Lord Valentine's Castle

He remembered what had gone through his own mind when he stood in the streets and beheld Lord Valentine the Coronal in the procession, and had felt himself in the presence of grace and might, and had realized that to be Coronal was to become a being set apart, a personage of aura and strangeness, one who holds power over twenty billions, who carries in himself the energies of thousands of years of famed princes, who is destined to go on to the Labyrinth one day and wear the authority of the Pontifex. Incomprehensible as all this was to him, it was sinking in, and he was dumbfounded and overwhelmed by it. But it was absurd. To fear himself? To sink down in awe at his own imaginary majesty? He was Valentine the juggler, and nothing more!

Carabella was sobbing. In another moment she would be hysterical. The Vroon, surely, would have some sleeping potion that would give her ease.

'Wait,' Valentine said. 'I’ll be back in a moment. I’ll ask Deliamber for something to calm you.'

He darted from the room, down the hall, wondering which room was the sorcerer’s. All doors were closed. He debated knocking at random, hoping not to blunder in on Zalzan Kavol, when a dry voice said out of the darkness from a point somewhere below his elbow, 'Do you have trouble sleeping?'

'Deliamber?'

'Here. Close by you.'

Valentine peered, narrowing his eyes, and made out the Vroon sitting cross-tentacled in the hallway in some kind of posture of meditation. Deliamber rose.

'I thought you might come in search of me soon,' he said.

'Carabella has had a sending. She needs a drug to quiet her spirit. Do you have anything useful?'

'No drugs, no. A touch, though — it can be done. Come.' The little Vroon glided along the corridor and into the room that Valentine shared with Carabella. She had not moved, still huddled pitifully beside the bed with her robe wrapped carelessly about her. Deliamber went to her at once; his ropy tendrils delicately enfolded her shoulders, and she loosened her tautly held muscles, and slumped as though rendered boneless. The sound of her heavy breathing was loud in the room. After a moment she looked up, calmer now, but still with a dazed, frozen look in her eyes.

She gestured toward Valentine and said, 'I dreamed that he was— that he had been—' She hesitated.

'I know,' said Deliamber.

'It is not true,' Valentine said thickly. 'I am only a juggler.'

Mildly Deliamber said, 'You are only a juggler now.'

'You believe this nonsense too?'

'It was obvious from the first. When you stepped between the Skandar and me. This is the act of a king, I told myself, and I read your soul—'

'What?'

'A professional trick. I read your soul, and saw what had been done to you—'

'But such a thing is impossible!' Valentine protested. 'To take a man’s mind from his body, and put it in another’s, and put another’s mind in his—'

'Impossible? No,' Deliamber said. 'I think not. There have been tales coming out of Suvrael that studies into this art are being done at the court of the King of Dreams. For several years now the rumors of strange experiments have trickled forth.'

Valentine stared sullenly at his fingertips. 'It could not be done.'

'So I thought too, when first I heard it. But then I considered. There are many wizardries nearly as great whose secrets I myself know, and I am only a minor wizard. The seeds of such an art have long existed. Maybe some Suvraelu sorcerer has found a way to germinate those seeds at last. Valentine, if I were you I would not reject the possibility.'

'A change of bodies?' Valentine said, bewildered. 'This is not my true body? Whose would it be, then?'

'Who knows? Some unlucky man struck down by accident, drowned perhaps, or choked on a piece of meat, or the victim of some evil toadstool unwisely eaten. Dead, anyway, in some manner that left his body reasonably whole; and taken within the hour of death to some secret place, there to have the Coronal’s soul transplanted into the empty shell, and then another man, giving up his own body forever, quickly taking possession of the Coronal’s vacated skull, possibly retaining much of the Coronal’s own memory and mind in union with his own, so that he can carry on the masquerade of ruling as though he were the true monarch—'

'I accept none of this as remotely real,' said Valentine stubbornly.

'Nevertheless,' Deliamber said, 'when I looked into your soul I saw everything even as I describe it to you now. And felt more than a little fear — in my trade one doesn’t often meet Coronals, or stumble on such evidence of gross treason — and I took a moment to compose myself, and asked myself if I would not be wiser to forget what I had seen, and for a time I seriously considered it. But then I knew that I could not, that I would be whipped with monstrous dreams until the end of my days if I ignored what I knew. I told myself that there is much in the world that is in need of repair, and I would, Divine willing, be part of the fixing. And now the fixing has begun.'

Valentine said, 'There is nothing to it.'

'For the sake of argument, say that there is,' Deliamber urged. 'Pretend that they came upon you in Til-omon and cast you from your body and put a usurper upon the throne. Suppose that is the case. What would you do then?'

'Nothing at all.'

'No?'

'Nothing,' said Valentine forcefully. 'Let him be Coronal who wants to be Coronal. I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen. If I once dwelled on Castle Mount, so be it, but I am not there now, and nothing in my being impels me to go back there. I’m a juggler and a good one getting better, and a happy man. Is the Coronal happy? Is the Pontifex? If I have been cast out of power, I regard it as good fortune. I would not now resume the burden.'

'It is what you were destined to carry.'

'Destined? Destined?' Valentine laughed. 'Just as fair to say that I was destined to be Coronal a little while, and then to be displaced by someone more fitting. One must be crazy to be a ruler, Deliamber, and I’m sane. The government is a burden and a chore. I would not accept it.'

'You will,' Deliamber said. 'You’ve been tampered with and you are not yourself. But once a Coronal, forever a Coronal. You will be healed and come into your own again, Lord Valentine.'

'Don’t use that title!'

'It will be yours again,' said Deliamber.

Valentine angrily shook the suggestion away. He looked toward Carabella: she was asleep on the floor, head against the bed. Carefully he lifted her and put her under the coverlet. To Deliamber he said. 'It grows late, and there’s been much foolishness tonight. My head hurts from all this heavy talk. Do to me what you did to her, wizard, and grant me sleep, and say no more to me of responsibilities that have never been mine and are never going to be mine. We must perform tomorrow, and I want to be rested for it.'

'Very well. Get into bed.'

Valentine settled in beside Carabella. The Vroon touched him lightly, then with more force, and Valentine felt his mind growing cloudy. Sleep came upon him easily, like a thick white mist sweeping up out of the ocean at twilight. Good. Good. Willingly he relinquished consciousness.

And in the night he dreamed, and there was about the dream a bright fierce glow that had the unmistakable aspect of a sending, for it was a dream vivid beyond imagining.

He saw himself crossing the harsh and terrible purple plain that he had visited so often in recent slumber. This time he knew without question where the plain was: no realm of fantasy, but the distant continent of Suvrael, that lay beneath the unshielded glare of the naked sun, and these fissures in the ground were scars of summer, where what little moisture the soil contained had been sucked forth. Ugly twisted plants with swollen grayish leaves lay limp against the ground, and things with thorns and weird angular joints grew tall. Valentine walked swiftly, in the heat and the merciless biting wind and the skin-cracking dryness. He was late, overdue at the palace of the King of Dreams, where he had been hired to perform.

The palace now loomed before him, sinister, black-shadowed, all spidery turrets and jagged porticoes, a building as spiky and forbidding as the plants of the desert. More a jail than a palace it seemed, at least in its outer aspect, but inside everything was different, cool and luxurious, with fountains in the courtyards, and soft plush draperies, and a scent of flowers in the air. Servants bowed and beckoned to him, leading him to inner chambers, stripping away his sand-crusted clothes, bathing him, drying him in feathery towels, giving him fresh clothes, elegant jeweled robes, offering him chilled sherbets, icy wine of a silvery hue, morsels of unknown delicate meats, and at last bringing him to the great high-vaulted throne-room where the King of Dreams sat in state.

At a vast distance Valentine saw him enthroned: Simonan Barjazid, the malign and unpredictable Power who from this wind-swept desert territory sent his messages of terrible import all through Majipoor. He was a heavy-bodied man, his face beardless, fleshy-jowled, eyes deep-set and ringed with dark circles, and around his close-cropped stubby head he wore the golden diadem of his power, the thought-amplifying apparatus that a Barjazid had devised a thousand years ago. To Simonan’s left sat his son Cristoph, fleshy like his father, and at his right hand was his son Minax, the heir, a man of lean and forbidding aspect, dark-skinned and sharp-faced, as if honed by the desert winds.

The King of Dreams, with a casual wave of his hand, ordered Valentine to begin.

It was knives he juggled, ten, fifteen of them, thin shining stilettos that would pierce right through his arm if they dropped wrongly, but he handled them with ease, juggling as only Sleet might do, or perhaps Zalzan Kavol, a virtuoso display of skill. Valentine stood still, making only the tiniest flicking motions of his hands and wrists, and the knives soared aloft and flashed with keen brilliance, coursing high through the air and falling perfectly back to his waiting fingers, and as they rose and fell, rose and fell, the arc that they described took on an alteration of form, no longer a mere cascade but becoming the starburst emblem of the Coronal, blades pointing outward as they flew through the air, and abruptly, as Valentine approached the climax of his performance, the knives froze in mid-air, and hovered there just above his questing fingers, and would not descend to them.

And from behind the throne came a scowling fierce-eyed man who was Dominin Barjazid, the third of the sons of the King of Dreams, and he strode toward Valentine and with an easy contemptuous gesture swept the starburst of knives from the air, thrusting them into the sash of his robe.

The King of Dreams smiled mockingly. 'You are an excellent juggler, Lord Valentine. At last you find a proper occupation.'

'I am Coronal of Majipoor,' Valentine replied.

'Were. Were. Were. You are a wanderer now, and fit to be nothing more.'

'Lazy,' said Minax Barjazid.

'Cowardly,' said Cristoph Barjazid. 'Idle.'

'A shirker of duty,' Dominin Barjazid declared.

'Your rank is forfeit,' said the King of Dreams. 'Your office is vacated. Go. Go and juggle, Valentine the juggler. Go, idler. Go, wanderer.'