The Skrayling Tree

by Michael Moorcock

  “I am an optimist.”

  “We have that in common.” He spoke without irony. He sat back against a post and stared around him at the flowers which flooded the entire courtyard. These blossoms vied with the bright colors worn by the customers, none of whom paid us much attention. I knew the people of Las Cascadas thought it ill mannered to show excessive attention to strangers.

  On my first visit to Las Cascadas I had had status. The Rose and I were lovers then. On my second visit I had been a captive and something of her dupe. My ultimate turning of the tables had not made her any less aggrieved. But it was unlikely she had left any instructions about my fate, since she would hardly expect me to visit her stronghold again.

  The friar confirmed that she was away until spring. She had sailed south again, he said. She always returned with exotic spices and jewels, and the occasional string of exquisite slaves. Ap Kwelch had gone with her. “That twin-prowed ship can sail faster and further than anything afloat,” said Tristelunne. “She can sail to China and back in a single season. While we winter against the Atlantic, she’s enjoying the sunshine and spoils of the Indies!”

  “I thought Gunnar had taken The Swan there?”

  “They both went in The Swan. She returned in The Either/Or after some dispute between them.” He stopped suddenly and looked up. I knew Gunnar had come into the courtyard. The friar began to laugh, as if at his own joke. “And then the other dog said, ‘No I only came in to get my claws trimmed.’ ”

  Gunnar’s hand fell on my shoulder. “We still have business to discuss,” he said. “You, Sir Priest, have no business with me, I understand.”

  Pulling his worn cassock about him Friar Tristelunne got up. “I will never be desperate enough, sir, to seek the devil’s employment.”

  “Then I was right,” said Gunnar. “Is there no service in here?” He went inside. The friar seemed completely amused. He shrugged, winked at me, told me that our paths were bound to cross again and slipped out of the gate as Gunnar came back holding a boy by his ear. “All the girls are elsewhere, is it?”

  “It is, sir,” said the boy, dropped back to the paving of the yard. “I’m all that is left.”

  Gunnar cursed the urgency of his own men’s drives and bellowed at the boy to bring ale. I told the lad to bring one more shant, tossed him a coin and got up. Gunnar’s glittering mask looked at me in evident astonishment.

  “You have the advantage of me, sir, and I cannot judge you for that,” I said, “but it’s clear you’ve no experience of partnership. I do not wish to hire your ship. I think you have some misunderstanding about me. You already told me that you know my blood and position. While I expect little from these kulaks and other rabble, I expect far more from one who claims to know my rank.”

  A sardonic bow. “Well, I apologize if that suits you. A breath of air and all is settled between us.”

  “Actions impress me more than words.” I made to leave. I was, of course, playing a game, but I was playing it by following my own natural inclinations.

  Gunnar, too, knew what was going on. He began to laugh. “Very well, Sir Silverskin. Let’s talk as equals. It’s true I’m used to bullying my way through this world, but you see the kind of company I’m forced to keep these days. I, too, was a Prince of the Balance. Now you find me a wretched corsair, clutching at legends for booty when once I crushed famous cities.”

  I sat down again. “While I am certain you have no intention of telling me your whole story, I suggest you let me know when you intend to sail for Vinland. Only the god-touched would venture into those seas in winter.”

  “Or the damned. Sir Silverskin, the course I propose to sail is directly through the realms of Hel. The entrance is on the other side of Greenland. Through the Underworld, through the moving rocks and the sucking whirlpools, through the monstrous darkness, to a land of eternal summer where riches are for the taking. The land is lush, growing wild what we cultivate with the sweat of our brows. And for wealth, there is legendary gold. A great ziggurat made entirely of gold and mysteriously abandoned by her people. So since we venture into the supernatural world, I suspect it makes little difference whether the season be summer or winter. We sail to Nifelheim itself.”

  “You sail to the north and the west,” I told him. “I have useful experience and something you value.”

  He sucked thoughtfully through one of his straws. “And what would you gain from this voyage?”

  “I seek a certain famous immortal smith. A Norseman maybe.”

  The noise from within the helm might have been laughter. “Is his name Volund? For Volund and his brothers guard that city called Illa Paglia della Oro by the Venetians. It stands in the center of a lake at the place where the edge of the world meets Polaris. That is where I am bound.”

  Gunnar was not telling me the whole truth. He wanted me to think a city of gold his goal. I guessed he sought something else at the World’s Rim. Something he could destroy.

  For the moment, however, I was content. The Swan was going where I wished to go. Whether the realm of Hel was supernatural or natural scarcely mattered if we sailed the North Sea in December or January. “You trust your boat completely,” I observed.

  “I have to,” he said. “Our fates are intertwined now. The ship will survive as long as I survive. I have magic, as I promised, and not the mere alchemical nonsense you hear in Nürnberg. I follow a vision.”

  “I suspect I do, also,” I said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Mouth of Hel

  Norn-curs’d Norsemen, nature-driven to explore Earth’s End,

  Followed their weird to Fimbulwinter’s icey land.

  Longswords lay unblooded in lifeless hands

  When warriors went the way of Gaynor, call’d the Damn’d.

  LONGFELLOW,

  “Lord of the Lost”

  When we left port a few days later, the seas were still calm. Gunnar hoped to make headway through a good autumn. We might even reach Greenland before the ice settled in.

  I asked him if, beyond Nifelheim, he did not expect to find empires and soldiers as powerful as any in this sphere. He looked at me as if I were mad. “I’ve heard the story from a dozen sources. It’s virgin land, free for the taking. The only defenders are wretched savages whose ancestors built the city before they offended the gods. It’s all written down.”

  I was amused. “So that makes it true?”

  We were in his tiny deckhouse. Stooping, he opened a small chest and took out a parchment. “If not, we’ll make it true!” The parchment was written in Latin, but there was runic scattered through the text. I glanced over it. The account of some Irish monk who had been the secretary of a Danish king, it told the story, in bare details, of a certain Eric the White. He had gone with five ships to Vinland and there established a colony, building a fortified town against those whom they called variously skredlinj, skraelings or skrayling. This was the Viking name for the local people. As far as I could tell it meant ‘whiner’ or ‘moaner’, and the Vikings considered them wretches and outlaws.

  On this evidence Gunnar was prepared to sail through Nifelheim. I had heard similar stories from every Norseman I had known. Moorish philosophers proposed that the world was the shape of an elongated egg with the barbarian, godless races somehow clinging to the underside in perpetual darkness. In all such matters, as one is taught to do in the Dream of a Thousand Years, I remained silent. This was a dream I could not afford to have truncated. This was the last possible dream I could occupy before Jagreen Lern destroyed our fleet and then destroyed Moonglum and myself.

  “So we will have only a land full of savages to conquer,” I said sardonically. “And, say, thirty of us?”

  “Exactly,” said Gunnar. “With your sword and mine, it will take us a couple of months at most.”

  “Your sword?”

  “You have Ravenbrand”—the faceless man tapped the swaddled blade at his side—“and I have Angurvadel.”

  He pulled away som
e of the covering to reveal a red-gold hilt hammered with the most intricate designs. “You’ll take my word that the blade has runes embedded in it which flame red in war and that if it be drawn it must be blooded…”

  I was, of course, curious. Did Gunnar carry a fauxglaive? Or did his sword have genuine magic? Was Angurvadel just another cursed sword of which the Norse folktales abounded? I had heard the name, of course, but it was an archetype I sought. Even if it were not false, Angurvadel was only one of the black sword’s many brothers.

  As Gunnar had hoped, the sailing was fair into the Atlantic. We stopped to take in provisions at a British settlement far from the protection of Norman law. There were only a few villagers left alive after Gunnar’s men had finished their slaughter. These were forced to help kill their own animals and haul their own grain to our ship before they were in turn disposed of. Gunnar had an old-fashioned efficiency and attention to detail in his work. Like mine, his own sword was not drawn during this time.

  We sailed on, knowing it would be some while before anyone considered pursuing us. Gunnar had a lodestone compass and various other Moorish instruments, which was probably what his men considered his magic. This made it far easier to risk quicker routes. As it happens, the sea was extraordinarily calm and the pale blue skies almost cloudless. Gunnar’s men ascribed the weather to a damned man’s luck. Gunnar himself had the air of a man thoroughly satisfied with his own good judgment.

  During the few hours we had, I talked to some of the crew. They were friendly enough in a generally uncouth manner. Few of these reavers had much in the way of imagination, which was perhaps why they were prepared to follow Gunnar’s standard.

  One of the Ashanti, whom we called Asolingas, was by now wrapped in thick wool. He spoke good Moorish and told me how he and ten others had been captured after a battle and taken down the coast to be sold. Bought to row a Syrian trader, they had overwhelmed the rest of the ship within an hour of being at sea and, with the few other slaves who had joined them, managed to get themselves to Las Cascadas where, he said, they had been cheated out of the boat. The others had all been killed in later raiding expeditions.

  Asolingas said he was homesick for Africa. Since his soul had already died and returned there, he supposed it would not be long before he followed it. He knew he would be killed sometime after we made our final landfall.

  “Then why do you go?” I asked.

  “Because I believe that my soul awaits me on the other side,” he said.

  A sigh came from starboard as the wind rose. I heard a gull. It would not be long before we made landfall.

  In Greenland the colonists were so poor that the best we could get for ourselves was their water, a little sour beer and a weary goat that seemed glad to be slaughtered. Greenland settlements were notoriously impoverished, the settlers inbred and insular, forever at odds with the native tribes over their small resources. I said to Gunnar how I hoped that the entrance into Nifelheim was close. We had provisions for two weeks at most. He reassured me. “Where we’re going, there won’t be time for eating and drinking.”

  When we put out from Greenland, heading west, the weather was already growling. A sea which had been slightly more than choppy began sending massive waves against the bleak beaches. We had considerable trouble getting into open water. We left behind perhaps the last European colony, struggling no more in that harsh world. Gunnar often joked that he was God’s kindest angel. “Do you know what they call this blade in Lombardy? Saint Michael’s Justice.” He began telling me a story which rambled off into nothing. He seemed to absorb himself psychically in the mountainous waves. There was a massive, slow repetition to the sea, even as it howled and thrashed and tossed us a hundred feet into the air, even as the wind and rain whistled in the rigging, and we dived another hundred feet into a white-tipped, swirling valley of water.

  I grew used to the larger rhythm to which the ship moved. I sensed the security and strength which lay beneath all that unruly ocean. Now I knew what Gunnar and his men knew, why the ship was thought to be a magic one. She slipped through all that weather like a barracuda, virtually oblivious and scarcely touched by it. She was so beautifully constructed that she never held water between waves and almost always rose up as another wave came down. The exhilaration of sailing on such an astonishingly well-made vessel, trusting her more than one trusted oneself, was something I had never experienced before. The nearest experience I knew was flying on a Phoorn dragon. I began to understand Gunnar’s reckless confidence. As I stood wrapped in my blue sea-cloak and stared into the face of the gale, I looked at the ship’s figurehead in a new light. Was this some memory of flight?

  Gunnar began swinging his way along the running ropes, a great bellow of glee issuing from within his faceless helm. Clearly he was almost drunk on the experience. His head flung back, his laughter did not stop. At length he turned to me and gripped my arm. “By God, Prince Elric, we are going to be heroes, you and I.”

  Any pleasure I had felt up to that moment immediately dissipated. I could think of nothing worse than being remembered for my association with Gunnar the Doomed.

  The Viking moved his head, like a scenting beast. “She is there,” he said. “I know she is there. And you and I will find her. But only one of us will keep her. Whoever it is shall be the final martyr.”

  His hand fell on my back. Then he returned to the stern and his tiller.

  I was, for a moment, reminded of my mother’s death, of my father’s hatred. I recalled my cousin’s bloody end, weeping as the soul was sucked from her. Who was “she”? Who did he mean?

  The waves crashed down again, and up we rose on the next, constantly moving ahead of the turbulence so that sometimes it really did seem we flew over the water. The ship’s half-reefed sail would catch the wind and act like a wing, allowing Gunnar to touch the tiller this way and that rapidly, and swing her with the water. I have never seen a captain before or since who could handle his ship with his fingertips, who could issue a command and have it instantly followed in any weather. Gunnar boasted that however many he lost on land, he almost never lost a man at sea.

  Foam drenched the decks, settled on the shoulders and thighs of the oarsmen. Foam flecked the troubled air. Black, red, brown and yellow backs bent and straightened like so many identical cogs, water and sweat pouring over them. Above, the sky was torn with wet, ragged clouds, boiling and black. I shivered in my cloak. I longed to be able to call Mishashaaa or any of the other elementals, to calm this storm by magic means. But I was already using my magic to inhabit this dream! The power of Ravenbrand was potent only in battle. To attempt anything else might result in uncontrollable consequences.

  All day and all night we plunged on through the wild Atlantic waters. We used oars, tiller and sails to answer every change of the wind and, with the help of Gunnar’s Moorish lodestone, now ran like an arrow due north until Gunnar called me into his deckhouse and showed me the instrument. “There’s sorcery here,” he insisted. “Some bastard’s bewitched the thing!”

  The stone was spinning in its glass, completely erratic.

  “There’s no other explanation,” Gunnar said. “The place has a protector. Some Lord of the Higher Worlds…”

  A howl came from the deck, and we both burst out of the deerskin deckhouse to see Leif the Larger, his face a frozen mask, staring at a vast head erupting from the wild water, glaring with apparent malevolence at our vulnerable little ship. It was human, and it filled the horizon. Gunnar grasped the Norseman by the shoulder and slapped him viciously. “Fool! It’s a score of miles away. It’s stone! It’s on the shore!” But at the same time Gunnar was lifting his head to look upward… and then upward again. There was no question that what we saw was a gigantic face, the eyes staring sightlessly down from under the cloud which covered its forehead. We were too small for it to see. We were specks of dust in comparison. What Gunnar had noted was true. The thing did not seem to be alive. Presumably, therefore, we had nothing to fear from
it. It was not a sentient human or god, rather an extraordinarily detailed sculpture in textured and delicately colored granite.

  Leif the Larger drew in a breath and mumbled something into his golden beard. Then he went to the side and threw up. The ship was still tossing about in the ocean, was still on top of the waves. She continued the course we had set before our lodestar was enchanted. A course which took us directly towards that gigantic head.

  When I pointed this out to Gunnar he shrugged. “Perhaps it’s your giant who lives at the North Pole? We must trust the fates,” he said. “You must have faith, Elric, to tread your path, to follow your myth.”

  And then, in an instant, the head opened its vast, black mouth and the sea poured down into it, taking us relentlessly towards a horizon which was dark, glistening and thoroughly organic.

  Gunnar roared his frustration and his despair. He made every effort to turn the ship. His men back-rowed heroically. But we were being drawn down into that fleshy pit.

  Gunnar shook his fist against the fates. He seemed more affronted than terrified. “Damn you!” Then he began laughing. “Can’t you see what’s happening to us, Elric? We’re being swallowed!”

  It was true. We might have been the contents of a cup of water with which some monstrous ogre refreshed himself. I found that I, too, was laughing. The situation seemed irredeemably comical to me. And yet there was every chance I was about to perish. If I did so, I would perish in both realities.

  All at once we were totally engulfed. The boat banged and buffeted, as if against the banks of a river. From somewhere amidships rose the sound of a deep, chanting song, its melody older than the world. Asolingas, the Ashanti, clearly believed his own particular moment had come.

  Then he, too, fell silent.

  I gasped and coughed at the foulness of the air. It was as if a street cur had breathed in my face. A whole series of fables I had heard about men being swallowed by gigantic fish came to mind. I could not recall a story about a ship being swallowed by a giant. Or was it a giant? Had we simply let ourselves see a configuration of rocks and made it into a face? Or was this some ancient sea-monster, large enough to swallow ships and drink seas?