Lord Valentine's Castle

indigo and topaz and sapphire and amber and jade hues all mixed together in irregular patterns. And in the great public places of the city were the most startling displays of all, gardens of the famous animate plants that grew wild a few hundred miles to the south, on the torrid coast that looked toward the distant desert continent of Suvrael. These plants — and plants they were, for they manufactured their food by photosynthesis and lived their lives rooted to a single place — had a fleshy look to them, with arms that moved and coiled and grasped, eyes that stared, tubular bodies that undulated and swayed, and though they derived nourishment enough from sunlight and water they were quite willing and able to devour and digest any small creature rash enough to come within their reach. Elegantly arranged groups of them, bordered by low stone walls that served as warnings as well as decorations, were planted everywhere in Stoien. Some were as tall as small trees, others short and globular, still others bushy and angular. All were in constant motion, reacting to breezes, odors, sudden shouts, the voices of their keepers, and other stimuli. Valentine found them sinister but fascinating. He wondered if a collection of them might not be brought to Castle Mount.

'Why not?' Carabella said. 'They can be kept alive as side-show displays in Pidruid. There ought to be a way to keep them in good health at Lord Valentine’s Castle.'

Valentine nodded. 'We’ll hire a staff of keepers out of Stoien. We’ll find out what they eat and have it shipped up to the Mount regularly.'

Sleet shuddered. 'These creatures give me a creepy feeling, my lord. Do you find them so lovely?'

'Not exactly lovely,' said Valentine. 'Interesting.'

'As I suppose you found the mouthplants, eh?'

'The mouthplants, yes!' Valentine cried. 'We’ll bring some of them to the Castle too!'

Sleet groaned.

Valentine paid little notice. His face glowed with sudden enthusiasm. Taking Sleet and Carabella by the hands, he said, 'Each Coronal has added something to the Castle: an observatory, a library, a parapet, a battlement of prisms and shields, an armory, a feasting-hall, a trophy-room, reign by reign the Castle growing, changing, becoming richer and more complex. In my short time I had no chance even to think about what I would contribute. But listen: what Coronal has seen Majipoor the way I have? Who has traveled so far, in so turbulent a fashion? To commemorate my adventures I’ll collect the weirdities I’ve seen, the mouthplants and these animate plants and the bladder-trees and a good-sized dwikka or two and a grove of fireshower palms and sensitives and those singing ferns, all the wonders of our journey. There’s nothing like that at the Castle now, only the little glassed-in plant-houses that Lord Confalume built. I’ll do it grandly! Lord Valentine’s garden! How do you like the sound of that?'

'It will be a marvel, my lord,' said Carabella.

Sleet said sourly, 'I would not care to stroll among the mouthplants of Lord Valentine’s garden, not for three dukedoms and the revenues of Ni-moya and Piliplok.'

'We excuse you from garden tours,' said Valentine, laughing.

But there would be no garden tours, nor any garden, until Valentine dwelled again in Lord Valentine’s Castle. For an interminable week he idled in Stoien, waiting for Asenhart to complete his provisioning. Three of the ships were going to return to the Isle, bearing the goods bought here for island use; the other four would continue on as Valentine’s surreptitious escort. The Lady had provided him with more than a hundred of her sturdiest bodyguards, under the command of the formidable hierarch Lorivade: not warriors, exactly, for there had not been violence on the Isle of Sleep since the Metamorphs last invaded it thousands of years ago, but these were competent and fearless men and women, loyal to the Lady and ready to give their lives if need be to restore the harmony of the realm. They were the nucleus of a private army — the first such military force, so far as Valentine knew, organized on Majipoor since ancient times.

At last the fleet was ready to depart. The Isle-bound ships left first, early on a warm Twoday morning, heading north-northwest. The others waited until Seaday afternoon, when they sailed on the same course, but swung about after dark to head due east into the Gulf of Stoien.

The Stoienzar Peninsula, long and narrow, jutted like a colossal thumb out of the central mass of Alhanroel. On its southern, or ocean, side it was intolerably hot. There were few settlements on that jungled insect-ridden coast. Most of the peninsula’s considerable population was clustered along the Gulf coast, which had a major city every hundred miles or so and a virtually unbroken line of fishing villages and farming districts and resort towns between. It was early summer now, and a heavy haze of heat lay over the tepid, virtually motionless waters of the Gulf. The fleet paused a day for further provisioning at Kircidane, where the coast began its sweeping northward curve, and then began the crossing to Treymone.

Valentine spent many of the quiet seaward hours alone in his cabin, practicing the use of the circlet the Lady had given him. In a week he mastered the art of entering a light dozing trance — he could slide his mind instantly below the threshold of sleep now, and just as readily emerge from it, all the while staying aware of ongoing events. In the trance-state he was able, although spottily and without much force, to make contact with other minds, to wander out aboard ship and locate the aura of a sleeping soul, sleepers being far more vulnerable to such intrusions than those who were awake. He could lightly touch Carabella’s mind, or Sleet’s, or Shanamir’s, and transmit his own image, or some genial message of good will. Reaching a less familiar mind — that of Pandelon the carpenter, say, or the hierarch Lorivade — was still too hard for him except in the briefest, most fragmentary bursts, and he had no success at all entering minds of nonhuman origin, even ones so well known to him as those of Zalzan Kavol or Khun or Deliamber. But he was still learning. He felt his skills growing day by day, as they had when he first had taken up juggling; and this was juggling of a sort, for to use the circlet he had to occupy a position at the very center of his soul, undistracted by irrelevant thought, and coordinate all aspects of his being toward the single thrust of making contact. By the time the Lady Thlin was in view of Treymone, Valentine had advanced to the level where he could plant the beginnings of dreams, with events and incidents and images, in the minds of his subjects. To Shanamir he sent a dream of Falkynkip, and mounts grazing in a field, and a great gihorna-bird circling overhead, descending in a foolish flapping of mighty wings. At table the next morning the boy described the dream in all details, except only that the bird was a milufta, a carrion-feeder, with bright orange beak and ugly blue claws. 'What does it mean, that I would dream of miluftas swooping down?' Shanamir asked, and Valentine said, 'Could it be that you misremember the dream, and it was another bird you saw, a gihorna, perhaps, a bird of good omen?' But Shanamir, in that straightforward and innocent way of his, merely shook his head and said, 'If I can’t tell a gihorna from a milufta, my lord, even in my sleep, I ought to be back in Falkynkip cleaning out the stables.' Valentine looked away, hiding a smile, and resolved to work more diligently on his image-sending technique.

To Carabella he sent a dream of juggling crystal goblets filled with golden wine, and she reported it accurately, down to the tapered shape of the goblets. To Sleet he sent a dream of Lord Valentine’s garden, a wonderland of glistening feathery-leaved white bushes and solemn spherical prickly things on long stems and little three-forked plants with winking playful eyes at their tips, all of them imaginary and not a mouthplant among them, and Sleet described that imaginary garden in delight, saying that if only the Coronal would plant a garden like that on Castle Mount he would be well pleased to stroll in it.

Dreams came to him as well. Almost nightly the Lady his mother touched his soul from afar. Her serene presence passed through his sleeping spirit like a cool shaft of moonlight, calming and reassuring him. He dreamed, too, of old times on Castle Mount, memories of his early days upwelling, tournaments and races and games, his friends Tunigorn and Elidath and Stasilaine by his side, and his brother Voriax teaching him to use sword and bow, and Lord Malibor the Coronal traveling from city to city on the Mount like some grand and shining demigod, and much more of the same, a flood of images released from the depths of his mind.

Not all the dreams were agreeable. The night before the Lady Thiin reached the mainland he saw himself going ashore, landing on some forlorn, windswept beach of low and twisted scrub that had a dull, weary look in the late afternoon light. And he began to walk inland toward Castle Mount, rising in the distance, a jagged and sharp-tipped spire. But there was a wall in his way, a wall higher than the white cliffs of the Isle of Sleep, and that wall was a band of iron, more metal than existed on all of Majipoor, a dark and terrible iron girdle that seemed to span the world from pole to pole, and he was on one side of it and Castle Mount on the other. As he drew near he perceived that the wall crackled as if with electricity, and a low humming sound came from it, and when he looked closely at it he saw his reflection in the shining metal, and the face that peered back at him out of that frightful iron band was the face of the son of the King of Dreams.

—3—

TREYMONE WAS THE CITY of the celebrated tree-houses, famed throughout Majipoor. His second day ashore, Valentine went to visit them, in the coastal district just south of the mouth of the River Trey.

Nowhere else but in the Trey’s alluvial plain did the tree-houses live. They had short stout trunks a little like those of dwikkas, though not nearly so thick, and their bark was a handsome pale green, with a high gloss to it. From these barrel-like boles rose sturdy flattened branches that curved upward and outward like the fingers of two hands pressed together at the heels, and viny twigs wandered from branch to branch, adhering in many places, creating a snug cup-shaped enclosure.

The tree-folk of Treymone shaped their dwellings to suit their whims by pulling the pliant branches into the forms of rooms and corridors and fastening them into place until the natural adhesion of bark to bark made the join permanent. From the trees came leaves tender and sweet for salads, fragrant cream-colored flowers whose pollen was a mild euphoric, tart bluish fruits that had many uses, and a sweet pale sap, easily tapped, that served in place of wine. Each tree lived a thousand years or more; families maintained jealous control over them; ten thousand trees filled the plain, all mature and inhabited. Valentine saw a few skinny saplings at the edge of the district. 'These,' he was told, 'are newly planted, to replace some that died in recent years.'

'Where does a family go when its tree dies?'

'Into town,' said the guide, 'to what we call houses of mourning, until the new tree is grown. That may be twenty years. We dread such a thing, but it happens only one generation out of ten.'

'And there’s no way to grow the trees elsewhere?'

'Not an inch beyond where you see them. Only in our climate will they thrive, and only in the soil on which you stand can they grow to fullness. Elsewhere they live a year or two, small stunted things.'

Quietly to Carabella Valentine said, 'We can make the experiment anyway. I wonder if they can spare some of their precious soil for Lord Valentine’s garden.'

She smiled. 'Even a small tree-house — a place where you can go when the cares of government grow too heavy, and sit hidden in the leaves, and breathe the perfume of the flowers, and pluck the fruits — oh, if you could have such a thing!'

'Someday I will,' said Valentine. 'And you’ll sit beside me in it.'

Carabella gave him a startled look. 'I, my lord?'

'If not you, then who? Dominin Barjazid?' Lightly he touched her hand. 'Do you think our travels together end when we reach Castle Mount?'