“I can feel my mother’s presence from here,” said Valentine as they made ready to go ashore. “She comes to me like the fragrance of alabandina blossoms on the wind.”
“Will the Lady be here to greet us today?” Carabella asked.
“I much doubt it,” Valentine said. “Custom calls for son to go to mother, not mother to son. She’ll remain at Inner Temple, and send her hierarchs, I suppose, to fetch us.”
A group of hierarchs indeed was waiting when the royal party disembarked. Among these women, in golden robes trimmed with red, was one already well known to Valentine, the austere white-haired Lorivade, who had accompanied him during the war of restoration on his journey from the Isle to Castle Mount, training him in the techniques of trance and mental projection that were practiced on the Isle. A second figure in the group seemed familiar to Valentine but he could not place her until the very instant when she spoke her name: and simultaneous with that came the flash of recognition, that this was Talinot Esulde, the slender, enigmatic person who had been his first guide on his pilgrimage to the Isle long ago. Then she had had a shaven skull, and Valentine had been unable to guess her sex, suspecting her to be male from her height or female from the delicacy of her features and the lightness of her frame; but since her advancement to the inner hierarchy she had allowed her hair to grow, and those long silken locks, as golden as Valentine’s own but far finer of texture, left no doubt that she was a woman.
“We carry dispatches for you, my lord,” said the hierarch Lorivade. “There is much news, and none of it good, I fear. But first we should conduct you to the royal lodging-place.”
There was a house in Numinor port known as the Seven Walls, which was a name that no one understood, because it was so ancient that its origins had been forgotten. It stood on the rampart of the city overlooking the sea, with its face toward Alhanroel and its back to the steep triple tiers of the Isle, and it was built of massive blocks of dark granite hewn from the quarries of the Stoienzar Peninsula, fitted together in a perfect joining with no trace of mortar. Its sole function was to serve as a place of refreshment for a visiting Coronal newly arrived on the Isle, and so it went unused for years at a time; yet it was scrupulously maintained by a large staff, as though a Coronal might arrive without warning at any moment and must needs have his house in order at the hour of his landing.
It was very old, as old as the Castle itself, and older, so far as archaeologists could determine, than any of the temples and holy terraces now in existence elsewhere on the Isle. According to legend it had been built for the reception of Lord Stiamot by his mother, the fabled Lady Thiin, upon his visit to the Isle of Sleep at the conclusion of the Metamorph wars of eight thousand years ago. Some said that the name Seven Walls was a reference to the entombing in the foundations of the building, as it was being constructed, of the bodies of seven Shapeshifter warriors slain by Lady Thiin’s own hand during the defense of the Isle against Metamorph invasion. But no such remains had ever come to light in the periodic reconstructions of the old building, and also it was thought unlikely by most modern historians that Lady Thiin, heroic woman that she was, had actually wielded weapons herself in the Battle of the Isle. By another tradition, a seven-sided chapel erected by Lord Stiamot in honor of his mother once had stood in the central courtyard, giving its name to the entire structure. That chapel, so the story went, had been dismantled on the day of Lord Stiamot’s death and shipped to Alaisor to become the pediment of his tomb. But that too was unproven, for no trace of an early seven-sided structure could be detected in the courtyard now, and there was little likelihood that anyone today would excavate Lord Stiamot’s tomb to see what could be learned from its paving-blocks. Valentine himself preferred a different version of the origin of the name, which held that Seven Walls was merely a corruption into the Majipoori tongue of certain ancient Metamorph words that meant “The place where the fish scales are scraped off,” and referred to the prehistoric use of the shore of the Isle by Shapeshifter fishermen sailing from Alhanroel. But it was unlikely that the truth would ever be determined.
There were rituals of arrival that a Coronal was supposed to perform upon reaching the Seven Walls, by way of aiding his transition from the world of action that was his usual sphere to the world of the spirit in which the Lady was supreme. While Valentine carried these things out—a matter of ceremonial bathing, of the burning of aromatic herbs, of meditation in a private chamber whose walls were airy damasks of pierced marble—he left Carabella to read through the dispatches that had accumulated for him during the weeks he was at sea; and when he returned, cleansed and calm, he saw at once from the stark expression of her eyes that he had gone about his rituals too soon, that he would be drawn back instantly into the realm of events.
“How bad is the news?” he asked.
“It could scarcely be worse, my lord.”
She handed him the sheaf of documents, which she had winnowed so that the uppermost sheets gave him the gist of the most important documents. Failure of crops in seven provinces—severe shortage of food in many parts of Zimroel— the beginnings of a mass migration out of the heartland of the continent toward the western coastal cities—sudden prominence of a formerly obscure religious cult, apocalyptic and millennial in nature, centering around the belief that sea dragons were supernatural beings that would soon come ashore to announce the birth of a new epoch—
He looked up, aghast.
“All this in so short a time?”
“And these are only fragmentary reports, Valentine. No one really knows what’s going on out there right now—the distances are so vast, the communications channels so disturbed—”
His hand sought hers. “Everything foretold in my dreams and visions is coming to pass. The darkness is coming, Carabella, and I am all that stands in its path.”
“There are some who stand beside you, love.”
“That I know. And for that am I grateful. But at the last moment I will be alone, and then what will I do?” He smiled ruefully. “There was a time when we were juggling at the Perpetual Circus in Dulorn, do you recall, and the knowledge of my true identity was only then beginning to break through to my awareness. And I was speaking with Deliamber, and telling him that perhaps it was the will of the Divine that I had been overthrown, and that perhaps it was just as well for Majipoor that the usurper keep my name and my throne, for I had no real desire to be king and the other might indeed prove to be a capable ruler. Which Deliamber denied completely, and said there could be only one lawfully consecrated king and I was that one, and must return to my place. You ask a great deal of me, I said. ‘History asks a great deal,’ he replied. ‘History has demanded, on a thousand worlds across many thousands of years, that intelligent beings choose between order and anarchy, between creation and destruction, between reason and unreason.’ And also: ‘It matters, my lord, it matters very much,’ said he, ‘who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal.’ I have never forgotten those words of his, and I never will.”
“And how did you answer him?”
“I answered ‘yes’ and then I added ‘perhaps,’ and he said, ‘You’ll go on wavering from yes to perhaps a long while, but yes will govern in the end.’ And so it did, and therefore I recaptured my throne—and nevertheless we move farther every day from order and creation and reason, and closer to anarchy, destruction, unreason.” Valentine stared at her in anguish. “Was Deliamber wrong, then? Does it matter who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal? I think I am a good man, and sometimes I think even that I am a wise ruler; and yet even so the world falls apart, Carabella, despite my best efforts or because of them, I know not which. It might have been better for everyone if I had stayed a wandering juggler.”