Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [76]
Standing with Lady Sough in the prow of the boat, Oone and Elric helped her use the tiller to hold a course that was almost steady. And then, ahead, the river ended without warning and they had tipped over a waterfall and before they knew it were landing heavily in calmer water, the barge bobbing like a scrap of bread on a pond and overhead they could see a diseased sky like pewter in which dark, leathery things flew and communicated with desolate cries above palms whose leaves resembled nothing so much as viridian skins stretched out to await a sun which never rose. There was a rich, rotten smell about the place and the constant splashing and distant roaring of the water filled a silence broken only by the flying creatures above the rocks and the foliage which surrounded them.
It was warm, yet Elric shivered. Oone drew up the collar of her doublet and even Lady Sough gathered her robes more tightly about herself.
“Are you familiar with this land, Lady Oone?” Elric asked. “You have visited this realm before, I know, but you seem as surprised as I.”
“There are always new aspects. It is in the nature of the realm. Perhaps Lady Sough can tell us more.” And Oone turned courteously to their navigator.
Lady Sough had secured her veils more firmly. She seemed unhappy that Elric had seen her face. “I am the queen of this land,” she said, exhibiting no pride or any other emotion.
“Then you have minions who can assist us?”
“It was a queen for me, so that I had no power over it, only the land’s protection. This is the place you call Falador.”
“And is it mad?”
“It has many defenses.”
“They keep out what might also wish to leave,” said Oone, almost to herself. “Are you afraid of those who protect Falador, Lady Sough?”
“I am Queen Sough now.” A drawing up of the graceful body, but whether in parody or in earnest Elric could not tell. “I am protected. You are not. Even I am not able to guard you here.”
The barge continued to float slowly along the water-course. The slime of the rocks appeared to shift and move as if alive and there were shapes in the water which disturbed Elric. He would have drawn his sword if it had not seemed ill-mannered.
“What must we fear here?” he asked the queen.
Now they floated below a great spur of rock on which a horseman had positioned himself. It was the Pearl Warrior, glaring down with the same mixture of mockery and mindlessness. He lifted a long stick to which he had tied some animal’s sharp, twisted horn.
Queen Sough shook her hand at him. “Pearl Warrior shall not do this! Pearl Warrior cannot defy, even here!”
The warrior let out his hideous chuckle and turned his horse back from the rock. Then he was gone.
“Will he attack us?” Oone asked the queen.
Queen Sough was concentrating on her tiller, steering the boat subtly along a smaller water-course, away from the main river. Perhaps she already aimed to avoid any conflict. “He is unpermitted,” she said. “Ah!”
The water had turned a ruby-red and there were now banks of glistening brown moss, gently rising towards the walls of rock. Elric was convinced he saw ancient faces staring at him both from the banks and from the cliffs, but he did not feel threatened. The red liquid looked like wine and there was a heady sweetness here. Did Queen Sough know all the secret, tranquil places of this world and was she guiding them through so as to avoid its dangers?
“Here my friend Edif has influence,” she told them. “He is a ruler whose chief interest is poetry. Will it be now? I do not know.”
They had quickly become used to her strange speech forms and were finding her more easily understood, though they had no idea who Edif might be and had passed through his land into a place where the desert appeared suddenly on both sides of them, beyond flanking lines of palms, as if they moved towards an oasis. Yet no oasis materialized.
Soon the sky was the colour of bad liver again and the rocky walls had risen around them and there was the sickly, oppressive odour, which reminded Elric of some decadent court’s ante-rooms. Perfume which had once