Revenge of the Rose (3 page)

 
          
And
now the jill’s slender neck rises, swaying like a mesmerized cobra, by degrees,
and her snout tilts towards the sun, and her long tongue tastes the air and her
saliva drips more slowly to devour the ground it touches and a great sigh, like
a sigh of contentment, escapes her belly and she moves one hind leg, then the
next, swaying and tilting like a storm-tossed ship, with Elric clinging on for
his life, his body banged and rolled this way and that, until at last Scarsnout
is poised, her claws folding tight as her hind legs rear. Yet still she seems
to hesitate. Then she tucks her forelegs into the silk-soft leather of her
stomach, and again she tests the air.

 
          
Her
back legs give a kind of hop. The massive wings crack once, deafeningly. Her
tail lashing out to steady her uneven weight, she has risen—she is aloft and
mounting—mounting through those miserable clouds into blue perfection, a late
afternoon sky, with the clouds below now, like white and gentle hills and
valleys where perhaps the harmless dead find peace; and Elric does not care
where the dragon flies. He is glad to be flying as he flew as a boy—sharing his
joy with his dragon-mate, sharing his senses and his emotions, for this is the
true union between Elric’s ancestors and their beasts—a union which had always
existed and whose origins were explained only in unlikely legends—this was the
symbiosis with which, natural and joyful at first, they had learned to defend
themselves against would-be conquerors and later, turned conquerors, with which
they had overwhelmed all victims. Having become greedy for even more conquests
than were offered by the natural world, they sought supernatural conquests also
and thus came to make their bond with Chaos, with Duke Arioch himself. And with
Chaos to aid them they ruled ten thousand years; their cruelties refined but
never abated.

 
          
Before
then, thinks Elric—before then my people had never thought of war or power. And
he knows that it was this respect for all life which must have brought about
the original bond between Melnibonéan and dragon. And, as he lies along the
natural pommel, the ridge above his jill’s neck, he weeps with the wonder of
suddenly recollected innocence, of something he believed lost as everything
else is lost to him and which makes him believe, if only for this moment, that
what he has lost might be, perhaps, restored …

 
          
Then
he is free! Free in the air! Part of that impossible monster whose wings carry
her as if she were a wind-dancing kestrel, light as down, through darkening
skies, her skin giving off a sweetness like lavender and her head set in an
expression which seems in a way to mirror Elric’s own, and she turns and dives,
she climbs and wheels while Elric clings without any seeming effort to her back
and sings the wild old songs of his ancestors who had come as nomads of the
worlds to settle here and had, some said, been welcomed by an even older race
whom they superseded and with whom the royal line intermarried.

 
          
Up
speeds Scarsnout, up she flies, and, when the air grows so thin it can no
longer support her and Elric shivers in spite of his clothing and his mouth
gasps at the atmosphere, down she goes in a mighty, rushing plummet until she
brings herself up as if to land upon the cloud, then veers slowly away to where
the clouds now break to reveal a moonlit tunnel in the surface and down this
Scarsnout plunges while behind her lightning flashes once and a thunder clap
seems to seal the tunnel as they descend into an unnatural coldness which makes
Elric’s whole skin writhe and his bones feel as if they must split and crack
within him and yet still the albino does not fear, because the dragon does not
fear.

 
          
Above
them now the clouds have vanished. A blue velvet sky is further softened by a
large yellow moon, whose light casts their long shadows upon the rushing
meadowlands below, while the horizon shows a glint of the
midnight
sea and is filled with the emerald points
of stars, and only as he begins to recognize the landscape below him does Elric
know fear.

 
          
The
dragon has carried him back to the ruins of his dreams, his past, his love, his
ambitions, his hope.

 
          
She
has brought him back to Melniboné.

 
          
She
has brought him home.

 
          
Of
Conflicting Loyalties and Unsummoned Ghosts; Of Bondage and Destiny
.

 
          
Now
Elric forgot his recent joy and remembered only his pain. He wondered wildly if
this was mere coincidence or had the jill-dragon been sent to bring him here?
Had his surviving kinfolk struck upon a means of capturing him so as to savour
the slowness of his tortured passing? Or did the dragons themselves demand his
presence?

 
          
Soon
the familiar hills gave way to the Plain of Imrryr and Elric saw a city ahead—a
ragged outline of burned and mutilated buildings. Was this the city of his
birth, the
Dreaming
City
he and his raiders had murdered?

 
          
As
they flew closer Elric began to realize that he did not recognize the
buildings. At first he thought they had been transformed by fire and siege, but
they were not even, he noticed now, of the same materials. And he laughed at
himself. He marveled at his secret longings which had made him believe the
dragon had brought him to Melniboné.

 
          
But
then he knew he recognized the hills and woods, the line of the coast beyond
the city. He knew that this was once, at least, where Imrryr stood. As
Scarsnout sailed to a gentle landing, hopping once to steady herself, Elric
looked across half a mile of familiar grassy ridges and knew that he looked not
upon Imrryr the Beautiful, the greatest of all cities, but upon a city his
people had called H’hui’shan, the City of the Island, in the High Melnibonéan
tongue, and this was the city destroyed in one night in the only civil war
Melniboné had ever known, when her lords quarreled over whether to compact
themselves with Chaos or remain loyal to the Balance. That war had lasted three
days and left Melniboné hidden by oily black smoke for a month. When it had
risen it had revealed ruins, but all who sought to attack her when she was weak
were more than disappointed, for her pact was made and Arioch aided her,
demonstrating the fearful variety of his mighty powers (there had been further
suicides in Melniboné as her unhonourable victories rose, while others fled
through the dimensions into foreign realms). The cruelest remained to relish an
ever-tightening grip upon their world-encompassing empire.

 
          
At
least, that was one of his people’s legends, said to be drawn from the Dead
Gods’ Book.

 
          
Elric
understood that Scarsnout had brought him to the remote past. But how had the
dragon found the means of traveling so easily between the Spheres? And, again
he wondered, why had he been transported here?

 
          
Hoping
Scarsnout might choose some further action, Elric sat upon the monster’s back
for a while until it became obvious that the dragon had no intention of moving,
so with some reluctance he dismounted, murmured the song of “I-would-appreciate-your-continuing-concern-in-this-matter”
and, there being nothing else for it, began to stride towards the desolate
ruins of his people’s earliest glories.

 
          
“Oh,
H’hui’shan, City of the
Island
, if
only I were here a week earlier, to warn thee of thy bond’s consequences. But
doubtless it would not suit my patron Arioch to let me thwart him so.” And he
smiled sardonically at this; smiled at his own aching need to make the past
produce a finer present: one in which he did not bear such a burden of guilt.

 
          
“Perhaps
our entire history is of Arioch’s writing!” His bargain with the Duke of Hell
was a pact of blood and human souls for aid—whatever the runesword did not
feast upon belonged to Duke Arioch (though some old tales would have it that
sword and patron demon were one and the same). And Elric rarely disguised his
distaste for this tradition, which even he lacked the courage to break. It was
immaterial to his patron what he thought so long as he continued to honour
their bond. And this Elric understood profoundly.

 
          
The
turf was still crossed by the trails he had known as a boy. He trod them as
surely as he had done when, he recollected, his father—distant upon a charger—called
to some servitor to take care with the child but to let him walk. He must grow
up to remember every pathway that existed in Melniboné; for in those trails and
tracks, those roads and highs, lay the configuration of their history, the
geometry of their wisdom, the very key to their most secret understandings.

 
          
All
these pathways, as well as the pathways to the otherworlds, Elric had
memorized, together, where necessary, with their accompanying songs and
gestures. He was a master-sorcerer, of a line of master-sorcerers, and he was
proud of his calling, though disturbed by the uses to which he, as well as
others, had put their powers. He could read a thousand meanings in a certain
tree and its branches, but he still failed to understand his own torments of
conscience, his moral crises, and that was why he wandered the world.

 
          
Dark
sorceries and spells, images of horrific consequence, filled his head and
threatened sometimes, when he dreamed, to seize control of him and plunge him
into eternal madness. Dark memories. Dark cruelties. Elric shuddered as he drew
close to the ruins, whose towers of wood and brick had collapsed and yet
attained a picturesque and almost welcoming aspect, even in the moonlight.

 
          
He
clambered over the burned rubble of a wall and entered a street which, at
ground level, still bore some resemblance to the thing it had been. He sniffed
sooty air and felt the ground still warm beneath his feet. Here and there,
towards the centre of the city, a few fires still flickered like old rags in a
wind and ash covered everything. Elric felt it clinging to his flesh. He felt
it clogging his nostrils and drifting through his clothing—the ash of his
distant ancestors, whose blackened corpses filled the houses in mimicry of life’s
activities, threatening to engulf him. But he walked on, fascinated by this
glimpse into his past, at the very turning point in his race’s destiny. He
found himself wandering through rooms still occupied by the husks of their
inhabitants, their pets, their playthings, their tools; through squares where
fountains had once splashed, through temples and public buildings where his
folk had met to debate and decide the issues of the day, before the emperors
had taken all power to themselves and Melniboné had grown to depend upon her
slaves, hidden away so that they should not make Imrryr ugly with their
presence. He paused in a workshop, some shoe-seller’s stall. He grieved for
these dead, gone more than ten thousand years since.

 
          
The
ruins touched something that was tender in him, and he found that he possessed
a fresh longing, a longing for a past before Melniboné, out of fear, bargained
for that power which conquered the world.

 
          
The
turrets and gables, the blackened thatch and torn beams, the piles of broken
stone and brick, the animal troughs and ordinary domestic implements abandoned
outside the houses filled him with a melancholy he found almost sweet and he
paused to inspect a cradle or a spinning wheel which showed an aspect of a
proud Melnibonéan folk he had never known, but which he felt he understood.

 
          
There
were tears in his eyes as he roamed those streets, desperately hoping to find
just one living soul apart from himself, but he knew the city had stood
unpopulated for at least a hundred years after her destruction.

 
          
“Oh,
that I had destroyed Imrryr so that I might restore H’hui’shan!” He stood in a
square of broken statues and fallen masonry looking up at the enormous moon
which now rose directly above his head, sending his shadow to mingle with those
of the ruins; and he dragged off his helmet and shook out his long, milk-white
hair and turned yearning hands towards the city as if to beg forgiveness, and
then he sat down upon a dusty slab carved with the delicacy and imagination of
genius and over which blood had flowed, then baked, a coarse glaze; and he
buried his crimson eyes in the sleeve of his ashy shirt and his shoulders shook
and he groaned his complaint at whatever fate had led him to this ordeal …

 
          
There
came a voice from behind him that seemed to echo from distant catacombs, across
aeons of time, as resonant as the Dragon Falls where one of Elric’s ancestors
had died (in combat, it was said, with himself) and as commanding as the whole
of Elric’s long and binding royal history. It was a voice he recognized and had
hoped, in so many ways, never to hear again.

 
          
Once
more he wondered if he were mad. The voice was unmistakably that of his dead
father, Sadric the Eighty-Sixth, whose company in life he had so rarely shared.

 
          
“Ah,
Elric, thou weepest I see. Thou art thy mother’s son and for that I love her
memory, though thou kill’dst the only woman I shall ever truly love and for
that I hate thee with an unjust hatred.”

 
          
“Father?”
Elric lowered his arm and turned his bone-white face behind him to where,
leaning against a ruined pillar, stood the slender, frail presence of Sadric.
Upon his lips was a smile that was terrible in its tranquility.

 
          
Elric
looked disbelievingly at the face which was exactly as it had been when he had
last seen it as his father had lain in funeral state.

 
          
“For
an unjust hatred there is no release, save the peace of death. And here, as you’ll
observe, I am denied the peace of death.”

 
          
“I
have dreamed of you, Father, and your disappointment with me. I would that I
could have been all you desired in a son …”

 
          
“There
was never a second, Elric, when you could have been that. The act of thy
creation was the sealing of her doom. We had been warned of it in every omen
but could do nothing to avert that hideous destiny—” and his eyes glared with a
hatred only the unrested dead could know.

 
          
“How
came you here, Father? I had thought you chosen by Chaos, gone to the service
of our patron duke, Lord Arioch.”

 
          
“Arioch
could not claim me because of another pact I had made, with Count Mashabak. He
is no longer my patron.” And a kind of laugh escaped him.

 
          
“Your
soul was claimed by Mashabak of Chaos?”

 
          
“But
disputed by Arioch. My soul is hostage to their rivalries—or was. By some
sorcery I still command, I betook myself here, to the very beginning of our
true history. And here I have some short sanctuary.”

 
          
“You
are hiding, Father, from the Lords of Chaos?”

 
          
“I
have gained some time while they dispute, for I have here a spell, my last great
spell, which will free me to join your mother in the
Forest
of
Souls
where she awaits me.”

 
          
“You
have a passport to the
Forest
of
Souls
? I’d thought such things a myth.” Elric
wiped chilly sweat from his forehead.