“And that is?”
“A wandering juggler. A free man. Why do you torment me this way, Deliamber?”
“I would gladly have you be a juggler,” the Vroon said gently. “I mean you no sorrow. But what one wants often has little connection with what may be marked out for one on the great scroll.”
“I will be a master juggler,” said Valentine, “and nothing more than that, and nothing less.”
“I wish you well,” Deliamber said courteously, and walked away.
Slowly Valentine let his breath escape. His entire body was tense and stiff, and he squatted and put his head down, stretching out first his arms and then his legs, trying to rid himself of these strange knots that had begun to invade him. Gradually he relaxed a little, but some residue of uneasiness remained, and the tension would not leave him. These tortured dreams, these squirming dragons in his soul, these portents and omens—
Carabella emerged from the wagon and stood above him as he stretched and twisted. “Let me help,” she said, crouching down beside him. She pushed him forward until he lay sprawled flat, and her powerful fingers dug into the taut muscles of his neck and back. Under her ministrations he grew somewhat less tense, yet his mood remained dark and troubled.
“The speaking didn’t help you?” she asked softly.
“No.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“I’d rather not,” he said.
“Whatever you prefer.” But she waited expectantly, her eyes alert, shining with warmth and compassion.
He said, “I barely understood the things the woman was telling me. And what I understood I can’t accept. But I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Whenever you do, Valentine, I’m here. Whenever you feel the need to tell someone—”
“Not right now. Perhaps never.” He sensed her reaching toward him, eager to heal the pain in his soul as she had grappled with the tensions in his body. He could feel the love flooding from her to him. Valentine hesitated. He did battle within himself. Haltingly he said, “The things the speaker told me—”
“Yes.”
No. To talk of these things was to give them reality, and they had no reality—they were absurdities, they were fantasies, they were foolish vapors.
“—were nonsense,” Valentine said. “What she said isn’t worth discussing.”
Carabella’s eyes reproached him. He looked away from her.
“Can you accept that?” he asked roughly. “She was a crazy old woman and she told me a lot of nonsense, and I don’t want to discuss it, not with you, not with anyone. It was my speaking. I don’t have to share it. I—” He saw the shock on her face. In another moment he would be babbling. He said in an entirely different tone of voice, “Get the juggling balls, Carabella.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
“But—”
“I want you to teach me the exchange between jugglers, the passing of the balls. Please.”
“We’re due to leave in half an hour!”
“Please,” he said urgently.
She nodded and sprinted up the steps of the wagon, returning a moment later with the balls. They moved apart, to an open place where they would have room, and Carabella flipped three of the balls to him. She was frowning.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Learning new techniques when the mind is troubled is never a good idea.”
“It might calm me,” he said. “Let’s try.”
“As you wish.” She began to juggle the three balls she held, by way of warming up. Valentine imitated her, but his hands were cold, his fingers unresponsive, and he had trouble doing this simplest of all routines, dropping the balls several times. Carabella said nothing. She continued to juggle while he launched one abortive cascade after another. His temper grew edgy. She would not tell him again that this was the wrong moment for attempting such things, but her silence, her look, even her stance, all said it more forcefully than words. Valentine desperately sought to strike a rhythm. You have fallen from a high place, he heard the dream-speaker saying, and now you must begin to climb back to it. He bit his lip. How could he concentrate, with such things intruding? Hand and eye, he thought, hand and eye, forget all else. Hand and eye. Nevertheless, Lord Valentine, that ascent awaits you, and it is not I who lays it on you. No. No. No. No. His hands shook. His fingers were rods of ice. He made a false move and the balls went scattering.
“Please, Valentine,” Carabella said mildly.
“Get the clubs.”
“It’ll be even worse with them. Do you want to break a finger?”
“The clubs,” he said.
Shrugging, she gathered up the balls and went into the wagon. Sleet emerged, yawned, nodded a casual greeting to Valentine. The morning was beginning. One of the Skandars appeared and crawled under the wagon to adjust something. Carabella came out bearing six clubs. Behind her was Shanamir, who gave Valentine a quick salute and went to feed the mounts. Valentine took the clubs. Conscious of Sleet’s cool eyes on him, he put himself into the juggling position, threw one club high, and botched the catch. No one spoke. Valentine tried again. He managed to get the three clubs into sequence, but for no more than thirty seconds; then they spilled, one landing unpleasantly on his toe. Valentine caught sight of Autifon Deliamber watching the scene from a distance. He picked up the clubs again. Carabella, facing him, patiently juggled her three, studiously ignoring him. Valentine threw the clubs, got them started, dropped one, started again, dropped two, started yet again, made a faulty grab, and bent his left thumb badly out of place.
He tried to pretend that nothing had gone wrong. Once more he picked up the clubs, but this time Sleet came over and took Valentine lightly by both wrists.
“Not now,” he said. “Give me the clubs.”
“I want to practice.”
“Juggling isn’t therapy. You’re upset about something, and it’s ruining your timing. If you keep this up, you can do damage to your rhythms that will take you weeks to undo.”
Valentine tried to pull free, but Sleet held him with surprising strength. Carabella, impassive, went on juggling a few feet away. After an instant Valentine yielded. With a shrug he surrendered the clubs to Sleet, who scooped them up and took them back into the wagon. A moment later Zalzan Kavol stepped outside, elaborately scratched his pelt fore and aft with several of his hands as though searching in it for fleas, and boomed, “Everybody in! Let’s move it along!”
14
The road to the Ghayrog city of Dulorn took them eastward through lush, placid farming country, green and fertile under the eye of the summer sun. Like much of Majipoor this was densely populated terrain, but intelligent planning had created wide agricultural zones bordered by busy strip-cities, and so the day went, through an hour’s worth of farms, an hour’s worth of town, an hour of farms, an hour of town. Here in the Dulorn Rift, the broad sloping lowland east of Falkynkip, the climate was particularly suited for farming, for the Rift was open at its northern end to the polar rainstorms that constantly drenched Majipoor’s temperate arctic, and the subtropical heat was made moderate by gentle, predictable precipitation. The growing season lasted year round: this was the time for harvesting the sweet yellow stajja tubers, from which a bread was made, and for planting such fruits as niyk and glein.
The beauty of the landscape lightened Valentine’s bleak outlook. By easy stages he ceased to think about things that did not bear thinking about, and allowed himself to enjoy the unending procession of wonders that was the planet of Majipoor. The black slender trunks of niyk-trees planted in rigid and complex geometrical patterns danced against the horizon; teams of Hjort and human farmers in rural costumes moved like invading armies across the stajja-fields, plucking the heavy tubers; now the wagon glided quietly through a district of lakes and streams, and now through one where curious blocks of white granite jutted tooth-fashion from the smooth grassy plains.
At midday they entered a place of particularl
y strange beauty, one of the many public forest preserves. At the gateway a sign glowing with green luminosity proclaimed:
BLADDERTREE PRESERVE
Located here is an outstanding virgin tract of Dulorn Bladdertree. These trees manufacture lighter-than-air gases which keep their upper branches buoyant. As they approach maturity their trunks and root systems atrophy, and they become epiphytic in nature, dependent almost entirely on the atmosphere for nourishment. Occasionally in extreme old age a tree will sever its contact with the ground entirely and drift off to found a new colony far away. Bladdertrees are found both in Zimroel and in Alhanroel but have become rare in recent times. This grove set aside for the people of Majipoor by official decree, 12th Pont. Confalume Cor. Lord Prestimion.
The jugglers followed the forest trail silently on foot for some minutes without seeing anything unusual. Then Carabella, who led the way, passed through a thicket of dense blue-black bushes and cried out suddenly in surprise.
Valentine ran to her side. She was standing in wonder in the midst of marvels.
Bladdertrees were everywhere, in all stages of their growth. The young ones, no higher than Deliamber or Carabella, were curious, ungainly looking shrublets with thick, swollen branches of a peculiar silvery hue that emerged at awkward angles from squat fleshy trunks. But in trees fifteen or twenty feet tall, the trunks had begun to attenuate and the limbs to inflate, so that now the bulging boughs appeared top-heavy and precarious, and in even older trees the trunks had shriveled to become nothing more than rough, scaly guy-ropes by which the trees’ buoyant crowns were fastened to the ground. High overhead they floated and bobbed in the gentlest breeze, leafless, turgid, the branches puffed up like balloons. The silvery color of the young branches became, in maturity, a brilliant translucent gleam, so that the trees seemed like glass models of themselves, shining brightly in the shafts of sunlight through which they danced and weaved. Even Zalzan Kavol seemed moved by the strangeness and beauty of the trees. The Skandar approached one of the tallest, its gleaming swollen crown floating far overhead, and carefully, almost reverently, encircled its taut narrow stem with his fingers. Valentine thought Zalzan Kavol might be minded to snap the stem and send the bladdertree floating away like a glittering kite, but no, the Skandar seemed merely to be marking the slenderness of the stem, and after a moment he stepped back, muttering to himself.
For a long while they wandered among the bladdertrees, studying the little ones, observing the stages of growth, the gradual narrowing of the trunks and bloating of the limbs. The trees were leafless and no flowers were apparent: it was difficult to believe that they were vegetable creations at all, so vitreous did they seem. It was a place of magic. The darkness of his earlier mood now seemed a mystery to Valentine. On a planet where such beauty abounded, how could one have any need for brooding or fretting?
“Here,” Carabella called. “Catch!”
She had gauged the change in his spirits and had gone to the wagon for the juggling balls. Now she threw three of them to him and he went easily into the basic cascade, and she the same, in a clearing surrounded by glistening bladdertrees.
Carabella stood facing him, just a few feet away. They juggled independently for three or four minutes, until a symmetry of phase encompassed them and they were throwing in identical rhythms. Now they juggled together, mirroring one another, Valentine feeling a deeper calmness settling over him with each cycle of throws: he was balanced, centered, tuned. The bladdertrees, stirring lightly in the wind, showered him with dazzles of refracted light. The world was silent and serene.
“When I tell you,” Carabella said quietly, “throw the ball from your right hand to my left, at precisely the height you’d throw it if you were giving it to yourself. One…two…three…four…five…pass!” And on pass he threw to her on a firm straight arc, and she to him. He managed, just barely, to catch the incoming ball and work it into the rhythm, continuing his own cascade, and counting off until it was time to pass again. Back—forth—back—forth—pass—
It was hard at first, the hardest juggling he had ever done, but yet he could do it, he was doing it without blundering, and after the first few passes he was doing it without awkwardness, smoothly exchanging throws with Carabella as though he had practiced this routine with her for months. He knew that this was extraordinary, that no one was supposed to master intricate patterns like this on the first try: but as before, he moved swiftly toward the core of the experience, placed himself in a region where nothing existed but hand and eye and the moving balls, and failure became not merely impossible but inconceivable.
“Hoy!” Sleet cried. “Over here now!”
He too was juggling. Momentarily Valentine was baffled by this multiplication of the task, but he forced himself to remain in automatic mode, to throw when it seemed appropriate, to catch what came to him, and constantly to keep the balls that remained to him moving between his hands. So when Sleet and Carabella began to exchange balls he was able to stay in the pattern, and catch from Sleet instead of Carabella. “One—two—one—two—” Sleet called, taking up a position between Valentine and Carabella and making himself the leader of the group, feeding the balls first to one, then to the other, in a rhythm that remained rock-steady for a long while and then accelerated comically to a pace far beyond Valentine’s abilities. Suddenly there were dozens of balls in the air, or so it seemed, and Valentine grasped wildly at all of them and lost them all and collapsed, laughing, onto the warm springy turf.
“So there are some limits to your skills, eh?” Sleet said gaily. “Good! Good! I was beginning to wonder whether you were mortal!”
Valentine chuckled. “Mortal enough, I fear.”
“Lunch!” Deliamber called.
He presided over a pot of stew hanging from a tripod above a glowglobe. The Skandars, who had been doing some practice of their own in another part of the grove, appeared as if conjured from the soil and helped themselves with ungracious eagerness. Vinorkis too was quick to fill his plate. Valentine and Carabella were the last to be served, but he hardly cared. He was sweating the good sweat of exertion well exerted, and his blood was pounding and his skin was tingling, and his long night of unsettling dreams seemed far behind him, something he had left in Falkynkip.
All that afternoon the wagon sped eastward. This was definitely Ghayrog country now, inhabited almost exclusively by that glossy-skinned reptilian-looking race. When nightfall came the troupe was still half a day’s journey from the provincial seat of Dulorn, where Zalzan Kavol had arranged some sort of theatrical booking. Deliamber announced that a country inn lay not far ahead, and they went on until they came to it.
“Share my bed,” Carabella said to Valentine.
In the corridor going to their chamber they passed Deliamber, who paused a moment, touching their hands with tentacle-tips and murmuring, “Dream well.”
“Dream well,” Carabella repeated automatically.
But Valentine did not offer the customary response with her, for the touch of the Vroon sorcerer’s flesh to his had set the dragon stirring within his soul again, and he was disquieted and grave, as he had been before the miracle of the bladdertree grove. It was as though Deliamber had appointed himself the enemy of Valentine’s tranquillity, arousing in him inarticulate fears and apprehensions against which he had no defense. “Come,” Valentine muttered hoarsely to Carabella.
“In a hurry, are you?” She laughed a light tinkling laugh, but it died away quickly when she saw his expression. “Valentine, what is it? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“May I be allowed moods, as other human beings sometimes have?”
“When your face changes like that, it’s like a shadow passing over the sun. And so suddenly—”
“Something about Deliamber,” Valentine said, “disturbs and alarms me. When he touched me—”
“Deliamber’s harmless. Mischievous, like all wizards, especially Vroonish ones, especial
ly small ones. There’s dark mischief in very small people. But you have nothing to fear from Deliamber.”
“Truly so?” He closed the door, and she was in his arms.
“Truly,” she said. “You have nothing to fear from anyone, Valentine. Everyone who sees you loves you. There’s no one who would injure you in this world.”
“How good to believe that,” he said, as she drew him down on the bed.
They embraced, and his lips touched hers gently, and then with more force, and soon their bodies were entwined. He had not made love with her for over a week, and he had looked forward to it with intense longing and delight. But the incident in the hallway had robbed him of desire, had left him numb and isolated, and that mystified and depressed him. Carabella must have sensed the coolness in him, but evidently she chose to ignore it, for her lithe energetic body sought his with fervor and passion. He forced himself to respond, and then after a minute he was no longer forcing, was nearly as enthusiastic as she, but still he stood outside his own sensations, a mere spectator as they made love. It was over quickly, and the light was out, although moonlight entering their window cast a harsh chilly glow over their faces.
“Dream well,” Carabella murmured.
“Dream well,” he replied.
She was asleep almost at once. He held her, keeping her warm slim body close against him, feeling no sleepiness himself. After a time he rolled away and drew himself into his favorite sleep position, on his back, arms folded across his chest, but no sleep came, only fitful dreamless dozing. He diverted himself by counting blaves, by imagining himself juggling in patterns of surpassing intricacy with Sleet and Carabella, by trying to relax his entire body one muscle at a time. Nothing worked. Wide awake, he propped himself on one arm and lay looking down at Carabella, lovely in the moonlight.
She was dreaming. A muscle flickered in her cheek; her eyes moved beneath their lids; her breasts rose and fell in jagged rhythms; she put her knuckles to her lips, murmured something in a thick unintelligible voice, drew her knees tightly to her chest. Her lean bare form looked so beautiful that Valentine wanted to reach out to her, to stroke her cool thighs, to touch his lips lightly to her small rigid nipples, but no, it was uncouth to interrupt a dreamer; it was an unforgivable breach of civility. So he was content to watch her, and to love her from afar, and to savor the reawakened desire that he felt.