She had not gotten more than two days away from the convent—distributing most of her food to children and the sick as she walked—when she had reached the edge of the forest, and her vague visions had directed her to follow the path through it. She had seen no signs of people, nor had she sensed anything about the place that would have caused folk to avoid it. That had puzzled her, so she had dropped into a walking trance to try and sort out what kind of a place the forest was.
That was when someone had come up behind her and hit her on the head.
Now she knew why ordinary folk avoided the forest; it was the home of bandits. And she knew what her fate was going to be. Only the strength of the hold the chieftain had over his men had kept her from that fate until now. He had decreed that they would wait until all the men were back from their errands—and then they would draw lots for their turns at her….
Leonie was so terrified that she was beyond thought; she huddled like a witless rabbit inside her robe and prayed for death.
“What's this?” the bandit chief said, loudly, startling her so that she raised her head out of the folds of her sleeves. She saw nothing at first; only the dark bulking shapes of men against the fire in their midst. He laughed, long and hard, as another of his men entered their little clearing, shoving someone in front of him. “By Satan's arse! The woods are sprouting wenches!”
Elfrida caught her breath at the curse; so, these men were not “just” bandits—they were the worst kind of bandit, nobles gone beyond the law. Only one who was once a follower of the White Christ would have used his adversary's name as an exclamation. No follower of the Old Way, either Moon or Blood-path, would have done so.
The brigand who had captured her shoved her over to land beside another girl—and once again she caught her breath, as her talisman-bag swung loose on its cord, and the other girl shrunk away, revealing the wooden beads and cross at the rope that served her as a belt. Worse and worse—the girl wore the robes of one who had vowed herself to the White Christ! There would be no help there …if she were not witless before she had been caught, she was probably frightened witless now. Even if she would accept help from the hands of a “pagan.”
Leonie tried not to show her hope. Another girl! Perhaps between the two of them, they could manage to win freedom!
But as the girl was shoved forward, to drop to the needles beside Leonie, something swung free of her robe to dangle over her chest. It was a little bag, on a rawhide thong.
And the bandit chief roared again, this time with disapproval, seizing the bag and breaking the thong with a single, cruelly hard tug of his hand. He tossed it out into the darkness and backhanded the outlaw who had brought the girl in.
“You witless bastard!” he roared. “You brought in a witch!”
A witch?
Leonie shrunk away from her fellow captive. A witch? Blessed Jesu—this young woman would be just as pleased to see Leonie raped to death! She would probably call up one of her demons to help!
As the brigand who had been struck shouted and went for his chief's throat, and the others gathered around, yelling encouragement and placing bets, she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and prayed. Blessed Mother of God, hear me. Angels of grace, defend us. Make them forget us for just a moment….
As the brainless child started in fear, then pulled away, bowed her head, and began praying, Elfrida kept a heavy hand on her temper. Bad enough that she was going to die—and in a particularly horrible way—but to have to do it in such company!
But—suddenly the outlaws were fighting. One of them appeared to be the chief; the other the one who had caught her. And they were ignoring the two girls as if they had somehow forgotten their existence….
Blessed Mother, hear me. Make it so.
The man had only tied her with a bit of leather, no stronger than the thong that had held her herb-bag. If she wriggled just right, bracing her tied hands against her feet, she could probably snap it.
She prayed, and pulled. And was rewarded with the welcome release of pressure as the thong snapped.
She brought her hands in front of her, hiding them in her tunic, and looked up quickly; the fight had involved a couple more of the bandits. She and the other girl were in the shadows now, for the fire had been obscured by the men standing or scuffling around it. If she crept away quickly and quietly—
No sooner thought than done. She started to crawl away, got as far as the edge of the firelight, then looked back.
The other girl was still huddled where she had been left, eyes closed. Too stupid or too frightened to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.
If Elfrida left her there, they probably wouldn't try to recapture her. They'd have one girl still, and wouldn't go hunting in the dark for the one that had gotten away….
Elfrida muttered an oath, and crawled back.
Leonie huddled with the witch-girl under the shelter of a fallen tree, and they listened for the sounds of pursuit. She had been praying as hard as she could, eyes closed, when a painful tug on the twine binding her wrists had made her open her eyes.
“Well, come on!” the girl had said, tugging again. Leonie had not bothered to think about what the girl might be pulling her into, she had simply followed, crawling as best she could with her hands tied, then getting up and running when the girl did.
They had splashed through a stream, running along a moonlit path, until Leonie's sides ached. Finally the girl had pulled her off the path and shoved her under the bulk of a fallen tree, into a little dug-out den she would never have guessed was there. From the musky smell, it had probably been made by a fox or badger. Leonie huddled in the dark, trying not to sob, concentrating on the pain in her side and not on the various fates the witch-girl could have planned for her.
Before too long, they heard shouts in the distance, but they never came very close. Leonie strained her ears, holding her breath, to try and judge how close their pursuers were, and jumped when the witch-girl put a hand on her.
“Don't,” the girl whispered sharply. “You won't be going far with your hands tied like that. Hold still! I'm not going to hurt you.”
Leonie stuttered something about demons, without thinking. The girl laughed.
“If I had a demon to come when I called, do you think I would have let a bastard like that lay hands on me?” Since there was no logical answer to that question, Leonie wisely kept quiet. The girl touched her hands, and then seized them; Leonie kept herself from pulling away, and a moment later, felt the girl sawing at her bonds with a bit of sharp rock. Every so often the rock cut into Leonie instead of the twine, but she bit her lip and kept quiet, gratitude increasing as each strand parted. “What were you doing out here, anyway?” the girl asked. “I thought they kept your kind mewed up like prize lambs.”
“I had a vision,” Leonie began, wondering if by her words and the retelling of her holy revelation, the witch-girl might actually be converted to Christianity. It happened that way all the time in the tales of the saints, after all….
So while the girl sawed patiently at the bonds with the sharp end of the rock, Leonie told her everything, from the time she realized that something was wrong, to the moment the bandit took her captive. The girl stayed silent through all of it, and Leonie began to hope that she might bring the witch-girl to the Light and Life of Christ.
The girl waited until she had obviously come to the end, then laughed, unpleasantly. “Suppose, just suppose,” she said, “I were to tell you that the exact same vision was given to me? Only it isn't some mystical cup that this land needs, it's the Cauldron of Cerridwen, the ever-renewing, for the High King refuses to sacrifice himself to save his kingdom as the Holy Bargain demands and only the Cauldron can give the land the blessing of the Goddess.”
The last of the twine snapped as she finished, and Leonie pulled her hands away. “Then I would say that your vision is wrong, evil,” she retorted. “There is no goddess, only the Blessed Virgin—”
“Who is one face of
the Goddess, who is Maiden, Mother and Wise One,” the girl interrupted, her words dripping acid. “Only a fool would fail to see that. And your White Christ is no more than the Sacrificed One in one of His many guises—it is the Cauldron the land needs, not your apocryphal Cup—”
“Your cauldron is some demon-thing,” Leonie replied, angrily. “Only the Grail—”
Whatever else she was going to say was lost, as the tree trunk above them was riven into splinters by a bolt of lightning that blinded and deafened them both for a moment.
When they looked up, tears streaming from their eyes, it was to see something they both recognized as The Enemy.
Standing over them was a shape, outlined in a glow of its own. It was three times the height of a man, black and hairy like a bear, with the tips of its outstretched claws etched in fire. But it was not a bear, for it wore a leather corselet, and its head had the horns of a bull, the snout and tusks of a boar, dripping foam and saliva, and its eyes, glowing an evil red, were slitted like a goat's.
Leonie screamed and froze. The witch-girl seized her bloody wrist, hauled her to her feet, and ran with her stumbling along behind.
The beast roared and followed after. They had not gotten more than forty paces down the road, when the witch-girl fell to the ground with a cry of pain, her hand slipping from Leonie's wrist.
Her ankle—Leonie thought, but no more, for the beast was shambling towards them. She grabbed the girl's arm and hauled her to her feet; draped her arm over her own shoulders, and dragged her erect. Up ahead there was moonlight shining down on something—perhaps a clearing, and perhaps the beast might fear the light—
She half-dragged, half-guided the witch-girl towards that promise of light, with the beast bellowing behind them. The thought crossed her mind that if she dropped the girl and left her, the beast would probably be content with the witch and would not chase after Leonie….
No, she told herself, and stumbled onward.
They broke into the light, and Leonie looked up—
And sank to her knees in wonder.
Elfrida fell beside the other girl, half blinded by tears of pain, and tried to get to her feet. The beast—she had to help Leonie up, they had to run….
Then she looked up.
And fell again to her knees, this time stricken not with pain, but with awe. And though she had never felt power before, she felt it now; humming through her, blood and bone, saw it in the vibration of the air, in the purity of the light streaming from the Cup.
The Cup held in the hand of a man, whose gentle, sad eyes told of the pain, not only of His own, but of the world's, that for the sake of the world, He carried on His own shoulders.
Leonie wept, tears of mingled joy and fear—joy to be in the Presence of One who was all of Light and Love, and fear, that this One was She and not He—and the thing that she held, spilling over the Light of Love and Healing was Cauldron and not Cup.
I was wrong—she thought, helplessly.
Wrong? said a loving, laughing Voice. Or simply—limited in vision?
And in that moment, the Cauldron became a Cup, and the Lady became the Lord, Jesu—then changed again, to a man of strange, draped robes and slanted eyes, who held neither Cup nor Cauldron, but a cup-shaped Flower with a jeweled heart—a hawk-headed creature with a glowing stone in His hand—a black-skinned Woman with a bright Bird—
And then to another shape, and another, until her eyes were dazzled and her spirit dizzied, and she looked away, into the eyes of Elfrida. The witch-girl—Wise Girl whispered the Voice in her mind, And Quest-Companion—looked similarly dazzled, but the joy in her face must surely mirror Leonie's. The girl offered her hand, and Leonie took it, and they turned again to face—
A Being of Light, neither male nor female, and a dazzling Cup as large as a Cauldron, the veil covering it barely dimming its brilliance.
Come, the Being said. You have proved yourselves worthy.
Hand in hand, the two newest Grail Maidens rose, and followed the shining beacon into the Light.
The Lands Beyond the World
Michael Moorcock
I
His bone-white, long-fingered hand upon a carved demon's head in black-brown hardwood (one of the few such decorations to be found anywhere about the vessel), the tall man stood alone in the ship's fo'csle and stared through large, slanting, crimson eyes at the mist into which they moved with a speed and sureness to make any mortal mariner marvel and become incredulous.
There were sounds in the distance, incongruent with the sounds of even this nameless, timeless sea: thin sounds, agonized and terrible, for all that they remained remote—yet the ship followed them, as if drawn by them; they grew louder—pain and despair were there, but terror was predominant.
Elric had heard such sounds echoing from his cousin Yyrkoon's sardonically named “Pleasure Chambers” in the days before he had fled the responsibilities of ruling all that remained of the old Melnibonéan Empire. These were the voices of men whose very souls were under siege; men to whom death meant not mere extinction, but a continuation of existence, forever in thrall to some cruel and supernatural master. He had heard men cry so when his salvation and his nemesis, his great black battle-blade Stormbringer, drank their souls.
He did not savor the sound: he hated it, turned his back away from the source and was about to descend the ladder to the main deck when he realized that Otto Blendker had come up behind him. Now that Corum had been borne off by friends with chariots which could ride upon the surface of the water, Blendker was the last of those comrades to have fought at Elric's side against the two alien sorcerers Gagak and Agak.
Blendker's black, scarred face was troubled. The ex-scholar, turned hireling sword, covered his ears with his huge palms.
“Ach! By the Twelve Symbols of Reason, Elric, who makes that din? It's as though we sail close to the shores of Hell itself!”
Prince Elric of Melniboné shrugged. “I'd be prepared to forego an answer and leave my curiosity unsatisfied, Master Blendker, if only our ship would change course. As it is, we sail closer and closer to the source.”
Blendker grunted his agreement. “I've no wish to encounter whatever it is that causes those poor fellows to scream so! Perhaps we should inform the Captain.”
“You think he does not know where his own ship sails?” Elric's smile had little humor.
The tall black man rubbed at the inverted V-shaped scar which ran from his forehead to his jawbones. “I wonder if he plans to put us into battle again?”
“I'll not fight another for him.” Elric's hand moved from the carved rail to the pommel of his runesword. “I have business of my own to attend to, once I'm back on real land.”
A wind came from nowhere. There was a sudden rent in the mist. Now Elric could see that the ship sailed through rust-colored water. Peculiar lights gleamed in that water, just below the surface. There was an impression of creatures moving ponderously in the depths of the ocean and, for a moment, Elric thought he glimpsed a white, bloated face not dissimilar to his own—a Melnibonéan face. Impulsively he whirled, back to the rail, looking past Blendker as he strove to control the nausea in his throat.
For the first time since he had come aboard the Dark Ship he was able clearly to see the length of the vessel. Here were the two great wheels, one beside him on the foredeck, one at the far end of the ship on the rear deck, tended now as always by the Steersman, the Captain's sighted twin. There was the great mast bearing the taut black sail, and fore and aft of this, the two deck cabins, one of which was entirely empty (its occupants having been killed during their last landfall) and one of which was occupied only by himself and Blendker. Elric's gaze was drawn back to the Steersman and not for the first time the albino wondered how much influence the Captain's twin had over the course of the Dark Ship. The man seemed tireless, rarely, to Elric's knowledge, going below to his quarters which occupied the stern deck as the Captain's occupied the foredeck. Once or twice Elric or Blendker had trie
d to involve the Steersman in conversation, but he appeared to be as dumb as his brother was blind.
The cryptographic, geometrical carvings covering all the ship's wood and most of its metal, from sternpost to figurehead, were picked out by the shreds of pale mist still clinging to them (and again Elric wondered if the ship actually generated the mist normally surrounding it) and, as he watched, the designs slowly turned to pale pink fire as the light from that red star, which forever followed them, permeated the overhead cloud.
A noise from below. The Captain, his long red-gold hair drifting in a breeze which Elric could not feel, emerged from his cabin. The Captain's circlet of blue jade, worn like a diadem, had turned to something of a violet shade in the pink light, and even his buff-colored hose and tunic reflected the hue—even the silver sandals with their silver lacing glittered with the rosy tint.
Again Elric looked upon that mysterious blind face, as unhuman, in the accepted sense, as his own, and puzzled upon the origin of the one who would allow himself to be called nothing but “Captain.”
As if at the Captain's summons, the mist drew itself about the ship again, as a woman might draw a froth of furs about her body. The red star's light faded, but the distant screams continued.
Did the Captain notice the screams now for the first time, or was this a pantomime of surprise. His blind head tilted, a hand went to his ear. He murmured in a tone of satisfaction: “Aha!” The head lifted. “Elric?”
“Here,” said the albino. “Above you.”
“We are almost there, Elric.”
The apparently fragile hand found the rail of the companion-way. The Captain began to climb.
Elric faced him at the top of the ladder. “If it's a battle…”
The Captain's smile was enigmatic, bitter. “It was a fight—or shall be one.”
“…we'll have no part of it,” concluded the albino firmly.
“It is not one of the battles in which my ship is directly involved,” the blind man reassured him. “Those whom you can hear are the vanquished—lost in some future which, I think, you will experience close to the end of your present incarnation.”
A Quest-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic Page 26
