Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [74]
ELRIC: “He asked too much of me. I could accept his god, but would not reject my own. My people have more direct experience of the supernatural in all its various manifestations …Besides, I had no cause against the Moor.”
Elric takes down the scabbarded sword and weighs it in his hands. He feels very ambiguously towards the thing.
Elric has the Chaos Shield on his back, the war-horn slung at his side and the Black Sword behind his saddle. He leans from his saddle to kiss his old friend's hand.
ELRIC: “Farewell, friend. I go to seek the Silverskin …”
Brother Constant watches his friend ride away into the woods.
CONSTANT: “Then I pray all the harder for your tortured soul …”
Later …
For a moment the rain has let up and the sun breaks through thick cloud showing Elric riding through a narrow valley with steeply wooded sides. He is clearly sick and having a hard time staying in his saddle. He has been spotted by a rabble of Franks led by a couple of shiftless Norman captains who have camped with their crude wagon in a clearing high above him.
FIRST NORMAN: “Look how he slumps in the saddle. That weakling has no right to be traveling our dangerous world untaxed …”
SECOND NORMAN: “We'll give him a sharp lesson in good old-fashioned Norman common sense!”
It's now obvious that Elric is aware of the armed men behind him and is smiling a little to himself. He murmurs:
ELRIC: “At last!”
Eight armed men attack in a nasty, overwhelming ambush—
—and Elric grins like a wolf—
—he almost licks his lips—
—for here is his sustenance volunteering to him…
and now the runecarved black blade is in his hands, the scarlet runes flickering up and down its black iron—
and the bloodletting is swift, ghastly, and horrifying to those of Elric's attackers who realize that their souls are being sucked from them to feed the albino and his own dark gods…
ELRIC: “Ariochl Ariochl Blood and souls for my lord Ariochl”
SECOND NORMAN: “My soul! Not my soul!”
ELRIC (grins at the dying man): “Like you, my friend, I live on whatever passing prey comes my way …”
He pants like a wolf, his crimson eyes glutted with stolen lifestuff, as, dismounted, he leads his horse away from the corpses, up-hill towards the camp, where a column of smoke reveals the dead Normans' fire.
Elric comes upon the Normans’ camp—cooking fires, a decrepit wagon.
He hears a voice from within the wagon—“Mmmmffffff.”
When he looks in the wagon, piled with miscellaneous junk, he sees two bundled figures, bound and gagged—a heavy, muscular man in middle years and a slender woman.
Elric hauls the two out of the wagon. The woman is veiled—her veil having become part of her gag. He ungags the man first. The man is a handsome Jewish soldier-scholar in rich silks and wearing a breastplate. He has many flesh-wounds and has clearly been fighting.
The man himself deals with the woman's bonds while Elric watches.
MAN: “I thank you, stranger. I am Isaak D'Israeli and this is my daughter Rebecca. You'll get a handsome ransom for us, be sure of that…”
ELRIC: “I've neither time nor desire to ransom you, sir. You're free. How did you become prisoners of that Norman scum?”
Isaak rummages in the wagon and gets out his own bits of armour and weaponry as well as a hooded cloak for his daughter. He continues his conversation with Elric.
ISAAK: “They kidnapped her. Arrogantly I thought I could take on fourteen of them …”
ELRIC: “SO you only killed six?”
ISAAK (smiling): “Five. One had meanwhile died of the pox. I tire too readily, these days. My old bones aren't what they were …”
Checking his property, Isaak opens a small chest of books and scrolled manuscripts in a variety of languages—Greek, Hebrew, Arabic but not the despised Latin which most Arab scholars found crude and useless.
ELRIC: “You're a scholar as well as a soldier?”
ISAAK: “I am whatever an intelligent man must be in these uncertain times. We are not so different, I think.”
Rebecca is shy. She prefers to stay