Revenge of the Rose (13 page)

 
          
And
Elric, who is the only one Phatt is ever likely to meet who could supply him
with anything but a metaphysical answer, remains silent, for in Tanelorn he
took a vow as all do who receive her protection and her peace. Only true
seekers after peace shall find Tanelorn, for Tanelorn is a secret carried by
every mortal. And Tanelorn exists wherever mortals gather in mutual
determination to serve the common good, creating as many paradises as there are
human souls …

 
          
“I
was told,” he said, “that it exists within oneself.”

 
          
At
which Fallogard Phatt laid down his pen and ink, picked up a sack in which he
had already, it appeared, packed his necessities, and began with downcast eyes
to wheel his old mother from the room, calling out for the other members of his
family as he did so.

 
          
Vailadez
Rench watched them trail off with their bundles and their keepsakes and sniffed
with considerable satisfaction as he looked around the house. “A lick of paint
will soon brighten this property,” he assured them, “and we will, of course,
have all this clutter sent for salvage and put to efficient use. We are well
rid, I’m sure you will agree, of the Family Phatt and that disgusting
valetudinarian!”

 
          
By
now Elric’s self-control was growing weak and had it not been for the Rose’s
steady eyes upon him, for Wheldrake’s grim and furious silence, he would have
spoken his mind. As it was, the Rose approved the house, agreed the lease and
accepted the keys from the fastidious fingers of that Sultan of Sophistry,
dismissed him swiftly and then led them in hurried pursuit of the exiled
debtors, sighting them as they made their way slowly towards the nearest
downside stairway.

 
          
Elric
saw her catch up with Fallogard Phatt, place a comforting hand upon the
shoulder of an adolescent girl, whisper a word in the ear of the mother, give a
friendly tug to the hair of the boy, and bring them, bewildered, back with her.
“They are to live with us—or at least upon our credit. That cannot, surely, be
against even the Gypsy Nation’s peculiar sense of security.”

 
          
Elric
regarded the threadbare group with some dismay, having no wish to burden himself
with a family, especially one which seemed to him so feckless. He glanced at
the girl, dark and petulant in her blossoming beauty, her expression one of
almost permanent contempt for everything she looked upon, while the boy, aged
about ten, had the black eyes he had noted on the stairs: the weasel’s alert
and eager eyes, and a narrow, pointed face to add to the effect, his long,
blond hair slicked hard against his skull, his small-fingered hands twitching
and eager, the nose questing, as if he already scented vermin. And when he
grinned, in grateful understanding of the Rose’s charity, he revealed sharp
little teeth, white against the moist redness of his lips. “You shall see an
end to your quest, lady,” he said. “Blood and sap shall blend again—lest Chaos
decide to challenge this prognosis. There is a road between the worlds that
leads to a better place than the one on which we travel. You must take the
Infinite Path, lady, and look at the end of it for the resolution to your
troubles.”

 
          
Instead
of responding with puzzlement or fear to his strange words, the Rose smiled and
bent to kiss him. “Clairvoyant, all of you?” she asked.

 
          
“It
is the chief business of the Family Phatt,” said Fallogard Phatt with some
dignity. “It has always been our privilege to read the cards, see through the
crystal’s mist and know the future such as it ever can be foretold with any
certainty. Which is why, of course, we were not unhappy when we found we must
join the Gypsy Nation. But, we discovered, these folk have no true
clairvoyance, merely a collection of tricks and illusions with which to impress
or control others. Once their people had the richest powers of all. They
dissipated, little by little, on their pointless march around the world. They
gave them up for security you see. And now we, too, have no use for our
powers …” He sighed and scratched rapidly at himself in several places,
adjusting buttons and loops and ties as he did so, as if he only just realized
his disheveled condition. “What are we to do? Should we become walkers, we
shall inevitably be doomed to end our days at the marching boards.”

 
          
“We
would join forces with you,” Elric heard the Rose say, and he looked at her in
surprise. “We have the power to help you against the jurisdiction of the Gypsy
Nation. And you have the power to help us find what we seek here. There are
three sisters we must discover. Perhaps they have another with them now, an
armoured man whose face is never revealed.”

 
          
“It
is my mother you must ask in that respect,” said Fallogard Phatt absently, as
he considered her words. “And my niece. Charion has all her grandmother’s
skills, I think, though she must learn more wisdom yet …”

 
          
The
girl glared at him, but she seemed flattered.

 
          
“It
is my boy Koropith Phatt, who is the greatest of all Phatts,” said his father,
laying a proud and perhaps proprietorial hand upon the infant, whose little
black eyes regarded his father with amused affection and a certain knowing
sympathy. “There has never
been
a
Phatt as full of the gift as Koropith. He is
brimming
with psychic advantages!”

 
          
“Then
he and we must come to our arrangements quickly,” said the Rose. “For the time
is here when we must seek a means of charting a specific course between the
worlds. If we can free you, can you lead us where we must go?”

 
          
“I
have that ability, at least,” said Fallogard Phatt, “and will gladly aid you
however I can. But the boy has found pathways through the realms I had not even
heard rumoured. And the girl can seek out an individual through all the layers
of the multiverse. She is a bloodhound, that child. She is a terrier. She is a
spaniel …”

 
          
Interrupting
this effusion of canine comparisons, Master Wheldrake found a book in one of
his inner pockets and drew it forth with a flourish. “Here’s what I remembered having!
Here it is!”

 
          
They
looked at him in polite expectation as he pulled his newly received credits
from his waistcoat and pushed them into the hands of the baffled boy. “Here,
young Master Koropith, go with your cousin to the market! I’ll give you a list.
Tonight I intend to make us all a meal substantial enough to help us through
our coming adventure!”

 
          
He
brandished the scarlet book. “Between Mrs. Beeton and myself I think I can
provide us with a supper the like of which you’ll not have tasted in a twelvemonth!”

 
          
Conversations
with Clairvoyants Concerning the Nature of the Multiverse &c. Dramatic
Methods of Escape
.

 
          
The
elaborate and exquisite feast over, and soothed by a recitation of some
excellent sonnets, even Elric was able to divert his attention, for a little
while, away from the persistent memory of his dead father waiting for him in
that dead city.

 
          
“We
have lived by our wits, the Phatts, for generations.” Fallogard Phatt was in
his cups. Even his old mother put wine to her wizened lips and occasionally
giggled. His son and niece were either in bed or hidden in the stairwell’s
shadows. Wheldrake refilled Mother Phatt’s bumper while the Rose sat back in
her chair, the only one determined to keep her mind upon the crucial issues of
their circumstances. She drank no wine, but seemed content to let the others
relax as they wished. Next to her around the table, Elric sipped the dark
blue-black stuff and wished that it could have some effect upon him, reflecting
sardonically to himself that after a draught of dragon’s venom most drinks had
something of an insipid quality …

 
          
“There
are only a few adepts,” Fallogard Phatt was saying, “who have ever explored
even a fraction of the multiverse, but the Phatts, I must say, are as experienced
as any. Mother here, for instance, has the routes of at least two thousand
different pathways between some five thousand realms. Her instincts are
occasionally a little dulled, these days, but our niece is learning well. She
has the same talent.”

 
          
“So
you sought this plane deliberately?” said the Rose suddenly, as if his remarks
coincided with her own thoughts.

 
          
This
produced a wild peal of laughter in Fallogard Phatt, threatening to burst his
thoroughly buttoned waistcoat while his hair sprang up around his head and his
face grew red. “No, madam, that’s the joke of it. Few here
ever
came because they had heard of the Gypsy Nation and wished to
join it. But the Nation has set up its own peculiar field—a kind of psychic
gravity—which draws many here who would otherwise be in limbo. It acts—in a
psychic, but also in an oddly material way, too—as a kind of false-limbo, a
world of lost souls, indeed.”

 
          
“Lost
souls?” Elric now grew alert. “Lost souls, Master Phatt?”

 
          
“And
bodies, too, of course. For the most part.” Fallogard Phatt made a drunken
movement with his hand then paused, as if he heard something, then peered with
sudden intelligence into the albino’s crimson eyes. “Aye, sir,” he said in a
quieter tone, “lost souls, indeed!” And Elric felt for a few seconds the sense
of some benign presence within him, sympathetic and perhaps even protective.
The sensation was quickly gone and Phatt was holding forth to Wheldrake on some
jolly abstraction which seemed to excite them both, but the Rose was, if anything,
more thoughtful as she glanced from Phatt to Elric and, frequently, at the busy
head of little Mother Phatt, who sat with her two hands clutching her wine-cup,
nodding and smiling and scarcely following, or caring to follow, the general
drift, yet seemingly content and alert in her own mysterious way.

 
          
“I
find it difficult to imagine, sir,” Wheldrake was saying. “It is a trifle
frightening, too, moreover, to contemplate such vastness. So many worlds, so
many tribes, and each with a different understanding of the nature of reality!
Billions of them, sir. Billions and billions—an infinity of possibilities and
alternatives! And Law and Chaos fight to control all that?”

 
          
“The
war is at present unadmitted,” said Phatt. “Instead there are skirmishes here
and there, battles for a world or two, or at best a realm. But a great
conjunction is coming and it is then that the Lords of the Higher Worlds wish
to establish their rule throughout the Spheres. Each Sphere contains a universe
and there are thought to be at least a million of them. This is no ordinary
cosmic event!”

 
          
“They
fight to control infinity!” Wheldrake was impressed.

 
          
“The
multiverse is not infinite in the strictest sense …” began Phatt, to be
interrupted by his mother, suddenly shrill with irritability.

 
          
“Infinity?
Loose talk! Infinity? The multiverse is
finite
.
It has limits and dimensions which only a god may occasionally perceive—but
they
are
limits and dimensions!
Otherwise there would be no point in it!”

 
          
“In
what, Mother?” Even Fallogard was surprised. “In what?”

 
          
“In
the Family Phatt, of course. It is our firm belief that we shall one day—” And
she left her son to recite the bulk of what was evidently the family
creed …

 
          
“—learn
the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere,
from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of
shifting, multicoloured stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions,
through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light—glory
beyond glory—pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.

 
          
“Why,
sir, have you ever sometimes stood alone and seen visions? That moment, you
recall, when you pause and are granted a glimpse of near-eternity, the
multiverse? You might glance at a cloud or a burning log, you might notice a
certain fold in a blanket, or the angle at which a blade of grass stands—it
does not matter. You know what you have seen and it brings that larger vision.
Yesterday, for instance—?” And he cocked an enquiring eye at the poet before
receiving his new friend’s approval to continue.

 
          
“—for
instance, I look up at about
noon
. Silver light pours like water down the
massed clouds, themselves vast floating asymmetric sea-beasts so large they are
host to whole nations of other species, including, surely, Man? As if they
entirely surfaced from their element, ready to plunge again into depths as
mysterious to those below as oceans are to those above them.” His face glowed a
richer red with all this bright recollection, his eyes appeared to focus again
upon those clouds, upon those monumental natural barges, like raised wrecks,
alarmingly complete after millennia, alien beyond imagining, beyond any impulse
of ordinary mortals to follow, which one’s very soul yearned to forget, those
obscenely ancient beast-ships grown insubstantial in their sudden element, this
brilliancy of sun and sky, and gradually their outlines dim, turn grey and fade
one into another until only the sun and the sky remain, witnesses of their
unmourned passing. “Have they grown invisible or are they gone for ever, even
from our blood’s strange memory, that tiny speck of ancestral matter that
informs our race’s united soul? Would that be to say they never existed and
never could exist? Many things existed before our ancestors ever lifted one
webbed foot upon a steamy shore …”

 
          
And
Elric smiled at this, for his race’s memory went back before mankind’s, at
least in his own realm. His folk, older and unhuman settlers, pursued or
banished or otherwise escaping through the realms, had been victims of a mighty
catastrophe, perhaps of their own creation.

 
          
Memory follows memory, memory defeats
memory; some things are banished only into the realms of our rich imaginings—but
this does not mean that they do not or cannot or will not exist—they exist!
They exist!

 
          
The last Melnibonéan thinks of his people’s
history and legends, and he tells his human friends some of what he knows and
one day a human scribe will write these remembered words which will become in
turn the foundation for whole cycles of myths, whole volumes of legend and
superstition, so that a grain of a grain of prehuman memory is carried over to
us, blood to blood, life to life. And the cycles turn and spin and intersect at
unpredictable points in an eternity of possibilities, paradoxes and
conjunctions, and one tale feeds another and one anecdote provides others with
entire epics. Thus we influence past, present and future and all their
possibilities. Thus are we all responsible for one another, through all the
myriad dimensions of time and space that make up the multiverse …

 
          
“Human
love,” says Fallogard Phatt, turning his eyes from his vision, “it is finally
our only real weapon against entropy …”

 
          
“Without
Chaos and Law in balance,” says Wheldrake, reaching for some cheese and
wondering, idly, which terrorized region along the road provided that
particular tribute, “we rob ourselves of the greatest possible number of
choices. That is the singular paradox of this conflict between the Higher
Worlds. Let one become dominant and half of what we have is lost. I cannot but
sometimes feel that our fate is in the hands of creatures hardly more
intelligent than a stoat!”

 
          
“Intelligence
and power were never the same thing,” murmurs the Rose, departing from her own
train of thought for a moment. “Frequently a lust for power is nothing more
than an impulse of the stupidly baffled who cannot understand why they have
been treated so badly by Dame Fortune. Who can blame those brutes, sometimes?
They are outraged by random Nature. Perhaps these gods feel the same? Perhaps
they make us endure such awful trials because they know we are actually
superior to them? Perhaps they have become senile and forget the point of their
old truces?”

 
          
“You
speak truth in one area, madam,” said Elric. “Nature distributes power with
about the same lack of discrimination as she distributes intelligence or beauty
or wealth, indeed!”

 
          
“Which
is why mankind,” says Wheldrake, revealing a little of his own background, “has
a duty to correct such mistakes of justice that Nature makes. That is why we
must provide for those whom random Nature creates poor, or sick or otherwise
distressed. If we do not do this, I think, then we are not fulfilling our own
natural function. I speak,” he said hastily, “as an agnostic. I am a
thorough-going Radical, make no mistake. Yet it does seem to me that Paracelsus
had it when he suggested …”

 
          
Whereupon
the Rose, growing skillful at such things, halted his ascent into the realms of
abstraction by enquiring loudly of Mother Phatt if she required more cheese.

 
          
“Cheese
enough tonight,” said the old woman mysteriously, but her smile was friendly. “Always
moving. Always moving. Heel and toe, the walkers go. Heel and toe, heel and
toe. All walking, my dear, in the hope of escaping their damnation. Unchanging;
generation upon generation; injustice upon injustice; and sustained by further
injustice. Heel and toe, the walkers go. Always moving. Always moving …”
And she subsided almost gratefully into staring silence.

 
          
“Ah,
such an infamous society, sir,” says her son, with a sage nod, an approving
wave of a biscuit. “Infamous. It is a lie, sir. A mighty deception, this ‘free
nation’ that always seems to proceed, yet never changes! Is that not true
decadence, sir?”

 
          
“Shall
it be Engeland’s fate, I wonder,” mused Wheldrake of some lost home. “Is it the
fate of all unjust empires? Oh, I fear I see the future of my country!”

 
          
“Certainly
it became the only future of my own,” said Elric with a grin that revealed much
more than it attempted to hide. “And that is why Melniboné collapsed like a
worm-eaten husk, almost at a touch …”

 
          
“Now,”
says the Rose, “down to business.” And she sketches a plan to move at night
between the wheels and find Duntrollin, there to skulk amongst the marching
boards until such time as they could gain the stairs—from there Fallogard Phatt
would be their bloodhound, his clairvoyance focused to find the three sisters. “But
we must discuss the details,” she says, “there could be practicalities, Master
Phatt, that I have overlooked.”

 
          
“A
few, ma’am, to be sure.” Politely, he listed them. The flaps to the marching
boards would be guarded. The warrior inhabitants of Duntrollin would almost
certainly be prepared for such an attempt as theirs. He had never seen the sisters
and therefore his gift would be unreliable. What was more, even when they had
reached the sisters there was no certainty they would be welcomed by them. And
then, how were they to leave the Gypsy Nation? The barriers of garbage were
almost impossible to cross and the guardians always detected would-be escapers.
Besides, it was useless for the Family Phatt to consider such things since they
were trapped by that peculiar form of psychic gravity which brought so many
poor souls to this road, to dwell upon it, or under it, for ever. “We are all
of us trapped here by more than a few black-fletched arrows and a refuse heap,”
he said. “The Gypsy Nation controls this world, my friends. It has gained a
strange, dark power. It has struck bargains. It has harnessed something of
Chaos to its own uses. That, I believe, is why they dare not stop. Everything
depends on maintaining their momentum.”