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 Lady Thiin, apart from his friends, visiting with himself.

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.

To Asenhart he said, "When will we reach land?"

"Tomorrow evening, my lord."

"We’ll have feasting and games tonight, then. The best wines broken out, all hands to share. And afterward a performance deckside, a small jubilee."

Asenhart regarded him gravely. The admiral was an aristocrat among Hjorts, more slender than most of his kind, though with the coarse and pebbled skin that was their mark, and he had an odd sobriety of manner that Valentine found a bit offputting. The Lady held him in the highest regard.

"A performance, my lord?"

"A little jugglery," said Valentine. "My friends feel a nostalgic need to practice their art again, and what better moment than to celebrate the safe conclusion of our long voyage?"

"Of course," said Asenhart with a formal nod. But obviously the admiral disapproved of such goings-on aboard his flagship.

Zalzan Kavol had suggested it. The Skandar was plainly restless aboard ship; he could often be seen moving his four arms rhythmically in the gestures of juggling, though no objects were in his hands. More than anyone he had had to adapt to circumstances in this trek across the face of Majipoor. A year ago Zalzan Kavol had been a prince of his profession, master among masters of the juggling art, traveling in splendor from city to city in his wondrous wagon. Now all that was gone from him. The wagon was ashes somewhere in the forests of Piurifayne; two of his five brothers lay dead there too, and a third at the bottom of the sea; no longer did he growl orders to his employees and have them leap to obey; and instead of performing nightly before wonder-struck audiences that filled his pouch with crowns, he wandered now from place to place in Valentine’s wake, a mere subsidiary. Unused strengths and drives were accumulating in Zalzan Kavol. His face and demeanor showed it, for in the old days his temper had been churlish and he vented it freely, but now he seemed repressed, almost meek, and Valentine knew that must be a sign of severe inner distress. The agents of the Lady had found Zalzan Kavol still at the Terrace of Assessment at the outer rim of the Isle, at work at his menial pilgrim-tasks in a shambling, sleepwalking way, as if he had resigned himself to spending the rest of his life pulling weeds and pointing masonry.