Land of Unreason (15 page)

            "God bless you,"
said Barber automatically.

           
"Yeeeee
!" All the kobolds together joined in the
ear-piercing shriek. The spearmen dropped their spears, the swordsmen their
swords, the long-nosed judge jumped over the table, and all together they raced
for the exits. In two minutes Barber was left alone with the discarded weapons,
the mound of papers and the gingerbread carving.

-

            Barber picked up a few of
the swords. Oberon had certainly told him not to use force on the kobolds and
it seemed that other methods were more effective—why hadn't he remembered from
the beginning that medieval legend always mentioned the name of God as anathema
to these people of the hills? Still, one of these swords would be a handy
object if he encountered the Plum or other monsters of that ilk. Most of the
weapons were too small, but he found a claymore which, being designed for both
a kobold's little fists, was about right for one of his own.

            Doorways led in several
directions among the forest of lambrequins, and the way he had entered by was
not promising. He chose an exit at random and found himself in one of the usual
passages, which ran on, dipping and winding past rooms dark and rooms lighted.
All were untenanted, and Barber was conscious of something vaguely wrong in the
air, as impalpable as a thought. He tried to shake it off, tried to hum
"Blue Danube"—and then it came to him what the difference was. The
undertone of the hammers, no longer so loud, had changed from the three-four
beat of a waltz to the four-four of march time.

            The passage also had changed
character. Its walls and ceilings were trued off smoothly now, no longer
dripped, so that it was like a corridor in an office building. A few yards
ahead the feeble light showed a pair of bronze doors with a complex design in massive
relief. Barber put his ear to the doors. Not a sound within. He pushed one of
them gently. As it swung back on hinges oiled to silence the design impressed
him as so familiar that he bent to examine it. A coat of arms—where had he seen
the like before, with its repeated crowns and eagles and singular half-a-bear?
Of course; it was the design he had seen more than half-effaced, on the big
tombstone in the graveyard at the edge of
the
forest, but here there was
no lettering with it. But that was not all; some insistent memory nagged at him
till he stopped and hunted it down, tried to localize it. That design ought not
to be on a door—when he had seen it before, somewhere, it was
worn.
Barber
gave up, shrugged his shoulders, and pushed in.

            Beyond the door was another
hall, huge as that of the drinkers, but only feebly lit by a couple of torches.
Their flames reflected redly on bright stone of walls and floor; the ceiling
was lost in gloom. Barber caught his breath sharply at the sight of what seemed
to be human figures in niches all down the walls. Inspection showed them to be
suits of kobold-size Gothic armor, with the visors of the armets down so that
it was impossible to tell whether they held living creatures.

            He stepped over to the
nearest and touched it on the plastron with his sword. It gave forth a metallic
scrape rather than the ring of hollowness, but remained immobile, and when he
tried to lift the visor that mechanism would not budge.

            Barber turned toward the far
end of the hall. It held a long, low table, with a row of chairs down one side.
At the end was a much larger chair, with a low seat but a high, intricately
carved back and damask upholstery. It looked like a throne.

            Barber walked the length of
the hall to examine this throne more closely. There was nothing special about
it, but set into the wall behind it was a copper plate with lettering on it.
Barber bent to puzzle out the Gothic inscription:

-

"Of
places three

The
one you see

Fyrst
touched shall bee."

-

           
Meaningless. Or perhaps
not quite. He remembered a line of Malacca's song:

-

"When he
touches the three places—"

-

           
Perhaps he was
supposed to touch this one. Perhaps this was what Oberon meant by the
enterprise he had been brought here for. Just for the hell of it, he reached
out and touched the plate with the point of his sword. Crash!

            The room stood out vivid in
a blue-white flash of lightning, then pitched into darkness while thunder
rumbled to and fro among the caverns like ten thousand cannonballs rolling downstairs.
Barber froze while the thunder died, straining his eyes against the black, more
than half expecting, and certainly hoping, that the returning light would show
the well-ordered interior of Gurton's cottage. Every hair follicle on his face
tingled till his jaw seemed on fire, and he felt a sudden tug at the back of
his jacket where the wing-cases were.

            The room slowly returned to
normal, the fiery pin-wheels before his eyes disappearing. He looked round. He
could swear that the halberd in the hand of that suit of armor swayed. The
torches were guttering out, darkness creeping from above like a spider lowering
itself on its thread. He heard a faint, fricative sound, that might be breath
whistling in and out through the holes of a visor, and realized with a shock
that the hammer sounds in the distance had gone altogether dumb.

            There was a faint scrape of
metal on steel plate and then, small but startling in the silence, the sound of
a cough. Barber turned and trotted on tiptoe down the length of that shiny
expanse of stone. The end seemed twice as distant as before, like the vanishing
point in a diagram showing the laws of perspective. Before he reached it he was
frankly running. At the last moment torches gave a final flicker and went out
together. He made the last few strides in darkness, located a door handle by
feel and tugged it open, with a sense of wild relief.

            No more than before did he
have any idea where he was, and now all those passages were more than ever
void, with not even the sound of the forges to keep him company. Neither was
the pitch of the tunnels any help; they turned up and down after a fashion that
had no logic. But the luck that had run with him through the caverns still
held, and after an hour or more of wandering he reached a fork where one
passage led to the drab pallor of daylight instead of the ubiquitous
torch-glow.

            The sun had just risen when
he came to the mouth, up on a high hillside looking out across a rolling and
grassy champaign, quite unlike the desert through which he had trekked to reach
the place. Off in the middle distance, half hidden by the intervening rolls,
was a group of brown and yellow rectangles that would be a farm or its
Fairyland equivalent. Beyond, the darker green of trees.

            There would be life of some
sort there and not kobold life. Barber went down the hillside in long, leaping
steps, his lungs glad of the fresh air.

            It was like a late summer
morning in New England with dewy spiderwebs on the grass and a few early midges
in their aerial dance above. Grasshoppers sprang out from before his feet,
whirred away over the rich meadow. Each rise brought the buildings nearer. At
the fourth the group of buildings became definitely farm; from the next a horse
was visible, pegged out in a field and cropping the lush grass, and from the
next again he spotted a man working over a patch of bare earth.

            Barber paused at the lip of
the last rise and rubbed his fingers through a considerable growth of whisker.
His appearance was certainly odd enough to cause alarm, but there was no razor
handy, nor did he feel like dropping the sword, his only protection.

            From the top of the hill he
could see the farm spread before him in orderly checkerboards marked off by
stone fences. The farmer did not look up till he heard the sound of a displaced
stone as Barber climbed over the nearest fence. He was a big, burly man with
rolled-up shirt sleeves and a pair of gaudily checked pants sustained by a
single gallus at the top, and at the bottom tucked into jackboots. As Barber drew
near, he turned a ruddy face in which a pair of startlingly blue eyes looked
out over gray-flecked sideburns. His glance fell on the sword; without wasted
motion he dropped his hoe, stepped lightly to an angle of the fence and picked
up a formidable looking broadax. Feet spread, he stood facing Barber without
hostility or fear.

            "Hello," said
Barber.

            The farmer replied:
"Howdy, mister." He relaxed a little and lowered the ax. "Nice
mornin'."

            "Yes, it is,"
agreed Barber judicially. "My name's Barber."

            "Glad to make your
'quaintance, Mr. Barber. Mine's Fawcett, Noah Fawcett. Where you from?"

            "King Oberon's
place."

            "Be you one of the
heathen?"

            "I'm not a fairy, if
that's what you mean."

            "Don't believe in
fairies. They're just heathen. You work for Oberon?"

            "Yes. I'm an
ambassador."

            "Well, I declare to
goodness. Where was you from originally?"

            Barber smiled.
"Lansing, Michigan, if you want to go back that far."

            Noah Fawcett frowned.
"Don't guess I know—say, d'you mean Michigan Territory?"

            "It's a state now.
Admitted to the Union in 1835."

            "Well, by the tarnal
nation. Harry Clay alius said we ought to take her in. A real American."
Fawcett dropped his ax definitely now and stepped forward to shake hands.
"Come on in and make yourself t'hum, mister. How old be you? Be you
married? What's your church? Be you Whig or one of those Damocrats? How'd you
come to work for Oberon? What's the news from back in the States?"

            Barber's movement of
desperation halted the spate of inquiry and Noah Fawcett gave a deep, chesty
laugh. "Guess I'be jumpin' ahead of the thills, but I ain't see ary man
but the swandangled heathen for a right long spell, let alone a real American. Get
pretty lonesome for news." He was leading the way to the larger of a pair
of clapboarded buildings. Inside, there was not even paint on the neat plaster,
but the room was cluttered with substantial-looking furniture dominated by a
wooden pendulum-clock, which was ticking busily. Everything had the
indescribable look of sophisticated design Barber had noted in articles made by
Continental peasants.

            Noah Fawcett caught his
glance. "Yep," he said, "made the hull business, mostly winters
when they wan't nathin' else on hand. 'Through the idleness of hands the house
droppeth through,' the Good Book says. That rack, now"—he indicated a pair
of jigsawed brackets against the wall—"was for a gun. But I never could
get a barrel, even from the mountain heathen, and they're pretty cute about
ironwork. You can put your sword there. That's a funny hump on your back. Was
you hurt when you was little?"

            "No. I guess it just
grew there."

            Fawcett shook his head.
"Better be careful of that, Mr. Barber. I had a cousin over to Lou-isy had
one of those lumps come on his chest, and the doctor said how he died of it.
But I don't put much store by doctors. Now you set down and I shall get some
wherewithal to celebrate. Be you married?"

            Without waiting for Barber's
reply he lifted a trap door and dived into a cellar, to return in a moment with
a jug. "Berry wine," commented Fawcett, pouring some into a pair of
wooden mugs with a pleasant glugging sound. " 'Taint's good as the cider I
make, but I'm a little mite short-handed, and have to go a long piece for
m'apples. How come you to work for the heathen king? Does he pay good wages?
He's all right for a heathen, but they're all like Injuns and woodchucks; it
won't do to take ary sass from them. Had a run-in with him myself a while back."