Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [111]
Gaynor was disappeared again, into his own ranks, seeking out Charion Phatt and the Rose, for now he was armed with a sword four times more powerful than those which had come against him and he wished to test the blade on ordinary, mortal flesh …
Wheldrake, still watching, still praying, saw everything from his balcony. He saw Princess Tayaratuka sheath her golden sword and lead Elric’s horse to where her sisters stood, also in attitudes of exhaustion. Their horses had bolted in Gaynor’s wake.
Yet still Gaynor had not found the Rose, and Charion Phatt evaded him as easily as an urchin in a market, returning to the others and speaking with some heat to the prone albino …
… When, round a pile of corpses, rode the Rose, dismounting in a single movement as she saw the predicament of her friends …
Then she, too, kneeled beside the fallen albino and she took his hand …
“There is one spell,” said Elric. “I am trying to recall it. There is, perhaps, a memory. Concerning you, Rose, or some folk of your own …”
“All my folk are dead, save me,” said the Rose, her soft, pink skin flushed with the work of battle. “And it seems I, too, am to die.”
“No!” Elric struggled to his feet. He held tight to his pommel while the horse shifted nervously, not knowing why it could not continue with its battle. “You must help me, lady. There is something about a woman, the Tangled Woman …”
The name was familiar to her.
“All I know is this,” she said, and, with furrowed brow, she recalled some lines of verse …
“In the first creative weaving of a world,
In the time before the time of long ago,
When neither haughty Law nor fractured Chaos rules,
Lives a creature born of foliage and flesh,
Who seeks to weave her world a-fresh,
And weaves one fine, a woven womb,
A womb of bramble flowers strong,
In which to sing her briar-song,
And bear her thorny child, who grows
Into a perfect rose.
“They are Wheldrake’s. From his youth, he says.”
But then she saw that she had, in a way she might never understand, communicated something to the pale lord, for Elric’s lips were moving and his eyes were raised to look into worlds the others could not see. Strange musical sounds came out of his lips, and even the three sisters could not understand what he said, for he spoke no earthly tongue. He spoke a tongue of the dark clay and the winding roots, of the old bramble-nests where the wild Vadhagh once, legend had it, played and spawned their strange offspring, part flesh, part leafy wood, a people of the forest and forgotten gardens, and, when he hesitated, it was the Rose who joined him in his song, in the language of a folk who were not her own, but whose ancestors had mingled with her own and whose blood flowed in her to this day.
They sang together, sending their song through all the dimensions of the multiverse, to where a dreaming creature stirred and lifted up arms made of a million woven brambles and turned faces which, too, were of knotted rosewood, in the direction of the song it had not heard for a hundred thousand years. And it was as if the song brought her to life, gave her some meaning at a moment when she had been about to die, so that, almost upon a whim, from something like curiosity, the Tangled Woman shifted her brambly body, arm by arm and leg by leg, then head by head, and, with a rustling movement which made all her foliage shudder, she formed herself into a shape very like a human shape, though somewhat larger.
And with that, she took a casual step through time and space which had not been in existence when she had first decided to sleep, and which she therefore ignored, and found herself standing in an ill-smelling morass of corrupt flesh and rotting bone which displeased her. But through all this she sensed another scent, something of herself in it, and she lowered her massive, woven head, a head of thick thorn branches whose eyes were not eyes at all, but flowers and leaves, and then she opened her briar lips and asked, in a voice so low it shook the ground, why her daughter had summoned her?