"Michael Moorcock - Elric 1 - Elric of Melnibone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

world.


1

A Melancholy King:
A Court Strives to Honour Him

IT IS THE colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his
shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and
moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of
bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby.
The crimson eyes are troubled and sometimes one hand will rise to finger the light helm
which sits upon the white locks: a helm made from some dark, greenish alloy and exquisitely
moulded into the likeness of a dragon about to take wing. And on the hand which absently caresses
the crown there is a ring in which is set a single rare Actorios stone whose core sometimes shifts


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sluggishly and reshapes itself, as if it were sentient smoke and as restless in its jewelled
prison as the young albino on his Ruby Throne.
He looks down the long flight of quartz steps to where his court disports itself, dancing
with such delicacy and whispering grace that it might be a court of ghosts. Mentally he debates
moral issues and in itself this activity divides him from the great majority of his subjects, for
these people are not human.
These are the people of Melnibone, the Dragon Isle, which ruled the world for ten thousand
years and has ceased to rule it for less than five hundred years. And they are cruel and clever
and to them 'morality' means little more than a proper respect for the traditions of a hundred
centuries.
To the young man, four hundred and twenty-eighth in direct line of descent from the first
Sorcerer Emperor of Melnibone, their assumptions seem not only arrogant but foolish; it is plain
that the Dragon Isle has lost most of her power and will soon be threatened, in another century or
two, by a direct conflict with the emerging human nations whom they call, somewhat patronisingly,
the Young Kingdoms. Already pirate fleets have made unsuccessful attacks on Imrryr the Beautiful,
the Dreaming City, capital of the Dragon Isle of Melnibone.
Yet even the emperor's closest friends refuse to discuss the prospect of Melnibone's fall.
They are not pleased when he mentions the idea, considering his remarks not only unthinkable, but
also a singular breach of good taste.
So, alone, the emperor broods. He mourns that his father, Sadric the Eighty-Sixth, did not
sire more children, for then a more suitable monarch might have been available to take his place
on the Ruby Throne. Sadric has been dead a year; whispering a glad welcome to that which came to
claim his soul. Through most of his life Sadric had never known another woman than his wife, for
the Empress had died bringing her sole thin-blooded issue into the world. But, with Melnibonean
emotions (oddly different from those of the human newcomers), Sadric had loved his wife and had
been unable to find pleasure in any other company, even that of the son who had killed her and who
was all that was left of her. By magic potions and the chanting of runes, by rare herbs had her
son been nurtured, his strength sustained artificially by every art known to the Sorcerer Kings of
Melnibone. And he had lived--still lives--thanks to sorcery alone, for he is naturally