Revenge of the Rose (5 page)

 
          
“I
shall seek your rosewood box, Father. But where can I begin?”

 
          
“The
jill-dragon knows. She’ll carry thee to the realm where the box was taken.
Beyond that I cannot predict. Prediction grows difficult. All my powers weaken.
Mayhap thou must kill to achieve the box. Kill many times.” The voice was faint
now, dry branches in the wind. “Or worse.”

 
          
Elric
found that he staggered. He was weakening by the moment. “Father, I have no
strength.”

 
          
“
The dragon venom
 …” But his father
was gone, leaving only a sense of his ghostly passing.

 
          
Elric
forced himself to move. Now every fallen wall seemed an impossible obstacle. He
picked his way slowly through the ruins, back over rubble and broken walls,
over the little streams and coarse turf terraces of the hills, forcing himself
with a will summoned from habit alone to climb the final hill where, outlined
against the huge, sinking moon, Scarsnout awaited him, her wings folded, her
long muzzle raised as her tongue tasted the wind.

 
          
He
remembered his father’s last words. They in turn made him recollect an old
herbal which had spoken of the distillation of dragon venom; how it brought
courage to the weak and skill to the strong, how a man might fight for five
days and nights and feel no pain. And he remembered how the herbal had said to
collect the venom, so before he clambered back upon the dragon he had reached
up his helm and caught in hissing steel a small drop of venom which would cool
and harden, he knew, into a pastille, a crumb or two of which might be taken
cautiously with considerable liquid.

 
          
But
now he must endure his pain and fight against his weakness as the dragon bears
him up into the unwelcoming blackness which lies above the moon; and a single
long, slow stroke of silver gashes the dark and a single sharp clap of thunder
breaks the terrible silence of the sky, and the jill-dragon raises her head and
beats her monstrous wings and roars a sudden challenge to those unlikely
elements …

 
          
 … While
Elric howls the old wild songs of the Dragon Lords, and plunges, in sensuous
symbiosis with the great reptile, out of the night and into the blinding glory
of a summer afternoon.

 
          
Peculiar
Geography of an Unknown Realm; A Meeting of Travelers. On the Meaning of
Freedom
.

 
          
As
if aware of her rider’s growing weakness, the dragon flew with long, deliberate
strokes of her wings and banked with careful grace through the blue pallor of
the sky until they flew over trees so close together, and with foliage so
dense, that it seemed at first they crossed dark green clouds until the old
forest gave way to grassy hills and fields through which a broad river ran, and
again the gentle landscape had a familiarity to it, though this time Elric did
not dread it.

 
          
Soon
a sprawling city lay ahead, built on both banks and making the sky hazy with
its smoke. Of stone and brick and wood, of slate and thatch and timber
shingles, of a thousand blended stinks and noises, it was full of statues and
markets and monuments over which the jill-dragon began slowly to circle while
below, in panic and curiosity, the citizens ran to look or dashed for cover,
depending upon their natures—but then Scarsnout had flapped her wings and taken
them with stately authority back into the upper sky, as if she had investigated
the place and found it unsuitable.

 
          
The
summer day went on. More than once did the great dragon-she seem about to land—on
scrubland, village, marsh, lake or elm-glade—but always Scarsnout rejected the
place and flew on dissatisfied.

 
          
Though
he had taken the precaution of tying himself by his long silk scarf to the
dragon’s spine-horn, Elric was losing strength with every moment. Now,
moreover, he had no reason to welcome death. To be reunited with his father
through eternity was perhaps the worst of all possible hells. It was only when
the dragon flew through rainclouds and Elric was able to capture a little water
in his helmet, crumbling into it the merest flake of dried venom and drinking
the foul-tasting result off in a single draught, that he knew any hope. But
when the liquid filled his every vein with fire whose stink made him loathe the
flesh that harboured it and want to tear at offending arteries, muscles, skin,
he wondered if he had not merely chosen an especially painful way of ensuring
his eternal union with Sadric. With each nerve alight, he yearned for any
death, any release from the agony.

 
          
But
even as the pain filled him, the strength grew until soon it was possible to
call on that strength and gradually abolish or ignore the pain until it was
gone and he felt a cleaner, sweeter energy fill him, somehow purer than that he
received from his runesword.

 
          
As
the jill-dragon flew through evening skies, Elric felt himself grow whole
again. A peculiar euphoria filled him. He sang out the ancient dragon-songs,
the rich, silky, wicked songs of his folk who, for all their cruelty, had
relished every experience that came their way and this relish for life and
sensation came naturally to the albino, despite the weakness of his blood.

 
          
Indeed,
it seemed to him that his blood was somehow touched by a compensatory quality,
a world of almost unrelieved sensuality and vividness, so intense that it
sometimes threatened to destroy not only him, but those around him. It was one
of the reasons he was prepared to accept his loneliness.

 
          
Now
it did not matter how far the jill-dragon flew. Her venom sustained him. The
symbiosis was near-complete. On without rest beat Scarsnout until, beneath a
golden late afternoon sun which made the three-quarters ripened wheat glow and
shimmer like burnished copper, where a startled figure in a pointed alabaster
cap cried out in delight at the sight of them and a cloud of starlings rose
suddenly to trace with their hurried flight some familiar hieroglyph in the
delicate blue wash of the sky and leave a sudden silence behind them, Scarsnout
extended her great ribbed wings in a sinuously elegant glide towards what
seemed at first a road made of basalt or some other rock and then became a
mile-wide long-healed scar through the wheatlands, too smooth, unpopulated and
vast to be a road, yet with an unguessable purpose. It cut through the crops as
if it had been laid that day, heaped on both sides by great unkempt banks on
which a few weeds and wildflowers grew and over which hopped, flapped and
crawled every kind of carrion vermin. As they dropped lower Elric could smell
the vile stuff and almost gagged. His nose confirmed what he saw—piles of
refuse, bones, human waste, bits of broken furniture and ruined pots—great
continuous banks of detritus stretching on either side of the smoothly polished
road from horizon to horizon, with no notion of where or from where it
led … Elric sang to his jill to take him up and away from all this
filth and into the sweet air of the high summer skies, but she ignored him,
wheeling first to the north, then to the south, until she was swooping down the
very middle of that great, smooth scar, which had something of the
brownish-pink of sunned flesh, and she had landed, almost without any
sensation, in the centre of it.

 
          
Now
Scarsnout folded back her wings and settled her clawed feet upon the ground,
clearly indicating that she intended to carry Elric no further. With some
reluctance he climbed off her back, unraveling the ruined scarf and wrapping it
around his waist, as if it would secure him from any dangers hereabouts, and
sang the farewell chant of thanking and kinship and, as he called the last
lines, the great jill-dragon lifted up her beautiful, reptilian head and
joined, with sonorous gravity, in the final cadences. Her voice might have been
the voice of Time itself.

 
          
Then
her jaws snapped shut, her eyes turned once upon him, half-lidded, almost in
affection, and, once her tongue had tasted the evening air, she had widened her
wings, hopped twice, shaking the surface so that Elric thought it must crack,
and was at last a-sky, mounting into the atmosphere again, her graceful body
curling and twisting as her wings carried her up to the eastern horizon, the
setting sun casting her long, terrible shadow across the fields, and then, near
the horizon, a single flash of silver suggested to Elric that his jill-dragon
had returned to her own dimension. He raised his helm in farewell, as grateful
for her venom as her patience.

 
          
All
Elric wished to do was to get free of this unnatural causeway. Though it
gleamed like polished marble, he could see now that it was nothing more than
beaten mud; earth piled on earth until it had almost the consistency of solid
rock. Perhaps the whole thing was built of garbage? For some reason, this
thought disturbed him and he began to walk rapidly towards the southern edge.
Wiping sweat from his forehead, he wondered again what purpose the place had.
Flies now surrounded him and buzzards regarded him as a possible contender for
their sweetmeats. He coughed again at the stink but knew he must climb the
stuff to get to the wholesome air of the wheatfields.

 
          
“Safe
passage to your home-cave, sweet Lady Scarsnout,” he murmured as he moved. “I
owe you both life and death, it seems. But I bear you no ill will.”

 
          
His
scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth, the albino began to climb the yielding
filth, disturbing bones and vermin with every movement and making slow
progress, while around him birds and winged rats hissed and chittered at him.
Again he wondered what kind of creature could have created such a path, if path
it were. It could not, he felt sure, be the work of any human agency and this
made him all the more anxious to return to the known qualities of the
wheatfield.

 
          
He
had reached the rim and was clambering along it to find a firmer foothold down.
Scattering rotted matter and angry rodents as he went, he wondered what kind of
culture brought its waste to line a track created by some supernatural being. Then
he thought he saw something larger shift below, near where the wheat grew, but
the light was bad and he put it down to his imagination. Was the refuse some
kind of holy offering? Did this realm’s people worship a god who patrolled from
one habitation to another in the form of a gigantic snake?

 
          
There
was another movement below him, as he slid down a few feet and came to rest on
an old cistern, and he saw a soft felt hat rise above a pile of rags and an
avian face stare up at him in astonished amusement. “Good heavens, sir. This
cannot be coincidence! But what purpose has Fate for pairing we two, do you
think?” It was Wheldrake, stumbling up from the wheatfield. “What lies behind
you, sir, that’s duller than this? More corn? Why, sir, this seems a world of
corn!”

 
          
“Of
corn and garbage and a somewhat idiosyncratic pathway of baffling purpose which
slices through all, from east to west. It has a sinister air to it.”

 
          
“So
you go the other way, sir?”

 
          
“To
avoid whichever unpleasant creation of Chaos has chosen to slither this route
and take its choice of these offerings. My horses, I suppose, were not carried
through the dimensions with you?”

 
          
“Not
to my knowledge, sir. I’d guessed you eaten, by now. But the reptile was one of
those with a sentimental weakness for heroes, I take it?”

 
          
“Something
of the sort.” Elric smiled, grateful in an odd way for the red-headed poet’s
ironies. They were preferable to his most recent conversation with his father.
As he slid down some powdery and decomposing substance alive with maggots, he
embraced the little man who almost chirped with pleasure at their reunion. “My
dear sir!”

 
          
Whereupon,
arm in arm they went, back to the bottom and the sweetening wheat, back in the
direction of a river Elric had seen from his dragon steed. There had been a
town upon that river which, he guessed, might be reached in less than a day. He
spoke of this to Wheldrake, adding that they were sadly short of provisions or
the means of obtaining any, unless they chewed the unripe wheat.

 
          
“I
regret my poaching days in Northumberland are long behind me, sir. But as a lad
I was apt enough with snare and a gun. It might be, since your scarf is rather
badly the worse for wear, that you would not mind if I unraveled it a little
more. It’s just possible I might remember my old skills.”

 
          
With
an amiable shrug, Elric handed the birdlike poet his scarf and watched as the
little fingers worked swiftly, unraveling and reknotting until he had a length
of thin cord. “With evening drawing close, sir, I’d best get to work at once.”

 
          
By
now they were some distance from the wall of garbage and could smell only the
rich, restful scents of the summer fields. Elric took his ease amongst the
wheatstalks while Wheldrake went to work and within a short space of time, having
cleared a wide area and dug a pit, they were able to enjoy a young rabbit while
they speculated at such a strange world which grew such vast fields and yet
seemed to have so few farmsteads or villages. Staring at the rabbit’s carcass
turning on a spit (also of Wheldrake’s devising) Elric said that, for all his
sorcerous education, he was not the familiar traveler through the realms that
Wheldrake seemed to be.

 
          
“Not
by choice, sir, I assure you. I blame a certain Doctor Dee, whom I consulted on
the Greeks. It was to do with metre, sir. A metric question. I needed, I
thought, to
hear
the language of
Plato. Well, the story’s long and not especially novel to those of us who
travel, willy-nilly, through the multiverse, but I spent some while on one
particular plane, shifting a little, I must admit, through time (but not the
other dimensions) until I had come to rest, I was sure, in Putney.”

 
          
“Would
you return there, Master Wheldrake?”

 
          
“Indeed
I would, sir. I’m growing a little long in the tooth for extra-dimensional
adventuring, and I tend to form firm attachments, so it is rather hard on me,
you know, to miss so many friends.”

 
          
“Well,
sir. I hope you will find them again.”

 
          
“And
you, sir. Good luck with whatever it is you hope to discover. Though I suspect
you are the kind who’s forever searching for the numinous.”

 
          
“Perhaps,”
said Elric soberly, chewing upon a tender leg, “but I think the numinosity of
what I presently seek would surprise you greatly …”