Land of Unreason (18 page)

            If he found the wand.

-

            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
damaged. 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 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 colorblind.

            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."