The Worm Ouroboros, Eric Rücker Eddison [epub ebook reader txt] 📗

dragged a dozen to perdition had he made a slip. The

ledges sloped outward; they were piled with broken rock and mud; the

soft red rock broke away at a hand’s touch and plunged at a leap to

the glacier below. Down and up and along, and down and up and up again

they wound their way, rounding the base of that great tower, and came

at last by a rotten gully safe to the ridge above it.

 

While they climbed, white wispy clouds which had gathered in the high

gullies of scilinon in the morning had grown to a mass of blackness

that hid ad the mountains to the west. Great streamers ran from it

across the gulf below, joined and boiled upward, lifting and sinking

like a full-tided sea, rising at last to the high ridge where the

Demons stood and wrapping them in a cloak of vapour with a chill wind

in its folds, and darkness in broad noon-day. They halted, for they

might not see the rocks before them. The wind grew boisterous,

shouting among the splintered towers. Snow swept powdery and keen

across the ridge. The cloud lifted and plunged again like some great

bird shadowing them with its wings. From its bosom the lightning

flared above and below. Thunder crashed on the heels of the lightning,

sending the echoes rolling among the distant cliffs. Their weapons,

planted in the snow, sizzled with blue flame; Juss had counselled

laying them aside lest they should perish holding them. Crouched in a

hollow of the snow among the rocks of that high ridge of Koshtra

Pivrarcha, Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha and Mivarsh Faz weathered

that might of terror. When night came they knew not, for the storm

brought darkness on them hours before sundown. Blinding snow and

sleet and fire and thunder, and wild winds shrieking in the gullies

till the firm mountain seemed to rock, kept them awake. They were near

frozen, and scarce desired aught but death, which might bring them

ease from that hellish roundelay.

 

Day broke with a weak gray light, and the storm died down. Juss stood

up weary beyond speech. Mivarsh said, “Ye be devils, but of myself I

marvel. For I have dwelt by snow mountains all my days, and many I wot

of that have been benighted on the snows in wild weather. And not one

but was starved by reason of the cold. I speak of them that were

found. Many were not found, for the spirits devoured them.”

 

Whereat Lord Brandoch Daha laughed aloud, saying, “O Mivarsh, I fear

me that in thee I have but a graceless dog. Look on him, that in

hardihood and bodily endurance against all hardships of frost or fire

surpasseth me as greatly as I surpass thee. Yet is he weariest of the

three. Wouldst know why? I’ll tell thee: all night he hath striven

against the cold, chafing not himself only but me and thee to save us

from frost-bite. And be sure nought else had saved thy carcase.”

 

By them was the mist grown lighter, so that they might see the ridge

for an hundred paces or more where it went up before them, each

pinnacle standing out shadowy and unsubstantial against the next

succeeding one more shadowy still. And the pinnacles showed monstrous

huge through the mist, like mountain peaks in stature.

 

They roped and set forth, scaling the towers or turning them, now on

this side now on that; sometimes standing on teeth of rock that seemed

cut off from all earth else, solitary in a sea of shifting vapour;

sometimes descending into a deep gash in the ridge with a blank wall

rearing aloft on the further side and empty air yawning to left and

right. The rocks were firm and good, like those they had first climbed

from the glacier. But they went but a slow pace, for the climbing was

difficult and made dangerous by new snow and by the ice that glazed

the rocks.

 

As the day wore the wind was fallen, and all was still when they stood

at length before a ridge of hard ice that shot steeply up before them

like the edge of a sword. The east side of it on their left was almost

sheer, ending in a blank precipice that dropped out of sight without a

break. The western slope, scarcely less steep, ran down in a white

even sheet of frozen snow till the clouds engulfed it.

 

Bramdoch Daha waited on the last blunt tooth of rock at the foot of

the ice-ridge. “The rest is thine,” he cried to Lord Juss. “I would

not that any save thou should tread him first, for he is thy

mountain.”

 

“Without thee I had never won up hither,” answered Juss; “and it is

not fitting that I should have that glory to stand first upon the peak

when thine was the main achievement. Go thou before.”

 

“I will not,” said Lord Brandoch Daha. “And it is not so.”

 

So Juss went forward, smiting with his axe great steps just below the

backbone of the ridge on the western side, and Lord Brandoch Daha and

Mivarsh Faz followed in the steps.

 

Presently a wind arose in the unseen spaces of the sky, and tore the

mist like a rotten garment. Spears of sunlight blazed through the

rifts. Distant sunny lands shimmered in the unimaginable depths to the

southward, seen over the crest of a tremendous wall that stood beyond

the abyss: a screen of black rock buttresses seamed with a thousand

gullies of glistening snow, and crowned as with battlements with a row

of mountain peaks, savage and fierce of form, that made the eye blink

for their brightness: the lean spires of the summit-ridge of Koshtra

Pivrarcha. These, that the Demons had so long looked up to as in

distant heaven, now lay beneath their feet. Only the peak they climbed

still reared itself above them, clear now and near to view, showing a

bare beetling cliff on the northeast, overhung by a cornice of snow.

Juss marked the cornice, turned him again to his step-cutting, and in

half an hour from the breaking of the clouds stood on that unascended

pinnacle, with all earth beneath him.

 

They went down a few feet on the southern side and sat on some rocks.

A fair lake studded with islands lay bosomed in wooded and crag-girt

hills at the foot of a deep-cut valley which ran down from the Gates

of Zimiamvia. Ailinon and Ashnilam rose near by in the west, with the

delicate white peak of Akra Garsh showing between them. Beyond,

mountain beyond mountain like the sea.

 

Juss looked southward where the blue land stretched in fold upon fold

of rolling country, soft and misty, till it melted in the sky. “Thou

and I,” said he, “first of the children of men, mow behold with living

eyes the fabled land of Zimiamvia. Is that true, thinkest thou, which

philosophers tell us of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may

tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be

departed, even they that were great upon earth and did great deeds

when they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the

glories thereof, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet

oppressors?”

 

“Who knoweth?” said Brandoch Daha, resting his chin in his hand and

gazing south as in a dream. “Who shall say he knoweth?”

 

They were silent awhile. Then Juss spake saying, “If thou and I come

thither at last, O my friend, shall we remember Demonland?” And when

he answered him not, Juss said, “I had rather row on Moommere under

the stars of a summer’s might, than be a King of all the land of

Zimiamvia. And I had rather watch the sunrise on the Scarf, than dwell

in gladness all my days on am island of that enchanted Lake of Ravary,

under Koshtra Belorn.”

 

Now the curtain of cloud that had hung till now about the eastern

heights was rent into shreds, and Koshtra Belorn stood like a maiden

before them, two or three miles to eastward, facing the slanting rays

of the sun. On all her vast precipices scarce a rock showed bare, so

encrusted were they with a dazzling robe of snow. More lovely she

seemed and more graceful in her airy poise than they had yet beheld

her. Juss and Brandoch Daha rose up, as men arise to greet a queen in

her majesty. In silence they looked on her for some minutes.

 

Then Brandoch Daha spake, saying, “Behold thy bride, O Juss.”

XIII KOSHTRA BELORN

How the Lord Juss accomplished at length his

dream’s behest, to inquire in Koshtra Belorn; and

what manner of answer he received.

 

THAT night they spent safely, by favour of the Gods, under the highest

crags of Koshtra Pivrarcha, in a sheltered hollow piled round with

snow. Dawn came like a lily, saffron-hued, smirched with smoke-gray

streaks that slanted from the north. The great peaks stood as islands

above a main of level cloud, out of which the sum walked flaming, a

ball of red-gold fire. An hour before his face appeared, the Demons

and Mivarsh were roped and started on their eastward journey. Ill to

do with as was the crest of the great north buttress by which they had

climbed the mountain, seven times worse was this eastern ridge,

leading to Koshtra Belorn. Leaner of back it was, flanked by more

profound abysses, deeplier gashed, too treacherous and too sudden in

its changes from sure rock to rotten and perilous: piled with

tottering crags, hung about with cornices of uncertain snow, girt with

cliffs smooth and holdless as a castle wall. Small marvel that it cost

them thirteen hours to come down that ridge. The sun wheeled towards

the west when they reached at length that frozen edge, sharp as a

sickle, that was in the Gates of Zimiamvia. Weary they were, and

ropeless; for by no means else might they come down from the last

great tower save by the rope made fast from above. A fierce northeaster

had swept the ridges all day, bringing snow-storms on its

wings. Their fingers were numbed with cold, and the beards of Lord

Brandoch Daha and Mivarsh Faz stiff with ice.

 

Too weary to halt, they set forth again, Juss leading. It was many

hundred paces along that ice-edge, and the sun was near setting when

they stood at last within a stone’s throw of the cliffs of Koshtra

Belorm. Since before noon avalanches had thundered ceaselessly down

those cliffs. Now, in the cool of the evening, all was still. The wind

was fallen. The deep blue sky was without a cloud. The fires of sunset

crept down the vast white precipices before them till every ledge and

fold and frozen pinnacle glowed pink colour, and every shadow became

an emerald. The shadow of Koshtra Pivrarcha lay cold across the lower

stretches of the face on the Zimiamvian side. The edge of that shadow

was as the division betwixt the living and the dead.

 

“What dost think on?” said Juss to Brandoch Daha, that leaned upon his

sword surveying that glory.

 

Brandoch Daha started and looked on him. “Why,” said he, “on this:

that it is likely thy dream was but a lure, sent thee by the King to

tempt us on to mighty actions reserved for our destruction. On this

side at least ‘tis very certain there lieth no way up Koshtra Belorn.”

 

“What of the little martlet,” said Juss, “who, whiles we were yet a

great way off, flew out of the south to greet us with a gracious

message?”

 

“Well if it were