The Revenge of the Rose

by Michael Moorcock

  Slowly now the black-and-yellow ship moved through the tugging currents of the reef—a few inches this way, a few that, sometimes touching a rock so lightly there was the barest whisper of friction, sometimes seeming to squeeze between pillars of basalt and obsidian, while the wind yelled and the surf crashed and the whole world seemed once more to be given up to Chaos. It was noon before they had negotiated the first line of reefs and lay at anchor in the calm waters between themselves and the second line. Now the navigator gave instructions for the crew to eat well and to rest. They would not attempt the next line until the following day.

  Next day they plunged again into cacophony and wave-tossed confusion as the navigator called out first one direction and then another, sometimes running back along the ship to take the wheel, sometimes clambering to the crow’s nest to remind himself of what lay ahead, for it was clear he had navigated these reefs more than once.

  Another river of clear, blue ocean running over pale sand; another patch of calm water—and the navigator made them rest another day.

  Twelve days it took them to reach the farthest reef and look with unpleasant emotions upon the black surf pouring like oily smoke onto the massive natural barrier created by the last line of islands, onto beaches of smooth, fused obsidian. The Heavy Sea moved with extreme precision, the waves rising and falling with agonizing slowness, and the deep sounds it made hinted at this sea having a voice largely inaudible to the human ear, for a peculiar silence existed over its dark, slow waters.

  “It is like a sea of cold, liquefied lead,” said Wheldrake. “It offends all natural laws!” At which remark of his own he shrugged, as if to say “What does not?” “How can any ship sail across that? The surface tension is rather more adequate than is needed, I would guess …”

  The navigator lifted his head from where he had been resting it on the rail. “It can be crossed,” he said. “It has been crossed. It is a sea that flows between the worlds, but there are folk for whom that ocean is as familiar as the one we have just left behind is to us. Mortal ingenuity can usually find a means of traveling through or over anything.”

  “But is it not a dangerous sea?” asked Wheldrake, looking upon it with considerable distaste.

  “Oh, yes,” agreed the navigator. “It is very dangerous.” He spoke carelessly. “Although it could be argued, I suppose, that anything which becomes familiar is less dangerous …”

  “Or more,” said Elric with some feeling. He took one last look at the Heavy Sea and went below, to the cabin he shared with Wheldrake. That night he remained in his quarters, brooding on matters impossible to discuss with any other creature, while Wheldrake joined the navigator and the crew in celebration of their successful crossing of the reefs and in the hope of gaining a little more courage for the voyage that remained. But if Wheldrake had planned to learn more of the navigator, save that Gaynor had taken him aboard only a couple of days before they came to Ulshinir, he was disappointed. Nor did he see anything else of Charion, his beloved, that night. Something stopped him from returning to the cabin—some sense of discretion—and he stayed, instead, upon the deck for a while, listening to the sluggish breakers splashing against the sea-smoothed obsidian and he thought of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the stories of the Boat of Souls, of Charon, Boatman to the Gods, for to him this truly seemed like some netherworld ocean—perhaps the waters which lapped the very shores of limbo.

  And now Wheldrake found himself beside the cage where the monster slept, its eyes tight shut as it snored and snuffled and smacked its loose, spongy lips, and at that moment the poet felt a certain sympathy for the creature, who was as surely trapped into compromise with Gaynor as almost everyone else aboard the ship. He leaned his arm on the rail of black, carved wood and watched as the moon emerged from behind a cloud and its light fell upon the scales, the leathery folds of flesh, the almost translucent webbing between the enormous fingers, and marveled at such ugliness, enraptured of such beauty. Whereupon he thought of himself, thought of a phrase, a certain cadence, felt about his pockets for his ink, his quill and his parchment and set to work in the moonlight to find romantic comparisons between Wheldrake the Poet and Khorghakh the Toad which was, he felt with a certain degree of self-satisfaction, all the more difficult if one attempted, for instance, some version of trochaic dimeter …

  Of this schism

  Occultism,

  Lately risen,

  (Euphemism)

  Calls for heroism rare.

  Which occupied him so successfully that it was not until dawn that he placed his pining head upon his pillow and fell into the sweetest dreams of love he had ever known …

  Dawn found all but Wheldrake on deck, faces upturned towards a lowering sky from which fell a languorous rain. It had grown warmer overnight and the humidity was very high. Elric tugged at his clothes and wished that he were naked. He felt as if he walked through tepid mead. The navigator was up on the foredeck with the toad; they seemed to be in conference. Then the grey man straightened and came back to where Elric, Gaynor and Charion stood together under a rough awning upon which the rain drops thumped with deliberate rhythm. He brushed his own woolen sleeve. “It’s like mercury, this stuff. You should try to swallow some. It won’t harm you, but it’s almost impossible—you have to chew it. Now, Prince Gaynor the Damned, you struck a bargain with me and I have fulfilled the first part. Whereupon you said you would return to me what was mine. Before, you agreed, we advance into the Heavy Sea.”

  The grey-green gaze was steady upon that shifting helm. They were eyes that feared almost nothing.

  “True,” says Gaynor, “such a bargain was made—” and he seems to hesitate, as if weighing the odds of breaking his oath, then deciding he would gain more by honouring it—“and I shall keep it, naturally. One moment.” He leaves the quarter-deck to go below and re-emerge with a small bundle—perhaps a wrapped greatcoat—which he puts into the navigator’s hands. For a second those strange eyes flare and the mouth grins oddly, then the grey man is impassive again. Carrying the bundle he returns to take a further word or two with the toad. Then it’s “Get a man to the lookout” and “Oarsmen to their positions” and “Keep that sail down—’tis a slow wind that will fill her, but ’tis worth the attempt” and the navigator is moving about the black-and-yellow ship—a man of the wild sea, a man of well-garnered wisdom and natural intellect, everything that a ship’s commander should be—encouraging, shouting, whistling, joking with all—even the great old toad that grumbled his way from the cage as Charion released him, to creep bit by bit to the prow, and lie along the creaking bowsprit, forcing the ship still further down into the sea—down now through a narrow channel (pointed out by the navigator hanging in the rigging above the toad’s green head) where white water meets black, where airy foam meets leaden droplets, suspended in the thick air. The prow of the ship—sharp and honed like a razor in the manner of the bakrasim of the Vilmirian Peninsula—sliced into that sluggish mass, driven by the toad’s weight, guided now by the toad’s bellows translated by the navigator to the steersman, and they are entering the Heavy Sea, going into darkness, going into the place where the sky itself seems like a kind of skin off which all sounds echo and the fading echoes are themselves returned until it seems the voices of tormented mortals in all their billions are sounding in their agonized ears and it is impossible to hear anything but that. They are tempted to signal to Prince Gaynor, standing himself at the helm now, to turn the ship about, for they must all die of the noise.

  But Gaynor the Damned would not heed them. His terrible helm is lifted against the elements, his armoured body challenges the multiverse, defiant of the natural or the supernatural, or any other form which might threaten him! For he is never alarmed by death.

  The toad croaks and gestures, the navigator signs with his hands, and Gaynor turns the wheel a little this way, a little that, fine as a needlewoman at her stretcher, while Elric holds his hands against his ears, seeks for something to stuff into
them, to stop the pain which must surely burst his brain. Up on deck, ghastly, comes Wheldrake—

  —and then the sound is over. A silence encloses the ship.

  “You, too,” says Wheldrake in some relief. “I thought it was last night’s wine. Or possibly the poetry …”

  He stares in dismay at the slow-moving darkness all around them, looks up at the bruised sky from which the leisurely rain still falls, and returns without further remark to his cabin for a moment.

  The ship still moves, the Heavy Sea still heaves, and through this liquid maze the craft of Chaos cleaves. The toad groans out his orders, the navigator shouts; and Gaynor on his quarter-deck turns the wheel a fraction south. The toad’s webbed hand makes urgent signs, the wheel is turned again, and onward into laggard seas drive Gaynor and his men. And on every single face of them, save Elric and his friend, is a wild, dark glee, and a sniffing at the sea for the smell of purest fear. They sniffed for fear like hounds for blood; they sniffed on that sluggish air; they sniffed for danger and scent of death and they tasted the wind like bread. And the toad groans out his orders and his mouth is wet with greed, and the toad’s breath wheezes in the toad’s dark maw, for soon he must come to feed.

  “Master, I must feed!”

  The strange water rolls like mercury over the ship’s decks as she plunges on, sometimes threatening, it seems, to become stuck in a glutinous wave. And at last the ship will not move at all. The toad takes ropes from the prow and, its wide feet spread upon the water, long enough to break the surface tension before treading on again at what is clearly a natural gait, hauls the whole ship behind it. Behind him, momentarily, in the heavy water are the toad’s footprints and then the tension is broken by the prow until at last the toad is swimming again, gasping with something akin to pleasure as the great droplets roll over his scales. There is a noise from it; a noise of joy: a noise that finds distant echo somewhere above, suggesting that they are in fact within a vast cave, or perhaps some more organic manifestation of Chaos. Then the booming song of the toad dies away and the creature comes paddling back to the ship, to crawl slowly aboard, tipping down the prow again, and resume its position along the bowsprit while the navigator climbs back overhead and once more Gaynor takes up the wheel.

  Elric, fascinated by these events, watches the drops of water roll from the toad’s glistening body and fall back into the sea. Above, in the rolling darkness, come sudden flashes of dusky scarlet and deep blue, as if whatever sun burns on them is not like any they have seen before. Now even the air is so thick that they must gulp at it like stranded fish and one man falls to the deck in a fit, but Gaynor does not lift a gauntleted hand from the wheel nor make any movement of his head to suggest that they must stop. And not one, now, asks him to stop. Elric realizes they are like-minded nihilists who have suffered too much already to fear any pain that might lie ahead. Certainly they do not fear a clean death. Unlike Gaynor, these men are not questing for death with his desperation. These are men who would kill themselves if they did not believe that living was just a little more interesting than dying. Elric recognized in them something of what he frequently felt—a terrible, deep boredom with all the reminders one met of human venality and folly—yet there was also in him another feeling, a memory of his people before they founded Melniboné, when they were gentler and lived with the existing realities rather than attempt to force their own; a memory of justice and perfection. He went to the rail and looked out over the slow-heaving waters of the Heavy Sea and he wondered where, in all that sluggish darkness, were the three sisters to be found. And did they still have the box of black rosewood? And did that box still contain his father’s soul?

  Wheldrake appeared, with Charion Phatt, chanting some rhyme of almost mesmeric simplicity and then blushing suddenly and stopping.

  “It would be useful, something like that,” said Mistress Phatt, “for the rowers. They need a steady sort of rhythm. I have no intention, I assure you, Master Wheldrake, of marrying that toad. I have no intention of marrying at all. I believe you have heard my views on the perils of domesticity.”

  “Hopeless love!” wailed Wheldrake, with what was almost relish. He cast a scrap of paper over the side. It fell flat upon the water, undulating with it as if given a spark of life of its own.

  “Whatever pleases you, sir.” She winked at Elric cheerfully.

  “You seem in excellent spirits,” said the albino, “for one who is embarked upon such a voyage as this.”

  “I can sense the sisters,” she said. “I told Prince Gaynor. I sensed them an hour ago. And I can sense them now. They have returned to this plane. And if they are here, then soon my uncle and my grandmother, and perhaps my cousin, will find them, too.”

  “You think the sisters will reunite you with your family? That’s the only reason you seek them?”

  “I believe that if they live it is inevitable that we shall meet, most probably through the sisters.”

  “But the Rose and the boy are dead.”

  “I said I did not know where they were, not that they were dead …” It was clear she feared the worst but was refusing to admit it.

  Elric did not pursue the subject. He knew what it was like to live with grief.

  And on sailed the Chaos ship, into the slow silence of the Heavy Sea, with the croaking of the great toad and the voice of the navigator the only sounds to cut through the swampy air.

  That night they dropped anchor and all but Gaynor retired. The damned prince strode the deck with a steady pace, almost in rhythm with the languid waves, and occasionally Elric, who could not sleep but had no wish to join Gaynor on deck, heard the creature cry out as if startled. “Who’s there?”

  Elric wondered what kind of denizens occupied the Heavy Sea. Were there others, like the toad but of a more malevolent disposition?

  At Gaynor’s third cry, he got to his feet, pulling on some clothes, his scabbarded sword in his hand. Wheldrake, too, was disturbed, but merely raised himself up in his bunk and murmured a question.

  Out into the salty miasma went Elric, seeking the source of Gaynor’s shout. Then he saw, looming over the port rail, the bulk of what could only be some kind of ship. A tall, wooden construction—a kind of castellated tower from which were already swinging half-a-dozen figures, all of them armed with long, savage pikes and flenchers—brutal weapons, but effective in this kind of fighting.

  But not, reflected Elric with a certain humour, as effective as a black runesword.

  And with that he dragged the hellblade from its scabbard and ran on bare feet along the deck to greet the first of the pirates as they dropped aboard the ship.

  Above them, on the foredeck, the navigator appeared for a moment, glaring upward and moving with an odd series of leaps back into the rigging. “Dramian Toad-hunters!” he cried to Elric. “They’re after our guide! We are dead without it!”

  Then the navigator had disappeared again and the first of the hunters stabbed at Elric with the jagged points of his pike—

  —and died almost without realizing it, wriggling like a speared fish as his soul was sucked into the blade …

  Stormbringer seemed to purr with pleasure. The sword’s song grew louder, greedier as one by one the hunters went down.

  Elric, used to supernatural foes, stood amongst the growing pile of corpses like a farmer scything hay on a pleasant summer’s day and it was left to Charion and the crew to finish off the few who now tried desperately to get back to their ship …

  … But Elric was ahead of them, clambering up one of their own lines as a hunter desperately tried to saw at it with his pike. Elric reached the hunter before the rope was sheared and he drove the sword deep through the man’s breastbone, watching him writhe. The hunter tried to keep his hold on the rope, then grasped the blade itself with both hands, as the sword relished its gradual feasting on the rich marrow of his soul. He tried to push himself off the sword, to cast himself into the dark water that now showed between the two ships, and on an impul
se Elric released his grip on Stormbringer and watched with a sense of profound calm as sword and victim went plunging downwards. Weaponless, he continued his climb up the rope, swinging over the crenelations to discover that the bulky forward tower belonged to a vessel of singular slimness. It was a ship designed to race upon the surface of this peculiar ocean. Elric could see large outriggers, like the limbs of some huge water-insect, curving into the darkness.

  And then, from a hatch in the deck, came more of the hunters, all armed with flenchers and grinning with the prospect of their butchery. Elric cursed himself for a fool and backed away from them, his eyes searching for some means of escape.

  The hunters had the look of men who intended to enjoy their work. The first made an experimental swing with his flencher. The broad, curved blade whistled in the sultry air.

  They were almost upon Elric when the albino heard a deep growling from somewhere over his head and thought the toad had climbed the tower undetected. But what he saw instead was a great snarling dog, silvery in the darkness, springing for the throat of the nearest hunter and tearing at it until it was nothing more than bloody meat, glaring up with a triumphant flaring of its nostrils as the other hunters fled. Elric did not care at that moment where his rescuer had come from. He merely thanked the animal and glanced down onto the deck to see how his companions fared. He saw Charion finishing off an adversary and lifting her lovely head in a high, ululating note.

  The few hunters who still lived ran for the sides in blind panic; for now, over the starboard rail, its lips smacking and its eyes gleaming, breathing with wheezing slowness, crawled the toad they had sought to capture for themselves. The dog had vanished.

  Khorghakh hesitated once he was aboard, his bulk enveloping parts of the rail and the hatches, and he cocked his head enquiringly.

  From somewhere on the Chaos ship Elric heard Gaynor’s voice crying out, exultant and full of an unusual excitement.

  “Now, toad! Now, my darling, now you can feed!”