Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [43]
“Don't stop!” cried Vassliss. “Let the flames slay us! It will be better!”
Smiorgan was looking upward. “We have no choice. Look! He has banished the wind, it seems.”
They were becalmed. Elric smiled a grim smile. He knew now what the folk of the Young Kingdoms must have felt when his ancestors had used these identical tactics against them.
“Elric?” Smiorgan turned to the albino. “Are these your people? That ship's Melnibonean without question!”
“So are the methods,” Elric told him. “I am of the blood royal of Melnibone. I could be emperor, even now, if I chose to claim my throne. There is some small chance that Earl Saxif D'Aan, though an ancestor, will recognize me and, therefore, recognize my authority. We are a conservative people, the folk of the Dragon Isle.”
The girl spoke through dry lips, hopelessly: “He recognizes only the authority of the Lords of Chaos, who give him aid.”
“All Melniboneans recognize that authority,” Elric told her with a certain humour.
From the forward hatch, the sound of the stallion's stamping and snorting increased.
“We're besieged by enchantments!” Count Smiorgan's normally ruddy features had paled. “Have you none of your own, Prince Elric, you can use to counter them?”
“None, it seems.”
The golden ship loomed over them. Elric saw that the rails, high overhead, were crowded not with Imrryrian warriors but with cutthroats equally as desperate as those he had fought on the island, and, apparently, drawn from the same variety of historical periods and nations. The galleon's long sweeps scraped the sides of the smaller vessel as they folded, like the legs of some water insect, to enable the grappling irons to be flung out. Iron claws bit into the timbers of the little ship and the brigandly crowd overhead cheered, grinning at them, menacing them with their weapons.
The girl began to run to the seaward side of the ship, but Elric caught her by the arm.
“Do not stop me, I beg you!” she cried. “Rather, jump with me and drown!”
“You think that death will save you from Saxif D'Aan?” Elric said. “If he has the power you say, death will only bring you more firmly into his grasp!”
“Oh!” The girl shuddered and then, as a voice called down to them from one of the tall decks of the gilded ship, she gave a moan and fainted into Elric's arms, so that, weakened as he was by his spell-working, it was all that he could do to stop himself falling with her to the deck.
The voice rose over the coarse shouts and guffaws of the crew. It was pure, lilting and sardonic. It was the voice of a Melnibonean, though it spoke the common tongue of the Young Kingdoms, a corruption, in itself, of the speech of the Bright Empire.
“May I have the captain's permission to come aboard?”
Count Smiorgan growled back: “You have us firm, sir! Don't try to disguise an act of piracy with a polite speech!”
“I take it I have your permission, then.” The unseen speaker's tone remained exactly the same.
Elric watched as part of the rail was drawn back to allow a gangplank, studded with golden nails to give firmer footing, to be lowered from the galleon's deck to theirs.
A tall figure appeared at the top of the gangplank. He had the fine features of a Melnibonean nobleman, was thin, proud in his bearing, clad in voluminous robes of cloth-of-gold, an elaborate helmet in gold and ebony upon his long auburn locks. He had grey-blue eyes, pale, slightly flushed skin, and he carried, so far as Elric could see, no weapons of any kind.
With considerable dignity, Earl Saxif D'Aan began to descend, his rascals at his back. The contrast between this beautiful intellectual and those he commanded was remarkable. Where he walked with straight back, elegant and noble, they slouched, filthy, degenerate, unintelligent, grinning with pleasure at their easy victory. Not a man among them showed any sign of human dignity; each was overdressed in tattered and unclean finery, each had at least three weapons upon his person, and there was much