Majipoor Chronicles

They passed through a close-clipped blue-green hedge and into the garden of alabandains that Haligome tended, thinning the buds to make for larger blooms. In these fragrant surroundings Haligome described, speaking flatly and quietly, the events that he had never described to anyone and that had become nearly unreal to him: the quarrel, the meeting, the window, the river. No emotion was apparent on the face of Goviran Gleim during the recitation, although Haligome searched the other man's features intently, trying to read his purpose.

When he was done describing the murder Haligome waited for response. There was none.

Ultimately Gleim said, 'And what happened to you afterward? Why did you disappear?'

'The King of Dreams whipped my soul with evil sendings, and put me in such torment that I took up hiding in Normork; and when he found me there I went on, fleeing from place to place, and eventually in my flight I came to the Isle as a pilgrim.'

'And the King still follows you?'

'From time to time I have sendings,' said Haligome. He shook his head. 'But they are useless. I have suffered, I have done penance, and it has been meaningless, for I feel no guilt for my crime. It was a moment of madness, and I have wished a thousand thousand times that it had never occurred, but I can find in myself no responsibility for your father's death: he goaded me to frenzy, and I pushed, and he fell, but it was not an act that bears any connection to the way I conducted the other aspects of my life, and it was therefore not mine.'

'You feel that, do you?'

'Indeed. And these years of tormented dreams — what good did they do? If I had refrained from killing out of fear of the King the whole system of punishment would be justified; but I gave no thought to anything, least of all the King of Dreams, and I therefore see the code under which I have been punished as a futile one. So too with my pilgrimage: I came here not so much to atone as to hide from the King and his sendings, and I suppose I have essentially achieved that. But neither my atonement nor my sufferings will bring your father back to life, so all this charade has been without purpose. Come: kill me and get it over with.'

'Kill you?' said Gleim.

'Isn't that what you intend?'

'I was a boy when my father vanished. I am no longer young now, and you are older still, and all this is ancient history. I wanted only to know the truth of his death, and I know it now. Why kill you? If it would bring my father back to life, perhaps I would, but, as you yourself point out, nothing can do that. I feel no anger toward you and I have no wish to experience torment at the hands of the King. For me, at least, the system is a worthy deterrent.'

'You have no wish to kill me,' said Haligome, amazed. 'None.'

'No. No. I see. Why should you kill me? That would free me from a life that has become one long punishment.'

Gleim again looked astounded. 'Is that how you see it?'

'You condemn me to life, yes.'

'But your punishment ended long ago! The grace of the Lady is on you now. Through my father's death you have found your way to her!'

Haligome could not tell whether the other man was mocking him or truly meant his words.

'You see grace in me?' he asked.

'I do.'

Haligome shook his head. 'The Isle and all it stands for are nothing to me. I came here only to escape the onslaughts of the King. I have at last found a place to hide, and no more than that.'

Gleim's gaze was steady. 'You deceive yourself,' he said, and walked away, leaving Haligome stunned and dazed.

Could it be? Was he purged of his crime, and had not understood that? He resolved that if that night a sending of the King came to him — and he was due, for it had been nearly a year since the last one — he would walk to the outer edge of the Terrace of Assessment and throw himself into the sea. But what came that night was a sending of the Lady, a warm and gentle dream summoning him inward to the Terrace of Mirrors. He still did not understand fully, and doubted that he ever would. But his dream-speaker told him in the morning to go on at once to that shining terrace that lay beyond, for the next stage of his pilgrimage had commenced.

EIGHT Among the Dream-Speakers

Often now Hissune finds that one adventure demands immediate explantion by another; and when he has done with the somber but instructive tale of the murderer Sigmar Haligome he understands a great deal of the workings of the agencies of the King of Dreams, but of the dream-speakers themselves, those intermediaries between the sleeping and waking worlds, he knows very little at all. He has never consulted one; he regards his own dreams more as theatrical events than as messages of guidance. This is counter to the central spiritual tradition of the world, he knows, but much that he does and thinks runs counter to those traditions. He is what he is, a child of the streets of the Labyrinth, a close observer of his world but not a wholehearted subscriber to all of its ways. There is in Zimroel, or was, a famous dream-speaker named Tisana, whom Hissune had met while attending the second enthronement of Lord Valentine. She was a fat old woman of the city of Falkynkip, and evidently she had played some part in Lord Valentine's rediscovery of his lost identity; Hissune knows nothing about that, but he recalls with some discomfort the old woman's penetrating eyes, her powerful and vigorous personality. For some reason she had taken a fancy to the boy Hissune: he remembers standing beside her, dwarfed by her, hoping that she would not get the notion of embracing him, for she would surely crush him in her vast bosom. She said then, 'And here's another little lost princeling!' What did that mean? A dream-speaker might tell him, Hissune occasionally thinks, but he does not go to dream-speakers. He wonders if Tisana has left a recording in the Register of Souls. He checks the archives. Yes, yes, there is one. He summons it and discovers quickly that it was made early in her life, some fifty years ago, when she was only learning her craft, and there are no others of hers on file. Nearly he sends it back. But something of Tisana's flavor lingers in his mind after only a moment of her recording. He might yet learn from her, he decides, and dons the helmet once more, and lets the vehement soul of the young Tisana enter his consciousness.

On the morning of the day before Tisana's Testing it suddenly began to rain, and everyone came running out of the chapter-house to see it, the novices and the pledgeds and the consummates and the tutors, and even the old Speaker-Superior Inuelda herself. Rain was a rare event here in the desert of Velalisier Plain. Tisana emerged with all the others, and stood watching the large clear drops descending on a slanting course from the single black-edged cloud that hovered high above the chapter-house's great spire, as though tethered to it. The drops hit the parched sandy ground with an audible impact: dark spreading stains, oddly far apart, were forming on the pale reddish soil. Novices and pledgeds and consummates and tutors flung aside their cloaks and frolicked in the downpour. 'The first in well over a year,' someone said.

'A omen,' murmured Freylis, the pledged who was Tisana's closest friend in the chapter-house. 'You will have an easy Testing.'

'Do you really believe such things?'

'It costs no more to see good omens than bad,' Freylis said.

'A useful motto for a dream-speaker to adopt,' said Tisana, and they both laughed.

Freylis tugged at Tisana's hand. 'Come dance with me out there!' she urged.

Tisana shook her head. She remained in the shelter of the overhang, and all Freylis' tugging was to no avail. Tisana was a tall woman, sturdy, big-boned and powerful; Freylis, fragile and slight, was like a bird beside her. Dancing in the rain hardly suited Tisana's mood just now. Tomorrow would bring the climax to seven years of training; she still had no idea whatever of what was going to be required of her at the ritual, but she was perversely certain that she would be found unworthy and sent back to her distant provincial town in disgrace; her fears and dark forebodings were a ballast of lead in her spirit, and dancing at such a time seemed an impossible frivolity.

'Look there,' Freylis cried. 'The Superior!'

Yes, even the venerable Inuelda was out in the rain, dancing with stately abandon, the gaunt leathery white-haired old woman moving in wobbly but ceremonious circles, skinny arms outspread, face upturned ecstatically. Tisana smiled at the sight. The Superior spied Tisana lurking on the portico and grinned and beckoned to her, the way one would beckon to a sulky child who will not join the game. But the Superior had taken her own Testing so long ago she must have forgotten how awesome it loomed; no doubt she was unable to understand Tisana's somber preoccupation with tomorrow's ordeal. With an apologetic little gesture Tisana turned and went within. From behind her came the abrupt drumming of a heavy downpour, and then sharp silence. The strange little storm was over.

Tisana entered her cell, stooping to pass under the low arch of blue stone blocks, and leaned for a moment against the rough wall, letting the tension drain from her. The cell was tiny, barely big enough for a mattress, a washbasin, a cabinet, a workbench, and a little bookcase, and Tisana, solid and fleshy, with the robust healthy body of the farm-girl she once had been, nearly filled the little room. But she had grown accustomed to its crampedness and found it oddly comforting. Comforting, too, were the routines of the chapter-house, the daily round of study and manual labor and instruction and — since she had attained the rank of a consummate — the tutoring of novices. At the time the rainfall began Tisana had been brewing the dream-wine, a chore that had occupied an hour of every morning for her for the past two years, and now, grateful for the difficulties of the task, she returned to it. On this uneasy day it was a welcome distraction.

All the dream-wine used on Majipoor was produced right here, by the pledgeds and consummates of the chapter-house of Velalisier. Making it called for fingers quicker and more delicate than Tisana's, but she had become adept all the same. Laid out before her were the little vials of herbs, the minuscule gray muorna-leaves and the succulent vejloo-roots and the dried berries of the sithereel and the rest of the nine-and-twenty ingredients that produced the trance out of which came the understanding of dreams. Tisana busied herself with the grinding and the mixing of them — it had to be done in a precise order, or the chemical reactions would go awry — and then the kindling of the flame, the charring, the reduction to powder, the dissolving into the brandy and the stirring of the brandy into the wine. After a while the intensity of her concentration helped her grow relaxed and even cheerful again.

As she worked she became aware of soft breathing behind her.

'Freylis?'

'Is it all right to come in?'

'Of course. I'm almost finished. Are they still dancing?'

'No, no, everything's back to normal. The sun is shining again.'