“Lonely, yes. I can’t deny that. Lonely — lonely—” Kasinibon turned a bloodshot gaze on Furvain. His eyes had taken on a glint as red as the waters of the Barbirike Sea. “But one learns to live with loneliness.

One makes one’s choices in life, does one not, and although they are never perfect choices, they are, after all, one’s own, eh? Ultimately, we choose what we choose because — we choose — because — because—”

Kasinibon’s voice grew less distinct and trailed off into incoherence. Furvain thought he might have fallen asleep; but no, no, Kasinibon’s eyes were open, his lips were slowly moving, he was searching still for the precise phrase to explain whatever it was he was trying to explain. Furvain waited until it became clear that the bandit chieftain was never going to find that phrase. Then he touched Kasinibon lightly on the arm. “You must forgive me,” he said. “The hour is very late.” Kasinibon nodded vaguely. A Hjort in livery showed Furvain to his rooms.

In the night Furvain dreamed a dream of such power and lucidity that he thought, even as he was experiencing it, that it must be a sending of the Lady of the Isle, who visits millions of the sleepers of Majipoor each night to bring them guidance and comfort. If indeed it was a sending, it would be his first: the Lady did not often visit the minds of the princes of the Castle, and in any case she would not have been likely to visit that of Furvain, for it was the ancient custom for the mother of the current Coronal to be chosen as Lady of the Isle, and thus, for most of Furvain’s life, the reigning Lady had been his own grandmother. She would not enter the mind of a member of her own family except at some moment of high urgency. Now, of course, with Lord Sangamor having moved on to become Sangamor Pontifex, there was a new Coronal at the Castle and a new Lady at the helm of the Isle of Sleep. But even so — a sending? For him? Here? Why?

As he was drifting back into sleep once the dream had left him, he decided that it had not been a sending at all, but merely the workings of his own agitated mind, stirred to frantic excitation by his evening with Master Kasinibon. It had been too personal, too intimate a vision to have been the work of the stranger who now was Lady of the Isle. Yet Furvain knew it to have been no ordinary dream, but rather one of those strange dreams by which one’s whole future life is determined.

For in it his sleeping mind had been lifted up out of Kasinibon’s stark sanctuary and carried from it over the night-shrouded plains of the east-country, off to the other side of the blue cliffs of Kekkinork where the Great Sea began, stretching forth into the immeasurable and incomprehensible distances that separated Alhanroel from the continent of Zimroel half a world away. Here, far to the east of any place he had ever known, he could see the light of the dawning day gleaming on the breast of the ocean, which was a gentle pink in color at the sandy shore, then pale green, and a deeper green farther out, and then deepening by steady gradation to the azure gray of the unfathomable depths.

The Spirit of the Divine lingered high above that mighty ocean, Furvain perceived: impersonal, unknowable, infinite, all-seeing. Though the Spirit was without form or feature, Furvain recognized it for what it was, and the Spirit recognized him, touching his mind, gathering it in, linking it, for one stunning moment, to the vastness that was itself. And in that infinitely long moment the greatest of all poems was dictated to him, poured into him in one tremendous cascade, a poem that only a god could create, the poem that encompassed the meaning of life and of death, of the destiny of all worlds and all the creatures that dwelled upon them. Or so Furvain thought, later, when he had awakened and lay shivering, feverish with bewilderment, contemplating the vision that had been thrust upon him.

No shard of that vision remained, not a single detail by which he could try to reconstruct it. It had shattered like a soap bubble and vanished into the darkness. Once again he had been brought to the presence of a sublime poem of the greatest beauty and profundity and then it had been snatched away again.

Tonight’s dream, though, was different in its deepest essence from the one of the night before. That other dream had been a sad cruel joke, a bit of mere harsh mockery. It had flaunted a poem before him but had given him no access to it, only the humiliating awareness that a major poem of some sort lurked somewhere within him but would be kept forever beyond his reach. This time he had had the poem itself.

He had lived it, line by line, stanza by stanza, canto by canto, through all its grand immensity. Although he had lost it upon waking, perhaps it could be found again. The first dream had told him, Your gift is an empty one and you are capable of nothing but the making of trivialities. The second dream had told him, You contain godlike greatness within you and you must now strive to find a way to draw it forth.

Though the content of that great vision was gone, Furvain realized in the morning that one aspect of it still remained, as though burned into his mind: its framework, the container for the mighty poem itself: the metric pattern, the rhyme scheme, the method of building verses into stanzas and the grouping of stanzas into cantos. A mere empty vessel, yes. But if the container, at least, was left to him, there might be hope of rediscovering the awesome thing that it had contained.

The structural pattern was such a distinctive one that he knew he was unlikely to forget it, but even so he would not take the risk. He reached hastily for his pen and a blank sheet of paper and scribbled it down.

Rather than attempting at this point to recapture even a fragment of what would be no small task to retrieve, Furvain used mere nonsense syllables to provide a shape for the vessel, meaningless dum-de-dum sounds that provided the basic rhythmic outline of one extended passage. When he was done he stared in wonder at it, murmuring it to himself over and over again, analyzing consciously now what he had set down as a sort of automatic transcription of his dream-memory. It was a remarkable structure, yes, but almost comically extreme. As he counted out its numbers he asked himself whether anything so intricate had ever been devised by a poet’s mind before, and whether any poet in the long history of the universe would ever have been able to carry off a long work using prosody of such an extravagant kind.

It was a marvel of complexity. It made no use of the traditional stress-patterned metrics he knew so well, the iambs and trochees and dactyls, the spondees and anapests, out of which Furvain had always built his poems with such swiftness and ease. Those traditional patterns were so deeply ingrained in him that it seemed to others that he wrote without thinking, that he simply exhaled his poems rather than creating them by conscious act. But this pattern — he chanted it over and over to himself, struggling to crack its secret — was alien to all that he understood of the craft of poetry.

At first he could see no sort of regularity to the rhythms whatever, and was at a loss to explain the strangely compelling power of them. But then he realized that the metric of his dream-poem must be a quantitative one, based not on where the accents fell but on the length of syllables, a system that struck Furvain at first as disconcertingly arbitrary and irregular but which, he saw after a while, could yield a wondrously versatile line in the hands of anyone gifted enough to manipulate its intricacies properly. It would have the force almost of an incantation; those caught up in its sonorous spell would be held as if by sorcery. The rhyme scheme, too, was a formidable one, with stanzas of seventeen lines that allowed of only three different rhymes, arranged in a pattern of five internal couplets split by a triolet and balanced by four seemingly unrhymed lines that actually were reaching into adjacent stanzas.