Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [45]
“She must be pushed, Master Fallogard! She will roll as we all roll. Forward, always forward. To a finer future, Master Fallogard. We work for that, you know.” Vailadez Rench stooped to peer at the old woman. “Thus do we maintain the integrity of our great Nation.”
“I had read somewhere,” said Master Wheldrake quietly, stepping a little further into the room and inspecting it as if he truly intended to make it his home, “that a society dedicated solely to the preservation of her past, soon has only her past to sell. Why not stop the village, Master Rench, so that the old lady shall not have to move?”
“You enjoy these obscenities, I suppose, sir, in your own realm? They are not appreciated here.” Vailadez Rench looked down his long nose—a stork offering a parakeet only disdain. “The platforms must always move. The Nation must always move. There can be no pause to the gypsy’s way. And any who would block our way are our enemies! Any not invited to set foot on our road but who tread it in defiance of our laws—they are our deadly enemies, for they represent the many who would block our way and attempt to bring to a halt the Gypsy Nation, which has traveled, for more than a thousand times, the circumference of the world, over land and sea, along the road of their own making. The Free Road of the Free Gypsy People!”
“I, too, was taught schoolboy litanies to explain the follies of my own country,” said Wheldrake, turning away. “I have no quarrel with such wounded, needy souls as yourself, who must chant a creed as some kind of primitive charm against the unknown. It seems to me, as I travel the multiverse, that reliance upon such insistencies is what all mortals have in common. Million upon million of different tribes, each with its own fiercely defended truth.”
“Bravo, sir!” cries Fallogard Phatt with a wave of his generous quill (and ink goes flying over mother, books and papers), “but do not elaborate on such sentiments, I warn you! They are mine. They are my whole family’s, yet they are forbidden here, as in so many worlds. Do not speak so frankly, sir, lest you’d follow my uncle and my sister to the boards and the Long Stroll to Oblivion.”
“Heretic! You have no right to such fine Property!” Vailadez Rench’s lugubrious features twist with dismay, his delicate paint glowing from the heat of his own offended blood, as if some exotic fruit of Eden had bloomed and given voice simultaneously. “Evictors must be summoned and that will not be pleasant for Fallogard Phatt and the Family Phatt!”
“What remains of it,” grumbles Phatt, suddenly downhearted, as if he had always anticipated his defeat. “I have a dozen futures. Which to pick?” And he closes his eyes and screws up his face as if he, too, has sipped a dragon’s diluted venom, and he lets out a great keening noise, the cry of a wronged soul, the despairing voice of a creature which sees Justice suddenly as a Chimera and all displays of it a mere Charade. “A dozen futures, but still no fairness for the common folk! Where does this Tanelorn, this paradise, exist?”
And Elric, who is the only one Phatt is ever likely to meet who could supply him with anything but a metaphysical answer, remains silent, for in Tanelorn he took a vow as all do who receive her protection and her peace. Only true seekers after peace shall find Tanelorn, for Tanelorn is a secret carried by every mortal. And Tanelorn exists wherever mortals gather in mutual determination to serve the common good, creating as many paradises as there are human souls …
“I was told,” he said, “that it exists within oneself.”
At which Fallogard Phatt laid down his pen and ink, picked up a sack in which he had already, it appeared, packed his necessities, and began with downcast eyes to wheel his old mother from the room, calling out for the other members of his family as he did so.
Vailadez Rench watched them trail off with their bundles and their keepsakes and sniffed with considerable satisfaction as he looked around the house. “A lick of paint will soon brighten this property,