At this point his meditations were interrupted by the unmistakable voice of the little bitch, her accent low and urgent: “Let him wake. Oh, let him wake before the dawn.”
Barber sat up and reached for the ache spot on his head. Malacea was facing him across the stream. She leaped to her feet: “Oh, my mortal lover!” she cried. “Come back; I know a spell to cure your pain.”
“Yeah?” said Barber with hostility. “I know how you’d do it, too—turn me over to that Dracula boyfriend of yours and have him fix me up so I wouldn’t have to worry about any pains anymore.”
The light, whether of moon or coming day, was bright enough to show two big tears coming out on her cheek. “Ah, never, I swear it. My heart rose when you escaped the clutches of that demon Plum.”
“That demon what?”
“Plum. I dare not but do as he asks. All the plums are hard and evil, but this one worst. His heart has dried and he wants a mortal blood transfusion.”
“And you help him get it. Is that the idea?” Barber’s voice was implacable.
“Oh . . .” Her fingers twisted against each other. “How can I make myself clean before you? How could I know that among the mortals that come to this wood would be my own dear love? Oh, come back, and help me repent; I’ll make it good to you.”
Barber, hunting among the long grasses for his dropped shoe, cocked an inward ear toward the alarm bell of his instinct for lies. Not a tinkle. She really meant it; or perhaps that new sixth sense merely did not work on emotional matters. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ll stay over here out of reach of your friend. What happened to my wand?”
“You need not fear him. Listen, I’ll prove my faith by giving you his secret. Wait for the sun; when daylight’s abroad he cannot stir from his tree. You have only to eat of his fruit, then he can never harm you after. A hundred and fifty paces upstream will bring you to where the tree can be seen; it has a broken top.”
“Unh.” Barber found the shoe and put it on. It was wet. “Good. I’ll wait till daylight and then try it.”
“But come to me now. Oh hurry!” She looked up at the sky, now fully rose-colored along the horizon. “It’s growing daybreak and I must go back to my own tree.”
“What became of my wand?” repeated Barber.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
She was weeping openly now. Barber, who had seen enough of both night-club life and diplomacy to develop some cynicism about feminine tears, flicked dried mud off his clothes without looking at her. Malacea stamped her foot: “The Plum took it; where, I do not know. So you have my full confession; won’t you—”
“No, I won’t,” said Barber. It seemed to him that his new sense of truth or no-truth was confused. Possibly Malacea suspected but did not definitely know where the wand was. He found a fallen trunk, tested it for solidity, and sitting down, opened the provision bag. Everything all right there, so far. Between bites, he said: “If you really want to impress me, you might tell me how to get to the Kobold Hills.”
“Go straight on. Beyond the wood, you will reach a plain; walk through it for an hour or two, and when you see the hills blue on the horizon, you are near. But there be devils and strange things in that plain; I can see to guide you only so for.”
Barber frowned, but there was no indication of anything but truth in her words. Watching him narrowly from beyond the stream, she suddenly became all gaiety.
“Oh, you’ll return; I see it now. I am your fate and you mine. We are all, all avatars, though you are mortal and I only a tree sprite who can be seen through when the light is strong. Farewell then, for a little time.”
“Good-by.” He was beginning to relent a little; after all, she had been decent as far as she knew how.
“No, not good-by. We’ll meet again and strangely.” The tinkling laugh that had accompanied her first words when they met ran three notes up a scale and two down. “And you, mortal, will live weirdly before you lose yourself in finding yourself.”
She took three steps among the crowding trees and was hidden, but behind her for a moment there floated the words of a song:
“. . . fairies turn to men;
When he touches the three—”
It was cut off abruptly and the wood went utterly silent as the first level ray of sunlight struck across the rapids in the stream.
Barber, dawdling over the remains of his breakfast, reflected that the downright approach of this child of nature was perhaps more appropriate to certain phases of international relations than to personal ones. There was something peculiar about the personal relations of Fairyland anyway, now that he came to think of it. The winged girl in Oberon’s palace and, now, this one had practically thrown themselves at him. He could not honestly flatter himself into believing it was because of any innate attractiveness of his own. Of course, his mortal appearance might be attractive to fairy girls . . . No—the Queen’s attendant had described him as preternaturally ugly, if he remembered right.
There was also Jib and Cyril, both busy, who had been willing enough to drop their concerns and help him when he asked in the right way. It was as though Fairyland psychological reaction worked like a slot machine; you dropped in a penny, and unless it was counterfeit, got a stick of gum. No, not quite. There seemed to be some choice of reaction. He remembered Titania catching herself midway in a reply to one of Oberon’s taunts, and the latter’s abrupt shift to meet her mood—Malacea’s lightning change from tears to happiness. It was more like a game of chess; you played pawn to king four on the board of personal relations and your opposite number, though not compelled to imitate you exactly, had to make one of a series of standard moves or find himself compromised.
If this held true as a general rule—Hold the boat, Malacea had just offered him a chance to give check to the king. Eat some of the dry-hearted Plum’s fruit, and then be damned to him. He would need any such protections he could get after having lost Titania’s wand, for he did not in the least doubt that queenly lady’s word about his coming to “misadventured piteous overthrow” as a result. Action!
The plum tree was there, all right, standing pretty much by itself, as though none of the neighboring foliage cared to approach the monster. It was a very seedy old tree indeed, with pink blotches of fungus on its straggling leaves.
Barber waded the stream and approached it cautiously, ready to bolt. It took some inspection to reveal any fruit at all on it, but he finally located a couple—flat, wrinkly things, but plums. There was no sign of the wand. He wondered if the plum were hollow and the wand inside. It would be interesting to investigate; for that matter, it would be interesting to chop down the tree itself. That ought to settle Mr. Plum-spook’s hash. But he had no ax, not even a knife; no matches to experiment with burning the thing down, and was not enough of a Boy Scout to start a fire by rubbing sticks.
The plums were well out of reach. A cast among the other trees gave him a dead branch, but it was not long enough. Two or three efforts to cast it javelin-wise gave no result.
Barber dropped the branch, wiped his hands, gripped the trunk of the Plum and started to climb. The bark seemed to crawl beneath his hands—imagination probably. About him the malformed leaves rustled and the big old trunk heaved ever so slightly, as though in the grip of a stormwind. It creaked till he wondered whether it would break beneath him.
The branch with the fruit was one of the uppermost, and when he reached it Barber was driven to the uncomfortable expedient of swinging out along it, hand after hand, with his toes balancing him on a lighter branch beneath. Under his weight the upper branch curved till he had difficulty keeping his grip, but the distance to the ground was not so great that he need fear a fall, so he kept on. Toward the end, he let go with one hand and grabbed. The fruit floated irritatingly away from his fingers, but at the fourth snatch he made it and tucked the Plum in his jacket. Another effort gave him a second, and he dropped to the ground.
Close up, the Plum looked
even more unappetizing than from a distance, and a tentative nibble assured him that it tasted even worse—like a sour dried prune. No two ways about it, though; when you have to—
Cr-rrack! He looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of a big dead branch, unaccountably broken loose from the tree’s morbid top, hurtling down at him. He jumped like a grasshopper, and sought the shelter of a friendly oak to finish his unpleasant snack. As he ate, he noted that the back of his jacket seemed tighter. Perhaps the wings were growing; but if so they were no use to him yet, so he set out to trudge his way along the banks of the stream.
The forest was very quiet in the dawnlight, almost as quiet as the strange parkland through which he had passed before, and he moved on without incident for a couple of hours till the trees on the left bank began to thin. Among their trunks he could see a line of yellow-brown where they stopped altogether, so crossed and made toward it. But when he got nearer he perceived that what he had taken for the packed earth of a sun-splashed plain was in fact a low, brown wall of some kind of adobe. It enclosed a space considerable both in length and in width, and entirely filled with rank on rank of gravestones, all alike in size except one very large one which faced a land of gate a hundred yards from them.
Barber found the sight surprising; he had always supposed the inhabitants of Fairyland to be immortal, or nearly so. The wall was only about knee-high. He hopped over it and went to investigate this curious cemetery, in which the ground was not humped as it would be over real graves. The stones were very old; all the inscriptions had been weathered from them except a letter here and there. To make matters worse, the first two he examined had been lettered in Greek, a language with which he had had no contact since college days. From the next the lettering had disappeared entirely; there was only just visible the incised outline of a violin and a pair of musical notes. The next bore a book open, with the letters VERI, a gap, and AS. Then came one that had a crude representation of a telescope, another with faded armorial bearings, and one with the academic mortarboard cap. All had some symbol, and as Barber wandered among them he was struck by the fact that none of these symbols could by any imagination be considered either military or religious in character.
He made his way toward the larger and more elaborate stone at the gate. Like the rest it had been nearly effaced; unlike them it still bore a few traces of lettering beneath a coat of arms now nearly wiped out. Peering close Barber was able to make out in the crumbling stone:
“When the redbeard comes again
Then shall . . . urn . . .
When he . . . lac . . .
He sh . . . faces.”
The illegibility of it was made still greater by the fact that it had originally been carved in old letter like the typeface of a German book. Barber puzzled over it for awhile but could make nothing of it, nor did there seem to be any other sign of life but a couple of lizards sunning themselves on the enclosure wall. So he left the graveyard and continued on his way.
Beyond, the trees really were thinning out along the left bank of the stream. “Go straight on,” Malacea had said, which he took to mean on along the river. It divided and flung one brooklike branch back among the trees, so he kept to the other. Along this fork the country was flat and soon became dismally bare, with the trees petering out into gray-green shrubs that had a greasy look under the now-high sun. Once or twice Barber caught a glimpse of something moving on the horizon, but too far and indistinctly for any details to be made out. The stream dropped away from him, down to the bottom of a stony arroyo, where it finally disappeared altogether.
It was hot. Barber called upon his foodbag for flasks of water, not without some trepidation, for in this region of no shade it had been impossible to keep the sun away from it. His respect for the frenetic little King’s ability rose as the bag unfailingly answered his desires, but when he tried the container for cold bottled beer he got only a bitter liquid that made him quickly return to water.
But he was making progress. Looking back, he could make out a dark line of green rimming the horizon—the forest. In spite of his hard night, he felt strong and full of energy.
He plodded resolutely on. The dust-green shrubs had now mostly gone, the ground was all sand and pebbles with bunches of coarse grass here and there, across which he steered by the sun. The loneliness and silence of the landscape were beginning to weigh on him. Even the presence of the too-affectionate apple sprite would have been a relief, he decided, and began to wonder unhappily about what happened to people lost in deserts. They went cuckoo, didn’t they? He couldn’t remember, but to keep his mind off the empty landscape, he composed an imaginary report to the Foreign Relations Committee on conditions in England. It was not much help; he had written that report too many times before.
He tried composing scurrilous limericks on the lords of Britain and imagined himself reciting them in Parliament. But this device also broke down on the failure to find a rhyme for “Norfolk,” for it would never do to forget the premier Duke of the British Empire.
Miles of nothing.
Suppose he had been misdirected or had lost his way? Suppose he were isolated for keeps in this ironing board of a landscape? Oberon’s bag would keep him in food and water, perhaps indefinitely, perhaps only to the next shaping, while he walked, walked, walked. Forever was a long time.
His beard would grow long and . . . whoa, there was a possibility of escape. His wings, those absurd shoulder-blade bunches, would grow too. He craned his neck around to look over his shoulder. There was certainly some kind of projection present, swelling his jacket to hunchback proportions. He tried using the new muscles at his chest, and could just see the projections wiggle. Interesting. He wondered if, when the wings came out, the ability to use them would grow too, or whether he would have to be pushed off a high place to learn how, like an eaglet from its nest. Who would catch him if he fell?
Consideration of the question diverted him till he noticed that his shadow had lengthened across the featureless plain and the sun was setting. Evidently he was to be caught out there for the night. Malacea had said it was only a walk of an hour or two—something wrong somewhere. He hoped it was only that she was a tree sprite and could not know this desert, but all the same the fear of this eternal emptiness came back and sat at the edge of his mind, waiting to be invited into the center.
There was no help for it at this moment. For better or worse he was stuck for the night. He sat down where he was, waited till the red ball of fire dipped under the horizon and then fished in the foodbag. Unlike the forest night, this one was brilliant with stars; though Barber, looking aloft, could recognize none of the constellations.
Stars. He and Kaja had picnicked under stars like that once. In sentimental memory, and to have something to do, he imagined her sharing the meal with him, and set aside the better half for her. But she was not really there, his conversational sallies remained unanswered, so Barber ended by eating both halves of the meal himself.
Since there was nothing else to do, he scratched hip and shoulder holes in the sand and went to sleep.
The sun woke him by hitting him squarely in the eye. He stood up, stiff from his comfortless bed, and looked around. There was a line of hills, rimming the distance in plain sight, and they could only be the Kobold Hills, his goal at last. He emitted a shout of delight which was lost in the immense silence, and requisitioning a flask of water from the bag, started briskly toward the hills.
But after an hour’s walk they were dismayingly smaller and more distant than before. It might, of course, be optical illusion. He had heard of such things in desert countries, though his personal experience extended no farther than the plateau of central Spain, where there was always a church or a house or a sleepy muleteer to serve as a point of reference. But it might equally be something connected with the peculiar physics or geography of this realm. He looked near and then far beside him, searching for some feature by which he could orient himself.
The result was d
isconcerting. The desert close by his side moved back as he strode along, as any well-behaved desert should. But that in the distance crawled slowly forward past him, faster than he. It was as though the narrow strip on which he walked were an endless belt conveyor, moving back faster than he went forward. The optical effect was the familiar one he had experienced as a boy, when he had looked for a long time from a train window. When the train stopped at a station the whole landscape would seem to crawl for a moment in a direction opposite to its previous motion. Only this time it really was moving.
He sat down discouragedly and flapped his wingstubs in annoyance. No result. He tried thinking his way through the problem, but that did not get him any forwarder.
As he did so, a movement caught his eye in the direction of the hills. A little accumulation of blue-black clouds was piling and tossing over there, their summits glorious where the sunlight turned them golden. There would be wind from the front of that storm, thought Barber, and looked down toward the desert in front of him. Sure enough four—a dozen—twenty—any number of little dust clouds were jigging and whirling across the desert toward him, and his eye gladly followed this movement in the waste.
“It’s up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown
dust devils go,
The dun he fled like a stag of ten, but the mare
like a barren doe . . .”
Barber quoted to himself.
One of the whirlwinds was riding past within ten feet of him. Suddenly its progress halted, and as though that braking had converted all its energy into angular velocity, spun more and more violently, denser and denser, till it collapsed into a dirt-colored mannikin, not over two feet high, its head covered with wobbly spikes.
Land of Unreason Page 8