Lord Valentine's Castle

'Please. This is a time of joy, of reuniting, Carabella. Please.'

She smiled and sighed and took up the harp again.

My love is fair as is the spring,
As gentle as the night,
My love is sweet as stolen fruit —

Yes, he thought. Yes, that one was better. He let his hand rest tenderly on the nape of her neck, and stroked it as they walked along the beach. It was astonishingly beautiful here, warm and peaceful. Birds of fifty hues perched in the tortuous-limbed little trees of the shore, and a crystalline sea, surfless, transparent, lapped at the fine sand. The air was soft and mild, fragrant with the perfumes of unknown blossoms. From far away came the sound of laughter and of a gay, bright, tinkling music. How tempting it was, Valentine thought, to abandon all fantasies of Castle Mount and settle forever on Mardigile, and go out at dawn on a fishing-boat for the catch, and spend the rest of each day frolicking in the hot sunshine.

But there would be no such abdications for him. In the afternoon Zalzan Kavol and Autifon Deliamber, both healthy and well rested after their ordeals at sea, came to call on him, and soon they were talking of ways and means to continue the journey.

Zalzan Kavol, parsimonious as always, had had the money-pouch on him when the Brangalyn went down, and so at least half their treasury had survived, even if Shanamir had lost the rest. The Skandar laid out the glittering coins. 'With this,' he said, 'we can hire these fisherfolk to convey us to the Isle. I have spoken with our hosts. This Archipelago is nine hundred miles in length, and numbers three thousand islands, more than eight hundred of them inhabited. No one here wishes to journey all the way to the Isle, but for a few royals we can hire a large trimaran that will carry us to Rodamaunt Graun, near the mid-point of the chain, and there we can probably find transport the rest of the way.'

'When can we leave?' Valentine asked.

'As soon,' said Deliamber, 'as we are reunited once more. I am told that several of our people are on their way across from the nearby isle of Burbont at this moment.'

'Which ones?'

'Khun, Vinorkis, and Shanamir,' Zalzan Kavol answered, 'and my brothers Erfon and Rovorn. With them is Captain Gorzval. Gibor Haern is lost at sea — I saw him perish, struck by a timber and sent under — and of Sleet there is no news.'

Valentine touched the Skandar’s shaggy forearm. 'I grieve for your latest loss.'

Zalzan Kavol’s feelings seemed well under control. 'Let us rather rejoice that some of us still live, my lord,' he said quietly.

In early afternoon a boat from Burbont brought the other survivors. There were embraces all around; and then Valentine turned to Gorzval, who stood apart, looking numb and bewildered, rubbing at the stump of his severed arm. The dragon-captain seemed in shock. Valentine would have put his arms around the hapless man, but the instant he approached, Gorzval sank to his knees in the sand and touched his forehead to the ground and stayed there, trembling, arms outspread in the starburst gesture. 'My lord—' he whispered harshly. 'My lord—'

Valentine, displeased, looked around. 'Who has been talking?'

Silence a moment. Then Shanamir, a bit frightened, said, 'I, my lord. I meant no harm. The Skandar seemed so injured by the loss of his ship — I thought to console him by telling him who his passenger had been, that he had become part of the history of Majipoor by giving you voyage. This was before we knew that you had survived the wreck.' The boy’s lip quivered. 'My lord, I meant no harm by it!'

Valentine nodded. 'And no harm was done. I forgive you. Gorzval?'

The cowering dragon-captain remained huddled at Valentine’s feet.

'Look up, Gorzval. I can’t talk to you this way.'

'My lord?'

'Get to your feet.'

'My lord—'

'Please, Gorzval. Get up!'

The Skandar, amazed, peered at Valentine and said, 'Please, you say? Please?'

Valentine laughed. 'I’ve forgotten the habits of power, I suppose. All right: Up! I command it!'

Shakily Gorzval rose. He was a miserable sight, this little three-armed Skandar, his fur matted, sandy, his eyes bloodshot, his expression downcast.

Valentine said, 'I brought foul luck upon you, and you had no need of more of that. Accept my apologies; and if fortune begins to smile more kindly on me, I will repair the harm you have suffered, someday. I promise you that. What will you do now? Gather your crew and return to Piliplok?'

Gorzval shook his head pathetically. 'I could never go there again. I have no ship, I have no reputation, I have no money. I have lost everything and it can never be regained. My people were released of their indentures when the Brangalyn sank. I am alone now. I am ruined.'

'Come with us to the Isle of the Lady, then, Gorzval.'

'My lord?'

'You can’t stay here. I think these islanders prefer not to take in settlers, and this is no climate for a Skandar, anyway. Nor can a dragon-hunter become a fisherman, I think, without knowing pain every time he casts his nets. Come with us. If we get no farther than the Isle, you may find peace there in the service of the Lady; and if we continue on our quest, there will be honor for you as we make the ascent of Castle Mount. What do you say, Gorzval?'

'It frightens me to be near you, my lord.'

'Am I so terrifying? Do I have a dragon’s mouth? Do you see these people green-faced with fear?' Valentine clapped the Skandar on his shoulder. To Zalzan Kavol he said, 'No one can replace the brothers you have lost. But at least I give you another companion of your own kind. And now let’s make arrangements for departure, eh? The Isle is still many days’ journey away.'

Within an hour Zalzan Kavol had secured an island craft to carry them eastward in the morning. That evening the hospitable islanders provided them with a splendid feast, cool green wines and sleek sweet fruits and fine fresh sea-dragon flesh. That last made Valentine queasy, and he would have pushed it away, but he saw Lisamon Hultin shoveling it in as though it were the last meal she would eat. As an exercise in self-discipline he decided to force a morsel into his own throat, and found the flavor so irresistible that he renounced on the spot any discomfort that sea-dragons might arouse in his mind. As they ate, sunset came, at an early hour here in the tropics, and an extraordinary one it was, streaking the sky with rich throbbing tones of amber and violet and magenta and gold. Surely these were blessed islands, Valentine thought, extraordinarily joyous places even on a world where most places were happy ones and most lives fulfilled. The population seemed generally homogeneous, handsome long-legged folk of human blood with thick unshorn golden hair and smooth honey-colored skin, though there was a scattering of Vroons and even Ghayrogs among them, and Deliamber said that other islands in the chain had people of different stocks. According to Deliamber, who had been mingling freely since his rescue, the islands were largely out of touch with the mainland continents, and went their way in a world of their own, ignorant of matters of high destiny in the greater world. When Valentine asked one of his hosts if Lord Valentine the Coronal had happened to pass this way on his recent journey to Zimroel, the woman gave him a blank look and said ingenuously, 'Is the Coronal not Lord Voriax?'

'Dead two years or more, I hear,' one of the other islanders declared, and it seemed to come as news to most of the people at the table.

Valentine shared his cottage with Carabella that night. They stood together a long while on the veranda, eyes fixed on the brilliant white track of moonlight gleaming out across the sea toward distant Piliplok. He thought of the sea-dragons grazing in that sea, and of the monster in whose belly he had made that dreamlike sojourn, and, with pain, of his two lost comrades, Gibor Haern and Sleet, one of whom was deep in the sea now, the other perhaps. So great a journey, he thought, remembering Pidruid, Dulorn, Mazadone, Ilirivoyne, Ni-moya, remembering the flight through the forest, the turbulence of the Steiche, the coldness of the Piliplok dragon-captains, the look of the dragon as it bore down on poor Gorzval’s doomed vessel. So great a journey, so many thousands of miles, and so many miles yet to cover before he could begin to answer the questions that flooded his soul.

Carabella nestled close beside him, silent. Her attitude toward him was constantly evolving, and now had become a mixture of awe and love, of deference and irreverence, for she accepted and respected him as true Coronal, and yet remembered his innocence, his ignorance, his naivete, qualities which had not yet left him even now. And clearly she feared she would lose him when he had again come into his own. Simply on the level of dealing daily with the world, she was far more competent than he, far more experienced, and that colored her view of him, making her see him as terrifying and childlike both at once. He understood that and took no issue with it, for, although fragments of his earlier self and princely education returned to him almost daily, and he grew daily more accustomed to the postures of command, most of his former identity still was inaccessible to him and he was, in large part, still Valentine the easy-going wanderer, Valentine the innocent, Valentine the juggler. That darker figure, the Lord Valentine he once had been, that he might someday be again, was a hidden substratum in his spirit, rarely operative but never to be ignored. He thought Carabella was making the best of a difficult position.

She said at last, 'What are you thinking of, Valentine?'

'Sleet. I miss that tough little man.'

'He’ll turn up. We’ll find him four islands from here.'

'I hope so.' Valentine cupped his arm about her shoulders. 'I think also of all that has happened, and all that will happen. I move as though through a world of dreams, Carabella.'

'Who can tell, really, what is the dream and what is not? We move as the Divine instructs us, and we ask no questions, because there are no answers. Do you know what I mean? There are questions and there are answers, of course. I can tell you what day this is, and what we had for dinner, and how this island is called, if you ask me, but there are no questions, there are no answers.'

'So I believe also,' Valentine said.

—6—