Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [41]
The Rose and Elric also had their share of temporary acolytes. This was clearly a village of some wealth, which yearned for novelty.
“We’re very cosmopolitan, you know, in Trollon. Like most of the ‘diddicoyim’ (ha, ha) villages, we are now almost wholly made up from outsiders. I, myself, am an outsider. From another realm, you know. From Heeshigrowinaaz, actually. Are you familiar—?” A middle-aged woman with an elaborate wig and considerable paint linked her bangled arm in Elric’s. “I’m Parapha Foz. My husband’s Barraban Foz, of course. Isn’t it boring?”
“I have the feeling,” said the Rose in an undertone as she went by with her own burden of enthusiasts, “that this is to be the greatest ordeal of them all …”
But it seemed to Elric that she was also amused, especially by his own expression.
And he bowed, with graceful irony, to the inevitable.
There followed a number of initiating rituals with which Elric was unfamiliar, but which Wheldrake dreaded as being all too familiar, and the Rose accepted, as if she, too, had once known such experiences better.
There were meals and speeches and performances, tours of the oldest and quaintest parts of the village, small lectures on its history and its architecture and how wonderfully it had been restored until Elric, brooding always on his father’s stolen soul, wished that they would turn into something with which he could more easily contend—like the hopping, slittering, drooling monsters of Chaos or some unreasonable demigod. He had rarely wished so longingly to draw his sword and let it silence this mélange of prejudice, semi-ignorance, snobbery and received opinion, of loud, superior voices so thoroughly reassured by all they met and read that they believed themselves confidently, unvulnerably, totally in control of reality …
And all the while Elric thought of the poor souls below, pressing their bodies against the marching boards and sending this village, in concert with all the other free gypsy villages, in its relentless progress, inch by inch, around the world.
Unused to gaining the information he required by any means less direct than torture, Elric left it to the Rose to glean whatever she could and eventually, when they were alone together, Wheldrake having been taken as a trophy to sport at some dinner, she relaxed into a mood of satisfaction. They had been given adjoining rooms in what they were assured was the best inn of its sort in any of the second-rank villages. Tomorrow, they were told, they would be shown what apartments were available to them.
“We have survived this first day well, I think,” she said, sitting on a chest to remove her doeskin boots. “We have proven interesting enough to them so that we still have our lives, relative liberty and, most important now, I think, our swords …”
“You mistrust them thoroughly, then?” The albino looked curiously at the Rose as she shook out her pale red-gold hair and peeled off her brown jerkin to reveal a blouse of dark yellow. “I have never encountered such folk before.”
“Save that they are drawn from every part of the multiverse, they are very much of a type I left behind me long ago and like poor Wheldrake hoped never to encounter again. The sisters reached the Gypsy Nation less than a week before we did. The woman who told me this had it from a woman she knows in the next village. The sisters, however, were accepted by a village of the forward rank.”
“And we can find them there?” Elric knew so much relief he only then realized how desperate he had become.
“Not so easily. We have no invitation to visit the village. There are forms to be observed before we can receive such an invitation. However, I also learned that Gaynor, of whom