Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [14]
“I, too, had never met Prince Corum before he came aboard,” said Erekose, “yet he insists we fought together once. I am inclined to believe him. Time on the different planes does not always run concurrently. Prince Corum might well exist in what we would term the future.”
“I had thought to find some relief from such paradoxes here,” said Hawkmoon, passing his hand over his face. He smiled bleakly. “But it seems there is none at this present moment in the history of the planes. Everything is in flux and even our identities, it seems, are prone to alter at any moment.”
“We were Three,” said Corum. “Do you not recall it, Elric? The Three Who Are One?”
Elric shook his head.
Corum shrugged, saying softly to himself, “Well, now we are Four. Did the captain say anything of an island we are supposed to invade?”
“He did,” said Elric. “Do you know who these enemies might be?”
“We know no more or less than do you, Elric,” said Hawkmoon. “I seek a place called Tanelorn and two children. Perhaps I seek the Runestaff, too. Of that I am not entirely sure.”
“We found it once,” said Corum. “We three. In the Tower of Voilodion Ghagnasdiak. It was of considerable help to us.”
“As it might be to me,” Hawkmoon told him. “I served it once. I gave it a great deal.”
“We have much in common,” Erekose put in, “as I told you, Elric. Perhaps we share masters in common, too?”
Elric shrugged. “I serve no master but myself.”
And he wondered why they all smiled in the same strange way.
Erekose said quietly, “On such ventures as these one is inclined to forget much, as one forgets a dream.”
“This is a dream,” said Hawkmoon. “Of late I've dreamed many such.”
“It is all dreaming, if you like,” said Corum. “All existence.”
Elric was not interested in such philosophizing. “Dream or reality, the experience amounts to the same, does it not?”
“Quite right,” said Erekose with a wan smile.
They talked on for another hour or two until Corum stretched and yawned and commented that he was feeling sleepy. The others agreed that they were all tired and so they left the cabin and went aft and below where there were bunks for all the warriors. As he stretched himself out in one of the bunks, Elric said to Brut of Lashmar, who had climbed into the bunk above:
“It would help to know when this fight begins.”
Brut looked over the edge, down at the prone albino. “I think it will be soon,” he said.
Elric stood alone upon the deck, leaning upon the rail and trying to make out the sea, but the sea, like the rest of the world, was hidden by white curling mist. Elric wondered if there were waters flowing under the ship's keel at all. He looked up to where the sail was tight and swollen at the mast, filled with a warm and powerful wind. It was light, but again it was not possible to tell the hour of the day. Puzzled by Corum's comments concerning an earlier meeting, Elric wondered if there had been other dreams in his life such as this might be—dreams he had forgotten completely upon awakening. But the useless-ness of such speculation became quickly evident and he turned his attention to more immediate matters, wondering at the origin of the captain and his strange ship sailing on a stranger ocean.
“The captain,” said Hawkmoon's voice, and Elric turned to bid good morning to the tall, fair-haired man who bore a strange, regular scar in the centre of his forehead, “has requested that we four visit him in his cabin.”
The other two emerged from the mist and together they made their way to the prow, knocking on the reddish-brown door and being at once admitted into the presence of the blind captain, who had four silver wine-cups already poured for them. He gestured them towards the great chest on which the wine stood. “Please help yourselves, my friends.”
They did so, standing there with the cups in their hands, four tall, doom-haunted swordsmen, each of a strikingly different cast of features, yet each bearing a certain stamp which marked them as being of a like kind. Elric noticed it, for all