These weren’t the conventional Christian variety of angels, but the lords and ladies of the Higher Worlds, closing in pitched battle, Law against Chaos, while elsewhere Elric’s struggle echoed theirs as he fought to herald in the Dawn. Lord Arioch, Duke of Chaos, and Lady Inald, haughty Countess of Law, leading their troops, faced each other across the boundary of the Middle March, fighting once again for control of the Balance.
I witnessed the chivalry of Law opposed, as ever, to the chivalry of Chaos, when they met on that Midsummer’s Night in the worst summer storm England had ever known and which equaled, in the course of twenty-four hours, other huge storms across the world.
A rather florid anonymous account appeared in the Craven Herald and was quoted extensively in later literature. It described an assembly of winged horsemen, wielding fiery swords, who clashed in the heavens: one side representing howling Chaos and one side for stern, relentless Law.
As angels fought and fell, I tried to make out their true shapes: Lord Arkyn pointed his white sword Mireen. Lady Xiombarg, spitting black blood and blue fire, challenged him with her massive twin-bladed ax.
Jack’s strongest memory, he says, is hearing the terrible smack of a winged body, the weight of an elephant, striking the limestone pavement above Chapel-le-Dale. It was Lady s’Rashdee falling down when half her left wing was severed. You can still see cracks in the rock. Large trees grow up through them now. Locals call it the Devil’s Pavement.
In America, two doctor friends of my parents, living in Inverness, California, reported the extraordinary view over the moody marshland shallows of Tomales Bay. They were sitting on their deck that night, enjoying the clarity of the weather, when they heard distant thunder and then watched a slowly darkening sky until, against it, a series of grey clouds formed the shapes of twelve Amerindian warriors in great detail. These were without doubt tribesmen not of the West but of the Northeast, every one of them slightly different in costume and features as they ran out of the sunset sky and headed inland.
I also heard how the folk of Marazion, the little port across from Saint Michael’s Mount, observed a gigantic figure in gold and ebony armor ride his warhorse over to the castle, a blazing brand in his right hand and a shard of flashing crystal in his left, make his horse rear, then bow in triumph and gratitude before galloping off across the water towards France.
I know most of it’s true, because I heard the parts I didn’t experience myself from Una Persson, as she calls herself now, that mysterious adventuress who spends so much of her time in Eastern Europe and never seems to age.
Sometimes I think of putting a book together of all the accounts, but this is probably all I’ll write. To be honest, I’ve had enough of supernatural adventures in other worlds, and so has my husband. We have two young children now. We’ve resolved to live ordinary lives and let the fantastic past fade into an incredible dream, as we become plain old Mr. and Mrs. John Daker.
Mum and Dad live full-time in Ingleton, where they work at their computer business. Jack and I are thinking of moving up there to get the kids a decent education and some fresh air. London changes faster than I can take sometimes, and the price of houses is ridiculous.
When I get crabby and think the world is becoming too heavily populated, though, I let myself remember the vast population of the entire multiverse, in which nothing really ever dies, or can ever die, while the original universe still lives, where there is always some other version of you and me. Then everything falls into perspective, and I cheer up again.
I prefer not to consider that too much, though. I’d rather think of myself and all those living souls within my extended family who know that they can be pretty much whatever they want to be but who also know, better than anyone, that there really are no free lunches, that wherever you are in the multiverse, everything must be paid for, usually with hard work.
Lately, Jack’s been having some bad nights. I think it’s stress. I’m beginning to wonder if the stock market is represented by too few principled warriors like him. He gets sick of the lies and deceptions in the modern business world. We could do with a bit more courage and determination in public life, not all this Hollywood-style brand-name politics too many people fall for. People don’t take enough responsibility for themselves or their actions.
We, too, have our ups and downs, of course. Jack says he remembers his life on the bum rather than our interventions or adventures in the multiverse. He think it’s for the best. Some of us can absorb that amount of information. Some can’t. Personally, I understand his denial. I don’t bring the past up very often.
I’m looking forward to moving. The first morning we get back to Tower House, we’ll go for a walk in grass which the fresh summer rain has sweetened, and I’ll show Jack Daker the real world his eye surgery has let him see again. It will be sparkling and beautiful in the golden sun, the evergreens dark against the pale blue sky. I’ll pretend it’s all as it was on that first day of my adventures, before I went looking for crayfish in the brook and met the most evil man in the multiverse. It now seems such a dream. As I often say to Jack, it takes a lot of courage and nerve just to face the terrors and anxieties of bringing up a couple of children in our modern world. Today’s realities are violent and fantastic enough for us! He heartily agrees.
EPILOGUE
AS HE FELL he knew that Law and Chaos both still pursued him and that somehow he was becoming an important piece in their perpetual battle. Struggle as he might to move against the Higher Worlds’ plans for him, he was never entirely free of their influence. His enemies wanted lives which were absolutely free to expand and express themselves without any form of hindrance. He could not share that lust. He valued the power and compassion of the many over the individual power and greed of the few. This set him apart from his father and family but reconnected him with his forebears who had practiced his virtues and vices with more questioning of the moral uses of power.
He could not believe that it was enough to preserve Melniboné, and so he had come to think that only death could save his people. Every advance in his journey to this moment had been earned and had brought him some unwanted burden of knowledge, some dreadful doom. His fate had been to destroy an ancient nation and take on an ancient curse in the form of a blade which served itself by appearing to serve certain masters. Yet his very struggle contained both the elements which warred in the Higher Worlds, making him an unlikely Knight of the Balance, one of those few representative champions chosen to fight the fight of the many.
And still he fell until he felt a sharp salt wind in his face and warm iron in his fist, and knew he breathed with a new vitality. A vitality he had earned as he and his kind had earned it over and over again down the centuries, across all the worlds of the moonbeam roads. This understanding faded as he woke, screaming:
“Stormbringer!”
Hearing a curse from beneath him, Elric saw Jagreen Lern pointing up at him. “Gag the white-faced sorcerer, and if that doesn’t put an end to his babbling, slay him!”
“Stormbringer!” called Elric again into that void, that terrible moment between life and death. “Stormbringer! Your master perishes!”
One of his guards reached up to tug at his bound foot. “Silence! You heard my master!”
But Elric had to take his remaining chance, his last knowing breath, to cry:
“Stormbringer!”
The guard put the sharp edge of his sword to Elric’s naked feet. He made to slice off his toes. But Elric paid him no heed. There was still breath enough.
“Stormbringer!”
The guard had climbed the rigging and was almost face-to-face with Elric. His coarse features grinned in stupid triumph as he drew back his arm to stab at the albino’s throat.
“Stormbringer!”
With an appalled gasp the warrior fell, his cutlass dropping from his fingers as he raised his hands to grapple with something invisible, which had him by the throat. Suddenly his fingers parted from his hands in littl
e fountains of blood.
Flinging the lifeless corpse to the deck, the sword stood before its master for a moment. Then, in a series of rapid movements, it slashed at the bonds holding him to the mast, leaped into his hand and fed him the life-stuff they, in their dreadful union, sucked from their victims, making man and sword symbiotic predators.
Elric’s story was moving towards its ultimate tragedy. Those who had fought to deny him his destiny were defeated. He could fight his way to the ruins of his own past, betraying all who sought to help him, to find at least a kind of tranquility, one Champion among many in whom morality and bleak necessity continually made war.
And now the objects of power are in fresh configuration upon an Earth where Tanelorn may sometimes be found. Old friends go there to meet and rejoice, and enemies go to be reconciled. Another name for that city is the Old and the New Jerusalem. And it is all your soul desires.
I hope I will see you there.
An End and a Beginning
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL MOORCOCK is a vanguard author, editor, journalist, critic, and rock musician. As the editor of the controversial magazine New Worlds, he fostered authors who would go on to win accolades as prestigious as the Booker Prize. A member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, Moorcock has won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the British Fantasy Award, among others. He received a platinum disc for Warrior on the Edge of Time, his band Hawkwind’s bestselling Eternal Champion concept album. His song “Black Blade” is one of several produced with Blue Oyster Cult.
Read Michael Moorcock!
One of the most intricate,
beloved series in all fantasy:
ELRIC, THE ETERNAL CHAMPION
THE DREAMTHIEF’S DAUGHTER
(0-446-61120-4)
The albino Ulric von Bek, last Count of Bek, battles to keep the dark sword Ravenbrand from being taken by Adolf Hitler while Elric, the last sorcerer-king of Melniboné, fights to keep the black sword Stormbringer from being taken by Gaynor the Damned. They both fail. Now, their destinies entwined with that of Oona, the mysterious Dreamthief’s Daughter, Elric and von Bek must become one hero. For the entire Multiverse will be destroyed—unless Elric can summon his dragon kin across space and time to the Battle of Britain, and show the Third Reich what hell on earth truly means …
THE SKRAYLING TREE
(0-446-61340-1)
Oona von Bek and the shaman White Crow cross Hiawatha’s lands of legend to a fabled golden city as Elric of Melniboné encounters fierce pygmies in need of an ally in Vinland, all while Count Ulric von Bek attempts to save all existence by protecting a golden city from demons and berserkers. The three heroes must follow their own fateful paths through space and time—only to meet in a moment of terrible tragedy that may destroy them … and the Multiverse itself.
AVAILABLE IN MASS MARKET FROM WARNER BOOKS
Michael Moorcock’s towering
fantasy achievement
is now available in a definitive
trade paperback edition.
GLORIANA
Or,
The Unfulfill’d Queen
Beautiful, powerful, and revered, Gloriana rules Albion, a vast empire that stretches from Asia to America. On the surface, the queen appears happy and her empire enjoys an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. But underneath the golden veneer is a monarch suffocating under the burden of her duty and seeking release in all manner of debauchery. And, unknown to Gloriana, her chancellor is keeping this age of peace through terror, oppression, and a network of informants—the most dangerous of whom is the sinister Captain Quire.
When this peerless spy feels insulted by the court, all Albion will suffer. For Quire plots to destroy the empire by seducing the sexually frustrated queen …
Praise for Gloriana:
“Vastly entertaining … a labor of love, and a triumphant one.”
—WILLIAM GIBSON
“Bawdy, barbaric, elegant … a beautifully written, perfectly realized tour de force … Moorcock’s most ambitious and most successful novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
AVAILABLE IN MASS MARKET FROM WARNER1 BOOKS
Legendary, award-winning author Michael Moorcock presents a monumental work that knits together the many tales of the Eternal Champion… in which Elric, the White Wolf, reaches the end of his thousand-year dream quest.
THE WHITE WOLF’S SON
Young Oonagh von Bek has an extraordinary and perilous adventure: She falls into a subterranean chasm only to be chased by dangerous men. Her grandparents—Oona, the Dreamthief’s Daughter, and Elric, the last sorcerer of Melniboné—follow, seeking Elric’s son, and encounter other avatars of the Eternal Champion. Now fanning out across the infinite realms of existence, they hope to stop Oonagh’s pursuers, Gaynor the Damned and his allies. All paths will converge in a cruel land of tyranny and dark magic, where defilers plan the ultimate arrogance: to re-create the entire Multiverse—and install themselves as eternal overlords…
“A classic fantasy…one of the best books Moorcock has ever written.”—Midwest Book Review
“Complex and entertaining… a triumph of mature talent and imagination?”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
1 See The Fortress of the Pearl.
Michael Moorcock, The White Wolf's Son: The Albino Underground
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