Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [74]
Whereupon Gaynor the Damned made a sound like a sigh, deep within his helm, and Elric understood how he had been rescued on the ship and why there was a fellow-feeling evident between the navigator and the deathless prince.
But Wheldrake was gasping with a kind of joy and clapping his hand upon the breakfast table, making the stewed herbs slop, unmourned, from cup to cloth. “By Heaven, sir, that’s Esbjorn Snorre, is it not? Now I have the trick of your pronunciation—and his, I note. I make no claims. We are, after all, rather grateful for that singular telepathy which provides us with the means, so frequently, of our survival in some highly inclement social weather—we should not begrudge benign Mother Nature a few regional accents—by way of a little light-hearted relief to her in her ever-vigilant concern for our continuing existence. Astonishing sir, when you think of it.”
“You have heard of the navigator?” Lady Charion caught, as it were, at the coat-tails of his conversation’s substance.
“I have heard of Esbern Snare. But the ending of his tale was a happy one. He tricked a troll into building a church for him and his bride to be married in. The troll’s wife gave away the troll’s name and so released Esbern Snare from his bargain. The troll’s wife can still be heard wailing, they say, under Ulshoi hill. I wrote a kind of ballad about it in my Norwegian Songs. Pillaged, of course, by Whittier, but we’ll say no more of that. No doubt he needed the money. Still, plagiarism’s only dishonourable if the coin you earn with it is worth less than the coin you stole.”
Again, Charion clutched bravely for the original substance:
“He married happily, you say? But you heard what Gaynor told him?”
“This is a sequel, it seems, to the original tale. I only know of the successful trickster. Any subsequent tragedy had been forgotten by the folklore of my day. Sometimes, you know, it occurs to me that I am in a dream in which all those heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses of my verses have come to life to haunt me, to befriend me, to make me one of themselves. A man, after all, could rarely hope to find such varied company in Putney …”
“So you do not know why Esbern Snare is aboard this ship, Master Wheldrake?”
“No better than you, my lady.”
“And you, Prince Elric?” She attracted the albino’s wandering attention. “Do you know this story?”
Elric shook his head.
“I only know,” he said, “that he is a shape-changer and, that most cursed of souls, a person of rare goodness and sanity. Imagine such torment as is his!”
Even Wheldrake bowed his head, as if in respect. For there are few more terrible fates than that of the immortal separated, by force of the most profound natural logic, from those immortal souls it cherishes in life. It can know only the pain of death but never the ecstasy of everlasting life. Its pleasures and rewards are short-lived; its torment, eternal.
And this made Elric think of his father, lingering in that timeless destruction of Imrryr’s ancestor; himself separated from his one abiding love by his willingness to bargain with his patron demon—even betray him—for a little more unearned power on Earth.
The albino found himself brooding upon the nature of all unholy bargains, of his own dependency upon the hellsword Stormbringer, of his willingness to summon supernatural aid without thought of any spiritual consequences to himself and, perhaps most significantly, of his unwillingness to find a way to cure himself of the occult’s seductive attraction; for there was a part of his strange brain that was curious to follow its own fate; to learn whatever disastrous conclusion lay in store for it—it needed to know the end of the saga: the value, perhaps, of its torment.
Elric found that he had walked up the deck to the forecastle, past the reverberant toad, to put his back against the bowsprit’s copper-shod knuckle and stare up at the navigator as he hung, still motionless, in the rigging.
“Where do you journey, Esbern Snare?” he asked.