The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino

by Michael Moorcock

  Reluctantly I joined him and together we took another five or six men before they retreated into the tower and began shooting at us from a safer distance. The narrow passage made it impossible for them to see us or hit us and their ammunition was wasted.

  Elric told us to keep the storm troopers diverted. He limped to the edge of the battlements and looked up into a night sky which boiled with dark cloud stained by an orange moon. He lifted the sword. It began to blaze again with black fire. Elric, in his ruined armor and torn silks, burned with the same flame as he lifted his skull-white face to the turbulent heavens and began the singing of a rune so ancient its words were the voice of the elements, the wind and the earth.

  A few more shots from the tower. A cautious storm trooper emerged. I killed him.

  Dark shapes roamed the sky now. Sinuous shapes slithered their way amongst the clouds.

  Elric had drawn strength from his victims. He stood silhouetted against the battlements, sword in hand, screaming at the sky.

  And the sky screamed back at him.

  Like sudden thunder, there was a bang, and the sky began to bubble and crack. Forms emerged from the distance. Monstrous flying creatures. Reptiles with long, curling tails and necks, slender snouts and wide, leathery wings. I recognized them from my nightmares. The dragons of Melniboné, brought to my own realm by Elric’s powerful sorcery. I knew Gaynor had hoped to recruit these dragons to his cause. I knew he had almost defeated Elric in the ruins of Imrryr. I knew he had found the hidden caves and sought to wake Elric’s dragon kin. He had been successful. But he had not understood that the dragons would refuse to serve him. Blood for blood; brother for brother. They served only the royal blood of Melniboné. And that blood, by a trick of history, Oona and I shared with her father.

  Two huge beasts circled the tower in the orange moonlight. Young Phoorn dragons, still with the black and white rings around their snouts and tails, still with feathery tips to their wings, they had not grown to the size of their elders, whose life spans were almost infinite, as dragons spent most of their time asleep.

  Elric was weakened by his incantation, but his spirits were rising. “I prepared for this. But I had also expected to have the Grail with me when I summoned my brothers.” Melnibonéans claimed direct kinship with the Phoorn dragons. In another age they had shared the same names, the same quarters, the same power. In ancient history, it was said dragons had ruled Melniboné as kings. Whatever the truth, Elric and his kind could drink dragon venom, which killed most other creatures. The venom was so powerful that it ignited in the air as soon as it spewed from the dragons’ mouths. I knew all this, because Elric knew it.

  I knew the language of the dragons. We greeted them affectionately as they landed their huge bodies delicately on the tower. They were steaming and shaking with the turbulence of their journey through the multiverse. They opened their huge red mouths, gasping in the thin air of this world. Their vast eyes turned to regard us. Expectant, benign, their monstrous claws gripped the stone battlements as they balanced there. The patterns of their scales, subtle and rich purples and scarlets, golds and dark greens, glistened in the moonlight. They were very similar in appearance, one distinguished by a blaze of white above its nose, the other with a blaze of black. Their great white teeth clashed when they closed their mouths, and on the edges of their lips, their venom constantly boiled. These were the beasts of the Siegfried legend, but far more intelligent and considerably more numerous. The Melnibonéans had made many studies of dragons, detailing all the various kinds, from the snub-snouted Erkanian, nicknamed the batwing, to these long-nosed hibernating Phoorn, whose relationship with us was oddly telepathic.

  Holding his side, Elric approached the nearest dragon, speaking to her softly. Both dragons were already saddled with the pulsing Phoorn skeffla’a, a kind of membrane which bonded with the dragon above its shoulder blades, giving it the ability to travel between the realms. The skeffla’a was one of the strangest productions of Melnibonéan alchemical husbandry and one of the oldest.

  Their names were simple, like most names given to them by men—Blacksnout and Whitesnout. Their names for themselves were long, complicated and utterly unpronounceable, detailing ancestry and where they had journeyed.

  Elric turned to me. “The dragons will take us to Gaynor. You know how to ride?”

  I knew. As I now knew most things connected with my doppelgänger.

  “He’s still in this world. Or at least certain aspects of him are. He could have exhausted himself and no longer have the power to travel the moonbeam roads. Whatever the reasons, the dragons can take us to him.”

  “To Morn,” said Oona. “It must be Morn. Does he still have the Grail?”

  “It’s not something we’ll know until we catch up with him . . .” Elric’s voice trailed away as he was overcome with pain. Yet he seemed slightly stronger than a few minutes earlier. I asked him how badly he had been shot and he looked at me in surprise. “Klosterheim shot to kill. And I am not dead.”

  “I should also have died from Klosterheim’s gun,” I told him. “The wounds were very evident. I lost an enormous amount of blood. But the wound has now almost vanished!”

  “The Grail,” said Elric. “We’ve been exposed to the Grail and haven’t known it. So it is either on Gaynor’s person or hidden somewhere back there.”

  Hess’s face emerged from the doorway. He ordered his men to stop shooting. His face bore an expression of sincerity, of urgency.

  “I must talk to you,” he said. “I must know what all this means. What kind of heroes are you? The heroes of Alfheim? Have we conjured our ancient legendary Teutonic world back in all its might and glory? Thor? Odin? Are you—?”

  The dragons had impressed him.

  “I regret, Your Excellency,” I said, “that these are dragons of oriental origin. They are Levantine dragons. From the wrong side of the Mediterranean.”

  His eyes widened. “Impossible.”

  Oona helped Elric adjust his skeffla’a on Blacksnout’s back. She climbed up behind him, signaling to me to take the other dragon, Whitesnout.

  “Let me come with you!” Hess was pleadingly eager. “The Grail—I am not your enemy.”

  “Farewell, Your Excellency!” Elric sheathed Stormbringer and wrapped his hands around the dragon’s reins. He seemed to regain his strength with every passing moment.

  I climbed into the dragon saddle with all the familiarity of one born to the royal line. I was full of a wild, unhuman glee. Alien. Faery. Though I would have scoffed at such an idea a short while earlier, now I accepted everything. There is no greater joy than riding through the night on the back of a dragon.

  The massive wings began to beat. Hess was driven back, as if by a hurricane. I saw him mouthing something, pleading with me. I almost felt sympathetic to him. Of all the Nazis, he seemed the least disgusting. Then I saw Göring and the storm troopers burst out onto the roof. The air was once again alive with popping bullets. They were no danger to us. We could have destroyed the tower and all within it by releasing a few drops of venom, but it did not occur to us. We were convinced Gaynor had the Grail and if we could catch him in time it would soon be ours.

  The exhilaration of the flight was extraordinary! Elric led the way through the air on Blacksnout’s back, while Whitesnout followed. I had no need to control my dragon, though I knew intuitively how to do so.

  Every anxiety was left behind me on the ground as the mighty wings beat against the clouds, bearing us higher and higher, farther and farther west. Where? To Ireland? Surely not to England?

  England was my country’s enemy. What if I were captured, still in the vestiges of my SS uniform? It would be impossible to convince them of my true reasons for being there!

  I had no choice. Blacksnout, with Elric and Oona, flew with long, slow movements of her wings, gliding above the clouds ahead of me, sometimes casting a faint shadow. She flew steadily and Whitesnout, her junior by a year or two, let her lead. As the light g
rew stronger, the markings of the dragon’s wings were clearer. They were like gigantic butterflies, with distinct patterns of red, black, orange and glowing viridian, far different from the green and yellow reptiles of picture books. The Phoorn dragons were creatures of extraordinary grace and beauty with a sense about them that they were wiser than men.

  Whenever the clouds parted, I could see the patterned fields and nestling towns of rural Germany. They had known little of direct strife for more than a century and were secure in Hitler’s assurances that no foreign bombers would be allowed to enter German airspace.

  I wondered if Hitler would be able to keep his promises. My guess was that he would begin relying on magic as political and military means failed him. He seemed like a man riding a tiger, terrified of where it was taking him yet unable to jump clear because of the momentum at which he was moving.

  Or a man riding a dragon? Did I think Hitler helplessly caught up in events because I myself was carried along by monumental realities?

  Such speculation soon left my head as I relished the beauty of the skies. The smell of clear air. I was so enraptured that I hardly heard the first droning behind me. I looked back and down. I saw a carpet of airplanes, so thick, so close together, that they seemed at first to be one huge bird. The droning was the steady sound of their engines. They were moving a little faster than we were, but in exactly the same direction.

  I could not see how any country, especially depleted, weary Britain, could stand against such a vast aerial armada. Nothing like it had been assembled in the world’s history. The only equivalent sea force had been the Spanish fleet, massed to attack England during Elizabeth’s reign. England had been saved that time by a trick of the weather. She could expect no such good fortune now.

  I had seen whole civilizations destroyed since this adventure had begun. I knew that the impossible was all too possible, that peoples and architecture could disappear from the face of the earth as if they had never existed.

  Was I, by some ghastly coincidence, about to see the last of England, the fall of the British Empire?

  What I had so far seen was a squadron of Junkers 87s—the famous Stuka dive-bomber, which the Luftwaffe had traditionally used in their first attacks on other countries. But as we flew on, obscured by the cloud separating us from the air fleets below, I saw waves of Messerschmitt fighters, squadrons of Junkers and Heinkels, relentlessly moving towards an already battered Britain that could not possibly produce the numbers or quality of aircraft to combat such an invasion.

  Was this why Gaynor was leading us to the west? So that we might witness the beginning of the end? The final battle whose winning would ensure the rule of the Lords of the Higher Worlds on earth? And would those same lords remain at peace? Or would they immediately begin to fall upon one another?

  Were we on our way to Ragnarok?

  The planes passed. A strange silence filled the sky.

  As if the whole world were waiting.

  And waiting.

  In the distance we began to hear the steady, mechanical thunder of guns and bombs, the shriek of fighters and tracer bullets. Away to our east, we saw oily smoke rising from erupting orange flame, saw flares and exploding shells. Blacksnout banked in a long graceful turn into the morning sun and soon the sound of warfare was behind us. England could not last the day. The war against Europe was as good as won. Where would Hitler turn his attentions next? Russia?

  I mourned England’s passing with mixed feelings. Her arrogance, her casual power, her easy contempt for all other races and nations, had all been there to the end. These qualities were what had led her to underestimate Germany. But also her courage, her tenacity, her lazy good nature, her inventiveness, her coolness under fire, all these had been invested in her great warships, those fighting islands in miniature, each its own small nation. Those men of war had ruled the world and defeated Napoleon on sea, while together we had defeated him on land. A bloody, piratical nation she might be, ready to boast of her own coarseness and brutality. But her heroes had earned their power through their own determination, by risking their own lives and fortunes. And not a few of those great men had been great poets or historians. If she were decadent now, it was because she no longer possessed such men of integrity and breadth of vision.

  This was her day of reckoning. The day to which all great imperial nations come eventually—Byzantium and Carthage, Jerusalem and Rome. Unable to conceive of their mortality, they know the double bitterness of defeat and slavery. Hitler had reintroduced slavery throughout his empire. The British, who had led the world in abolishing that dreadful practice, would again know the humiliation and deep misery of forced labor. Even as she set her national vices aside and called upon her virtues, the Last Post was sounding for her freedom and her glory. She would go to her defeat proving that virtue is stronger than vice, that courage is more prevalent than cowardice and that the two can exist together at a moment to which we can point years later as examples of the best, rather than the worst, that we can be. And show how virtue made us stronger and safer than any cynicism ever could. Why was that a lesson we had to learn over and over again?

  Such philosophical meanderings while experiencing the physical exhilaration of riding on a dragon! What a typical thing for me to be doing! But I could not help grieving for that great country which so many Germans thought of as their natural partner, the best that they themselves could be.

  Water now. Calm, blue sparkling water. Green hills. Yellow beaches. More water. Lazy sunlight, as if the world had never been anything but paradise. Little towns seemed to have grown from the earth itself. Rivers, woods, valleys. The distinctive domestic beauty of the English shires. What would become of all this once Germany crushed British air power and “Germanified” the world into a comic-opera version of its heritage? The bleak, black cities they all loathed, of course, were defending this tranquillity, this ideal, against the tyranny which, in the name of preserving it, would destroy their way of life forever.

  So powerful were my feelings that I wished I was back facing the dangers of Mu Ooria. That would have been easier. Had Gaynor really destroyed that gentle race and left only a few survivors?

  Over the sea again, gentle in a southerly breeze, to a tiny green spot looking scarcely more than a hillock, jutting out of the water and lapped by white-topped waves. The leading dragon banked again and circled the island, which was about half a mile across. I saw a Tudor house, a ruined abbey, a white peninsula, like a rat’s tail, which served as a natural quay. No people were gathering to see us; nothing suggested the place had been occupied for a long time. The center of the island was topped by a grassy hill which bore a ragged granite crown of stones, marking it as the site of an ancient place of ritual. At one time, long ago, those stones had stood straight and formed a combined observatory, church and place of contemplative study.

  And so we came to the Isle of Morn, to Marag’s Mount, “whence all the pure virtue of the English race came so long ago,” as their epic explorer poet Wheldrake put it. One of the great holy places of the West with a history even more ancient than that of Glastonbury or Tintagel. As the dragons landed gracefully upon Morn’s pure white sandy beach, and the sea beat like a warning drum upon the rocks, I knew why Gaynor was here.

  Morn was one of the great places of power which even the Nazis acknowledged, though its founders were Celts, not Saxons. The Isle of Morn, where all the old races of the world sent their scholars to exchange ideas and discuss the nature of existence, the differences and similarities of religions, in that Silver Age before the Teuton explosion. Before the violence and the conquest began.

  To Morn had come bishops, rabbis and Muslim scholars, Buddhists, Hindus, Gnostics, philosophers and scientists, all to share their knowledge, At the abbey below the hill they had met regularly. An international university, a monument to good will. Then the Norsemen had come in their dragonships and it was over.

  I climbed down from my dragon, scratching her neck under her scal
es, and thanking her for her courtesy. I removed the skeffla’a, folded it and tucked it inside my shirt. Oona stumbled towards me, still finding her land legs in the soft, white sand. She pointed to the headland. There, at anchor, sat a German U-boat with two sentries standing guard on her low, water-washed decks.

  A coincidence? The scouts for the invasion fleet? Or had Gaynor arranged for it to be here, to use it to escape, if need be? But why? He had not known we could follow him. It seemed an elaborate precaution to take on the mere chance of being found here.

  Whatever the reason, the Nazi U-boat offered no immediate danger. I doubted they would have believed the reality anyway. Dragons rarely come ashore on small islands in the middle of the Irish Sea.

  A word from Elric, and the great beasts were airborne again, arrowing to the upper regions of the air where they would wait out of sight.

  Pausing only for a few moments, we struck inland through the cobbled streets of the deserted village, past the great Hall where Morn’s independent Duke had ruled until 1918 and which was now boarded up, past a surviving farm or two which had no doubt been evacuated at the outbreak of this war, and up the winding lane which led to the top of the grassy hill and the ring of stones.

  So far nothing was unusual about the place. Squabbling gulls cruised the waves and hovered in the air. Blackbirds sang in windswept trees, sparrows hunted in the overgrown hedgerows, and in the distance the surf drummed reassuring rhythms.

  With some effort we climbed to the crest of the island where the granite standing stones leaned like old men, one against the other. Their circle was still complete.

  We were approaching the stones, when I noticed a strange milky light flickering faintly from within. I hesitated. I had no stomach for further supernatural encounters. But Oona urged us on.