Lord Valentine's Castle

There was a ghastly impact as the onrushing dragon crashed broadside into the Brangalyn.

The ship heeled over as though it had been pushed by a giant’s hand, then rolled dizzyingly back the other way. An awful shudder shook its timbers. A secondary impact came — the wings hitting the hull, the thrashing flukes? — and then another, and the Brangalyn bobbed like a cork. 'We’re stove in!' a desperate voice cried. Things rolled free on the deck, a giant rendering cauldron breaking its moorings and tumbling over three hapless crewmen, a case of boning- axes ripping loose and skidding over the side. As the ship continued to sway and lurch, Valentine caught a glimpse of the great dragon on the far side, where the recent catch still hung, unbalancing everything; and the monster swung around and headed in for another attack. There could be no doubt now of the purposefulness of its onslaught.

The dragon struck, shoulder-side on; the Brangalyn rocked wildly; Valentine grunted as Lisamon Hultin’s grip became an almost crushing embrace. He had no idea where any of the others might be, nor whether they would survive. Clearly the ship was doomed. Already it was listing badly as water poured into the hold. The tail of the dragon rose nearly to deck-level and struck again. Everything dissolved into chaos. Valentine felt himself flying; he soared gracefully, he dipped and bobbed, he plunged with elegance and skill toward the water.

He landed in something much like a whirlpool and was drawn down into the terrible turbulent spin.

As he went under Valentine could not help but hear the ballad of Lord Malibor ringing in his mind. In truth that Coronal had taken a fancy for dragon-hunting some ten years back, and had gone out in what was said to be the finest dragon-ship in Piliplok, and the ship had been lost with all hands. No one knew what had happened, but — so it came out of Valentine’s spotty recollections — the government had spoken of a sudden storm. More likely, he thought, it had been this killer- beast, this avenger of dragonkind.

Twelve miles long and three miles wide
And two miles deep was he —

And now a second Coronal, successor but one to Malibor, would meet the same fate. Valentine was oddly unmoved by that. He had thought himself dying in the rapids of the Steiche, and had survived that; here, with a hundred miles of sea between him and any sort of safety, and a rampaging monster lashing about close at hand, he was even more surely doomed, but there was no use bemoaning it. The Divine had clearly withdrawn its favor from him. What grieved him was that others whom he loved would die with him, merely because they had been loyal, because they had pledged themselves to follow him on his journey to the Isle, because they had tied themselves to a luckless Coronal and a luckless dragon-captain and now must share their evil destinies.

He was sucked deep into the heart of the ocean and ceased to ponder the tides of luck. He struggled for breath, coughed, choked, spat out water and swallowed more. His head pounded mercilessly. Carabella, he thought, and darkness engulfed him.

Valentine had never, since awakening out of his broken past to find himself near Pidruid, given much thought to a philosophy of death. Life held challenges enough for him. He recalled vaguely what he had been taught in boyhood, that all souls return to the Divine Source at their last moment when the release of life-energy comes, and travel over the Bridge of Farewells, the bridge that is the prime responsibility of the Pontifex. But whether there might be truth in that, whether there was a world beyond, and if so of what sort, Valentine had never paused to consider. Now, though, he returned to consciousness in a place so strange that it surpassed the imaginings of even the most fertile of thinkers.

Was this the afterlife? It was a giant chamber, a great silent room with thick moist pink walls and a roof that was in places high and domed, supported by mighty pillars, and in other places drooped until it nearly touched the floor. In that roof were mounted huge glowing hemispheres that emitted a faint blue light, as if by phosphorescence. The air in here was rank and steamy, and had a sharp, bitter flavor, unpleasant and stifling. Valentine lay on his side against a wet slippery surface, rough to the touch, deeply corrugated, quivering with constant deep palpitations and tremors. He put the flat of his hand to it and felt a kind of convulsion deep within. The texture of the ground was like nothing he had known before, and those tiny but perceptible motions within it made him wonder if what he had entered was not the world after death but merely some grotesque hallucination.

Valentine got unsteadily to his feet. His clothing was soaked, he had lost one boot somewhere, his lips burned with the taste of salt, his lungs seemed full of water, and he felt shaky and dazed; furthermore it was hard to keep upright on this unendingly trembling surface. Looking about, he saw by the dim pale luminosity a kind of vegetation, pliant whip-shaped growths, thick and fleshy and leafless, sprouting from the ground. They too writhed with inner animation. Making his way between two lofty pillars and through an area where ceiling and floor almost met, he caught sight of what seemed to be a pond of some greenish fluid. Beyond that he was unable to see in the dimness.

He walked toward the pond and perceived something exceedingly odd in it: hundreds of brightly colored fish, of the kind that he had seen flitting about in the water before the day’s hunt had begun. They were not swimming now. They were dead and decaying, flesh stripping away from bones, and below them in the pool was a carpet of similar bones, many feet thick.

Suddenly there was a sound as of the roaring of the wind behind him. Valentine turned. The walls of the chamber were in motion, pulling back, the drooping places in the ceiling retracting to create a vast open space; and a torrent of water came rushing toward him, as high as his hips. He barely had time to reach one of the ceiling-pillars and fling his arms tight about it; then the inrushing of water sluiced about him with tremendous force. He held on. It seemed that half the Inner Sea was pouring past him, and for a moment he thought he would lose his grip, but then the flow subsided and the water drained away through slits that materialized abruptly in the floor — leaving in its wake scores of stranded fish. The floor convulsed; the fleshy whips swept the desperate flopping fish across the floor to the greenish pool; and once they entered it they quickly ceased to move.

Suddenly Valentine understood.

I am not dead, he knew, nor is this any place of afterlife. I am within the belly of the dragon. He began to laugh.

Valentine threw back his head and let giant guffaws pour from him. What other response was fitting? To cry? To curse? The vast beast had gobbled him whole at a gulp, had sucked in the Coronal of Majipoor as heedlessly as it might a minnow. But he was too big to be propelled into that digestive pond down there, so here he was, camped on the floor of the dragon’s maw, in this cathedral of an alimentary canal. What now? Hold court for the fishes? Dispense justice among them as they came sweeping in? Settle down here and spend the rest of his days dining on raw fish stolen from the monster’s catch?

It was high comedy, Valentine thought.

But dark tragedy as well, for Sleet and Carabella and young Shanamir and all the others, drawn down to death in the wreck of the Brangalyn, victims of their own sympathies and of his awesomely bad luck. For them he felt only anguish. Carabella’s lilting voice silenced forever, and Sleet’s miraculous skills of hand and eye forever lost, and the rough-souled Skandars no longer to fill the air with whirling multitudes of knives and sickles and torches, and Shanamir cut off before he had fairly begun his life—

Valentine could not bear thinking about them.

For himself, though, there was only cosmic amusement at this absurd plight. To take his mind from grief and pain and loss he laughed again, and stretched his arms wide to the distant walls of the strange room. 'Lord Valentine’s Castle, this is!' he cried. 'The throne-room! I invite you all to dine with me in the grand feasting- hall!'

Out of the murky distance a booming voice called, 'By my gut, I accept that invitation!'

Valentine was astounded beyond all measure.

'Lisamon?'

'No, it’s the Pontifex Tyeveras and his cross-eyed uncle! Is that you, Valentine?'

'Yes! Where are you?'

'In the gizzard of this stinking dragon! Where are you?'

'Not far from you! But I can’t see you!'

'Sing,' she called. 'Stay where you are and sing, and keep singing! I’ll try to reach you!'

Valentine began, in the loudest voice he could muster:

Lord Malibor was fine and bold
And loved the heaving sea —

Again the roaring sound came; again the great creature’s gullet opened to admit a cascade of sea-water and a horde of fish; again Valentine clung to a pillar as the influx hit him.

'Oh — by the Divine’s toes,' Lisamon cried. 'Hang on, Valentine, hang on!'

He hung on until the force was spent, and slumped against the pillar, soaked, panting. Somewhere in the distance the giantess called to him, and he called back. Her voice grew nearer. She urged him to keep singing, and he did:

Lord Malibor stood at the helm
And faced the heaving wave
And sailed in quest of the dragon free —

He heard her occasionally bawling a snatch of the ballad herself, with amiably bawdy embellishments, as she approached through the intricacies of the dragon’s interior, and then he looked up and saw by the faint luminous light her enormous form looming above him. He smiled at her. She smiled, and laughed, and he laughed with her, and they clasped one another in a wet, slippery embrace.