Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [54]
It is only as the dawn comes up behind them, soaring pinks, blues and faint golds, washing the road ahead with pale, watery light, that Elric understands why Mother Phatt screams and Charion holds her hands over her ears, and why Fallogard Phatt’s face is a tormented mask!
The light races forward over the great span of the causeway, revealing the lumbering settlements, the tramping thousands, the smoke and the dimming lamps, the ordinary domestic details of the day—but ahead—ahead is what the clairvoyants have foreseen …
The mile-wide span across the bay, that astonishing creation of an obsessively nomadic people, has been cut as if by a gigantic sword—sheared in a single blow!
Now the two halves rise and fall slowly with the shock of this catastrophe. That massive bridge of human bones and animal skins, of every kind of compacted ordure, trembles like a cut branch, lifting and dropping almost imperceptibly, with steady beats, while on the landside the boiling waters release all their fury and the white spray makes rainbows high overhead.
One by one, with appalling deliberation, the villages of the Gypsy Nation crawl to the edge and plunge into the abyss.
To stop is obscene. They do not know how to stop. They can only die.
Elric, too, is screaming now, as he forces his horse forward. But he screams, he knows, at the apparent inevitability of human folly, of people who can destroy themselves to honour a principle and a habit that has long since ceased to have any practical function. They are dying because they would rather follow habit than alter their course.
As the villages crawl to the broken edge of the causeway and drop into oblivion, Elric thinks of Melniboné and his own race’s refusals in the face of change. And he weeps for the Gypsy Nation, for Melniboné, and for himself.
They will not stop.
They cannot stop.
There is confusion. There is consternation. There is growing panic in the villages. But still they will not stop.
Through the falling mist rides Elric now, crying out for them to turn back. He rides almost to the edge of the causeway and his horse stamps and snorts in terror. The Gypsy Nation is dropping not into the distant ocean but into a great blossoming mass of reds and yellows, whose sides open like exotic petals and whose hot centre pulses as it swallows village after village. And it is then that Elric knows this is Chaos work!
He turns the black stallion away from the edge and gallops back through that doomed press to where Mother Phatt in her chair shrieks: “No! No! The Rose! Where is the Rose?”
Elric dismounts and seizes Fallogard Phatt by his lean, trembling shoulders. “Where is she? Do you know? Which village is Duntrollin?” But Fallogard Phatt shakes his head, his mouth moving dumbly, until at last all he can do is repeat her name. “The Rose!”
“She should not have done this,” cries Charion. “It is wrong to do this!”
Even Elric could not condone what was happening, careless as he often was of human life, and he longed to call upon Chaos to bring a halt to the dreadful destruction. But Chaos had been summoned to perform this deed and he knew he would not be heeded. He had not believed the Rose capable of raising such formidable allies; he could scarcely accept that she would willingly permit such horror as thousands upon thousands of living creatures plunged into the abyss, their cries of terror now unified in the air, while overhead the white spray spumed and the rainbows glittered.
Then he had turned, hearing a familiar voice, and it was young Koropith Phatt, running towards them, his clothes in shreds and blood pouring from a score of minor cuts.
“Oh, what has she done!” cried Wheldrake. “The woman is a monster!”
But Koropith was panting, pointing backwards to where, as bloody and ragged as himself, her hair slick with sweat, her sword Swift Thorn in her right hand, her dagger Little Thorn in her left, staggered the Rose, with tears like diamonds upon her haggard face.
Wheldrake addressed her first. He, too, was crying. “Why did you do this? Nothing can