Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [11]
This thought brought Elric back to pain, to his longing for Cymoril. Again he tried to rise. The sun’s position had changed. He thought he saw Cymoril standing before him. Then she became an aspect of Arioch. Was the Duke of Chaos playing with him, even now?
Elric moved his gaze to contemplate the sword, which seemed to shift in its loose silk wrappings and whisper some kind of warning, or possibly a threat.
Elric turned his head away. “Cymoril?” He peered into the shaft of sunlight, following it until he looked through the window at the intense desert sky. Now he believed he saw shapes moving there, shadows that were almost the forms of men, of beasts and demons. As these shapes grew more distinct they came to resemble his friends. Cymoril was there again. Elric moaned in despair. “My love!”
He saw Rackhir, Dyvim Tvar, even Yyrkoon. He called out to them all.
At the sound of his own cracked speech he realized he had grown feverish, that his remaining energy was being dissipated by his fantasies, that his body was feeding on itself and that death must be close.
Elric reached to touch his own brow, feeling the sweat pouring from it. He wondered how much each bead might fetch on the open market. He found it amusing to speculate on this. Could he sweat enough to buy himself more water, or at least a little wine? Or was this production of liquid in itself against Quarzhasaat’s bizarre water laws?
He looked again beyond the sunlight, thinking he saw men there, perhaps the city’s guard come to inspect his premises and demand to see his licence to perspire.
Now it seemed that the desert wind, which was never very far away, came sliding through the room, bringing with it some elemental gathering, perhaps a force which was to bear his soul to its ultimate destination. He felt relief. He smiled. He was glad in several ways that his struggle was over. Perhaps Cymoril would join him soon?
Soon? What could Time mean in that intemporal realm? Perhaps he must wait for Eternity before they could be together? Or a mere passing moment? Or would he never see her? Was all that lay ahead for him an absence, a nothingness? Or would his soul enter some other body, perhaps as sickly as his present one, and be faced again with the same impossible dilemmas, the same terrible moral and physical challenges which had plagued him since his emergence into adulthood?
Elric’s mind drifted further and further from logic, like a drowning mouse swept away from the shore, spinning ever more crazily before death brought oblivion. He chuckled, he wept; he raved and occasionally slept as his life dissipated its last with the vapours now pouring from his strange, bone-white flesh. Any uninformed onlooker would have seen that some misborn diseased beast, not a man at all, lay in its final agonies upon that rough bed.
Darkness came and with it a brilliant panoply of people from the albino’s past. He saw again the wizards who had educated him in all the arts of sorcery; he saw the strange mother he had never known and his stranger father; the cruel friends of his childhood with whom, bit by bit, he could no longer enjoy the luscious, terrible sports of Melniboné; the caverns and secret glades of the Dragon Isle, the slim towers and hauntingly intricate palaces of his unhuman people, whose ancestors were only partially of this world and who had arisen as beautiful monsters to conquer and rule before, with a deep weariness which he could appreciate all the better now, declining into self-examination and morbid fantasies. And he cried out, for in his mind he saw Cymoril, her body as wasted as his own while Yyrkoon, giggling with horrible pleasure, practised upon it the foulest of abominations. And then, again, he wanted to live, to return to Melniboné, to save the woman he loved so deeply that often he refused to let himself be conscious of the intensity