hands fumbled around his neck.
He couldn’t breathe; but he was not concerned about breathing. He was worried about standing. Richard had suddenly forgotten how to stand. It was a relief to discover how soft the brick path he was standing on had become as it slowly came up to embrace him.
They were standing together under a night sky hung with a thousand huge stars, by the ruins of what might once have been an ancient temple.
Elric’s ruby eyes stared down at him. They looked, Richard thought, like the eyes of a particularly vicious white rabbit that Richard had once had, before it gnawed through the wire of the cage and fled into the Sussex countryside to terrify innocent foxes. His skin was perfectly white; his armor, ornate and elegant, traced with intricate patterns, perfectly black. His fine white hair blew about his shoulders as if in a breeze, but the air was still.
—So you want to be a companion to heroes? he asked. His voice was gentler than Richard had imagined it would be.
Richard nodded.
Elric put one long finger beneath Richard’s chin, lifted his face up. Blood eyes, thought Richard. Blood eyes.
—You’re no companion, boy, he said in the High Speech of Melnibone.
Richard had always known he would understand the High Speech when he heard it, even if his Latin and French had always been weak.
— Well, what am I, then? he asked. Please tell me. Please?
Elric made no response. He walked away from Richard, into the ruined temple.
Richard ran after him.
Inside the temple Richard found a life waiting for him, all ready to be worn and lived, and inside that life, another. Each life he tried on, he slipped into and it pulled him farther in, farther away from the world he came from; one by one, existence following existence, rivers of dreams and fields of stars, a hawk with a sparrow clutched in its talons flies low above the grass, and here are tiny intricate people waiting for him to fill their heads with life, and thousands of years pass and he is engaged in strange work of great importance and sharp beauty, and he is loved, and he is honored, and then a pull, a sharp tug, and it’s . . .
. . . it was like coming up from the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool. Stars appeared above him and dropped away and dissolved into blues and greens, and it was with a deep sense of disappointment that he became Richard Grey and came to himself once more, filled with an unfamiliar emotion. The emotion was a specific one, so specific that he was surprised, later, to realize that it did not have its own name: a feeling of disgust and regret at having to return to something he had thought long since done with and abandoned and forgotten and dead.
Richard was lying on the ground, and Lindfield was pulling at the tiny knot of his tie. There were other boys around, faces staring down at him, worried, concerned, scared.
Lindfield pulled the tie loose. Richard struggled to pull air, he gulped it, clawed it into his lungs.
“We thought you were faking. You just went over.” Someone said that.
“Shut up,” said Lindfield. “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Christ. I’m sorry.”
For one moment, Richard thought he was apologizing for having called him back from the world beyond the temple.
Lindfield was terrified, solicitous, desperately worried. He had obviously never almost killed anyone before. As he walked Richard up the stone steps to the matron’s office, Lindfield explained that he had returned from the school tuck-shop, found Richard unconscious on the path, surrounded by curious boys, and had realized what was wrong. Richard rested for a little in the matron’s office, where he was given a bitter soluble aspirin, from a huge jar, in a plastic tumbler of water, then was shown in to the headmaster’s study.
“God, but you look scruffy, Grey!” said the headmaster, puffing irritably on his pipe. “I don’t blame young Lindfield at all. Anyway, he saved your life. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Grey.
“That will be all,” said the headmaster in his cloud of scented smoke.
“Have you picked a religion yet?” asked the school chaplain, Mr. Aliquid.
Richard shook his head. “I’ve got quite a few to choose from,” he admitted.
The school chaplain was also Richard’s biology teacher. He had recently taken Richard’s biology class, fifteen thirteen-year-old boys and Richard, just twelve, across