Valentine's Memoirs – The Early Days
Two weeks have I sat here at this bastard Pattern in Brandspace. I have learned a fair amount—more than I expected, less than I hoped. It has been a welcome respite from activity of late, a break from what has been a busy life ever since King Random sent some of us on a fool's errand of escort into the heart of the shadow hurricane.
Now I am taking a break from that break. I have found a corner of shadow filled with little but quiet and will use it, perhaps, to set some of it all down. Why? I haven't the faintest idea. It's not as if I fear losing any of my accumulated knowledge and insight—my technical notes are complete and many times the length of what this will probably become. Chalk it up to an exercise in completeness of being, I suppose. A couple weeks of intense Pattern-research may just leave the expressive spirit parched. On my darker days I sometimes think that, while I know much more about the universe than I did a year ago, I feel it less. A silly sentiment, I know, but maybe this little exercise will appease it.
I was born in a shadow called Woodmere. Raised in a small village of farmers and traders, knowing that I was an orphan, but knowing little else but stories of my parents which, after not much time, I realized weren't the truth. None of this mattered a great deal—child rearing was largely communal in the village anyway, and by the time I was 10, having proven responsible, I was allowed to tend to myself.
For an Amberite, the prospect of shifting without knowledge of the Pattern is dim. The only reason the issue interests me as anything more than an aberration is that I myself accomplished it, though I didn't know what I was doing at the time. I wanted to see a place stories told of—the magnificent palace in the capital city of Woodmere, a many-spired thing by the sea that I had seen only in crude paintings. I knew it lay to the west.
I wanted to see it very badly. I was consumed with an intense curiosity about anything and everything that lay beyond the borders of my tiny village. According to those whom I asked, it was a journey of three weeks. On the fifth day, when I rounded a hill to see the sea and the city and the palace before me, I was shocked.
Of course it wasn't the same palace or the same city. The people there had never heard of my village, and their language was strange. The sky was a somewhat deeper shade of blue than that to which I was accustomed.
I spent a week in that strange city, living on the streets, before hunger drove me home. It took me the full three weeks to return, or maybe just a little less. Everyone was worried about me, wondered where I had gone. Of course they didn't believe I had been to the capital city, because, from their perspective, there was no way I could have gone back there and returned, let alone stay a week.
I was fourteen before anything like this happened again. By then the others in the village considered me an odd bird—I kept to myself too much for their tastes, and spent too much time wandering the forests alone. I couldn't have put a name to what was eating at me then, but my dreams were filled with long journeys to exotic places. I also knew, however, that I would not be able to make my fortune abroad without skills. The only craftsperson in the village who would apprentice me, though, was the tailor, who was already halfway toward being the town outcast himself. So I learned the arts of tailoring and clothesmaking and related skills. On my seventeenth birthday I bid farewell to the villagers. My only real remorse there was parting with the young women that had livened up my nights in secret—good, wholesome girls of the village that I was lucky enough to charm. I left with some examples of my own wares to sell along the way, and what money as I had been able to save.
I no longer remember what direction I left in. For the next four or five years I wandered from town to town, city to city, discovering that there was more to the world than even the most fantastic stories in the village had described. I lingered for a time in a place—a shadow, I now realize, of course—far different from Woodmere. It was called Falkenstein, where the buildings in the cities were of steel and where nations fought with armies of crude, gear-crammed robots. It was there, ironically, that I found M & Sons Tailor Shop. M lived and worked in an old quarter of the city, and tailoring had been in his family for generations. I worked in his shop for several months, learning enough about the craft of a tailor to keep me in business for a lifetime.
And a year later, in a different city, once I rounded a strangely familiar corner and saw another M & Sons Tailor Shop, I began to think up some theories about the nature of the universe. I had no word for Amber, or Shadow, but I had begun to wonder if my subconscious desires and thoughts were somehow steering the world before me. I often mused that I was asleep or in a coma and dreaming a long dream. A whole range of solipsistic possibilities came to me too, especially after the months I spent in a university in Falkenstein or a place like it, taking philosophy classes.
I thought that if my unconscious steered things, how much easier the conscious mind? And I found I could shape the reality around me. Only in the tiniest ways, though—I would spend days trying to make some deliberate change to the sky or to the city and wear myself to exhaustion. Then, some time later, I would arrive in the place I had intended quite by accident.
Years came and went, as did places. I left the cities of steel and dwelt in places closer to my home. I might well have done this for the rest of my life. But one morning, I awoke in a forest clearing and saw something in the sky. Not an object, but its color or tone, or the way leaves flitted about me through a strong breeze. I suspect now that what I achieved then was an intuition of Amber. Maybe the weather made the sky look more like Amber's. Maybe that place had a greater share of reality due to some Amberite passing through. Maybe it was only a matter of time before such an insight fell upon me. At any rate, for the first time I began to believe that behind or before this constantly shifting world would be a center, a place better or stronger or more real than the others. Again, I'm probably ascribing to myself thoughts that only came later. At the time, best as I can recall, I was mostly afraid.
After that moment, though, my every step, conscious or unconscious, took me closer to Amber. I was something of a mad traveler, then, possessed with the knowledge that I was going somewhere but understanding little else. I ate little and grew gaunt. I was ambushed by bandits and nearly died, but rallied in a remarkable recovery in a fishing village by a magenta ocean. On my twenty-fifth birthday I achieved the Golden Circle kingdom of Alitraine.
At the time I thought it was the place I sought. It is a coastal kingdom, with nearly impassable mountains inland that leave room for little else. Its shipwrights pride themselves on building unnaturally large vessels, and their engineering in doing so is indeed ingenious. They are ruled by an oligarchy of merchant lords that vies for power with the courts, in which all the judges are female and bald. I discovered these things only gradually, for my arrival in Alitraine was in a mining town far from the port cities, where I lingered for some months thanks to the uncomplicated attractions of the magistrate's daughter.
But when I got to one of the ports and saw the sea and felt the breeze I knew that I was close but not quite there. I signed on to a ship and was miserable for some time until I got my sea legs, and even then it was not particularly appealing work to me. But toward the end of my tour the ship anchored at Amber. I still remember the first view of the mountain. A trick of the clouds or mist hid the castle from my sight until we were almost ashore, but when I saw it I knew I had arrived.
When I saw Messalina for the first time she was walking with her father from the town back to the castle. I had spent some days in town by then; I knew them for some of the royalty of Amber, these princes and princesses spoken of in such strange terms by the populace. Legendary warriors. Travelers to far realms. The first time it occurred to me that the stories bore some resemblance to my own experience – unsual strength and ability, and the traveling thing – I thought I was being horribly conceited. Had it not been for Messalina, it may not have even occurred to me to sneak into the castle. Opening a tailor shop there in the city would have been quite fine enough. What a strange life that might have been!
But I did sneak into the castle. I suppose it was her beauty, coupled with my fanciful dreams that we were somehow “kindred spirits,” that drove me on. Whatever the cause, I was willing to do anything to see her.
Getting in was surprisingly easy. Mostly what it took was patience. I watched the comings and goings of the guards, thought about knocking one out and taking their uniform, but eventually realized that making a uniform was easier. That was just a matter of befriending a local tailor and using his facilities after hours. Most times an extra guard is somewhat conspicuous, but not after General Quarters Drills, every month or so, where all the guards are inspected somewhat ceremoniously out front and clamber through the main gates in a chaotic mass when it's all done. That's when I slipped in. Once there, non-guard garb was much safer. As long as I appeared to know what I was about, and stayed out of the way of the highest-level guards (and certainly the princes themselves), all was well.
After a day or so, I found her alone in the gardens, on a beautiful, clear night. I had rehearsed the moment a thousand times. She was looking at the moon. I approached.
“The moonlight becomes my lady well,” I said. “I have followed the whispering of the flowers here. They promised me a sight of great beauty.”
“Who the fuck are you?” she replied.
So from the beginning it was an uphill battle. I had to change strategies to keep from getting beaten head to toe and kicked out of the castle, let alone making any headway into Messalina's heart. Fortunately I had an ace up my sleeve—I could drop cryptic comments about my travels. These gained a great deal more mileage than I thought they would. When she learned that I had, since my youth, been able to travel from place to place in strange fashion, passing, it sometimes seemed, to places unheard of in the places I arrived, she was curious indeed. That earned me a second choice, which I didn't squander.
We had some strange conversations that only make sense to me now, in retrospect. She was concerned that I was of the blood, but when she learned, through oblique inquiries, that I had never been to Amber before and had never walked the Pattern (or even heard of it), she concluded that I was an aberration, but not an Amberite. She had been spending a great deal of time in Amber at her father's request, though, and was somewhat bored as a result. So she welcomed the distractions of a stranger so obviously infatuated with her.
At the time I had only a dim idea about what we were actually talking about. I was far more concerned with making a good impression. The next fortnight was a sweet time, filled with walks in the garden, long conversations, secret intimacies. And she was a princess . I could hardly believe my fortune. The things I was learning from her about Amber and the world were only secondary in my mind. Part of me knew that for her, this relationship was a fanciful tryst, an amusing departure from the norm. I didn't mind a bit.
At some point there was a subtle shift. I don't pretend to know her mind or heart, but I suspect that the ironic distance a part of her had maintained, when it came to us , faded away. I've lived to long to bandy about phrases like “fallen in love,” but something happened there more than she predicted. As for me, it went the other way. By the Unicorn, I really was infatuated with her at first! Maybe even loved her. But she sensed my curiosity about the workings of Amber and, in a desire to make me happy, told me more than she probably should have, and in doing so unwittingly paved the way for me to leave her.
She told me about the Pattern. Not about it, per se—she merely mentioned that it existed, that it was important. That it could be “walked.” I felt, when I heard that, like I had felt back in Alitraine, or even before that—those moments when, despite my current happiness, I knew there was more to see.
By this time we had been glanced together by some of Messalina's uncles and aunts, apparently. Not her father, fortunately enough, but that was only going to be a matter of time. She spoke of leaving for Shadow, and she had told me enough by that point that I understand what she meant. I knew we would have to leave, but I didn't want to go without seeing the Pattern. I think all of that was happening at the same time as other troubles of hers—chafing under the yoke of elders who expected too much, granted too little freedom. It's a tendency I've had a chance to see more of since then, though one to which I've been exempt. In our heated preparations to leave the palace, I continued to pester her about the Pattern, the Pattern, always the Pattern. When the moment came and she caved in, agreed to take me there, I think it was because she just wanted it to get it out of the way so that we could leave. Or perhaps, at the time, because she was angry with her father and it might anger him. What I am trying to get at, I suppose, is that she wasn't stupid to do it. And I don't pretend to know how much or even whether she was smitten with me, and whether that had anything to do with it.
Then end result, whatever the cause, is the same. She took me there. We were in traveling clothes and had packs on our shoulders. Down the spiraling stairs, through the murky corridors. When I saw it, I didn't hesitate for even a moment. She had described it to me, talked about “walking” it, so I sought the place where the path began. I have thought back on that moment many times, even considered what it must have seemed like to Messalina. I must have appeared as a man possessed, and perhaps I was. She asked where I was walking. She said we should be going. She cautioned me not to stand so close. She ran toward me when she realized I meant to stop on it, saying that if I did I would die—
And I didn't die. I started the path. By the time I noticed her again I was well on the path, perhaps halfway through, and I glanced out to see her standing by the beginning of the path. At some point she had probably thought to follow after me, but decided against it. I could barely discern the tears staining her cheeks, and in that moment I wanted to respond in kind—felt that at least gesture would be appropriate to the situation. But there is little room when you're walking the Pattern for those kinds of outbursts, and even if I had the energy I don't know if I would have reciprocated her sorrow. With each step, even as I slowed, I felt like a bird whose cage door was opening.
When I achieved the middle I didn't even know the bit about going anywhere. I closed my eyes and cherished the new sensations in my mind. Some arbitrary memory triggered of a place in Falkenstein, a high observation spire at the edge of one of their great steel cities, overlooking the untamed wilderness. In the next instant I appeared there, and saw a new world about me. I took the stairs down from the top of the spire, and by the time I reached the bottom I was in another world altogether. In the next year or so, I hardly ever spent more than a day or two in what could be considered the same place.
Apparently my wanderlust is pretty common among Amberites who have newly walked the Pattern. They get their newfound freedom and set off to walk among shadows, to make themselves kings and princesses and whatever else they desire in the places they choose. Occasionally in dealing with my cousins I've had opportunities to see the places they've found, the people they've met. I saw countless people and places but never in my explorations did I really settle down or make any friends. Each place that I went to, after I had left, faded from memory. A few times I would circle back to revisit old Shadows, but it was more of an academic exercise, to see if I could get back to exactly the same place or only one that was a little different, or to see whether things I had left there still remained, whether things I had done there were remembered.
It was a year and a half, or thereabouts, before I started to wonder how Messalina was doing, and whether I had burned that bridge entirely or not. It had also occurred to me that a return to Amber would be helpful, and that another walk on the Pattern might answer any number of questions that had piled up in my head during my travels. But I had no idea how I might be received there, and imagined that I would be captured and imprisoned, perhaps executed, if I showed my face anywhere near the Castle. So instead I sought for Messalina in Shadow. It was my first try at that sort of thing specifically, and it took me quite a long time, but eventually I found her.
She was on a boat, a schooner, at sea. I never did remember to ask why. She wasn't alone—she introduced her traveling companion as Brigit. “A cousin of mine—and of yours, I suppose,” she said, somewhat icily. I did my best to start a conversation, with very little success. I was surprised at how eager I was to share some of my discoveries in Shadow with those who might be able to understand them. Brigit's ears proved more willing for that sort of talk, although the next time I saw her, Messalina had caught her up on our previous encounters, and she, too, was colder.
I learned two important things that day:
First, that I would not be killed if I returned to Amber—my impromptu walking of the Pattern wasn't exactly smiled upon, but blood was blood and I would be, in a way, even welcomed should I go there. Apparently there had been some curious discussion as to my parentage, as no one had stepped forward to claim me.
Second, that I was able to do things in Shadow that Brigit and Messalina weren't. Chalk it up to genetics, I suppose, though eighteen months of rather intense tinkering in Shadow certainly helped. Judging from their reactions to my stories, it was clear that I could move through Shadow faster than they, and that I noticed things about where I was that they didn't pick up on at all.
I left that meeting with more questions. It appeared that Amber was the center of the universe, the Pattern its anchor, but why there? What was the history? Obviously there was only one place to go. It took me some weeks of travel, but I found Amber again. This time I wasn't so sure the same trick would work to get me in the castle, though. Whether security was tighter or I was just more sensibly cautious, I don't know. I learned of Rebma while hanging around the city, even paid a brief visit, but things were stranger there and I saw even less of a chance to get to its reputed Pattern.
For the longest time it didn't even occur to me to try to shift Shadow in those places. Eventually I got around to it – a dismal failure, of course, but a highly educational one. That was when I first struck on the idea of concentrating on the Pattern really hard, which led to attempts to visualize it in my mind as I was concentrating on other things. My curiosity about the history of Amber was promptly sidetracked—I wandered back into Shadow to continue toying with these matters, until one day somewhere in there I raised a lens and held it before me, in my mind's eye. Since then I've found no one else who I know for certain did the same thing without training. Even Fiona and Bleys, from what I've gathered, learned what they knew from Dworkin.
Now then: I had noticed a little by then (and have noticed more since) that assorted genetic advantages tend to pass down the hereditary line in Amber just like anywhere else. So if I was such an uncanny natural at this whole Shadow-manipulation thing, who were my parents? Or parent—whichever one it was that came from Amber. It troubled me greatly that no one claimed me, until I learned enough of the history to know that it was at least possible that Oberon had other, unrecorded children—or that I might be the progeny of those Amberites who stay out of the way.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Out there in Shadow, working with the Pattern, none of this had really occurred to me yet. I was still in the throes of experimentation, testing the limits of my power. I was horrifically obsessive about this for another year or so, maybe more (I was adjusting time in Shadow in those days, and lost track). And then, to put it simply, I learned all I could. Or I got sick of learning. Or both.
Whatever the case, I started doing what is apparently more “natural” for Amberites—I started spending more time in specific Shadows, building up their strength, meeting people, getting into adventures, etc. There were a handful of Shadows I visited regularly in those days, but by far the most common was Agra. It was an opulent place, ruled by a thoroughly decadent Emperor. I arrived as a wandering tailor and impressed the nobility with some of my designs. Soon the Emperor appointed me one of his personal assistants—ignoble, I know, but I was having fun with it at the time. Over the months I worked my way into a position as one of his private advisors, and then, one of his viziers. His sons started to worry that I would usurp the throne, or even that their father would appoint me Emperor when he died, and so intrigue abounded. There were shadowy plots, poison darts, even foreign invasions financed by forces within. Through it all I was having a perfectly marvelous time. I even ran into Messalina once in those days. I thought she might have sought me out, but she never admitted any such thing, and it's at least as possible that the stronger reality of that place had simply made it more likely that it would lie along her path. We spoke for a short while. I think she was curious about this place I had been dwelling in despite herself. She was less curt than the last time we had met, which I counted as a minor victory. Oh, I'll be frank—her rejection of me, however justified, made me want to reconcile things with her all the more. I was even a little infatuated with the prospect. Several months later, one of the cupbearers of the Emperor pointed out to me that I had been favoring the women in my harem that “resembled m'lord's guest from summer last—the pale-skinned stranger.” I was irked that he had noticed what I myself hadn't. The cupbearer found himself with a new job at a colony far, far away, and I wandered for a time in Shadow, leaving the Emperor and his business behind.
Things were starting to get a little strange in the year following. I had come across a slightly greater than normal number of shadowstorms in my travel, not to mention a greater proportion of nasty forces harassing the assorted denizens of Shadow. It was not enough to make me even dream that something might be happening Shadow-wide, but it did turn my mind back to Agra. I wondered how the Emperor had fared without me and whether he, too, had faced strange troubles.
So I returned to Agra, and found it in chaos. Efreeti had come from over the sea—terrific flying demons with horrendous powers not entirely in keeping with the laws of that Shadow as I had previously perceived them. I went to work setting things aright in the way I knew best: manipulating reality itself. But nothing I attempted could shake their attacks. And the far sea on the horizon, from when they came, grew black as midnight. I suffered a rather humiliating defeat then. I had always noted a greater physical prowess and acumen in combat than those around me—not as pronounced as some of my other advantages, but there, nonetheless. I thought it might be fun to arrive back in the Emperor's Court as a masked warrior, come to challenge one of the efreeti to a duel. It all went splendidly until the duel itself, which was duly arranged. The efreet kicked my ass, scooped my half-dead form in the crook of his massive arm, and rocketed skyward and back out toward the Black Water. I doubt I could have done a thing to stop him, were it not for his own curiosity—it was uncertain who or what I was, and cast some sort of spell to peer into my mind. This established a connection between us, and a striving of minds, in the which I proved to be by far the superior. In the next moment I found myself plummeting toward the ocean in the grasp of an unconscious magical demon.
We hit the water and I broke free. Fighting to remain conscious, I shifted to a beach and pulled myself onto the shore. What shifting I did after that, in a daze, must have been more or less unconscious, but eventually I made it to a peaceful, primitive seaside village whose shaman took me in and healed me. It wasn't too long between the chaos found that place, too—in the form of hordes of black monkeys streaming out from the jungle. But by then I was healthy enough to leave.
I realized that if trouble was everywhere, the place to go for the cause, or the answer, had to be Amber. I had yet another reason to go back, not only to the city, but to the castle itself. So I started to make my way.
And that journey lasted about seven years. I think if I had pressed on relentlessly I might have made it sooner. But the Black Road (as I now know how to name it) and all its manifestations turned shadow into one conflict after another. And, though I tried, I couldn't bring myself to pass them all by. Certainly I did sometimes—I never returned to Agra, and I let the monkeys devour the villagers behind me—but in following the paths of least resistance to Amber I came across places that I felt I could help, for whatever reasons. And, quite pragmatically, staying in one place, though never dull, was more restful than trying to continually move through shadow. When I stopped I could usually gain a few days, weeks, or months in respite before some road, circle, or spire of ebony found me again. In some places I was able to do some good, but in most it was just a matter of holding on until things were hopeless and then setting out again, traveling for a few more days fitfully toward Amber.
A map through Shadow of my route through those years would probably be an erratic zigzag. Shadow was so disrupted that I doubt any place would be quite the same if I tried to return to where it was. The one exception may be Mandrake – I spent over two years there, helping the primitive locals hold back an improbable invasion of evolving robots – even killing their leader. Mostly I lingered there because their attire was a cut or two above that in most of Shadow, and because the king's daughter bore an uncanny resemblance to you-know-who. Though I haven't returned there, I've passed close enough to note that the presence my strength gave the place still endured.
I could have made it in six years, but I tried to get there by sea, the way I had first arrived. It is considerably more dangerous than land, and my experiences in Agra had left me a little gun-shy in such circumstances. So backing out and looking for another approach caused months of delay. At the end of seven years I was near to Arden, on my final approach. I had found a place of relative peace and was taking the opportunity to meditate & focus on the Pattern in my mind. If I hadn't been doing that right then I don't know what would have happened to me, but I was lucky – I felt the ripple before it came. It was as if someone had dropped a boulder in the center of reality's pool and the waves were rippling outwards, tearing things apart as they went. I felt it coming and did what I could, strengthening reality around me into a cocoon of concentration and Pattern essence. When it hit I was knocked about, both physically and mentally, and through Shadow. I awoke in a different place than where I had started, a little further out from Amber. But the rest of my walk was uninterrupted and peaceful. In a few days I was in Arden and through it, and looking upon Amber for the third time.
That wave had been the end of the Patternfall War, of course, and the end of Oberon, and the end of the Black Road. I found this out when I returned and knocked on the door to the castle. Gerard answered. Who can say what might have happened if I had arrived again under other circumstances? But the royal family, some of whom were just returning from what for them had been a single battle, were all too relieved and flushed with victory to quibble with a new arrival.
In the weeks that followed, Brigit set to work adding trumps to the decks, mine included, and I was presented with a deck, and a room in the castle. First thing I walked the Pattern again, something I had been waiting years to do. I spent a lot of time around the others, watching them, trying to find out what I could learn. What shocked me was not how little they were willing to teach, but how little they could teach. Here they were, at the center of the universe, and most of them had barely taken the time to walk the Pattern in recent memory, let alone study it or plumb its depths! Fiona and Bleys, those who did seem to have an idea or two in that regard, weren't around all that much. But I stayed, and talked, and asked questions. And waited. I waited and waited for the moment when one of these vaunted Elders would stand at dinner and claim me for a son. It didn't happen. Then I waited for one of them to meet with me privately, to tell me of my heritage. Nothing. Then I waited for news from some ancient tome – a reference to a child of Finndo or Osric, perhaps, someone that might be me. But not only did no one come forward, everyone seemed quite taken enough with their own problems to pay it much mind. I spent many days in the library to no avail. The question has not ceased to trouble me.
When the shadow storms started kicking up again, and the emissaries from the Courts arrived, I leapt at the chance to tag along and see what I could find out. In those days I was also trying to stay close to Messalina in an effort to patch things up – and Brigit so that I could get access to Bleys. All those goals and curiosities are somewhat distant to me now. I sit in the middle of a new Pattern. I have spoken with Dworkin. It feels like a new and stranger world.
Postscript:
The above was written some time ago, and while it seemed then that everything had changed between where I was and where I had been, that gap is nothing compared to the gulf that stands now. I have come across my old journal while organizing other notes, atop a stone near a pagoda in a place where time has been stretched thin so that Xenophal can learn a trick or two from me. But this place, which once would have seemed to me a Shadow more or less near the center of things, now feels like a corner of a corner. I have seen the Five Pyramids and have spoken with a branch of Yggdrasil. I have walked in the heart of existence and soul and drawn its pattern, the true Pattern, around me and through me. I have seen the way that the worlds that we inhabit are held above the Abyss only by the smallest threads. Why is it, then, that when Xeno has learned what he can, the first thing that I will do is go to see her, if only briefly?
The leaves on the trees here remind me of the trees on Woodmere. Yes, they are exactly the same – I must have unconsciously added them. In this moment, at this time, I would wish myself an ignorant denizen of Shadow, content to leave a peaceful life in a place of beauty. I would trade my power for the ability to forget.
It is but a feeling of the moment. It will pass.