Asolingas said he was homesick for Africa. Since his soul had already died and returned there, he supposed it would not be long before he followed it. He knew he would be killed sometime after we made our final landfall.
"Then why do you go?" I asked.
"Because I believe that my soul awaits me on the other side," he said.
A sigh came from starboard as the wind rose. I heard a gull. It would not be long before we made landfall.
In Greenland the colonists were so poor that the best we could get for ourselves was their water, a little sour beer and a weary goat that seemed glad to be slaughtered. Greenland settlements were notoriously impoverished, the settlers inbred and in-
sular, forever at odds with the native tribes over their small resources. I said to Gunnar how I hoped that the entrance into Nifelheim was close. We had provisions for two weeks at most. He reassured me. "Where we're going, there won't be time for eating and drinking."
When we put out from Greenland, heading west, the weather was already growling. A sea which had been slightly more than choppy began sending massive waves against the bleak beaches. We had considerable trouble getting into open water. We left behind perhaps the last European colony, struggling no more in that harsh world. Gunnar often joked that he was God's kindest angel. "Do you know what they call this blade in Lombardy? Saint Michael's Justice." He began telling me a story which rambled off into nothing. He seemed to absorb himself psychically in the mountainous waves. There was a massive, slow repetition to the sea, even as it howled and thrashed and tossed us a hundred feet into the air, even as the wind and rain whistled in the rigging, and we dived another hundred feet into a white-tipped, swirling valley of water.
I grew used to the larger rhythm to which the ship moved. I sensed the security and strength which lay beneath all that unruly ocean. Now I knew what Gunnar and his men knew, why the ship was thought to be a magic one. She slipped through all that weather like a barracuda, virtually oblivious and scarcely touched by it. She was so beautifully constructed that she never held water between waves and almost always rose up as another wave came down. The exhilaration of sailing on such an astonishingly well-made vessel, trusting her more than one trusted oneself, was something I had never experienced before. The nearest experience I knew was flying on a Phoorn dragon. I began to understand Gunnar's reckless confidence. As I stood wrapped in my blue sea-cloak and stared into the face of the gale, I looked at the ship's figurehead in a new light. Was this some memory of flight?
Gunnar began swinging his way along the running ropes, a great bellow of glee issuing from within his faceless helm. Clearly
he was almost drunk on the experience. His head flung back, his laughter did not stop. At length he turned to me and gripped my arm. "By God, Prince Elric, we are going to be heroes, you and I."
Any pleasure I had felt up to that moment immediately dissipated. 1 could think of nothing worse than being remembered for my association with Gunnar the Doomed.
The Viking moved his head, like a scenting beast. "She is there," he said. "I know she is there. And you and I will find her. But only one of us will keep her. Whoever it is shall be the final martyr."
His hand fell on my back. Then he returned to the stern and his tiller.
I was, for a moment, reminded of my mother's death, of my father's hatred. I recalled my cousin's bloody end, weeping as the soul was sucked from her. Who was "she"? Who did he mean?
The waves crashed down again, and up we rose on the next, constantly moving ahead of the turbulence so that sometimes it really did seem we flew over the water. The ship's half-reefed sail would catch the wind and act like a wing, allowing Gunnar to touch the tiller this way and that rapidly, and swing her with the water. I have never seen a captain before or since who could handle his ship with his fingertips, who could issue a command and have it instantly followed in any weather. Gunnar boasted that however many he lost on land, he almost never lost a man at sea.
Foam drenched the decks, settled on the shoulders and thighs of the oarsmen. Foam flecked the troubled air. Black, red, brown and yellow backs bent and straightened like so many identical cogs, water and sweat pouring over them. Above, the sky was torn with wet, ragged clouds, boiling and black. I shivered in my cloak. I longed to be able to call Mishashaaa or any of the other elementals, to calm this storm by magic means. But I was already using my magic to inhabit this dream! The power of Ravenbrand was potent only in battle. To attempt anything else might result in uncontrollable consequences.
All day and all night we plunged on through the wild Atlantic waters. We used oars, tiller and sails to answer every change of the wind and, with the help of Gunnar's Moorish lodestone, now ran like an arrow due north until Gunnar called me into his deckhouse and showed me the instrument. "There's sorcery here," he insisted. "Some bastard's bewitched the thing!"
The stone was spinning in its glass, completely erratic.
"There's no other explanation," Gunnar said. "The place has a protector. Some Lord of the Higher Worlds..."
A howl came from the deck, and we both burst out of the deerskin deckhouse to see Leif the Larger, his face a frozen mask, staring at a vast head erupting from the wild water, glaring with apparent malevolence at our vulnerable little ship. It was human, and it filled the horizon. Gunnar grasped the Norseman by the shoulder and slapped him viciously. "Fool! It's a score of miles away. It's stone! It's on the shore!" But at the same time Gunnar was lifting his head to look upward. . . and then upward again. There was no question that what we saw was a gigantic face, the eyes staring sightlessly down from under the cloud which covered its forehead. We were too small for it to see. We were specks of dust in comparison. What Gunnar had noted was true. The thing did not seem to be alive. Presumably, therefore, we had nothing to fear from it. It was not a sentient human or god, rather an extraordinarily detailed sculpture in textured and delicately colored granite.
Leif the Larger drew in a breath and mumbled something into his golden beard. Then he went to the side and threw up. The ship was still tossing about in the ocean, was still on top of the waves. She continued the course we had set before our lodestar was enchanted. A course which took us directly towards that gigantic head.
When I pointed this out to Gunnar he shrugged. "Perhaps it's your giant who lives at the North Pole? We must trust the fates," he said. "You must have faith, Elric, to tread your path, to follow your myth."
And then, in an instant, the head opened its vast, black
mouth and the sea poured down into it, taking us relentlessly towards a horizon which was dark, glistening and thoroughly organic.
Gunnar roared his frustration and his despair. He made every effort to turn the ship. His men back-rowed heroically. But we were being drawn down into that fleshy pit.
Gunnar shook his fist against the fates. He seemed more affronted than terrified. "Damn you!" Then he began laughing. "Can't you see what's happening to us, Elric? We're being swalbwedl"
It was true. We might have been the contents of a cup of water with which some monstrous ogre refreshed himself. I found that I, too, was laughing. The situation seemed irredeemably comical to me. And yet there was every chance I was about to perish. If I did so, I would perish in both realities.
All at once we were totally engulfed. The boat banged and buffeted, as if against the banks of a river. From somewhere amidships rose the sound of a deep, chanting song, its melody older than the world. Asolingas, the Ashanti, clearly believed his own particular moment had come.