The long-nosed kobold looked up with a sour expression. “Guard Section Eleven. Prisoner found spying in arsenal room. Authorization of Krey, Incoming Section Four,” said the spearman, in the metallic voice of an old-fashioned phonograph.
“Look here,” Barber burst in, “you’re going to have some trouble about this. I’m a perfectly legal ambassador from King Oberon and—”
Long-nose took a new sheet of paper and scribbled. “Your protest is noted and rejected,” he cut in. “All residents of the Kobold Caverns, whether metic or natural, are subject to the same restrictions. I sentence you to—”
“But I’m not a resident!” cried Barber desperately. He could see two of the sword-bearers start toward him, and the thought of what the sentence might be gave him cold shivers. “I’m not even a resident of Fairyland. I’m a mortal.”
Long-nose’s brows elevated. “A mortal! Just a moment, please, I must find a precedent. Though I warn you it will not be so pleasant for you, since you have now added perjury to the other charge. Mortals do not have wings.” He turned to one of the mounds of papers which reached desk-high from the floor, and began shuffling through them. They had not been disturbed for a long time, apparently, for a little cloud of dust rose from them. Long-nose’s face worked convulsively, his head went back, and he emitted a thundering sneeze.
“God bless you,” said Barber automatically.
“Yeeeee!” All the kobolds together joined in the ear-piercing shriek. The spearmen dropped their spears, the swordsmen their swords, the long-nosed judge jumped over the table, and all together they raced for the exits. In two minutes Barber was left alone with the discarded weapons, the mound of papers and the gingerbread carving.
CHAPTER IX
Barber picked up a few of the swords. Oberon had certainly told him not to use force on the kobolds and it seemed that other methods were more effective—why hadn’t he remembered from the beginning that medieval legend always mentioned the name of God as anathema to these people of the hills? Still, one of these swords would be a handy object if he encountered the Plum or other monsters of that ilk. Most of the weapons were too small, but he found a claymore which, being designed for both a kobold’s little fists, was about right for one of his own.
Doorways led in several directions among the forest of lambrequins, and the way he had entered by was not promising. He chose an exit at random and found himself in one of the usual passages, which ran on, dipping and winding past rooms dark and rooms lighted. All were untenanted, and Barber was conscious of something vaguely wrong in the air, as impalpable as a thought. He tried to shake it off, tried to hum “Blue Danube”—and then it came to him what the difference was. The undertone of the hammers, no longer so loud, had changed from the three-four beat of a waltz to the four-four of march time.
The passage also had changed character. Its walls and ceilings were trued off smoothly now, no longer dripped, so that it was like a corridor in an office building. A few yards ahead the feeble light showed a pair of bronze doors with a complex design in massive relief. Barber put his ear to the doors. Not a sound within. He pushed one of them gently. As it swung back on hinges oiled to silence the design impressed him as so familiar that he bent to examine it. A coat of arms—where had he seen the like before, with its repeated crowns and eagles and singular half-a-bear? Of course; it was the design he had seen more than half-effaced, on the big tombstone in the graveyard at the edge of the forest, but here there was no lettering with it. But that was not all; some insistent memory nagged at him till he stopped and hunted it down, tried to localize it. That design ought not to be on a door—when he had seen it before, somewhere, it was worn. Barber gave up, shrugged his shoulders, and pushed in.
Beyond the door was another hall, huge as that of the drinkers, but only feebly lit by a couple of torches. Their flames reflected redly on bright stone of walls and floor; the ceiling was lost in gloom. Barber caught his breath sharply at the sight of what seemed to be human figures in niches all down the walls. Inspection showed them to be suits of kobold-size Gothic armor, with the visors of the armets down so that it was impossible to tell whether they held living creatures.
He stepped over to the nearest and touched it on the plastron with his sword. It gave forth a metallic scrape rather than the ring of hollowness, but remained immobile, and when he tried to lift the visor that mechanism would not budge.
Barber turned toward the far end of the hall. It held a long, low table, with a row of chairs down one side. At the end was a much larger chair, with a low seat but a high, intricately carved back and damask upholstery. It looked like a throne.
Barber walked the length of the hall to examine this throne more closely. There was nothing special about it, but set into the wall behind it was a copper plate with lettering on it. Barber bent to puzzle out the Gothic inscription:
“Of places three
The one you see
Fyrst touched shall bee.”
Meaningless. Or perhaps not quite. He remembered a line of Malacea’s song:
“When he touches the three places—”
Perhaps he was supposed to touch this one. Perhaps this was what Oberon meant by the enterprise he had been brought here for. Just for the hell of it, he reached out and touched the plate with the point of his sword.
Crash!
The room stood out vivid in a blue-white flash of lightning, then pitched into darkness while thunder rumbled to and fro among the caverns like ten thousand cannonballs rolling downstairs. Barber froze while the thunder died, straining his eyes against the black, more than half-expecting, and certainly hoping, that the returning light would show the well-ordered interior of Gurton’s cottage. Every hair follicle on his face tingled till his jaw seemed on fire, and he felt a sudden tug at the back of his jacket where the wingcases were.
The room slowly returned to normal, the fiery pinwheels before his eyes disappearing. He looked round. He could swear that the halberd in the hand of that suit of armor swayed. The torches were guttering out, darkness creeping from above like a spider lowering itself on its thread. He heard a faint, fricative sound that might be breath whistling in and out through the holes of a visor, and realized with a shock that the hammer sounds in the distance had gone altogether dumb.
There was a faint scrape of metal on steel plate and then, small but startling in the silence, the sound of a cough. Barber turned and trotted on tiptoe down the length of that shiny expanse of stone. The end seemed twice as distant as before, like the vanishing point in a diagram showing the laws of perspective. Before he reached it he was frankly running. At the last moment torches gave a final flicker and went out altogether. He made the last few strides in darkness, located a door handle by feel and tugged it open, with a sense of wild relief.
No more than before did he have any idea where he was, and now all those passages were more than ever void, with not even the sound of the forges to keep him company. Neither was the pitch of the tunnels any help; they turned up and down after a fashion that had no logic. But the luck that had run with him through the caverns still held, and after an hour or more of wandering he reached a fork where one passage led to the drab pallor of daylight instead of the ubiquitous torch-glow.
The sun had just risen when he came to the mouth, up on a high hillside looking out across a rolling and grassy champaign, quite unlike the desert through which he had trekked to reach the place. Off in the middle distance, half-hidden by the intervening rolls, was a group of brown and yellow rectangles that would be a farm or its Fairyland equivalent. Beyond, the darker green of trees.
There would be life of some sort there and not kobold life. Barber went down the hillside in long, leaping steps, his lungs glad of the fresh air.
It was like a late summer morning in New England with dewy spiderwebs on the grass and a few early midges in their aerial dance above. Grasshoppers sprang out from before his feet, whirred away over the rich meadow. Each rise brought the buildings neare
r. At the fourth the group of buildings became definitely farm; from the next a horse was visible, pegged out in a field and cropping the lush grass, and from the next again he spotted a man working over a patch of bare earth.
Barber paused at the lip of the last rise and rubbed his fingers through a considerable growth of whisker. His appearance was certainly odd enough to cause alarm, but there was no razor handy, nor did he feel like dropping the sword, his only protection.
From the top of the hill he could see the farm spread before him in orderly checkerboards marked off by stone fences. The farmer did not look up till he heard the sound of a displaced stone as Barber climbed over the nearest fence. He was a big, burly man with rolled-up shirt sleeves and a pair of gaudily checked pants sustained by a single gallus at the top, and at the bottom tucked into jackboots. As Barber drew near, he turned a ruddy face in which a pair of startlingly blue eyes looked out over gray-flecked sideburns. His glance fell on the sword; without wasted motion he dropped his hoe, stepped lightly to an angle of the fence and picked up a formidable looking broadax. Feet spread, he stood facing Barber without hostility or fear.
“Hello,” said Barber.
The farmer replied: “Howdy, mister.” He relaxed a little and lowered the ax. “Nice mornin’.”
“Yes, it is,” agreed Barber judicially. “My name’s Barber.”
“Glad to make your ’quaintance, Mr. Barber. Mine’s Fawcett, Noah Fawcett. Where you from?”
“King Oberon’s place.”
“Be you one of the heathen?”
“I’m not a fairy, if that’s what you mean.”
“Don’t believe in fairies. They’re just heathen. You work for Oberon?”
“Yes. I’m an ambassador.”
“Well I declare to goodness. Where was you from originally?”
Barber smiled. “Lansing, Michigan, if you want to go back that far.”
Noah Fawcett frowned. “Don’t guess I know—say, d’you mean Michigan Territory?”
“It’s a state now. Admitted to the Union in 1835.”
“Well, by the tarnal nation. Harry Clay allus said we ought to take her in. A real American.” Fawcett dropped his ax definitely now and stepped forward to shake hands. “Come on in and make yourself t’hum, mister. How old be you? Be you married? What’s your church? Be you Whig or one of those Damocrats? How’d you come to work for Oberon? What’s the news from back in the States?”
Barber’s movement of desperation halted the spate of inquiry and Noah Fawcett gave a deep, chesty laugh. “Guess I’be jumpin’ ahead of the thills, but I ain’t see ary man but the swandangled heathen for a right long spell, let alone a real American. Get pretty lonesome for news.” He was leading the way to the larger of a pair of clapboarded buildings. Inside, there was not even paint on the neat plaster, but the room was cluttered with substantial-looking furniture dominated by a wooden pendulum-clock, which was ticking busily. Everything had the indescribable look of sophisticated design Barber had noted in articles made by Continental peasants.
Noah Fawcett caught his glance. “Yep,” he said, “made the hull business, mostly winters when they wan’t nathin’ else on hand. ‘Through the idleness of hands the house droppeth through,’ the Good Book says. That rack, now”—he indicated a pair of jigsawed brackets against the wall—“was for a gun. But I never could get a barrel, even from the mountain heathen, and they’re pretty cute about ironwork. You can put your sword there. That’s a funny hump on your back. Was you hurt when you was little?”
“No. I guess it just grew there.”
Fawcett shook his head. “Better be careful of that, Mr. Barber. I had a cousin over to Lou-isy had one of those lumps come on his chest, and the doctor said how he died of it. But I don’t put much store by doctors. Now you set down and I shall get some wherewithal to celebrate. Be you married?”
Without waiting for Barber’s reply he lifted a trap door and dove into a cellar, to return in a moment with a jug. “Berry wine,” commented Fawcett, pouring some into a pair of wooden mugs with a pleasant glugging sound. “ ’Taint’s good as the cider I make, but I’m a little mite short-handed, and have to go a long piece for m’apples. How come you to work for the heathen king? Does he pay good wages? He’s all right for a heathen, but they’re all like Injuns and woodchucks; it won’t do to take ary sass from them. Had a run-in with him myself a while back.”
He chuckled at the memory. Barber experienced a sudden twinge of embarrassment at the thought of his own ready acceptance of the authority of the “heathen” court, and was glad he had not mentioned the incipient wings. “How did that happen?” he asked, to keep the conversation on safe lines.
“Passel of plaguey whoop-te-tiddle about some logs. When I come here I made a deal, fair and square, to farm this land and swap my produce. I built me that little sod house you seen outside. Come fall, I went down to the river to get stun, and found a hull batch of apple trees, so I grubbed up some of the littlest and planted ’em round my house. They growed all right, but I had to get rid of ’em.” Fawcett paused dramatically to take a pinch of snuff, and held out the box to Barber, who declined and asked the expected: “Why?”
“The heathen. At night, they’d come dancin’ around, wavin’ their arms and scowlin’ suthin’ metaphorical. They was dressed up in bark like they was tryin’ to give me a chivaree. We Fawcetts don’t scare easy. When I went out to give ’em a piece of my mind they all took after me. I pulled foot back into the house and grabbed my ax. Right there I larnt that must of the heathen is tarnal ’fraid of iron. Some superstition of theirn. Long as I had that ax they wouldn’t come nigh me . . .” Fawcett bent to a bootjack. “Pull off your shoes and be comfortable, mister.”
Barber was willing enough to do so. The shoes given him by the King’s tailor had been comfortable enough in the beginning, but the unwonted amount of walking he had done lately seemed to have spread his feet so much that they were tight; it was a relief to get rid of them. “I thought you said it was something about logs,” he said.
“I’be comin’ to that. They kept comin’ around at night. When I asked ’em why they couldn’t let a Christian sleep, they told me they were sperrits of the trees. Now I’be a moderate man, but it says in hundred and first Psalms, ‘He that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight,’ and furthermore, ‘Regard not them that have familiar sperrits,’ so that got my dander up. I cut down those trees and used the logs to start my little log house that’s a corncrib now. Well, I like to had a heathen uprisin’ on my hands.”
He made another dramatic caesura, emphasized it by getting up to refill both mugs, and asked with elaborate offhandedness: “Have much trouble with uprisin’s out in the new states?”
“Not very,” Barber smiled. “But what happened? How did you put down the uprising?”
“Well, the heathen came round agin, yellin’ notoriously, and makin’ out I’d massacreed a mort of their relations. They was goin’ to tell the King and have the law on me. ‘Law ahead,’ says I, knowin’ I had the King’s leave to farm this land, and the guv’ment’s word has to be better’n the next man’s or he’d be runnin’ things. So I went down to the river and got some more trees. I skided ’em out with federalist—”
“Who?” interrupted Barber.
“Federalist. My hoss, that the King guv me when we made the deal. I finished my house; but it just goes to show what the Good Book says: ‘Put not thy trust in princes.’ Along come that King, madder’n a nest of hornets and wanted to cancel the hull deal and put me off my land. I told him I was a citizen of the United States and protected by its constitution, that says the obligations of contract shall not be impaired, the way John Marshall told ’em in that there Georgia land case, a few years back. Well, he hemmed and he hawed, and the heathen with him ripped around till I got tired of hearin’ ’em. I told him we Bay Staters fit a war to get rid of one king, and if he was minded to see how we did it, I’d show him right there.
“That didn’t
take him so good; he fizzed ike a firin’ pan, and I thought we was goin’ to have real troubulous times, till all of a sudden it come over me to say: ‘See here, my hearty, there be more of us Fawcetts comin’ this way, so you better not try ary monkeyshines with the first one. I be a moderate man. If those trees are special pets of yourn, you could tell me so without a lot of cock-and-bull about sperrits, for I’do not believe in vain boastin’, as is related in the first book of the Kings of Israel, twentieth chapter. I shall make you a hoss trade,’ I said to him. ‘If your people’ll deliver me good sound timber for some of my produce I shall leave your pet trees be.’ By and by he earned down and seen the sense of it, and that’s how it’s been ever since. But it seems agin nater to have a farm without a wood lot. I guess now I’ve done enough talkin’. Tell me about your trip here, mister. See ary Injuns? How’d you come by the sword?”
One sentence in the narrative had caught Barber’s attention. “Oh, I got that from the—kobolds in the mountain,” he parried. “But didn’t you say something about more of you Fawcetts?”
The farmer sloshed the lees of his drink around the bottom of the mug and tossed it off. “Brothers,” he answered briefly. “Obadiah and Lemuel—he married one of the Whiting gals. They was goin’ to leave Middlesex County the summer arter me, and follow right along the Albany trail. But it’s been a mighty long time, and I sometimes consider mebbe they got caught by the Injuns or some of those other heathen . . .” He glanced at the clock. “Time to put the victuals on,” he said in a changed tone, and got up.
Land of Unreason Page 10