Elysia (2 page)

'Armandra,' the Warlord sighed now, pausing in his troubled striding to reach out and gently grasp her shoulders in his massive paws
—
the delicate-seeming shoulders of this incredible woman, human spawn of the vastly inhuman Wind-Walker — 'we've had all this before. Don't you remember the last time? And didn't you entertain just such doubts then? And what came of all your fears, eh?'

As she gazed back steadily into his eyes, so his words brought memories:

When last de Marigny was here and before, they had all four — Henri and Moreen, Hank and Armandra — gone out on their impossible, peril-fraught mission to the moons of Borea, she had had plenty of time to talk to de Marigny and get to know him. She had questioned him minutely in all aspects of his past and his wanderings in the time-clock, adventures of which the Warlord had already apprised her, but which she found more immediately thrilling when retold by de Marigny. And it had been perfectly obvious to the Woman of the Winds that never before had she met a man like this one. Even in the Motherworld he had been something of an anachronism, the perfect gentleman in a world where morals and all standards of common courtesy were continually falling, but here on Borea his like had been unknown.

It had not required much effort on the handsome Earthman's part to convince her that his presence on Borea was purely accidental, that he had not deliberately sought out Hank Silberhutte in order to perform some fantastic interplanetary, hyperdimensional rescue! No, for he was on his way to Elysia, home of the Elder Gods, and only the tides of Fate had washed him ashore on Borea's chilly strand . .

Armandra came back to the present. 'Oh, yes, I remember,' she said, unsmiling. And she tossed her long red tresses and flashed her oval green eyes. 'And I remember what followed. It finished on Dromos in the caves of the ice-priests, where you and Henri very nearly died and I almost became handmaiden to my monstrous father! As for poor Moreen, if that
beast
had had his way ...' She shuddered and left it unfinished.

`But none of that happened,' the Warlord patiently reminded. 'Instead we taught Ithaqua a lesson. That was the second time he'd tried it on, and the second time we'd bruised his ego. And now he stands off, regards the plateau and its peoples with a little more respect, spends his time and energies in more profitable pursuits. In other words, the last time de Marigny visited here it worked to the good of the plateau. Remember, too, he saved my life, snatched me from Ithaqua's wolf-warriors — who without a doubt would have given me into the hands of their terrible master.'

'He saved
your
life?' she flared up, and for the briefest moment a tinge of carmine flashed in her green eyes. 'And how often did you save his, at great risk? Oh, no, Lord Silberhutte,' (she only ever called him that when he was in the wrong), 'there's no debt between you there!'

`He hasn't come back to collect on any debts, Armandra,' the Texan released her, turned away, clenched his great hands behind his back. 'He wants nothing of us except our hospitality. He's come back as he went a friend — come back to be with people, for however short a time — before he goes off again on this crazy quest of his. Next to Earth, which he put behind him the day he left it, we're the closest he's got to family. That's why he's come back: because this is
,
as near as he'll get to home. At least until he finds Titus Crow in Elysia.
If
he finds him!'

Armandra stepped round in front of him. Draped in a deep-pile, white fur smock, still her figure was the answer to any man's dream, the body of an exceedingly beautiful
woman. Almost unchanged from the first time Silberhutte had seen her nearly six years ago, Armandra was Complete Woman. Her long, full body was a wonder of half-seen, half-imagined curves growing out of the perfect pillars of her thighs; her neck, framed in the red, flowing silk of her hair, was long and slender, adorned with a large medallion of gold; her face was oval as her eyes and classically boned. With her straight nose, delicately rounded at its tip, and her Cupid's bow of a mouth, perfect in shape if perhaps a shade too ample, the Woman of the Winds was a beautiful picture of femininity. But where her flesh was pale as snow, those great eyes of hers were green as the boundless. northern oceans of Earth. Yes, and They were just as deep.

That was Armandra. When she smiled it brought the sunlight into the Warlord's darkest hours, and when she frowned ... then the fiery hair of her head was wont to have an eerie life of its own, and her eyes might narrow and take on a warning tint other than ocean green: the carmine passed down to her from her inhuman father.

She was frowning now, but not in anger. In fear, perhaps? Fear of losing this man of the Motherworld, this Warlord, this Texan whom she loved so desperately.

`And what of you, Hank?' she asked at last. 'What of
your
home?' Her frown did not lighten, and Silberhutte knew what was coining next 'Do you, too, feel trapped here, marooned? You guard your thoughts well, my husband, but I would know the truth. The plateau must seem a very small place compared to what you've told -me of those mighty city-hives of the Motherworld. And now, with de Marigny returned him and his time-clock -'

He took her in his arms, lifted her up as surely and as easily as her familiar winds when she walked in the sky, then lowered her down until his mouth closed on hers with a kiss. And after long moments he slid her down his hard-muscled body until her sandalled feet touched the furs of the floor; and before she could speak again, he said:

'This - is my home. You -
are
my life. Borea's my world now, Armandra. My woman, my son, my people are here. If I could go down to the pens and take Morda and ride him out a single mile across the plain and into the Motherworld - if it was as easy, as that - I wouldn't do it. I might ... but only if I could take you with me. And for all its many wonders, the Motherworld is .a common place. It has nothing like you. What would its thronging people make .of a woman of unearthly beauty who walks on the wind and commands the very lightnings?' And he paused.

He might have said more: how Armandra would be lost on Earth, bewildered, a complete outsider. An alien. A curiosity. A seven-day wonder. And finally a freak. But saying it, even thinking it, hurt him worse than it would hurt her. Which was too much. And so instead he finished with:

'I love and
will love
only you. Where you are I must be. Be it Borea, heaven or hell, if you are there it's the place for me. But surely you can see that while I have found my home - the only home I need - our friend Henri-Laurent de Marigny has not yet found his. What you call my "trouble" is in fact his trouble. If you see pain in me, it's only pain for him. Moreen says he's known as The Searcher in a hundred inhabited worlds. Beings who are not men, who don't
even think
like men, understand his quest and have named him for it. They feel for him. And should. I hide my feelings? No, Armandra, I'm not a child to be homesick. Nor is de Marigny, not for a home he's never seen. But it's his destiny - yes, and it's driving him to distraction. My. pain is this: that I don't know how to help him.'

Now Armandra felt wretched. She knew that she did not have to look into her man's mind, that everything he had said was right in there. Yes, this strange world with its weird auroras and inhabited moons
was
his world now but he
was still a man of the Motherworld, and so felt for his fellow man, de Marigny The Searcher.

`Hank, I ' she began, her voice full of shame. But before she could continue, and because he would not let her humble herself

'I know, I know.' And he patted her, head.

'But how can we help him?' She desired only to put. things right now. 'Should I commune with my familiar winds? For they have talked to winds from across the farthest reaches of eternity. Perhaps they have heard of this Elysia.'

Silberhutte nodded. 'It's worth a try.' Then he stood up straighter and squared his shoulders, finally gave a snort and chuckled to himself. Armandra looked at him quizzically, but he only smiled and shook his head.

'What is it?' she asked, raising the corner of a golden eyebrow.

He chickled again, then shrugged. 'Once - oh, six years ago - I set out on a vengeance quest to track down and destroy your father. I knew Ithaqua was real: not supernatural but a Being of alien spaces and dimensions. That was my
total
belief in matters concerning things not of Earth: that Ithaqua was real, and with him others of an incredibly ancient order or pantheon of Beings, the Cthulhu Cycle Deities. Also, I was a telepath. But the rest of me was Texan, and
all
of me was Earthman, in many ways mundane as any other. And instead of tracking Ithaqua he tracked me and carried me and my crew here to Borea. Since when -

'Yes?'

'Why, see how my spheres have widened! And what's become of this vengeful, telepathic but otherwise "mundane" Texan now, eh? Warlord of polyglot peoples on an alien world; adventurer in strange moons; mate to the daughter of the one he vowed to destroy, a woman who walks on the wind and "communes" with puffs of ether from the stars? And when you say:
have a word with
some winds I know from the other side of eternity," this man nods and answers, "sure, it's worth a try!" ' And now he burst out laughing.

Barely understanding this sudden bout of self-directed humour, but carried along by it anyway, Armandra joined the laughter; and she hugged him and clung to him for a moment. Then, arm in arm, they set out together to find de Marigny and tell him how she would try to help him .. .

Henri-Laurent de Marigny was aware of some of the concern he caused in the plateau and among its inhabitants, but aware of it only on the periphery of his consciousness. His ever-advancing obsession would not allow for more than that. No, for now the quest was all that mattered. He knew it, and could do nothing about it. He suspected, too, that but for Moreen he might well have cracked long before now, that she alone was his sanity. Together they had visited many worlds with near-human, half-human, and totally inhuman inhabitants, might easily have settled on several. Oh, yes, for there were wonderful, beautiful islands galore out there in the infinite seas of space. But while they'd rested in these planets and found peace in them, it had never, lasted. Always de Marigny would wake with a cry one morning, sit up and cast about, discover that yesterday's wonders and last night's marvels had turned drab on him and lost their flavour, and his eyes would grow dull while the bright dream he had dreamed receded. And then they would go to the time-clock, and at his command its panel would open and spill out that familiar, pulsing purplish glow, and it would be time to move on.

And of course he knew that it would be exactly the same here on Bore
.
But at least there were friends here, completely
human
friends; which was why, after these last three years of futile search, he had returned. Earth ... ? That thought had never seriously occurred to him. The

Earth was beautiful but diseased, polluted by men, the one planet of all the worlds de Marigny knew whose inhabitants were systematically raping and ruining her. Indeed; even. Earth's dreamlands were beginning to suffer!

And that
was
a thought, an idea, which had occurred more than once: why not give up all Elysian aspirations and dwell instead
in
the lands of Earth's dreams? Fine, but there are perils even in the dreamlands. And the very least of them lay in waking up! For de Marigny knew that there are certain dreams from which men never wake ...

The dreamlands, strange dimension formed by the subconscious longings of men. A
real
place or world, as de Marigny now knew.

Gazing down from a rock-hewn bartizan at the rim of the plateau, now he smiled — however wryly as his mind went back again to the adventures he had known in Earth's dreamlands with Titus Crow and Tiania of Elysia. For peering from on high like this was not unlike (and yet, in another sense, totally unlike) the vertiginous view from cloud-floating Serannian's wharves of pink-veined marble, where that fabulous city was built in the sky and looked out over an ethereal sea of glowing cirrus and cirrocumulus:

And remembering that wonderful aerial city, de Marigny's mind could not help but conjure, too, Kuranes: 'Lord of Ooth-Nargei, Celephais, and the Sky around Serannian.' Kuranes, yes! — and Randolph Carter, perhaps Earth's greatest dreamer, a king himself now in Ilek-Vad — and who better for the job, since he himself had probably dreamed Ilek-Vad in the first place?

Other lands and cities sprang to mind: Ulthar, where no man may kill a cat, and the Isle of Oriab across the Southern Sea, with its principal port Bahama. Aye, incredible places all, and their peoples fabulous as the dreams that Made them; but not all dreams are pleasant, and the dreamlands had their share of nightmares, too.

Now de Marigny thought of Dylath-Leen in the Bad Days and shuddered, and he tasted something bitter in his mouth as he recalled names and places such as Zura of the Charnel Gardens, the Vale of Pnoth, Kadath in the Cold Waste and Leng's forbidden plateau and hideous hinterland. Especially Leng, where squat, horned beast-men cavorted about balefires to the whine of demon flutes and the bone-dry rattle of crazed crotala