Barber stepped quickly to the door of the kitchen-living room and out, slipped round the house to put it between him and the farmer, and started off. He looked back now and then, changing direction slightly to keep the bulk of the buildings between him and the house, and so angling away from the Kobold Hills. The rain felt good on his face.
Not till he was passing among the first sentinels of a line of trees did he remember the Kobold caves again and the fact that he was leaving Fawcett in quite genuine trouble, with his supply of iron tools cut off. However, there was nothing that he, Barber, could do about it in his present condition and with more urgent business on hand. If he found the wand and returned to Oberon with it, perhaps that monarch would do something for the farmer. Perhaps he would be able to send Barber back where he belonged. If he found the wand.
CHAPTER XI
The trees drew in around him to form an extensive grove. Big, slow drops slipped from their branches, and the going was heavy. But when Barber glanced aloft he saw a streak of blue among the clouds, and by the time he had reached the far side of the tree belt the sun broke through to shine down, clear and bright, as though nature itself were smiling on his resolution to take the road again. Here the ground pitched down across a meadow of rank grass toward a watercourse—probably the river to which Fawcett had occasionally referred. He pushed toward it, the grasses clutching at his ankles. No breath of wind stirred; and the summer sun was blistering hot as postlude to the shower.
The river ran on sluggishly, not much wider than that in the forest, spreading into a pool where Barber paused on its bank in the shade of a tall poplar. There was yellow sand on the bottom, spotted with dead leaves, cool and inviting in its rippled refraction. Nothing else moved but a pair of dragonflies patrolling over the pool, intent on their own particular brand of murder, and a kingfisher diving like a Stuka from a branch downstream.
Barber paused, one hand on the poplar trunk, contemplating the dragonflies, and realized he was hungry. When they flew in opposite directions his eyes swung out on independent orbits, one following each of the insects, and his appetite increased.
Hell, he was getting to the stage of wanting to eat dragonflies. Titania’s “overthrow” was affecting his mind as well as his body, giving him one of those psychoses that made people swallow handfuls of thumbtacks or broken bottles. What was more, his skin had developed an exasperating sensitivity, ever since the morning’s rain. He stirred uneasily in clothes that rasped, and wondered whether the effect of the sudden sun on dampened garments had something to do with it.
What he needed was a swim. Maybe that would snap him out of it.
He peered along the line of poplars, saw no one and nothing, and undressed with fumbling haste. Let’s see—he didn’t want to leave his clothes in a heap on the brink, nor yet to take chances with the sword. He rolled both up into a single bundle, rammed the package under some spreading ferns, and dropped a dead branch over the cache to help out the camouflage.
The poplar roots had assembled enough earth around themselves to make a little hummock at the edge of the pool. He stood erect on it for a moment, stretched comfortably, took a deep breath and dove.
No shock. As soon as he was well under water he opened his eyes. The thought flashed across his mind without conscious phrasing that this was the strangest swim or the strangest water that he had ever been in. There was curiously no feeling of wetness. Below him lay the mottled yellow-and-brown bottom, clear and bright, but much farther down than it had looked from above. He might almost have been floating through an aqueous atmosphere in one of those Freudian dreams of wingless flight. There was the same sensation of movement without effort or volition.
He drew up his legs and kicked, in the strong underwater stroke that should carry him out across the pool to the surface. The drive shot him forward above the bottom at such alarming speed that he backed water, and with a flashing sensation of surprise, he found himself hanging suspended over nothingness.
At the same moment he realized that he had really been under long enough to come up for air, but that his lungs were not protesting in the least, he was getting along without man’s most intimate necessity in perfect comfort. Whatever Fairyland metamorphosis he had undergone was not without its compensations.
“Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange . . .”
he repeated to himself, and thinking inconsequentially of Kingsley’s Water Babies, ducked his head down and swam cautiously lower. No difficulties.
He tried another powerful kick, and the bottom rushed up at him as though he were falling from a skyscraper window. He hit it at an angle and bounced, tumbling head over heels, in a cloud of fine sand that obscured his vision. As it settled, with the larger flakes corkscrewing slowly past, he picked himself up and felt for bumps.
There seemed to be nothing changed. Standing on tiptoe, he launched out again and found himself once more soaring over the bottom in that strange wingless flight, sustained by the surrounding medium. It must be as graceful to watch as it was easy to perform.
A silvery titter of laughter floated to him from above, right and rear. Barber spun round.
“Kaja!’” he cried.
A slim, red-haired girl was drifting easily, twenty feet from him. She made a slight paddling motion and slid easily into position beside him.
“Sorry, old dear,” she said, “but the name’s Cola. Or Arvicola, if you want to be formal, which I don’t think. You do look so fonny, swimming like that.” Even her voice had a trace of accent, like Kaja’s, but what Barber caught was the insult to his swimming. He hated being ridiculous.
“What’s the matter with my swimming?”
“For a frog your age? About as elegant as a drowning beetle. You must have been a lovely tadpole.”
Barber raised an eyebrow. Kaja had been like that, too—always with a note of jeering banter, as though nothing life had to offer were worth the taking. “Did you say a frog?”
“Yes, Froggy.” She laughed again.
Barber looked down. “First time I ever heard of a frog with hair on his chest,” he remarked practically.
“Gahn.” The derisive word had the note of the London streets, and then her voice turned ladylike again. “You froggies aren’t veddy clever, are you? And no wonder, coming out of eggs.”
Barber remained good-humored. “All right, then, I’m a frog, you newt.”
Her eyes—they were green eyes—seemed to snap. “I’ll thank you to be civil. After all, we voles belong to the higher orders, as though you didn’t know.”
He tried to bow and did a curious flip in the restraining medium, which rather ruined his effect. “Oh, yes. And I suppose you were a baroness once. Isn’t that usual with water rats?”
There was another and harder snap to her eyes. “Listen,” she said, “I don’t know why I take the trouble to stay here and be insulted, and I won’t, either, if you carry on that way. The next time you call me a water rat—”
“I’m sorry,” said Barber, and was. “I didn’t mean to insult you. I was just carrying on your joke about frogs—and er, voles.”
“Joke!” She laughed aloud, her head came forward and a pair of green eyes searched his. “Poor frog, I see now. You’re new, and don’t know the Laws of the Pool yet. Come with me.”
A warm hand gave his a tug, and she shot off, slanting upward. She was half-concealed in a dimness that began in the middle distance before Barber whipped up his muscles to start after her, and for the first few strokes he followed a receding pale blob. But he was pleased to note that, once started, he gained fast, and by the time they reached the silvery, rippling overhead he was up with her.
Barber scrambled out of the water on all fours. He half-turned to where he expected his lovely companion to be and opened his mouth to say, “You see—”
A deep, reverberating croak was all that came out.
Barber made a frantic
effort to stand up, and fell forward on his chin. Or rather on his lower lip. He had no chin.
He looked down and saw a pair of thick, stubby arms, covered with speckled skin. They ended in a pair of hands with four widespread fingers and no thumb. The change was complete. He was a frog, all right.
A few feet away a rodent of about his own size sat on the edge of the pool, her wide luminous eyes and sharply chiseled features bearing the same sub-human resemblance to Kaja that an ape often has to a mick. What color its fur was he could not tell, for the picture registered by his widely diverging eyes was one of blacks, whites and grays. He was color-blind.
His mouth felt funny, with the skin fitting tightly over the bones of his jaws and the queer long tongue hinged front instead of rear, for flipping at insects. This was an overthrow for fair; how could he find the wand now? What could he do? Hang around the pond till some hungry snake or snapping turtle caught up with him? He emitted a mournful croak that was intended for a groan.
The vole studied him for a moment with bright, amused eyes, lifted a paw in a beckoning motion, and slipped smoothly into the water.
Barber humped himself around—awkwardly, because his limbs were not articulated for any wide variety of movement—and leaped after her. He had forgotten the power in his great jumping-legs. Air whistled past in a self-created breeze as he soared far out over the water. He caught one glimpse of his own reflection, bruised by surface ripples, with great jeweled eyes, stubby arms spread, web-footed hindlegs trailing back, and then came down in a tremendous belly-whopper.
The red-haired girl was floating lazily beside him in the medium that seemed more normal than air. “Wiped your eye that time, old thing,” she jeered. “You froggies are so clever.” She cocked her pretty head and examined him with embarrassing thoroughness. “Really, you know, you should take the strong, silent and handsome line with a figure like that.”
Barber looked at himself. To the eye he was again the man who had dived from under the poplar. No; he was a better man, for all the ominous imperfections of his arrival in Fairyland had vanished, including the stump wings.
“Uh-huh,” he said humbly. “Look here, is there some place where we can talk? You said something about the Laws of the Pool, and I really don’t know anything about them. I’d be awfully obliged—”
“Poor stupid froggy. Come on, then.” She turned, and he followed her down an invisible slope that ended at a group of gigantic roots which sprang from the bottom to twist in again. Cola stretched herself along one of them with an arm bent behind her neck, and comfortably wiggled her toes. “The Laws of the Pool are these,” she half-chanted: “To reverence by day the gods to which we pray—”
“Beg pardon,” interrupted Barber, “but isn’t that a sort of catechism you’re supposed to learn? Because I’m on a mission and I hope—that is, I may not stay here long, so most of it wouldn’t be much use to me.”
The eyes widened and she lifted her head to gaze at him again. “Oh, reahlly,” with a galling note of incredulity. “A froggy with a mission! For Sir Lacomar, I presume?”
“No. For King Oberon, if you must know.”
“The Father of the Gods? Don’t try to come it over me, Froggy.”
“What do you mean, Father of the Gods? He’s no different from you or me.”
“Oh, why do you have to be so stupid? Didn’t I just take you to the surface? . . . But wait, you’re new. Listen, poor foolish froggy; the gods can walk in air and not change . . . Though I don’t believe that tradition about them punishing evil-doers by catching them and beating them. Not half. They jolly well do take some of us away, but I think it’s mostly those they like and want to translate to their own sphere. They took Rana the other day, and she never did anything wrong in her life . . . It would be wonderful to be made into a god.”
“Oh. Isn’t there any way it can happen without being taken from the pool?”
“Only when the redbeard comes. That’s part of the Laws of the Pool, you know:
“ ‘When the redbeard comes again,
Then shall fairies turn to men—’ ”
She sang it to the same tune Malacea had used when she disappeared into the forest, then broke off suddenly and became practical: “What about the other Laws, froggy? Want them or no? I haven’t all day.”
“My name’s not Froggy; it’s Fred Barber. And I’d be awfully obliged if you could tell me one or two things. Perhaps I could learn more that way. For instance, I’m hunting for a wand that belongs to Queen Titania. It was stolen from me. Have you any idea where it could be?” If she laughed at him again, he was ready to give up hope.
But she didn’t. “That mission again, frog—Fred?” she said, with a bantering air that carried no sting, and frowned thought. “I reahlly don’t know unless—unless—”
“Go on.”
“Come closer,” said Cola.
He did so and leaned over to catch the words she was barely whispering: “Unless the Low One has it. They say he gets everything sooner or later.”
“Who is the Low One?”
She lifted her head and looked around before replying. “That’s what everyone asks. It’s in the Laws:
‘You shall not speak of the Low One
Or question his right to rule;
Lest it come to you to be numbered
Among the cursed of the Pool—’
“Oh!” She put her hands to her face. “Perhaps I’ve done the forbidden thing just talking about Him, and the gods will punish me. I don’t know why I did—”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“Please, don’t.” Little lines of strain and tragedy set in the vole’s delicate voice. She went on, so low he could hardly hear: “If he really has the wand of the Mother of Gods, there’s no limit to what he can do.”
“Where does he live?”
She said: “You don’t want to go there, Fred. Nobody does.”
“Yes, I do. If he’s got that wand I’m going to get it.”
“What a brave froggy!” But her voice was shaky. “You couldn’t get it. You couldn’t do anything. Please, Fred, listen to me. You’re not talking about doing anything fine, but just something stupid—and ignorant.”
“Then you won’t tell me.”
“No.”
He stood up. How like Kaja she was! They had quarreled this way a dozen times, but every time he yielded she had despised him for her very victory. That was why—“Okay, young lady,” he said, “then I’ll have to ask somebody else.”
“You’re not really going?”
“Right this minute.”
“But, Fred—” The green eyes were desperate, and then her expression changed. “All right, then, go! You don’t even know the Laws, you silly helpless frog! You’ll get what’s coming to you, and I hope you do!” She was off the root and stamping in vexation, lovelier and more like Kaja than ever.
“I’ll find someone to tell me about them.”
“Who? There’s only old Sir Lacomar, the mutton-headed old pot, and he’s so busy watching the mussels he won’t even speak to you.”
Further argument seemed useless. Barber poised to take off, then felt the old tug Kaja always brought to his heartstrings, the old fascination that would never quite let him play the game to win. He turned. “If I stay,” he said, “will you—”
“No! I never want to see you again, you—you bloody bahstard!”
As Barber kicked himself away and soared easily through the water, she was suddenly shaken with sobs.
CHAPTER XII
Keeping quite close to the bank, he went on for a distance that seemed like a couple of miles but was probably much less. At this point he saw something moving down and to the left in the murky distance. As he approached, it resolved itself into a man, pulling a crude hand plow across the bottom.
The man glanced up at Barber, dropped his plow, snatched at a huge shield that hung down his back by a strap around his neck, flopped himself down and pulled the shield over him
. The protection was complete. He even managed to tuck his toes out of sight.
“Hey!” said Barber, lighting beside the shield. It remained motionless. Barber sat down to wait. This was most unlikely to be anything but one of the mussels. In due time the shield shifted a trifle, an eye peeked out and was followed by a head. The head was apparently satisfied, for the mussel heaved the shield up and himself after it.
“Thought you was a trout,” he remarked by way of apology. He was stocky, muscular, stoop-shouldered, with high cheekbones and a dead-white skin, hairless as a fish.
Barber said: “Hello. My name’s Barber.”
“Call me Joe,” said the mussel.
“Nice little farm you have here.”
“Okay,” said the mussel. “I got a farm. So what?”
“Nothing. I just wondered if you were one of Sir Lacomar’s people.”
Joe spat, the spittle drifting off to dissolution. He jerked a thumb toward the riverbank. “Awright. I work for Lacomar. And I think he’s a jerk, a lousy slave driver. So what?”
“Nothing. I was looking for someone else. Can you tell me where the Low One lives?”
The mussel stuck his head forward. “Smart guy, huh? You frogs are all smart guys. He’s a goddam heel, but he’ll fix your wagon.”
“Why? Is he coming this way?”
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