Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [9]
The albino reaches to take her ungloved hand and kiss it. “We share honours this day, Countess Guyë.”
And his smile is a thing to fear and to adore.
“Indeed, Lord Elric!” She draws on her gauntlet and takes her prancing mount in check. “But for the fecundity of thy sorcery and the courage of my soldiery, we’d both be Chaos-meat tonight—and unlucky if still alive!”
He answers with a sigh and an affirmative gesture. She speaks with deep satisfaction.
“The host shall waste no other lands, and its women in their home-trees shall bear no more brutes to bloody the world.” Throwing back her heavy cloak, she slings her slender shield behind her. Her long hair catches the evening light, deep vermilion, restless as the ocean as she laughs, while her blue eyes weep; for she had begun the day in the fullest expectation that the best she could hope for was sudden death. “We are deeply in your debt, sir. We are obligated, all of us. You shall be known throughout Anakhazhan as a hero.”
Elric’s smile is ungrateful. “We came together for mutual needs, madam. I was but settling a small debt with my captors.”
“There are other means of settling such debts, sir. We are still obliged.”
“I would not take credit,” he insists, “for altruism that is no part of my nature.” He looks away into the horizon where a purple scar washed with red disguises the falling of the sun.
“I have a different sense of it.” She speaks softly, for a hush is coming to the field, and a light breeze tugs at matted hair, bits of bloody fabric, torn skin. There are precious weapons and metals and jewels to be seen, especially where the Haghan’iin nobles had tried to make their escape, but not one of Countess Guyë’s sworders, mercenary or free Anakhazhani, will approach the booty. There is a general tendency amongst these weary soldiers to drop back as far as possible from the field. Their captains neither question them on this nor do they try to stop them. “I have the sense, sir, that you serve some Cause or Principle, nonetheless.”
He is quick to shake his head, his posture in the saddle one of growing impatience. “I am for no master nor moral persuasion. I am for myself. What your yearning soul, madam, might mistake for loyalty to person or Purpose is merely a firm and, aye, principled determination to accept responsibility only for myself and my own actions.”
She offers him a quick, girlish look of puzzled disbelief, then turns away with a dawning, woman’s grin. “There’ll be no rain tonight,” she observes, holding a dark, golden hand against the evening. “This mess’ll be stinking and spreading fever in hours. We’d best move on, ahead of the flies.” She hears the flapping even as he does and they both look back and watch the first gleeful ravens settling on flesh that has melted into one mile-wide mass of bloody meat, limbs and organs scattered at random, to hop upon and peck at half-destroyed faces still screaming for the mercy laughingly denied them as Elric’s patron Duke of Hell, Lord Arioch, gave aid to his favourite son.
These were in the times when Elric left his friend Moonglum in Tanelorn and ranged the whole world to find a land which seemed enough like his own that he might wish to settle there, but no such land as Melniboné could be a tenth its rival in any place the new mortals might dwell. And all these lands were mortal now.
He had begun to learn that he had earned a loss which could never be assuaged and in losing the woman he loved, the nation he had betrayed, and the only kind of honour he had known he had also lost part of his own identity, some sense of his own purpose and reason