Patroness divine, with sweet cool lips set firm and steady eyes fixed
on the haven and the riding ships. Gently she drew her hand from Gro’s,
and he strove not to retain it. She eased forward the reins. Gro
mounted and followed her. They rode quietly down to the road and so
southward side by side to the harbour. Ere they came within earshot of
the quay, Mevrian spake and said, “Thou’lt not think me graceless nor
forgetful, my lord. All that is mine, O ask it, and I’ll give it thee
with both hands. But ask me not that I have not to give, or if I gave
should give but false gold. For that’s a thing not good for thee nor
me, nor I would not do it to an enemy, far less to thee my friend.”
• • • • •
Now was the army all gotten ashipboard, and farewells said to Volle and
those who should abide at home with him. The ships rowed out into the
firth all orderly, their silken sails unfurled, and that great armament
sailed southward into the open seas under a clear sky. All the way
the wind favoured them, and they made a swift passage, so that on the
thirtieth morning from their sailing out of Lookinghaven they sighted
the long gray cliff-line of Impland the More dim in the lowblown spray
of the sea, and sailed through the Straits of Melikaphkhaz in column
ahead, for scarce might two ships pass abreast through that narrow way.
Black precipices shut in the straits on either hand, and the sea-birds
in their thousands whitened every little ledge of those cliffs like
snow. Great flights of them rose and circled overhead as the ships
sped by, and the air was full of their plaints. And right and left, as
of young whales blowing, columns of white spray shot up continually
from the surface of the sea. For these were the stately-winged gannets
fishing that sea-strait. By threes and fours they flew, each following
other in ordered line, many mast-heights high; and ever and anon
one checked in her flight as if a bolt had smitten her, and swooped
head-foremost with wings half-spread, like a broad-barbed dart of
dazzling whiteness, till at a few feet above the surface she clapped
close her wings and cleft the water with a noise as of a great stone
cast into the sea. Then in a moment up she bobbed, white and spruce
with her prey in her gullet; rode the waves a minute to rest and
consider; then with great sweeping wing-strokes up again to resume her
flight.
After a mile or two the narrows opened and the cliffs grew lower, and
the fleet sped past the red reefs of Uaimnaz and the lofty stacks of
Pashnemarthra white with sea-gulls on to the blue solitude of the
Didornian Sea. All day they sailed south-east with a failing wind. The
coast-line of Melikaphkhaz fell away astern, paled in the mists of
distance, and was lost to sight, until only the square cloven outline
of the Pashnemarthran islands broke the level horizon of the sea. Then
these too sank out of sight, and the ships rowed on south-eastward in a
dead calm. The sun stooped to the western waves, entering his bath of
blood-red fire. He sank, and all the ways were darkened. All night they
rowed gently on under the strange southern stars, and the broken waters
of that sea at every oar-stroke were like fire burning. Then out of the
sea to eastward came the day-star, ushering the dawn, brighter than all
night’s stars, tracing a little path of gold along the waters. Then
dawn, filling the low eastern skies with a fleet of tiny cockle-shells
of bright gold fire; then the great face of the sun ablaze. And with
the going up of the sun a light wind sprang up, bellying their sails on
the starboard tack; so that ere day declined the sea-cliffs of Muelva
hung white above the spray-mist on their larboard bow. They beached
the ships on a white shell-strand behind a headland that sheltered it
from the east and north. Here the barrier of cliffs stood back a little
from the shore, giving place for a fertile dell of green pasture, and
woods clustering at the foot of the cliffs, and a little spring of
water in the midst.
So for that night they slept on board, and next day made their camp,
discharging the ships of burthen that were laden with the horses and
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 those shadowing
cliffs into the haunted wastes of the Moruna. Ere noon was all this
accomplished and farewells said, and those 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 PSARRION
OF 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
glow-worm’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 Here, 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 snow-fields 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
grey 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.
[Illustration: HIPPOGRIFF IN FLIGHT.]
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 ever 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 death-like 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, couched 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 Juss, gritting his teeth, 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 snow-bedded 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-a-moor 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 earth-born 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.”