Elric of Melnibone (elric saga), Page 2

  Yyrkoon flushed with anger and bit his lip.

  'But go on, dear cousin Yyrkoon, ' Elric said. 'I am interested. Enlarge further on your argument.'

  Yyrkoon looked around him, as if for support. But all his supporters were on the floor of the hall. Only Elric's friends, Dyvim Tvar and Cymoril, were nearby. Yet Yyrkoon knew that his supporters were hearing every word and that he would lose face if he did not retaliate. Elric could tell that Yyrkoon would have preferred to have retired from this confrontation and choose another day and another ground on which to continue the battle, but that was not possible. Elric, himself, had no wish to continue the foolish banter which was, no matter how disguised, a little better than the quarrelling of two little girls over who should play with the slaves first. He decided to make an end to it.

  Yyrkoon began: 'Then let me suggest that an emperor who was physically weak might also be weak in his will to rule as befitted...'

  And Elric raised his hand. 'You have done enough, dear cousin. More than enough. You have wearied yourself with this conversation when you would have preferred to dance. I am touched by your concern. But now I, too, feel weariness steal upon me.' Elric signaled for his old servant Tanglebones who stood on the far side of the throne dais, amongst the soldiers: 'Tanglebones! My cloak.'

  Elric stood up. 'I thank you again for your thoughtfulness, cousin.' He addressed the court in general. 'I was entertained. Now I retire.'

  Tanglebones brought the cloak of white fox fur and placed it around his master's shoulders. Tangle-bones was very old and much taller than Elric, though his back was stooped and all his limbs seemed knotted and twisted back on themselves, like the limbs of a strong, old tree.

  Elric walked across the dais and through the door which opened onto a corridor which led to his private apartments.

  Yyrkoon was left fuming. He whirled round on the dais and opened his mouth as if to address the watching courtiers. Some, who did not support him, were smiling quite openly. Yyrkoon clenched his fists at his sides and glowered. He glared at Dyvim Tvar and opened his thin lips to speak. Dyvim Tvar coolly returned the glare, daring Yyrkoon to say more.

  Then Yyrkoon flung back his head so that the locks of his hair, all curled and oiled, swayed against his back. And Yyrkoon laughed.

  The harsh sound filled the hall. The music stopped. The laughter continued.

  Yyrkoon stepped up so that he stood on the dais. He dragged his heavy cloak round him so that it engulfed his body.

  Cymoril came forward. 'Yyrkoon, please do not...' He pushed her back with a motion of his shoulder.

  Yyrkoon walked stiffly towards the Ruby Throne. It became plain that he was about to seat himself in it and thus perform one of the most traitorous actions possible in the code of Melnibone. Cymoril ran the few steps to him and pulled at his arm.

  Yyrkoon's laughter grew. 'It is Yyrkoon they would wish to see on the Ruby Throne, ' he told his sister. She gasped and looked in horror at Dyvim Tvar whose face was grim and angry.

  Dyvim Tvar signed to the guards and suddenly there were two ranks of armoured men between Yyrkoon and the throne.

  Yyrkoon glared back at the Lord of the Dragon Caves. 'You had best hope you perish with your master, ' he hissed.

  'This guard of honour will escort you from the hall, ' Dyvim Tvar said evenly. 'We were all stimulated by your conversation this evening, Prince Yyrkoon.'

  Yyrkoon paused, looked about him, then relaxed. He shrugged. 'There's time enough. If Elric will not abdicate, then he must be deposed.'

  Cymoril's slender body was rigid. Her eyes blazed. She said to her brother:

  'If you harm Elric in any way, I will slay you myself, Yyrkoon.'

  He raised his tapering eyebrows and smiled. At that moment he seemed to hate his sister even more than he hated his cousin. 'Your loyalty to that creature has ensured your own doom, Cymoril. I would rather you died than that you should give birth to any progeny of his. I will not have the blood of our house diluted, tainted--even touched--by his blood. Look to your own life, sister, before you threaten mine.'

  And he stormed down the steps, pushing through those who came up to congratulate him. He knew that he had lost and the murmurs of his sycophants only irritated him further.

  The great doors of the hall crashed together and closed. Yyrkoon was gone from the hall.

  Dyvim Tvar raised both his arms. 'Dance on, courtiers. Pleasure yourselves with all that the hall provides. It is what will please the emperor most.'

  But it was plain there would be little more dancing done tonight. Courtiers were already deep in conversation as, excitedly, they debated the events.

  Dyvim Tvar turned to Cymoril. 'Elric refuses to understand the danger, Princess Cymoril. Yyrkoon's ambition could bring disaster to all of us.'

  'Including Yyrkoon.' Cymoril sighed.

  'Aye, including Yyrkoon. But how can we avoid this, Cymoril, if Elric will not give orders for your brother's arrest?'

  'He believes that such as Yyrkoon should be allowed to say what they please. It is part of his philosophy. I can barely understand it, but it seems integral to his whole belief. If he destroys Yyrkoon, he destroys the basis on which his logic works. That at any rate, Dragon Master, is what he has tried to explain to me.'

  Dyvim Tvar sighed and he frowned. Though unable to understand Elric, he was afraid that he could sometimes sympathise with Yyrkoon's viewpoint. At least Yyrkoon's motives and arguments were relatively straightforward. He knew Elric's character too well, however, to believe that Elric acted from weakness or lassitude. The paradox was that Elric tolerated Yyrkoon's treachery because he was strong, because he had the power to destroy Yyrkoon whenever he cared. And Yyrkoon's own character was such that he must constantly be testing that strength of Elric's, for he knew instinctively that if Elric did weaken and order him slain, then he would have won. It was a complicated situation and Dyvim Tvar dearly wished that he was not embroiled in it. But his loyalty to the royal line of Melnibone was strong and his personal loyalty to Elric was great. He considered the idea of having Yyrkoon secretly assassinated, but he knew that such a plan would almost certainly come to nothing. Yyrkoon was a sorcerer of immense power and doubtless would be forewarned of any attempt on his life.

  'Princess Cymoril, ' said Dyvim Tvar, 'I can only pray that your brother swallows so much of his rage that it eventually poisons him.'

  'I will join you in that prayer, Lord of the Dragon Caves.'

  Together, they left the hall.

  3

  Riding Through the Morning: A Moment of Tranquillity

  THE LIGHT OF the early morning touched the tall towers of Imrryr and made them scintillate. Each tower was of a different hue; there were a thousand soft colours. There were rose pinks and pollen yellows, there were purples and pale greens, mauves and browns and oranges, hazy blues, whites and powdery golds, all lovely in the sunlight. Two riders left the Dreaming City behind them and rode away from the walls, over the green turf towards a pine forest where, among the shadowy trunks, a little of the night seemed to remain. Squirrels were stirring and foxes crept homeward; birds were singing and forest flowers opened their petals and filled the air with delicate scent. A few insects wandered sluggishly aloft. The contrast between life in the nearby city and this lazy rusticity was very great and seemed to mirror some of the contrasts existing in the mind of at least one of the riders who now dismounted and led his horse, walking knee-deep through a mass of blue flowers. The other rider, a girl, brought her own horse to a halt but did not dismount. Instead, she leaned casually on her: high Melnibonean pommel and smiled at the man, her lover.

  'Elric? Would you stop so near to Imrryr?'

  He smiled back at her, over his shoulder. 'For the moment. Our flight was hasty. I would collect my thoughts before we ride on.'

  'How did you sleep last night?'

  'Well enough, Cymoril, though I must have dreamed without knowing it, for there were--there were little intimations in my head when I awo
ke. But then, the meeting with Yyrkoon was not pleasant...'

  'Do you think he plots to use sorcery against you?'

  Elric shrugged. 'I would know if he brought a large sorcery against me. And he knows my power, I doubt if he would dare employ wizardry.'

  'He has reason to believe you might not use your power. He has worried at your personality for so long--is there not a danger he will begin to worry at your skills? Testing your sorcery as he has tested your patience?'

  Elric frowned. 'Yes, I suppose there is that danger. But not yet, I should have thought.'

  'He will not be happy until you are destroyed, Elric.'

  'Or is destroyed himself, Cymoril.' Elric stooped and picked one of the flowers. He smiled. 'Your brother is inclined to absolutes, is he not? How the weak hate weakness.'

  Cymoril took his meaning. She dismounted and came towards him. Her thin gown matched, almost perfectly, the colour of the flowers through which she moved. He handed her the flower and she accepted it, touching its petals with her perfect lips. 'And how the strong hate strength, my love. Yyrkoon is my kin and yet I give you this advice--use your strength against him.'

  'I could not slay him. I have not the right.' Elric's face fell into familiar, brooding lines.

  "You could exile him.'

  'Is not exile the same as death to a Melnibonean?'

  'You, yourself, have talked of travelling in the lands of the Young Kingdoms.'

  Elric laughed somewhat bitterly. 'But perhaps I am not a true Melnibonean. Yyrkoon has said as much--and others echo his thoughts.'

  'He hates you because you are contemplative. Your father was contemplative and no one denied that he was a fitting emperor.'

  'My father chose not to put the results of his contemplation into his personal actions. He ruled as an emperor should. Yyrkoon, I must admit, would also rule as an emperor should. He, too, has the opportunity to make Melnibone great again. If he were emperor, he would embark on a campaign of conquest to restore our trade to its former volume, to extend our power across the earth. And that is what the majority of our folk would wish. Is it my right to deny that wish?'

  'It is your right to do what you think, for you are the emperor. All who are loyal to you think as I do.'

  'Perhaps their loyalty is misguided. Perhaps Yyrkoon is right and I will betray that loyalty, bring doom to the Dragon Isle?' His moody, crimson eyes looked directly into hers. 'Perhaps I should have died as I left my mother's womb. Then Yyrkoon would have become emperor. Has Fate been thwarted?'

  'Fate is never thwarted. What has happened has happened because Fate willed it thus--if, indeed, there is such a thing as Fate and if men's actions are not merely a response to other men's actions.'

  Elric drew a deep breath and offered her an expression tinged with irony. 'Your logic leads you close to heresy, Cymoril, if we are to believe the traditions of Melnibone. Perhaps it would be better if you forgot your friendship with me.'

  She laughed. 'You begin to sound like my brother. Are you testing my love for you, my lord?'

  He began to remount his horse. 'No, Cymoril, but I would advise you to test your love yourself, for I sense there is tragedy implicit in our love.'

  As she swung herself back into her saddle she smiled and shook her head. 'You see doom in all things, Can you not accept the good gifts granted you? They are few enough, my lord.'

  'Aye. I'll agree with that.'

  They turned in their saddles, hearing hoofbeats behind them. Some distance away they saw a company of yellow-clad horsemen riding about in confusion. It was their guard, which they had left behind, wishing to ride alone.

  'Come! ' cried Elric. 'Through the woods and over yonder hill and they'll never find us! '

  They spurred their steeds through the sun-speared wood and up the steep sides of the hill beyond, racing down the other side and away across a plain where noidel bushes grew, their lush, poison fruit glimmering a purplish blue, a night-colour which even the light of day could not disperse. There were many such peculiar berries and herbs on Melnibone and it was to some of them that Elric owed his life. Others were used for sorcerous potions and had been sown generations before by Elric's ancestors. Now few Melniboneans left Imrryr even to collect these harvests. Only slaves visited the greater part of the island, seeking the roots and the shrubs which made men dream monstrous and magnificent dreams, for it was in their dreams that the nobles of Melnibone found most of their pleasures; they had ever been a moody, inward-looking race and it was for this quality that Imrryr had come to be named the Dreaming City. There, even the meanest slaves chewed berries to bring them oblivion and thus were easily controlled, for they came to depend on their dreams. Only Elric himself refused such drugs, perhaps because he required so many others simply to ensure his remaining alive.

  The yellow-clad guards were lost behind them and once across the plain where the noidel bushes grew they slowed their flight and came at length to cliffs and then the sea.

  The sea shone brightly and languidly washed the white beaches below the cliffs. Seabirds wheeled in the clear sky and their cries were distant, serving only to emphasise the sense of peace which both Elric and Cymoril now had. In silence the lovers guided their horses down steep paths to the shore and there they tethered the steeds and began to walk across the sand, their hair--his white, hers jet black--waving in the wind which blew from the east.

  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 warhelm 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 l
aughter 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.

  4

  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 morning. Southern barbarians, by their chequered dress. We are holding them until the emperor himself can question them.'

  Elric waved his hand. 'Then lead on, captain. Let's see the brave fools who dare Melnibone's sea-maze.'

  The Tower of Monshanjik had been named for the wizard-architect who had designed the sea-maze millennia before. The maze was the only means of reaching the great harbour of Imrryr and its secrets had been carefully guarded, for it was their greatest protection against sudden attack. The maze was complicated and pilots had to be specially trained to steer ships through it. Before the maze had been built, the harbour had been a kind of 'inland lagoon, fed by the sea which swept in through a system of natural caverns in the towering cliff which rose between lagoon and ocean. There were five separate routes through the sea-maze and any individual pilot knew but one. In the outer wall of the cliff there were five entrances. Here Young Kingdom ships waited until a pilot came aboard. Then one of the gates to one of the entrances would be lifted, all aboard the ship would be blindfolded and sent below save for the oar-master and the steersman who would also be masked in heavy steel helms so that they could see nothing, do nothing but obey the complicated instructions of the pilot. And if a Young Kingdom ship should fail to obey any of those instructions and should crush itself against the rock walls, well Melnibone did not mourn for it and any survivors from the crew would be taken as slaves. All who sought to trade with the Dreaming City understood the risks, but scores of merchants came every month to dare the dangers of the maze and trade their own poor goods for the splendid riches of Melnibone.