The Chronicles of Castle Brass

by Michael Moorcock

  Captain Vedla became embarrassed, murmuring: 'It was merely a theory.' He raised his glass to catch the firelight, studying the rich, red wine within. 'And this stuff is doubtless what encourages me to voice such theories!'

  They both laughed and then they drank some more.

  'Speaking of Granbretan,' said Count Brass later, 'I wonder how Queen Flana is coping with the problem of the unregenerates who still, from what she has said in her letters, inhabit some of the darker, less accessible parts of underground Londra? I have had little news from her in recent months. I wonder if the situation has worsened, so that she devotes more time to it'

  'You have had a letter from her recently, surely?'

  'By messenger. Two days ago. Aye. The letter was much briefer, however, than those she used to send. It was almost formal. Merely extending the usual invitation to visit her whenever I desired.'

  'Could it be that, of late, she has become offended that you have not taken her up on her offer of hospitality?' Vedla suggested. 'Perhaps she thinks you do not feel friendship for her.'

  'On the contrary, she is the nearest thing to my heart save for my memory of my own dead daughter.'

  'But you have not indicated as much?' Vedla poured himself more wine. 'Women require these affirmations, you know. Even queens.'

  'Flana is above such feelings. She is too intelligent. Too sensible. Too kind.'

  'Possibly,' said Captain Vedla, as if he doubted Count Brass's words.

  Count Brass understood the implication. 'You think I should write to her in more - more flowery terms?"

  'Well...' Captain Vedla grinned.

  'I was never capable of these literary flourishes.'

  'Your style at its best (and on whatever subject) usually resembles communiques issued in the field during the heat of a battle,' Captain Vedla admitted. 'Though I do not mean that as an insult. On the contrary.'

  Count Brass shrugged. 'I would not like Flana to think I did not remember her with anything but the greatest affection. Yet I cannot write. I suppose I should go to Londra - accept her offer.' He stared around his shadowed hall. 'It might be a change. This place has become almost overpoweringly gloomy of late.'

  'You could take Hawkmoon with you. He was fond of Flana. It might be the only thing likely to attract him away from his toy soldiers.' Captain Vedla caught himself speaking sardonically and regretted it. He had every sympathy for Hawkmoon, every respect for him, even in his present state of mind. But Hawkmoon's brooding was a strain on all who had been even remotely connected with him in the past.

  'I'll suggest it to him,' said Count Brass. Count Brass understood his own feelings. Much of him wanted to get away from Hawkmoon for a while. Yet his conscience would not let him go alone at least until he had put the idea to his old friend. And Vedla was right. A trip to Londra might force Hawkmoon out of his brooding mood. The chances were, however, that it would not. In which case, Count Brass anticipated a journey and a visit involving more emotional strain on himself and the rest of his party then that which they now experienced within the confines of Castle Brass.

  'I'll speak to him in the morning,' Count Brass said after a pause. 'Perhaps by returning to Londra itself, rather than by involving himself with models of the place, the melancholy in him will be exercised...'

  Captain Vedla agreed. 'It is something we should have considered earlier, maybe?'

  Count Brass was, without rancour, thinking that Captain Vedla was expressing a certain amount of self-interest when he suggested that Hawkmoon go with him to Londra.

  'And would you journey with us, Captain Vedla?' he asked with a faint smile.

  'Someone would be needed here to act on your behalf ...' Vedla said. 'However, if the Duke of Koln declined to go then, of course, I would be glad to accompany you.'

  'I understand you, captain.' Count Brass leaned back in his chair, sipping his wine and regarding his old friend with a certain amount of humour.

  After Captain Josef Vedla had left, Count Brass remained in his chair. He was still smiling. He cherished his amusement, for it had been a long while since he had felt any at all. And now that the idea was in his mind, he began to look forward to his visit to Londra, for he only realised at this moment to what extent the atmosphere had become oppressive in Castle Brass, once so famous for its peace.

  He stared up at the smoke-darkened beams of the roof, thinking sadly of Hawkmoon and what he had become. He wondered if it was altogether a good thing that the defeat of the Dark Empire had brought tranquillity to the world. It was possible that Hawkmoon, even more than himself, was a man who only came alive when conflict threatened. If, for instance, there was trouble again in Granbretan - if the unregenerate remnants of the defeated warriors were seriously troubling Queen Flana -perhaps it would be a good notion to ask Hawkmoon to make it his business to find them and destroy them.

  Count Brass sensed that a task of that nature would be the only thing which could save his friend. Instinctively he guessed that Hawkmoon was not made for peace. There were such men — men fashioned by fate to make war, either for good or for evil (if there was a difference between the two qualities) - and Hawkmoon might well be one of them.

  Count Brass sighed and returned his attention to his new plan. He would write to Flana in the morning, sending news ahead of his intended visit. It would be interesting to see what had become of that strange city since he had last visited it, as a conqueror.

  Chapter Two

  Count Brass Goes A-Journeying

  'Give Queen Flana my kindest compliments,' said Dorian Hawkmoon distantly. He held a tiny representation of Flana in his pale fingers, turning the model this way and that as he spoke. Count Brass was not entirely sure that Hawkmoon realised he had picked the model up. 'Tell her that I do not feel fit enough to make the journey.'

  'You would feel fitter once you had begun to travel,' Count Brass pointed out. He noticed that Hawkmoon had covered the windows with dark tapestries. The room was lit now by lamps, though it neared noon. And the place smelled dank, unhealthy, full of festering memories.

  Hawkmoon rubbed at the scar on his forehead, where the Black Jewel had once been imbedded. His skin was waxy. His eyes burned with a dreadful, feverish light. He had become so thin that his clothes draped his body like drowned flags. He stood looking down at the table bearing the intricate model of old Londra, with its thousands of crazy towers, interconnected by a maze of tunnels so that no inhabitant need ever see daylight.

  Suddenly it occurred to Count Brass that Hawkmoon had caught the disease of those he had defeated. It would not have surprised the Count to discover that Hawkmoon had taken to wearing an ornate and complicated mask.

  'Londra has changed,' said Count Brass, 'since last you saw it. I hear that the towers have been torn down - that flowers grow in wide streets - that there are parks and avenues in place of the tunnels.'

  'So I believe,' said Hawkmoon without interest. He turned away from Count Brass and began to move a division of Dark Empire cavalry out from beyond Londra's walls. He seemed to be working on a battle situation where the Dark Empire had defeated Count Brass and the other Companions of the Runestaff. 'It must be exceptionally - pretty. But for my own purposes I prefer to remember Londra as it was.' His voice became sharp, unwholesome. 'When Yisselda died there,' he said.

  Count Brass wondered if Hawkmoon was blaming him - accusing him of cohabiting with those whose compatriots had slain Yisselda. He ignored the inference. He said: 'But the journey itself. Would that not be exhilarating? The last you saw of the outside world it was wasted, ruined. Now it flourishes again.'

  'I have important things to do here,' Hawkmoon said.

  'What things?' Count Brass spoke almost sharply. 'You have not left your apartments for months.'

  'There is an answer," Hawkmoon told him curtly, 'in all this. There is a way to find Yisselda.'

  Count Brass shuddered.

  'She is dead,' he said softly.

  'She is alive,' Hawkmoon mur
mured. 'She is alive. Somewhere. In another place.'

  'We once agreed, you and I, that there was no life after death,' Count Brass reminded his friend. 'Besides - would you resurrect a ghost. Would that please you - to raise Yisselda's shade?'

  'If that were all I could resurrect, aye.'

  'You love a dead woman,' Count Brass said in a quiet, disturbed voice. 'And in loving her you have fallen in love with death itself.'

  'What is there in life to love?'

  'Much. You would discover it again if you came with me to Londra.'

  'I have no wish to see Londra. I hate the city.'

  'Then just travel part of the distance with me."

  "No. I am dreaming again. And in my dreams I come closer to Yisselda - and our two children.'

  'There never were children. You invented them. In your madness you invented them.'

  'No. Last night I dreamed I had another name, but that I was still the same man. A strange, archaic name. A name from before the Tragic Millenium. John Daker. That was the name. And John Daker found Yisselda.'

  Count Brass was close to weeping at his friend's insane mutterings. 'This reasoning - this dreaming - will bring you much more pain, Dorian. It will heighten the tragedy, not decrease it. Believe me. I speak the truth.'

  'I know that you mean well, Count Brass. I respect your view and I understand that you believe that you are helping me. But I ask you to accept that you are not helping me. I must continue to follow this path. I know that it will lead me to Yisselda.'

  'Aye,' said Count Brass sorrowfully. 'I agree. It will lead you to your death.'

  If that is the case, the prospect does not alarm me.' Hawkmoon turned again to regard Count Brass. The count felt a chill go through him as he looked at the gaunt, white face, the hot eyes which burned in deep sockets.

  'Ah, Hawkmoon,' he said. 'Ah, Hawkmoon.'

  And he walked towards the door and he said nothing else before he left the room.

  And he heard Hawkmoon shout after him in a high, hysterical voice:

  'I will find her, Count Brass!'

  Next day Hawkmoon drew back the tapestry to peer through his window down into the courtyard below. Count Brass was leaving. His retinue was already mounted on good, big horses, caparisoned in the Count's red colours. Ribbons and pennants waved on bolstered flame-lances, surcoats curled in the breeze, bright armour shone in the early morning sunlight. The horses snorted and stamped their feet. Servants moved about, making last minute preparations, handing warming drinks up to the horsemen. And then the Count Brass himself emerged and mounted his chestnut stallion, his brazen armour flickering as if fashioned from flame. The count looked up at the window, his face thoughtful for a moment. Then his expression changed as he turned to give an order to one of his men. Hawkmoon continued to watch.

  While looking down upon the courtyard, he had been unable to rid himself of the sensation of observing particularly detailed models; models which moved and talked, yet were models nonetheless. He felt he could reach down and move a horseman to the other side of the courtyard, or pick up Count Brass himself and send him off away from Londra in another direction all together. He had vague feelings of resentment towards his old friend which he could not understand. Sometimes it occurred to him, in dreams, that Count Brass had bought his own life with that of his daughter. Yet how could that be? And neither was it a thing which Count Brass could possibly conceive of doing. On the contrary, the brave old warrior would have given his life for a loved one without a second thought. Still, Hawkmoon could not drive the thought from his skull. For a moment he felt a pang of regret, wondering if he should, after all, have agreed to accompany Count Brass to Londra. He watched as Captain Josef Vedla rode forward and ordered the portcullis raised in the gateway. Count Brass had left Hawkmoon to rule in his place; but really the stewards and the veteran Guardians of the Kamarg could run things perfectly well and would make no demands on Hawkmoon for a decision.

  But no, thought Hawkmoon. This was not a time for action, but a time for thought. He was determined to find a way through to those ideas which he could feel in the back of his own mind and yet which he could not, as yet, reach. For all his old friends might disdain his ‘playing with toy soldiers' he knew that by putting the models through a thousand permutations it might release, at some point, those thoughts, those elusive notions which would lead him to the truth involving his own situation. And once he understood the truth, he was sure he would find Yisselda alive. He was almost sure, too, that he would find two children - perhaps a boy and a girl. They had all judged him mad for five years, yet he was convinced that he had not been mad. He believed that he knew himself too well - that if he ever did go mad it would not be in the way his friends had described.

  Now Count Brass and his retinue were waving to the castle's retainers as they rode through the gates on the first stage of the long journey to Londra.

  Contrary to Count Brass's suspicions, Dorian Hawkmoon still held his old friend in great esteem. It caused him a pang of sorrow to see Count Brass leaving. Hawkmoon's problem was that he could no longer express any of the sentiments he felt. He had become too single-minded in his considerations, too absorbed in the problems which he attempted to solve in his obsessive manipulation of the tiny figures on his boards.

  Hawkmoon continued to watch as Count Brass and his men rode down through the winding streets of Aigues-Mortes. The streets were lined with townsfolk, bidding Count Brass farewell. At last the party reached the walls of the town and rode out across the broad road through the marshes. Hawkmoon looked after them until they were out of sight, then he turned his attention back to his models.

  Currently he was working out a situation in which the Black Jewel had not been set in his forehead, but in that of Oladahn of the Bulgar Mountains, and where the Legion of the Dawn could not be summoned. Would the Dark Empire have been defeated then? And if it could have been defeated, how might that have been accomplished? He had reached the point he had reached a hundred times before, of reenacting the Battle of Londra. But this time it struck him that he, himself, might have been killed. Would this have saved Yisselda's life?

  If he hoped, by going through these permutations of past events, to find a means of releasing the truth he believed to be hidden in his mind, he failed again. He completed the tactics involved, he noted the fresh possibilities involved, he considered his next development. He wished that Bowgentle had not died at Londra. Bowgentle had known much and might have helped him in this line of reasoning.

  There again, the messengers of the Runestaff - The Warrior in Jet and Gold, Orland Fank or even the mysterious Jehamia Cohnalias, who had not claimed to be human - might have helped him. He had called to them for their help in the darkness of the nights, but they had not come. The Runestaff was safe now and they had no need of Hawkmoon's help. He had felt abandoned, though he knew they owed him nothing.

  Yet could the Runestaff be involved in what had happened to him, was happening to him now? Was that strange artefact under some new threat? Had it set into motion a fresh series of events, a new pattern of destiny? Hawkmoon had a sense that there was more to his situation than anything which the ordinary, observed facts might suggest. He had been manipulated by the Runestaff and its servants just as he now manipulated his model soldiers. Was he being manipulated again? And was that why he turned to the models, deceiving himself that he controlled something when, in fact, he was controlled?

  He pushed such thoughts aside. He must devote himself to his original speculations.

  And thus it was that he avoided confronting the truth.

  By pretending to search for the truth, by pretending that he was single-minded in that quest, he was able to escape it. For the truth of his situation might have been intolerable to him.

  And that was ever the way of mankind.

  Chapter Three

  A Lady All In Armour

  A month went by.

  Twenty alternative destinies were played out on Hawkmoon's
wargame boards. And Yisselda came no closer to him, even in his dreams.

  Unshaven, red-eyed, acned, his skin flaking with eczema, weak from lack of food, flabby from lack of exercise, Dorian Hawkmoon had nothing of the hero left in him, either in his mind, his character or his body. He looked thirty years older than his real age. His clothes, stained, torn, ill-smelling, were the clothes of a beggar. His unwashed hair hung in greasy strands about his face. His beard contained flecks of distasteful substances. He had taken to wheezing, to muttering to himself, to coughing. His servants avoided him as much as they could. He had little cause to call on them and so he did not notice their absence.

  He had changed beyond recognition, this man who had been the Hero of Koln, the Champion of the Runestaff, the great warrior who had led the oppressed to victory over the Dark Empire.

  And his life was fading from him, though he did not realise it.

  In his obsession with alternative destinies he had come close to fixing his own; he was destroying himself.

  And his dreams were changing. And because they were changing he slept even less frequently than before. In his dreams he had four names. One of them was John Daker, but much more often now did he sense the other names - Erekose and Urlik. Only the fourth name escaped him, though he knew it was there. On waking, he could never recall the fourth name. He began to wonder if there was such a thing as reincarnation. Was he remembering earlier lives? That was his instinctive conclusion. Yet his common sense could not accept the idea.

  In his dreams he sometimes met Yisselda. In his dreams he was always anxious, always weighed down by a sense of heavy responsibility, of guilt He always felt that it was his duty to perform some action, but could never recall what that action was. Had he lived other lives that had been just as tragic as this one? The thought of an eternity of tragedy was too much for him. He drove it off, almost before it had formed.

  And yet these ideas were half-familiar. Where had he heard them before? In other, earlier dreams? In conversation with someone? With Bowgentle? In Danark, the distant city of the Runestaff?