The Chronicles of Castle Brass Read online

  The Chronicles Of Castle Brass

  Count Brass

  The Champion of Garathorm

  The Quest for Tanelorn

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Introduction to The Michael Moorcock Collection

  John Clute

  HE IS NOW over 70, enough time for most careers to start and end in, enough time to fit in an occasional half-decade or so of silence to mark off the big years. Silence happens. I don’t think I know an author who doesn’t fear silence like the plague; most of us, if we live long enough, can remember a bad blank year or so, or more. Not Michael Moorcock. Except for some worrying surgery on his toes in recent years, he seems not to have taken time off to breathe the air of peace and panic. There has been no time to spare. The nearly 60 years of his active career seems to have been too short to fit everything in: the teenage comics; the editing jobs; the pulp fiction; the reinvented heroic fantasies; the Eternal Champion; the deep Jerry Cornelius riffs; NEW WORLDS; the 1970s/1980s flow of stories and novels, dozens upon dozens of them in every category of modern fantastika; the tales of the dying Earth and the possessing of Jesus; the exercises in postmodernism that turned the world inside out before most of us had begun to guess we were living on the wrong side of things; the invention (more or less) of steampunk; the alternate histories; the Mitteleuropean tales of sexual terror; the deep-city London riffs: the turns and changes and returns and reconfigurations to which he has subjected his oeuvre over the years (he expects this new Collected Edition will fix these transformations in place for good); the late tales where he has been remodelling the intersecting worlds he created in the 1960s in terms of twenty-first-century physics: for starters. If you can’t take the heat, I guess, stay out of the multiverse.

  His life has been full and complicated, a life he has exposed and hidden (like many other prolific authors) throughout his work. In Mother London (1988), though, a nonfantastic novel published at what is now something like the midpoint of his career, it may be possible to find the key to all the other selves who made the 100 books. There are three protagonists in the tale, which is set from about 1940 to about 1988 in the suburbs and inner runnels of the vast metropolis of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. The oldest of these protagonists is Joseph Kiss, a flamboyant self-advertising fin-de-siècle figure of substantial girth and a fantasticating relationship to the world: he is Michael Moorcock, seen with genial bite as a kind of G.K. Chesterton without the wearying punch-line paradoxes. The youngest of the three is David Mummery, a haunted introspective half-insane denizen of a secret London of trials and runes and codes and magic: he too is Michael Moorcock, seen through a glass, darkly. And there is Mary Gasalee, a kind of holy-innocent and survivor, blessed with a luminous clarity of insight, so that in all her apparent ignorance of the onrushing secular world she is more deeply wise than other folk: she is also Michael Moorcock, Moorcock when young as viewed from the wry middle years of 1988. When we read the book, we are reading a book of instructions for the assembly of a London writer. The Moorcock we put together from this choice of portraits is amused and bemused at the vision of himself; he is a phenomenon of flamboyance and introspection, a poseur and a solitary, a dreamer and a doer, a multitude and a singleton. But only the three Moorcocks in this book, working together, could have written all the other books.

  It all began – as it does for David Mummery in Mother London – in South London, in a subtopian stretch of villas called Mitcham, in 1939. In early childhood, he experienced the Blitz, and never forgot the extraordinariness of being a participant – however minute – in the great drama; all around him, as though the world were being dismantled nightly, darkness and blackout would descend, bombs fall, buildings and streets disappear; and in the morning, as though a new universe had taken over from the old one and the world had become portals, the sun would rise on glinting rubble, abandoned tricycles, men and women going about their daily tasks as though nothing had happened, strange shards of ruin poking into altered air. From a very early age, Michael Moorcock’s security reposed in a sense that everything might change, in the blinking of an eye, and be rejourneyed the next day (or the next book). Though as a writer he has certainly elucidated the fears and alarums of life in Aftermath Britain, it does seem that his very early years were marked by the epiphanies of war, rather than the inflictions of despair and beclouding amnesia most adults necessarily experienced. After the war ended, his parents separated, and the young Moorcock began to attend a pretty wide variety of schools, several of which he seems to have been expelled from, and as soon as he could legally do so he began to work full time, up north in London’s heart, which he only left when he moved to Texas (with intervals in Paris) in the early 1990s, from where (to jump briefly up the decades) he continues to cast a Martian eye: as with most exiles, Moorcock’s intensest anatomies of his homeland date from after his cunning departure.

  But back again to the beginning (just as though we were rimming a multiverse). Starting in the 1950s there was the comics and pulp work for Fleetway Publications; there was the first book (Caribbean Crisis, 1962) as by Desmond Reid, co-written with his early friend the artist James Cawthorn (1929–2008); there was marriage, with the writer Hilary Bailey (they divorced in 1978), three children, a heated existence in the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill Gate region of London he was later to populate with Jerry Cornelius and his vast family; there was the editing of NEW WORLDS, which began in 1964 and became the heartbeat of the British New Wave two years later as writers like Brian W. Aldiss and J.G. Ballard, reaching their early prime, made it into a tympanum, as young American writers like Thomas M. Disch, John T. Sladek, Norman Spinrad and Pamela Zoline found a home in London for material they could not publish in America, and new British writers like M. John Harrison and Charles Platt began their careers in its pages; but before that there was Elric. With The Stealer of Souls (1963) andStormbringer (1965), the multiverse began to flicker into view, and the Eternal Champion (whom Elric parodied and embodied) began properly to ransack the worlds in his fight against a greater Chaos than the great dance could sustain. There was also the first SF novel, The Sundered Worlds (1965), but in the 1960s SF was a difficult nut to demolish for Moorcock: he would bide his time.

  We come to the heart of the matter. Jerry Cornelius, who first appears in The Final Programme (1968) – which assembles and coordinates material first published a few years earlier in NEW WORLDS – is a deliberate solarisation of the albino Elric, who was himself a mocking solarisation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, or rather of the mighty-thew-headed Conan created for profit by Howard epigones: Moorcock rarely mocks the true quill. Cornelius, who reaches his first and most telling apotheosis in the four novels comprising The Cornelius Quartet, remains his most distinctive and perhaps most original single creation: a wide boy, an agent, a flaneur, a bad musician, a shopper, a shapechanger, a trans, a spy in the house of London: a toxic palimpsest on whom and through whom the zeitgeist inscribes surreal conjugations of ‘message’. Jerry Cornelius gives head to Elric.

  The life continued apace. By 1970, with NEW WORLDS on its last legs, multiverse fantasies and experimental novels poured forth; Moorcock and Hilary Bailey began to live separately, though he moved, in fact, only around the corner, where he set up house with Jill Riches, who would become his second wife; there was a second home in Yorkshire, but London remained his central base. The Condition of Muzak (1977), which is the fourth Cornelius novel, andGloriana; or, The Unfulfill’d Queen (1978), which transfigures the first Elizabeth into a kinked Astraea, marked perhaps the high point of his career as a writer of fiction whose font lay in genre or its mutations – marked perhaps the furthest bournes he could transgress while remaining
within the perimeters of fantasy (though within those bournes vast stretches of territory remained and would, continually, be explored). During these years he sometimes wore a leather jacket constructed out of numerous patches of varicoloured material, and it sometimes seemed perfectly fitting that he bore the semblance, as his jacket flickered and fuzzed from across a room or road, of an illustrated man, a map, a thing of shreds and patches, a student fleshed from dreams. Like the stories he told, he seemed to be more than one thing. To use a term frequently applied (by me at least) to twenty-first-century fiction, he seemed equipoisal: which is to say that, through all his genre-hopping and genre-mixing and genre-transcending and genre-loyal returnings to old pitches, he was never still, because ‘equipoise’ is all about making stories move. As with his stories, he cannot be pinned down, because he is not in one place. In person and in his work, it has always been sink or swim: like a shark, or a dancer, or an equilibrist…

  The marriage with Jill Riches came to an end. He married Linda Steele in 1983; they remain married. The Colonel Pyat books, Byzantium Endures (1981), The Laughter of Carthage(1984), Jerusalem Commands (1992) and The Vengeance of Rome (2006), dominated these years, along with Mother London. As these books, which are non-fantastic, are not included in the current Michael Moorcock Collection, it might be worth noting here that, in their insistence on the irreducible difficulty of gaining anything like true sight, they represent Moorcock’s mature modernist take on what one might call the rag-and-bone shop of the world itself; and that the huge ornate postmodern edifice of his multiverse loosens us from that world, gives us room to breathe, to juggle our strategies for living – allows us ultimately to escape from prison (to use a phrase from a writer he does not respect, J.R.R. Tolkien, for whom the twentieth century was a prison train bound for hell). What Moorcock may best be remembered for in the end is the (perhaps unique) interplay between modernism and postmodernism in his work. (But a plethora of discordant understandings makes these terms hard to use; so enough of them.) In the end, one might just say that Moorcock’s work as a whole represents an extraordinarily multifarious execution of the fantasist’s main task: which is to get us out of here.

  Recent decades saw a continuation of the multifarious, but with a more intensely applied methodology. The late volumes of the long Elric saga, and the Second Ether sequence of meta-fantasies – Blood: A Southern Fantasy (1995), Fabulous Harbours (1995) and The War Amongst the Angels: An Autobiographical Story (1996) – brood on the real world and the multiverse through the lens of Chaos Theory: the closer you get to the world, the less you describe it. The Metatemporal Detective (2007) – a narrative in the Steampunk mode Moorcock had previewed as long ago as The Warlord of the Air (1971) and The Land Leviathan (1974) – continues the process, sometimes dizzyingly: as though the reader inhabited the eye of a camera increasing its focus on a closely observed reality while its bogey simultaneously wheels it backwards from the desired rapport: an old Kurasawa trick here amplified into a tool of conspectus, fantasy eyed and (once again) rejourneyed, this time through the lens of SF.

  We reach the second decade of the twenty-first century, time still to make things new, but also time to sort. There are dozens of titles in The Michael Moorcock Collection that have not been listed in this short space, much less trawled for tidbits. The various avatars of the Eternal Champion – Elric, Kane of Old Mars, Hawkmoon, Count Brass, Corum, Von Bek – differ vastly from one another. Hawkmoon is a bit of a berk; Corum is a steely solitary at the End of Time: the joys and doleurs of the interplays amongst them can only be experienced through immersion. And the Dancers at the End of Time books, and the Nomad of the Time Stream books, and the Karl Glogauer books, and all the others. They are here now, a 100 books that make up one book. They have been fixed for reading. It is time to enter the multiverse and see the world.

  John Clute

  September 2012

  Table of Contents

  Count Brass

  Book One - Old Friends

  Chapter One - The Haunting Of Dorian Hawkmoon

  Chapter Two - The Meeting In The Marsh

  Chapter Three - A Letter From Queen Flana

  Chapter Four - A Company Of The Dead

  Book Two - Old Enemies

  Chapter One - A Speaking Pyramid

  Chapter Two - The Return Of The Pyramid

  Chapter Three - The Journey To Soryandum

  Chapter Four - A Further Encounter With Another Old Enemy

  Chapter Five - Some Other Londra

  Chapter Six - Another Victim

  Book Three - Old Dreams And New

  Chapter One - The World Half-Made

  Chapter Two - A Museum Of The Living And The Dead

  Chapter Three - Count Brass Chooses To Live

  Chapter Four - A Great Wind Blowing

  Chapter Five - Something Of A Dream

  Epilogue

  The Champion of Garathorm

  Dedication

  Quotes

  Book One - Departures

  Chapter One - Representations And Possibilities

  Chapter Two - Count Brass Goes A-Journeying

  Chapter Three - A Lady All In Armour

  Chapter Four - News From Beyond The Bulgar Mountains

  Chapter Five - Reluctantly - A Quest

  Book Two - A Homecoming

  Chapter One - Ilian Of Garathorm

  Chapter Two - Outlaws Of A Thousand Spheres

  Chapter Three - A Meeting In The Forest

  Chapter Four - A Pact Is Made

  Chapter Five - The Raid On Virinthorm

  Chapter Six - The Wrong Champion

  Book Three - A Leavetaking

  Chapter One - Sweet Battle, Triumphant Vengeance

  Chapter Two - An Impossible Death

  Chapter Three - The Swaying Of The Balance

  Chapter Four - The Soul Gem

  The Quest for Tanelorn

  Dedication

  Book One - The World Insane: A Champion Of Dreams

  Chapter One - An Old Friend At Castle Brass

  Chapter Two - On The Silver Bridge

  Chapter Three - In The Mist

  Chapter Four - The Gathering Of The Wise

  Chapter Five - On The Shore

  Book Two - Sailing Between The Worlds: 3 Sailing For Tanelorn...

  Chapter One - The Waiting Warriors

  Chapter Two - The Blind Captain

  Chapter Three - The Island Of Shadows

  Chapter Four - A City Haunted By Itself

  Chapter Five - Agak And Gagak

  Chapter Six - The Battle For Everything

  Chapter Seven - The Heroes Part

  Book Three - In Which Many Things Are Found To Be One Thing

  Chapter One - Prisoners In Shadows

  Chapter Two - In Tanelorn

  Chapter Three - The Deaths Of The Undying

  Chapter Four - Captives Of The Sword

  Chapter Five - The Captain And The Steersman

  Chapter Six - The Sword And The Staff

  Chapter Seven - Going Back To Castle Brass

  About the Author

  Count Brass

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  www.sfgateway.com

  Book One

  Old Friends

  Chapter One

  The Haunting of Dorian Hawkmoon

  It had taken all these five years to restore the land of Kamarg, to repopulate its marshes with the giant scarlet flamingoes, the wild white bulls and the horned great horses which had once teemed here before the coming of the Dark Empire's bestial armies. It had taken all these five years to rebuild the watchtowers of the borders, to put up the towns and to erect tall Castle Brass in all its massive, masculine beauty. And, if anything, in these five years of peace, the walls were built stronger, the watchtowers taller, for, as Dorian Hawkmoon had said once to Queen Flana of Granbretan, the world was still wild and there was still little justice in it.

  Dorian Hawkmoon, the Duke of Koln, and his bride, Yisselda,
Countess of Brass, old, dead Count Brass's daughter, were the only two who remained of that group of heroes who had served the Runestaff against the Dark Empire and finally defeated Granbretan in the great Battle of Londra, putting Queen Flana, sad Queen Flana, upon the throne so that she might guide her cruel and decadent nation towards humanity and vitality.

  Count Brass had died slaying three barons (Adaz Promp, Mygel Hoist and Saka Gerden) and in turn was slain by a spearman of the Order of the Goat.

  Oladahn of the Bulgar Mountains, beastman and loyal friend of Hawkmoon, had been hacked to pieces by the war axes of the Order of the Pig.

  Bowgentle, the unwarlike, the philosophical, had been savaged and decapitated by Pigs, Goats and Hounds to the number of twelve.

  Huillam D'Averc, mocker of everything, whose only faith had seemed to be in his own lack of good health, who had loved and been loved by Queen Flana, had died most ironically, riding to his love and being slain by one of her soldiers who thought D'Averc attacked her.

  Four heroes died. Thousands of other heroes, unnamed in the histories, but brave, also died in the service of the Runestaff, in the destruction of the Dark Empire tyranny.

  And a great villain died. Baron Meliadus of Kroiden, most ambitious, most ambivalent, most awful of all the aristocrats of Granbretan, died upon the sword of Hawkmoon, died beneath the edge of the mystical Sword of the Dawn.

  And the ruined world seemed free.

  But that had been five years hence. Much had passed since then. Two children had been born to Hawkmoon and the Countess of Brass. They were called Manfred, who had red hair and his grandfather's voice and health and stood to be his grandfather's size and strength, and Yarmila, who had golden hair and her mother's gentle toughness of will, as well as her beauty. They were Brass stock, there was little in them of the Dukes of Koln, and perhaps that was why Dorian Hawkmoon loved his children so fiercely and so well.