“One Coronal has,” said Valentine. “In my time as a juggler I was there, and performed, in fact, before an audience of Metamorphs and the Danipiur herself.”
“A different matter,” Sleet said. “You could do anything you pleased, when you were a juggler. That time we went among the Shapeshifters, you scarce believed you were Coronal yourself. But now that you are undoubted Coronal—”
“I will go. As a pilgrimage of humility, as the beginning of an act of atonement.”
“My lord—!” Sleet sputtered.
Valentine smiled. “Go ahead. Give me all the arguments against it. I’ve been expecting for weeks to have a long dreary debate with you three about this, and now I suppose the time has come. But let me tell you this first: when we are done speaking, I will go to Piurifayne.”
“And nothing will shake you?” Tunigorn asked. “If we speak of the dangers, the breach of protocol, the possible adverse political consequences, the—”
“No. No. No. Nothing will shake me. Only by kneeling before the Danipiur can I bring an end to the disaster that is ravaging Zimroel.”
“Are you so sure, my lord,” said Deliamber, “that will be as simple as that?”
“It is something that must be tried. Of that I am convinced, and you will never shake me from my resolve.”
“My lord,” Sleet said, “it was the Shapeshifters that witched you off your throne, or so I do recall it, and I think you have some recollection of it also. Now the world stands at the edge of madness, and you propose to offer yourself up into their hands, in their own trackless forests. Does that seem—”
“Wise? No. Necessary? Yes, Sleet. Yes. One Coronal more or less doesn’t matter. There are many others who can take my place and do as well, or better. But the destiny of Majipoor matters. I must go to Ilirivoyne.”
“I beg you, my lord —”
“I beg you,” said Valentine. “We have talked enough. My mind is set on this.”
“You will go to Piurifayne,” said Sleet in disbelief. “You will offer yourself to the Shapeshifters.”
“Yes,” Valentine said. “I will offer myself to the Shape-shifters.”
THREE
The Book of the Broken Sky
1
Millilain would always remember the day when the first of the new Coronals proclaimed himself, because that was the day she paid five crowns for a couple of grilled sausages.
She was on her way at noon to meet her husband Kristofon at his shop on the esplanade by Khyntor Bridge. It was the beginning of the third month of the Shortage. That was what everyone in Khyntor called it, the Shortage, but inwardly Millilain had had a more realistic name for it: the famine. No one was starving—yet—but no one was getting enough to eat, either, and the situation seemed to be worsening daily. The night before last, she and Kristofon had eaten nothing but some porridge he had made out of dried calimbots and a bit of ghumba root. Tonight’s dinner would be stajja pudding. And tomorrow—who knew? Kristofon was talking of going hunting for small animals, mintuns, droles, things of that sort, in Prestimion Park. Filet of mintun? Roast breast of drole? Millilain shuddered. Lizard stew would be next, probably. With boiled cabbage-tree leaves on the side.
She came down Ossier Boulevard to the place where it turned into Zimr Way, which led to the bridge esplanade. And just as she passed the Proctorate office the unmistakable and irresistible aroma of grilled sausages came to her.
I’m hallucinating, she thought. Or dreaming, maybe.
Once there had been dozens of sausage peddlers along the esplanade. But not for weeks, now, had Millilain seen one. Meat was hard to come by these days: something about cattle starving in the western ranching country for lack of forage, and livestock shipments from Suvrael, where things still seemed to be all right, being disrupted by the sea-dragon herds that were thronging the maritime lanes.
But the smell of those sausages was very authentic. Millilain stared in all directions, seeking its source.
Yes! There!
No hallucination. No dream. Incredibly, astoundingly, a sausage peddler had emerged onto the esplanade, a little stoop-shouldered Liiman with a dented old cart in which long red sausages hung skewered over a charcoal fire. He was standing there just as if everything in the world were exactly as it had always been. As if there were no Shortage. As if the food shops had not gone on a three-hour-a-day schedule, because that was usually how long it took them to sell out everything they had in stock.
Millilain began to run.
Others were running too. From all sides of the esplanade they converged on the sausage peddler as though he were giving away ten-royal pieces. But in fact what he had to offer was far more precious than any shiny silver coin could be.
She ran as she had never run before, elbows flailing, knees coming up high, hair streaming out behind her. At least a hundred people were heading toward the Liiman and his cart. He couldn’t possibly have enough sausages for everyone. But Millilain was closer than anyone else: she had seen the vendor first, she was running the hardest. A long-legged Hjort woman was coming up close behind her, and a Skandar in an absurd business suit was thundering in from the side, grunting as he ran. Who could ever have imagined a time, Millilain wondered, when you’d run to buy sausages from a street vendor?
The Shortage—the famine—had started somewhere out west, in the Rift country. At first it had seemed unimportant and almost unreal to Millilain, since it was happening so far away, in places that were themselves unreal to her. She had never been west of Thagobar. When the first reports came in, she had felt a certain abstract compassion for the people who were said to be going hungry in Mazadone and Dulorn and Falkynkip, but it was hard for her to believe that it was actually happening—nobody ever went hungry on Majipoor, after all—and whenever word came of some new crisis out west, a riot or a mass migration or an epidemic, it struck her as being remote not only in space but in time, not something taking place right this moment but more like something out of a history book, an event of Lord Stiamot’s time, say, thousands of years ago.
But then Millilain began to find that there were days when things like niyk and hingamorts and glein were in short supply at the places where she shopped. It’s because of the crop failures out west, the clerks told her: nothing much is coming out of the Rift farm belt any longer, and it’s a slow and costly business to ship produce in from other areas. After that, such basic things as stajja and ricca suddenly were being rationed, even though they were grown locally and there had been no disruptions of agriculture in the Khyntor region. The explanation this time was that surplus food stocks were being shipped to the afflicted provinces; we must all make sacrifices in such a time of dire need, et cetera, et cetera, said the imperial decree. Then came the news that certain of the plant diseases had shown up around Khyntor also, and east of Khyntor as far downriver as Ni-moya. Allotments of thuyol and ricca and stajja were cut in half, lusavender disappeared entirely from sale, meat began to become scarce. There was talk of bringing in supplies from Alhanroel and Suvrael, where apparently everything was still normal. But that was only talk, Millilain knew. There weren’t enough cargo ships in the whole world to carry produce from the other continents in quantities big enough to make a difference, and even if there were, the cost would be prohibitive. “We’re all going to starve,” she told Kristofon.
So the Shortage reached Khyntor at last.
The Shortage. The famine.
Kristofon didn’t think anyone would really starve. He was always optimistic. Somehow things will get better, he said. Somehow. But here were a hundred people desperately converging on a sausage vendor.