The Metamorphs, when they made their first abortive try at insurrection early in Valentine’s reign, had understood the power of the King of Dreams, and when the head of the Barjazids, old Simonan, had fallen ill, they had cunningly substituted one of their own in the place of the dying man. Which had led then to the usurpation of Lord Valentine’s throne by Simonan’s youngest son Dominin, though he had never suspected that the one who had urged him into that rash adventure was not his true father but a Metamorph counterfeit.
And yes, Valentine thought, Sleet was right: how strange indeed that the Coronal now should be turning to the Barjazids almost as a suppliant, when his throne was once more in jeopardy.
He had come almost accidentally to Suvrael. In making their retreat from Piurifayne, Valentine and his party had taken a sharp southeasterly route toward the sea, for it would clearly have been unwise to go northeast to rebellious Piliplok, and the central part of the Gihorna coast was without cities or harbors. They emerged finally close by the southern tip of eastern Zimroel, in the isolated province known as Bellatule, a humid tropical land of tall saw-edged grasses, spice-muck swamps, and feathered serpents.
The people of Bellatule were Hjorts, mainly: sober, glum-faced folk with bulging eyes and vast mouths filled with rows of rubbery chewing-cartilage. Most of them earned their livelihoods in the shipping trade, receiving manufactured goods from all over Majipoor and forwarding them to Suvrael in return for cattle. Since the recent worldwide upheavals had caused a sharp drop in manufacturing output and a nearly total breakdown in the traffic between provinces, the merchants of Bellatule were finding their trade greatly diminished; but at least there had been no famines, because the province was generally self-sufficient in its food supply, depending largely on its bountiful fisheries, and such little agriculture as was practiced there had been untouched by the blights afflicting other regions. Bellatule seemed calm and had remained loyal to the central government.
Valentine had hoped to take ship there for the Isle, in order to confer on matters of strategy with his mother. But the shipmasters of Bellatule warned him sternly against making the voyage to the Isle just now. “No ship’s gone north from here in months,” they told him. “It’s the dragons: they’re running crazy out there, smashing anything that sails up the coast or across toward the Archipelago. A voyage north or east while that’s going on would be suicide and nothing else.” It might be six or eight months more, they believed, before the last of the dragon swarms that lately had rounded the southeastern corner of Zimroel had completed their journey into northern waters and the maritime lanes were open again.
The prospect of being trapped in remote and obscure Bellatule appalled Valentine. Going back into Piurifayne seemed pointless, and making any sort of overland trek around the Metamorph province into the vast middle of the continent would be risky and slow. But there was one other option. “We can take you to Suvrael, my lord,” the shipmasters said. “The dragons have not entered the southern waters at all and the route remains untroubled.” Suvrael? At first consideration the idea was bizarre. But then Valentine thought, Why not? The aid of the Barjazids might be valuable; certainly it ought not be scorned out of hand. And perhaps there was some sea route out of the southern continent to the Isle, or to Alhanroel, that would take him beyond the zone infested by the unruly sea dragons. Yes. Yes.
So, then: Suvrael. The voyage was a swift one. And now the fleet of Bellatule merchantmen, gliding steadily southward against the scorching wind, began its entry into Tolaghai harbor.
The city baked in the late afternoon heat. It was a dismal place, a featureless clutter of mud-colored buildings a story or two high, stretching on and on along the shore and interminably back toward the ridge of low hills that marked the boundary between the coastal plain and the brutal interior desert. As the royal party was escorted ashore, Carabella glanced at Valentine in consternation. He offered her an encouraging smile, but without much conviction. Castle Mount seemed just then to be not ten thousand miles away, but ten million.
But five magnificent floaters ornamented with bold stripes of purple and yellow, the colors of the King of Dreams, waited in the courtyard of the customs house. Guards in livery of the same colors stood before them; and, as Valentine and Carabella approached, a tall, powerful-looking man with a thick black beard lightly flecked with gray emerged from one of the floaters and began to walk slowly toward them, limping slightly.
Valentine remembered that limp well, for it once had been his. As had the body that the black-bearded man once wore: for this was Dominin Barjazid, the former usurper, by whose orders Lord Valentine had been cast into the body of some unknown golden-haired man so that the Barjazid, taking Valentine’s own body for his own, might rule in Valentine’s guise on Castle Mount. And the limp was the doing of the young Valentine of long ago, when he had smashed his leg in a foolish accident while riding with Elidath in the pygmy forest by Amblemorn on the Mount.
“My lord, welcome,” said Dominin Barjazid with great warmth. “You do us a high honor by this visit, for which we have hoped so many years.”
Most submissively he offered Valentine the starburst gesture—with trembling hands, the Coronal observed. Valentine was far from unmoved himself. For it was a strange and disturbing experience once again to see his first body, now in the possession of another. He had not cared to undergo the risk of having that body back, after the defeat of Dominin, but all the same it stirred a mighty confusion in him to see another’s soul looking outward through his eyes. And also it stirred him to see the onetime usurper now so wholly redeemed and cleansed of his treasons and so genuine in his hospitality.
There had been some who had wanted Dominin put to death for his crime. But Valentine had never been willing to countenance such talk. Perhaps some barbarian king on some remote prehistoric world might have had his enemies executed, but no crime—not even an attempt on a Coronal’s life—had ever drawn so severe a penalty on Majipoor. Besides, the fallen Dominin had collapsed into madness, his mind wholly shattered by the revelation that his father, the supposed King of Dreams, was in truth a Metamorph impostor.
It would have been senseless to impose any sort of punishment on such a ruined creature. Valentine, upon resuming his throne, had pardoned Dominin and had had him handed over to emissaries of his family, so that he might be returned to Suvrael. There he slowly mended. Some years afterward he had begged leave to come to the Castle to ask the Coronal’s forgiveness. “You have my pardon already,” Valentine had replied; but Dominin came anyway, and knelt most humbly and sincerely before him on audience day in the Confalume throne-room, and cleared the burden of treason from his soul.
Now, thought Valentine, the circumstances are greatly altered once again: for this is Dominin’s own domain, and I am little more than a fugitive in it.
Dominin said, “My royal brother Minax has sent me, my lord, to convey you to Palace Barjazid, where you are to be our guest. Will you ride with me in the lead floater?”