Elric_ The Sleeping Sorceress - Michael Moorcock [77]
They found a great, dry cave which caught the sounds the sea made and replied in a whispering echo. They removed their silken garments and made love tenderly in the shadows of the cave. They lay in each other’s arms as the day warmed and the wind dropped. Then they went to bathe in the waters, filling the empty sky with their laughter.
When they were dry and were dressing themselves they noticed a darkening of the horizon and Elric said: “We shall be wet again before we return to Imrryr. No matter how fast we ride, the storm will catch us.”
“Perhaps we should remain in the cave until it is past?” she suggested, coming close and holding her soft body against him.
“No,” he said. “I must return soon, for there are potions in Imrryr I must take if my body is to retain its strength. An hour or two longer and I shall begin to weaken. You have seen me weak before, Cymoril.”
She stroked his face and her eyes were sympathetic. “Aye. I’ve seen you weak before, Elric. Come, let’s find the horses.”
By the time they reached the horses the sky was grey overhead and full of boiling blackness not far away in the east. They heard the grumble of thunder and the crash of lightning. The sea was threshing as if infected by the sky’s hysteria. The horses snorted and pawed at the sand, anxious to return. Even as Elric and Cymoril climbed into their saddles large spots of rain began to fall on their heads and spread over their cloaks.
Then, suddenly, they were riding at full tilt back to Imrryr while the lightning flashed around them and the thunder roared like a furious giant, like some great old Lord of Chaos attempting to break through, unbidden, into the Realm of Earth.
Cymoril glanced at Elric’s pale face, illuminated for a moment by a flash of sky-fire, and she felt a chill come upon her then and the chill had nothing to do with the wind or the rain, for it seemed to her in that second that the gentle scholar she loved had been transformed by the elements into a hell-driven demon, into a monster with barely a semblance of humanity. His crimson eyes had flared from the whiteness of his skull like the very flames of the Higher Hell; his hair had been whipped upward so that it had become the crest of a sinister war-helm and, by a trick of the stormlight, his mouth had seemed twisted in a mixture of rage and agony.
And suddenly Cymoril knew.
She knew, profoundly, that their morning’s ride was the last moment of peace the two of them would ever experience again.
The storm was a sign from the gods themselves—a warning of storms to come.
She looked again at her lover. Elric was laughing. He had turned his face upward so that the warm rain fell upon it, so that the water splashed into his open mouth. The laughter was the easy, unsophisticated laughter of a happy child.
Cymoril tried to laugh back, but then she had to turn her face away so that he should not see it. For Cymoril had begun to weep.
She was weeping still when Imrryr came in sight—a black and grotesque silhouette against a line of brightness which was the as yet untainted western horizon.
CHAPTER FOUR
Prisoners: Their Secrets Are Taken from Them
The men in yellow armour saw Elric and Cymoril as the two approached the smallest of the eastern gates.
“They have found us at last,” smiled Elric through the rain, “but somewhat belatedly, eh, Cymoril?”
Cymoril, still embattled with her sense of doom, merely nodded and tried to smile in reply.
Elric took this as an expression of disappointment, nothing more, and called to his guards: “Ho, men! Soon we shall all be dry again!”
But the captain of the guard rode up urgently, crying: “My lord emperor is needed at Monshanjik Tower where spies are held.”
“Spies?”
“Aye, my lord.” The man’s face was pale. Water cascaded from his helm and darkened his thin cloak. His horse was hard to control and kept sidestepping through pools of water, which had gathered wherever the road was in disrepair. “Caught in the maze this