself before departing from the Isle, at the prow of his vessel, so that all of Piliplok might see him clearly as the royal fleet approached.

“Again they send the dragon-ships to us,” Sleet said.

Yes. As had been done the last time, when Valentine as Coronal had come to Piliplok on what was to have been the beginning of his grand processional through Zimroel, the fleet of dragon-hunters was sailing forth to meet him. But that other time they had had bright Coronal-ensigns of green and gold fluttering in their riggings, and they had greeted him with the joyous sounds of trumpets and drums. Now, Valentine saw, the dragon-ships flew a different flag, a yellow one with a great crimson slash across it, as somber and sinister as the spike-tailed vessels themselves. It was surely the flag of the free republic that Piliplok now deemed itself to be; nor was this fleet coming to hail him in any friendly way.