Majipoor Chronicles

"Valentine—"

Valentine glanced boldly at his brother and laughed. "I'll protect you against evil, Voriax! Have no fear!" And in a lower voice he said, "We've traveled alone long enough, brother. I'm hungry for company."

"So I see," murmured Voriax.

But the witch was attractive and Valentine was insistent and shortly Voriax appeared to grow less uneasy about her presence; he carved a third portion of meat for her, and she went into the forest and came back with fruits of the pingla and showed them how to roast them to make their juice run into the meat and give a pleasingly dark and smoky flavor to it. Valentine felt his head swimming somewhat after a time, and he doubted that the few sips of wine he had had could be responsible, so quite probably it was the juice of the pinglas; the thought crossed his mind that there might be some treachery here, but he rejected it, for the dizziness that was overtaking him was an amiable and even exciting one and he saw no peril in it. He looked across at Voriax, wondering if his brother's more suspicious nature would arise to darken their feast, but Voriax, if he was feeling the effects of the juice at all, appeared only to be made more congenial by it: he laughed loudly at everything, he swayed and clapped his thighs, he leaned close to the witch-woman and shouted raucous things into her face. Valentine helped himself to more meat. Night was falling, now, a sudden blackness settling over the camp, stars abruptly blazing out of a sky lit only by one small sliver of moon. Valentine imagined he could hear distant singing and discordant chanting, though it seemed to him that Ghiseldorn must be too far away for such sounds to carry through the dense woods: a fantasy, he decided, stirred by these intoxicating fruits.

The fire burned low. The air grew cool. They huddled close together, Valentine and Voriax and Tanunda, and body pressed against body in what was at first an i

Valentine had never known so wild a night. Whatever drug was in the pingla-juice worked on him to free him of all inhibition and to spur his energies, and with Voriax it must have been the same. To Valentine the night became a sequence of fragmentary images, of sequences of events unlinked to others. Now he lay sprawled with Tanunda's head in his lap, stroking her gleaming brow while Voriax embraced her, and he listened to their mingled gasps with a strange pleasure; and then it was he who held the witch tight, and Voriax was somewhere close at hand but he could not tell where; and then Tanunda lay sandwiched between the two men for some giddy grappling; and somehow they went from there to the stream, and bathed and splashed and laughed, and ran naked and shivering to the dying fire, and made love again, Valentine and Tanunda, Voriax and Tanunda, Valentine and Tanunda and Voriax, flesh calling to flesh until the first grayish strands of morning broke the darkness.

All three were awake as the sun burst into the sky. Great swathes of the night were gone from Valentine's memory, and he wondered if he had slept unknowing from time to time, but now his mind was weirdly clear, his eyes were wide, as though this were the middle of the day. Voriax was the same, and the gri

"Now," she said, "the telling of fortunes!"

Voriax made an uneasy sound, a rasping of the throat, but Valentine said quickly, "Yes! Yes! Prophesy for us!"

"Gather the pingla-seeds," she said.

They were scattered all about, glossy black nuts with splashes of red on them. Valentine scooped up a dozen of them, and even Voriax collected a few; these they gave to Tanunda, who had found a handful also, and she began to roll them in her fists and scatter them like dice on the ground. Five times she cast them, and scooped them up and cast again; then she cupped her hands and allowed a line of seeds to fall in a circle, and threw the remaining ones within that circle, and peered close a long while, squatting with face to the ground to study the patterns. At length she looked up. The wanton deviltry was gone from her face; she looked strangely altered, very solemn and some years older.

"You are high-born men," she said. "But that could be seen from the way you carry yourselves. The seeds tell me much more. I see great perils ahead for both of you."

Voriax looked away, scowling, and spat.

"You are skeptical, yes," she said. "But you each face dangers. You—" she indicated Voriax—"must be wary of forests, and you—" a glance at Valentine—"of water, of oceans." She frowned. "And of much else, I think, for your destiny is a mysterious one and I am unable to read it clearly. Your line is broken — not by death, but by something stranger, some change, a great transformation—" She shook her head. "It is puzzling to me. I can be of no other help."

Voriax said, "Beware of forests, beware of oceans — beware of nonsense!"

"You will be king," said Tanunda.

Voriax caught his breath sharply. The anger fled his face and he gaped at her.

Valentine smiled and clapped his brother's back and said, "You see? You see?"

"And you also will be king," the witch said.

"What?" Valentine was bewildered. "What foolishness is this? Your seeds deceive you!"

"If they do, it is for the first time," said Tanunda. She gathered the fallen seeds and flung them quickly into the stream, and wrapped her strips of leather about her body. "A king and a king, and I have enjoyed my night's sport with you both, your majesties-to-be. Shall you go on to Ghiseldorn today?"

"I think not," said Voriax, without looking at her.

"Then we will not meet again. Farewell!"

She moved swiftly toward the forest. Valentine stretched out a hand toward her, but said nothing, only squeezed the air helplessly with his trembling fingers, and then she was gone. He turned toward Voriax, who was scuffing angrily at the embers of the fire. All the joy of the night's revelry had fled.

"You were right," Valentine said. "We should not have let her dabble in prophecy at our expense. Forests! Oceans! And this madness of our both being kings!"

"What does she mean?" asked Voriax. "That we will share the throne as we shared her body this night past?"

"It will not be," said Valentine.

"Never has there been joint rule in Majipoor. It makes no sense! It is unthinkable! If I am to be king, Valentine, how are you also to be king?"

"You are not listening to me. I tell you, pay no attention to it, brother. She was a wild woman who gave us a night of drunken pleasure. There's no truth in prophecy."

"She said I was to be king."

"And so you probably shall be. But it was only a lucky guess."

"And if not? And if she is a genuine seer?"

"Why, then, you will be king!"

"And you? If she spoke truly about me, then you too must be Coronal, and how—"