Essential Novelists - Eric Rücker Eddison. August Nemo

Snow fell, and the fog hung on the land, and night came of such a pitchy blackness that even by torch-light 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?”

      XII. Koshtra Pivrarcha

      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 himself 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 hill-tops with some sharper-featured loftier heights bodying cloudily beyond them. The Demons strained their eyes searching the curtain of mystery behind and above those foot-hills; 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 foot-hills 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 borne 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, bleak-visaged precipices, cobweb-streaked with huge snow corridors, rise to a rampart where the rock towers stand against the sky. This is the great