by John Klima
As the angel swept toward him, the great cloud of feathers swirled. The flow of warmth from the beating wings fanned the original flames, and now all the boxwoods were beginning to burn. Even the field of grain was tasseled in fire.
“You are nothing but a tiny pipkin to my Caesarian oil jar! What’s an emmet to an emperor, or a mote to a monarch?” Astariel stamped a foot as white and heavy as that of a marble Roman.
Ned’s gaze had been fixed with fascination on the opaline features and the mane of feathers that had bristled with the first sign of indignation. At last he noticed that the boxwoods were dying, their glossy leaves crumbling to the ground, every bit of stalk and twig flying away as glowing atoms.
“The world is being hacked so small,” he cried out, frightened that what he had dreamed into place would dissolve and leave him who knows where. “It will be shredded and lost.”
The nimbus of hair around the angel’s head was now incandescent wire, and the vanes of feathers showed luminous against a growing darkness. He laughed once more, and the minister wondered at such changeable moods.
“You are not what you seemed—I thought that immortal sunshine had blinked into my mind, but now fear that I—”
Astariel finished the sentence. “Have been blinded by a hoodwink jerked over your eyes? Is that it, mortal man? I made this place, not you.” As he gestured, the last of the scorched trunks of boxwoods crumbled, while what was left of the barley and millet dissolved into flecks and was blown into the sky, where it gyred like a dust devil.
“No angel ever created anything—you’ve thieved what’s mine, what I dreamed into a new pattern out of the treasure house of creation.”
The words stilled the angel’s feathers and the ash floating overhead. Emboldened, the minister struck out again.
“You’re a fallen angel, one of the accursed: you’ve given up beauty and are a demon! You’re like a gold-washed coin—inside you’re only worthless brass!”
“Careful what you say, Neddie. Haven’t I whisked by your windows and heard you at your prayers, crooked up tight in the chimney corner? I’ve heard you call yourself a lump of loathsomeness, a stall rich-hung with Satan’s knicknacks, a shattered squitchen. And am I not to be called ‘golden,’ not ‘beautiful’? You have the pertness to call me ‘worthless brass’? I call that an almighty cheek.”
The demon angel was taller than before, and his hair had lengthened and floated wildly about his head, echoing the turbulence of wings that now resembled a maelstrom of feathers. Ned looked about for assistance. The garden was crisped, the boxwoods were anthills of dust, and the whole landscape had gone strangely black, aside from a few pinpricks of stars.
“If only the true angels would hold up the blessed mirror of smaragdine that the devil fears—if only I had some weapon.” He whirled about, finding no help, no splendor bursting from a surface of polished stone.
“Perhaps,” Astariel mused, “you are looking for love-knots to pelt at me, or for that unfortunate shade of brilliant green that so annoyed me in the boxwoods. It’s true that we demons are irritated by love-knots. Don’t like love, for that matter. Nor the color you call smaragdine, and especially the gem. That’s why I had to harvest the shrubbery, you see. It was a mistake, letting you think up that garden—I could’ve lured you into meditation on the third-best parlor of Hell, cozy and snug. I don’t mind telling you, Neddie, because you like to study things, don’t you? And this is almost the last you will learn. Because now I’m afraid that I will have to whisk you off to my nest, where I shall strip the living flesh from your bones and savor, sip by sip, the refined taste of your soul.”
Wordless, the minister poet stared, his visions of the marvelous world to come dwindling fast. He felt light-headed, as though he might be about to dissolve into specks, as the love-knots of boxwood had done.
The demon stirred the ashes with his big toe. “I’m afraid there will be nothing at all left of you for Paradise.”
Ned stepped backward. Sweat had soaked his skin, and his eyes stung from the smoke. He forgot how to pray.
“Scurry, my little man.” The voice was pleasant and light. “You won’t get far, but you can scuttle like a mouse until I snatch you by the neck.”
And so Neddie ran, his legs churning across the burned-over ground. It was hard to see. At home, he never budged from his door once lamps were lit, not unless he was fetched by a man with a lantern to attend a deathbed. The village was plunged into a sack of darkness, and only the blaze of stars and an occasional glimmer at a window were to be seen. Fearsome creatures and painted men roamed the wilderness at night; they all knew it. He longed to be fast in bed, the shucks rustling as he turned to embrace his wife. She was pregnant again, her belly as round and firm as an unripe fruit. What would she do without him? He remembered his little son, tossing a ball painted green and blue in the garden and crying when the toy was lost—vanished, perhaps seized by the sky. The surface of the ground sucked at his feet, as though smeared with honey and molasses: a snare to trap him. His mind likewise slipped and couldn’t hold a thought—he feared that the demon was exerting its powers, no doubt expecting him to conjure a picture of home.
Casting a rearward glance, he saw the fallen angel beginning to rouse. There was a fabulous, sleepy slowness and power about his thighs that struck Ned as utterly inhuman. Flashes of fire disclosed a nightjar reeling about his head. The wings seemed monstrous tangles of feathered serpents.
“Watch out, Neddie!” The warning might have been in the voice of a townsman, calling out as the minister stepped too close to the river by the water meadows.
“Ah!” He threw himself to the brink. For land had abruptly ended, plunging into the gulf of space. He closed his eyes against its relentless black, concentrating on green images—his mind roving from the mirror of the angels to love-knots and back again. But when he opened his eyes, no shining smaragdine glass or knot of ribbons had appeared. But there was something he hadn’t seen before.
Far off, a blue and green ball hung like an earring against the cheek of night. It blurred, dissolved into his tears. Who would have thought that a simple meditation could have carried him so far from Earth? The demon had snatched his dream and set it here. He had been distant in other meditations—he had wandered through the shattered temple at Jerusalem, had seen bulls dragging a cart loaded with the horned creature called rhinoceros toward the even more monstrous hills of Rome, had hidden from lions in an artificial forest erected in the Coliseum—but never had he thought to soar to such an unearthly height as this. Again he recalled the boy with hands up and ball spinning against a backdrop of dark trees.
“My sweet child,” he whispered.
He couldn’t stop staring at the faraway planet, and his tears were mixed with a piercing recognition of the beauty of creation. The poet in him knelt before the altar of space and time, on which lay the round wafer of the world. A fuse of joy ignited and sparkled in his heart, as if to explode him to atoms.
The demon’s feet shook the expanse of destroyed garden and scattered the ashes. The minister did not look but stared on and on at the precious sphere of Earth until he felt the warmth of breath at his nape.
Springing up, he flung out his arm.
“Behold the globe,” he cried. “Behold the shining toy of angels! Behold the hand-mirror of sea and lake and flood—the footstool of God! Behold the smaragdine pebble brightening the nest of night!”
Astariel emitted a thunderclap of anger, his cumulus of feathers darkening and curling close to his body.
“Behold,” the minister shouted, extending his palm so that the earth appeared to be a marble barely floating above his hand, “behold the philosopher’s stone and alchemy of wonders that transforms all things of brass to gold! Behold the one true love-knot of the world, tied with ribbons of smaragdine!”
With a lightning cry of rage that made the jots of air quiver, the damned angel toppled from the edge and spiraled into the dark.
The un
fortunate Ned was left perched on a plot of soil hijacked by a demon, and in only a few moments it began to crumble and sift into the sheer fall of space, so that soon he was pinwheeling downward, the little marble of a planet seeming to swell and move swiftly toward him—until with an immense thud, he landed on his backside on the hearthrug, now smoldering with sparks from a fire that was roaring up the chimney.
“And that’s the gist of it,” Great-uncle Samuel pronounced, once more quarrying in his pipe with Aunt Bideth’s missing pickle fork. “I might’ve changed a bit, where I couldn’t remember.”
“That’s—”
“Astonishing,” Sam suggested.
“Ye-es, it certainly is that,” I said.
“Neddie mourned that he had nothing but a titmouse’s quill for a pen. I suppose he wanted an eagle or an angel’s feather. But he didn’t write too badly with it. Used the universe for his ink-stand.” My uncle jammed the stem between his teeth and began the interminable stagy business of an old man lighting a pipe.
“Want help with that match?”
He ignored me. “Old Neddie was a lively sort of fellow. Lots of flourish. Not to mention a formidable pack of offspring.”
“Good thing for us,” I said.
“He thought that souls were sin’s bowling ground—seems about right.” The ice cubes clinked as Sam held out his glass for more.
“You don’t believe the rest of it, though.”
“Maybe I do. What would we call his ramblings—astral projection, time travel? I’ve never had a whit of trouble believing in outlandish things. Maybe that’s why I had a certain amount of difficulty believing in myself, once upon a time. I wasn’t strange enough by half. Yet when I was a boy, I was asked to believe in marvels on an almost daily basis. As I’ve grown older, the world has dwindled and grown mundane. What the average child is asked to believe these days is far too dull and small.” Great-uncle Sam inspected his pipe. “But in my extreme old age, I find that I’m growing quite, quite fabulous. I might as well be from another world. Soon I’ll be as weird as a dodo, and after that I plan to go extinct. The rest of you descendants of Neddie will be left with Chauncy for your entertainment.” The way he snorted indicated that this was a sorry lookout for us all.
It wasn’t like Sam to talk about going extinct. He might have been a whiskery geezer of ninety-three, but he was a whiskery geezer with plenty of vim. I wondered if the loss of The Smaragdine Knot was a weightier blow than I had reckoned.
“I’m going to scour this house for the book and be the one to find it.” I thumped the bottle down.
“Good for you,” he said, “but you’ll have to have dealings with that shriveled infant, Chauncy.”
He tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth.
“Tell you what. I’ll make you the next G. H. K. of the Knot if you find it before anyone else. I was considering Saffin, but a younger person would be better, somebody with at least a good seventy years ahead. We’re a long-lived bunch, and getting longer all the time.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or not. Seventy seemed a considerable swath of years. “Grand High Keeper is a big job,” I said.
“Of course it is. Changes the keeper to suit itself. What else could appointment as steward of The Smaragdine Knot do? You hold the globe in the palm of your hand. The world in a nutshell bed, as Neddie would say. The mirror of angels, the love-knot of God.”
I scrutinized him, but I couldn’t tell—was he dead serious or pulling my leg? He puffed steadily on his pipe, obscuring the air between us.
“Thanks.”
“No problem, young Simon. It’ll be good for you to have the responsibility. Simon the Keeper-to-be. Nice ring to it, don’t you think? So now, since you’ve got some serious questing about to do, why don’t you just leave your ancient relic of an uncle to his dodo-bird meditations?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll get started.” But I just sat staring at him, wondering what he’d just done to me—and what exactly he’d meant by his “meditations.” Nothing came to mind except the uninvited image of a boy tossing a green and blue ball in a snowy garden, against a background of dark trees.
When Sam cracked open an eyelid, I glimpsed an arc of pale green iris. “Simon, Grand High Keeper of The Smaragdine Knot,” he said slowly, as if savoring the syllables. “Be sure to start with that fool Chauncy.”
* * *
I•N•S•O•U•C•I•A•N•T
in·sou·ci·ant in-'sü-sē-ent, an-süs-yän
adjective
: lighthearted, nonchalant
* * *
A Portrait in Ivory
AN ELRIC STORY BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK
I
An Encounter with a Lady
ELRIC, WHO HAD SLEPT WELL and revived himself with fresh-brewed herbs, was in improved humour as he mixed honey and water into his cup of green breakfast wine. Typically, his night had been filled with distressing dreams, but any observer would see only a tall, insouciant “silverskin” with high cheekbones, slightly sloping eyes and tapering ears, revealing nothing of his inner thoughts.
He had found a quiet hostelry away from the noisy centre of Séred-Öma, this city of tall palms. Here, merchants from all over the Young Kingdoms gathered to trade their goods in return for the region’s most valuable produce. This was not the dates or livestock on which Séred-Öma’s original wealth had been founded, but the extraordinary creations of artists famed everywhere in the lands bordering the Sighing Desert. Their carvings, especially of animals and human portraits, were coveted by kings and princes. It was the reputation of these works of art which brought the crimson-eyed albino out of his way to see them for himself. Even in Melniboné, where barbarian art for the most part was regarded with distaste, the sculptors of Séred-Öma had been admired.
Though Elric had left the scabbarded runesword and black armour of his new calling in his chamber and wore the simple chequered clothing of a regional traveller, his fellow guests tended to keep a certain distance from him. Those who had heard little of Melniboné’s fall had celebrated the Bright Empire’s destruction with great glee until the implications of that sudden defeat were understood. Certainly, Melniboné no longer controlled the world’s trade and could no longer demand ransom from the Young Kingdoms, but the world was these days in confusion as upstart nations vied to seize the power for themselves. And meanwhile, Melnibonéan mercenaries found employment in the armies of rival countries. Without being certain of his identity, they could tell at once that Elric was one of those misplaced unhuman warriors, infamous for their cold good manners and edgy pride.
Rather than find themselves in a quarrel with him, the customers of The Rolling Pig kept their distance. The haughty albino too seemed indisposed to open a conversation. Instead, he sat at his corner table staring into his morning wine, brooding on what could not be forgotten. His history was written on handsome features which would have been youthful were it not for his thoughts. He reflected on an unsettled past and an uneasy future. Even had someone dared approach him, however sympathetically, to ask what concerned him, he would have answered lightly and coldly, for, save in his nightmares, he refused to confront most of those concerns. Thus, he did not look up when a woman, wearing the conical russet hat and dark veil of her caste, approached him through the crowd of busy dealers.
“Sir?” Her voice was a dying melody. “Master Melnibonéan, could you tolerate my presence at your table?” Falling rose petals, sweet and brittle from the sun.
“Lady,” said Elric, in the courteous tone his people reserved for their own highborn kin, “I am at my breakfast. But I will gladly order more wine…”
“Thank you, sir. I did not come here to share your hospitality. I came to ask a favour.” Behind the veil her eyes were grey-green. Her skin had the golden bloom of the Na’äne, who had once ruled here and were said to be a race as ancient as Elric’s own. “A favour you have every reason to refuse.”
The albino was almost a
mused, perhaps because, as he looked into her eyes, he detected beauty behind the veil, an unexpected intelligence he had not encountered since he had left Immryr’s burning ruins behind him. How he had longed to hear the swift wit of his own people, the eloquent argument, the careless insults. All that and more had been denied him for too long. To himself he had become sluggish, almost as dull as the conniving princelings and self-important merchants to whom he sold his sword. Now, there was something in the music of her speech, something in the lilt of irony colouring each phrase she uttered, that spoke to his own sleeping intellect. “You know me too well, lady. Clearly, my fate is in your hands, for you’re able to anticipate my every attitude and response. I have good reason not to grant you a favour, yet you still come to ask one, so either you are prescient or I am already your servant.”
“I would serve you, sir,” she said gently. Her half-hidden lips curved in a narrow smile. She shrugged. “And, in so doing, serve myself.”
“I thought my curiosity atrophied,” he answered. “My imagination a petrified knot. Here you pick at threads to bring it back to life. This loosening is unlikely to be pleasant. Should I fear you?” He lifted a dented pewter cup to his lips and tasted the remains of his wine. “You are a witch, perhaps? Do you seek to revive the dead? I am not sure….”
“I am not sure, either,” she told him. “Will you trust me enough to come with me to my house?”
“I regret, madam, I am only lately bereaved—”
“I’m no sensation-seeker, sir, but an honest woman with an honest ambition. I do not tempt you with the pleasures of the flesh, but of the soul. Something which might engage you for a while, even ease your mind a little. I can more readily convince you of this if you come to my house. I live there alone, save for servants. You may bring your sword, if you wish. Indeed, if you have fellows, bring them also. Thus I offer you every advantage.”
The albino rose slowly from his bench and placed the empty cup carefully on the well-worn wood. His own smile reflected hers. He bowed. “Lead on, madam.” And he followed her through a crowd which parted like corn before the reaper, leaving a momentary silence behind him.