Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [57]
While the schooner lay at anchor, just off the island, Duke Avan called Elric to his cabin and showed him, for a second time, that ancient map.
Pale golden sunlight filtered through the cabin's ports and fell upon the old parchment, beaten from the skin of a beast long since extinct, as Elric and Duke Avan Astran of Old Hrolmar bent over it.
“See,” Duke Avan said, pointing. “This island's marked. The map's scale seems reasonably accurate. Another three days and we shall be at the mouth of the river.”
Elric nodded. “But it would be wise to rest here for a while until our strength is fully restored and the morale of the crew is raised higher. There are reasons, after all, why men have avoided the jungles of the West over the centuries.”
“Certainly there are savages there—some say they are not even human—but I'm confident we can deal with those dangers. I have much experience of strange territories, Prince Elric.”
“But you said yourself you feared other dangers.”
“True. Very well, we'll do as you suggest.”
* * *
On the fourth day a strong wind began to blow from the east and they raised anchor. The schooner leaped over the waves under only half her canvas and the crew saw this as a good omen.
“They are mindless fools,” Smiorgan said as they stood clinging to the rigging in the prow. “The time will come when they will wish they were suffering the cleaner hardships of the Boiling Sea. This journey, Elric, could benefit none of us, even if the riches of R'lin K'ren A'a are still there.”
But Elric did not answer. He was lost in strange thoughts, unusual thoughts for him, for he was remembering his childhood and his father who had been the last true ruler of the Bright Empire—proud, insouciant, cruel. His father had expected him—perhaps because of his strange albinism—to restore the glories of Melnibone. Instead Elric threatened to destroy what was left of that glory. Like himself, his father had had no real place in this new age of the Young Kingdoms, but had refused to acknowledge it. This journey to the Western Continent, to the land of his ancestors, had a peculiar attraction for him. Here no new nations had emerged. The continent had, as far as he knew, remained the same since R'lin K'ren A'a had been abandoned. The jungles would be the jungles his folk had known, the land would be the land that had given birth to his peculiar race, moulded the character of its people with their sombre pleasures, their melancholy arts and their dark delights. Had his ancestors felt this agony of knowledge, this impotence in the face of the understanding that existence had no point, no purpose, no hope? Was this why they had built their civilization in that particular pattern, why they had disdained the more placid, spiritual values of mankind's philosophers? He knew that many of the intellectuals of the Young Kingdoms pitied the powerful folk of Melnibone as mad. But if they had been mad and if they had imposed a madness upon the world that had lasted a hundred centuries, what had made them so? Perhaps the secret did lie in R'lin K'ren A'a—not in any tangible form but in the ambiance created by the dark jungles and the deep, old rivers. Perhaps here, at last, he would be able to feel at one with himself.
He ran his fingers through his milk-white hair and there was a kind of innocent anguish in his crimson eyes. He might be the last of his kind and yet he was unlike his kind. Smiorgan had been wrong. Elric knew that everything that existed had its opposite. In danger he might find peace. And yet, of course, in peace there was danger. Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world, he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.
It was on the morning of the third day that the coast was sighted and the schooner