Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [68]
And now Wheldrake found himself beside the cage where the monster slept, its eyes tight shut as it snored and snuffled and smacked its loose, spongy lips, and at that moment the poet felt a certain sympathy for the creature, who was as surely trapped into compromise with Gaynor as almost everyone else aboard the ship. He leaned his arm on the rail of black, carved wood and watched as the moon emerged from behind a cloud and its light fell upon the scales, the leathery folds of flesh, the almost translucent webbing between the enormous fingers, and marveled at such ugliness, enraptured of such beauty. Whereupon he thought of himself, thought of a phrase, a certain cadence, felt about his pockets for his ink, his quill and his parchment and set to work in the moonlight to find romantic comparisons between Wheldrake the Poet and Khorghakh the Toad which was, he felt with a certain degree of self-satisfaction, all the more difficult if one attempted, for instance, some version of trochaic dimeter …
Of this schism
Occultism,
Lately risen,
(Euphemism)
Calls for heroism rare.
Which occupied him so successfully that it was not until dawn that he placed his pining head upon his pillow and fell into the sweetest dreams of love he had ever known …
Dawn found all but Wheldrake on deck, faces upturned towards a lowering sky from which fell a languorous rain. It had grown warmer overnight and the humidity was very high. Elric tugged at his clothes and wished that he were naked. He felt as if he walked through tepid mead. The navigator was up on the foredeck with the toad; they seemed to be in conference. Then the grey man straightened and came back to where Elric, Gaynor and Charion stood together under a rough awning upon which the rain drops thumped with deliberate rhythm. He brushed his own woolen sleeve. “It’s like mercury, this stuff. You should try to swallow some. It won’t harm you, but it’s almost impossible—you have to chew it. Now, Prince Gaynor the Damned, you struck a bargain with me and I have fulfilled the first part. Whereupon you said you would return to me what was mine. Before, you agreed, we advance into the Heavy Sea.”
The grey-green gaze was steady upon that shifting helm. They were eyes that feared almost nothing.
“True,” says Gaynor, “such a bargain was made—” and he seems to hesitate, as if weighing the odds of breaking his oath, then deciding he would gain more by honouring it—“and I shall keep it, naturally. One moment.” He leaves the quarter-deck to go below and re-emerge with a small bundle—perhaps a wrapped greatcoat—which he puts into the navigator’s hands. For a second those strange eyes flare and the mouth grins oddly, then the grey man is impassive again. Carrying the bundle he returns to take a further word or two with the toad. Then it’s “Get a man to the lookout” and “Oarsmen to their positions” and “Keep that sail down—’tis a slow wind that will fill her, but ’tis worth the attempt” and the navigator is moving about the black-and-yellow ship—a man of the wild sea, a man of well-garnered wisdom and natural intellect, everything that a ship’s commander should be—encouraging, shouting, whistling, joking with all—even the great old toad that grumbled his way from the cage as Charion released him, to creep bit by bit to the prow, and lie along the creaking bowsprit, forcing the ship still further down into the sea—down now through a narrow channel (pointed out by the navigator hanging in the rigging above the toad’s green head) where white water meets black, where airy foam meets leaden droplets, suspended in the thick air. The prow of the ship—sharp and honed like a razor in the