Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [32]
After a short rest, Elric decided to press on, although night had fallen, and see if he could reach the river where he might at least drink and, possibly, in the morning find fish to eat.
Again, no moon appeared to aid his progress and he walked for two or three hours in a darkness which was almost total, stumbling occasionally into large rocks, until the ground leveled and he felt sure he had reached the floor of the valley.
He had developed a strong thirst by now and was feeling somewhat hungry, but decided that it might be best to wait until morning before seeking the river when, rounding a particularly tall rock, he saw, with some astonishment, the light of a campfire.
Hopefully this would be the fire of a company of merchants, a trading caravan on its way to some civilized country which would allow him to travel with it, perhaps in return for his services as a mercenary swordsman (it would not be the first time, since he had left Melnibone, that he had earned his bread in such a way).
Yet Elric's old instincts did not desert him; he approached the fire cautiously and let no-one see him. Beneath an overhang of rock, made shadowy by the flame's light, he stood and observed the group of fifteen or sixteen men who sat or lay close to the fire, playing some kind of game involving dice and slivers of numbered ivory.
Gold, bronze and silver gleamed in the firelight as the men staked large sums on the fall of a die and the turn of a slip of ivory.
Elric guessed that, if they had not been so intent on their game, these men must certainly have detected his approach, for they were not, after all, merchants. By the evidence, they were warriors, wearing scarred leather and dented metal, their weapons ready to hand, yet they belonged to no army—unless it be an army of bandits—for they were of all races and, oddly, seemed to be from various periods in the history of the Young Kingdoms.
It was as if they had looted some scholar's collection of relics. An axeman of the later Lormyrian Republic, which had come to an end some two hundred years ago, lay with his shoulder rubbing the elbow of a Chalalite bowman, from a period roughly contemporary with Elric's own. Close to the Chalalite sat a short Ilmioran infantryman of a century past. Next to him was a Filkharian in the barbaric dress of that nation's earliest times. Tarkeshites, Shazaarians, Vilmirians all mingled and the only thing they had in common, by the look of them, was a villainous, hungry cast to their features.
In other circumstances Elric might have skirted this encampment and moved on, but he was so glad to find human beings of any sort that he ignored the disturbing incongruities of the group; yet he remained content to watch them.
One of the men, less unwholesome than the others, was a bulky, black-bearded, bald-headed sea-warrior clad in the casual leathers and silks of the people of the Purple Towns. It was when this man produced à large gold Melnibonean wheel—a coin not minted, as most coins, but carved by craftsmen to a design both ancient and intricate—that Elric's caution was fully conquered by his curiosity.
Very few of those coins existed in Melnibone and none, that Elric had heard of, outside; for the coins were not used for trade with the Young Kingdoms. They were prized, even by the nobility of Melnibone.
It seemed to Elric that the bald-headed man could only have acquired the coin from another Melnibonean traveler—and Elric knew of no other Melniboneans who shared his penchant for exploration. His wariness dismissed, he stepped into the circle.
If he had not been completely obsessed by the thought of the Melnibonean wheel he might have taken some satisfaction in the sudden scuffle to arms which resulted. Within seconds, the majority of the men were on their feet, their weapons drawn.
For a moment, the gold wheel was forgotten. His hand upon his runesword's pommel, he presented the other in a placatory gesture.
“Forgive the interruption, gentlemen.