Revenge of the Rose (22 page)

 
          
His
final words were uttered with such chilling ferocity that Elric, completely
unprepared for them, felt he had been struck physically, to his vitals, by iron
of such infinite coldness it reached to his soul …

 
          
“
Oh, Elric, I hate thee with such jealous
hate! I hate thee for thine insistent relish of life! For what I once was and
what I might have become, I hate thee! For what thou aspireth to, I hate thee
most of all
 …”

 
          
As
he bent to close the door, the albino looked back at the figure of Gaynor and
it seemed to him that the armour which enclosed the damned prince had long
since ceased to protect him from any of the things he truly feared. Now the
armour had become nothing more than a prison.

 
          
“And
for my part, Gaynor the Damned,” he said with gentle subtlety, “I pity thee
with all my soul.”

 
          
Land
at last! A Certain Conflict of Interests. Concerning the Anatomy of Lycanthropy
.

 
          
“In
my own world, sir, sad to say, human prejudice is matched only by human folly.
Not a soul
claims
to be prejudiced,
of course, as there are few who would describe themselves as fools …”
Ernest Wheldrake addressed the grey navigator as they sat at breakfast on deck
the next morning beneath a leaden sky upon the Heavy Sea and watched black
waves rise and fall with what seemed unnatural slowness.

 
          
Elric,
chewing on a piece of barely palatable salt beef, remarked that this seemed a
quality of a good deal of society, throughout the multiverse.

 
          
The
navigator turned his sharp green-grey eyes upon the albino and there was a
certain restrained humour in his face when he spoke. “I have known whole
Spheres where reason and gentleness, respect for self and for others, have
existed together with vigorous intellectual and artistic pursuits—and where the
supernatural world was merely a metaphor …”

 
          
At
which Wheldrake smiled. “Even in my England, sir, such perfection was rarely
found.”

 
          
“I
did not say perfection was common,” murmured the grey man, and he curled his
lithe old body off the bench and stood to peer into the green-black sky and
stretch his long limbs and lick his thin lips and sniff at the wind and turn
towards the prow and the toad, whose sleepy bellows had sounded like rage to
the waking passengers. “There is a comet up there!” He pointed one tapering
finger. “It means a prince has died.” He listened for a moment until, mysteriously
satisfied, he loped on about his duties.

 
          
“Where
I once lived,” came the sepulchral melody of Gaynor the Damned as he climbed up
from his cabin, “they said that when a comet died a
poet
died.” He clapped a shimmering gauntlet upon Wheldrake’s resisting
shoulder. “Do they say that, where you are from, Master Wheldrake?”

 
          
“You
are in ungentle spirits I see, this morning, sir,” Wheldrake spoke gently, his
cool anger overwhelming his fear. “Perhaps you have your toad’s indigestion?”

 
          
Gaynor
withdrew his hand and acknowledged the little man’s admonishment. “Well, well,
sir. Some princes are more eager for death than others. And poets, for life, we
know. Lady Charion.” A bow that set his whole helm to flowing with angry fire. “Prince
Elric. Aha! And Master Snare—” for back from his post ran the grey navigator.

 
          
“I
sought you earlier, Prince Gaynor. We had an agreement between us.”

 
          
“There
is no hope for you,” said Gaynor the Damned, making a movement forward, perhaps
of sympathy. “She is dead. She died when the church collapsed. You must seek
your bride in limbo now, Esbern Snare.”

 
          
“You
promised you would tell me—”

 
          
“I
promised I would tell thee the truth. And the truth is what I have told thee.
She is dead. Her soul awaits thee.”

 
          
The
grey navigator bowed his shaggy head. “You know I cannot join her! I have
forfeited my right to life after death! And in return, O, Heaven help me! I
have joined with the Undead …” With that sudden statement of feeling,
Esbern Snare rushed back to the forecastle and ran up into the rigging, to
stare blindly into the seething horizon.

 
          
Whereupon
Gaynor the Damned made a sound like a sigh, deep within his helm, and Elric
understood how he had been rescued on the ship and why there was a
fellow-feeling evident between the navigator and the deathless prince.

 
          
But
Wheldrake was gasping with a kind of joy and clapping his hand upon the
breakfast table, making the stewed herbs slop, unmourned, from cup to cloth. “By
Heaven, sir, that’s Esbjorn Snorre, is it not? Now I have the trick of your
pronunciation—and his, I note. I make no claims. We are, after all, rather
grateful for that singular telepathy which provides us with the means, so
frequently, of our survival in some highly inclement social weather—we should
not begrudge benign Mother Nature a few regional accents—by way of a little
light-hearted relief to her in her ever-vigilant concern for our continuing
existence. Astonishing sir, when you think of it.”

 
          
“You
have heard of the navigator?” Lady Charion caught, as it were, at the
coat-tails of his conversation’s substance.

 
          
“I
have heard of Esbern Snare. But the ending of his tale was a happy one. He
tricked a troll into building a church for him and his bride to be married in.
The troll’s wife gave away the troll’s name and so released Esbern Snare from
his bargain. The troll’s wife can still be heard wailing, they say, under
Ulshoi hill. I wrote a kind of ballad about it in my
Norwegian Songs
. Pillaged, of course, by Whittier, but we’ll say no
more of that. No doubt he needed the money. Still, plagiarism’s only
dishonourable if the coin you earn with it is worth less than the coin you
stole.”

 
          
Again,
Charion clutched bravely for the original substance:

 
          
“He
married happily, you say? But you heard what Gaynor told him?”

 
          
“This
is a sequel, it seems, to the original tale. I only know of the successful
trickster. Any subsequent tragedy had been forgotten by the folklore of my day.
Sometimes, you know, it occurs to me that I am in a dream in which all those
heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses of my verses have come to life
to haunt me, to befriend me, to make me one of themselves. A man, after all,
could rarely hope to find such varied company in Putney …”

 
          
“So
you do not know why Esbern Snare is aboard this ship, Master Wheldrake?”

 
          
“No
better than you, my lady.”

 
          
“And
you, Prince Elric?” She attracted the albino’s wandering attention. “Do you
know this story?”

 
          
Elric
shook his head.

 
          
“I
only know,” he said, “that he is a shape-changer and, that most cursed of
souls, a person of rare goodness and sanity. Imagine such torment as is his!”

 
          
Even
Wheldrake bowed his head, as if in respect. For there are few more terrible
fates than that of the immortal separated, by force of the most profound
natural logic, from those immortal souls it cherishes in life. It can know only
the pain of death but never the ecstasy of everlasting life. Its pleasures and
rewards are short-lived; its torment, eternal.

 
          
And
this made Elric think of his father, lingering in that timeless destruction of
Imrryr’s ancestor; himself separated from his one abiding love by his
willingness to bargain with his patron demon—even betray him—for a little more
unearned power on Earth.

 
          
The
albino found himself brooding upon the nature of all unholy bargains, of his
own dependency upon the hellsword Stormbringer, of his willingness to summon
supernatural aid without thought of any spiritual consequences to himself and,
perhaps most significantly, of his
unwillingness
to find a way to cure himself of the occult’s seductive attraction; for there
was a part of his strange brain that was curious to follow its own fate; to
learn whatever disastrous conclusion lay in store for it—it needed to know the
end of the saga: the value, perhaps, of its torment.

 
          
Elric
found that he had walked up the deck to the forecastle, past the reverberant
toad, to put his back against the bowsprit’s copper-shod knuckle and stare up
at the navigator as he hung, still motionless, in the rigging.

 
          
“Where
do you journey, Esbern Snare?” he asked.

 
          
The
grey man cocked his head, as if hearing a distant but familiar whistle. Then
his pale green-grey eyes stared down into the albino’s crimson orbs and a great
gust of air escaped him, and a tear appeared upon his cheek.

 
          
“Nowhere,
now,” said Esbern Snare. “Nowhere, now, sir.”

 
          
“Would
you continue in Gaynor’s service?” Elric asked. “Even when land is sighted?”

 
          
“Until
I choose to do otherwise, sir. As you shall yourself observe. There is land
ahead, no more than a mile before us.”

 
          
“You
can see it?” Elric asked in surprise, attempting to peer into the swirling
vapours of the Heavy Sea.

 
          
“No,
sir,” said Esbern Snare. “But I can smell it.”

 
          
And
land it soon was. Land rising up from the slow, awful waters of the Heavy Sea;
land like a wakened monster, an angry shadow, all sharp ridges and jagged
points; cliffs of black marble; beaches of carbon, and black breakers which
poured like the smoke of hell upon that squealing shore …

 
          
Land
so inhospitable the voyagers who looked at it now were all pretty much of the
same accord, that the Heavy Sea was less daunting; and it was Wheldrake who
suggested they sail on until they found a more accessible island.

 
          
But
Gaynor shook his flickering helm and lifted up his glowing fist and put his
steel palm upon the slender shoulders of Charion Phatt. “You told me, child,
that the other Phatts are here. Have they found the sisters?”

 
          
The
young woman shook her head slowly. Her face was grave and her eyes seemed to
look into some different reality. “They have not found the sisters.”

 
          
“Yet
they—and the sisters—are here?”

 
          
“Beyond
this—aye—in there …” Her mouth grew a little slack now as she lifted her
head and pointed towards the massive cliffs dashed by that black foam. “Aye—there—and
there, they go—yet—oh, Uncle! I see why! The sisters ride on. But Uncle? Where
is grandma? The sisters go towards the East. It is in their nature to bear
always eastward, now. They are going home.”

 
          
“Good,”
says Gaynor with deep satisfaction. “We must find a place to land.”

 
          
And
Wheldrake confided to Elric that he had the feeling Gaynor was prepared to
wreck them all now, in order to make landfall and continue his pursuit.

 
          
And
yet the ship was beached at last upon that black, salty shingle up which the
gougy tide lazily rolled and as lazily retreated.

 
          
“It
is like,” said Wheldrake in distaste as, the skirts of his frock-coat wrapped
around his narrow chest, he stepped gingerly through the shallows, “a form of
molasses. What causes this, Master Snare?”

 
          
His
bundle under his arm, Esbern Snare lifted his long legs through the liquid. “Nothing,”
he said, “save a minor distortion in the fabric of time. Such places are not
uncommon in this particular Sphere. In my own they were rare. I came across a
small one—a matter of a few feet—near the North Pole. That would have been
around the turn of your century, Master Wheldrake, I think.”

 
          
“Which
one, sir? I am a native of several. I am, as it were, timeless. Perhaps I have
been granted my own particular ironic doom, ha, ha!”

 
          
Now
Esbern Snare loped ahead, up the beach to where a great crack had opened in the
wall of marble and through the jagged opening poured a shaft of watery golden
light. “I think we have our pathway to the cliff-top,” he said.

 
          
His
bundle between his teeth, he was already climbing—his long limbs perfect for
the route he chose from jutting crag to jutting crag—a great, grey spider
scuttling up the rock, finding first one ledge and then another, until he had
marked a path for the others, an easy means of climbing from the beach to the
surface of the cliff. They mounted this, one at a time, with Elric bringing up
the rear. On Gaynor’s orders the sailors were already letting down their sail
and moving the ship back into the water while from the forecastle came the wailing
and groanings of a recently awakened toad who only now realized that its
beloved was departing, perhaps for ever.