Lord Valentine's Castle

sort of trash into food. The skill of making them was long forgotten, but now they bred of themselves, like natural animals, and it would be a slow business getting about on Majipoor without them.

The road to Pidruid led along the high ridge for more than a mile, then began sudden sharp switchbacks down into the coastal plain. Valentine let the boy do most of the talking as they made the descent. Shanamir came, he said, from a district two and a half days’ journey inland, to the northeast; there he and his brothers and his father raised mounts for sale at Pidruid market, and turned a good living at it; he was thirteen years old, and had a high opinion of himself; he had never been outside the province of which Pidruid was the capital, but someday he meant to go abroad, to travel everywhere on Majipoor, to make the pilgrimage to the Isle of Sleep and kneel before the Lady, to cross the Inner Sea to Alhanroel and achieve the ascent of Castle Mount, even to go down south, maybe, beyond the steaming tropics, into the burnt and barren domain of the King of Dreams, for what was the use of being alive and healthy on a world as full of wonders as Majipoor if you did not journey hither and thither about on it?

'And you, Valentine?' he asked suddenly. 'Who are you, where from, whither bound?'

Valentine was caught by surprise, lulled by the boy’s prattle and the steady gentle rhythm of the mount as it padded down the broad twisting road, and the burst of jabbing questions left him unprepared. He said only, 'I come from the eastern provinces. I have no plans beyond Pidruid. I’ll stay here until I have reason to leave.'

'Why have you come?'

'Why not?'

'Ah,' said Shanamir. 'All right. I know purposeful evasion when I hear it. You’re the younger son of a duke in Ni-moya or Piliplok, and you sent someone a mischievous dream and were caught at it, and your father gave you a pouch of money and told you to vanish to the far side of the continent. Right?'

'Precisely,' Valentine said, with a wink.

'And you’re loaded with royals and crowns and you’re going to set yourself up like a prince in Pidruid and drink and dance until your last coin is gone, and then you’ll hire aboard a seagoing vessel and ship out for Alhanroel, and you’ll take me with you as your squire. Isn’t that so?'

'You have it exactly, my friend. Except for the money. I neglected to provide for that part of your fantasy.'

'But you have some money,' said Shanamir, not so playfully now. 'You aren’t a beggar, are you? They’re very hard on beggars in Pidruid. They don’t allow any sort of vagrancy down there.'

'I have a few coins,' Valentine said. 'Enough to carry me through festival time and a bit beyond. And then I’ll see.'

'If you do go to sea, take me with you, Valentine!'

'If I do, I will,' he promised.

They were halfway down the slope now. The city of Pidruid lay in a great basin along the coast, rimmed by low gray hills on the inland side and along much of the shore, save only where a break in the outer range allowed the ocean to spill through, forming a blue-green bay that was Pidruid’s magnificent harbor. As he approached sea level here in late afternoon Valentine felt the offshore breezes blowing toward him, cool, fragrant, breaking the heat. Already white shoals of fog were rolling toward the shore out of the west, and there was a salty tang to the air, thick as it was now with water that had embraced the fishes and sea-dragons only hours before. Valentine was awed by the size of the city that lay before him. He could not remember ever having seen a larger one; but there was so much, after all, that he could not remember.

This was the edge of the continent. All of Zimroel lay at his back, and for all he knew he had walked it from end to end, from one of the eastern ports indeed, Ni-moya or Piliplok, except that he knew himself to be a young man, not very young but young enough, and he doubted that it was possible to have made such a journey on foot in one lifetime, and he had no recollection of having been on any sort of mount until this afternoon. On the other hand, he seemed to know how to ride, he had lifted himself knowledgeably into the beast’s broad saddle, and that argued that he must have ridden at least part of the way before. It did not matter. He was here now, and he felt no restlessness; since Pidruid was where he had somehow arrived, Pidruid was where he would stay, until there was reason to go elsewhere. He lacked Shanamir’s hunger for travel. The world was so big it did not bear thinking about, three great continents, two enormous seas, a place that one could comprehend fully only in dreams, and even then not bring much of the truth of it away into the waking world. They said this Lord Valentine the Coronal lived in a castle eight thousand years old, with five rooms for every year of its existence, and that the castle sat upon a mountain so tall it pierced the sky, a colossal peak thirty miles high, on whose slopes were fifty cities as big as Pidruid. Such a thing as that did not bear much thought either. The world was too big, too old, too populous for one man’s mind. I will live in this city of Pidruid, Valentine thought, and I will find a way to pay for my food and lodging, and I will be happy.

'Naturally you don’t have a bed reserved in an inn,' Shanamir said.

'Of course not.'

'It stands to reason you wouldn’t. And naturally everything in town is full, this being festival time and the Coronal already here. So where will you sleep, Valentine?'

'Anywhere. Under a tree. On a mound of rags. In the public park. That looks like a park there, over to the right, that stretch of green with the tall trees.'

'You remember what I told you about vagrants in Pidruid? They’ll find you and lock you deep for a month, and when they let you out they’ll have you sweeping dung until you can buy your way out of your fine, which at the pay of a dung-sweeper will take you the rest of your life.'

'At least dung-sweeping’s steady work,' Valentine said.

Shanamir didn’t laugh. 'There’s an inn the mount-sellers stay at. I’m known there, or rather my father is. We’ll get you in somehow. But what would you have done without me?'

'Become a dung-sweeper, I suppose.'

'You sound as though you really wouldn’t mind.' The boy touched his mount’s ear, halting it, and looked closely at him. 'Doesn’t anything matter to you, Valentine? I don’t understand you. Are you a fool, or simply the most carefree man on Majipoor?'

'I wish I knew,' said Valentine.

At the foot of the hill the ridge road joined with a grand highway that came running down out of the north and curved westward toward Pidruid. The new road, wide and straight along the valley floor, was rimmed with low white markers stamped with the double crest of Pontifex and Coronal, the labyrinth and the starburst, and was paved in smooth blue-gray stuff of light resiliency, a springy, flawless roadbed that probably was of great antiquity, as were so many of the best things of this world. The mounts plodded tirelessly. Synthetic things that they were, they scarcely understood fatigue, and would clop from Pidruid to Piliplok without resting and without complaining. From time to time Shanamir glanced back, checking for strays, since the beasts were not tied; but they remained blandly in their places, one after another, blunt snout of one close behind coarse ropy tail of another, along the flank of the highway.

Now the sun was faintly tinged with late-day bronze, and the city lay close before them. A stunning sight presented itself in this part of the road: on both shoulders of it had been planted noble trees, twenty times the height of a man, with slim tapering trunks of dark bluish bark and mighty crowns of glistening greenish- black leaves sharp as daggers. Out of those crowns burst astounding clusters of bloom, red tipped with yellow, that blazed like beacons as far as Valentine could see.

'What are those trees?' he asked.

'Fireshower palms,' Shanamir said. 'Pidruid is famous for them. They grow only near the coast and flower just one week a year. In the winter they drop sour berries, that make a strong liquor. You’ll drink it tomorrow.'

'The Coronal has picked a good moment to come here, then.'

'Not by chance, I imagine.'

On and on the twin column of brilliant trees stretched, and they followed along, until open fields yielded to the first country villas, and then suburban tracts thick with more modest homes, and then a dusty zone of small factories, and finally the ancient wall of Pidruid itself, half as high as a fireshower tree, pierced by a pointed arch set with archaic-looking battlements. 'Falkynkip Gate,' Shanamir announced. 'The eastern entrance to Pidruid. Now we enter the capital. Eleven million souls here, Valentine, and all the races of Majipoor to be found, not just humans, no, everything here, all mixed together, Skandars and Hjorts and Liimen and all the rest. Even, so they say, a little group of Shapeshifters.'

'Shapeshifters?'

'The old race. The first natives.'

'We call them something else,' Valentine said vaguely. 'Metamorphs, is it?'

'The same. Yes. I’ve heard they’re called that in the east. You have a strange accent, do you know that?'

'No stranger than yours, friend.'

Shanamir laughed. 'To me your accent’s strange. And I have no accent at all. I speak normal speech. You shape your words with fancy sounds. ‘We call them Metamorphs,’' he said, mimicking. 'That’s how you sound to me. Is that Ni-moyan talk?'

Valentine replied only with a shrug.

Shanamir said, 'They frighten me, Shapeshifters. Metamorphs. This would be a happier planet without them. Sneaking around, imitating others, working mischief. I wish they would keep to their own territory.'

'Mostly they do, is that not so?'

'Mostly. But they say a few live in each city. Plotting who knows what kind of trouble for the rest of us.' Shanamir leaned across toward Valentine, caught his arm, peered solemnly into his face. 'One might meet one anywhere. Sitting on a ridge looking out toward Pidruid on a hot afternoon, for example.'

'So you think I’m a Metamorph in masquerade?'

The boy cackled. 'Prove that you aren’t!'

Valentine groped for some way to demonstrate his authenticity, found none, and made a terrifying face instead, stretching his cheeks as though they were rubber, twisting his lips in opposite directions, rolling his eyeballs high. 'My true visage,' he said. 'You have discovered me.' And they laughed, and passed on through Falkynkip Gate into the city of Pidruid.

Within the gate everything seemed much older, the houses built in a curious angular style, humpbacked walls swelling outward and upward to tiled roofs, and the tiles themselves often chipped and broken, and interspersed with heavy clumps of low fleshy-leaved roof-weeds that had gained footholds in cracks and earthy pockets. A heavy layer of fog hovered over the city, and it was dark and cool beneath it, with lights glowing in almost every window. The main highway split, and split again, until now Shanamir was leading his animals down a much narrower street, though still a fairly straight one, with secondary streets coiling off from it in every direction. The streets were thick with folk. Such crowds made Valentine obscurely uncomfortable; he could not recall having had so many others so close about him at