Chronicles of Corum, Page 2

  It was unjust.

  By creating Man, the universe had betrayed the old races.

  But it was a perpetual and familiar injustice. The sentient may perceive and love the universe, but the universe cannot perceive and love the sentient. The universe recognizes no distinction between the multitude of creatures and elements which comprise it. All are equal None is favored. The universe, equipped with nothing but the materials and the power of creation, continues to create: something of this, something of that. It cannot control what it creates, and it cannot, it seems, be controlled by its creations (though a few might deceive themselves otherwise). Those who curse the workings of the universe curse that which is deaf. Those who strike out at those workings fight that which is inviolate. Those who shake their fists, shake their fists at blind stars.

  But this does not mean that there are some who will not try to do battle with and destroy the invulnerable. There will always be such beings, sometimes beings of great wisdom, who cannot bear to believe in an insouciant universe.

  Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsei was one of these. Perhaps the last of the Vadhagh race, he was sometimes known as the Prince in the Scarlet Robe.

  This is the second chronicle concerning his adventures. The first chronicle, known as The Books of Corum, told how the Mabden followers of Earl Glandyth-a-Krae killed Prince Corum ‘s relatives and his nearest kin and thus taught the Prince in the Scarlet Robe how to hate, how to kill, and how to desire vengeance. We have heard how Earl Glandyth tortured Prince Corum and took away a hand and an eye and how Corum was rescued by the Giant of Laahr and taken to the castle of the Margravine Rhalina—a castle set upon a mount surrounded by the sea. Though Rhalina was a Mabden woman (of the gentler folk of Lwym-an-Esh), Corum and she fell in love. When Glandyth roused the Pony Tribes, the forest barbarians, to attack the Margravine’s castle, she and Corum sought supernatural aid and thus fell into the hands of the sorcerer Shool, whose domain was the island called Svi-an-Fanla-Brool— Home of the Gorged God. And now Corum had direct experience of the morbid, unfamiliar powers at work in the world. Shool spoke of dreams and realities (“I see you are beginning to argue in Mabden terms, ” he told Corum. “It is just as well for you, if you wish to survive in this Mabden dream.’‘—“It is a dream …?’‘ said Corum.—“Of sorts, ” answered Shool. “Real enough. It is what you might call the dream of a God. There again you might say that it is a dream that a God has allowed to become reality. I refer of course to the Knight of the Swords, who rules the Five Planes. “)

  With Rhalina his prisoner Shool could make a bargain with Corum. He gave him two gifts—the Hand of Kwll and the Eye of Rhynn—to replace his own missing organs. These jewelled and alien things were once the property of two brother gods known as the Lost Gods since they mysteriously vanished.

  Armed with these Corum began his great quest, which was to take him against all three Sword Rulers—the Knight, the Queen and the King of the Swords—the mighty Lords of Chaos. And Corum discovered much concerning these gods, the nature of reality and the nature of his own identity. He learned that he was the Champion Eternal, that, in a thousand other guises, in a thousand other ages, it was his lot to struggle against those forces which attacked reason, logic and justice, no matter what form they took. And, at long last, he was able to overwhelm (with the help of a mysterious ally) those forces and banish gods from his world.

  Peace came to Bro-an-Vadhagh and Corum took his mortal bride to his ancient castle which stood on a cliff overlooking a bay. And meanwhile the few surviving Vadhagh and Nhadragh turned again to their own devices, and the golden land of Lwym-an-Esh flourished and became the center of the Mabden world—famous for its scholars, its bards, its artists, its builders and its warriors. A great age dawned for the Mabden folk; they flourished. And Corum was pleased that his wife’s folk flourished. On the few occasions when Mabden travellers passed near Castle Erorn, he would feast them well and be filled with gladness when he heard of the beauties of Halwyg-nan-Vake, capital city of Lwym-an-Esh, whose walls bloomed with flowers all year round. And the travellers would tell Corum and Rhalina of the new ships which brought great prosperity to the land, so that none in Lwym-an-Esh knew hunger. They would tell of the new laws which gave all a voice in the affairs of that country. And Corum listened and was proud of Rhalina’s race.

  To one such traveller he offered an opinion: “When the last of the Vadhagh and the Nhadragh have disappeared from this world, ” he said, “the Mabden will emerge as a greater race than ever were we. ”

  “But we shall never have your powers of sorcery, “answered the traveller, and he caused Corum to laugh heartily.

  “We had no sorcery at all! We had no conception of it. Our ‘sorcery ’ was merely our observation and manipulation of certain natural laws, as well as our perception of other planes of the multiverse, which we have now all but lost. It is the Mabden who imagine such things as sorcery. They would always rather invent the miraculous than investigate the ordinary (and find the miraculous therein). Such imaginations will make your race the most exceptional this Earth has yet known, but those same imaginations could also destroy you!”

  “Did we invent the Sword Rulers whom you so heroically fought?”

  ‘Aye,” answered Corum, ‘ I suspect that you did! And I suspect that you might invent others again.”

  “Invent phantoms? Fabulous beasts? Powerful gods? Whole cosmologies?” queried the astonished traveller. “Are all these things, then, unreal?”

  “They’re real enough,” Corum replied. “Reality, after all, is the easiest thing in the world to create. It is partly a question of need, partly a question of time, partly a question of circumstance …”

  Corum had felt sorry for confounding his guest, and he laughed again and passed on to other topics.

  And so the years went by and Rhalina began to show signs of age while Corum, near-immortal, showed none. Yet still they loved each other— perhaps with greater intensity as they realized that the day drew near when death would part them.

  Their life was sweet, their love strong. They needed little but each other’s company.

  And then she died.

  And Corum mourned for her. He mourned without the sadness which mortals have (which is, in part, sadness for themselves and fear of their own death).

  Some seventy years had passed since the Sword Rulers fell, and the travellers grew fewer and fewer as Corum of the Vadhagh people became considered more as a legend in Lwym-an-Esh and less as a creature of ordinary flesh. He had been amused when he had heard that in some outlying parts of that land there were now shrines to him and crude images of him to which folk prayed as they had prayed to their gods. It had not taken them long to find new gods, and it was ironic that one of them should be the person who had helped rid them of their old ones. They magnified his feats and, in so doing, simplified him as an individual. They attributed magical powers to him; they told stories of him which they had once told of their previous gods. Why was the truth never enough for the Mabden? Why did they forever embellish and obscure it? What a paradoxical people they were!

  Corum recalled his parting with his friend Jhary-a-Conel, self-styled Companion to Champions, and the last words he had spoken to him: “New gods can always be created.” Yet he had never guessed what at least one of those gods would be created from.

  And, because he had become divine to so many, the people of Lwym-an-Esh took to avoiding the headland on which stood ancient Castle Erorn, for they knew that gods had no time to listen to the silly talk of mortals.

  Thus Corum grew lonelier still; he became reluctant to travel in Mabden lands, for this attitude of the folk made him uncomfortable.

  In Lwym-an-Esh those who had known him well and known that, save for his longer lifespan, he was as vulnerable as themselves, were now all dead, too. So there were none to deny the legends.

  And likewise, because he had grown used to Mabden ways and Mabden people about him, he found that he could not find muc
h pleasure in the company of his own race, for they had retained their remoteness, their inability to understand their situation, and would continue to do so until the Vadhagh race perished for good. Corum envied them their lack of concern, for, though he took no part in the affairs of the world, he still felt involved enough to speculate about the possible destiny of the various races.

  A kind of chess played by the Vadhagh took up much of his time (he played against himself, using the pieces like arguments, testing one strain of logic against another). Brooding upon his various past conflicts, he doubted sometimes if they had ever taken place at all. He wondered if the portals to the Fifteen Planes were closed forever now, even to the Vadhagh and the Nhadragh, who had once moved in and out of them so freely. If this were so, did it mean, in effect, that those other planes no longer existed? And thus his dangers, his fears, his discoveries, slowly took on the quality of little more than abstractions; they became factors in an argument concerning the nature of time and identity and, after a while, the argument itself ceased to interest Corum.

  Some eighty years were to pass since the fall of the Sword Rulers before Corum‘s interest was to be reawakened in matters concerning the Mabden folk and their gods.

  BOOK ONE

  In which Prince Corum finds himself dreaming an unlikely and unwelcome dream…

  THE FIRST CHAPTER

  FEARING THE FUTURE AS THE PAST GROWS DIM

  Rhalina, ninety-six years old, and handsome, had died. Corum had wept for her. Now, seven years later, he still missed her. He contemplated his own lifespan of perhaps another thousand years, and he envied the race of Mabden its brief years, yet shunned the company of that race because he was reminded of her.

  Dwelling again in their isolated castles—whose forms so mirrored the natural rock that many Mabden passing by could not see them as buildings at all but mistook them for outcrops of granite, limestone and basalt—were his own race, the Vadhagh. These he shunned because he had grown, while Rhalina lived, to prefer Mabden company. It was an irony about which he would write poetry, or paint pictures, or compose music in the several halls of Castle Erorn set aside for the purpose.

  And thus he grew strange, in Castle Erorn by the sea.

  His remoteness caused his retainers (all Vadhagh now) to wonder how to express to him their view that perhaps he should take a Vadhagh wife, by whom he might have children and through whom he might discover a renewed interest in the present and the future. But there was no way they could find to approach their lord, Corum Jhalen Irsei, Prince in the Scarlet Robe, who had helped conquer the most powerful gods and rid this world of much that it had feared.

  The retainers began to know fear. They grew to fear Corum—that lonely figure with an eye-patch covering an empty socket and a variety of artificial right hands, each one of exquisite craftsmanship (made by Corum for his own use); that silent strider in midnight halls; that moody rider through the winter woods.

  And Corum knew fear, too. He felt a fear of empty days, of lonely years, waiting through the slow-turning centuries for death.

  He contemplated ending his life, but somehow he felt that such an action would be an insult to Rhalina’s memory. He considered embarking upon a quest, but there were no lands to explore in this bland, warm, tranquil world. Even the bestial Mabden of King Lyr-a-Brode had returned to their original pursuits, becoming farmers, merchants, fishermen, miners. No enemies threatened; no injustice was evident. Freed from gods, the Mabden had become content, kindly and wise.

  Corum recalled the old pursuits of his youth. He had hunted. But now he had lost any relish he ever had for the chase. He had been hunted too frequently during his battle with the Sword Rulers to feel anything now but anguish for the pursued. He had ridden. He had relished the lush and lovely countryside landward to Castle Erorn. But his relish for life had waned.

  He still rode, however. He would ride through the broadleaf forests which skirted the promontory on which Castle Erorn was raised. Sometimes he would venture as far as the deep, green moor beyond, with its thick gorse, its hawks, its skies and its silence. Sometimes he would take the coast road back to Castle Erorn, riding dangerously close to the crumbling cliff edge. Far below, the high, white surf would rear against the rocks, hissing and growling. Sometimes tendrils of spray would strike Corum’s face, but he would hardly feel them. Once such sensations had made him grin with pleasure.

  On most days Corum would not venture out. Neither sun, nor wind, nor rattling rain would lure him from the gloomy rooms which had, in the days when his family, and, later, Rhalina, had occupied them, been replete with love and light and laughter. Sometimes he would not even move from his chair. His tall, slender body would sprawl upon the cushions. He would rest his beautiful, tapering head upon his fleshly fist, and with his almond-shaped yellow and purple eye, he would stare into the past, a past which grew dimmer all the time and increased his desperation as he strove to remember every detail of his life with Rhalina. He was a prince of the great Vadhagh folk, grieving for a mortal woman. There had never been ghosts in Castle Erorn before the Mabden came.

  And sometimes, when he did not yearn for Rhalina, he would wish that Jhary-a-Conel had not decided to leave this plane—for Jhary, like him, was apparently immortal. The self-styled Companion to Heroes seemed able to move at will through all the fifteen planes of existence acting as guide, foil, and counselor to one who, in Jhary’s opinion, was Corum in several different guises. It had been Jhary-a-Conel who had said that he and Corum could be ‘aspects of a greater hero’, just as, in the tower of Voilodion Ghagnasdiak, he had met two other aspects of that hero, Erekose and Elric. Jhary had claimed that those two were Corum in other incarnations and it was Erekose’s particular doom to be aware of most of those incarnations. Intellectually, Corum could accept such an idea, but emotionally he rejected it. He was Corum. And that was his doom.

  Corum had a collection of Jhary’s paintings (most of them self-portraits, but some were of Rhalina and of Corum and of the small black and white winged cat which Jhary took everywhere with him, as he took his hat). Corum, in his most morbid moments, would study the portraits, recalling the old days, but slowly even the portraits came to be those of strangers. He would make efforts to consider the future, to make plans regarding his own destiny, but all his intentions came to nothing. There was no plan, no matter how detailed, how reasonable, which lasted more than a day or so. Castle Erom was littered with unfinished poems, unfinished prose, unfinished music, unfinished painting. The world had turned a man of peace into a warrior and then left him with nothing to fight.

  Such was Corum’s fate. He had no reason to work the land, for Vadhagh food was grown within the castle walls. There was no shortage of meat or wine. Castle Erorn provided all its few inhabitants needed. Corum had spent many years working on a variety of artificial hands, based on what he had seen at the doctor’s house in the world of Lady Jane Pentallyon. Now he had a selection of hands, all perfect, which worked as well for him as any hand of flesh had done. His favorite, which he wore most of the time, was one which resembled a finely-wrought gauntlet in filigree’d silver, an exact match to the hand which Earl Glandyth-a-Krae had cut off nearly a century before. This was the hand he could have used to hold his sword or his lance or his bow, had there been any call for him to use his weapons now. Tiny movements of the muscles in the stump of his original wrist would make it do everything an ordinary hand could do, and more, for the grip was stronger. Secondly, he had become ambidextrous, able to use his left hand as well as he had used his right hand. Yet all his skill could not make him a new eye, and he had to be content with a simple patch, covered in scarlet silk and worked with Rhalina’s fine needle into an intricate pattern. It was his unconscious habit now to run the fingers of his left hand frequently over that needlework as he sat brooding in his chair.

  Corum began to realize that his taciturnity was turning to madness when, in his bed at night, he began to hear voices. They were distant voices, a chant
ing chorus calling a name which might be his in a language which resembled the Vadhagh tongue and yet was unlike it. Try as he might, he could not drive the voices out, just as he could not, however much he strained his ears to listen, understand more than a few words of what they said. After several nights of these voices, he began to shout for them to stop. He would groan. He would roll in his silks and furs and try to stuff his ears. And in the days he would try to laugh at himself, would go for long rides to tire himself so that he would sleep heavily. Yet still the voices would come to him.

  And later there were dreams. Shadowy figures stood in a grove in a thick wood. Their hands were linked in a circle, apparently surrounding him. In his dreams he would speak to them, saying that he could not hear them, that he did not know what they wanted. He asked them to stop. But they continued to chant. Their eyes were closed, their heads flung back. They swayed.

  “Corum. Corum. Corum. Corum.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Corum. Help us. Corum.”

  He would break through their circle and run into the forest and then he would awake. He knew what had happened to him. His mind had turned in on itself. Not properly occupied, it had begun to invent phantoms. He had never heard of such a thing happening to a Vadhagh, though it happened frequently enough to Mabden people. Did he, as Shool had once told him, still live in a Mabden dream? Was the dream of the Vadhagh and the Nhadragh completely over? And did he therefore dream one dream within another?

  But these thoughts did not help his sanity. He tried to drive them away. He began to feel the need for advice, yet there was none to advise him. The Lords of Law and Chaos no longer ruled here, no longer had servants here to whom they imparted at least some of their knowledge. Corum knew more of philosophical matters than did anyone else.

  Yet there were wise Vadhagh who had come here from Gwlas-cor-Gwrys, the city in the Pyramid, who knew something of these matters. He detenriined that, if the dreams and the voices continued, he would set off on a journey to one of the other castles where the Vadhagh lived and there seek help. At least, he reasoned, there was a good chance that the voices would not follow him from Castle Erorn.