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

Juss, gritting his teeth,

climbed on and through them, they being unsubstantial. Then up rose an

eldritch cry, “What man of middle-earth is this that troubleth our

quiet? Make an end! Call up the basilisks. Call up the Golden

Basilisk, which bloweth upon and setteth on fire whatsoever he seeth.

Call up the Starry Basilisk, and whatso he seeth it immediately

shrinks up and perisheth. Call up the Bloody Basilisk, who if he see

or touch any living thing it floweth away so that nought there

remaineth but the bones!”

 

That was a voice to freeze the marrow, yet he pressed on, saying in

himself, “All is illusion, save that alone she told me of.” And nought

appeared: only the silence and the cold, and the rocks grew ever

steeper and their ice-glaze more dangerous, and the difficulty like

the difficulty of those Barriers of Emshir, up which more than two

years ago he had followed Brandoch Daha and on which he had

encountered and slain the beast mantichora. The leaden hours drifted

by, and now night shut down, bitter and black and silent. Sore

weariness bodily was come upon Juss, and his whole soul weary withal

and near to death as he entered a snowbedded gully that cut deep into

the face of the mountain, there to await the day. He durst not sleep

in that freezing night; scarcely dared he rest lest the cold should

master him, but must keep for ever moving and stamping and chafing

hands and feet. And yet, as the slow night crept by, death seemed a

desirable thing that should end such utter weariness.

 

Morning came with but a cold alteration of the mist from black to

gray, disclosing the snow-bound rocks silent, dreary, and dead. Juss,

enforcing his half frozen limbs to resume the ascent, beheld a sight

of woe too terrible for the eye: a young man, helmed and graithed in

dark iron, a black-a-moor with goggle-eyes and white teeth agrin, who

held by the neck a fair young lady kneeling on her knees and clasping

his as in supplication, and he most bloodily brandishing aloft his

spear of six foot of length as minded to reave her of her life. This

lady, seeing the Lord Juss, cried out on him for succour very

piteously, calling him by his name and saying, “Lord Juss of

Demonland, have mercy, and in your triumph over the powers of night

pause for an instant to deliver me, poor afflicted damosel, from this

cruel tyrant. Can your towering spirit, which hath quarried upon

kingdoms, make a stoop at him? O that should approve you noble indeed,

and bless you for ever!”

 

Surely the very heart of him groaned, and he clapped hand to sword

wishing to right so cruel a wrong. But on the motion he bethought him

of the wiles of evil that dwelt in that place, and of his brother, and

with a great groan passed on. In which instant he beheld sidelong how

the cruel murtherer smote with his spear that delicate lady, and

detrenched and cut the two master-veins of her neck, so as she fell

dying in her blood. Juss mounted with a great pace to the head of the

gully, and looking back beheld how black-amoor and lady both were

changed to two coiling serpents. And he laboured on, shaken at heart,

yet glad to have so escaped the powers that would have limed him so.

 

Darker grew the mist, and heavier the brooding dread which seemed

elemental of the airs about that mountain. Pausing well nigh exhausted

on a small stance of snow, Juss beheld the appearance of a man armed

who rolled prostrate in the way, tearing with his nails at the hard

rock and frozen snow, and the snow was all one gore of blood beneath

the man; and the man besought him in a stifled voice to go no further

but raise him up and bring him down the mountain. And when Juss, after

an instant’s doubt betwixt pity and his resolve, would have passed by,

the man cried and said, “Hold, for I am thy very brother thou seekest,

albeit the King hath by his art framed me to another likeness, hoping

so to delude thee. For thy love sake be not deluded!” Now the voice

was like to the voice of his brother Goldry, howbeit weak. But the

Lord Juss bethought him again of the words of Sophonisba the Queen,

that he should see his brother in his own shape and nought else must

he trust; and he thought, “It is an illusion, this also.” So he said,

“If that thou be truly my dear brother, take thy shape.” But the man

cried as with the voice of the Lord Goldry Bluszco, “I may not, till

that I be brought down from the mountain. Bring me down, or my curse

be upon thee for ever.”

 

The Lord Juss was torn with pity and doubt and wonder, to hear that

voice again of his dear brother so beseeching him. Yet he answered and

said, “Brother, if that it be thou indeed, then bide till I have won

to this mountain top and the citadel of brass which in a dream I saw,

that I may know truly thou art not there, but here. Then will I turn

again and succour thee. But until I see thee in thine own shape I will

mistrust all. For hither I came from the ends of the earth to deliver

thee, and I will set my good on no doubtful cast, having spent so much

and put so much in danger for thy dear sake.”

 

So with a heavy heart he set hand again to those black rocks, iced and

slippery to the touch. Therewith up rose an eldritch cry, “Rejoice,

for this earthborn is mad! Rejoice, for that was not perfect friend,

that relinquished his brother at his need!” But Juss climbed on, and

by and by looking back beheld how in that seeming man’s place writhed

a grisful serpent. And he was glad, so much as gladness might be in

that mountain of affliction and despair.

 

Now was his strength near gone, as day drew again toward night and he

climbed the last crags under the peak of Zora. And he, who had all his

days drunk deep of the fountain of the joy of life and the glory and

the wonder of being, felt ever deadlier and darker in his soul that

lonely horror which he first had tasted the day before at his first

near sight of Zora, while he flew through the cold air portent-laden;

and his whole heart grew sick because of it.

 

And now he was come to the ring of fire that was about the summit of

the mountain. He was beyond terror or the desire of life, and trod the

fire as it had been his own home’s threshold. The blue tongues of

flame died under his foot-tread, making a way before him. The brazen

gates stood wide. He entered in, he passed up the brazen stair, he

stood on that high roof-floor which he had beheld in dreams, he looked

as in a dream on him he had crossed the confines of the dead to find:

Lord Goldry Bluszco keeping his lone watch on the unhallowed heights

of Zora. Not otherwise was the Lord Goldry, not by an hairsbreadth,

than as Juss had aforetime seen him on that first night in Koshtra

Belorn, so long ago. He reclined propped on one elbow on that bench of

brass, his head erect, his eyes fixed as on distant space, viewing the

depths beyond the star-shine, as one waiting till time should have an

end.

 

He turned not at his brother’s greeting. Juss went to him and stood

beside him. The Lord Goldry Bluszco moved not an eyelid. Juss spoke

again, and touched his hand. It was stiff and like dank earth. The

cold of it struck through Juss’s body and smote him at the heart. He

said in himself, “He is dead.”

 

With that, the horror shut down upon Juss’s soul like madness.

Fearfully he stared about him. The cloud had lifted from the

mountain’s peak and hung like a pall above its nakedness. Chill air

that was like the breath of the whole world’s grave: vast blank cloud-barriers: dim far forms of snow and ice, silent, solitary, pale, like

mountains of the dead: it was as if the bottom of the world were

opened and truth laid bare: the ultimate Nothing.

 

To hold off the horror from his soul, Juss turned in memory to the

dear life of earth, those things he had most set his heart on, men and

women he loved dearest in his life’s days; battles and triumphs of his

opening manhood, high festivals in Galing, golden summer noons under

the Westmark pines, hunting morns on the high heaths of Mealand; the

day he first backed a horse, of a spring morning in a primrose glade

that opened on Moonmere, when his small brown legs were scarce the

length of his fore-arm now, and his dear father held him by the foot

as he trotted, and showed him where the squirrel had her nest in the

old oak tree.

 

He bowed his head as if to avoid a blow, so plain he seemed to hear

somewhat within him crying with a high voice and loud, “Thou art

nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams,

nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou,

were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and

sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion

comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things

shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old

and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten.

For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? and all

things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come,

and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being

and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be

nothing, for ever.”

 

And the Lord Juss cried aloud in his agony, “Fling me to Tartarus,

deliver me to the black infernal Furies, let them blind me, seethe me

in the burning lake. For so should there yet be hope. But in this

horror of Nothing is neither hope nor life nor death nor sleep nor

waking, for ever. For ever.”

 

In this black mood of horror he abode for awhile, until a sound of

weeping and wailing made him raise his head, and he beheld a company

of mourners walking one behind another about the brazen floor, all

cloaked in funeral black, mourning the death of Lord Goldry Bluszco.

And they rehearsed his glorious deeds and praised his beauty and

prowess and goodliness and strength: soft women’s voices lamenting, so

that the Lord Juss’s soul seemed as he listened to arise again out of

annihilation’s waste, and his heart grew soft again, even unto tears.

He felt a touch on his arm and looking up met the gaze of two eyes

gentle as a dove’s, suffused with tears, looking into his from under

the darkness of that hood of mourning; and a woman’s voice spake and

said, “This is the observable day of the death of the Lord Goldry

Bluszco, which hath been dead now a year; and we his fellows in

bondage do bewail him, as thou mayst see, and shall so bewail him

again year by year whiles we are on life. And for thee, great lord,

must we yet more sorrowfully lament, since of all thy great works