Lord Valentine's Castle

'Not before last year.'

'What led you to take it up, then?'

Valentine smiled. 'I needed a livelihood, and there were traveling jugglers in Pidruid for the Coronal’s festival, who had need of an extra pair of hands. They taught me quickly, as I could teach you.'

'You could, do you think?'

'Here,' Valentine said, and tossed the black-bearded man one of the fruits he was juggling, a firm green bishawar. 'Throw that back and forth between your hands awhile, to loosen your fingers. You must master a few basic positions, and certain habits of perception, which will take practice, and then—'

'What did you do before you were a juggler?' asked Farssal as he tossed the fruit.

'I wandered about,' said Valentine. 'Here: hold your hands in this fashion—'

He drilled Farssal half an hour, trying to train him as Carabella and Sleet had done for him at the inn in Pidruid. It was a welcome diversion in this placid and monotonous life. Farssal had quick hands and good eyes, and learned rapidly, though not nearly so rapidly as Valentine had. Within a few days he had developed most of the elementary skills and could juggle after a fashion, though not gracefully. He was an outgoing and talkative man, who kept up a steady flow of conversation as he flipped the bishawars from hand to hand. Born in Ni-moya, he said; for many years a merchant in Piliplok; recently overtaken by a spiritual crisis that had thrust him into confusion and then sent him on the Isle pilgrimage. He talked of his marriage, his unreliable sons, his winning and losing huge fortunes at the gaming-tables; and he wanted to know all about Valentine as well, his family, his ambitions, the motives that had brought him to the Lady. Valentine dealt with these queries as plausibly as he could, and turned aside the most awkward ones with quickly contrived dissertations on the art of juggling.

At the end of the second week — toil, study, meditation, periods of free time spent juggling with Farssal, a stable and static round — Valentine felt restlessness coming over him again, the yearning to be moving onward.

He had no idea how many terraces there were — nine? ninety? — but if he spent this much time at each, he might be years in reaching the Lady. Some means of abbreviating the process of ascent was needed.

Counterfeit summoning-dreams did not seem to work. He trotted forth his drifting-in-the-pool dream for Silimein, his dream-speaker here, but she was no more impressed by it than Stauminaup had been. He tried, during his meditation periods and when he was falling asleep at night, to reach forth to the mind of the Lady and implore her to summon him. This produced nothing useful either.

He asked those who sat near him in the dining-hall how long they had been at the Terrace of Inception. 'Two years,' said one. 'Eight months,' said another. They looked untroubled.

'And you?' he asked Farssal.

Farssal said he had arrived only a few days before Valentine. But he felt no impatience about moving on. 'There’s no hurry, is there? We serve the Lady wherever we may be, don’t you think? So one terrace is as good as another.' Valentine nodded. He hardly dared disagree. Late in the third week he thought he caught sight of Vinorkis far across the field of stajja where he was working. But he was not sure — was that a flash of orange on that Hjort’s whiskers? — and the distance was too great for shouting. The next day, though, as Valentine stood casually juggling with Farssal near the bathing-pool, he saw Vinorkis, unquestionably Vinorkis, watching from the other side of the plaza. Valentine excused himself and jogged over. After so many weeks sundered from his old companions here, even the Hjort was a welcome sight.

'Then it was you in the stajja-fields,' Valentine said. Vinorkis nodded. 'These past few days I’ve had several glimpses of you, my lord. But the terrace is so huge — I’ve never been able to come close. When did you arrive?'

'About a week after you. Are there others of us here?'

'Not so far as I know,' the Hjort replied. 'Shanamir was, but he’s moved on. I see you’ve lost none of your juggling skill, my lord. Who’s your partner?'

'A man of Piliplok. Quick with his hands.'

'And with his tongue as well?'

Valentine frowned. 'What do you mean?'

'Have you said much to this man of your past, my lord, or of your future?'

'Of course not.' Valentine stared. 'No, Vinorkis! Surely no spies of the Coronal right here on the Lady’s own Isle!'

'Why not? Is it so hard to infiltrate this place?'

'But why do you suspect—'

'Last night, after I glimpsed you in the fields, I came here to make inquiry about you. One of those I spoke to was your new friend, my lord. Asked him if he knew you and he started questioning me. Was I your friend, had I known you in Pidruid, why had we come to the Isle, and so on and so on. My lord, I am uneasy when strangers ask questions. Especially in this place, where one is taught to remain apart from others.'

'You may be too suspicious, Vinorkis.'

'Maybe so. But guard yourself anyway, my lord.'

'That I will,' said Valentine. 'He’ll learn nothing from me but what he’s already had. Which is merely some juggling.'

'He may already know too much about you,' said the Hjort gloomily. 'But let us watch him, even as he watches you.'

The notion that he might be under surveillance even here dismayed him. Was there no sanctuary? Valentine wished he had Sleet beside him, or Deliamber. A spy now might well become an assassin later, as Valentine drew closer to the Lady and became that much more of a peril to the usurper.

But Valentine seemed to be drawing no closer to the Lady. Another week went by in the same fashion as before. Then, just as he was coming to believe he would spend the rest of his days at the Terrace of Inception, and when he was reaching a point where it mattered little to him if he did, he was called from the fields and told to make ready to go on to the Terrace of Mirrors.

—9—

THIS THIRD TERRACE WAS A place of dazzling beauty, with a glitter that reminded Valentine of Dulorn. It nestled against the base of Second Cliff, a forbidding vertical wall of white chalk that seemed an absolute barrier to further inward progress, and when the sun was in the west the face of the cliff was such a wonder of reflected brilliance that it stunned the eye and wrung gasps of awe from the soul.

Then, too, there were the mirrors — great rough-hewn slabs of polished black stone set edgewise in the ground everywhere about this terrace, so that wherever one looked one encountered one’s own image, glowing against a shining inner light. Valentine at first studied himself critically, searching for the changes that his journey had brought upon him, some dimming of the warm radiance that had flowed from him since the Pidruid days, or perhaps marks of weariness or stress. But he saw none of that, only the familiar golden-haired smiling man, and he waved to himself and winked amiably and saluted, and then, after a week or so, ceased to notice his reflection at all. If he had been ordered to ignore the mirrors he would probably have lived in guilty tension, flicking his gaze involuntarily toward them and wrenching it away; but no one here told him what purpose the mirrors served or what attitude he should take toward them, and in time he simply forgot them. This, he realized much later, was the key to forward movement on the Isle: evolution of the spirit from within, a growing ability to discern and discard the irrelevant.

He was entirely alone here. No Shanamir, no Vinorkis, and no Farssal. Valentine kept close watch for the black-bearded man: if indeed he was some sort of spy, he would doubtless find a way to follow Valentine from terrace to terrace. But Farssal did not arrive.

Valentine stayed at the Terrace of Mirrors eleven days and went onward, in the company of five other novices, via a floater-sled to the rim of Second Cliff and the Terrace of Consecration.

From here there was a magnificent view back over the first three terraces, far below, to the distant sea. Valentine could barely see the Terrace of Assessment — only a thin line of pink against the dark green of the forest — but the great Terrace of Inception spread out awesomely at the mid-point of the lower plateau, and the Terrace of Mirrors, just below, blazed like a million bright pyres in noonday light.

It was becoming unimportant to him, now, how swift his pace might be. Time was losing its meaning. He had slipped entirely into the rhythm of the place. He worked in the fields; he attended lengthy sessions of spiritual instruction; he spent much of his time in the darkened stone-roofed building that was the shrine of the Lady, asking, in a way that was not really asking at all, that illumination be granted him. Occasionally he remembered that he had intended to go quickly to the heart of the Isle and to the woman who dwelled there. But there seemed little urgency to any of that now. He had become a true pilgrim.

Beyond the Terrace of Consecration lay the Terrace of Flowers, and beyond that the Terrace of Devotion, and then the Terrace of Surrender. All these were of Second Cliff, as was the Terrace of Ascent, which was the final stage before one went up onto the plateau where the Lady lived. Each of the terraces. Valentine came to understand, completely encircled the island, so that there might be a million votaries in each at any time, or even more, and each pilgrim saw only a tiny segment of the whole as he pursued his course toward the center. How much effort had gone into constructing all this! How many lives had been given over entirely to the Lady’s service! And each pilgrim moved within a sphere of silence: no friendships were begun here, no confidences were exchanged, no lovers embraced. Farssal had been a mysterious exception to that custom. It was as though this place existed outside of time and apart from the ordinary rituals of life.

In this middle zone of the Isle there was less emphasis on teaching, more on toil. When he reached Third Cliff, he knew, he would join those who actually carried out the Lady’s work in the world at large; for it was not the Lady herself, he now understood, who emanated most sendings to the world, but rather the millions of advanced acolytes of Third Cliff, whose minds and spirits became amplifiers for the Lady’s benevolence. Not that everyone reached Third Cliff: many of the older acolytes, he gathered, had spent decades on Second Cliff, performing administrative tasks, with neither the hope nor the desire of moving toward the more taxing responsibilities of the inner zone.

In his third week at the Terrace of Devotion, Valentine was granted what he knew to be an unmistakable summoning-dream.

He saw himself crossing that parched purple plain that had darkened his sleep in Pidruid. The sun was low at the horizon and the sky was harsh and bleak, and ahead of him lay two broad mountain ranges that rose like giant swollen fists. In the jagged boulder-strewn valley between them the last ruddy glimmer of sunlight was visible, a peculiar oily light, ominous, more a stain than a radiance. A cool dry wind blew out of that strangely illuminated valley, and on it came sighing, singing sounds, soft melancholy melodies riding the breeze. Valentine walked for hours but made no progress: the mountains grew no nearer, the desert sands extended themselves infinitely as he trekked, that last shard of light did not depart. His strength was ebbing. Menacing mirages danced before him. He saw Simonan Barjazid, the King of Dreams, and his three sons. He saw the ghastly senile Pontifex roaring on his subterranean throne. He saw monstrous amorflbot crawling sluggishly in the dunes, and