“Oh, Valentine, what foolish talk this is!”
“Is it?”
“Are you saying that if you’d left Dominin Barjazid to rule, there would have been a fine lusavender harvest this year? How are you to blame for crop failures in Zimroel? These are natural calamities, with natural causes, and you’ll find a wise way to deal with them, because wisdom is your way, and you are the chosen of the Divine.”
“I am chosen of the princes of Castle Mount,” he said. “They are human and fallible.”
“The Divine speaks through them when a Coronal is chosen. And the Divine did not mean you to be the instrument of Majipoor’s destruction. These reports are serious but not terrifying. You will speak with your mother in a few days, and she’ll fortify you where weariness makes you weaken; and then we’ll proceed on to Zimroel and you will set all to rights.”
“So I hope, Carabella. But—”
“So you know, Valentine! I say once more, my lord, I hardly recognize in you the man I know, when you speak this gloomy way.” She tapped the sheaf of dispatches. “I would not minimize these things. But I think there is much we can do to turn back the darkness, and that it will be done.”
He nodded slowly. “So I think myself, much of the time. But at other times—”
“At other times it’s best not to think at all.” A knock sounded at the door. “Good,” she said. “We are interrupted, and I give thanks for that, for I tire of hearing you make all these downcast noises, my love.”
She admitted Talinot Esulde to the room. The hierarch said, “My lord, your mother the Lady has arrived, and wishes to see you in the Emerald Room.”
“My mother here? But I expected to go to her tomorrow, at Inner Temple!”
“She has come to you,” said Talinot Esulde imperturbably.
The Emerald Room was a study in green: walls of green serpentine, floors of green onyx, translucent panes of green jade in place of windows. The Lady stood in the center of the room, between the two huge potted tanigales, covered with dazzling blossoms of metallic green, that were virtually all that the chamber contained. Valentine went quickly toward her. She stretched her hands to him, and as their fingertips met he felt the familiar throbbing of the current that radiated from her, the sacred force that, like spring water draining into a well, had accumulated in her through all her years of intimate contact with the billions of souls of Majipoor.
He had spoken with her in dreams many times, but he had not seen her in years, and he was unprepared for the changes time had worked upon her. She was still beautifuclass="underline" the passing of the years could not affect that. But age now had cast the faintest of veils over her, and the sheen was gone from her black hair, the warmth of her gaze was ever so slightly diminished, her skin seemed somehow to have loosened its grasp on her flesh. Yet she carried herself as splendidly as ever, and she was, as always, magnificently robed in white, with a flower behind one ear, and the silver circlet of her power on her brow: a figure of grace and majesty, of force and of infinite compassion.
“Mother. At last.”
“Such a long while, Valentine! So many years!”
She touched his face gently, his shoulders, his arms. The brush of her fingers over him was feather-light, but it left him tingling, so great was the power within this woman. He had to remind himself that she was no goddess, but only mortal flesh and daughter of mortal flesh, that upon a time long ago she had been wife to the High Counsellor Damiandane, that two sons had sprung from her and he was one of them, that once he had nestled at her breast and listened happily to her soft song, that it was she who had wiped the mud from his cheeks when he came home from play, that in the tempests of childhood he had wept in her arms and drawn comfort and wisdom from her. Long ago, all that: it seemed almost to be in another life. When the sceptor of the Divine had descended upon the family of the High Counsellor Damiandane and raised Voriax to the Confalume Throne it had by the same stroke transformed the mother of Voriax into the Lady of the Isle, and neither one could ever again be regarded even within the family as merely mortal. Valentine found himself then and always after unable to think of her simply as his mother, for she had donned the silver circlet and had gone to the Isle, and dwelled there in majesty as Lady, and the comfort and wisdom that formerly she had dispensed to him she shared now with the entire world, who looked to her with reverence and need. Even when another stroke of that same scepter had elevated Valentine to Voriax’s place, and he too passed in some way beyond the realm of the ordinary and became larger than life, virtually a figure of myth, he had retained his awe of her, for he had no awe of himself, Coronal or no, and could not through his own inner vision see himself with the awe that others held for him, or he for this Lady.
Yet they talked of family things before they turned to higher questions. He told her such details as he knew of the doings of her sister Galiara and her brother Sait of Stee, and of Divvis and Mirigant and the daughters of Voriax. She asked him whether he returned often to the old family lands at Halanx, and if he found the Castle a happy place, and whether he and Carabella were still so loving and close. The tensions within him eased, and he felt almost as though he were a real person, some minor lordling of the Mount, visiting amiably with his mother, who had settled in a different clime but still was avid for news of home. But it was impossible to escape the truths of their position for long, and when the conversation began to grow forced and strained he said, in somewhat another tone, “You should have let me come to you in the proper way, mother. This is not right, the Lady descending from Inner Temple to visit the Seven Walls.”
“Such formality is unwise now. Events crowd us: the actions must be taken.”
“Then you’ve had the news from Zimroel?”
“Of course.” She touched her circlet. “This brings me news from everywhere, with the swiftness of the speed of thought. Oh, Valentine, such an unhappy time for our reunion! I had imagined that when you made your processional you would come here in joy, and now you are here and I feel only pain in you, and doubt, and fear of what is to come.”
“What do you see, mother? What is to come?”
“Do you think I have some way of knowing the future?”
“You see the present with great clarity. As you say, you receive news from everywhere.”
“What I see is dark and clouded. Things stir in the world that are beyond my understanding. Once again the order of society is threatened. And the Coronal is in despair. That is what I see. Why do you despair, Valentine? Why is there so much fear in you? You are the son of Damiandane and the brother of Voriax, and they were not men who knew despair, and despair is not native to my soul either, or to yours, so I thought.”
“There is great trouble in the world, as I have learned since my arrival here, and that trouble increases.”
“And is that cause for despair? It should only increase your desire to set things right, as once you did before.”
“For the second time, though, I see Majipoor overtaken by calamity during my reign. What I see,” said Valentine, “is that my reign has been an unlucky one, and will be unluckier yet, if these plagues and famines and panicky migrations grow more severe. I fear that some curse lies on me.”
He saw anger briefly flare in her eyes, and he was reminded again of the formidable strength of her soul, of the icy discipline and devotion to duty that lay below her warm and gentle appearance. In her way she was as fierce a warrior as the famed Lady Thiin of ancient times, who had gone out upon the barricades to drive back the invading Metamorphs. This Lady too might be capable of such valor, if there were need. She had no tolerance, he knew, for weakness in her sons, or self-pity, or despondency, because she had none for those things in herself. And, remembering that, he felt some of the bleakness of his mood begin to go from him.