Revenge of the Rose (20 page)

 
          
“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.”