Wall of Serpents

by L. Sprague De Camp

  He managed to waylay Lemminkainen's mother to ask her something about the hero's background, bearing in mind that one of the requirements of Kalevala magic was a fairly intimate acquaintance with the person or thing you were going to put a spell on. It was like putting soap in a geyser; the old dame prattled away at a furious pace, and Shea soon discovered that his own memory was by no means the equal of Lemminkainen's, so that he had to re-open the floodgates a couple of times by asking her to repeat.

  The process lasted through another of the gigantic Kalevalan meals; when it was over, Shea retired to the corner of the fireplace with a big mug of beer and tried to work out a chant in iambic tetrameters along the line Lemminkainen had used. The form wasn't very familiar to him and he kept forgetting lines, so he got a charred stick and tried scratching some of the key-words on the floor. While he was about it, the others drifted off to bed. Bayard was already snoring from his pile of bearskins when Shea, satisfied at last, took one of the rushlights, made his way to the door of the hero's bedroom, and in a low voice, chanted his composition.

  As he finished, something seemed to flash before his eyes and he felt a little dizzy. It might be the beer, but he rather thought the spell had worked, and he staggered weakly across to the lock bed, almost missing the bracket when he put the rush-light in it.

  Belphebe sat up, with the skin-blankets gathered close around her chin; her expression was far from welcoming.

  " 'Lo, sweetheart," said Shea. He hiccupped slightly, sat down on the bed and started to take off his boots.

  Belphebe said, "Begone, sir. I'm an honest wife."

  "Huh?" said Shea. "Who ever said you were anything else? And why the fire-alarm?"

  He reached out an arm for her. Belphebe wriggled toward the back of the bed, her voice suddenly going high. "Harold! Walter! Help—I am beset!"

  Shea looked at her in bewilderment. Why was she dodging him? He hadn't done anything. And why was she calling for "Harold" when he was right there?

  Before he could think up anything intelligent to say, Bayard's voice said from behind him, "He's at it again—grab him and tie him up till Harold can do something about it."

  "Is everybody crazy?" demanded Shea, and felt Brodsky grab his arm. He pulled loose and threw a punch at the detective, which the latter dodged with a slight movement of his head. Then the light went out.

  -

  Shea awakened with a splitting headache and a dark brown taste in his mouth. There had been too much beer; and on top of that he was hog-tied even more efficiently than he had bound Lemminkainen the previous night. It was just about dawn; somewhere outside he could hear a clink of metal as a serf went about the early business of the house. The two piles of bearskins near him on the floor would be Bayard and Brodsky.

  "Hey, you guys!" he called. "What happened?"

  One set of snores bit off, a head lifted and Brodsky's voice said, "Listen, glom. We dropped you dead bang. Now dummy up before I let you have it again."

  Shea fumed inwardly. From the feeling at the side of his cranium Brodsky had let him have it all right, and with a peculiarly solid blackjack. The prospect of another treatment had no appeal. But he could not understand why everybody was behaving that way—unless perhaps Lemminkainen had put some kind of spell on him while he was trying to work on the hero. That must be it, Shea decided, and lay uncomfortably, trying to work out a counter-spell in Kalevalan terms. While he was doing that, he must have drifted off into a doze again. He wakened to a roar of laughter.

  It was fully light. The entire household was standing around him, including Belphebe with a worried expression, and the laughter came from Lemminkainen, who was doubled up, choking with mirth. Bayard merely looked surprised.

  The master of the house finally got his breath long enough to say: "Fetch me a pail of water, Kylliki—ho, ho, ho!—and we'll give his proper semblance to this son of Ouhaiola."

  Kylliki brought the pail. Lemminkainen crooned a spell over it, then dashed it into Shea's face.

  "Harold!" cried Belphebe. She threw herself down on Shea and covered his wet and sputtering face with kisses. "You left me burning anxious when you came not to me last night. I had thought you taken in some trap."

  "Help me off with this rope," said Shea. "What do you mean I didn't come to you? How do you think I got in this jam?"

  "Nay, I see it now," said the girl. "You put on the appearance of Lemminkainen. Was it to test me?"

  "Yeah," said Brodsky. "Sorry I sapped you, Shea, but how the hell was we to know?"

  Shea stretched cramped arms and scratched a stubbly chin. He had put a line about "As if we were twins identic" into his spell the previous night, and it appeared now that this had been a mistake. "I was trying a little spell," he said, "and I guess it must have backfired."

  "You were twin to Lemminkainen," said the hero. "Learn, strange man from Ouhaiola, that the laws of magic tell us when a spell is falsely woven, all things wear another semblance. Nevermore seek to equal the master of magic until you know more of the art." He turned. "Mother! Kylliki! We must fall to eating, for we have a journey before us."

  Belphebe said to Shea, "Harold, it is well to be warned. This saying that if a spell isn't accurate it will give another look to things is well to remember."

  "Yeah, the laws of magic are different here. But I wish we'd known that last night."

  They took their places at the table. Lemminkainen was in the best of humors, crowing over Shea's discomfiture and boasting of what he would do to the Pohjolans when he got to them. He seemed to have forgotten about Dunyazad or any other squab.

  His mother looked more and more melancholy. At last she said, "If you will not hear me for your own sake, at least listen for mine. Will you leave your mother alone and unprotected?"

  "Little protection is needed," said the hero. "But such as you need. I give you. This Payart, this Piit shall stay with you. Not that the two together would be of one-third as much use as such a hero as myself."

  "Harold ..." began Bayard, and Brodsky said, "Hey, ain't we going with?"

  Lemminkainen shook his head firmly. "Never shall I consent. This is hero's work. Harolsjei has shown he can be a fighting man of sorts, and this shield-maiden is not the worst archer in the world, though far from so good as I am—but you, frogs of Ouhaio, what can you do?"

  "Listen, lug," said Brodsky, getting to his feet. "Come on outside, and I'll show you. I don't care if you're as big as Finn McCool."

  Bayard put out a restraining hand. "Just a minute, Pete," he said. "I rather think he's right, at that. The kind of activity in which we are skilled is of little value in this continuum, and we might be more useful preserving the base, as it were." He glanced at Kylliki. "Besides, it occurs to me that perhaps you could improve the hour. I doubt if any of these people have heard of predestination and original sin."

  "Say, you're a good head," said Brodsky, sitting down again. "Maybe if we make that grift good, I could get a couple of converts."

  Lemminkainen was already on his feet, leading his way to the door. He took down a long rawhide lariat from a peg and headed out toward the meadow, where the same quartet of animals were gazing. They started walking away; the hero swung the rope and cast it over the nearest antler of an enormous reindeer. Then, chanting something about "Elk of Hiisi," he climbed down the rope and made a loop around the animal's neck with the other end. The reindeer bucked; Lemminkainen gave one jerk and it went down on its knees.

  Pete Brodsky's eyes opened wide. "Lord!" he said softly. "Maybe I copped the right dope not trying to go on the muscle with that ghee."

  Lemminkainen started back across the meadow, leading the reindeer as though it were a puppy. Suddenly he stopped and stiffened. Shea followed his glance and saw that a man, too well dressed for a serf, was standing at the door of the main house, talking to Kylliki. As they came closer, it was apparent that the man was about Lemminkainen's own height, but stouter, with a great gray Santa Claus beard. He turned a beaming smile on th
e hero; they fell into each other's arms and administered powerful slaps on their respective backs, then held each Other at arm's length. The stranger declaimed,

  -

  "Hail, the lively Lemminkainen!

  Is it true thou plan'st to visit

  In the fogbound land of Turja,

  And with help of foreign swordsmen

  Teach old Ilpotar a lesson?"

  -

  They fell into each other's arms and slapped again. "Will you go with me to Pohjola?" bawled Lemminkainen.

  "Nay, I still seek a new wife!" shouted the gray-beard, and both of them laughed as though this were a peculiarly brilliant jest.

  Brodsky and Bayard pressed close to Shea and muttered questions. Shea said, "The old guy must be Vainamoinen, the great minstrel and magician. Damn, if I'd known where to find him, I wouldn't, have made that deal ..."

  "What old guy?" asked Bayard.

  "The one talking to Lemminkainen and whacking him on the back. The one with the beard."

  "I don't see any such person," said Bayard. "He's hardly more than an adolescent, with only the beginnings of whiskers."

  "What!"

  "Not over twenty."

  Shea exclaimed, "Then this must be another magical illusion, and he must be after something. Watch him!"

  The pseudo-Vainamoinen seemed to be trying to question Lemminkainen, but every now and then one of them would get off five or six lines of poetry, they would fall into each other's arms and begin back-slapping again. Suddenly, at the beginning of one of these declamations, Brodsky leaped, catching the stranger's wrist just as it came sweeping down. The detective twisted deftly, pulled the wrist across his own shoulders and stooped forward. The man's feet flew up, he came down on his head in the long grass with a wicked-looking knife in his hand. Brodsky deliberately kicked him in the ribs. The knife dropped.

  The man sat up, a hand pressed to his side and the Santa Claus face twisted with pain. Lemminkainen looked bewildered. Shea said, "Walter says this man is not what he seems. Maybe you better make him use his right face."

  Lemminkainen crooned a spell and spat on the man's head. A sallow young face glowered up sullenly. The hero said, "So, my cousins of Pohjola send me greeting for my journey! Bow your head, spy of Pohjola." He drew his broadsword and felt the edge.

  "Hey!" said Brodsky, "you can't just bump the ghee off like that."

  "Wherefore not?" said Lemminkainen.

  "He ain't gone up or got his bit or nothing. Where's the law?"

  Lemminkainen shook his head in honest puzzlement. "Piit, you are surely the strangest of men, whose words are without meaning. Spy, will you bow your head, or shall I have the serfs deal with you in their manner?"

  Shea said to Pete, "They don't have judges or trials around here. I told you this guy was the big boss and made his own law."

  Pete shook his head. "Some connection man," he said as Lemminkainen's sword whistled through the air. The man's head thumped on the grass in a little fountain of blood.

  "Serfs, bury this carrion!" Lemminkainen shouted, then turned toward the visitors from Ohio. Shea noticed that the expression of shrewdness had come back into his eyes.

  "You have the gratitude of a hero," he said to Brodsky. "Never have I seen a wrestle-hold like that."

  "Jujitsu," said Pete. "Any shamus is hep to it."

  "On our trip to far Pohjola you shall go with us and show it." His eyes swept the group. "Which of you is so skilled in magic as to have penetrated the false shaping that deceived even me, the master of spells?"

  "Why, I guess that was me," said Bayard. "Only I'm not skilled in magic at all. Not the way Harold is."

  Shea said, "Walter, that must be just the reason. That's why Doc Chalmers couldn't get you out of Xanadu, too. And remember how you saw Lemminkainen's mother untying him when none of the rest of us could? You must be too rational or something, so that spells working a change of appearance make no impression on you." He turned to Lemminkainen. "This guy would be more help on the trip than all the rest of us put together."

  The hero appeared to be making a convulsive and prodigious effort to think. Finally, he said, "For your eyes, O Valtarpayart, so be it, since it is not to be concealed that many and strange are the enchantments that beset the road to this land of fog and darkness,"

  Chapter Six

  Under Lemminkainen's direction, the serfs dragged out the largest of four sleds that stood in a shed stacked high with harness and similar gear.

  "What do you know!" said Pete Brodsky. "Is the big shot going to take a sleigh ride?"

  "We all are," said Shea. "It's the only way they have of traveling here."

  The detective shook his head. "If I tell them that back at the precinct, they'll think I'm on the snow myself. Why don't they get wised up and use a heap? Say, Shea, maybe we could dope one out for them! It wouldn't have to be no gold-plated boiler, just something that would buzz. These jakes always go for the big-sounding show."

  "It wouldn't work here, even if we could build it," said Shea. "Any more than your gun. You want to remember that nothing that hasn't been invented yet will."

  He turned to watch the serfs carrying out armfuls of deerskin blankets and vast sacks of food, which they lashed in position with rawhide ropes. Two of them trundled out a keg of beer and added it to the heap. It looked as though the Elk of Hiisi would have his work cut out for him; but, gazing at the gigantic beast, Shea decided that it looked capable of meeting the demand. Lemminkainen bawled orders about the stowing of the gear and warmer clothes for Bayard and Brodsky, whose twentieth-century garments he regarded with unconcealed contempt.

  Presently the tasks were done. All the serfs came out of the building and formed in a line, with Lemminkainen's two women in the middle. He kissed them smackingly, shouted the others into the sled, and jumped in himself. It immediately became crowded. As he cracked his whip and the giant reindeer strained forward, the whole line of serfs and women lifted their heads back and burst into a high-pitched doleful chanting. Most of them seemed to have forgotten the words of what they were supposed to be singing, and those who remembered were off key.

  "Marry!" said Belphebe. "Glad am I, Harold, that these farewells do not come often."

  "So am I," said Shea behind his hand, "but it gets Lemminkainen. The mug's eyes actually have tears in them!"

  "I wish my schnozz was okay again," said Brodsky. "I used to could make them fill a bucket with eye-juice when I gave them 'Mother Machree'."

  "Then I'm rather glad you got the polyp or whatever it is that prevents you doing it now," said Bayard, and grabbed the side of the sled, as the Elk of Hiisi went into a swinging trot and the sled bounced and skidded along the muddy track northward.

  "Now, listen ..." began Brodsky, but just at this moment a flying clod of mud from the animal's hooves took him squarely in the face. "Jesus!" he shouted, then with a glance at Belphebe, "Write it on the ice, will you, lady? That was such a nut-buster I forgot for a minute that we gotta take what's laid out for us in the Lord's book, even if he throws the whole package at us."

  Lemminkainen turned his head. "Strange the language of Ouhaio," he said, "but if I hit rightly your saying, O Piit, it is that none may escape the course laid down for him."

  "You got it," said Brodsky.

  "Then," said the hero, "if one but knew the incantations, one might call forth the spirits of the future to tell what will come of any doing."

  "No, wait ..." began Brodsky, but Shea said, "They can in some continua."

  Bayard said, "It might be worth trying in this one, Harold. If the thought-pattern is right, as you put it, the ability to see consequences might keep us out of a lot of trouble. Don't you mink that with your magic ..."

  They hit a stone just then, and Shea collapsed into the lap of Belphebe, the only member of the party who had been able to find a place to sit in the jouncing sled. It was not that the road was worse than before, but the strain of hanging on and being bumped made it too diffic
ult to talk. The trunks of birch and fir fled past them, close by on both sides, like the palings of a fence, the branches closing off all but fugitive glimpses of the sky overhead. The road zigzagged slightly—not, so far as Shea could determine, for topographic reasons, since the country was flat as an ironing board—because it had never been surveyed. Now and then the forest would clear a little on one side and a farmhouse or a small lake would appear among the trees. Once they met another sled, horse-drawn, and everybody had to dismount and manhandle the vehicles past each other.

  At last, as they reached one of the lakes, Lemminkainen reined in his singular draft-animal, said, "Pause we here a while for eating," jumped out and began to rummage among the food-bags.

  When he had consumed one of the usual Gargantuan snacks, belched and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he announced, "Valtarpayart and Piit, I have allowed you to accompany me on this journey, but learn that for all your arts, you will be worse than useless unless you learn how to fight. I have brought swords for you, and as we take our ease, you shall learn to use them under the greatest master in all Kalevala."