The Skrayling Tree (16 page)

I was reconciled to what was expected of me. I had no other choice, even though I risked a terrible death. In one moment of
recovered memory, I knew exactly what
had led to this moment. I knew why I was here. I knew what I must now do. I understood it in my bones, in my soul.

I knew what I had to become.

I readied myself for the transformation.

E
LRIC
’
S
S
TORY

Elric, called the White, son of Sadric,

Am the bearer of the black rune-sword.

Long ran the blood rivers ere the reavers came.

Great was the grieving in the widows’ songs.

Souls were stolen by the score

When skraelings sent a thousand to be slain.

T
HE
T
HIRD
E
DDA
, “Elrik’s Saga”

(
TR
. S
HELDRAKE
)

This was my dream of a thousand years

Each moment liv’d, all joys and every fear.

Through turning time and space gone mad,

I sought my magic and my weird.

For a millennium I trailed what I had lost.

My unholy charge, which e’en my soul had cost.

A
USTIN
, A Knight of the Balance”

From Loki’s Yard came Elrik Silverskin

Speaking with old stones he carried wisdom with him

To that fateful, thrice-doomed Diocletian’s hall

And sought for one whom the Norns held thrall.

T
HE
T
HIRD
E
DDA
,

“Elrik’s Saga” (
TR
. W
HELDRAKE
)

T
his is my Dream of a Thousand Years. In reality it lasted a single night, but I lived every moment of the dream, risked every
kind of death in one last attempt to save myself. I describe it here, through Ulric’s agency, because of its relevance to
his tale. It was a dream I dreamed as I hung crucified on the yardarm of Jagreen Lern’s triumphant flagship, the banner of
my own defeat. I had lost my much-needed burden, the demon-blade Stormbringer. I was racking my memory for some means of recovering
the sword to save myself and Moonglum and if possible stop the tide of Chaos which
threatened the Cosmic Balance and would turn the whole of creation inchoate.

In this dream I was searching for the Nihrainian smith who had forged the original black blade. I had heard of one called
Volnir. He lived close to the world’s northern edge in what some called Cimmeria but which you know better as North America.
If I found him, I should then be able to find Stormbringer. By such means I might save myself, my friend and even my world.
I knew the price to be paid for following this dream path.

It would be the second time I had undertaken the Dream of a Thousand Years. To a youth of my genesis it is integral training.
It must be done several times. You go alone into the wilderness. You fast. You meditate and seek the path to the world of
long dreams. These are the worlds which determine and reveal the future. They offer the secrets of your past. In such worlds
one serves more than one rules. Certain knowledge is gained by extended experience as well as study. The Dream of a Thousand
Years provides that experience. The memory of those lifetimes fades, leaving the instinctive wisdom, the occasional nightmare.

One does not learn how to rule the Bright Empire of Melniboné without such service. Only in the extreme could I use my skills.
I knew the danger involved, but I had no choice. The fate of my world depended upon my regaining, for a few moments, control
of the black sword.

To attempt this desperate and unlikely magic, I had summoned all my remaining powers of sorcery. I had allowed
myself to sink into a familiar trance. Jagreen Lern had already provided me with more than sufficient fasting and physical
privations. I sought a supernatural gateway to the dream-worlds, some link to my own youthful past, where our many destinies
are already recorded. And it brought me to your world in the year A.D. 900. I would leave it in the year 2001 upon the death
of a relative.

Riding from Vienna, having but recently returned from a conquered Jerusalem, by October I found myself in the rocky Balkan
mountains, where a tradition of banditry lived side by side with a tradition of hill farming to break the hearts and backs
of most other peasants.

While wolf’s-heads might covet my fine black steel helmet and armor, they had the sense not to test the great claymore I carried
at my side. She was called Ravenbrand, sister to my own Stormbringer. How I came by Ravenbrand in that place is a tale yet
to be told.

Until finding temporary peace with my wife, Zarozinia, I had been a mercenary outlaw in the Young Kingdoms. I had no difficulty
making a good living here. Both the blade and I had reputations few were ready to challenge. Already I had served in Byzantium,
in Egypt, fought Danes in England and Christians in Cadiz. In Jerusalem through a bizarre sequence of events, coveting a particular
horse, I had helped create an order of the Knights Templar, founded by Christians, to ensure that no temporal master should
ever claim the Holy Sepulchre. My interest was not in their religions, which are primitive, but in their politics, which are
complicated. Their prophets constantly make false claims for themselves and their people.

Because their maps put Jerusalem at the heart of the world, I had hoped to find signs of my smith there, but I was following
a fading song. The only smiths I found were shoeing crusader horses or repairing crusader arms. In Vienna I heard at last
of a Norseman who had explored the farther reaches of the world’s edge and might know where to find the Nihrainian smith.

My journey through the Balkans was rarely eventful. I was soon in the Dalmatian hinterland, where the blood feud was the only
real law, and neither Roman, Greek nor Ottoman had much influence. The mountains continued to shelter tribes whose only concession
to the Iron Age was to steal whatever they could from those who carried any kind of metal. They used old warped crossbows
and spears chiefly and were inaccurate with both. But I had no trouble from them. Only one band of hunters attempted to take
my sword from me. Their corpses served to enlighten the others.

I found warm and welcoming lodging at the famous Priory of the Sacred Egg in Dalmatia. Their matronly prioress told me how
Gunnar the Norseman had anchored a month since to make minor repairs at the safe harbor of Isprit on the protected western
coast. She had heard it from one of his homebound sailors. Gunnar, tired of slim pickings in the civilized ports, was determined
to sail north to the colonies Ericsson and his followers had established there. He was obsessed with an idea about a city
made entirely of gold. The sailor, a hardened sea-robber, swore never again to sail under a
captain as evil as Gunnar. The man spent an unlikely amount of the time with the confessor and then left, saying he thought
he would try his luck in the Holy Land.

The Wendish prioress was an educated woman. She said Isprit had known greater glory. The real center of power had shifted
to Venice. The Norseman had made a good choice. Using the local name for the place, the prioress told me the old imperial
port was little more than three days’ ride on a good horse. Two, the buxom Wend offered with a hearty laugh, if I wished to
risk trespassing in Satan’s backyard. She hugged my shoulders in an embrace which might have snapped a less battle-hardened
invalid. I relaxed in her uncomplicated warmth.

The sailor had said the Norseman was anxious to leave port as soon as possible. He feared they should be trapped there. The
Vikings had already angered the Venetians with a raid on Pag, which was successful, and another on Rab, which was not. Those
dreaming old Adriatic ports now relied upon Venice for their prosperity and security and were glad to be off the main crusader
routes. The knights and their armies brought little benefit and much destruction. The pope had called the Crusade in 1148.
He had infected the whole of Europe and Arabia with his own dementia, which he then proceeded to die of. He had invented the
jihad. The Arabs learned his lesson well.

I had no quarrel with any of the warring sects, who all claimed to serve an identical God! Human madness was ever banal. Jerusalem
commanded no more of my interest. I had all I needed from the city. I had my horse, some gold and the odd ring on my finger.
I found
myself dragged briefly into the civic business of the city, but it was of no interest to me now whether or not order had been
restored. Jerusalem was the turbulent heart of all their sects and would no doubt remain so.

Meanwhile Venice expanded her influence wherever the Turk’s attention was distracted. Venice had most reason to see a nuisance
in the Norseman. Her navy had already tried to trap him at Nin, but he had escaped, damaging
The Swan
in the attempt. The Viking would not take the risk of his beloved
Swan
being captured. They said she was the last of her kind, as Gunnar was the last of his. The other Vikings had made themselves
kings and indulged in imperial expansion, missionaries of their Prince of Peace.

While the Crusades drew the world’s attention, the man I sought was raiding through the winter months, taking the rather impoverished
towns of the Adriatic, careful never to attract the wrath of Venice. Until recently neither Byzantines, Turks nor any other
of the various local powers had will or men to send ships after a sea-raider. His skills and ferocity were infamous, his vessel
so fast and lithe in the water many thought her possessed.
The Swan
was as lucky as she was beautiful. But previously neutral or disputed ports now came under the protection of Venice. Venice
was rapidly expanding her trade. The Doge coveted Gunnar’s legendary ship.

Gunnar, I was told, was not even a Viking by birth. He was a Rus. Outlawed from Kiev he’d returned to the reiving trade of
his forefathers more from necessity than romance. Otherwise he was something of a mystery. Evidently
neither Christian, Jew nor Moslem, he had never revealed his face, even to his women. Night and day he wore a reflective steel
mask.

“Sounds a devilish wicked creature, eh?” the prioress said. “Not plague or leprosy, so I gather.”

This matronly prioress, a woman of the world, had, until her retirement, run a brothel in Athens. She had a strong interest
in the doings of the region. It was useful, pleasurable and politic to succumb to her charms, even if she found mine a little
more supernatural than she bargained for. Before retiring, however, we were joined by another intelligent person of some experience,
who was, by coincidence, lodging there for the night.

This guest had arrived a few hours ahead of me. A cheerful, wide-mouthed redheaded little man, he might have been a relative
of my old friend Moonglum. My memory, as always in these dreams, was a little dim regarding any other life. This friar was
a soldier-priest, with a mail shirt under his heavy homespun cassock, a useful-looking sword of Eastern pattern in an elaborate
sheath and boots of fine quality that had seen better days.

He introduced himself in Greek, still the common tongue of the region. Friar Tristelunne had been a Heironymite hermit until
his own natural garrulousness took him back, he said, to society. He now made ends meet as best he could, from marriages,
deaths, funerals, letter writing, and selling the occasional small relic. Sadly there was often more work for his sword than
his prayer book. The Crusade had been a disappointment to him. It no doubt satisfied the Christian appetites of the
city’s liberators, he said, but it wasn’t man’s work. He drew the line at skewering old Jewish women and babies in the name
of the Lord of Light.

Friar Tristelunne knew the Norseman. “Some call him Earl Gunnar the Ill-famed, but he has a dozen worse names. A captain so
cruel only the most desperate and depraved will sail with him.”

A pagan, Gunnar’s attempt to join and profit from the Crusade had been thwarted.

“Even the realistic, pious and opportunistic Saint Clair could not excuse the recruitment of an unreformed worshipper of Woden.”

Gunnar was famous for his treachery, and there was no guarantee that once he reached the Holy Land he would not discover a
better master in Saladin. The only good reason anyone would have to strike an alliance with Gunnar the Doomed was if they
needed a good navigator. “His skills are greater than the Ericssons’. He uses magic lodestones. He takes wild risks and survives
them, even if all his comrades do not. Not only has he reached the rim of the world, he has sailed completely around it.”

Friar Tristelunne had met Earl Gunnar, he said, when the captain was a mercenary in Byzantine employ. The monk had been fascinated
by his mixture of intelligence and rapacity. Indeed, Gunnar had tried to get him involved in a scheme for robbing a wealthy
Irish abbey said to be the home of the
gradal sante.
But his methods ultimately disgusted the Byzantines, who outlawed him. He had worked for the Turkish sultan for a while but
was once again sailing on his own behalf, getting a
new expedition ready. He was busy promising every man who would sail with him that even their fleas’ shares would be worth
a caliph’s ransom.

Friar Tristelunne had considered joining the adventure, but he knew Gunnar to be notoriously treacherous. “The chances of
returning alive to the civilized world would be slim indeed.” He had a passage on a ship leaving Omis for the Peninsula in
a few days’ time. He had decided to strike out for Cordova, where he could get plenty of translation work and study to his
heart’s content at their great library, assuming the caliph was still well disposed towards unbelievers.