—Hear me, O enemies. I am the King That Is!
And the silent voices cried in deafening tones:
—Hear him, O enemies. He is the King That Is!
—Your time has come! Your day is done! Your crimes will be punished, and none will survive! Go from our world!
—Go from our world!
“Faraataa!” they cried aloud. “Faraataa! Faraataa!”
“I am the Prince To Come. I am the King That Is!”
And they answered him, “All hail the Prince To Come, who is the King That Is!”
FOUR
The Book of the Pontifex
1
“A strange day, my lord, when the Coronal must come as a beggar to the King of Dreams,” Sleet said, holding his hand outspread before his face to shield himself against the torrid wind that blew unrelentingly toward them out of Suvrael. Just a few hours more and they would make landfall at Tolaghai, largest of the southern continent’s ports.
“Not as a beggar, Sleet,” said Valentine quietly. “As a brother-in-arms, seeking aid against a common enemy.”
Carabella turned to him in surprise. “A brother-in-arms, Valentine? Never before have I heard you speak of yourself in such a warlike way.”
“We are at war, are we not?”
“And will you fight, then? And will you take lives with your own hand?”
Valentine peered closely at her, wondering if she were somehow trying to goad him; but no, her face was gentle as ever, her eyes were loving. He said, “You know I will never shed blood. But there are other ways of waging war. I have fought one war already, with you beside me: did I take life then?”
“But who were the enemies then?” Sleet demanded impatiently. “Your own dearest friends, misled by Shapeshifter deception—Elidath—Tunigorn—Stasilaine—Mirigant—all of them took the field against you. Of course you were gentle with them! You had no wish to slay such as Elidath and Mirigant: only to win them to your side.”
“Dominin Barjazid was no dear friend of mine. I spared him also: and I think we will be glad of that now.”
“An act of great mercy, yes. But we have a different sort of enemy now—Shapeshifter filth, cruel vermin—”
“Sleet—!”
“That is what they are, my lord! Creatures that have vowed to destroy all that we have built on our world.”
“On their world, Sleet,” said Valentine. “Remember that: this is their world.”
“Was, my lord. They lost it to us by default. A mere few million of them, on a planet large enough for—”
“And shall we have this tired dispute one more time, then?” Carabella burst out, making no effort to disguise her irritation. “Why? Is it not hard enough to breathe the blowtorch stuff that comes out of Suvrael, without straining our lungs in such futile talk as this?”
“I only mean to say, my lady, that the war of restoration was such a war as could be won by peaceful means, by open arms and a loving embrace. We have a different kind of enemy now. This Faraataa is consumed with hatred. He will not rest until we are all dead: and will he be won by love, do you think? Do you, my lord?”
Valentine looked away. “We will use whatever means are appropriate,” he said, “to make Majipoor whole again.”
“If you are sincere in what you say, then you must be prepared to destroy the enemy,” replied Sleet darkly. “Not merely pen them up in the jungle as Lord Stiamot did, but to exterminate them, to eradicate them, to end forever the threat to our civilization that they—”
“Exterminate? Eradicate?” Valentine laughed. “You sound prehistoric, Sleet!”
“He does not mean it literally, my lord,” Carabella said.
“Ah, he does, he does! Don’t you, Sleet?”
With a shrug Sleet said, “You know that my loathing of Metamorphs is not entirely of my own making, but was laid upon me in a sending—a sending out of that very land that lies ahead of us. But apart from that: I think their lives are forfeit, yes, for the damage they have already done. I make no apology for believing that.”
“And you would massacre millions of people for the crimes of our leaders? Sleet, Sleet, you are more than a threat to our civilization than ten thousand Metamorphs!”
Color surged to Sleet’s pale fleshless cheeks, but he said nothing.
“You are offended by that,” Valentine said. “I meant no offense.”
In a low voice Sleet said, “The Coronal need not ask the pardon of the bloodthirsty barbarian who serves him, my lord.”
“I had no desire to mock you. Only to disagree with you.”
“Then let us disagree,” said Sleet. “If I were Coronal, I would kill them all.”
“But I am Coronal—at least in some parts of this world. And so long as I am, I will search for ways of winning this war that fall short of exterminations and eradications. Is that acceptable to you, Sleet?”
“Whatever the Coronal wishes is acceptable to me, and you know it, my lord. I tell you only what I would do if I were Coronal.”
“May the Divine spare you from that fate,” said Valentine, with a faint smile.
“And you, my lord, from the need to meet violence with violence, for I know it is not in your nature,” responded Sleet, smiling even more faintly. He offered a formal salute. “We will be arriving shortly in Tolaghai,” he said, “and I must make a great many arrangements for our accommodations. May I have leave to withdraw, my lord?”
As Sleet moved off down the deck, Valentine stared after him a moment; then, shading his eyes against the harsh blaze of the sun, he stared into the wind at the southern continent, now a dark massive shape sprawling on the horizon.
Suvrael! The name alone evoked a shiver!
He had never expected to come here: the stepchild among Majipoor’s continents, forgotten, neglected, a sparsely populated place of barren and forbidding wastelands, almost entirely bleak and arid, so little like the rest of Majipoor as to seem almost like a slice of some other planet. Though millions of people dwelled here, clustered in half a dozen cities scattered through the least uninhabitable regions of the place, Suvrael for centuries had maintained only the most perfunctory of ties with the two main continents. When officials of the central government were sent off for a tour of duty there, they regarded it virtually as a penal sentence. Few Coronals had ever visited it. Valentine had heard that Lord Tyeveras had been there, on one of his several grand processionals, and he thought that Lord Kinniken once had done the same. And of course there was the famous exploit of Dekkeret, roaming the Desert of Stolen Dreams in the company of the founder of the Barjazid dynasty, but that had happened long before he had become Coronal.
Out of Suvrael came only three things that impinged on the life of Majipoor in any important way. One was wind: out of Suvrael at all months of the year poured a torrent of searing air that fell brutally upon the southern shores of Alhanroel and Zimroel and rendered them nearly as disagreeable as Suvrael itself. Another was meat: on the western side of the desert continent, mists rising from the sea drifted inland to sustain a vast grassland where cattle were raised for shipment to the other continents. And the third great export of Suvrael was dreams. For a thousand years now the Barjazids had held sway as Powers of the realm from their great domain inland of Tolaghai: with the aid of thought-amplifying devices, whose secret they jealously guarded, they filled the world with their sendings, stern and troublesome infiltrations of the soul that sought and found anyone who had done injury to a fellow citizen, or even was merely contemplating it. In their harsh and austere way the Barjazids were the consciences of the world, and they long had been the rod and the scourge by which the Coronal and the Pontifex and the Lady of the Isle were able to sustain their more benign and gentle mode of government.