Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [37]
The dreamthief shook his handsome head. “It was not your message which brought me hither, Raik Na Seem.”
“Still,” said the old man philosophically, “you are here. You can help us.”
Alnac Kreb seemed disturbed, but disguised his emotions quickly. “I will do my best, that I swear. In the morning we shall visit the Bronze Tent.”
“It is well guarded now, for more Quarzhasaatim have come since those first evil ones, and we have been forced to defend our Holy Girl against them. That has been a simple enough matter. But you spoke of the enemy we have buried, Prince Elric. What do you know of him?”
Elric paused for only a few seconds before he spoke. He told Raik Na Seem everything which had happened: how he had been tricked by Lord Gho, what he had been told to find, the hold which Lord Gho had over him. He refused to lie to the old man and the respect he showed Raik Na Seem was apparently reciprocated, for though the First Elder’s face darkened with anger at the tale he reached out with a firm hand when it was finished and gripped Elric’s arm in a gesture of sympathy.
“The irony is, my friend, that the Place of the Pearl exists only in our poetry and we have never heard of the Fortress of the Pearl.”
“You must know that I would do your Holy Girl no further harm,” said Elric, “and that if I can help you and yours in any way that is what I shall do. My quest is ended here and now.”
“But Lord Gho’s potion will kill you unless you can find the antidote. Then he’ll kill your friend, too. No, no. Let us look more positively at these problems, Prince Elric. We have them in common, I think, for we are all victims of that soon-dead lord. We must consider how to defeat his schemes. It is possible that my daughter does indeed know something about this fabulous pearl, for she is the vessel of all our wisdom and has already learned more than ever my poor head could hold …”
“Her knowledge and her intelligence are as breathtaking as her beauty and her amiability,” said Alnac Kreb, still fuming at the story of what the Quarzhasaatim had done to Varadia. “If you had known her, Elric …” He broke off, his voice shaking.
“We are all in need of rest, I think,” said the First Elder of the Bauradim. “You shall be our guests and in the morning I shall take you to the Bronze Tent, there to look upon my sleeping daughter and hope, perhaps with the sum of all our wisdom, to find a means of bringing her waking mind back to this realm.”
That night, sleeping in the luxury only a wealthy nomad tent could provide, Elric dreamed again of Cymoril, trapped in a drugged slumber by his cousin Yyrkoon, and it seemed that he slept beside her, that they were one and the same, as he had always felt when they lay together. But now he saw the dignified figure of Raik Na Seem standing over him and he knew that this was his father, not the neurotic tyrant, the distant figure of his childhood, and he understood why he was obsessed with questions of morality and justice, for it was this Bauradi who was his true ancestor. He knew a kind of peace, then, as well as some kind of new, disturbing emotion, and when he awoke in the morning he was reconciled to the fact that he was craving the elixir which at once brought him life and death, and he reached for his flask and took a small sip before rising, washing himself and joining Alnac and Raik Na Seem at the morning meal.
When this was done, the old man called for the fleet, sturdy mounts for which the Bauradim were famous, and the three of them rode away from the Silver Flower Oasis, which bustled with every kind of activity, where comedians, jugglers and snake-charmers were already performing their skills and story-tellers had gathered groups of children whose parents had sent them there while they went about their business, and they rode towards the Ragged Pillars seen faintly on the morning horizon. These mountains had been eroded by the winds of the