Robert Silverberg: Lord Valentine's Castle

"Zalzan Kavol?"

"Impressed — yes, astonished. But how could he praise a human? You have only two arms! Well, praise isn’t his way. Here. Get out of those."

Quickly she stripped, and he did the same, dropping his soggy garments to the ground. By bright moonlight he saw her nakedness and was delighted. Her body was slim and lithe, almost boyish but for the small round breasts and the sudden flaring of the hips below her narrow waist. Her muscles lay close beneath the skin and were well developed. A flower had been tattooed in green and red on the crest of one flat buttock.

She led him under the cleanser and they stood close together as the vibrations rid them of sweat and grime. Then, still naked, they returned to the sleeping-quarters, where Carabella produced a fresh pair of trousers in soft gray fabric for herself, and a clean jerkin. By then Sleet had come back from the bazaar with new clothes for Valentine: a dark-green doublet with scarlet trim, tight red trousers, and a light cloak of blue that verged on black. It was a costume far more elegant than the one he had shed. Wearing it, he felt like one raised to some high rank, and moved with conscious hauteur as he accompanied Sleet and Carabella to the kitchen.

Dinner was stew — an anonymous meat at its base, and Valentine did not dare ask — washed down with copious drafts of fireshower wine. The six Skandars sat at one end of the table, the four humans at the other, and there was little conversation. At meal’s end Zalzan Kavol and his brothers rose without a word and strode out.

"Have we offended them?" Valentine asked.

"It is their normal politeness," said Carabella.

The Hjort who had spoken to him at breakfast, Vinorkis, now crossed the room and hovered by Valentine’s shoulder, staring down in that fishy-eyed way of his: evidently it was a habit. Valentine smiled awkwardly.

Vinorkis said, "Saw you juggling in the yard this afternoon. You’re pretty good."

"Thank you."

"Hobby of yours?"

"Actually, I’ve never done it before. But the Skandars seem to have hired me for their troupe."

The Hjort looked impressed. "Really? And will you go on tour with them?"

"So it appears."

"Whereabouts?"

"I have no idea," said Valentine. "Perhaps it hasn’t even been decided yet. Wherever they want to go will be good enough for me."

"Ah, the free-floating life," Vinorkis said. "I’ve meant to try it myself. Perhaps your Skandars would hire me, too."

"Can you juggle?"

"I can keep accounts. I juggle figures." Vinorkis laughed vehemently and gave Valentine a hearty slap on the back. "I juggle figures! Do you like that? Well, good night to you!"

"Who was that?" Carabella asked, when the Hjort was gone.

"I met him at breakfast this morning. A local merchant, I think."

She made a face. "I don’t think I like him. But it’s so easy not to like Hjorts. Ugly things!" She rose gracefully and stretched. "Shall we go?"

He slept soundly again that night. To dream of juggling might have been expected, after the afternoon’s events, but instead he found himself once more on the purple plain — a disturbing sign, for the Majipoori know from childhood that dreams of recurring aspect have extra significance, probably dark. The Lady rarely sends recurring dreams, but the King is given to the practice. Again the dream was a fragment. Mocking faces hovered in the sky. Whirlpools of purple sand churning alongside the path, as if creatures with busy claws and clacking palps were moving beneath. Spikes sprouted from the ground. The trees had eyes. Everything held menace, ugliness, foreboding. But the dream was without characters and without events. It communicated only sinister foreboding.

The world of dreams yielded to the world of daybreak. This time he was the first to waken, when the earliest strands of light entered the hall. Next to him Shanamir slumbered blissfully. Sleet lay coiled like a serpent far down the hall, and near him was Carabella, relaxed, smiling in her dreams. The Skandars evidently slept elsewhere; the only aliens in the room were a couple of lumpish Hjorts and a trio of Vroons tangled in a weave of limbs that defied comprehension. From Carabella’s trunk Valentine took three of the juggling balls, and went outside into the misty dawn to sharpen his burgeoning skills.

Sleet, emerging an hour later, found him at it and clapped his hands. "You have the passion, friend. You juggle like one possessed. But don’t tire yourself so soon. We have more complicated things to teach you today."

The morning’s lesson had to do with variations on the basic position. Now that Valentine had mastered the trick of throwing three balls so that one was always in the air — and he had mastered it, no question of that, attaining in one afternoon a control of technique that Carabella said had taken her many days of practice — they had him moving about, walking, trotting, turning corners, even skipping, all the while keeping the cascade going. He juggled the three balls up a flight of stairs and down again. He juggled in a squatting position. He juggled standing on one leg like the solemn gihorna-birds of the Zimr Marsh. He juggled while kneeling. By now he was absolutely secure in the harmony of eye and hand, and what the rest of his body might be doing had no effect on that.

In the afternoon Sleet moved him to new intricacies: throwing the ball from behind his back in mid-volley, throwing it up under one leg, juggling with crossed wrists. Carabella taught him how to bounce a ball against a wall and work the return smoothly into the flow, and how to send a ball from one hand to the other by letting it hit the back of his hand, instead of catching and throwing. These things he grasped swiftly. Carabella and Sleet had stopped complimenting him on the quickness of his mastery — it was patronizing to shower him constantly with praise — but he did not fail to observe the little glances of astonishment that often passed between them, and that pleased him.

The Skandars juggled in another part of the courtyard, rehearsing the act they would do in the parade, a miraculous thing involving knives and sickles and blazing torches. Occasionally Valentine glanced over, marveling at what the four-armed ones were achieving. But mainly he concentrated on his own training.

So went Seaday. On Fourday they began teaching him how to juggle with clubs instead of balls. This was a challenge, for although the principles were mainly the same, clubs were bigger and clumsier, and it was necessary for Valentine to throw them higher in order to have time to make the catches. He began with one club, tossing it from hand to hand. This is how you hold it, said Carabella, this is how you throw, this is how you catch, and he did as she said, bending a thumb now and then but soon learning the skills. "Now," she said, "put two balls in your left hand and the club in your right," and he threw, confused for a moment by the differences in mass and spin, but not for long, and after that it was two clubs in his right hand and a ball in his left, and late Fourday afternoon he worked with three clubs, wrists aching and eyes tight with strain, working all the same, unwilling and almost unable to stop.

That evening he asked, "When will I learn how to throw the clubs with another juggler?"

Carabella smiled. "Later. After the parade, as we travel eastward through the villages."

"I could do it now," he said.

"Not in time for the parade. You’ve performed wonders, but there are limits to what you can master in three days. If we had to juggle with a novice, we’d be forced to come down to your level, and the Coronal won’t take much joy in that."

He admitted the justice of what she said. Still, he longed for the time when he would take part in the interplay of the jugglers, and pass clubs or knives or torches with them as a member of a single many-souled entity in perfect coordination.