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

of burthen that were laden with the horses and

stuff. But the Lord Juss was minded not to tarry an hour more in

Muelva than should suffice to give all needful orders to Gaslark and

La Fireez what they should do and when expect him again, and to make

provision for himself and those who must fare with him beyond these

shadowing cliffs into the haunted wastes of the Moruna. Ere noon was

all this accomplished and farewells said, and these lords, Juss,

Spitfire, and Brandoch Daha, set forth along the beach southward

towards a point where it seemed most hopeful to scale the cliffs. With

them went the Lord Gro, both by his own wish and because he had known

the Moruna aforetime and these particular parts thereof; and with them

went besides those two brothers-in-law, Zigg and Astar, bearing the

precious burden of the egg, for that honour and trust had Juss laid on

them at their earnest seeking. So with some pains after an hour or

more they won up the barrier, and halted for a minute on the cliff’s

edge.

 

The skin of Gro’s hands was hurt with the sharp rocks. Tenderly he

drew on his lambswool gloves, and shivered a little; for the breath of

that desert blew snell and frore and there seemed a shadow in the air

southward, for all it was bright and gentle weather below whence they

were come. Yet albeit his frail body quailed, even so were his spirits

within him raised with high and noble imaginings as he stood on the

lip of that rocky cliff. The cloudless vault of heaven; the unnumbered

laughter of the sea; that quiet cove beneath, and those ships of war

and that army camping by the ships; the emptiness of the blasted wolds

to southward, where every rock seemed like a dead man’s skull and

every rank tuft of grass hag-ridden; the bearing of those lords of

Demonland who stood beside him, as if nought should be of commoner

course to them pursuing their resolve than to turn their backs on

living land and enter those regions of the dead; these things with a

power as of a mighty music made Gro’s breath catch in his throat and

the tear spring in his eye.

 

In such wise after more than two years did Lord Juss begin his second

crossing of the Moruna in quest of his dear brother the Lord Goldry

Bluszco.

XXVIII ZORA RACH NAM PSARRION

Of the Lord Juss’s riding of the hippogriff to Zora

Rach, and of the ills encountered by him in that

accursed place, and the manner of his performing

his great enterprise to deliver his brother out of

bondage.

 

LULLED with light-stirring airs too gentle-soft to ruffle her glassy

surface, warm incense-laden airs sweet with the perfume of immortal

flowers, the charmed Lake of Ravary dreamed under the moon. It was the

last hour before the dawn. Enchanted boats, that seemed builded of the

glowworm’s light, drifted on the starry bosom of the lake. Over the

sloping woods the limbs of the mountains lowered, unmeasured, vast,

mysterious in the moon’s glamour. In remote high spaces of night

beyond glimmered the spires of Koshtra Pivrarcha and the virgin snows

of Romshir and Koshtra Belorn. No bird or beast moved in the

stillness: only a nightingale singing to the stars from a coppice of

olive-trees near the Queen’s pavilion on the eastern shore. And that

was a note not like a bird’s of middle earth, but a note to charm down

spirits out of the air, or to witch the imperishable senses of the

Gods when they would hold communion with holy Night and make her

perfect, and all her lamps and voices perfect in their eyes.

 

The silken hangings of the pavilion door, parting as in the portal of

a vision, made way for that Queen, fosterling of the most high Gods.

She paused a step or two beyond the threshold, looking down where

those lords of Demonland, Spitfire and Brandoch Daha, with Gro and

Zigg and Astar, wrapped in their cloaks, lay on the gowany dewy banks

that sloped down to the water’s edge.

 

“Asleep,” she whispered. “Even as he within sleepeth against the dawn.

I do think it is only in a great man’s breast sleep hath so gentle a

bed when great events are toward.”

 

Like a lily, or like a moonbeam strayed through the leafy roof into a

silent wood, she stood there, her face uplifted to the starry night

where all the air was drenched with the silver radiance of the moon.

And now in a soft voice she began supplication to the Gods which are

from everlasting, calling upon them in turn by their holy names, upon

gray-eyed Pallas, and Apollo, and Artemis the fleet Huntress, upon

Aphrodite, and Hera, Queen of Heaven, and Ares, and Hermes, and the

dark-tressed Earthshaker. Nor was she afraid to address her holy

prayers to him who from his veiled porch beside Acheron and Lethe Lake

binds to his will the devils of the under-gloom, nor to the great

Father of All in Whose sight time from the beginning until to-day is

but the dipping of a wand into the boundless ocean of eternity. So

prayed she to the blessed Gods, most earnestly requiring them that

under their countenance might be that ride, the like whereof earth had

not known: the riding of the hippogriff, not rashly and by an ass as

heretofore to his own destruction, but by the man of men who with

clean purpose and resolution undismayed should enforce it carry him to

his heart’s desire.

 

Now in the east beyond the feathery hilltops and the great snow wall

of Romshir the gates were opening to the day. The sleepers wakened and

stood up. There was a great noise from within the pavilion. They

turned wide-eyed, and forth of the hangings of the doorway came that

young thing new-hatched, pale and doubtful as the new light which

trembled in the sky. Juss walked beside it, his hand on the sapphire

mane. High and resolute was his look, as he gave good-morrow to the

Queen, to his brother and his friends. No word they said, only in turn

gripped him by the hand. The hour was upon them. For even as day

striding on the eastern snowfields stormed night out of high heaven,

so and with such swift increase of splendour was might bodily and the

desire of the upper air born in that wild steed. It shone as if

lighted by a moving lamp from withinward, sniffed the sweet morning

air and whinnied, pawing the grass of the waterside and tearing it up

with its claws of gold. Juss patted the creature’s arching neck,

looked to the bridle he had fitted to its mouth, made sure of the

fastenings of his armour, and loosened in the scabbard his great

sword. And now up sprang the sun.

 

The Queen said, “Remember: when thou shalt see the lord thy brother in

his own shape, that is no illusion. Mistrust all else. And the

almighty Gods preserve and comfort thee.”

 

Therewith the hippogriff, as if maddened with the day-beams, plunged

like a wild horse, spread wide its rainbow pinions, reared, and took

wing. But the Lord Juss was sprung astride of it, and the grip of his

knees on the ribs of it was like brazen clamps. The firm land seemed

to rush away beneath him to the rear; the lake and the shore and

islands thereof showed in a moment small and remote, and the figures

of the Queen and his companions like toys, then dots, then shrunken to

nothingness, and the vast silence of the upper air opened and received

him into utter loneliness. In that silence earth and sky swirled like

the wine in a shaken goblet as the wild steed rocketed higher and

higher in great spirals. A cloud billowy-white shut in the sky before

them; brighter and brighter it grew in its dazzling whiteness as they

sped towards it, until they touched it and the glory was dissolved in

a gray mist that grew still darker and colder as they flew till

suddenly they emerged from the further side of the cloud into a

radiance of blue and gold blinding in its glory. So for a while they

flew with no set direction, only ever higher, till at length obedient

to Juss’s mastery the hippogriff ceased from his sports and turned

obediently westward, and so in a swift straight course, mounting ever,

sped over Ravary towards the departing night. And now indeed it was as

if they had verily overtaken night in her western caves. For the air

waxed darker about them and always darker, until the great peaks that

stood round Ravary were hidden, and all the green land of Zimiamvia,

with its plains and winding waters and hills and uplands and enchanted

woods, hidden and lost in an evil twilight. And the upper heaven was

ateem with portents: whole armies of men skirmishing in the air,

dragons, wild beasts, bloody streamers, blazing comets, fiery strakes,

with other apparitions innumerable. But all silent, and all cold, so

that Juss’s hands and feet were numbed with the cold and his

moustachios stiff with hoar-frost.

 

Before them now, invisible till now, loomed the gaunt peak of Zora

Rach, black, wintry, and vast, still towering above them for all they

soared even higher, grand and lonely above the frozen wastes of the

Psarrion Glaciers. Juss stared at that peak till the wind of their

flight blinded his eyes with tears; but it was yet too far for any

glimpse of that which he hungered to behold: no brazen citadel, no

coronal of flame, no watcher on the heights. Zora, like some dark

queen of Hell that disdains that presumptuous mortal eyes should dare

to look lovely on her dread beauties, drew across her brow a veil of

thundercloud. They flew on, and that steel-blue pall of thunderous

vapour rolled forth till it canopied all the sky above them. Juss

tucked his two hands for warmth into the feathery armpits of the

hippogriff’s wings where the wings joined the creature’s body. So

bitter cold it was, his very eyeballs were frozen and fixed; but that

pain was a light thing beside somewhat he now felt within him the like

whereof he never before had known: a deathlike horror as of the

houseless loneliness of naked space, which gripped him at the heart.

 

They landed at last on a crag of black obsidian stone a little below

the cloud that hid the highest rocks. The hippogriff, crouched on the

steep slope, turned its head to look on Juss. He felt the creature’s

body beneath him quiver. Its ears were laid back, its eye wide with

terror. “Poor child,” he said. “I have brought thee an ill journey,

and thou but one hour hatched from the egg.”

 

He dismounted; and in that same instant was bereaved. For the

hippogriff with a horse-scream of terror took wing and vanished down

the mirk air, diving headlong away to eastward, back to the world of

life and sunlight.

 

And the Lord Juss stood alone in that region of fear and frost and the

soul-quailing gloom, under the black summit-rocks of Zora Rach.

 

Setting, as the Queen had counselled him to do, his whole heart and

mind on the dread goal he intended, he turned to the icy cliff. As he

climbed the cold cloud covered him, yet not so thick but he might see

ten paces’ distance before and about him as he went. Ill sights enow,

and enow to quail a strong man’s resolution, showed in his path:

shapes of damned fiends and gorgons of the pit running in the way,

threatening him with death and doom. But