by Paula Guran
Elric marched on, passing the gateway. Moonglum and Shaarilla nervously followed.
Gusty laughter roared from the mouth of the giant and the scarlet fire fluttered about him. He was naked and unarmed, but the power which flowed from him almost forced the three back. His skin was scaly and of smoky purple coloring. His massive body was alive with rippling muscle as he rested lightly on the balls of his feet. His skull was long, slanting sharply backwards at the forehead and his eyes were like slivers of blue steel, showing no pupil. His whole body shook with mighty, malicious joy.
“Greetings to you, Lord Elric of Melniboné—I congratulate you for your remarkable tenacity!”
“Who are you?” Elric growled, his hand on his sword.
“My name is Orunlu the Keeper and this is a stronghold of the Lords of Entropy.” The giant smiled cynically. “You need not finger your puny blade so nervously, for you should know that I cannot harm you now. I gained power to remain in your realm only by making that vow.”
Elric’s voice betrayed his mounting excitement. “You cannot stop us?”
“I do not dare to—since my oblique efforts have failed. But your foolish endeavors perplex me somewhat, I’ll admit. The Book is of importance to us—but what can it mean to you? I have guarded it for three hundred centuries and have never been curious enough to seek to discover why my Masters place so much importance upon it—why they bothered to rescue it on its sunward course and incarcerate it on this boring ball of earth populated by the capering, briefly lived clowns called Men.”
“I seek in it the Truth,” Elric said guardedly.
“There is no Truth but that of Eternal struggle,” the scarlet-flamed giant said with conviction.
“What rules above the forces of Law and Chaos?” Elric asked. “What controls your destinies as it controls mine?”
The giant frowned. “That question, I cannot answer. I do not know. There is only the Balance.”
“Then perhaps the Book will tell us who holds it.” Elric said purposefully. “Let me pass—tell me where it lies.”
The giant moved back, smiling ironically. “It lies in a small chamber in the central tower. I have sworn never to venture there, otherwise I might even lead the way. Go if you like—my duty is over.”
Elric, Moonglum, and Shaarilla stepped towards the entrance of the castle, but before they entered, the giant spoke warningly from behind them.
“I have been told that the knowledge contained in the Book could swing the Balance on the side of the forces of Law. This disturbs me—but, it appears, there is another possibility which disturbs me even more.”
“What is that?” Elric said.
“It could create such a tremendous impact on the multiverse that complete entropy would result. My Masters do not desire that, for it could mean the destruction of all matter in the end. We exist only to fight—not to win, but to preserve the Eternal struggle.”
“I care not,” Elric told him. “I have little to lose, Orunlu the Keeper.”
“Then go.”
The giant strode across the courtyard into blackness.
Inside the tower, light of a pale quality illuminated winding steps leading upwards. Elric began to climb them in silence, moved by his own doom-filled purpose. Hesitantly, Moonglum and Shaarilla followed in his path, their faces set in hopeless acceptance.
On and upward the steps mounted, twisting tortuously towards their goal, until at last they came to the chamber, full of blinding light, many-colored and scintillating, which did not penetrate outwards at all but remained confined to the room which housed it.
Blinking, shielding his red eyes with his arm, Elric pressed forward and, through slitted pupils saw the source of the light lying on a small stone dais in the center of the room.
Equally troubled by the bright light, Shaarilla and Moonglum followed him into the room and stood in awe at what they saw.
It was a huge book—the Dead Gods’ Book, its covers encrusted with alien gems from which the light sprang. It gleamed, it throbbed with light and brilliant color.
“At last,” Elric breathed, “At last—the Truth!” He stumbled forward like a man made stupid with drink, his pale hands reaching for the thing he had sought with such savage bitterness. His hands touched the pulsating cover of the Book and, trembling, turned it back.
“Now, I shall learn,” he said, half-gloatingly. With a crash, the cover fell to the floor, sending the bright gems skipping and dancing over the paving stones.
Beneath Elric’s twitching hands lay nothing but a pile of yellowish dust.
“No!” His scream was anguished, unbelieving. “No!” Tears flowed down his contorted face as he ran his hands through the fine dust. With a groan which racked his whole being, he fell forward, his face hitting the disintegrated parchment, Time had destroyed the Book—untouched, possibly forgotten, for three hundred centuries. Even the wise and powerful Gods who had created it had perished—and now its knowledge followed them into oblivion.
They stood on the slopes of the high mountain, staring down into the green valleys below them. The sun shone and the sky was clear and blue. Behind them lay the gaping hole which led into the stronghold of the Lords of Entropy.
Elric looked with sad eyes across the world and his head was lowered beneath a weight of weariness and dark despair. He had not spoken since his companions had dragged him sobbing from the chamber of the Book. Now he raised his pale face and spoke in a voice tinged with self-mockery, sharp with bitterness—a lonely voice: the calling of hungry seabirds circling cold skies above bleak shores. “Now,” he said, “I will live my life without ever knowing why I live it—whether it has purpose or not. Perhaps the Book could have told me. But would I have believed it, even then? I am the eternal skeptic—never sure that my actions are my own; never certain that an ultimate entity is not guiding me.
“I envy those who know. All I can do now is to continue my quest and hope, without hope, that before my span is ended, the truth will be presented to me.”
Shaarilla took his limp hands in hers and her eyes were wet.
“Elric—let me comfort you.”
The albino sneered bitterly. “Would that we’d never met, Shaarilla of the Dancing Mist. For a while, you gave me hope—I had thought to be at last at peace with myself. But, because of you, I am left more hopeless than before. There is no salvation in this world—only malevolent doom. Goodbye.” He took his hands away from her grasp and set off down the mountainside.
Moonglum darted a glance at Shaarilla and then at Elric. He took something from his purse and put it in the girl’s hand.
“Good luck,” he said, and then he was running after Elric until he caught him up.
Still striding, Elric turned at Moonglum’s approach and, despite his brooding misery said: “What is it, friend Moonglum? Why do you follow me?”
“I’ve followed you thus far, Master Elric, and I see no reason to stop,” grinned the little man. “Besides, unlike yourself, I’m a materialist. We’ll need to eat, you know.”
Elric frowned, feeling a warmth growing within him. “What do you mean, Moonglum?”
Moonglum chuckled. “I take advantage of situations of any kind, where I may,” he answered. He reached into his purse and displayed something on his outstretched hand which shone with a dazzling brilliancy. It was one of the jewels from the cover of the Book. “There are more in my purse,” he said, “And each one worth a fortune.” He took Elric’s arm. “Come, Elric—what new lands shall we visit so that we may change these baubles into wine and pleasant company?”
Behind them, standing stock still on the hillside, Shaarilla stared miserably after them until they were no longer visible. The jewel Moonglum had given her dropped from her fingers and fell, bouncing and bright, until it was lost amongst the heather. Then she turned—and the dark mouth of the cavern yawned before her.
Normalizing & Annealing
During the 1970s, the marketing terms “high fantasy” and “heroi
c fantasy” were often applied to S&S fiction, but by any name it was the dawning of a second golden age for sword-and-sorcery fiction. There were opportunities for novels and venues for short fiction. Tanith Lee—who became an extremely prolific author in several genres—was published in both long and short forms. Her first novel for adults, The Birthgrave (1975), was S&S of a new kind. As David Forbes has written:
It is a Sword and Sorcery epic, thunderously bloody and sensual . . . Yet it is also a deeper story of character and identity: a feminist work of a piece with the questions sweeping through its time. . . . It was innovative for Lee to turn the focus of the story not just on a woman . . . but on one who, by the end, is well on her way to becoming the sort of secret-clad sorceress that usually plays the villain’s part.
Lee also wrote shorter sword-and-sorcery stories. In 1979 and 1980 she wrote six short stories about Cyrion, a mysterious swordsman, that were published in various anthologies and magazines. In 1982 they were collected—along with new material—in Cyrion. James Lecky sums up the collection and character in a 2009 review:
Tanith Lee’s stories of the mysterious swordsman Cyrion are as entertaining as they come . . . . Angelically handsome, devilishly clever, and with a past shrouded in mystery, Cyrion could be likened to a quasi-medieval James Bond or, perhaps more accurately, like a medieval cross between James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. Never stuck for a solution to a problem, no matter how thorny or potentially fatal. Cyrion takes it all in his cool, handsome stride. . . . there is no threat he cannot meet and no enemy he cannot conquer.
A Hero at the Gates
Tanith Lee
The city lay in the midst of the desert.
At the onset it could resemble a mirage; next, one of the giant mesas that were the teeth of the desert, filmy blue with distance and heat. But Cyrion had found the road which led to the city, and taking the road, presently the outline of the place came clear. High walls and higher towers within, high gates of hammered bronze. And above, the high and naked desert sky that reflected back from its sounding-bowl no sound at all from the city, and no smoke.
Cyrion stood and regarded the city. He was tempted to believe it a desert too, one of those hulks of men’s making, abandoned centuries ago as the sands of the waste crept to their threshold. Certainly, the city was old. Yet it had no aspect of neglect, none of the indefinable melancholy of the unlived-in house.
Intuitively, Cyrion knew that as he stood regarding the city from without, so others stood noiselessly within, regarding Cyrion.
What did they perceive? This: a young man, tall and deceptively slim, deceptively elegant, which elegance itself was something of a surprise, for he had been months traveling in the desert, on the caravan routes and the rare and sand-blown roads. He wore the loose dark clothing of a nomad, but with the generous hood thrust back to show he did not have a nomad’s pigmentation. At his side a sword was sheathed in red leather. The sunlight struck a silver-gold burnish on the pommel of the sword that was also the color of his hair. His left hand was mailed in rings which apparently no bandit had been able to relieve him of. If the watchers in the city had remarked that Cyrion was as handsome as the Arch-Demon himself, they would not have been the first to do so.
Then there came the booming scraping thunder of two bronze gates unbarred and dragged inward on their runners. The way into the city was exposed—yet blocked now by a crowd. Silent they were, and clad in black, the men and the women; even the children. And their faces were all the same, and gazed at Cyrion in the same way. They gazed at him as if he were the last bright day of their lives, the last bright coin in the otherwise empty coffer.
The sense of his dynamic importance to them was so strong that Cyrion swept the crowd a low, half-mocking bow. As he swept the bow, from his keen eyes’ corner, Cyrion saw a man walk through the crowd and come out of the gate.
The man was as tall as Cyrion. He had a hard face, tanned but sallow, wings of black hair beneath a shaved crown, and a collar of swarthy gold set with gems. But his gaze also clung on Cyrion. It was like a lover’s look. Or the starving lion’s as it beholds the deer.
“Sir,” said the black-haired man, “what brings you to this, our city?”
Cyrion gestured lazily with the ringed left hand. “The nomads have a saying: ‘After a month in the desert, even a dead tree is an object of wonder.’ ”
“Only curiosity, then,” said the man.
“Curiosity; hunger, thirst, loneliness, exhaustion,” enlarged Cyrion. By looking at Cyrion, few would think him affected by any of these things.
“Food we will give you, drink and rest. Our story we may not give. To satisfy the curious is not our fate. Our fate is darker and more savage. We await a savior. We await him in bondage.”
“When is he due?” Cyrion inquired.
“You, perhaps, are he.”
“Am I? You flatter me. I have been called many things, never savior.”
“Sir,” said the black-haired man, “do not jest at the wretched trouble of this city, nor at its solitary hope.”
“No jest,” said Cyrion, “but I hazard you wish some service of me. Saviors are required to labor, I believe, in behalf of their people. What do you want? Let us get it straight.”
“Sir,” said the man, “I am Memled, prince of this city.”
“Prince, but not savior?” interjected Cyrion, his eyes widening with the most insulting astonishment.
Memled lowered his gaze. “If you seek to shame me with that, it is your right. But you should know, I am prevented by circumstance.”
“Oh, indeed. Naturally.”
“I bear your gibe without complaint. I ask again if you will act for the city.”
“And I ask you again what I must do.”
Memled raised his lids and directed his glance at Cyrion once more.
“We are in the thrall of a monster, a demon-beast. It dwells in the caverns beneath the city, but at night it roves at will. It demands the flesh of our men to eat; it drinks the blood of our women and our children. It is protected through ancient magic, by a pact made a hundred years before between the princes of the city (cursed be they!) and the hordes of the Fiend. None born of the city has power to slay the beast. Yet there is a prophecy. A stranger, a hero who ventures to our gates, will have the power.”
“And how many heroes,” said Cyrion gently, “have you persuaded to an early death with this enterprise, you and your demon-beast?”
“I will not lie to you. Upward of a score. If you turn aside, no one here will speak ill of you. Your prospects of success would be slight, should you set your wits and sword against the beast. And our misery is nothing to you.”
Cyrion ran his eyes over the black-clad crowd. The arid faces were all still fixed towards his. The children, like miniature adults, just as arid, immobile, noiseless. If the tale were true, they had learned the lessons of fear and sorrow early, nor would they live long to enjoy their lessoning.
“Other than its dietary habits,” Cyrion said, “what can you tell me of your beast?”
Memled shivered. His sallowness increased.
“I can reveal no more. It is a part of the foul sorcery that binds us. We may say nothing to aid you, do nothing to aid you. Only pray for you, if you should decide to pit your skill against the devil.”
Cyrion smiled. “You have a cool effrontery, my friend, that is altogether delightful. Inform me then merely of this. If I conquer your beast, what reward is there—other, of course, than the blessing of your people?”
“We have our gold, our silver, our jewels. You may take them all away with you, or whatever you desire. We crave safety, not wealth. Our wealth has not protected us from horror and death.”
“I think we have a bargain,” said Cyrion. He looked at the children again. “Providing the treasury tallies with your description.”
It was noon, and the desert sun poured its merciless light upon the city. Cyrion walked in the company of Prince Memled and his guard—similarly b
lack-clad men, but with weighty blades and daggers at their belts, none, presumably, ever stained by beast-blood. The crowd moved circumspectly in the wake of their prince. Only the rustle of feet shuffling the dust was audible, and no speech. Below the bars of overhanging windows, here and there, a bird cage had been set out in the violet shade. The birds in the cages did not sing.
They reached a marketplace, sun-bleached, unpeopled and without merchandise of any sort. A well at the market’s center proclaimed the water which would, in the first instance, have caused the building of a city here. Further evidence of water lay across from the market, where a broad stairway, flanked by stone columns, led to a massive battlemented wall and doors of bronze this time plated by pure flashing gold. Over the wall-top, the royal house showed its peaks and pinnacles, and the heads of palm trees. There was a green perfume in the air, heady as incense in the desert.
The crowd faltered in the marketplace. Memled, and his guard conducted Cyrion up the stairway. The gold-plated doors were opened. They entered a cool palace, blue as an under-sea cave, buzzing with slender fountains, sweet with the scent of sun-scorched flowers.
Black-garmented servants brought chilled wine. The food was poor and did not match the wine. Had the flocks and herds gone to appease the demon-beast? Cyrion had spied not a goat nor a sheep in the city. For that matter, not a dog, nor even the sleek lemon cats and striped marmosets rich women liked to nurse instead of babies.
After the food and drink, Memled, near wordless yet courteous, led Cyrion to a treasury where wealth lay as thick as dust, and spilling on the ground.
“I would have thought,” said Cyrion, fastidiously investigating ropes of pearls and chains of rubies, “such stuff might have bought you a hero, had you sent for one.”
“This, too, is our limitation. We may not send. He must come to us, by accident.”
