Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [68]
“So one should do nothing here? Make no decisions?”
She passed her fingers through her hair. “At least we should be aware that the consequences might not manifest themselves for a long while yet.”
Together they left the dead rabbit-warrior behind them and continued down the tunnel of trees. Now from time to time Elric thought he saw faces peering at him from the green shadows. Once he was sure he saw the figure of his dead father, Sadric, mourning for Elric’s mother, the only creature he had ever truly loved. So strong was the image that Elric called out.
“Sadric! Father! Is this your Limbo?”
At this Oone cried urgently. “No! Do not address him. Do not bring him to you. Do not make him real! It is a trap, Elric. Another trap.”
“My father?”
“Did you love him?”
“Aye. Though it was an unhappy kind of love.”
“Remember that. Do not bring him here. It would be obscene to recall him to this gallery of illusion.”
Elric understood her and used all his habits of self-discipline to rid himself of his father’s shade. “I tried to tell him, Oone, how much I grieved for him in his loss and his sorrow.” He was weeping. His body was shaking with an emotion from which he believed he had long since freed himself. “Ah, Oone. I would have died myself to let him have his wife returned to him. Is there no way…?”
“Such sacrifices are meaningless,” she said, gripping him in both her hands and holding him to her. “Especially here. Remember your quest. We have already crossed three of the seven lands which will bring us to the Fortress of the Pearl. We have crossed half this. That means we have already accomplished more than most. Hold on to yourself, Prince of Melniboné. Remember who and what depends upon your success!”
“But if I have the opportunity to make something right that was so wrong …?”
“That is to do with your own feelings, not what is and what can be. Would you invent shadows and make them play out your dreams? Would that bring happiness to your tragic mother and father?”
Elric looked over her shoulder into the forest. There was no sign of his father now. “He seemed so real. Of such solid flesh!”
“You must believe that you and I are the only solid flesh in this entire land. And even we are—” She stopped herself. She reached up to his face and kissed it. “We will rest for a little, if only to restore our psychic strength.”
And Oone drew Elric down into the soft leaves at the side of the path. And she kissed him and she moved her lovely hands over his body and slowly she became all that he had lost in his love of women and he knew that he, in turn, became everything she had ever refused to allow herself to desire in a man. And he knew, without guilt or regret, that their love-making had no past and that its only future lay somewhere beyond their own lives, beyond any realm they would ever visit, and that neither would ever witness the consequences.
And in spite of this knowledge they were careless and they were happy and they gave each other the strength they would need if they ever hoped to fulfill their quest and reach the Fortress of the Pearl.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Intervention of a Navigator
Surprised by his own lack of confusion, filled with an apparent clarity, Elric stepped, side by side with Oone, through the shimmering silver gateway into Imador, called mysteriously by dreamthieves the Land of New Ambition, and found himself at the top of an heroic flight of steps which curved downward towards a plain which stretched towards an horizon turned a pale, misty blue and which he could almost have mistaken for the sky. For a moment he thought that he and Oone were alone on that vast stairway and then he saw that it was crowded with people. Some were engaged in hectic conversation, some bartering, some embracing, while others were gathered around holy men, speech makers, priestesses, story-tellers, either listening avidly or arguing.
The steps down to the plain were alive with every manner of human intercourse. Elric saw snake-charmers, bear-baiters, jugglers and acrobats. They were dressed in costumes