Michael Moorcock returns triumphantly to his best-known character, the albino prince, Elric of Melniboni. In the first of three new tales of the doomed swordsman, Moorcock plaits differing realities effortlessly, mixing the eternal city of Tanelorn with the rise of Hitler's Germany. In the 1930s, Count Ulric von Bek has been harried and imprisoned by the Nazis for a black sword that is part of his family's history. Almost dead, he is rescued from Sachsenhausen concentration camp by two unknown figures--an Englishman called Bastable and an albino girl, Oona. With them, he journeys to a strange, underground world. And there he meets a figure known to him only from dreams, in which they are somehow the same person, yet separate: Elric of Melniboni. As their stories intertwine, von Bek comes to know of Elric's past, and their very beings become one. Sometimes Elric is in control, sometimes Ulric, and the neverending struggle between Law and Chaos must be fought in both their universes.

CHAPTER ONE

Stolen Dreams

My name is Ulric, Graf von Bek, and I am the last of my earthly line. An unhealthy child, cursed with the family disease of albinism, I was born and raised in Bek, Saxony, in the early years of the century. I was trained to rule our province wisely and justly, to preserve the status quo, in the best traditions of the Lutheran Church.

My mother died giving birth to me. My father perished in a ghastly fire, when our old tower was partially destroyed. My brothers were all far older than I, and engaged mostly in military diplomacy abroad, so the estate, it was thought, would be my responsibility. It was not expected that I would wish to expose, any longer than necessary, my strange, ruby eyes to the light of common day. I accepted this sentence of virtual imprisonment as my due. It had been suffered by many ancestors before me. There were terrible tales of what had become of twin albino children born to my great-grandmother.

Any unease I had in this role was soon subdued as, in my questioning years, I made friends with the local Catholic priest and became an obsessive fencer. I would discuss theology with Fra. Cornelius in the morning and practice my swordplay every afternoon. All my bafflement and frustrations were translated into learning that subtle and dangerous art. Not the sort of silly swashbuckling boy-braggadocio nonsense affected by the nouveaux riches and ennobled bürgermeisters who perform half-invented rituals of ludicrous manliness at Heidelberg.

No real lover of the sword would subject the instrument to such vulgar, clattering nonsense. With precious few affectations, I hope, I became a true swordsman, an expert in the art of the duel to the death. For in the end, existentialist that I am, entropy alone is the only enemy worth challenging, to conquer entropy is to reach a compromise with death, always the ultimate victor in our conflicts.

There's something to be said for dedicating one's life to an impossible cause. Perhaps an easier decision for a solitary albino aristocrat full of the idealism of previous centuries, disliked by his contemporaries and a discomfort to his tenants. One given to reading and brooding. But not unaware, never unaware, that outside the old, thick walls of Bek, in my rich and complex Germany, the world was beginning to march to simplistic tunes, numbing the race mind so that it would deceive itself into making war again. Into destroying itself again.

Instinctively, still a teenager, and after an inspiring school trip to the Nile Valley and other great sites of our civilization, I plunged deeply into archaic studies.

Old Bek grew all around me. A towered manor house to which rooms and buildings had been added over the centuries, she emerged like a tree from the lush grounds and thickly wooded hills of Bek, surrounded by the cedars, poplars and cypresses my crusader forebears had brought from the Holy Land, by the Saxon oaks into which my earlier ancestors had bound their souls, so that they and the world were rooted in the same earth. Those ancestors had first fought against Charlemagne and then fought with him. They had sent two sons to Roncesvalles. They had been Irish pirates. They had served King Ethelred of England.

My tutor was old von Asch, black, shrunken and gnarled, whom my brothers called The Walnut, whose family had been smiths and swordsmen since the time their first ancestor struck the bronze weapon. He loved me. I was a vessel for his experience.

 

Michael Moorcock was born in England in 1939. In 1964 he became editor

of New Worlds magazine, one of the seminal publishers of the "New

Wave" of writing that changed the face of science fiction. He has

written more than 50 novels, both genre and mainstream. He now lives in

Bastrop, Texas, with his wife Linda.

 

The Dreamthief's Daughter by Michael Moorcock
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