The Worm Ouroboros by Eric Rücker Eddison (e book reader online .TXT) 📖
- Author: Eric Rücker Eddison
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climbed on and through them, they being unsubstantial. Then up rose an
eldritch cry, “What man of middle-earth is this that troubleth our
quiet? Make an end! Call up the basilisks. Call up the Golden
Basilisk, which bloweth upon and setteth on fire whatsoever he seeth.
Call up the Starry Basilisk, and whatso he seeth it immediately
shrinks up and perisheth. Call up the Bloody Basilisk, who if he see
or touch any living thing it floweth away so that nought there
remaineth but the bones!”
That was a voice to freeze the marrow, yet he pressed on, saying in
himself, “All is illusion, save that alone she told me of.” And nought
appeared: only the silence and the cold, and the rocks grew ever
steeper and their ice-glaze more dangerous, and the difficulty like
the difficulty of those Barriers of Emshir, up which more than two
years ago he had followed Brandoch Daha and on which he had
encountered and slain the beast mantichora. The leaden hours drifted
by, and now night shut down, bitter and black and silent. Sore
weariness bodily was come upon Juss, and his whole soul weary withal
and near to death as he entered a snowbedded gully that cut deep into
the face of the mountain, there to await the day. He durst not sleep
in that freezing night; scarcely dared he rest lest the cold should
master him, but must keep for ever moving and stamping and chafing
hands and feet. And yet, as the slow night crept by, death seemed a
desirable thing that should end such utter weariness.
Morning came with but a cold alteration of the mist from black to
gray, disclosing the snow-bound rocks silent, dreary, and dead. Juss,
enforcing his half frozen limbs to resume the ascent, beheld a sight
of woe too terrible for the eye: a young man, helmed and graithed in
dark iron, a black-a-moor with goggle-eyes and white teeth agrin, who
held by the neck a fair young lady kneeling on her knees and clasping
his as in supplication, and he most bloodily brandishing aloft his
spear of six foot of length as minded to reave her of her life. This
lady, seeing the Lord Juss, cried out on him for succour very
piteously, calling him by his name and saying, “Lord Juss of
Demonland, have mercy, and in your triumph over the powers of night
pause for an instant to deliver me, poor afflicted damosel, from this
cruel tyrant. Can your towering spirit, which hath quarried upon
kingdoms, make a stoop at him? O that should approve you noble indeed,
and bless you for ever!”
Surely the very heart of him groaned, and he clapped hand to sword
wishing to right so cruel a wrong. But on the motion he bethought him
of the wiles of evil that dwelt in that place, and of his brother, and
with a great groan passed on. In which instant he beheld sidelong how
the cruel murtherer smote with his spear that delicate lady, and
detrenched and cut the two master-veins of her neck, so as she fell
dying in her blood. Juss mounted with a great pace to the head of the
gully, and looking back beheld how black-amoor and lady both were
changed to two coiling serpents. And he laboured on, shaken at heart,
yet glad to have so escaped the powers that would have limed him so.
Darker grew the mist, and heavier the brooding dread which seemed
elemental of the airs about that mountain. Pausing well nigh exhausted
on a small stance of snow, Juss beheld the appearance of a man armed
who rolled prostrate in the way, tearing with his nails at the hard
rock and frozen snow, and the snow was all one gore of blood beneath
the man; and the man besought him in a stifled voice to go no further
but raise him up and bring him down the mountain. And when Juss, after
an instant’s doubt betwixt pity and his resolve, would have passed by,
the man cried and said, “Hold, for I am thy very brother thou seekest,
albeit the King hath by his art framed me to another likeness, hoping
so to delude thee. For thy love sake be not deluded!” Now the voice
was like to the voice of his brother Goldry, howbeit weak. But the
Lord Juss bethought him again of the words of Sophonisba the Queen,
that he should see his brother in his own shape and nought else must
he trust; and he thought, “It is an illusion, this also.” So he said,
“If that thou be truly my dear brother, take thy shape.” But the man
cried as with the voice of the Lord Goldry Bluszco, “I may not, till
that I be brought down from the mountain. Bring me down, or my curse
be upon thee for ever.”
The Lord Juss was torn with pity and doubt and wonder, to hear that
voice again of his dear brother so beseeching him. Yet he answered and
said, “Brother, if that it be thou indeed, then bide till I have won
to this mountain top and the citadel of brass which in a dream I saw,
that I may know truly thou art not there, but here. Then will I turn
again and succour thee. But until I see thee in thine own shape I will
mistrust all. For hither I came from the ends of the earth to deliver
thee, and I will set my good on no doubtful cast, having spent so much
and put so much in danger for thy dear sake.”
So with a heavy heart he set hand again to those black rocks, iced and
slippery to the touch. Therewith up rose an eldritch cry, “Rejoice,
for this earthborn is mad! Rejoice, for that was not perfect friend,
that relinquished his brother at his need!” But Juss climbed on, and
by and by looking back beheld how in that seeming man’s place writhed
a grisful serpent. And he was glad, so much as gladness might be in
that mountain of affliction and despair.
Now was his strength near gone, as day drew again toward night and he
climbed the last crags under the peak of Zora. And he, who had all his
days drunk deep of the fountain of the joy of life and the glory and
the wonder of being, felt ever deadlier and darker in his soul that
lonely horror which he first had tasted the day before at his first
near sight of Zora, while he flew through the cold air portent-laden;
and his whole heart grew sick because of it.
And now he was come to the ring of fire that was about the summit of
the mountain. He was beyond terror or the desire of life, and trod the
fire as it had been his own home’s threshold. The blue tongues of
flame died under his foot-tread, making a way before him. The brazen
gates stood wide. He entered in, he passed up the brazen stair, he
stood on that high roof-floor which he had beheld in dreams, he looked
as in a dream on him he had crossed the confines of the dead to find:
Lord Goldry Bluszco keeping his lone watch on the unhallowed heights
of Zora. Not otherwise was the Lord Goldry, not by an hairsbreadth,
than as Juss had aforetime seen him on that first night in Koshtra
Belorn, so long ago. He reclined propped on one elbow on that bench of
brass, his head erect, his eyes fixed as on distant space, viewing the
depths beyond the star-shine, as one waiting till time should have an
end.
He turned not at his brother’s greeting. Juss went to him and stood
beside him. The Lord Goldry Bluszco moved not an eyelid. Juss spoke
again, and touched his hand. It was stiff and like dank earth. The
cold of it struck through Juss’s body and smote him at the heart. He
said in himself, “He is dead.”
With that, the horror shut down upon Juss’s soul like madness.
Fearfully he stared about him. The cloud had lifted from the
mountain’s peak and hung like a pall above its nakedness. Chill air
that was like the breath of the whole world’s grave: vast blank cloud-barriers: dim far forms of snow and ice, silent, solitary, pale, like
mountains of the dead: it was as if the bottom of the world were
opened and truth laid bare: the ultimate Nothing.
To hold off the horror from his soul, Juss turned in memory to the
dear life of earth, those things he had most set his heart on, men and
women he loved dearest in his life’s days; battles and triumphs of his
opening manhood, high festivals in Galing, golden summer noons under
the Westmark pines, hunting morns on the high heaths of Mealand; the
day he first backed a horse, of a spring morning in a primrose glade
that opened on Moonmere, when his small brown legs were scarce the
length of his fore-arm now, and his dear father held him by the foot
as he trotted, and showed him where the squirrel had her nest in the
old oak tree.
He bowed his head as if to avoid a blow, so plain he seemed to hear
somewhat within him crying with a high voice and loud, “Thou art
nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams,
nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou,
were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and
sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion
comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things
shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old
and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten.
For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? and all
things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come,
and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being
and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be
nothing, for ever.”
And the Lord Juss cried aloud in his agony, “Fling me to Tartarus,
deliver me to the black infernal Furies, let them blind me, seethe me
in the burning lake. For so should there yet be hope. But in this
horror of Nothing is neither hope nor life nor death nor sleep nor
waking, for ever. For ever.”
In this black mood of horror he abode for awhile, until a sound of
weeping and wailing made him raise his head, and he beheld a company
of mourners walking one behind another about the brazen floor, all
cloaked in funeral black, mourning the death of Lord Goldry Bluszco.
And they rehearsed his glorious deeds and praised his beauty and
prowess and goodliness and strength: soft women’s voices lamenting, so
that the Lord Juss’s soul seemed as he listened to arise again out of
annihilation’s waste, and his heart grew soft again, even unto tears.
He felt a touch on his arm and looking up met the gaze of two eyes
gentle as a dove’s, suffused with tears, looking into his from under
the darkness of that hood of mourning; and a woman’s voice spake and
said, “This is the observable day of the death of the Lord Goldry
Bluszco, which hath been dead now a year; and we his fellows in
bondage do bewail him, as thou mayst see, and shall so bewail him
again year by year whiles we are on life. And for thee, great lord,
must we yet more sorrowfully lament, since of all thy great works
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