Lord Valentine's Castle

In his blunt straightforward way Ermanar said, 'You have all heard the decree of the Pontifex that the fair-haired man must be hailed as Lord Valentine the Coronal. Who among you will stand up against the decree of the Pontifex?'

Haligorn’s face showed terror. Dealing with Duke Holmstorg might have been harder for Valentine, for he was of high blood and great haughtiness, and might not have been so easily intimidated by one who came before him wearing a home-made crown and leading a little band of such oddly assorted followers. But Redvard Haligorn, a mere elected official, who for years had dealt with nothing more challenging than state banquets and debates over flood-control taxes, was far beyond his depth.

He said, almost mumbling it, 'The command has come down from Lord Valentine’s Castle that you are to be apprehended and bound over for trial.'

'Many commands lately have come down from Lord Valentine’s Castle,' said Valentine, 'and not a few have been unwise, unjust, or ill-timed, eh, Mayor Haligorn? They are the commands of the usurper, and worthless. You have heard the voices of the Lady and the Pontifex. You have had sendings urging you to give allegiance to me.'

'And sendings of the other kind,' said Haligorn feebly.

'From the King of Dreams, yes!' Valentine laughed. 'And who is the usurper? Who is it that has stolen the throne of the Coronal? Dominin Barjazid is the one! The son of the King of Dreams! Now do you comprehend those sendings out of Suvrael? Now do you see what has been done to Majipoor?'

Valentine let the trance-state come over him, and flooded the hapless Redvard Haligorn with the full force of his soul, the full impact of a waking sending from the Coronal.

Haligorn tottered. His face reddened and grew blotchy. He reeled and clutched at his comrades for support, but they had received the outflow from Valentine as well, and were barely able to sustain themselves.

Valentine said, 'Give me your support, friends. Open your city to me. From here I will launch the reconquest of Castle Mount, and great will be the fame of Pendiwane, as the first city of Majipoor to turn against the usurper!'

—6—

SO PENDIWANE FELL, without a blow being struck. Redvard Haligorn, wearing the expression of a man who has just swallowed a Stoienzar oyster and feels it squirming in his gullet, dropped down and offered Valentine the starburst gesture, and then two of his vice-mayors did the same, and suddenly there was a contagion of it, thousands of people giving homage, and crying out, first without much conviction, then more lustily as they decided to commit themselves to the idea: 'Valentine! Lord Valentine! Long life to the Coronal!' And the gates of Pendiwane were opened.

'Too easy,' Valentine muttered to Carabella. 'Can it continue this way right up Castle Mount? Browbeat a fat mayor or two and win back the throne by acclamation?'

'If only you could,' she said. 'But the Barjazid waits up there with his bodyguards, and browbeating him will take more than words and fine dramatic effects. There will be battles, Valentine.'

'Let there be no more than one, then.'

She touched his arm lightly. 'For your sake I hope no more than one, and that one just a small one.'

'Not for my sake,' he said. 'For the sake of all the world. I want none of my people to perish in repairing what Dominin Barjazid has brought upon us.'

'I had not thought kings would be so gentle, my love,' Carabella said.

'Carabella—'

'You look so sad just now!'

'I fear what comes.'

'What comes,' she said, 'is a necessary struggle, and joyous triumph, and the restoration of order. And if you would be a proper king, my lord, wave to your people, and smile, and put that tragic look from your face. Yes?'

Valentine nodded. 'You speak the truth,' he said, and catching up her hand, brushed his lips quickly but tenderly across her small sharp knuckles. And turned to stare at the multitudes who shouted his name, and lifted his arms to them and acknowledged their greeting.

It seemed wondrously familiar to be riding into a great city down boulevards lined with cheering throngs. Valentine remembered, though it seemed like the memory of a dream, the beginnings of his abortive grand processional, when in the springtime of his reign he had gone by river to Alaisor on the western coast, and across to the Isle to kneel beside his mother at Inner Temple, and then on the great sea-journey westward to Zimroel, and crowds hailing him in Piliplok and Velathys and Narabal, down there in the lush leafy tropics. Those parades, those banquets, the excitement, the splendor, and then on to Til-omon, once more the crowds, once more the cries, 'Valentine! Lord Valentine!' He remembered too in Til-omon a surprise, that Dominin Barjazid the son of the King of Dreams had come up from Suvrael to greet him and honor him in a feast, for the Barjazids customarily stayed down there in their sunswept kingdom, dwelling apart from humanity, tending their dream- machines, sending forth their nightly messages to instruct and command and chastise. And the banquet at Til-omon, and the flask of wine from the hand of Barjazid, and the next thing Valentine knew he was staring down at the city of Pidruid from a limestone ridge, with muddled memories in his mind of having grown up in eastern Zimroel and somehow having wandered across the entire continent to its western shore. Now, so many months later, they were shouting his name again in the streets of a mighty city, after the long and strange interruption.

In the royal suite at the mayoral palace Valentine summoned Mayor Haligorn, who still had a stunned and dazed look about him, and said, 'I’ll need from you a flotilla of riverboats to take me up the Glayge to its rising. The costs will be met by the imperial treasury after the restoration.'

'Yes, my lord.'

'And how many troops can you supply me?'

'Troops?'

'Troops, militia, warriors, bearers of arms. Do you follow my meaning, Mayor Haligorn?'

The mayor showed dismay. 'We of Pendiwane are not known for our skills in warfare, my lord.'

Valentine smiled. 'We are not known for our skills in warfare anywhere on Majipoor, the Divine be thanked. Nevertheless, peaceful though we are, we fight when we are threatened. The usurper threatens us all. Haven’t you felt the sting of strange new taxes and unfamiliar decrees in this year just past?'

'Of course, but—'

'But what?' Valentine asked sharply.

'We assumed it was only a new Coronal, feeling his power.'

'And you would blandly let yourselves be oppressed by the one whose role it is to serve you?'

'My lord—'

'Never mind. You have as much to gain as I in putting things to rights, do you see? Give me an army, Mayor Haligorn, and for thousands of years the bravery of the people of Pendiwane will be sung in our ballads.'

'I am responsible for the lives of my people, my lord. I would not have them slain or—'

'I am responsible for the lives of your people, and twenty billion others besides,' said Valentine briskly. 'And if five drops of anyone’s blood are shed as I move toward Castle Mount, that will be six drops too many to suit me. But without an army I’m too vulnerable. With an army I become a royal presence, an imperial force moving toward a reckoning with the enemy. Do you understand, Haligorn? Call your people together, tell them what must be done, call for volunteers.'

'Yes, my lord,' said Haligorn, trembling.

'And see to it that the volunteers are willing to volunteer!'

'It will be done, my lord,' the mayor murmured.

Assembling the army went faster than Valentine expected — a matter of days for choosing, equipping, and provisioning. Haligorn was cooperative indeed — as though he were eager to see Valentine rapidly on his way to some other region.

The citizen-militia that had been scraped together to defend Pendiwane against an invading pretender now became the nucleus of the hastily constructed loyalist army — some twenty thousand men and women. A city of thirteen million might well have produced a larger force; but Valentine had no wish to disrupt Pendiwane to any greater extent. Nor had he forgotten his own axiom about juggling with clubs rather than with dwikka-trunks. Twenty thousand troops provided him with something that looked decently military, and it was his strategy, as it had been for a long while, to gain his purpose by gradual accumulation of support. Even the colossal Zimr, he reasoned, begins as mere trickles and rivulets somewhere in the northern mountains.

They set forth on the Glayge on a day that was rainy before dawn, gloriously bright and sunny afterward. Every riverboat for fifty miles on either side of Pendiwane had been commandeered for army transport. Serenely the great flotilla moved northward, the green-and-gold banners of the Coronal waving in the breeze.

Valentine stood near the prow of his flagship. Carabella was beside him, and Deliamber, and Admiral Asenhart of the Isle. The rain-washed air smelled sweet and clean: the good fresh air of Alhanroel, blowing toward him from Castle Mount. It was a fine feeling to be on his way home at last.

These riverboats of eastern Alhanroel were more streamlined, less fancifully baroque, than the ones Valentine had known on the Zimr. They were big, simple vessels, high of draft and narrow of beam, with powerful engines designed to drive them against the strong flow of the Glayge.

'The river is swift against us,' said Asenhart.

'As well it should be,' Valentine said. He pointed toward some invisible summit far to the north and high in the sky. 'It rises on the lower slopes of the Mount. In its few thousand miles it drops almost ten, and all the weight of that water comes rushing against us as we go toward the source.'

The Hjort seaman smiled. 'It makes ocean sailing seem like child’s play, to think of coping with such a force. Rivers always were strange to me — so narrow, so quick. Give me the open sea, dragons and all, and I’m happy!'

But the Glayge, though swift, was tame. Long ago it had been a thing of rapids and waterfalls, ferocious and all but innavigable for hundreds of miles. Fourteen thousand years of human settlement on Majipoor had changed all that. By dams, locks, bypass canals, and other devices, the Glayge, like all the Six Rivers that descended from the Mount, had been made to serve the needs of its masters through nearly all its course. Only in the lower stretches, where the flatness of the