The Sleeping Sorceress (15 page)

“The banners have vanished,” Rackhir told him. “And the arrows, too. Only the corpses of those creatures remain and we shall bury them. Will you come back with us, now, to Tanelorn?”

“Tanelorn cannot give me peace, Rackhir.”

“I believe that to be true. But I have a potion in my house which will deaden some of your memories, help you forget some of what has happened lately.”

“I would be grateful for such a potion. Though I doubt . . .”

“It will work. I promise. Another would achieve complete forgetfulness from drinking this potion. But you may hope to forget a little.”

Elric thought of Corum and Erekosë and Jhary-a-Conel and the implications of his experiences—that even if he were to die he would be reincarnated in some other form to fight again and to suffer again. An eternity of warfare and of pain. If he could forget that knowledge it would be enough. He had the impulse to ride far away from Tanelorn and concern himself as much as he could in the pettier affairs of men.

“I am so weary of gods and their struggles,” he murmured as he mounted his golden mare.

Moonglum stared out into the desert.

“But when will the gods themselves weary of it, I wonder?” he said. “If they did, it would be a happy day for Man. Perhaps all our struggling, our suffering, our conflicts are merely to relieve the boredom of the Lords of the Higher Worlds. Perhaps that is why when they created us they made us imperfect.”

They began to ride towards Tanelorn while the wind blew sadly across the desert. The sand was already beginning to cover up the corpses of those who had sought to wage war against eternity and had, inevitably, found that other eternity which was death.

For a while Elric walked his horse beside the others. His lips formed a name but did not speak it.

And then, suddenly, he was galloping towards Tanelorn dragging the screaming runesword from its scabbard and brandishing it at the impassive sky, making the horse rear up and lash its hoofs in the air, shouting over and over again in a voice full of roaring misery and bitter rage:

“Ah, damn you! Damn you! Damn you!”

But those who heard him—and some might have been the gods he addressed—knew that it was Elric of Melniboné himself who was truly damned.

AND SO THE GREAT EMPEROR
RECEIVED HIS EDUCATION . . .

AND SO THE GREAT EMPEROR
RECEIVED HIS EDUCATION . . .
(2003)

L
EARNING HIS WIZARD’S craft on the dream couches, where one might live a thousand years in a single night, Elric was trained in the ancient traditions of Melniboné’s Sorcerer Kings.

No mortal could learn all there was to learn in a single lifetime, and thus it was that the lords of the Bright Empire conceived a means by which their sons might gain all their inherited wisdom. A wisdom of millennia.

These sons (and sometimes daughters) dreamed the long dreams of Imrryr the Beautiful, the Dreaming City. They made pacts with the great elementals of fire, water, air and earth.

In these dreams, while they lay upon the dream couches of the Dreaming City, they consorted with demons, with angels and with violent, desperate men, with cruel warlocks, powerful witches and all manner of supernatural beings.

In these dreams they walked with the denizens of hell and made bargains with the Lords of Chaos, even indulged in compacts with the Dukes and Duchesses of Law.

In sublime terror they made love to the undying. With horrible joy they made war against the never-to-be-born. They explored the corridors of measureless palaces and wandered through unmappable landscapes without horizon or end.

They journeyed beneath the earth, into the lands of sunless, crystalline beauty, where vast, glowing rivers roared and strange, unhuman beings ruled.

They walked the moonbeam roads, the astral roads between the worlds. They fell into burning suns and froze on silver moons. They learned the histories of all their pasts and all their futures.

In these dreams no pain was unfamiliar to them. No pleasure went untasted. Dream followed dream. Knowledge was heaped on knowledge. Terror on terror and joy on joy. And by this means they learned their magic, their power over all men and all the forces of nature. They learned to summon great winds, to throw fire, to raise the waters, to break open the very surface of the earth. They learned to destroy the living and to resurrect the dead. They learned to survive dangers no ordinary mortal might ever hope to experience and live . . .

Not all survived. Many died on the dream couches, trapped in some nameless spell, victims of some voracious immortal, torn apart by unimaginable creatures, destroyed by some appalling force.

Of course, no mortal brain could absorb so many experiences or hold so many memories and remain sane and it was frequently argued that there were few sane emperors of Melniboné.

Was Elric sane?

Elric of Melniboné, son of Sadric, would never be certain of his own sanity, nor indeed of his own moral choices. These were questions forever in his conscious mind, filling his waking hours, just as the terrors and wisdom of his dream-quests remained in his
un
conscious mind, to disturb his sleeping hours.

Elric of Melniboné had received the most rigorous education of all. For almost every hour of his lifetime he had lived ten years upon the dream couches. Those who saw a young man, just reaching maturity, could not possibly know, unless they had experienced it themselves, what an ancient near-immortal dwelled within.

Yet in some ways, the ordinary ways of the world, its certainties and its deceits, Elric
was
a young man. He had a young man’s ambitions, a young man’s ideals, a young man’s need for spontaneous action, for love and for adventure.

Elric’s dreams had not dulled his taste for life. They had taught him sorcery more than teaching him conventional manners. Though he had the courtliness and grace taught to all Melnibonéan aristocrats, though his own stock of irony was not small and his own powers of observation not minor, yet he was still an untried creature, whose vast sorcerous power was balanced by his own moral uncertainties.

Elric’s dream-quests were recalled as nightmares, the vaguest of disturbing memories, interruptions of the sleeping mind. But what he had learned on those quests remained—sorcerous and military arts of complex depth and variety. Arts which something in him feared to use, for he instinctively understood their destructive power.

When one day Elric’s father died suddenly, brought low by deep melancholy and too many disappointments, having failed to reinvigorate an empire which had grown lazy with its own great might, Elric was forced to consider his inheritance.

He was now natural successor to the throne of ancient Imrryr. A responsibility he was not sure he could fulfill.

And Elric was not the only one to doubt his own abilities. Some said he was not suited for the task, that he had deficient blood, impaired strength, weak eyes and an unstable mind, such as marked earlier, so-called ‘Silver Emperors’, the white-haired, crimson-eyed albinos whose strange condition marked them out in the long line of sorcerer emperors and empresses.

Some, who supported another contender for the throne, said this ‘Silver Emperor’ who conversed with humans as if they were equals, who had human friends as well as alliances with demons, would bring the Empire down. It was predicted, they said (though these predications, when challenged, proved to be somewhat numinous). Elric’s succession would cause the defenses of Imrryr to tumble, they said. He would allow the human hordes to flood in. These hordes had grown powerful and longed to sack the city of the Dragon Lords. They hated these lords, who had ruled them for so many millennia. They longed to loot, to destroy, to rape. These voices warned that Elric was fated to be the very last of his ancient line, a prince of ruins and desolation.

Even Melniboné’s greatest power, the Phoorn, asleep in the dragon caves far below the Dreaming City, dragons who dripped fiery venom upon their enemies, even these would not defend the Bright Empire against the threat of those nations they called the Young Kingdoms, the upstart nations of a new and changing world.

Some of Elric’s own party, often the wisest, argued that Melniboné had grown too certain of herself, too proud to make alliances with those who refused vassalage, too arrogant to call upon the emergent nations and respect them as brothers, rather than clients. In her lofty pride lay the seeds of her own doom. Even as she rose to her greatest power, Melniboné was already facing destruction. But this was not talk Elric’s enemies cared to hear. Rather, they blamed him alone for any dangers Melniboné might face. And they championed his cousin, the swaggering warrior prince Yyrkoon, who promised them glory, who promised them new wealth, who promised them a kind of immortality.

Yyrkoon, too, had learned his sorcerous craft upon the dream couches, though not with Elric’s patience. He saw that his power lay not in wisdom but in strength. He placed all his ambitions in the blade of his sword.

And so they schemed, these various parties—some for Elric, some for Yyrkoon, some for themselves. There were those who loved their strange country as passionately as any patriot loved their country, there were some who cared little for Melniboné, but sought personal advancement. There were others who calculated the security of their nation and saw Elric as too weak to defend them, while loving the man himself. Some hated him and his dependence on drugs to survive at all, yet revered his lineage as the true blood of ancient Melniboné. They would support him no matter what arguments were brought against him. Still others spoke of ridding Melniboné of kings and aristocrats and founding a fresh republic, as had once ruled the Dreaming City.

And all of these and more gathered at the great Court of Emperors, to scheme behind their hands, to whisper of betrayal and support, of wisdom and folly, and plot the dominance of this party or that. Over all of them, the young Emperor must preside, with due ceremony and pride. Over all of them he must appear dispassionate and distant, as his blood demanded. Over all he must exert his enormous power, a power he did not even understand as yet.

Soon he would begin to learn of that power. But meanwhile, a great Masque must be played out, for the entertainment of the fresh-crowned Emperor, for the satisfaction of tradition. A masque which, some would later say, predicted much that was to occur to bring about the doom of Elric’s long line and the destruction of the Dreaming City . . .

ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ

ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ
(1972)

To Poul Anderson for T
he Broken Sword
and
Three Hearts and Three Lions
. To the late Fletcher Pratt for
The Well of the Unicorn
. To the late Bertolt Brecht for
The Threepenny Opera,
which, for obscure reasons, I link with the other books as being one of the chief influences on the first Elric stories.

P
ROLOGUE

This is the tale of Elric before he was called Womanslayer, before the final collapse of Melniboné. This is the tale of his rivalry with his cousin Yyrkoon and his love for his cousin Cymoril, before that rivalry and that love brought Imrryr, the Dreaming City, crashing in flames, raped by the reavers from the Young Kingdoms. This is the tale of the two black swords, Stormbringer and Mournblade, and how they were discovered and what part they played in the destiny of Elric and Melniboné—a destiny which was to shape a larger destiny: that of the world itself. This is the tale of when Elric was a king, the commander of dragons, fleets and all the folk of that half-human race which had ruled the world for ten thousand years.

This is a tale of tragedy, this tale of Melniboné, the Dragon Isle. This is a tale of monstrous emotions and high ambitions. This is a tale of sorceries and treacheries and worthy ideals, of agonies and fearful pleasures, of bitter love and sweet hatred. This is the tale of Elric of Melniboné. Much of it Elric himself was to remember only in his nightmares.

—The Chronicle of the Black Sword

BOOK ONE

On the island kingdom of Melniboné all the old rituals are still observed, though the nation’s power has waned for five hundred years, and now her way of life is maintained only by her trade with the Young Kingdoms and by the fact that the city of Imrryr has become the meeting place of merchants. Are those rituals no longer useful; can the rituals be denied and doom avoided? One who would rule in Emperor Elric’s stead prefers to think not. He says that Elric will bring destruction to Melniboné by his refusal to honour all the rituals (Elric honours many). And now opens the tragedy which will close many years from now and precipitate the destruction of this world.