The Worm Ouroboros by Eric Rücker Eddison (english readers txt) 📕

But Corund stirred not. After a space, he filled another cup, and

drank, and sat on. And Gro sat motionless before him. At last Corund

rose heavily from his seat, and pushing Gro’s sword back across the

table, “Thou’dst best to bed,” said he. “But the night air’s o’er

shrewd for thine ague. Sleep on my couch tonight.”

The day dawned cold and gray, and with the dawn Corund ordered his

lines round about Eshgrar Ogo and sat down for a siege. For ten days

he sat before the burg, and nought befell from dawn till night, from

night till dawn: only the sentinels walked on the walls and Corund’s

folk guarded their lines. On the eleventh day came a bank of fog

rolling westward from the Moruna, chill and dank, blotting out the

features of the land. Snow fell, and the fog hung on the land, and

night came of such a pitchy blackness that even by torchlight a man

might not see his hand stretched forth at arm’s length before him.

Five days the fog held. On the fifth night, it being the twenty-fourth

of November, in the darkness of the third hour after midnight, the

alarm was sounded and Corund summoned by a runner from the north with

word that a sally was made from Eshgrar Ogo, and the lines bursten

through in that quarter, and fighting going forward in the mirk.

Corund was scarce harnessed and gotten forth into the night, when a

second runner came hot-foot from the south with tidings of a great

fight thereaway. All was confounded in the dark, and nought certain,

save that the Demons were broken out from Eshgrar Ogo. In a space, as

Corund came with his folk to the northern quarter and joined in the

fight, came a message from his son Heming that Spitfire and a number

with him were broken out at the other side and gotten away westward,

and a great band chasing him back towards Outer Impland; and therewith

that more than an hundred Demons were surrounded and penned in by the

shore of the lakes, and the burg entered and taken by Corund’s folk;

but of Juss and Brandoch Daha no certain news, save that they were not

of Spitfire’s company, but were with those against whom Corund went in

person, having fared forth northaway. So went the battle through the

night. Corund himself had sight of Juss, and exchanged shots with him

with twirl-spears in a lifting of the fog toward dawn, and a son of

his bare witness of Brandoch Daha in that same quarter, and had gotten

a great wound from him.

When night was past, and the Witches returned from the pursuit, Corund

straitly questioned his officers, and went himself about the

battlefield hearing each man’s story and viewing the slain. Those

Demons that were hemmed against the lakes had all lost their lives,

and some were taken up dead in other parts, and some few alive. These

would his officers let slay, but Corund said, “Since I am king in

Impland, till that the King receive it of me, it is not this handful

of earth-lice shall shake my safety here; and I may well give them

their lives, that fought sturdily against us.” So he gave them peace.

And he said unto Gro, “Better that for every Demon dead in Ogo Morveo

ten should rise up against us, if but Juss only and Brandoch Daha were

slain.”

“I’ll be in the tale with thee, if thou wilt proclaim them dead,” said

Gro. “And nothing is likelier, if they be gone with but two or three

on to the Moruna, than that such a tale should come true ere it were

told in Carcë.”

“Pshaw!” said Corund, “to the devil with such false feathers. What’s

done shows brave enow without them: Impland conquered, Juss’s army

minced to a gallimaufry, himself and Brandoch Daha chased like runaway

thralls up on the Moruna. Where if devils tear them, ‘tis my best wish

come true. If not, thou’lt hear of them, be sure. Dost think these can

survive on earth and not raise a racket that shall be heard from hence

to Carcë?”

Of the coming of the Lords of Demonland to

Morna Moruna, whence they beheld the

Zimiamvian Mountains, seen also by Gro in years

gone by; and of the wonders seen by them and

perils undergone and deeds done in their attempt

on Koshtra Pivrarcha, the which alone of all

Earth’s mountains looketh down upon Koshtra

Belorn; and none shall ascend up into Koshtra

Belorn that hath not first looked down upon her.

NOW it is to be said of Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha that they,

finding themselves parted from their people in the fog, and utterly

unable to find them, when the last sound of battle had died away wiped

and put up their bloody swords and set forth at a great pace eastward.

Only Mivarsh fared with them of all their following. His lips were

drawn back a little, showing his teeth, but he carried hims elf

proudly as one who being resolved to die walks with a quiet mind to

his destruction. Day after day they journeyed, sometimes in clear

weather, sometimes in mist or sleet, over the changeless desert,

without a landmark, save here a little sluggish river, or here a piece

of rising ground, or a pond, or a clump of rocks: small things which

faded from sight amid the waste ere they were passed by a half-mile’s

distance. So was each day like yesterday, drawing to a morrow like to

it again. And always fear walked at their heel and sat beside them

sleeping: clanking of wings heard above the wind, a brooding hush of

menace in the sunshine, and noises out of the void of darkness as of

teeth chattering. So came they on the twentieth day to Morna Moruna,

and stood at even in the sorrowful twilight by the little round

castle, silent on Omprenne Edge.

From their feet the cliffs dropped sheer. Strange it was, standing on

that frozen lip of the Moruna, as on the limit of the world, to gaze

southward on a land of summer, and to breathe faint summer airs

blowing up from blossoming trees and flower-clad alps. In the depths a

carpet of huge tree-tops clothed a vast stretch of country, through

the midst of which, seen here and there in a bend of silver among the

woods, the Bhavinan bore the waters of a thousand secret mountain

solitudes down to an unknown sea. Beyond the river the deep woods,

blue with distance, swelled to feathery hilltops with some sharper-featured loftier heights bodying cloudily beyond them. The Demons

strained their eyes searching the curtain of mystery behind and above

those foothills; but the great peaks, like great ladies, shrouded

themselves against their curious gaze, and no glimpse was shown them

of the snows.

Surely to be in Morna Moruna was to be in the death chamber of some

once lovely presence. Stains of fire were on the walls. The fair

gallery of open wood-work that ran above the main hall was burnt

through and partly fallen in ruin, the blackened ends of the beams

that held it jutting blindly in the gap. Among the wreck of carved

chairs and benches, broken and worm-eaten, some shreds of figured

tapestries rotted, the home now of beetles and spiders. Patches of

colour, faded lines, mildewed and damp with the corruption of two

hundred years, lingered to be the memorials, like the mummied skeleton

of a king’s daughter long ago untimely dead, of sweet gracious

paintings on the walls. Five nights and five days the Demons and

Mivarsh dwelt in Morna Moruna, inured to portents till they marked

them as little as men mark swallows at their window. In the still

night were flames seen, and flying forms dim in the moonlit air; and

in moonless nights unstarred, moans heard and gibbering accents:

prodigies beside their beds, and ridings in the sky, and fleshless

fingers plucking at Juss unseen when he went forth to make question of

the night.

Cloud and mist abode ever in the south, and only the foothills showed

of the great ranges beyond Bhavinan. But on the evening of the sixth

day before Yule, it being the nineteenth of December when Betelgeuze

stands at midnight on the meridian, a wind blew out of the northwest

with changing fits of sleet and sunshine. Day was fading as they stood

above the cliff. All the forest land was blue with shades of

approaching night: the river was dull silver: the wooded heights afar

mingled their outlines with the towers and banks of turbulent deep

blue vapour that hurtled in ceaseless passage through the upper air.

Suddenly a window opened in the clouds to a space of clean wan

wind-swept sky high above the shaggy hills. Surely Juss caught his breath

in that moment, to see those deathless ones where they shone

pavilioned in the pellucid air, far, vast, and lonely, most like to

creatures of unascended heaven, of wind and of fire all compact, too

pure to have aught of the gross elements of earth or water. It was as

if the rose-red light of sundown had been frozen to crystal and these

hewn from it to abide to everlasting, strong and unchangeable amid the

welter of earthborn mists below and tumultuous sky above them. The

rift ran wider, eastward and westward, opening on more peaks and

sunset-kindled snows. And a rainbow leaning to the south was like a

sword of glory across the vision.

Motionless, like hawks staring from that high place of prospect, Juss

and Brandoch Daha looked on the mountains of their desire.

Juss spake, haltingly as one talking in a dream. “The sweet smell,

this gusty wind, the very stone thy foot standeth on: I know them all

before. There’s not a night since we sailed out of Lookinghaven that I

have not beheld in sleep these mountains and known their names.”

“Who told thee their names?” asked Lord Brandoch Daha.

“My dream,” Juss answered. “And first I dreamed it in mine own bed in

Galing when I came home from guesting with thee last June. And they be

true dreams that are dreamed there.” And he said, “Seest thou where

the foothills part to a dark valley that runneth deep into the chain,

and the mountains are bare to view from crown to foot? Mark where,

beyond the nearer range, bleakvisaged precipices, cobweb-streaked with

huge snow corridors, rise to a rampart where the rock towers stand

against the sky. This is the great ridge of Koshtra Pivrarcha, and the

loftiest of those spires his secret mountaintop.”

As he spoke, his eye followed the line of the eastern ridge, where the

towers, like dark gods going down from heaven, plunge to a parapet

which runs level above a curtain of avalanche-fluted snow. He fell

silent as his gaze rested on the sister peak that east of the gap

flamed skyward in wild cliffs to an airy snowy summit, softlined as a

maiden’s cheek, purer than dew, lovelier than a dream.

While they looked the sunset fires died out upon the mountains,

leaving only pale hues of death and silence. “If thy dream,” said Lord

Brandoch Daha, “conducted thee down this Edge, over the Bhavinan,

through yonder woods and hills, up through the leagues of ice and

frozen rock that stand betwixt us and the main ridge, up by the right

road to the topmost snows of Koshtra Belorn: that were a dream

indeed.”

“All this it showed me,” said Juss, “up to the lowest rocks of the

great north buttress