Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [23]
He had reached the rim and was clambering along it to find a firmer foothold down. Scattering rotted matter and angry rodents as he went, he wondered what kind of culture brought its waste to line a track created by some supernatural being. Then he thought he saw something larger shift below, near where the wheat grew, but the light was bad and he put it down to his imagination. Was the refuse some kind of holy offering? Did this realm’s people worship a god who patrolled from one habitation to another in the form of a gigantic snake?
There was another movement below him, as he slid down a few feet and came to rest on an old cistern, and he saw a soft felt hat rise above a pile of rags and an avian face stare up at him in astonished amusement. “Good heavens, sir. This cannot be coincidence! But what purpose has Fate for pairing we two, do you think?” It was Wheldrake, stumbling up from the wheatfield. “What lies behind you, sir, that’s duller than this? More corn? Why, sir, this seems a world of corn!”
“Of corn and garbage and a somewhat idiosyncratic pathway of baffling purpose which slices through all, from east to west. It has a sinister air to it.”
“So you go the other way, sir?”
“To avoid whichever unpleasant creation of Chaos has chosen to slither this route and take its choice of these offerings. My horses, I suppose, were not carried through the dimensions with you?”
“Not to my knowledge, sir. I’d guessed you eaten, by now. But the reptile was one of those with a sentimental weakness for heroes, I take it?”
“Something of the sort.” Elric smiled, grateful in an odd way for the red-headed poet’s ironies. They were preferable to his most recent conversation with his father. As he slid down some powdery and decomposing substance alive with maggots, he embraced the little man who almost chirped with pleasure at their reunion. “My dear sir!”
Whereupon, arm in arm they went, back to the bottom and the sweetening wheat, back in the direction of a river Elric had seen from his dragon steed. There had been a town upon that river which, he guessed, might be reached in less than a day. He spoke of this to Wheldrake, adding that they were sadly short of provisions or the means of obtaining any, unless they chewed the unripe wheat.
“I regret my poaching days in Northumberland are long behind me, sir. But as a lad I was apt enough with snare and a gun. It might be, since your scarf is rather badly the worse for wear, that you would not mind if I unraveled it a little more. It’s just possible I might remember my old skills.”
With an amiable shrug, Elric handed the birdlike poet his scarf and watched as the little fingers worked swiftly, unraveling and reknotting until he had a length of thin cord. “With evening drawing close, sir, I’d best get to work at once.”
By now they were some distance from the wall of garbage and could smell only the rich, restful scents of the summer fields. Elric took his ease amongst the wheatstalks while Wheldrake went to work and within a short space of time, having cleared a wide area and dug a pit, they were able to enjoy a young rabbit while they speculated at such a strange world which grew such vast fields and yet seemed to have so few farmsteads or villages. Staring at the rabbit’s carcass turning on a spit (also of Wheldrake’s devising) Elric said that, for all his sorcerous education, he was not the familiar traveler through the realms that Wheldrake seemed to be.
“Not by choice, sir, I assure you. I blame a certain Doctor Dee, whom I consulted on the Greeks. It was to do with metre, sir. A metric question. I needed, I thought, to hear the language of Plato. Well, the story’s long and not especially novel to those of us who travel, willy-nilly, through the multiverse, but I spent some while on one particular plane,