Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [90]
“I assure you, Mistress Phatt,” said Elric, also disturbed, “I am only the one you know. For some reason, Fate does not want me annihilated as yet. It seems, indeed, that I am surviving annihilation rather successfully.”
It was this last little irony that seemed to convince her and she relaxed. But it was clear every psychic sense in her was probing his being for signs of imposture. “You are indeed a remarkable creature, Elric of Melniboné,” said Charion Phatt as she turned away to attend to her grandmother.
“I am glad you found us, sir. We ourselves have some rather excellent intimations concerning my missing son,” called out Fallogard Phatt cheerfully, oblivious of his niece’s suspicions. “So, gradually, we become, as it were, concrete again. You already know, I believe, my niece’s intended?”
At which Charion Phatt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices made by lovers.
And Mother Phatt opened her merry red mouth in which a few fangs still glittered and cried: “Ding dong, for the six sad drabs! Ding dong for the dilly-o!” As if, in senility, she had become possessed by a mad parrot. Yet she waved an approving hand upon her granddaughter’s choice and her wink at Elric was full of knowing wit and, when he returned it, he was sure she smiled. “Dark days for the lily-white boy; bright days for the darkling joy! Feast of evil, feast of good, feasting fine the Chaos brood. Feast the devil, feast the Son; dark days for the shining one. For the flowers of the forest are blooming at night, and the ships of the ocean are sailing on land. Ding dong for the lily-white lad, ding dong for the good and the bad; sail through the wildwood, sow grain on the sea; Chaos has come to the Land of the Three.”
But when they taxed her on the meaning, if any, of her rhymes, she merely chuckled and called for her tea. “Mother Phatt is a greedy old woman,” she confided to Elric. “But she’s done her bit in the past, vicar, I think you’ll agree. Mother Phatt sat under a tree; bore five strong sons to Eternity.”
“Koropith, then, is not far from here?” Elric spoke to Fallogard Phatt. “You can sense him, you said, sir.”
“Too much Chaos, you see,” exclaimed the tall clairvoyant with a vigorous nod. “Hard to part it—hard to look through. Hard to call. Hard to hear an answer. Fuzzy, sir. The cosmos is always fuzzy when Chaos goes to work. This world is threatened, sir, you see. The first invaders have long since gained their foothold. Yet something holds them back, it seems.”
Elric thought again of the runesword, yet had the notion that his blade was neither helping nor resisting the complicated flow of events; it had merely fought to return to the plane on which it must be at a certain time, during a certain movement of the multiverse. Some other power fought Chaos here, of that he was sure. And he wondered about the three sisters and their part in this. That they possessed certain treasures, which both he and Gaynor coveted, was almost all he knew—save for Wheldrake’s ballad, which was mostly the poet’s own invention and therefore of little use as an objective oracle. Did the sisters exist at all? Were they wholly the creation of the Bard of Putney? Was everyone pursuing a chimera—the invention of a highly romantic and over-coloured imagination?
“In the third grey month on the third grey day,
Three sistren rode to Radinglay,
Seeking three treasures they had lost,
To the laughing lord of The Ship That Was.”
“Well, sir,” says Elric, helping with the fire they are building, for they had planned to make camp here, even before his sudden arrival, “do those old rhymes of yours give you any clue to the whereabouts of the sisters?”
“I must admit, sir, that I have modified the verses a little, to allow for the new things I have learned, so I am an unreliable source of truth, sir, save in its most fundamental sense. Like a majority of poets,