An hour passed, two, three. Let them send an interrogator, he prayed, an inquisitor, anyone, only not this silence, this boredom, this solitude. He counted paces. The room was not precisely square: one pair of walls was a pace and a half longer than the other pair. He searched for the outlines of the doorway, and could not find them. The fit was seamless, a marvel of design that gave him little cheer. He invented dialogues and silently embellished them: Valentine and Deliamber, Valentine and the Lady, Valentine and Carabella, Valentine and Lord Valentine. But it was an amusement that soon palled.
He heard a faint whining sound and whirled to see a slot open in the wall and a tray come sliding into his cell. They had given him baked fish, a cluster of ivory- colored grapes, a beaker of cool red juice. 'For this repast I thank you kindly,' he said out loud. His fingers probed the wall, seeking the place where the tray had entered: no trace.
He ate. He invented more dialogues, conversing in his mind with Sleet, with the old dream-speaker Tisana, with Zalzan Kavol, with Captain Gorzval. He asked them about their childhoods, their hopes and dreams, their political opinions, their tastes in food and drink and clothing. Again the game wore thin after a while, and he stretched out to sleep.
Sleep was thin too, a shallow doze, broken half a dozen times by white dreary spells of wakefulness. His dreams were patchy ones; through them drifted the Lady, Farssal, the King of Dreams, the Metamorph chieftain, and the hierarch Lorivade, but they offered only muddled and murky words. When he woke, finally, a tray of breakfast had appeared in the room.
A long day passed.
He had never known a day so interminable. There was nothing at all to do, nothing, nothing whatever, an endless stretch of gray nothingness. He would have juggled his dishes, but they were light and flimsy things and it would have been like juggling feathers. He tried to juggle his boots, but he had only two of those and juggling things in twos was a fool’s sport. He juggled memories instead, reliving all that had befallen him since Pidruid, but the prospect of an infinity of hours doing that dismayed him. He meditated until there was a dull buzz of fatigue between his ears. He crouched in the center of the room, trying to anticipate the moment when the next meal would arrive, but the tension he generated out of that yielded only feeble entertainment.
On the second night Valentine made an attempt to communicate with the Lady. He prepared himself for sleep, but as his mind began to release itself from consciousness he endeavored to slip into an intermediate place between waking and sleeping, a trance-state of sorts. It was a ticklish business, for if he concentrated too intently he would tip himself back into full wakefulness, and if he relaxed too thoroughly he would fall asleep; he balanced there a long time, at the floating-point, wishing he had taken the opportunity in some quiet part of his Zimroel journey to have Deliamber train him in these matters.
At last he sent forth his spirit.
—
He imagined his soul coursing high over the Terrace of Shadows and drifting inward, inward, past terrace after terrace, to the core of Third Cliff, to Inner Temple, to the chamber where the Lady of the Isle rested.
—
Valentine lay still. He was wholly calm. A pure white radiance seemed to glow in his mind.
—
—
—
—
He slept.
The radiance still glowed. He perceived the first tingling music of the dream-state, the overture, the initial sensations of contact. Visions came. No longer was he imprisoned. He lay beneath the cool white stars on a great circular platform of finely polished stone, as though an altar, and to him came a white-robed woman with lustrous dark hair, who knelt beside him and touched him lightly, saying in a tender voice, 'You are my son Valentine, and I do acknowledge you before all Majipoor to be my son, and I summon you now to my side.'
That was all. When he woke he could recall nothing of the dream but that.
There was no breakfast tray for him that morning. Was it truly morning, then, or had he awakened in the middle of the night? Hours passed. No tray. Had they forgotten him? Did they plan to starve him to death? He felt a twinge of terror: was that an improvement over boredom? He thought he preferred boredom to terror, but not by much. He called out, but he knew it was useless. This place was sealed like a tomb. Like a tomb. Glumly Valentine looked at the accumulation of old trays, stacked against the far wall. He remembered the wonders and joys of food, the sausages of the Liiimen, the fish that Khun and Sleet had grilled on the banks of the Steiche, the flavor of dwikka-fruit, the potent tang of fireshower wine in Pidruid. His hunger was growing intense. And he was frightened. Not bored at all now, but frightened. They had held a meeting, perhaps, and condemned him to death for overwhelming folly.
Minutes. Hours. Half a day gone now.
Folly to think he could touch the Lady’s mind in sleep. Folly to think he could float effortlessly into Inner Temple and win her aid. Folly to think he could regain Castle Mount, or that he had ever had it at all. He had propelled himself halfway around the world on no force other than folly, and now, he thought bitterly, he would have the reward of his presumption and his foolishness.
Then at last he heard the familiar faint whine. But it was not the food-slot opening: it was the door.
Two white-haired hierarchs entered the cell. They favored him with a look of bleak and sour bafflement.
'Have you come to deliver my breakfast?' Valentine asked.
'We have come,' said the taller one, 'to conduct you to Inner Temple.'
—11—
H` feed him first — a wise move, for the trip proved to be a lengthy one, all the rest of the day by swift mount-drawn floater-wagon. The hierarchs sat flanking him in chilly silence throughout. When he asked a question — the name of some terrace through which they were passing, for example — they would reply in the fewest possible words; otherwise they offered no chatter.
Third Cliff had many terraces — Valentine lost count after about seven — and they were much closer together than those of the outer cliffs, with only token strips of forest separating them. This central zone of the Isle seemed a busy and populous place.
At twilight they came to the Terrace of Adoration, a domain of serene gardens and rambling low buildings of whitewashed stone. Like all the other terraces it was circular in outline, but it was much smaller than the others, here at the innermost part of the island, a mere ringlet that probably could be walked in all its circumference in an hour or two, whereas it might take months to complete the circuit of a First Cliff terrace. Ancient gnarled trees with close-set oval leaves rose at regular intervals along its rampart. Bowers of richly blossoming vines coiled between the buildings; small courtyards were everywhere, decorated with slender pillars of polished black stone and bedecked with flowering shrubs. In twos and threes the servants of the Lady moved quietly through these peaceful precincts. Valentine was conducted to a chamber far more gracious than his last, with a broad sunken bath, an inviting bed, windows facing into a garden, baskets of fruit on the table. The hierarchs left him here. He bathed, nibbled fruit, waited for the next event. That was some time in arriving, an hour or more: a knock on the door, a soft voice asking if he wished dinner, a cart rolled into the room bearing more substantial fare than he had had since coming to the Isle — grilled meats, blue gourds artfully stuffed with minced fish, a beaker of something cold that might almost have been wine. Valentine ate eagerly. Afterward he stood by his windows a long time, studying the darkness. He saw nothing; he heard no one. He tested his door: locked. So he was still a prisoner, although in far more pleasing surroundings than before.
He slept a dreamless sleep. A flood of golden sunlight cascading into his room awakened him. He bathed; the same discreet servitor appeared outside, with a breakfast of sausages and stewed pink fruit; and a short while after he was done the two somber hierarchs came to him, saying, 'The Lady has summoned you this morning.'
They led him through a garden of marvelous beauty and across a slender bridge of pure white stone that rose in a gentle arch above a dark pond in which golden fish swam in sparkling patterns. Ahead lay a wondrously manicured green-sward. At the center of it was a one-story building of great size, extraordinarily delicate in form, with long narrow wings radiating in the form of starbeams from the circular center.
This could only be Inner Temple, Valentine thought.
Now he trembled. He had journeyed, for more months than he could remember, toward this very spot, toward the threshold of the mysterious woman whose realm this was, whom he fancied to be his mother. At last he was here; and what if it proved all to be foolishness, or fantasy, or terrible error, what if he was no one in particular, a yellow-haired idler from Zimroel, bereft of his memory through some stupidity and filled by trifling companions with nonsensical ambitions? The thought was unbearable. If the Lady repudiated him now, if she denied him—
He entered the temple.
The hierarchs still close at his sides, Valentine marched endlessly down an impossibly elongated entrance hall that was guarded every twenty feet by a grim- faced rigid warrior, and into an interior room, octagonal in shape, with walls of the finest white stone and a pool, octagonal also, at its center. Morning light entered through an open eight-sided skylight. At each corner of the room stood a stern figure in hierarchical robes. Valentine, a little dazed, looked from one to the next and saw no welcome on their faces, only a sort of pursed-lip disapproval.
There was a single note of music, softly swelling, then dying away, and when it was gone the Lady of the Isle was in the room.
She seemed much like the figure Valentine had seen so often in dreams: a woman of middle years and ordinary height, dusky of skin, with glossy black hair, warm soft eyes, a full mouth that hovered always at the edge of a smile, a silver band at her brow, and, yes, a flower behind one ear, with many thick green petals. It seemed, though, that there was an aura about her, a nimbus, a radiance of force and authority and majesty, such as befitted the Power of Majipoor that she was, and he had not been prepared for that, expecting as he had been only the warm motherly woman, and forgetting that she was a queen, a priestess, almost a goddess, as well. He stood speechless before her, and for a long moment she studied him from the far side of the pool, her gaze resting lightly but penetratingly on his face. Then she waved one hand sharply in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal. Not of him: of the hierarchs. Their glacial calm was broken by that. They looked to one another, obviously confused. The Lady repeated the gesture, a mere shallow snap of the wrist, and something imperious flashed in her eyes, a look of almost terrifying strength.
