Other eagles were coming to join those beneath him, their direction clearly marked from this height. He swooped down a thousand feet or so, and saw the latest comers circle round to join those gathering in a cloud of wings behind him. In addition to the ability to combine efforts, they evidently possessed a good communications system and had passed on word that he was too dangerous an opponent for single-handed attack.
After a while no more eagles seemed to be coming. Barber circled, looking down, and perceived that he was over an amazingly tall, prominent peak. His eyesight seemed exceptionally good—probably another Fairyland gift, like the wings. Another circle; behind, the eagles were spreading out in a widening crescent to shut him in, methodically and with no indication of haste. A single eagle came soaring up from the shadow of the peak; Barber closed wings, dove and killed it before it knew he was there, noticing as he did so that the shadow from which it had flown held a single spot of iridescent light.
Toward this he flew; as he did so, the flock behind him burst into screams and began to close, overhead as well as on all sides. But he held course and came to a landing on the ledge where the spot was.
It was a ball of some brownish but shiny substance, perhaps a yard in diameter. Barber tapped it with his sword and was instantly rewarded by a chorus of screams from the eagles above. The ball gave off a sharp, dry wooden sound, and when he swung at it full arm, only moved slightly without breaking. It appeared to be attached to the ledge.
The eagles overhead screamed again and one swooped at Barber. He struck it down, a neat blow, right between the paired necks. Another dove at him, and as he dodged, crashed into the rocks and went tumbling a thousand feet down in a cloud of feathers.
A sharp ping made Barber look round. The globe had vanished into a haze of golden particles. On the ledge where it had been sat a new young eagle, shaking dampness from its feathers. It spied Barber and opened its beaks, but he took both heads off with a single sweeping stroke, and dodged another suicidal dash from above.
On the spot where ball and then eagle had been was a circular hole in the ledge, above the size of a broomstick, with a smooth, shiny lip. As Barber watched, with glances overhead, another sphere appeared at the mouth of this hole and grew like a bubble.
Two more eagles had died in attacks from above when this one reached the size of the first. Barber twice hit it with all his strength and no result. A moment later it shattered. Barber killed the eagle it contained and kicked its carcass off the ledge; a proceeding obviously futile, since a new egg began to grow immediately. The process appeared endless, and there was nothing to plug the hole with, the ledge as bare as a banker’s head and as hard as his heart.
Another eagle swooped from above, and as Barber lowered his sword after cutting down the bird his elbow touched Titania’s wand, still stuck through his belt. The very thing! When the next egg dissolved, he rapidly slew the eagle it contained, reached over and before the new bubble could come forth, rammed the wand in. It went home to a tight fit, and from within the hole came a bubbling tumult like the cooking of a gigantic kettle, but no more balls appeared.
The eagles above burst into such an earsplitting racket that Barber could hardly hear himself think, and all around him began diving at the cliff in witless frenzy. Thump! Thump! They landed, bounding off into the black depths below with flying feathers, utterly neglecting Barber in their furious desire for death; and soon there were no more eagles visible, on the ledge or in the sky. The tubelike orifice still gave forth a sound of boiling. Barber did not quite dare to withdraw the wand, but after a few minutes’ rest, he hung his sword at his side and took to wing again.
As he soared above the peak in now-empty air, he noted something unseen before on the far horizon. Not a mountain nor a meadow, it was as tall as the former and wide as the latter, smooth and shining like the roc’s egg of Sindbad. Barber flew toward it.
CHAPTER XVIII
Ice. The roc’s egg was ice.
Fred Barber knew it long before he arrived at that glistening and translucent structure by the chill that hung round it, though that chill—strangely, to his senses attuned to another world—brought no mist in the air and the great dome showed no sign of melting. “Princes of the Ice,” Oberon had said, and this was doubtless their residence, the central seat of power of that Enemy he was arrayed against.
Locked in the heart of the icy dome, distorted by curvature and refraction, was something dark and shapeless. Barber lit near it and shivered for the first time in Fairyland in the constant current of cold air flowing outward. Whatever lay at the heart of that gelid bubble remained ineluctable, for practical purposes invisible, as he walked round, trying to peer in.
Ice. If this were the last, it was also the hardest of his tasks, to try to make something of this outrageous glacier. There was no way of dealing with the damned thing, especially with the wand left behind to plug the hole of the eagle eggs. It was utterly silent, impressive, remote, like death. Not for nothing had Dante had the last and most terrible of his infernal circles an icy one; no wonder Oberon thought the princes of this place his ultimate and deadliest Enemy. Barber himself began to experience a sense of depression, of utter futility such as he had seldom experienced. He would a dozen times rather have dealt with the tricky activity of the kobolds, the treacherous violence of Hirudia, or even endless swarms of double-headed eagles. There seemed simply nothing he could do to those glasslike walls.
Wait for day and the sun to melt it? It could not be long delayed, the moon was paling to its close, already the stars shone brighter. But, no, that held no promise of success. The cold dome came down flush to the ground, with a thin rim of dry grass around it and beyond that meadow, bespeaking the thought that this was no ice he knew but some unreasonable variety that did not melt in the sun.
His teeth were chattering with cold. Perhaps the only way of penetration was the obvious one. He stepped up to the smooth surface at random and swung his sword. It bit deep; great fragments tinkled and clashed away with every stroke. The ice was soft or brittle or both. He marked out with his eye space enough to give him a good tunnel and fell to hewing, the work warming him.
But as the shards broke out and fell away it became apparent that the ice was not homogeneous in quality. A large irregular lump at the heart of the area on which he was working turned the edge of Barber’s blade while the material around it shattered and cascaded away. This adamantine lump was something over Barber’s own size, and as it took form beneath the undirected sculpture of his sword it became apparent that it was about his own shape.
With a crash of glasslike crystals, ice avalanched away from the lump, leaving it standing in the mouth of the shaft like a snow man in high relief. It was, in fact, exactly a snow man, or better, an ice man, of imposing stature, faceless under a domed glassy headgear, with a club over its shoulder.
And it began to move; sluggishly with creaking ice sounds, detaching itself from the remaining matrix, shifting the club.
Barber stumbled back in alarm, his feet skidding on the unmelted fragments beneath. His sword would not bite, and the wand was far away.
But the creature apparently had no aggressive intentions. After one step it became immobile in its former pose. The starshine shimmered on a film of water, flowing down from some unseen source over the surface and around the ice giant. It froze as it descended and in a moment or two the surface on which Barber had labored was as smooth as ever. The air was cold.
Barber walked fifty paces around the circle of the wall and began chipping again. The ice broke away with the same ease, and as easily as before did an ice giant, complete with club, emerge. Once more the film of water flowed smoothly down and filled the wound. Barber stepped close and touched his hand to the current; it was icy cold and stung like brine in the wounds the twig had made.
He stepped back, grimacing with pain and shaking off the shining drops. As he did so a couple of them fell on the rose in his buttonhole, the double rose he had
plucked at the luchrupán’s tree. With a faint sissing sound they dissolved into steam.
Barber stepped back to consider and found that the ends of his now long red beard were covered with tiny particles of rime. Once more he experienced the baffling scene of standing at the edge of discovery, yet somehow lacking the clue that would unlock knowledge. Perhaps the key lay once more in Malacea’s injunction to leave his imported, habits of thought for those that went with the environment.
But what did that mean in the present case? As a devotee of the mathematically logical approach favored by the newer school of science, he set himself to examine the fundamental assumptions on which he had been working. The first thing that he discovered—somewhat to his own surprise—was that he had been accepting chance as causation. There was something wrong about this; as wrong as his earlier assumption that because the formulas of this existence did not jibe with those he knew, the whole thing was utterly without logic or reason.
Oberon and, still more, Imponens had given him a glimpse of a Fairyland ruled by laws as definite as any he knew, though of a different order. They related more to matters accepted figuratively or not accepted at all in the world he was accustomed to call “his.” Probably astrology and numerology would be exact sciences here. Assuredly, he could reject the idea that mere chance had carried him to the encounters with Malacea or the kobolds or the world under the water. The monkeys would write Shakespeare before such a series could come about by accident.
What he had to do was discover the chain of causation and apply it to the present circumstance, shivering outside that dome of ice beneath a cold sky from which the moon had gone, and only faintly tinged with coming day. The three places. It had something to do with that; and he was convinced that the third place lay before him, hidden in that impassive hood of ice. Had the others anything in common; was it possible to establish any series?
Apparently not. The first place lay in the heart of the hills and he had reached it by a toilsome journey on foot; the second, under the Pool, and he had attained it by a special adaptation or metamorphosis into a frog. Here was the third, which he hardly could have reached at all with this other special adaptation of wings. . . . Hold on a minute; had not that gauzy-winged fay he met in the skies said something about: “We have in us the light elements, Fire and Air?” Here was series, the series of the Empedoclean elements—Earth for the first place, Water for the second; he had vanquished Air in dealing with those double-headed eagles. Fire would surely be the antidote to the ice that stood before him.
It was at this point that Fred Barber remembered how the icy brine had hissed when it touched his rose. The finding of that flower could be no more chance than the other events of the series.
Fred Barber plucked the rose from his coat and advanced to the wall of ice, holding it in front of him. As far as his fingers could tell it was an ordinary blossom, but when he came near the ice there was a hiss and crackle, and water flowed down in a young torrent, welling out over the grass. A cloud of vapor rose from it.
The rose melted a deep hemispherical pit in the face of the ice dome, and of the ice man who had been there before there was no sign. Barber stepped into the cavity, holding his new weapon before him. Beneath his feet was slippery ice and around them gathered a runnel of coldly steaming water. A step at a time carried him forward into the tunnel he was melting, a passage out of dark into dark, with just the faintest shimmering of rainbow hues where the rising day behind shot a few beams through. All had a bluish cast, as though this were the permanent and natural color of that grim place.
It must have taken half an hour to reach the dark core of that berg, and an uncontrollable fit of shivering had overtaken him, not entirely due to cold. His foot felt an edge; he bent, holding the rose downward, and melted a coating of ice from a granite step, immemorially ancient, and rutted deep with the pressure of many feet. Other steps rose beyond it, leading up to a monumental double door of bronze. Down them the melting water cascaded.
When he had cleared the ice from it by using the rose again, Barber perceived that the door bore a coat of arms—the same, with crowns and double-headed eagles that he had now seen twice before. But this time it was partly overlaid with a more recent plate in plain brass, into which lettering had been deeply incised. Barber bent to examine it in the tricky, pulsing light that came through the ice from the gathering day:
“This is the veritable Wartburg.
Let him enter who has a high heart and the four elemental spells;
but not unless he can bear the eyes of the Kedbeard.”
There was something strange about that inscription, but not until he had already laid hand on the door to push it open did Barber realize that neither letters nor words had been English. They were old German, a language he did not know—or did he? The building itself had a curious mental atmosphere, as though it possessed a memory of its own, independent of his, and were trying to communicate with him, tell him a great and happy secret. He pushed the door.
It opened slowly, with a musical tinkle of unmelted ice from the hinges. He was in a hall, high, wide and deep, blue-dim at the far end, pale blue along the high windows between the dark uprights. A huge table ran its whole length, a table in white-streaked stone that would be marble. At the near end a figure was seated with its back to Barber, in a chair of horn, curiously mosaicked together. The figure was wearing a dark robe and a tall, conical hat, dark blue and sprinkled with stars.
As Barber came level with him, he perceived this individual was leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his chin cupped in his hands. A beard lay on the table; the face above it was that of Imponens or any other learned doctor in philosophy, with wide-open eyes staring straight ahead. But he did not answer when Barber spoke and shook his shoulder, and the body beneath the robe felt cold.
Barber shuddered slightly and went on down the hall, wondering whether he heard a noise behind him. Toward the far end his eyes focused on figures there. For there were many—a whole row of boys standing against the farther wall, clad in medieval page costumes and with hair to their shoulders, staring stiffly before them like the man in the conical hat. Barber noted that the line had one gap; but what caught and held his eye was the figure in front of the gap.
For this figure also occupied a seat at the table, but the seat was a great carved ivory throne, sweeping up in tall lines to carved double-headed eagles on the pillars at the back. The man himself was leaned forward in an attitude of sleep, his forehead on one arm and chin on the table, and a tall crown of mingled gold and iron, set with jewels, had rolled from his head. All round face and arm lay a great mat of beard, and deeper still, seeming to pass right into the substance of the table itself; and even in that dimness Barber could see that it was red.
A thrill of passionate expectancy, as though he were on the threshold of something at once splendid and terrible, ran through him. He stepped to the table and saw, just beyond the extended fingers, a brass plate let into its top. (Was that a sound again behind him?) Straining his eyes Barber bent close and read:
“He shall gain the triple grace
Who reaches this as the third place.”
Clomp.
Barber whirled. Ice men, faceless and menacing, their clubs held aloft, were flooding through the doorway by which he had entered. They deployed into a line across the hall, both sides of the table, and came marching down with ice-creaking steps ponderous and irresistible.
Barber snatched for the kobold sword, remembered it would not bite on their hardness. The rose? He was surprised to discover it was no longer in his hand; he must have dropped it at the door or when he shook the shoulder of that figure at the other end of the table. For a moment panic jarred through him; then he perceived that the terrible regiment bearing down on him had a gap in its line, the gap caused by the table itself.
He leaped for the tabletop, and in the very moment of the leap saw a figure at the door behind the ice men; the single page boy missing f
rom the line. The lad’s high voice cried: “Time is! The ravens fly no more!” and then Barber’s foot touched the brazen plate that was the third place.
It seemed to go right through; he had a sensation of floating disembodied into nothingness. There was a rending crash; the ice without the castle split and shivered away, and a bright new golden sun came streaming in all the windows of that hall, and—
Frederick Barbarossa, he that was Fred Barber, gripped the arms of the ivory throne and stood upright. There was a tug at his chin; the marble table split and its halves toppled to side and side with a booming crash.
“Where is the Enemy?” he demanded, and looked around on ice men that were ice men no longer, but knights and barons in shining mail with swords in hand and a few drops of water shining like jewels on them in the new light.
But that philosopher from the lower end of the table stretched his arms and answered:
“Lord, there is no Enemy, nor ever was, within this place. For the Enemy but shifts from body to body, being impalpable; and being put down in one form, seeks a new and must again be dealt with. This is the end, Lord, for which you were called from sleep, that you might bring the strong power of the iron to the alliance of King Oberon’s realm, which is of law. Neither can stand without the other; and now I counsel you that you send straitly to him, since the Enemy in a new guise draws near his borders.”
“Let it be done,” said Barbarossa.
In the annals of Fairyland the story of that alliance is written—how Barbarossa and his knights journeyed to the west and won a great battle among the sea crags against an invasion of Rakshas, hideous yellow things that lived like ghouls. They were not the last of such invaders, for the Enemy is ubiquitous. But Barbarossa deals hardly with them all; and there is an end of shapings and evil enchantments in that land. These have no power against the iron.
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