Chronicles of Corum (3 page)

In which Prince Corum finds himself dreaming an unlikely and unwelcome dream…

Rhalina, ninety-six years old, and handsome, had died. Corum had wept for her. Now, seven years later, he still missed her. He contemplated his own lifespan of perhaps another thousand years, and he envied the race of Mabden its brief years, yet shunned the company of that race because he was reminded of her.

Dwelling again in their isolated castles—whose forms so mirrored the natural rock that many Mabden passing by could not see them as buildings at all but mistook them for outcrops of granite, limestone and basalt—were his own race, the Vadhagh. These he shunned because he had grown, while Rhalina lived, to prefer Mabden company. It was an irony about which he would write poetry, or paint pictures, or compose music in the several halls of Castle Erorn set aside for the purpose.

And thus he grew strange, in Castle Erorn by the sea.

His remoteness caused his retainers (all Vadhagh now) to wonder how to express to him their view that perhaps he should take a Vadhagh wife, by whom he might have children and through whom he might discover a renewed interest in the present and the future. But there was no way they could find to approach their lord, Corum Jhalen Irsei, Prince in the Scarlet Robe, who had helped conquer the most powerful gods and rid this world of much that it had feared.

The retainers began to know fear. They grew to fear Corum—that lonely figure with an eye-patch covering an empty socket and a variety of artificial right hands, each one of exquisite craftsmanship (made by Corum for his own use); that silent strider in midnight halls; that moody rider through the winter woods.

And Corum knew fear, too. He felt a fear of empty days, of lonely years, waiting through the slow-turning centuries for death.

He contemplated ending his life, but somehow he felt that such an action would be an insult to Rhalina’s memory. He considered embarking upon a quest, but there were no lands to explore in this bland, warm, tranquil world. Even the bestial Mabden of King Lyr-a-Brode had returned to their original pursuits, becoming farmers, merchants, fishermen, miners. No enemies threatened; no injustice was evident. Freed from gods, the Mabden had become content, kindly and wise.

Corum recalled the old pursuits of his youth. He had hunted. But now he had lost any relish he ever had for the chase. He had been hunted too frequently during his battle with the Sword Rulers to feel anything now but anguish for the pursued. He had ridden. He had relished the lush and lovely countryside landward to Castle Erorn. But his relish for life had waned.

He still rode, however. He would ride through the broadleaf forests which skirted the promontory on which Castle Erorn was raised. Sometimes he would venture as far as the deep, green moor beyond, with its thick gorse, its hawks, its skies and its silence. Sometimes he would take the coast road back to Castle Erorn, riding dangerously close to the crumbling cliff edge. Far below, the high, white surf would rear against the rocks, hissing and growling. Sometimes tendrils of spray would strike Corum’s face, but he would hardly feel them. Once such sensations had made him grin with pleasure.

On most days Corum would not venture out. Neither sun, nor wind, nor rattling rain would lure him from the gloomy rooms which had, in the days when his family, and, later, Rhalina, had occupied them, been replete with love and light and laughter. Sometimes he would not even move from his chair. His tall, slender body would sprawl upon the cushions. He would rest his beautiful, tapering head upon his fleshly fist, and with his almond-shaped yellow and purple eye, he would stare into the past, a past which grew dimmer all the time and increased his desperation as he strove to remember every detail of his life with Rhalina. He was a prince of the great Vadhagh folk, grieving for a mortal woman. There had never been ghosts in Castle Erorn before the Mabden came.

And sometimes, when he did not yearn for Rhalina, he would wish that Jhary-a-Conel had not decided to leave this plane—for Jhary, like him, was apparently immortal. The self-styled Companion to Heroes seemed able to move at will through all the fifteen planes of existence acting as guide, foil, and counselor to one who, in Jhary’s opinion, was Corum in several different guises. It had been Jhary-a-Conel who had said that he and Corum could be ‘aspects of a greater hero’, just as, in the tower of Voilodion Ghagnasdiak, he had met two other aspects of that hero, Erekose and Elric. Jhary had claimed that those two were Corum in other incarnations and it was Erekose’s particular doom to be aware of most of those incarnations. Intellectually, Corum could accept such an idea, but emotionally he rejected it. He was Corum. And that was his doom.

Corum had a collection of Jhary’s paintings (most of them self-portraits, but some were of Rhalina and of Corum and of the small black and white winged cat which Jhary took everywhere with him, as he took his hat). Corum, in his most morbid moments, would study the portraits, recalling the old days, but slowly even the portraits came to be those of strangers. He would make efforts to consider the future, to make plans regarding his own destiny, but all his intentions came to nothing. There was no plan, no matter how detailed, how reasonable, which lasted more than a day or so. Castle Erom was littered with unfinished poems, unfinished prose, unfinished music, unfinished painting. The world had turned a man of peace into a warrior and then left him with nothing to fight.

Such was Corum’s fate. He had no reason to work the land, for Vadhagh food was grown within the castle walls. There was no shortage of meat or wine. Castle Erorn provided all its few inhabitants needed. Corum had spent many years working on a variety of artificial hands, based on what he had seen at the doctor’s house in the world of Lady Jane Pentallyon. Now he had a selection of hands, all perfect, which worked as well for him as any hand of flesh had done. His favorite, which he wore most of the time, was one which resembled a finely-wrought gauntlet in filigree’d silver, an exact match to the hand which Earl Glandyth-a-Krae had cut off nearly a century before. This was the hand he could have used to hold his sword or his lance or his bow, had there been any call for him to use his weapons now. Tiny movements of the muscles in the stump of his original wrist would make it do everything an ordinary hand could do, and more, for the grip was stronger. Secondly, he had become ambidextrous, able to use his left hand as well as he had used his right hand. Yet all his skill could not make him a new eye, and he had to be content with a simple patch, covered in scarlet silk and worked with Rhalina’s fine needle into an intricate pattern. It was his unconscious habit now to run the fingers of his left hand frequently over that needlework as he sat brooding in his chair.

Corum began to realize that his taciturnity was turning to madness when, in his bed at night, he began to hear voices. They were distant voices, a chanting chorus calling a name which might be his in a language which resembled the Vadhagh tongue and yet was unlike it. Try as he might, he could not drive the voices out, just as he could not, however much he strained his ears to listen, understand more than a few words of what they said. After several nights of these voices, he began to shout for them to stop. He would groan. He would roll in his silks and furs and try to stuff his ears. And in the days he would try to laugh at himself, would go for long rides to tire himself so that he would sleep heavily. Yet still the voices would come to him.

And later there were dreams. Shadowy figures stood in a grove in a thick wood. Their hands were linked in a circle, apparently surrounding him. In his dreams he would speak to them, saying that he could not hear them, that he did not know what they wanted. He asked them to stop. But they continued to chant. Their eyes were closed, their heads flung back. They swayed.

“Corum. Corum. Corum. Corum.”

“What do you want?”

“Corum. Help us. Corum.”

He would break through their circle and run into the forest and then he would awake. He knew what had happened to him. His mind had turned in on itself. Not properly occupied, it had begun to invent phantoms. He had never heard of such a thing happening to a Vadhagh, though it happened frequently enough to Mabden people. Did he, as Shool had once told him, still live in a Mabden dream? Was the dream of the Vadhagh and the Nhadragh completely over? And did he therefore dream one dream within another?

But these thoughts did not help his sanity. He tried to drive them away. He began to feel the need for advice, yet there was none to advise him. The Lords of Law and Chaos no longer ruled here, no longer had servants here to whom they imparted at least some of their knowledge. Corum knew more of philosophical matters than did anyone else.

Yet there were wise Vadhagh who had come here from Gwlas-cor-Gwrys, the city in the Pyramid, who knew something of these matters. He detenriined that, if the dreams and the voices continued, he would set off on a journey to one of the other castles where the Vadhagh lived and there seek help. At least, he reasoned, there was a good chance that the voices would not follow him from Castle Erorn.

His rides grew wilder and he tired all his horses. He went further and further away from Castle Erorn, as if he hoped to find something. However, he found nothing but the sea to his west and the moors and the forests to his east, south and north. No Mabden villages were here, no farms or even the huts of charcoal-burners or foresters, for the Mabden had no desire to settle in Vadhagh lands, not since the fall of King Lyr-a-Brode. And was that really what he sought, Corum wondered. Mabden company? Did his voices and his dreams represent his desire to share adventures with mortals again? The thought was painful to him. He saw Rhalina clearly for a moment, as she had been in her youth—radiant, proud and strong.

With his sword he slashed at the stems of ferns; with his lance he drove at the boles of trees; with his bow he shot at rocks—a parody of battle. Sometimes he would fall upon the grass and sob.

And still the voices called him:

“Corum! Corum! Help us!”

‘ ‘Help you? ” he screamed back. “It is Corum who needs help!” “Corum. Corum. Corum …”

Had he ever heard those voices before? Had he been in a situation like this one before?

It seemed to Corum that he had; yet, as he recalled all the events in his life, he knew that it could not be true. He had never heard those voices, dreamed those dreams. And still he was sure that he remembered them from another time. Perhaps from another incarnation? Was he truly the Champion Eternal?

Weary, sometimes ragged, sometimes without his weapons, sometimes leading a limping horse, Corum would return to Castle Erorn by the sea, and the pounding of the waves in the caves below Erorn would be like the pounding of his own heart.

His servants would try to comfort him, to restrain him, to ask what ailed him. He would not reply. He was civil but would tell them nothing of his torment. He had no way of telling them, and he knew that they would not understand, even if he could find a way.

And then, one day, as he stumbled across the threshold of the castle courtyard, barely able to keep himself from falling, the servants told him that a visitor had come to Castle Erorn. He waited for Corum in one of the music chambers which Corum had ordered closed for some years. The sweetness of the music had reminded him too much of Rhalina, whose favorite chamber it had been.

‘His name?” Corum muttered.’ ‘Is he Mabden or Vadhagh? His purpose here?”

“He would tell us nothing, master, save that he was either your friend or your enemy—that you would know which.”

“Friend or enemy? A riddler? An entertainer? He’ll have hard work here …”

Yet Corum was curious, almost grateful for the mystery. Before he went to the music room he washed himself and put on fresh clothes and drank a little wine until he felt revived enough to face the stranger.

The harps and the organs and the crystals in the music chamber had begun their symphony. He heard the faint notes of a familiar tune drifting up to his apartments, as the long silence was broken. At once he felt overwhelmed by depression and determined that he would not do the stranger the courtesy of receiving him. But something in Corum wanted to listen to that music. He had composed it himself for Rhalina’s birthday one year. It expressed much of the tenderness he had felt towards her. She had then been ninety years old, with her mind and body as sound as they had ever been: ‘You keep me young, Corum,’ she had said.

Tears came into Corum’s single eye. He brushed them away, cursing the visitor who had revived such memories. The man was a boor, coming uninvited to Castle Erorn, opening up a deliberately closed chamber. How could he justify such actions?

And then Corum wondered if this were a Nhadragh, for the Nhadragh, he had heard, still hated him. Those who had remained alive after King Lyr-a-Brode’s conquests had degenerated into semi-sentience. Had one of them remembered just enough of his hatred to seek out Corum to slay him? Corum felt something close to elation at this thought. He would relish a fight.

And so he strapped on his silver hand and his slender sword before he went down the ramp to the music chamber.

As he neared the chamber the music grew louder and louder, more complex and more exquisite. Corum had to struggle against it as he might struggle against a strong wind.

He entered the room. Its colors swirled and danced with the music. It was so bright that Corum was momentarily blinded. Blinking, he peered around the chamber, seeking his visitor.

Corum saw the man at last. He was sitting in the shadows, absorbed in the music. Corum went amongst the huge harps, the organs and the crystals, touching them and quieting them until, at last, there was complete silence. The colors faded from the room. The man rose from his corner and began to approach. He was small of stature and walked with a distinct swagger. He had a wide-brimmed hat upon his head and a deformity on his right shoulder, perhaps a hump. His face was entirely obscured by the brim of the hat, yet Corum began to suspect that he knew the man.