People began to step out from around grass-blades or rise from behind pebbles. They wore all manner of clothing, generally pleated skirts for the females and breeches held up by shoulder straps for the men. Their headgear was invariably ornate, running to feathers and furs and metal spikes or sheets of foil.
They looked odd without quite being grotesque. They gave the impression of being normal humans who had gone about all their lives with stone blocks on their heads, slowly flattening them into shorter, broader beings.
“Where are we?” Hedia demanded. She spoke because the newcomers were making her nervous. If she simply stood and waited for others to act, she might show that fear.
There were twenty-odd of the strangers. The tallest was shorter than Hedia and probably not even as tall as Alphena.
“We are in the place from which I went from this world to the Waking World,” Melino muttered.
He opened the
Book.
As before, it spoke a word. Hedia felt existence shudder like a sheet of water sweeping over rocks.
Melino tottered. Hedia put out her hand to steady him, but at the last moment she hesitated.
The magician opened his eyes. He nodded toward two inward-arching grass-blades. Hedia could follow the opening between them for as far as her eyes could reach.
“That way,” Melino said, closing the
Book.
He started forward.
A short man in red breeches and a puffy white blouse stepped into the magician’s path. He wore a hat with a low crown. Tiny chariots appeared to race around its wide brim.
“One moment, sir,” the little man said. “This can be a very dangerous place for those who don’t know its foibles. My family and I will guide you.”
When Melino said nothing, the stranger said, “It would be very dangerous for you to attempt to proceed without our help.”
Melino sniffed. To the ring demon he said, “Deal with him.”
The demon’s expression might have been a smile. She said, “Pluck,” and extended her left hand. A dusting of ruby sparkles drifted from her fingertips toward the strangers’ spokesman.
The little man backed away, but the sparkles encircled him and closed in. “Please, good master, you must have misunderstood me!” he said.
The sparkles pulled back from the little man’s torso, tearing his blouse and trousers away in shreds. His torso was ridged, and a third pair of limbs had been concealed under his clothing.
“We meant no harm!” the little man squealed, though he wasn’t a man. His fellows had vanished. “You must believe—”
The sparkles pulled away the three limbs on his left side as they had done his clothing. He fell to the ground, shrieking wordlessly. He began to wriggle in a circle, but he couldn’t rise.
“That should be enough of a lesson,” Melino said. He was breathing hard. “Come along, though, before something worse finds us.”
He started in the direction he had indicated, walking around the crippled spokesman.
“Are you going to finish him?” Hedia said, skirting the writhing thing a little wider than Melino had done.
“He’s no longer a danger,” Melino said. “He can squirm as long as he wants to. Although—”
He looked at Hedia.
“—are you hungry? They taste like crabmeat.”
“Thank you,” said Hedia, “but I don’t care for shellfish.”
They walked briskly through the forest. The demon was leading.
Sexual bondage with the right partner could be pleasant, but Hedia had already decided that the magician would
not
be the right partner. The business behind them merely reinforced that opinion.
The lute was still playing. The turtle’s feet plucked the strings.
CHAPTER
XIII
The haze cleared, and Corylus could see the ground on which he walked. The sky remained featureless: evenly lighted, but with the same greenish cast as the atmosphere that had formed the curtain between wherever this was and the Waking World. The yew sprite released his hand, but she moved slightly closer to him.
He leaned forward to look past her and said, “Pandareus?”
“Yes, I’m quite all right,” said Pandareus. “But I’m interested in the ground cover. Have you noticed it?”
Only to the extent of making sure that we’re not stepping off a precipice,
Corylus thought, but he didn’t expect the scholar to be concerned with the possibilities that Ethiopes—or Germans; there was no end of potential enemies—would momentarily charge over the horizon.
“No, master,” Corylus said. “It looks like mushrooms, but I don’t think they’re dangerous. Unless we eat them, perhaps.”
“Fascinating,” Pandareus said, his eyes on the ground. “I almost hate to step on them, they’re so lovely.”
The mushrooms covered the ground for as far as Corylus could see. The only difference when he looked back was that their three sets of footprints—paired trails rather than prints because their toes had dragged through the fragile growth—started in the middle of the plain.
Their colors differed, mostly in the form of soft pastels but with occasional vivid splotches of red. Corylus instinctively avoided those last. Some varieties of fungus clumped together or formed streaks across the multi-colored background, occasionally forming patterns that seemed to have meaning.
Corylus wasn’t in a mood to consider beauty. Something was a threat or it wasn’t; and at present, nothing seemed to be a threat.
“The footing’s all right,” he said. The mushrooms gave only the slightest resistance to his heavy sandals, pulping as he touched them but sometimes coating his foot with dust or slime as he tramped on. It was like walking across thin mud on top of ground that was still frozen beneath.
Corylus was irritated that Pandareus was behaving like a scholar, not a fellow soldier on a dangerous reconnaissance. He chuckled at the realization. He would have gripped his teacher’s hand in friendship if the dryad hadn’t been between them.
“Corylus?” Pandareus said, responding to the laughter.
“You remind me that there are things beyond the present, teacher,” Corylus said formally. “And that if life has any meaning, those things are the only ones that are important.”
“We could have walked within the forest,” said Taxus, glancing toward Pandareus. “You would not have damaged the mushrooms then, nor damaged the ones who live within the mushrooms. But—”
She looked now at Corylus; her fingertips caressed his sword scabbard.
“—they might have damaged you, some of them. And besides, you are a short-lived race and might not have lived long enough to reach the garden.”
“I doubt that the color patterns would be as attractive at that scale,” said Pandareus. “Although if I was forced to make them my life’s work, I’m sure I would find a great deal of interest in them. I’m a philosopher, after all.”
Corylus laughed outright. The most amusing aspect of his teacher’s statement was that though he said it in a tone of dry humor, it was literally true, every word. And Pandareus knew it was.
“There,” Taxus said, gesturing ahead of them with her right hand. “The garden of Vergil.”
“The poet Vergil?” said Pandareus, his voice unnaturally flat.
“He may have been a poet,” the dryad said. “He was a magician, surely.”
She looked at Corylus and added, “I’m not good at human names, you know, Cousin. But he marked this garden as his own, and no one forgets that.”
Corylus supposed that he shouldn’t have been so surprised. Lucinus had spoken of his uncle Vergil’s magic, after all. It remained a shock to learn that the man who wrote, “I sing of arms, and the man who first driven by fate fled the shores of Troy to Italy,” used that same skill with words to twist the Waking World to his wish and to build a garden here in the Otherworld.
The garden ahead was extensive, though Corylus couldn’t tell how far back it stretched because the terrain was dead flat. The rows of olive trees might reach into the infinite distance from all he could tell.
He glanced at Pandareus and said, “The ground is unnaturally flat.” They both grinned at the joke.
“I’ll leave you here,” said Taxus. “You’ll have to make your own way through the wall … though I don’t think that you’ll find that difficult.”
She smiled knowingly. “You won’t, at least, Cousin.”
“I don’t see the wall,” said Pandareus. “Ah. But I’m not a magician, so I shouldn’t expect to see a barrier built by a magician.”
“Thank you, mistress,” Corylus said, bowing to the dryad.
She stepped back but eyed him with speculation. “May your roots always find water, Cousin,” she said. “And perhaps we will meet another time.”
Instead of walking away, she vanished. There were now only two tracks across the colored fungus, those of the humans; the dryad might have been a dream. Corylus and his teacher stood at the edge of the garden.
The cultivated ground stood out from the mushroom forest as sharply as a volcanic vent raising its cone in a pasture. There was a row of olive trees on the outside edge and individual olives were scattered deeper within the garden to shield and support grapevines. Corylus could see flowers and vegetables in furrows beyond—
And workers as well, all of whom were automatons. Some hoed and pruned, and two were gathering ripe olives into the handbarrow in which they would transport the olives to an unseen press.
“They don’t appear to see us,” Pandareus said.
“Be thankful you don’t look like a cabbage worm, then,” said Corylus. “My concern is the form the barrier takes.”
He reached out with his left hand. He thought of using the toe of his sandal, just in case the barrier was a sudden sheet of flame, but he decided that would be cowardly. Nonetheless, it was with his extended little finger that he probed—nothing, but a nothing as solid as polished granite. Only air protected Vergil’s garden, but that air was impenetrable.
“Well, that could have been worse,” Corylus said, feeling a rush of relief. “Mind you, it doesn’t get us any closer to entry.”
One, then a full dozen olive nymphs appeared and walked to where Corylus and his teacher stood outside the wall. The nymphs looked mature—certainly not in their first youth—but were radiant with health.
The first to step from her tree stood arms akimbo, smiling at Corylus; her sisters stood just behind and to the sides. They wore gray-green tunics so thin that they were transparent except when they caught the light.
The first dryad said, “We’ve waited a long time for visitors, but you’re worth waiting for, Cousin.”
“The other one’s cute too,” another said with the back of her hand across her mouth to hide her lips’ moving. She and the nymphs closest to her giggled.
“Mistress,” Corylus said, “we’ve come to find a way to rescue our comrade, who was stolen away by a magician. Your cousin who guided us here—”
“He means the yew,” a dryad whispered hoarsely.
“Such
prickly
things,” another said/agreed. “I can’t imagine why
anybody
would keep company with a yew.”
“—said that there’s a passage in your garden by which we can follow her,” Corylus said, keeping his eyes on the leading dryad. He had to hope that she at least would stay focused for long enough to help him. “But now that we’re here, we can’t enter the garden.”
He patted the invisible wall with the flat of his hand.
The dryad laughed and took him by the wrist. “Of course you can come in,” she said, drawing him firmly toward her as though the barrier did not exist—which it didn’t, so long as she was holding him. “We’re glad to have
you
visit.”
“Here, you come too,” said another olive nymph. She reached through the barrier, if it really was a barrier to the sprites. Their feet didn’t pass beyond the point that his finger reached in the other direction, though. Before her hand touched Pandareus, three of her fellows also snatched at the scholar’s tunic and left arm.
“Mistresses!” Pandareus said as he fell off-balance into the garden. “I’m quite willing to enter. You don’t have to pull.”
Corylus smiled as he stepped through. He’d expected the dryad to move back and give him room, however. Instead her arms wrapped about him and she kissed him hard.
Corylus lifted the dryad off the ground, returning her kiss, then set her down at arm’s length when her hug slackened. He continued to hold her at a distance. “Thank you for your courtesy, Cousin,” he said, “but our friend may be in great danger. Can you guide us to the passage which leads us to where the magician has taken her?”
Corylus didn’t know where Alphena was, let alone what sort of route would take him to her. This was as bad as wandering in darkness through the Hercynian Forest, hoping to find a soldier who’d gone missing.
Corylus grinned. There might well be worse things lying in ambush here than there were across the Rhine—but at least for the moment the olive nymphs didn’t pose a life-threatening danger.
Pandareus was in the garden also, almost hidden by the clot of giggling dryads around him. “Please, mistresses!” he said in as agitated a voice as Corylus had ever heard him use. “I’m not a eunuch, but I don’t find this in the least congenial. For one thing, there are far too many people—”
Corylus thought he heard a minute hesitation as the teacher chose the word.
“—around for me to be in the least titillated by your behavior.”
“Such an old silly!” said a nymph. She winked at Corylus. “That’s half the fun!”
“Please, Cousin,” Corylus said, his eyes on the dryad whom he held. Though other nymphs hovered close, he wasn’t being mobbed the way his teacher was; perhaps his nymph had authority of some sort over her sisters.
She made a disappointed moue, then backed out of his grip. “Not this time, girls,” she said. “I’ll take them to the master’s bridge. Perhaps we’ll be luckier when they return.”
“I think they’d be luckier too,” said one of the sprites stepping away from Pandareus with a look of disappointment.
Pandareus straightened his tunic. “Thank you, mistresses,” he said. “I truly appreciate your enthusiasm, but I fear that I’m too staid to match it.”
The dryad Oliva took Corylus by the hand and walked through the garden. Pandareus quickly fell into step on his other side, and the whole grove of olive nymphs followed in a chattering group.