The bells ring out a paean of triumph.

— Now at last has my kingdom come!

After the dream had left him Valentine did not return to full wakefulness, but allowed himself to drift into middlesleep, the place of sensitive receptivity, and there he lay, calm, quiet, reliving the dream, entering again that all-devouring mouth, analyzing, attempting to interpret.

Then the first light of morning fell upon him, and he came up to consciousness. Carabella lay beside him, awake, watching him. He slipped his arm about her shoulder and let his hand rest fondly, playfully, on her breast.

"Was it a sending?" she asked.

"No, I felt no presence of the Lady, nor of the King." He smiled. "You know always when I dream, don't you?"

"I could see the dream come upon you. Your eyes moved beneath the lids; your lip twitched; your nostrils moved like those of some hunting animal."

"Did I look troubled?"

"No, not at all. Perhaps at first you frowned; but then you smiled in your sleep, and a great calmness came over you, as if you were going forth toward some preordained fate and you accepted it entirely."

He laughed. "Ah, then I'll be gulped again by a sea dragon!"

"Is that what you dreamed?"

"More or less. Not the way it actually happened, though. This was the Kinniken dragon coming up on shore, and I marched right down its gullet. As did everyone else in the world, I think. And then it ate the world as well."

"And can you speak your dream?" she asked.

"In patches and fragments only," he said. "The wholeness of it still eludes me."

It was too simple, he knew, to call the dream merely a replaying of an event of his past, as though he had plugged in an entertainment cube and seen a reenactment of that strange event of his exile years, when he had indeed been swallowed by a sea dragon, after being shipwrecked off the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and Lisamon Hultin, swallowed up in that same gulp, had cut a path to freedom through the monster's blubber-walled gut. Even a child knew better than to take a dream at its most literal autobiographical level.

But nothing yielded itself to him on the deeper level, either, except an interpretation so obvious as to be trivial: that these movements of sea-dragon herds he had lately observed were yet another warning that the world was in danger, that some potent force threatened the stability of society. That much he knew already, and it needed no reinforcement. Why sea dragons, though? What metaphor was churning in his mind that had transformed those vast marine mammals into a world-swallowing menace?

Carabella said, "Perhaps you look too hard. Let it pass, and the meaning will come to you when your mind is turned to something else. What do you say? Shall we go on deck?"

They saw no more herds of dragons in the days that followed, only a few solitary stragglers, and then none at all, nor were Valentine's dreams invaded again by threatening images. The sea was calm, the sky was bright and fair, the wind stood them well from the east. Valentine spent much of his time alone on the foredeck, looking off to sea; and at last came the day when out of the emptiness there suddenly came into view, like a bright white shield springing out of the dark horizon, the dazzling chalk cliffs of the Isle of Sleep, the holiest and most peaceful place of Majipoor, the sanctuary of the compassionate Lady.