Ahead, the wall was a big and solid door which moved noiselessly at Cola’s light push. No light inside. The floor, soft and squeezy between Barber’s toes, was obscenely like walking on something’s huge tongue.
One step—two, three, four, five, six, and he lost count. Had something moved in the blackness ahead? No—yes; Acravis apparently caught it too, for he stumbled slightly, pulled back and bumped the girl, sent her caroming into Barber’s left arm and shoulder. The sausagelike light worm was almost knocked from his grasp; he recovered it with a violent effort and gripped the thing hard. Its light pealed forth in that black place like the sudden blare of a pipe organ.
“No!” came Arvicola’s frantic stage-whisper. “It is forbidden!” But in the flickering moment before the glow faded Barber had just time to see what it was had moved.
It was his own reflection in a big mirror; and beneath that mirror on a little shelf lay Titania’s crook-handled wand.
He released the worm, which went slithering off into the water, back and forth, and snatched for the wand. As his hand touched it, the glow from Arvicola’s light just permitted him to notice what he had not seen before—some lettering, so deeply engrailed into the glass as to be part of its structure. He shoved his face close and read:
“On the pathway of your trace
The face that you face
Is the median place.”
“Come—oh, quick!” said the vole’s voice close in his ear; her hand gripped his wrist urgently. The thought struck him that here was another of those mysterious shrines like that in the Kobold Caverns, and he pulled loose, turned, reaching for the mirror with the tip of the wand.
A violent electric shock ran up his arm and all through him, but before he could analyze it or even think of it, there was a clank of armor. He caught the flickering reflection of Acravis’ blade, heard him pant with effort once. Then he vanished. In the place where he had been, in the glow of the swimming worm, was a new, deeper darkness; a shapeless something that almost filled that side of the chamber, with two expressionless eyes that reflected.
At that same instant there came to Barber’s ears a deafening gurgle of water; stinging wetness in his eyes and nostrils, crushing pressure on his chest. He saw only vaguely that Arvicola was flashing past, heard her shout, “Fred—oh, Fred!” in a voice that trailed off into an agonized scream as the blackness wrapped round her. He tried to swing the anlace, opened his mouth to shout, found it suddenly filled with water and himself strangling, choking, desperate for air; struck out frantically, and felt himself rising, up—up, toward a pinpoint of light above. The last glimpse was of Sir Lacomar, hewing away two-handed in the direction of those lidless eyes, and then he was swimming.
His head broke surface. He tried to take a deep breath and burst into a violent spasm of coughing that brought up a pint of water before he got, at long last, his precious gulp of air. Too weak to do more than dog-paddle, he propelled himself feebly toward the shore.
The bright moon of Fairyland was above, picking out around him a little river that wound among tree-lined banks. The scene was cousin-german to that he had left, how long ago?—for the dive that had turned him into a frog. He was no frog now. As a frog you did not choke in water, you could really swim. No; frog, man, or whatever he was, he could forget that half-formed thought of diving back to Arvicola’s rescue. He had gone through another metamorphosis, a shaping as these Fairylanders called it, no turning back ever.
Something was attached to his back, hampering him grievously. His knee bumped bottom, and he almost sprawled, but managed to crawl the rest of the way, dripping and surprised as he touched dry earth to find he was still holding Titania’s wand. He almost collapsed, but the thing attached to his back brought him up and made him look over his shoulder.
The bumps that had been on his back at Oberon’s palace and had grown so astonishingly in the Kobold Caverns had sprouted full. He had a well-developed pair of wings, springing from the lower ends of his shoulder blades. And the effort to stretch one of them out for inspection told him that he also possessed the necessary structure of bone and muscle to work them. The effort ended in a gasp as the wings stood fully spread and revealed.
They were bat wings.
CHAPTER XV
The wand was still clutched in his hand. For a moment or two he gazed at it, only half-comprehending its import in the wave of revulsion and self-hatred that swept over him. Bat wings; that explained it. He had turned, or turned himself, into some kind of willy-nilly devil, condemned to bring evil to everyone he touched.
For that was the only possible explanation of the chain of disasters that followed his actions. If it had not been for his willful insistence on venturing to Hirudia, Arvicola might have lived out her carefree existence—and the doughty but dimwitted crawfish-knights . . . They might have come through then, but for his carelessness with the light. He thought again of the girl’s appeal for help, which he had so ill answered, and for one wild moment contemplated diving into the pool again. Dead leeches were afloat on its surface, unpleasantly breaking the moonlight ripple. No; down there he would be a man again, and they crawfish and leech and vole. He had gone through the metamorphosis, another change as radical as the one that had brought him to this world. Perhaps there would be no escape from it but along the route of an endless series of such unsought adventurings. He was a god to the waterworld now, and like most gods, of limited and negative powers, without capacity for helping those he liked. One could only carry on . . .
Toward disaster for the other inhabitants of this unreasonable world. He thought of Noah Fawcett and his declining stock of iron tools; had brought the kobolds to ruin too, though they probably deserved it. Even the woodsprite, Malacea—
“I knew, I knew,” said a voice. “Who dares say I cannot see tomorrow? Even beneath that great beard I knew.”
Barber jumped a foot, sat down on the tails of his own wings, jumped up again to flap them and the next moment found himself scrambling and clinging among the branches overhead. That sugary accent could belong only to the girl he had just been thinking about. He looked down; sure enough, there she was, arms outstretched and gazing at him. He wrapped the wings about him, suddenly conscious of the nudity to which he had given no attention while a frog, and hunched on the limb like a gargoyle.
She trilled laughter at him, then in a breath turned serious: “I crave pardon,” she said, “for forgetting that laughter makes you mortals angry. If it be within your rules of conduct to forgive the fault without penalty, I beg you, do; if not, I’ll gladly bear whatever you put upon me.”
A reply seemed in order. “I don’t want to put anything on you,” said Barber sensibly. “I want my clothes, to put on me.”
Her eyes narrowed calculatingly; and she flung up one hand in a sharp gesture. “Stupid that I am to forget mortals are under no laws compelling conduct but those they impose on themselves! Yet how am I to serve you in this? I have not hid them.”
“No, but—” began Barber, and stopped, embarrassed at showing embarrassment before this child of nature.
“But they’re near and you’d be solitary to put them on—is that it? Poor mortal, I suppose that is your modesty, clinging like a remnant of the world you came from. Discard it; we are each other’s fate, you and I, and in this land of Fairy, hiding from such fate is presumption.”
She was certainly speaking the truth, but Barber hoped only the truth as she understood it. The thought of this full-bosomed and cloying wench after Cola made him shudder. “All the same, I want my clothes,” he said obstinately.
She spun round, moving her hands in and out, then fixing like a pointer dog, took a dozen steps and was stooping at a clump of fern. She lifted something triumphantly—Barber could make out the flash of color that would be his clothes—but the next instant staggered back and dropped with a little shriek. “The Metal! It burns! O lovely mortal, help me!”
It would have taken an ox to be impervious to that appeal. Barb
er spread his wings and parachuted down beside her, pulling her away from contact with the sword which had caused the trouble. The cry was no phony on Malacea’s part; a six-inch gash with singed edges showed in the filmy material of her dress, and beneath it the forearm bore a long, angry welt.
As Barber looked at it, she pushed herself up to a sitting posture and flung the other arm around his neck. “Damn it!” he said, trying to push her away. “Malacea, you’re a woman of one idea.”
“And that idea old. But not stale; they say the world still has a use for it.
“Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove—”
“I might be glad to if I didn’t have other business and weren’t afraid your boyfriend the Plum might find us together again.”
“Oh, you need fear him no longer.”
“I know it. I ate some of his fruit.”
“He has escaped that spell. He gave your wand to some wizard of the Pool—the Base One, the Under One, I am not sure of his name—and received an enchantment in exchange, to free him from the power of those who had eaten his fruit. I meant rather that you can handle the Metal. With that”—she pointed at the sword and he felt her shudder slightly—“at the door of my place, he can never enter. We can love nightlong and fearless.”
“And in the day you’d have to go to your tree. It isn’t logical.”
“What does that mean? A magic word?”
“No, it means according to the laws of consistent reasoning. Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, nothing can be both true and false, and two and two make four.”
“A mortal word; and like most such, not true.”
“Oh, but it is.” Barber disengaged himself and picked up four pebbles, two in each hand. “Look,” he said, “two!” and then opened the other hand to show the others. “Two!” He clapped the two hands together and opened them again. “Four!”
“No,” said Malacea.
Barber looked and gaped. His opened hands held five pebbles.
It might have been an accident, or she might have dropped one in. He tossed away the extra stone, shut both hands resolutely, and clapped them together again.
“Now will you admit there are four?” he demanded belligerently.
“No,” said Malacea. She was right. There were eight pebbles, but this time the tree sprite did not laugh.
“My love and fate,” she said, laying a hand on his arm, “let me beg you, once for all, to lay aside those stiff mortal thoughts. There’s no living in a country, or a world, but by its laws. There have been mortals here that could not. They wander like sad shadows till some accident pitches them back to their sty, or they turn to mere walking vegetables, like one who keeps a farm near here and whom you have doubtless seen. But this time it is more than a little important, and not me alone, though you are my very dear; for we of the forest can often see hidden things, and I swear by my life that of all who have ever come here you are the nearest to fulfilling the prophecy. If you but hold to the true line.”
“What prophecy? And what is the true line?”
“Why, the prophecy of the redbeard that shall mean life and grace to us all! Look, you have the wand and the red beard and the power of Metal! And for the true line, that is no more than to hold straight to the task in the face of all impediments.”
Barber’s hand flew to his chin. He was aware that his beard had grown since his experience in the waterworld, but the touch showed him how surprisingly it had spread into the great chest mattress of a nineteenth-century patriarch—and it was red, all right, the end strands showing a brick color which he never would have believed his chin capable of producing.
“But look here,” he said, “haven’t you just furnished me with the best possible argument against staying with you? How can I stick to the task, whatever it is, and go off with you, too?”
Her eyes suddenly stared into vacancy and her voice went to a whisper. “It’s true,” she said slowly, “true I might have known that to set my love on one of the great ones would be to share his hard rule of achievement before enjoyment. Go, then.” She gave him a little push with the flat of her hand and Barber felt as though he had struck a child. “Go and tell your new love that Malacea the dryad sends her hate. . . . No, wait. At least you shall kiss my arm that you burned with your Metal and make it well.”
She held it out and Barber obediently kissed the place where the burn was now swelling to blister. Somewhat to his surprise it immediately became as smooth—and as semitransparent—as the other arm.
He turned to his clothes with a trace of irresolution and began to pull them on. Malacea had turned her back to him, and did not look round even when he was, with some difficulty, buttoning the jacket around the bases of his wings. As he stood on tiptoe before leaping away into flight he could see that her head had sunk forward and her shoulders were shaken with sobs.
With each powerful stroke his big new pectoral muscles bulged out the front of his jacket. He cleared the trees easily, and straightened away in level flight across the forest through which he had toiled on foot. Bat wings might not be pretty, but they were certainly efficient about getting one over territory. Barber did a loop and a couple of barrel rolls just for the hell of it, and zoomed along, savoring the pleasure of this new physical motion, all his depression fled. So he was near to fulfilling the prophecy of the redbeard, was he? What prophecy? Everyone seemed to know of it; there was that tune Malacea and then Arvicola had sung—devilish odd, now that he thought of it, that denizens of such different worlds should have the same air and same words. There had been something about a redbeard, too, on that big tomb in the graveless graveyard, the one that bore the same strange heraldic design as the door in the Kobold Caverns.
It all tied together somehow and somewhere. Barber experienced the maddening sense that comes just before the climax of a good detective story, of having all the clues laid out before him, but being unable to interpret them into a meaningful pattern. Or did he have all the clues? There seemed one missing from the set; he ought to be doing something, having some authority he did not now possess. The accomplishment of whatever he had to do waited on that; even if what he had to do was only to get back where he belonged through one more of these insane permutations. Perhaps the clues never would make sense in this impossible cosmos. He thought of the pebbles, and clapping his wings behind his back in irritation, did a fifteen-foot drop.
Long black striding shadows beneath hinted of moonset, and he guessed it must be near dawn till he remembered Malacea’s counsel to forget his imported habits of thought. But what time was it, then?—or since time appeared a matter of no consequence, which way lay Oberon’s palace? He flapped and soared easily—the motion was no more difficult than walking—while he considered the question. A thin haze of cirrus diluted the moonlight above him; neither Fawcett’s farm nor the Kobold Hills were visible.
But wasn’t there something moving up there to his right? He spiraled toward it. As he approached the vision resolved itself into a small female sprite sailing nonchalantly along on gauzy wings.
“Beg pardon,” Barber called up, “could you—”
“Why, ’tis the King’s new changeling!” she cried. “And alate—not to mention barbed like a centaur. Well met! What’s toward?”
“Why, I’d like to find my way to the palace.”
“There to cozen more fays with unmeant gambits in the game of love, I’ll be bound.” She laughed at him and did a couple of butterfly flip-flops.
“No. . . . Say, aren’t you the girl who was in Oberon’s apartment when Titania came home?”
“Nay, not I; ’twas no more than one of our band—Idalia. But an you think to hold matters secret in Fairyland, Sir Changeling, let me undeceive you. The very trees are sib to all that stirs. How else would I know that you’re but newly come from the embrace of the apple sprite, Malacea?”
Barber wondered if his flush was visible in the moonlight and on t
he wing. “I assure you, I—”
“Come sir, no hoity-toity manners; the whole matter’s exposed. The world knows that your conscience is clear enough—which swinish commodity you seem to value highly, being mortal—but I cannot say as much for your courtesy.”
“But look here, do you mean to tell me that everyone knows everything that happens to everyone else?”
“To be sure, witling, in so far as they are interested enough to discover.”
“Then Queen Titania knew all the time that Oberon had this Idalia at the palace?”
“She were marvelously less than the Queen’s Resplendency did she not.”
“Then why didn’t she make a fuss when she came in? And why was it necessary for me to get Idalia out of there so fast? Sounds like Dinkelspiel to me.”
“Soft, soft, you’d choke the goose to death to make him cough eggs from ’s crop. Why, as to take your first question first, since it holds the nub of the matter—because she could not; the laws of conduct forbade, there being no trace of Cousin Idalia within the apartment.”
“Oh.” Barber digested that for a moment, flying along beside her, and reflecting that he had heard something of the same kind before. “Very convenient laws. Who makes them?”
The fay went off into a long peal of laughter, curiously soft in the unechoing sky. “Makes ’em? Why, child, they’re laws natural and were made with the world. . . . Stay, I do forget you’re of mortal kindred, who live by other rules. Tell me, is it good fact, as some say, that in the land you come from all the dumb world follows an immutable procession, as the sun arriving punctually on hour or the seed producing nought but the tree that bore it?”
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