The Worm Ouroboros by Eric Rücker Eddison (e book reader online .TXT) 📖
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stuff. But the Lord Juss was minded not to tarry an hour more in
Muelva than should suffice to give all needful orders to Gaslark and
La Fireez what they should do and when expect him again, and to make
provision for himself and those who must fare with him beyond these
shadowing cliffs into the haunted wastes of the Moruna. Ere noon was
all this accomplished and farewells said, and these lords, Juss,
Spitfire, and Brandoch Daha, set forth along the beach southward
towards a point where it seemed most hopeful to scale the cliffs. With
them went the Lord Gro, both by his own wish and because he had known
the Moruna aforetime and these particular parts thereof; and with them
went besides those two brothers-in-law, Zigg and Astar, bearing the
precious burden of the egg, for that honour and trust had Juss laid on
them at their earnest seeking. So with some pains after an hour or
more they won up the barrier, and halted for a minute on the cliff’s
edge.
The skin of Gro’s hands was hurt with the sharp rocks. Tenderly he
drew on his lambswool gloves, and shivered a little; for the breath of
that desert blew snell and frore and there seemed a shadow in the air
southward, for all it was bright and gentle weather below whence they
were come. Yet albeit his frail body quailed, even so were his spirits
within him raised with high and noble imaginings as he stood on the
lip of that rocky cliff. The cloudless vault of heaven; the unnumbered
laughter of the sea; that quiet cove beneath, and those ships of war
and that army camping by the ships; the emptiness of the blasted wolds
to southward, where every rock seemed like a dead man’s skull and
every rank tuft of grass hag-ridden; the bearing of those lords of
Demonland who stood beside him, as if nought should be of commoner
course to them pursuing their resolve than to turn their backs on
living land and enter those regions of the dead; these things with a
power as of a mighty music made Gro’s breath catch in his throat and
the tear spring in his eye.
In such wise after more than two years did Lord Juss begin his second
crossing of the Moruna in quest of his dear brother the Lord Goldry
Bluszco.
XXVIII ZORA RACH NAM PSARRIONOf the Lord Juss’s riding of the hippogriff to Zora
Rach, and of the ills encountered by him in that
accursed place, and the manner of his performing
his great enterprise to deliver his brother out of
bondage.
LULLED with light-stirring airs too gentle-soft to ruffle her glassy
surface, warm incense-laden airs sweet with the perfume of immortal
flowers, the charmed Lake of Ravary dreamed under the moon. It was the
last hour before the dawn. Enchanted boats, that seemed builded of the
glowworm’s light, drifted on the starry bosom of the lake. Over the
sloping woods the limbs of the mountains lowered, unmeasured, vast,
mysterious in the moon’s glamour. In remote high spaces of night
beyond glimmered the spires of Koshtra Pivrarcha and the virgin snows
of Romshir and Koshtra Belorn. No bird or beast moved in the
stillness: only a nightingale singing to the stars from a coppice of
olive-trees near the Queen’s pavilion on the eastern shore. And that
was a note not like a bird’s of middle earth, but a note to charm down
spirits out of the air, or to witch the imperishable senses of the
Gods when they would hold communion with holy Night and make her
perfect, and all her lamps and voices perfect in their eyes.
The silken hangings of the pavilion door, parting as in the portal of
a vision, made way for that Queen, fosterling of the most high Gods.
She paused a step or two beyond the threshold, looking down where
those lords of Demonland, Spitfire and Brandoch Daha, with Gro and
Zigg and Astar, wrapped in their cloaks, lay on the gowany dewy banks
that sloped down to the water’s edge.
“Asleep,” she whispered. “Even as he within sleepeth against the dawn.
I do think it is only in a great man’s breast sleep hath so gentle a
bed when great events are toward.”
Like a lily, or like a moonbeam strayed through the leafy roof into a
silent wood, she stood there, her face uplifted to the starry night
where all the air was drenched with the silver radiance of the moon.
And now in a soft voice she began supplication to the Gods which are
from everlasting, calling upon them in turn by their holy names, upon
gray-eyed Pallas, and Apollo, and Artemis the fleet Huntress, upon
Aphrodite, and Hera, Queen of Heaven, and Ares, and Hermes, and the
dark-tressed Earthshaker. Nor was she afraid to address her holy
prayers to him who from his veiled porch beside Acheron and Lethe Lake
binds to his will the devils of the under-gloom, nor to the great
Father of All in Whose sight time from the beginning until to-day is
but the dipping of a wand into the boundless ocean of eternity. So
prayed she to the blessed Gods, most earnestly requiring them that
under their countenance might be that ride, the like whereof earth had
not known: the riding of the hippogriff, not rashly and by an ass as
heretofore to his own destruction, but by the man of men who with
clean purpose and resolution undismayed should enforce it carry him to
his heart’s desire.
Now in the east beyond the feathery hilltops and the great snow wall
of Romshir the gates were opening to the day. The sleepers wakened and
stood up. There was a great noise from within the pavilion. They
turned wide-eyed, and forth of the hangings of the doorway came that
young thing new-hatched, pale and doubtful as the new light which
trembled in the sky. Juss walked beside it, his hand on the sapphire
mane. High and resolute was his look, as he gave good-morrow to the
Queen, to his brother and his friends. No word they said, only in turn
gripped him by the hand. The hour was upon them. For even as day
striding on the eastern snowfields stormed night out of high heaven,
so and with such swift increase of splendour was might bodily and the
desire of the upper air born in that wild steed. It shone as if
lighted by a moving lamp from withinward, sniffed the sweet morning
air and whinnied, pawing the grass of the waterside and tearing it up
with its claws of gold. Juss patted the creature’s arching neck,
looked to the bridle he had fitted to its mouth, made sure of the
fastenings of his armour, and loosened in the scabbard his great
sword. And now up sprang the sun.
The Queen said, “Remember: when thou shalt see the lord thy brother in
his own shape, that is no illusion. Mistrust all else. And the
almighty Gods preserve and comfort thee.”
Therewith the hippogriff, as if maddened with the day-beams, plunged
like a wild horse, spread wide its rainbow pinions, reared, and took
wing. But the Lord Juss was sprung astride of it, and the grip of his
knees on the ribs of it was like brazen clamps. The firm land seemed
to rush away beneath him to the rear; the lake and the shore and
islands thereof showed in a moment small and remote, and the figures
of the Queen and his companions like toys, then dots, then shrunken to
nothingness, and the vast silence of the upper air opened and received
him into utter loneliness. In that silence earth and sky swirled like
the wine in a shaken goblet as the wild steed rocketed higher and
higher in great spirals. A cloud billowy-white shut in the sky before
them; brighter and brighter it grew in its dazzling whiteness as they
sped towards it, until they touched it and the glory was dissolved in
a gray mist that grew still darker and colder as they flew till
suddenly they emerged from the further side of the cloud into a
radiance of blue and gold blinding in its glory. So for a while they
flew with no set direction, only ever higher, till at length obedient
to Juss’s mastery the hippogriff ceased from his sports and turned
obediently westward, and so in a swift straight course, mounting ever,
sped over Ravary towards the departing night. And now indeed it was as
if they had verily overtaken night in her western caves. For the air
waxed darker about them and always darker, until the great peaks that
stood round Ravary were hidden, and all the green land of Zimiamvia,
with its plains and winding waters and hills and uplands and enchanted
woods, hidden and lost in an evil twilight. And the upper heaven was
ateem with portents: whole armies of men skirmishing in the air,
dragons, wild beasts, bloody streamers, blazing comets, fiery strakes,
with other apparitions innumerable. But all silent, and all cold, so
that Juss’s hands and feet were numbed with the cold and his
moustachios stiff with hoar-frost.
Before them now, invisible till now, loomed the gaunt peak of Zora
Rach, black, wintry, and vast, still towering above them for all they
soared even higher, grand and lonely above the frozen wastes of the
Psarrion Glaciers. Juss stared at that peak till the wind of their
flight blinded his eyes with tears; but it was yet too far for any
glimpse of that which he hungered to behold: no brazen citadel, no
coronal of flame, no watcher on the heights. Zora, like some dark
queen of Hell that disdains that presumptuous mortal eyes should dare
to look lovely on her dread beauties, drew across her brow a veil of
thundercloud. They flew on, and that steel-blue pall of thunderous
vapour rolled forth till it canopied all the sky above them. Juss
tucked his two hands for warmth into the feathery armpits of the
hippogriff’s wings where the wings joined the creature’s body. So
bitter cold it was, his very eyeballs were frozen and fixed; but that
pain was a light thing beside somewhat he now felt within him the like
whereof he never before had known: a deathlike horror as of the
houseless loneliness of naked space, which gripped him at the heart.
They landed at last on a crag of black obsidian stone a little below
the cloud that hid the highest rocks. The hippogriff, crouched on the
steep slope, turned its head to look on Juss. He felt the creature’s
body beneath him quiver. Its ears were laid back, its eye wide with
terror. “Poor child,” he said. “I have brought thee an ill journey,
and thou but one hour hatched from the egg.”
He dismounted; and in that same instant was bereaved. For the
hippogriff with a horse-scream of terror took wing and vanished down
the mirk air, diving headlong away to eastward, back to the world of
life and sunlight.
And the Lord Juss stood alone in that region of fear and frost and the
soul-quailing gloom, under the black summit-rocks of Zora Rach.
Setting, as the Queen had counselled him to do, his whole heart and
mind on the dread goal he intended, he turned to the icy cliff. As he
climbed the cold cloud covered him, yet not so thick but he might see
ten paces’ distance before and about him as he went. Ill sights enow,
and enow to quail a strong man’s resolution, showed in his path:
shapes of damned fiends and gorgons of the pit running in the way,
threatening him with death and doom. But
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