When they drew near, they spread out about the royal fleet in what surely was a carefully planned formation, and hoisted great Coronal ensigns in green and gold into their riggings, and shouted raucously into the wind, “Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine!” The music of drums and trumpets and sistirons and galistanes drifted across the water, blurred and muddled but nonetheless jubilant and touching.
A very different reception, thought Valentine wryly, from the one he had had on his last visit to Piliplok, when he and Zalzan Kavol and the rest of the jugglers had gone pitifully from one dragon-captain to the next, trying in vain to hire one to carry them toward the Isle of Sleep, until finally they had managed to buy passage aboard the smallest and shabbiest and unluckiest vessel of all. But many things had altered since then.
The grandest of the dragon-ships now approached the Lady Thiin, and put forth a boat bearing a Skandar and two humans. When they came alongside, a floater-basket was lowered to draw them up on deck, but the humans remained at their oars, and only the Skandar came aboard.
She was old and weatherbeaten and tough-looking, with two of her powerful incisor teeth missing and fur of a dull grayish color. “I am Guidrag,” she said, and after a moment Valentine remembered her: the oldest and most revered of the dragon-captains, and one of those who had refused to take the jugglers on as passengers on her own ship; but she had refused in a kindly way, and had sent them on to Captain Gorzval and his Brangalyn. He wondered if she remembered him: very likely not. When one wears the Coronal’s robes, Valentine had long ago discovered, the man within the robes tends to become invisible.
Guidrag made a rough but eloquent speech of welcome on behalf of all her shipmates and fellow dragon-hunters and presented Valentine with an elaborately carved necklace made from interlocking sea-dragon bones. Afterward he gave thanks for this grand naval display, and asked her why the dragon-ship fleet was idle here in Piliplok harbor and not out hunting on the high seas; to which she replied that this year’s migration had brought the dragons past the coast in such astonishing and unprecedented numbers that all the dragon-ships had fulfilled their lawful quotas in the first few weeks of the hunt; their season had ended almost as soon as it had begun.
“This has been a strange year,” said Guidrag. “And I fear more strangeness awaits us, my lord.”
The escort of dragon-ships stayed close by, all the way to port. The royal party came ashore at Malibor Pier, in the center of the harbor, where a welcoming party waited: the duke of the province with a vast retinue, the mayor of the city and an equally vast swarm of officials, and a delegation of dragon-captains from the ships that had accompanied the Coronal to shore. Valentine entered into the ceremonies and rituals of greetings like one who dreams that he is awake: he responded gravely and courteously and at all the right times, he conducted himself with serenity and poise, and yet it was as though he moved through a throng of phantoms.
The highway from the harbor to the great hall of the city, where Valentine was to lodge, was lined with thick scarlet ropes to keep back the throngs, and guards were posted everywhere. Valentine, riding in an open-topped floater with Carabella at his side, thought that he had never heard such clamor, a constant incomprehensible roar of jubilant welcome so thunderous that it took his mind away, for the moment, from thoughts of crisis. But the respite lasted only a short while, for as soon as he was settled in his quarters he asked that the latest dispatches be brought him, and the news they contained was unrelievedly grim.
The lusavender blight, he learned, had spread somehow into the quarantined unaffected provinces. The stajja harvest was going to be half normal this year. A pest called the wireworm, long thought eradicated, had entered the regions where thuyol, an important forage crop, was grown: ultimately that would threaten the supply of meat. A fungus that attacked grapes had caused widespread dropping of unripe fruit in the wine country of Khyntor and Ni-moya. All of Zimroel now was affected by some sort of agricultural disturbance, except only the area of the remote southwest around the tropical city of Narabal.
Y-Uulisaan, when Valentine had showed him the reports, said gravely. “It will not be contained now. These are ecologically interlocking events: Zimroel’s food supply will be totally disrupted, my lord.”
“There are eight billion people in Zimroel!”
“Indeed. And when these blights spread to Alhanroel—?”
Valentine felt a chill. “You think they will?”
“Ah, my lord, I know they will! How many ships go back and forth between the continents each week? How many birds and even insects make the crossing? The Inner Sea is not that broad, and the Isle and the archipelagos make useful halfway houses.” With a strangely serene smile the agricultural expert said, “I tell you, my lord, this cannot be resisted, this cannot be defeated. There will be starvation. There will be plague. Majipoor will be devoured.”
“No. Not so.”
“If I could give you comforting words, I would. I have no comfort for you, Lord Valentine.”
The Coronal stared intently into Y-Uulisaan’s strange eyes. “The Divine has brought this catastrophe upon us,” he said. “The Divine will take it from us.”
“Perhaps. But not before there has been great damage. My lord, I ask permission to withdraw. May I study these papers an hour or so?”
When Y-Uulisaan had gone, Valentine sat quietly for a time, thinking through one last time the thing that he was intending to do, and which now seemed more urgent than ever, in the face of these calamitous new reports. Then he summoned Sleet and Tunigorn and Deliamber.
“I mean to change the route of the processional,” he said without preamble.
They looked warily toward one another, as though they had been expecting for weeks some such sort of troublesome surprise.
“We will not go on to Ni-moya at this time. Cancel all arrangements for Ni-moya and beyond.” He saw them staring at him in a tense and somber way, and knew he would not win their support without a struggle. “On the Isle of Sleep,” he continued, “it was made manifest to me that the blights that have come upon Zimroel, and which may before long come upon Alhanroel as well, are a direct demonstration of the displeasure of the Divine. You, Deliamber, raised that point with me long ago, when we were at the Velalisier ruins, and you suggested that the troubles of the realm that had grown from the usurpation of my throne might be the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs. We have gone a long way here on Majipoor, you said, without paying the price for the original sin of the conquerors, and now chaos was upon us because the past was starting to send us its reckoning at last, with compound interest added.”
“So I remember. Those were my words, almost exactly.”
“And I said,” Valentine went on, “that I would dedicate my reign to making reparations for the injustices we visited upon the Metamorphs. But I have not done that. I have been preoccupied with other problems, and have made only the most superficial of gestures toward entering into an understanding with the Shapeshifters. And while I delayed, our punishment has intensified. Now that I am on Zimroel, I intend to go at once to Piurifayne—”
“To Piurifayne, my lord?” said Sleet and Tunigorn in virtually the same instant.
“To Piurifayne, to the Shapeshifter capital at Ilirivoyne. I will meet with the Danipiur. I will hear her demands, and take cognizance of them. I—”
“No Coronal has ever gone into Metamorph territory before,” Tunigorn cut in.