The adjutant Ermanar made reply on behalf of the Coronal. When he was done, it was the turn of ancient shriveled Dilifon, private secretary to the Pontifex, who conveyed the personal greetings of the high monarch. Which was mere fraud, Valentine knew, since it was common knowledge that old Tyeveras had not spoken a rational word to anyone close upon a decade. But he accepted Dilifon’s quavering fabrications politely and delegated Tunigorn to offer the response.
Then Hornkast spoke: the high spokesman of the Pontificate, plump, solemn, the true ruler of the Labyrinth in these years of the senility of the Pontifex Tyeveras. His theme, he declared, was the grand processional. Valentine sat to attention at once: for in the past year he had thought of little else than the processional, that far-ranging ceremonial journey in which the Coronal must go forth upon Majipoor and show himself to the people, and receive from them their homage, their allegiance, their love.
“It may seem to some,” said Hornkast, “a mere pleasure jaunt, a trivial and meaningless holiday from the cares of office. Not so! Not so! For it is the person of the Coronal—the actual, physical person, not a banner, not a flag, not a portrait—that binds all the far-flung provinces of the world to a common loyalty. And it is only through periodic contact with the actual presence of that royal person that that loyalty is renewed.”
Valentine frowned and looked away. Through his mind there surged a sudden disturbing image: the landscape of Majipoor sundered and upheaved, and one solitary man desperately wrestling with the splintered terrain, striving to thrust everything back into place.
“For the Coronal,” Hornkast went on, “is the embodiment of Majipoor. The Coronal is Majipoor personified. He is the world; the world is the Coronal. And so when he undertakes the grand processional, as you, Lord Valentine, now will do for the first time since your glorious restoration, he is not only going forth to the world, but he is going forth to himself—to a voyage into his own soul, to an encounter with the deepest roots of his identity—”
Was it so? Of course. Of course. Hornkast, he knew, was simply spouting standard rhetoric, oratorical noises of a sort that Valentine had had to endure all too often. And yet, this time the words seemed to trigger something in him, seemed to open some great dark tunnel of mysteries. That dream—the cold wind blowing across Castle Mount, the groans of the earth, the shattered landscape—The Coronal is the embodiment of Majipoor —he is the world —
Once in his reign already that unity had been broken, when Valentine, thrust from power by treachery, stripped of his memory and even of his own body, had been hurled into exile. Was it to happen again? A second overthrow, a second downfall? Or was something even more dreadful imminent, something far more serious than the fate of one single man?
He tasted the unfamiliar taste of fear. Banquet or no, Valentine knew he should have gone at once for a dream-speaking. Some grim knowledge was striving to break through to his awareness, beyond all doubt. Something was wrong within the Coronal—which was the same as saying something was wrong in the world—
“My lord?” It was Autifon Deliamber. The little Vroonish wizard said, “It is time, my lord, for you to offer the final toast.”
“What? When?”
“Now, my lord.”
“Ah. Indeed,” Valentine said vaguely. “The final toast, yes.”
He rose and let his gaze journey throughout the great room, into its most shadowy depths. And a sudden strangeness came upon him, for he realized that he was entirely unprepared. He had little notion of what he was to say, or to whom he should direct it, or even—really—what he was doing in this place at all. The Labyrinth? Was this in truth the Labyrinth, that loathsome place of shadows and mildew? Why was he here? What did these people want him to do? Perhaps this was merely another dream, and he had never left Castle Mount. He did not know. He did not understand anything.
Something will come, he thought. I need only wait. But he waited, and nothing came, except deeper strangeness. He felt a throbbing in his forehead, a humming in his ears. Then he experienced a powerful sense of himself here in the Labyrinth as occupying a place at the precise center of the world, the core of the whole gigantic globe. But some irresistible force was pulling him from that place. Between one moment and the next his soul went surging from him as though it were a great mantle of light, streaming upward through the many layers of the Labyrinth to the surface and then reaching forth to encompass all the immensity of Majipoor, even to the distant coasts of Zimroel and sun-blackened Suvrael, and the unknown expanse of the Great Sea on the far side of the planet. He wrapped the world like a glowing veil. In that dizzying moment he felt that he and the planet were one, that he embodied in himself the twenty billion people of Majipoor, humans and Skandars and Hjorts and Metamorphs and all the rest, moving within him like the corpuscles of his blood. He was everywhere at once: he was all the sorrow in the world, and all the joy, and all the yearning, and all the need. He was everything. He was a boiling universe of contradictions and conflicts. He felt the heat of the desert and the warm rain of the tropics and the chill of the high peaks. He laughed and wept and died and made love and ate and drank and danced and fought and rode wildly through unknown hills and toiled in the fields and cut a path through thick vine-webbed jungles. In the oceans of his soul vast sea dragons breached the surface and let forth monstrous bleating roars and dived again, to the uttermost depths. Faces without eyes hovered before him, grinning, leering. Bony attenuated hands fluttered in the air. Choirs sang discordant hymns. All at once, at once, at once, a terrible lunatic simultaneity.
He stood in silence, bewildered, lost, as the room reeled wildly about him. “Propose the toast, lordship,” Deliamber seemed to be saying over and over. “First to the Pontifex, and then to his aides, and then—”
Control yourself, Valentine thought. You are Coronal of Majipoor.
With a desperate effort he pulled himself free of that grotesque hallucination.
“The toast to the Pontifex, lordship—”
“Yes. Yes, I know.”
Phantom images still haunted him. Ghostly fleshless fingers plucked at him. He fought free. Control. Control. Control.
He felt utterly lost.
“The toast, lordship!”
The toast? The toast? What was that? A ceremony. An obligation upon him.You are Coronal of Majipoor. Yes. He must speak. He must say words to these people.
“Friends—” he began. And then came the dizzying plunge into chaos.
8
“The Coronal wants to see you,” Shanamir said.
Hissune looked up, startled. For the past hour and a half he had been waiting tensely in a dismal many-columned antechamber with a grotesque bulbous ceiling, wondering what was happening behind the closed doors of Lord Valentine’s suite and whether he was supposed to remain here indefinitely. It was well past midnight, and some ten hours from now the Coronal and his staff were to depart from the Labyrinth on the next leg of the grand processional, unless tonight’s strange events had altered that plan. Hissune still had to make his way all the way up to the outermost ring, gather his possessions and say goodbye to his mother and sisters, and get back here in time to join the outbound party—and fit some sleep into the picture, too. All was in confusion.
After the collapse of the Coronal, after Lord Valentine had been carried away to his suite, after the banquet hall had been cleared, Hissune and some of the other members of the Coronal’s group had assembled in this drab room nearby. Word had come, after a time, that Lord Valentine was recovering well, and that they were all to wait there for further instructions. Then, one by one, they had been summoned to the Coronal—Tunigorn first, then Ermanar, Asenhart, Shanamir, and the rest, until Hissune was left alone with some members of the Coronal’s guard and a few very minor staff people. He did not feel like asking any of these subalterns what the appropriate thing for him to do might be; but he dared not leave, either, and so he waited, and waited some more, and went on waiting.