— Who will be Coronal next?
— No one knows that yet, son.
— Will I? Will Voriax?
— It could happen, if you grow up wise and strong.
— Oh, I will, father, I will, I will!
The room dissolved. Valentine saw himself in another room, similarly magnificent but not quite as large, and he was older now, not a boy but a young man, and there was Voriax with the starburst crown on his head, looking somewhat befuddled by it.
— Voriax! Lord Voriax!
Valentine dropped to his knees and raised his hands, spreading his fingers wide. And Voriax smiled and gestured at him.
— Get up, brother, get up. It is not fitting that you crawl like this in front of me.
— You will be the most splendid Coronal in the history of Majipoor, Lord Voriax.
— Call me brother, Valentine. I am Coronal, but I am still your brother.
— Long life to you, brother! Long life to the Coronal! And others were shouting it about him:
— Long life to the Coronal! Long life to the Coronal!
But something had changed, though the room was the same, for Lord Voriax was nowhere in view, and it was Valentine who wore the strange crown now, and the others who were shouting to him, and kneeling before him, and waving their fingers in the air, crying his name. He looked at them in wonder.
— Long life to Lord Valentine!
— I thank you, my friends. I will try to be worthy of my brother’s memory.
— Long life to Lord Valentine!
'Long life to Lord Valentine,' said the Lady softly.
Valentine blinked and gaped. For a moment he was entirely disoriented, wondering why he was kneeling like this, and what room he was in, and who this woman was with her face so close to his. Then the shadows cleared from his mind.
He rose to his feet.
He felt altogether transformed. Through his mind coursed turbulent memories: the years on Castle Mount, the studies, all that dry history, the roster of the Coronals, the list of the Pontifexes, the volumes of constitutional lore, the economic surveys of the provinces of Majipoor, the long sessions with his tutors, with his constantly probing father, with his mother — and the other, less dedicated moments: the games, the river-journeys, the tournaments, his friends, Elidath and Stasilaine and Tunigorn, the free-flowing wine, the hunts, the good times with Voriax, the two of them the center of all eyes, the princes of princes. And the terrible moment of the death of Lord Malibor at sea, and Voriax’ look of fright and joy at being named Coronal, and then the time eight years later when the delegation of high princes came to Valentine to offer him his brother’s crown—
He remembered.
He remembered everything, up to a night in Til-omon, when all recollection ceased. And after that he knew only the sunshine of Pidruid, pebbles tumbling past him from a ridge, the boy Shanamir standing above him with his mounts. He looked at himself in his mind and it seemed to him that he cast a double shadow, one bright and one dark; and he looked through the insubstantial haze of false memories that they had given him in Til-omon, looked back over an impenetrable gap of darkness to the time when he was Coronal. He knew that his mind now was as whole as it was ever likely to be.
Again the Lady said, 'Long life to Lord Valentine.'
'Yes,' he said in wonder. 'Yes, I am Lord Valentine, and will be again. Mother, give me ships. The Barjazid has already had too much time on the throne.'
'Ships are waiting in Numinor, and people loyal to me who will enter your service.'
'Good. There are people here who must be gathered, I don’t know from which terraces, but they’ll have to be found swiftly. A little Vroon, some Skandars, a Hjort, a blue-skinned stranger from another world, and several humans. I’ll give you the names.'
'We will find them,' said the Lady.
Valentine said, 'And I thank you, mother, for returning me to myself.'
'Thanks? Why thanks? I gave you to yourself originally. No thanks were required for that. Now you are brought forth again, Valentine, and if needs be I’ll do it a third time. But let needs not be. Your fortunes now resume their upward path.' Her eyes were bright with merriment. 'Will I see you juggle this evening, Valentine? How many balls can you keep in the air at once?'
'Twelve,' he said.
'And blaves can dance. Speak the truth!'
'Less than twelve,' he admitted. 'But more than two. I’ll stage a performance after we dine. And — mother?'
'Yes?'
'When I regain Castle Mount I’ll hold a grand festival, and you’ll come from the Isle, and you’ll see me juggle again, from the steps of the Confalume Throne. I promise you that, mother. From the steps of the throne.'
IV
The Book of the Labyrinth
—1—
FROM NUMINOR PORT the ships of the Lady departed, seven of them, with broad sails and high splendid prows, under the command of the Hjort Asenhart, chief of the Lady’s admirals, and bearing as passengers Lord Valentine the Coronal, his chief minister Autifon Deliamber the Vroon, his aides-de-camp Carabella of Til-omon and Sleet of Narabal, his military adjutant Lisamon Hultin, his ministers-at-large Zalzan Kavol the Skandar and Shanamir of Falkynkip, and various others. The fleet’s destination was Stoien at the tip of Alhanroel’s Stoienzar Peninsula, at the far side of the Inner Sea. Already the ships had been at sea for weeks, scudding ahead of the brisk westerlies that blew in late spring in these waters, but there was no sign yet of land, nor would there be for many days.
Valentine found the long journey comforting. He was not at all fearful of the tasks ahead, but neither was he impatient to begin them; rather, he needed a time to sort through his newly regained mind, and discover who he had been and what he had hoped to become. Where better than on the great bosom of the ocean, where nothing altered from day to day except the patterns of the clouds, and time seemed to stand still? And so he stood for hours at a time at the rail of his flagship, the
The person who he had been pleased him: stronger and more forceful of character than Valentine the juggler, but with no uglinesses of soul as sometimes are found among persons of power. To Valentine his former self seemed reasonable, judicious, calm, and moderate, a man of serious demeanor but not without playfulness, one who understood the nature of responsibility and obligation. He was well educated, as might be supposed of one whose entire life had been spent in training for high office, with a thorough grounding in history, the law, government, and economics, somewhat less thorough in literature and philosophy, and, so far as Valentine could tell, only the merest smattering of mathematics and the physical sciences, which were much in eclipse on Majipoor.
The gift of his former self was like the finding of a treasure trove. Valentine was still not fully united to that other self, and tended to think of 'him' and 'me,' or of 'us,' instead of viewing himself as a single integrated personality; but the split grew less apparent every day. There had been enough damage to the Coronal’s mind in the overthrow at Til-omon that a cleavage now marked the discontinuity between Lord Valentine the Coronal and Valentine the juggler, and perhaps there would always be scar tissue along that cleft, the Lady’s ministrations notwithstanding. But Valentine could cross the place of discontinuity at will, could travel to any point along his previous time-line, into his childhood or young manhood or his brief period of rule, and wherever he looked was such a wealth of knowledge, of experience, of maturity, as in his simple wandering days he had never hoped to master. If at the moment he must enter those memories as one might enter an encyclopedia, or a library, so be it; he was sure that a fuller joining of self and self would occur in time.
In the ninth week of the voyage a thin green line of land appeared at the horizon.
'Stoienzar,' said Admiral Asenhart. 'See, there, to the side, that darker place? Stoien harbor.'
Through his double vision Valentine studied the shore of the approaching continent. As Valentine he knew next to nothing of Alhanroel, only that it was the largest of Majipoor’s continents and the first to be settled by humans, a place of enormous population and tremendous natural wonders, and the seat of the planetary government, home to Coronal and Pontifex both. But out of Lord Valentine’s memory came much more. To him Alhanroel meant Castle Mount, almost a world in itself, on whose vast slopes one could spend one’s entire life among the Fifty Cities and not exhaust their marvels. Alhanroel was Lord Malibor’s Castle crowning the Mount — for so he had called it through all his boyhood, and the habit had persisted even into his own reign. He saw the Castle now in the eye of his mind, enfolding the summit of the Mount like some many-armed creature spreading over crags and peaks and alpine meadows, and down into the great terminal valleys and folds, a single structure of so many thousands of rooms that it was impossible to count them, a building that seemingly had a life of its own, and added annexes and outbuildings at the far perimeters of itself by authority of itself alone. And Alhanroel was, also, the great hump mounded up over the Labyrinth of the Pontifex, and the subterranean Labyrinth itself, reverse counterpart of the Lady’s Isle, for where the Lady dwelled at Inner Temple on a sun-splashed wind-washed height surrounded by ring upon ring of open terraces, the Pontifex laired like a mole deep underground, at the lowest place of his realm, surrounded by the coils of his Labyrinth. Valentine had been to the Labyrinth only once, on a mission from Lord Voriax, years ago, but the memory of those winding caverns still glowed darkly in him.
Alhanroel, too, meant the Six Rivers that spilled down from the slopes of Castle Mount, and the creature-plants of the Stoienzar that he soon would see again, and the tree-houses of Treymone, and the stone ruins of Velalisier Plain, said to be older than the advent of humankind on Majipoor. Looking eastward at that faint line, growing larger but still barely perceptible, Valentine sensed all the vastness of Alhanroel unrolling like a titanic scroll before him, and the tranquillity that had governed his frame of mind during the voyage melted at once. He was eager to be ashore, to commence his march to the Labyrinth.
