Mimicking Sleet’s stance and timing, Valentine began to throw, dropped two balls on the first try, reddened and muttered apologies, started again, and this time did not stop. Five, six, seven interchanges, ten, and then he lost count, for they no longer seemed like interchanges but all part of one seamless process, infinite and never- ending. Somehow his consciousness was split, one part making precise and accurate catches and tosses, the other monitoring the floating and descending balls, making rapid calculation of speed, angle, and rate of descent. The scanning part of his mind relayed data instantly and constantly to the part of his mind that governed the throwing and catching. Time seemed divided into an infinity of brief strokes, and yet, paradoxically, he had no sense of sequence: the three balls seemed fixed in their places, one perpetually in mid-air, one in each of his hands, and the fact that at each moment a different ball held one of those positions was inconsequential. Each was all. Time was timeless. He did not move, he did not throw, he did not catch: he only observed the flow, and the flow was frozen outside time and space. Now Valentine saw the mystery of the art. He had entered into infinity. By splitting his consciousness he had unified it. He had traveled to the inner nature of movement, and had learned that movement was illusion and sequence an error of perception. His hands functioned in the present, his eyes scanned the future, and nevertheless there was only this moment of now.
And as his soul journeyed toward the heights of exaltation, Valentine perceived, with the barest flicker of his otherwise transcendent consciousness, that he was no longer standing rooted to the place, but somehow had begun to move forward, drawn magically by the orbiting balls, which were drifting subtly away from him. They were receding across the courtyard with each series of throws — and he experienced them now as a series once again, rather than as an infinite seamless continuum — and he was having to move faster and faster to keep pace with them, until he was virtually running, staggering, lurching around the yard, Sleet and Carabella scrambling to avoid him, and finally the balls were out of his reach altogether, beyond even his last desperate; lunge. They bounced off in three directions.
Valentine dropped to his knees, gasping. He heard the laughter of his instructors and began to laugh with them.
'What happened?' he asked finally. 'I was going so well — and then— and then—'
'Small errors accumulate,' Carabella told him. 'You get carried away by the wonder of it all, and you throw a ball slightly out of the true plane and you reach forward to catch it, and the reaching causes you to make the next throw out of plane as well, and the next, and so on until everything drifts away from you, and you give chase, and in the end pursuit is impossible. It happens to everyone at the beginning. Think nothing of it.'
'Pick up the balls,' said Sleet. 'In four days you juggle before the Coronal.'
—7—
HE DRILLED FOR HOURS, going no further than the three-ball cascade but repeating it until he had penetrated the infinite a dozen times, moving from boredom to ecstasy to boredom so often that boredom itself became ecstasy. His clothing was soaked with sweat, clinging to him like warm wet towels. Even when one of Pidruid’s brief light rainshowers began he continued to throw the balls. The rain ended and gave way to a weird twilight glow, the early evening sun masked by light fog. Still Valentine juggled. A crazy intensity overcame him. He was dimly aware of figures moving about the courtyard, Sleet, Carabella, the various Skandars, Shanamir, strangers, coming and going, but he paid no attention. He had been an empty vessel into which this art, this mystery, had been poured, and he dared not stop, for fear he would lose it and be drained and hollow once again.
Then someone came close and he was suddenly empty-handed, and he understood that Sleet had intercepted the balls, one by one, as they arced past his nose. For a moment Valentine’s hands went on moving anyway in persistent rhythms. His eyes would not focus on anything but the plane through which he had been throwing the balls.
'Drink this,' Carabella said gently, and put a glass to his lips. Fireshower wine: he drank it like water. She gave him another. 'You have a miraculous gift,' she told him. 'Not only coordination but concentration. You frightened us a little, Valentine, when you would not stop.'
'By Starday you will be the best of us,' said Sleet. 'The Coronal himself will single you out for applause. Eh, Zalzan Kavol? What do you say?'
'I say he is soaking wet and needs clean clothes,' the Skandar rumbled. He handed Sleet some coins. 'Go to the bazaar, buy something that fits him before the booths close. Carabella, take him out back to the cleanser. We eat in half an hour.'
'Come with me,' Carabella said.
She led Valentine, who still was dazed, through the courtyard to the sleeping-quarters, and behind them. A crude open-air cleanser had been rigged against the side of the building. 'The animal!' she said angrily. 'He could have given you a word of praise. But praise isn’t his way, I suppose. He was impressed, all right.'
'Zalzan Kavol?'
'Impressed — yes, astonished. But how could he praise a human? You have only two arms! Well, praise isn’t his way. Here. Get out of those.'
Quickly she stripped, and he did the same, dropping his soggy garments to the ground. By bright moonlight he saw her nakedness and was delighted. Her body was slim and lithe, almost boyish but for the small round breasts and the sudden flaring of the hips below her narrow waist. Her muscles lay close beneath the skin and were well developed. A flower had been tattooed in green and red on the crest of one flat buttock.
She led him under the cleanser and they stood close together as the vibrations rid them of sweat and grime. Then, still naked, they returned to the sleeping- quarters, where Carabella produced a fresh pair of trousers in soft gray fabric for herself, and a clean jerkin. By then Sleet had come back from the bazaar with new clothes for Valentine: a dark-green doublet with scarlet trim, tight red trousers, and a light cloak of blue that verged on black. It was a costume far more elegant than the one he had shed. Wearing it, he felt like one raised to some high rank, and moved with conscious hauteur as he accompanied Sleet and Carabella to the kitchen.
Dinner was stew — an anonymous meat at its base, and Valentine did not dare ask — washed down with copious drafts of fireshower wine. The six Skandars sat at one end of the table, the four humans at the other, and there was little conversation. At meal’s end Zalzan Kavol and his brothers rose without a word and strode out.
'Have we offended them?' Valentine asked.
'It is their normal politeness,' said Carabella.
The Hjort who had spoken to him at breakfast, Vinorkis, now crossed the room and hovered by Valentine’s shoulder, staring down in that fishy-eyed way of his: evidently it was a habit. Valentine smiled awkwardly.
Vinorkis said, 'Saw you juggling in the yard this afternoon. You’re pretty good.'
'Thank you.'
'Hobby of yours?'
'Actually, I’ve never done it before. But the Skandars seem to have hired me for their troupe.'
The Hjort looked impressed. 'Really? And will you go on tour with them?'
'So it appears.'
'Whereabouts?'
'I have no idea,' said Valentine. 'Perhaps it hasn’t even been decided yet. Wherever they want to go will be good enough for me.'
'Ah, the free-floating life,' Vinorkis said. 'I’ve meant to try it myself. Perhaps your Skandars would hire me, too.'
'Can you juggle?'
'I can keep accounts. I juggle figures.' Vinorkis laughed vehemently and gave Valentine a hearty slap on the back. 'I juggle figures! Do you like that? Well, good night to you!'
'Who was that?' Carabella asked, when the Hjort was gone.
'I met him at breakfast this morning. A local merchant, I think.'
She made a face. 'I don’t think I like him. But it’s so easy not to like Hjorts. Ugly things!' She rose gracefully and stretched. 'Shall we go?'
He slept soundly again that night. To dream of juggling might have been expected, after the afternoon’s events, but instead he found himself once more on the purple plain — a disturbing sign, for the Majipoori know from childhood that dreams of recurring aspect have extra significance, probably dark. The Lady rarely sends recurring dreams, but the King is given to the practice. Again the dream was a fragment. Mocking faces hovered in the sky. Whirlpools of purple sand churning alongside the path, as if creatures with busy claws and clacking palps were moving beneath. Spikes sprouted from the ground. The trees had eyes. Everything held menace, ugliness, foreboding. But the dream was without characters and without events. It communicated only sinister foreboding.
The world of dreams yielded to the world of daybreak. This time he was the first to waken, when the earliest strands of light entered the hall. Next to him Shanamir slumbered blissfully. Sleet lay coiled like a serpent far down the hall, and near him was Carabella, relaxed, smiling in her dreams. The Skandars evidently slept elsewhere; the only aliens in the room were a couple of lumpish Hjorts and a trio of Vroons tangled in a weave of limbs that defied comprehension. From Carabella’s trunk Valentine took three of the juggling balls, and went outside into the misty dawn to sharpen his burgeoning skills.
Sleet, emerging an hour later, found him at it and clapped his hands. 'You have the passion, friend. You juggle like one possessed. But don’t tire yourself so soon. We have more complicated things to teach you today.'
The morning’s lesson had to do with variations on the basic position. Now that Valentine had mastered the trick of throwing three balls so that one was always in the air — and he had mastered it, no question of that, attaining in one afternoon a control of technique that Carabella said had taken her many days of practice — they had him moving about, walking, trotting, turning corners, even skipping, all the while keeping the cascade going. He juggled the three balls up a flight of stairs and down again. He juggled in a squatting position. He juggled standing on one leg like the solemn gihorna-birds of the Zimr Marsh. He juggled while kneeling. By now he was absolutely secure in the harmony of eye and hand, and what the rest of his body might be doing had no effect on that.
In the afternoon Sleet moved him to new intricacies: throwing the ball from behind his back in mid-volley, throwing it up under one leg, juggling with crossed wrists. Carabella taught him how to bounce a ball against a wall and work the return smoothly into the flow, and how to send a ball from one hand to the other by letting it hit the back of his hand, instead of catching and throwing. These things he grasped swiftly. Carabella and Sleet had stopped complimenting him on the quickness of his mastery — it was patronizing to shower him constantly with praise — but he did not fail to observe the little glances of astonishment that often passed between them, and that pleased him.
The Skandars juggled in another part of the courtyard, rehearsing the act they would do in the parade, a miraculous thing involving knives and sickles and blazing torches. Occasionally Valentine glanced over, marveling at what the four-armed ones were achieving. But mainly he concentrated on his own training.
