Authors: L. Sprague de Camp,Fletcher Pratt
"Go straight on. Beyond
the wood, you will reach a plain; walk through it for an hour or two, and when
you see the hills blue on the horizon, you are near. But there be devils and
strange things in that plain; I can see to guide you only so far."
Barber frowned, but there
was no indication of anything but truth in her words. Watching him narrowly
from beyond the stream, she suddenly became all gaiety.
"Oh, you'll return; I
see it now. I am your fate and you mine. We are all, all avatars, though you
are mortal and I only a tree sprite who can be seen through when the light is
strong. Farewell then, for a little time."
"Good-by." He was
beginning to relent a little; after all, she had been decent as far as she knew
how.
"No, not good-by. We'll
meet again and strangely." The tinkling laugh that had accompanied her
first words when they met ran three notes up a scale and two down. "And you,
mortal, will live weirdly before you lose yourself in finding yourself."
She took three steps among
the crowding trees and was hidden, but behind her for a moment there floated
the words of a song:
-
"... fairies
turn to men;
When he touches
the three—"
-
It was cut off
abruptly and the wood went utterly silent as the first level ray of sunlight
struck across the rapids in the stream.
Barber, dawdling over the
remains of his breakfast, reflected that the downright approach of this child
of nature was perhaps more appropriate to certain phases of international
relations than to personal ones. There was something peculiar about the
personal relations of Fairyland anyway, now that he came to think of it. The
winged girl in Oberon's palace and, now, this one had practically thrown
themselves at him. He could not honestly flatter himself into believing it was
because of any innate attractiveness of his own. Of course, his mortal
appearance might be attractive to fairy girls ... No—the Queen's attendant had
described him as preternaturally ugly, if he remembered right.
There was also Jib and
Cyril, both busy, who had been willing enough to drop their concerns and help
him when he asked in the right way. It was as though Fairyland psychological
reaction worked like a slot machine; you dropped in a penny, and unless it was
counterfeit, got a stick of gum. No, not quite. There seemed to be some choice
of reaction. He remembered Titania catching herself midway in a reply to one of
Oberon's taunts, and the latter's abrupt shift to meet her mood—Malacca's
lightning change from tears to happiness. It was more like a game of chess; you
played pawn to king four on the board of personal relations and your opposite
number, though not compelled to imitate you exactly, had to make one of a
series of standard moves or find himself compromised.
If this held true as a
general rule—Hold the boat, Malacea had just offered him a chance to give check
to the king. Eat some of the dryhearted plum's fruit, and then be damned to
him. He would need any such protections he could get after having lost
Titania's wand, for he did not in the least doubt that queenly lady's word
about his coming to "misadventured piteous overthrow" as a result.
Action!
The plum tree was there, all
right, standing pretty much by itself, as though none of the neighboring
foliage cared to approach the monster. It was a very seedy old tree indeed,
with pink blotches of fungus on its straggling leaves.
Barber waded the stream and
approached it cautiously, ready to bolt. It took some inspection to reveal any
fruit at all on it, but he finally located a couple-flat, wrinkly things, but
plums. There was no sign of the wand. He wondered if the plum were hollow and
the wand inside. It would be interesting to investigate; for that matter, it
would be interesting to chop down the tree itself. That ought to settle Mr.
Plum-spook's hash. But he had no ax^ not even a knife; no matches to experiment
with burning the thing down, and was not enough of a Boy Scout to start a fire
by rubbing sticks.
The plums were well out of
reach. A cast among the other trees gave him a dead branch, but it was not long
enough. Two or three efforts to cast it javelin-wise gave no result.
Barber dropped the branch,
wiped his hands, gripped the trunk of the plum and started to climb. The bark
seemed to crawl beneath his hands—imagination probably. About him the malformed
leaves rustled and the big old trunk heaved ever so slightly, as though in the
grip of a stormwind. It creaked till he wondered whether it would break beneath
him.
The branch with the fruit
was one of the uppermost, and when he reached it Barber was driven to the
uncomfortable expedient of swinging out along it, hand after hand, with his
toes just balancing him on a lighter branch beneath. Under his weight the upper
branch curved till he had difficulty keeping his grip, but the distance to the
ground was not so great that he need fear a fall, so he kept on. Toward the
end, he let go with one hand and grabbed. The fruit floated irritatingly away
from his fingers, but at the fourth snatch he made it and tucked the plum in
his jacket. Another effort gave him a second, and he dropped to the ground.
Close up, the plum looked
even more unappetizing than from a distance, and a tentative nibble assured him
that it tasted even worse—like a sour dried prune. No two ways about it,
though; when you have to—
Cr-rrack!
He looked
up just in time to catch a glimpse of a big dead branch, unaccountably broken
loose from the tree's morbid top, hurtling down at him. He jumped like a
grasshopper, and sought the shelter of a friendly looking oak to finish his
unpleasant snack. As he ate, he noted that the back of his jacket seemed
tighter. Perhaps the wings were growing; but if so they were no use to him yet,
so he set out to trudge his way along the banks of the stream.
The forest was very quiet in
the dawnlight, almost as quiet as the strange parkland through which he had
passed before, and he moved on without incident for a couple of hours till the
trees on the left bank began to thin. Among their trunks he could see a line of
yellow-brown where they stopped altogether, so crossed and made toward it. But
when he got nearer he perceived that what he had taken for the packed earth of
a sun-splashed plain was in fact a low, brown wall of some kind of adobe. It
enclosed a space considerable both in length and in width, and entirely filled
with rank on rank of gravestones, all alike in size except one very large one
which faced a kind of gate a hundred yards from them.
Barber found the sight
surprising; he had always supposed the inhabitants of Fairyland to be immortal,
or nearly so. The wall was only about knee-high. He hopped over it and went to
investigate this curious cemetery, in which the ground was not humped as it
would be over real graves. The stones were very old; all the inscriptions had
been weathered from them except a letter here and there. To make matters worse,
the first two he examined had been lettered in Greek, a language with which he
had had no contact since college days. From the next the lettering had
disappeared entirely; there was only just visible the incised outline of a
violin and a pair of musical notes. The next bore a book open, with the letters
veri
, a gap, and
as
. Then came one that had a crude
representation of a telescope, another with faded armorial bearings, and one
with the academic mortarboard cap. All had some symbol, and as Barber wandered
among them he was struck by the fact that none of these symbols could by any
imagination be considered either military or religious in character.
He made his way toward the
larger and more elaborate stone at the gate. Like the rest it had been nearly
effaced; unlike them it still bore a few traces of lettering beneath a coat of
arms now nearly wiped out. Peering close Barber was able to make out in the
crumbling stone:
-
"When
the redbeard comes again
Then
shall ... urn ...
When
he ... lac ...
He
sh ... faces."
-
The illegibility
of it was made still greater by the fact that it had originally been carved in
old letter like the type face of a German book. Barber puzzled over it for
awhile, but could make nothing of it, nor did there seem to be any other sign
of life but a couple of lizards sunning themselves on the enclosure wall, so he
left the graveyard and continued his way.
Beyond, the trees really
were thinning out along the left bank of the stream. "Go straight
on," Malacea had said, which he took to mean on along the river. It
divided and flung one brooklike branch back among the trees, so he kept to the
other. Along this fork the country was flat and soon became dismally bare, with
the trees petering out into gray-green shrubs that had a greasy look under the
now-high sun. Once or twice Barber caught a glimpse of something moving on the
horizon, but too far and indistinctly for any details to be made out. The
stream dropped away from him, down to the bottom of a stony arroyo, where it
finally disappeared altogedier.
It was hot. Barber called
upon his foodbag for flasks of water, not without some trepidation, for in this
region of no shade it had been impossible to keep the sun away from it. His
respect for the frenetic little King's ability rose as the bag unfailingly
answered his desires, but when he tried the container for cold bottied beer he
got only a bitter liquid that made him quickly return to water.
But he was making progress.
Looking back, he could make out a dark line of green rimming the horizon—
the
forest. In spite of his hard night, he felt strong and full of energy.
He plodded resolutely on.
The dust-green shrubs had now mostly gone, the ground was all sand and pebbles
with bunches of coarse grass here and there, across which he steered by the
sun. The loneliness and silence of the landscape were beginning to weigh on
him. Even the presence of the too-affectionate apple sprite would have been a
relief, he decided, and began to wonder unhappily about what happened to people
lost in deserts. They went cuckoo, didn't they? He couldn't remember, but to
keep his mind off the empty landscape, he composed an imaginary report to the
Foreign Relations Committee on conditions in England. It was not much help; he
had written that report too many times before.
He tried composing
scurrilous limericks on the Lords of Britain and imagined himself reciting them
in Parliament. But this device also broke down on the failure to find a rhyme
for "Norfolk," for it would never do to forget the premier Duke of
the British Empire.
Miles of nothing.
Suppose he had been
misdirected or had lost his way? Suppose he were isolated for keeps in this
ironing board of a landscape? Oberon's bag would keep him in food and water,
perhaps indefinitely, perhaps only to the next shaping, while he walked,
walked, walked. Forever was a long time.
His beard would grow long
and ... whoa, there was a possibility of escape. His wings, those absurd
shoulder-blade bunches, would grow too. He craned his neck around to look over
his shoulder. There was certainly some kind of projection present, swelling his
jacket to hunchback proportions. He tried using the new muscles at his chest,
and could just see the projections wiggle. Interesting. He wondered if, when
the wings came out, the ability to use them would grow too, or whether he would
have to be pushed off a high place to learn how, like an eaglet from its nest.
Who would catch him if he fell?
Consideration of the
question diverted him till he noticed that his shadow had lengthened across the
featureless plain and the sun was setting. Evidently he was to be caught out
there for the night. Malacea had said it was only a walk of an hour or
two—something wrong somewhere. He hoped it was only that she was a tree sprite
and could not know this desert, but all the same the fear of this eternal
emptiness came back and sat at the edge of his mind, waiting to be invited into
the center.