Lord Valentine's Castle

mountings, perhaps in a petulant swipe by an angry dragon; the masts had lost some of their yards also. Crewmen with a sluggish and dispirited look to them were at work, but not in any very effective way, caulking and coiling ropes and mending sail.

Captain Gorzval himself seemed as weary and worn as his vessel. He was a Skandar not quite as tall as Lisamon Hultin — virtually a dwarf among his race — with a cast in one eye and a stump where his outer left arm should be. His fur was matted and coarse; his shoulders were slumped; his entire look was one of fatigue and defeat. But he brightened immediately at Zalzan Kavol’s query about taking passengers to the Rodamaunt Archipelago. 'How many?'

'Twelve. Four Skandars, a Hjort, a Vroon, five humans, and one — other.'

'All pilgrims, you say?'

'All pilgrims.'

Gorzval made the sign of the Lady in a perfunctory way and said, 'You know it’s irregular for passengers to travel on a dragon-ship. But I owe the Lady recompense for past favors received. I’m willing to make an exception. Cash in advance?'

'Of course,' said Zalzan Kavol.

Valentine quickly released his breath. This was a miserable dilapidated ship, and Gorzval probably a third-rate navigator dogged by bad fortune or even downright incompetence; nevertheless, he was willing to take them, and no one else would even entertain the idea.

Gorzval named his price and waited, with obvious tension, to be haggled with. What he asked was less than half what they had unsuccessfully offered the other captains. Zalzan Kavol, bargaining out of habit and pride, no doubt, attempted to cut three royals from that. Gorzval, plainly dismayed, offered a reduction of a royal and a half; Zalzan Kavol appeared ready to shave another few crowns, but Valentine, pitying the hapless captain, cut in quickly to say, 'Done. When do we sail?'

'In three days,' Gorzval said.

It turned out to be four, actually — Gorzval spoke vaguely of some need for additional refitting, by which he meant. Valentine discovered, patching of some fairly serious leaks. He had not been able to afford it until his passengers had hired on. According to the gossip in the dockside taverns, Lisamon Hultin reported, Gorzval had been trying to mortgage part of his catch to raise the money for carpenters, but found no takers. He had, she said, a doubtful reputation: his judgment was inferior, his luck poor, his crew ill-paid and shiftless. Once he had missed the sea-dragon swarm entirely and returned empty to Piliplok; on another voyage he had lost his arm to a lively little dragon not quite as dead as he thought; and on this last one the Brangalyn had been struck amidships by an irritated beast and nearly sent to the bottom. 'We might do better,' Lisamon Hultin suggested, 'by trying to swim to the Isle.'

'Possibly we’ll bring our captain better luck than he’s had,' said Valentine.

Sleet laughed. 'If optimism alone could carry one to the throne, my lord, you’d be on Castle Mount by Winterday.'

Valentine laughed with him. But after the disaster in Piurifayne he hoped he was not leading these folk into new catastrophe aboard this ill-favored vessel. They were following him, after all, on faith alone, on the evidence of dreams and wizardry and an enigmatic Metamorph prank: it would be shame and pain for him if, in his haste to reach the Isle, he caused them more grief. Yet Valentine felt powerful sympathy for the bedraggled stump-armed Gorzval. An unlucky mariner he might be — but a fitting helmsman, perhaps, for a Coronal so frowned upon by fortune that he had managed to lose throne and memory and identity all in a single night!

On the eve of the Brangalyn’s departure Vinorkis drew Valentine aside and said in a troubled tone, 'My lord, we are being watched.'

'How do you know?'

The Hjort smiled and preened his orange mustachios. 'When one has done a little spying, one recognizes the traits in others. I’ve noticed a grayish Skandar lounging around the docks these past few days, asking questions of Gorzval’s people. One of the ship’s carpenters told me he was curious about the passengers Gorzval had taken on, and about our destination.'

Valentine scowled. 'I hoped we had shaken them off our track in the jungles!'

'They must have discovered us again in Ni-moya, my lord.'

'Then we must lose them again in the Archipelago,' said Valentine. 'And be wary until then of other spies along our way. I thank you, Vinorkis.'

'No thanks are needed, my lord. It is my duty.'

A strong wind blew from the south in the morning when the ship set forth. Vinorkis kept close look for the inquisitive Skandar at the pier during the embarkation, but he was nowhere in view; his work was done, Valentine supposed, and some other informant farther on would continue the surveillance on the usurper’s behalf.

The route lay to the east and south; these dragon-ships were accustomed to tack against that constant hostile wind all the way to the hunting grounds. It was a wearying business, but there was no avoiding it, for the sea-dragons were within the reach of hunters only at this season. The Brangalyn had supplementary engine power, but not any great deal of it, fuels of all kinds being so scarce on Majipoor. With a certain majestic clumsiness the Brangalyn picked up the side wind and moved out of Piliplok harbor into the open sea.

This was the smaller sea of Majipoor, the Inner Sea, which separated eastern Zimroel from western Alhanroel. It was no trifle — some five thousand miles from shore to shore — yet it was a mere puddle compared with the Great Sea that occupied most of the other hemisphere, an ocean beyond the possibility of navigation, untold thousands of miles of open water. The Inner Sea was more human in scale, and was broken midway between the continents by the Isle of Sleep — itself big enough so that on another world, of less extraordinary size, it would be considered a continent — and by several major island chains.

The sea-dragons spent their lives in unending migration between the two oceans. Round and round the globe they went, taking years or even decades, so far as anyone knew, to make the circumnavigation. Perhaps a dozen great herds of them inhabited the ocean, traveling constantly from west to east. Every summer one of those herds would complete its journey across the Great Sea, passing south of Narabal and up the southern coast of Zimroel toward Piliplok. It was forbidden to hunt them then, for the herd abounded at that time with pregnant cows. By autumn the young were born, the herd now having reached the windswept waters between Piliplok and the Isle of Sleep, and the annual hunt began. Out from Piliplok came the dragon-ships in great numbers. The herds were thinned of both young and old, and the survivors made their way back into the tropics, passing south of the Isle of Sleep, rounding the hump of Alhanroel’s lengthy Stoienzar Peninsula, and heading on eastward below Alhanroel to the Great Sea, where they would swim unmolested until their time brought them round to Piliplok again.

Of all the beasts of Majipoor, the sea-dragons were by far the largest. Newborn, they were tiny, no more than five or six feet in length, but through all their lives they continued to grow, and their lifespans were long, although no one knew just how long. Gorzval, who let his passengers share his table and proved to be a talkative man now that his anxieties were behind him, was fond of telling tales of the immensity of certain sea-dragons. One that had been taken in the reign of Lord Malibor was a hundred and ninety feet in length, and another, of Confalume’s time, two hundred forty, and in the era when Prestimion was Pontifex and Lord Dekkeret the Coronal they had caught one thirty feet longer than that. But the champion, said Gorzval, was one that had boldly appeared almost in the mouth of Piliplok harbor in the reign of Thimin and Lord Kinniken, and had reliably been measured at three hundred fifteen feet. That monster, known as Lord Kinniken’s dragon, had escaped unharmed because the entire fleet of dragon-ships was then far out to sea. Allegedly it had been sighted again several times by hunters in succeeding centuries, most recently in the year Lord Voriax became Coronal, but no one had ever laid a harpoon on it, and among hunters it had a baleful reputation. 'It must be five hundred feet long by now,' said Gorzval, 'and I pray that some other captain is given the honor of encountering it when it returns to our waters.'

Valentine had seen small sea-dragons, pithed, gutted, salted, and dried, sold in marketplaces all over Zimroel, and on occasion he had tasted their meat, which was dark, tangy, and tough. Dragons less than ten feet long were the ones prepared in this way. The meat of larger ones, up to fifty feet or so, was butchered and sold fresh along the eastern coast of Zimroel, but difficulties of transportation kept it from finding markets far from the sea. Beyond that length the dragons were too old to be edible, but their flesh was rendered into oil that had many purposes, petroleum and other fossil hydrocarbons being scarce on Majipoor. The bones of sea-dragons of all sizes had their uses in architecture, for they were nearly as strong as steel and far more readily obtained, and there was medicinal value in the unborn dragon- eggs, found in quantities of many hundreds of pounds in the abdomens of mature females. Dragon-skin, dragon-wings, dragon this and dragon that, everything was put to some benefit and nothing wasted. 'This, for example, is dragon-milk,' said Gorzval, offering his guests a flask of a pale bluish liquid. 'In Ni-moya or Khyntor they’d pay ten crowns for a flask like this. Here, taste it.'

Lisamon Hultin took a hesitant sip and spat it on the floor. 'Dragon-milk or dragon-piss?' she demanded.

The captain smiled frostily. 'In Dulorn,' he said, 'what you spat out would cost you at least a crown, and you’d count yourself lucky to find some.' He pushed the flask toward Sleet, who shook his head, and then to Valentine. After a moment’s pause Valentine put it to his lips.

'Bitter,' he said, 'and a musty taste, but not entirely terrible. What’s the secret of its appeal?'

The Skandar patted his thighs. 'Aphrodisiac!' he boomed. 'Stirs the juices! Heats the blood! Prolongs the life!' He pointed jovially at Zalzan Kavol, who, unasked, had taken a robust swig of the stuff. 'See? The Skandar knows! The man of Piliplok doesn’t need to be begged to drink it!'

Carabella said, 'Dragon-milk? These are mammals?'

'Mammals, yes. The eggs are hatched within, so, and the young born alive, ten or twenty in a litter, rows of nipples all up and down the belly. You think it’s odd, milk from dragons?'

'I think of dragons as reptiles,' said Carabella, 'and reptiles give no milk.'

'Think of dragons as dragons, better. You want to taste?'

'Thank you, no,' she replied. 'My juices need no stirring.'

The meals in the captain’s cabin were the best part of the voyage, Valentine decided. Gorzval was good-natured and outgoing, as Skandars went, and he set a decent table, with wine and meats and fish of various sorts, including a good deal of dragon-flesh. But the ship itself was creaky and cramped, poorly designed and even more poorly maintained, and the crew, a dozen Skandars and an assortment of Hjorts and humans, was uncommunicative and often downright hostile. Obviously these dragon-hunters were a proud and insular lot, even the crew of a bedraggled vessel like the Brangalyn, and resented the presence of outsiders among them as they practiced their mysteries. Only Gorzval seemed at all hospitable; but he clearly felt grateful to them, for their fare was all that had allowed him to get his ship seaworthy.

They were far from land now, in a featureless realm where pale blue ocean met pale blue sky to obliterate all sense of place and direction. The course was south-southeasterly, and the farther they got from Piliplok the warmer grew the wind, hot now and dry as ever. 'We call the wind our sending,' said Gorzval, 'because it comes straight from Suvrael. The little gift of the King of Dreams, it is, as delightful as all his others.' The sea was empty: no islands, no drifting logs, no sign of anything, not even dragons. The dragons had gone far past the coast this year, as they sometimes did, and were basking in the tropical waters close by the fringes of the Archipelago. Occasionally a gihorna-bird passed far overhead, making its autumn migration from the islands to the Zimr Marsh, which was not near the Zimr at all but on the coast five hundred miles south of Piliplok; these long-legged creatures must have made tempting targets, but no one took aim at them. Another tradition of the sea, it seemed.