Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [89]
“Elric!”
“Father, I fear I have lost thy soul …!”
“My soul shall never be lost to thee, my son …”
A bright and sudden gleam of hard, pink-gold light, like a weapon against his eyes, and a smack of freezing air against his flesh, and a rhythmic sound, so familiar, so wonderful to him, that he felt the hot tears fall once, then twice, upon his chilled cheeks …
“So Gaynor rode to The Ship That Was,
And made of it his own,
And three sisters rare he did ensnare,
To insure the Chaos Throne.
The first of these sisters was The Unfolded Flower,
The second was Duty’s Bud,
While the third-born they christened Secret Thorn
And her bower was built of blood.”
And, sobbing, Elric fell into the welcoming arms of that great-hearted, if dwarfish, poet, Master Ernest Wheldrake. “My dear, good, sir! My good, old friend! Greetings to thee, Prince Elric. Does something pursue thee?” And he pointed back up through the deep snow-banks terracing the valley wall, where a fresh-ploughed furrow ran, as if Elric had slid from the top of the cliff to the bottom.
“I am glad to see thee, Master Wheldrake.” He brushed caked snow from his clothing, wondering, not for the first time, if he had dreamed his journey through the multiverse or if the dragon venom, perhaps, possessed more than restorative qualities. He glanced across the fresh-trod snow of a small clearing in the winter birchwood and saw Stormbringer leaning, almost casually, against a tree, and for a pure, clear moment, he knew absolute hatred of the blade, that part of himself he could no longer exist without or (as some small voice continued to tell him) that part, perhaps, that he wished to keep alive, since only in the rage of supernatural battle did he ever know any true relief from the burden of his conscience.
With deliberate slowness he strolled to the tree, picked up the blade and sheathed it as a man might sheath any ordinary weapon, his attention still upon his friend’s disheveled features. “How came you here, Master Wheldrake? Is it a plane familiar to you?”
“Familiar enough, Prince Elric. And to yourself, I should think. We have not left the realm where flows the Heavy Sea.”
And now Elric realized exactly what the Black Sword had done, dragging them both back to the very world from which Arioch had sought to banish them. And this suggested that the hellblade had motives of its own for ensuring his remaining here. He said none of this to Wheldrake but listened while his friend explained how Charion Phatt was at last reunited with her Uncle Fallogard and her grandmother.
“But Koropith remains lost to us at present,” the poet concluded. “Fallogard, however, has a close sense of his son’s presence. So we are hopeful, dear prince, that soon all surviving Phatts shall know again the pleasures of family security.” He lowered his voice to a kind of conspiratorial squeak. “There is some talk of marriage between myself and my beloved Charion.”
And, before he could burst into verse, the snowy branches of a forest path parted and here came the confident Charion, carrying the handles of a litter on which Mother Phatt sat, smiling and nodding, like a queen in a procession, the other end borne by her tall, untidy son who flashed a smile of jolly recognition towards the albino, as one might greet a familiar face at a local tavern. Only Charion seemed a little disturbed to discover the newcomer. “I sensed your destruction a year ago,” she said quietly, after she had lowered her grandmother’s litter to the ground. “I sensed you blasted out of any recognizable form of existence. How could you have survived that? Are you Gaynor or some shape-changer in