The dragon swims inexorably shoreward, and its huge mouth gapes like the mouth of a cavern.
—My hour at last has come, says the king of dragons, and you are mine.
The pilgrims, caught, drawn, mesmerized by the rich pulsating light that streams from the dragon, float onward toward the rim of the sea, toward that gaping mouth.
—Yes. Yes. Come to me. I am the water-king Maazmoorn, and you are mine!
Now the dragon king has reached the shallows, and the waves part for him, and he moves with ease onto the beach. The pealing of the bells grows louder stilclass="underline" insistently that terrible sound conquers the atmosphere and presses down upon it, so that with each new tolling the air grows thicker, slower, warmer. The dragon-king has unfurled the pair of colossal winglike fins that sprout from thick fleshy bases behind his head, and the wings thrust him onward over the wet sand. As he pulls his ponderous form to land, the first pilgrims reach him and without hesitation float on into the titanic maw and disappear; and behind them come others, an unending procession of willing sacrifices, racing forward to meet the dragon-king as he lurches landward to take them in.
And they enter the great mouth, and are engulfed into it, and Valentine is among them, and he goes down deep into the pit of the dragon’s stomach. He enters a vaulted chamber of infinite size, and finds it already occupied by the legion of the swallowed, millions, billions—humans and Skandars and Vroons and Hjorts and Liimen and Su-Suheris and Ghayrogs, all the many peoples of Majipoor, impartially caught up in the gullet of the dragon-king.
And still Maazmoorn goes forward, deeper upon the land, and still the dragon-king feeds. He swallows all the world, gulping and gulping and still more ravenously gulping, devouring cities and mountains, the continents and the seas, taking within himself the totality of Majipoor, until at last he has taken it all, and lies coiled around the planet like a swollen serpent that has eaten some enormous globular creature.
The bells ring out a paean of triumph.
—Now at last has my kingdom come!
After the dream had left him Valentine did not return to full wakefulness, but allowed himself to drift into middlesleep, the place of sensitive receptivity, and there he lay, calm, quiet, reliving the dream, entering again that all-devouring mouth, analyzing, attempting to interpret.
Then the first light of morning fell upon him, and he came up to consciousness. Carabella lay beside him, awake, watching him. He slipped his arm about her shoulder and let his hand rest fondly, playfully, on her breast.
“Was it a sending?” she asked.
“No, I felt no presence of the Lady, nor of the King.” He smiled. “You know always when I dream, don’t you?”
“I could see the dream come upon you. Your eyes moved beneath the lids; your lip twitched; your nostrils moved like those of some hunting animal.”
“Did I look troubled?”
“No, not at all. Perhaps at first you frowned; but then you smiled in your sleep, and a great calmness came over you, as if you were going forth toward some preordained fate and you accepted it entirely.”
He laughed. “Ah, then I’ll be gulped again by a sea dragon!”
“Is that what you dreamed?”
“More or less. Not the way it actually happened, though. This was the Kinniken dragon coming up on shore, and I marched right down its gullet. As did everyone else in the world, I think. And then it ate the world as well.”
“And can you speak your dream?” she asked.
“In patches and fragments only,” he said. “The wholeness of it still eludes me.”
It was too simple, he knew, to call the dream merely a replaying of an event of his past, as though he had plugged in an entertainment cube and seen a reenactment of that strange event of his exile years, when he had indeed been swallowed by a sea dragon, after being shipwrecked off the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and Lisamon Hultin, swallowed up in that same gulp, had cut a path to freedom through the monster’s blubber-walled gut. Even a child knew better than to take a dream at its most literal autobiographical level.
But nothing yielded itself to him on the deeper level, either, except an interpretation so obvious as to be triviaclass="underline" that these movements of sea-dragon herds he had lately observed were yet another warning that the world was in danger, that some potent force threatened the stability of society. That much he knew already, and it needed no reinforcement. Why sea dragons, though? What metaphor was churning in his mind that had transformed those vast marine mammals into a world-swallowing menace?
Carabella said, “Perhaps you look too hard. Let it pass, and the meaning will come to you when your mind is turned to something else. What do you say? Shall we go on deck?”
They saw no more herds of dragons in the days that followed, only a few solitary stragglers, and then none at all, nor were Valentine’s dreams invaded again by threatening images. The sea was calm, the sky was bright and fair, the wind stood them well from the east. Valentine spent much of his time alone on the foredeck, looking off to sea; and at last came the day when out of the emptiness there suddenly came into view, like a bright white shield springing out of the dark horizon, the dazzling chalk cliffs of the Isle of Sleep, the holiest and most peaceful place of Majipoor, the sanctuary of the compassionate Lady.
7
The estate was virtually deserted now. All of Etowan Elacca’s field hands were gone, and most of the house staff. Not one of them had bothered to make a formal leavetaking, even for the sake of collecting the pay he owed them: they simply slipped stealthily away, as though they dreaded remaining in the blighted zone a single hour more, and feared that he would somehow find a way to compel them to stay if he knew they wished to leave.
Simoost, the Ghayrog foreman, was still loyal, as was his wife Xhama, Etowan Elacca’s head cook. Two or three of the housekeepers had stayed, and a couple of the gardeners. Etowan Elacca did not greatly mind that the rest had fled— there was, after all, no work for most of them to do any longer, nor could he afford to pay them properly, with no crop going to market. And sooner or later it would have become a problem simply to feed them all, if what he had heard about a growing food shortage in the entire province was true. Nevertheless, he took their departures as a rebuke. He was their master; he was responsible for their welfare; he was willing to provide for them as long as his resources lasted. Why were they so eager to go? What hope did they have, these farm workers and gardeners, of finding work in the ranching center of Falkynkip, which was where he assumed they had gone? And it was odd to see the place so quiet, where once there had been such bustling activity all through the day. Etowan Elacca often felt like a king whose subjects had renounced their citizenship and gone to some other land, leaving him to prowl an empty palace and issue orders to the unheeding air.
Yet he attempted to live as he had always lived. Certain habits remain unbroken even in the most dire time of calamity.
In the days before the falling of the purple rain, Etowan Elacca had risen each morning well ahead of the sun, and at the dawn hour went out into the garden to make his little tour of inspection. He took always the same route, through the alabandina grove to the tanigales, then a left turn into the shady little nook where the caramangs clustered, and onward under the fountaining profusion of the thagimole tree, which from its short stubby trunk sent graceful branches perpetually laden with fragrant blue-green flowers arching upward sixty feet or more. Then he saluted the mouthplants, he nodded to the glistening bladdertrees, he paused to hear the song of the singing ferns; and eventually he would come to the border of brilliant yellow mangahone bushes that marked the boundary between the garden and the farm, and he would look up the slight slope toward the plantings of stajja and glein and hingamorts and niyk.