Land of Unreason (13 page)

            There was no help for it at
this moment. For better or worse he was stuck for the night. He sat down where
he was, waited till the red ball of fire dipped under the horizon and then
fished in the foodbag. Unlike the forest night, this one was brilliant with
stars, though Barber, looking aloft, could recognize none of the
constellations.

            Stars. He and Kaja had
picnicked under stars like that once. In sentimental memory, and to have
something to do, he imagined her sharing the meal with him, and set aside the
better half for her. But she was not really there, his conversational sallies
remained unanswered, so Barber ended by eating both halves of the meal himself.
Since there was nothing else to do, he scratched hip and shoulder holes in the
sand and went to sleep.

            The sun woke him by hitting
him squarely in the eye. He stood up, stiff from his comfortless bed, and
looked around. There was a line of hills, rimming the distance in plain sight,
and they could only be the Kobold Hills, his goal at last. He emitted a shout
of delight which was lost in the immense silence, and requisitioning a flask of
water from the bag, started briskly toward the hills.

            But after an hour's walk
they were dismayingly smaller and more distant than before. It might, of
course, be optical illusion. He had heard of such things in desert countries,
though his personal experience extended no farther than the plateau of central
Spain, where there was always a church or a house or a sleepy muleteer to serve
as a point of reference. But it might equally be something connected with the
peculiar physics or geography of this realm. He looked near and then far beside
him, searching for some feature by which he could orient himself.

            The result was disconcerting.
The desert close by his side moved back as he strode along, as any well-behaved
desert should. But that in the distance crawled slowly forward past him, faster
than he. It was as though the narrow strip on which he walked were an endless belt
conveyor, moving back faster than he went forward. The optical effect was the
familiar one he had experienced as a boy, when he had looked for a long time
from a train window. When the train stopped at a station the whole landscape
would seem to crawl for a moment in a direction opposite to its previous
motion. Only this time it really was moving.

            He sat down discouragedly
and flapped his wing-stubs in annoyance. No result. He tried thinking his way
through the problem, but that did not get him any forwarder.

            As he did so, a movement
caught his eye in the direction of the hills. A little accumulation of
blue-black clouds was piling and tossing over there, their summits glorious
where the sunlight turned them golden. There would be wind from the front of
that storm, thought Barber, and looked down toward the desert in front of him.
Sure enough four—a dozen-twenty—any number of little dust clouds were figging
and whirling across the desert toward him, and his eye gladly followed this
movement in the waste.

-

"It's
up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown

    
dust devils go,

The
dun he fled like a stag of ten, but the mare

    
like a barren doe... "

-

           
Barber quoted to
himself.

            One of the whirlwinds was
riding past within ten feet of him. Suddenly its progress halted, and as though
that braking had converted all its energy into angular velocity, spun more and
more violently, denser and denser, till it collapsed into a dirt-colored
manni-kin, not over two feet high, its head covered with wobbly spikes.

            "Hey, there, doc!"
it shouted, bouncing and fidgeting in front of Barber. "Hey, there, Si!
How's about some gutbucket, huh? Um-pum, um-pum." It balanced adroitly on
one toe, whirled till it was a blur, and went round and round him.

            "Beg pardon," said
Barber, "but could you tell me how to get to those hills?"

            The thing stopped whirling
and did handsprings instead. "Aw, what d'you want to waste your time there
for, Mac? Only saps work. Come on down to the clambake. We got a new
scat-singer; you won't have to watch no flutes swish. Diddy-boom, diddy-boom.
We'll make you a side-man—"

            "Sorry, but I have to
get to those hills. Business— for the King."

            "Oh, a Joe Union, eh?
Thought you was a go-man." The thing went into a wild calisthenic dance
that made it into a mere whirl of dust again, but the voice came out of it.
"What was it you wanted to get smarted up on?
Hotcha., hotcha.."

           
"How to get
to those hills. The more I walk toward them the farther away they get."

            "Chill it, handsome,
chill it. Face away, look back over your shoulder, ankle backward toward 'em,
and you'll be right in the groove." It danced on its hands. "What
d'you play—Jibbo? Slushpump? Doghouse? Woodpile?"

            "I'm not a musician, if
that's what you mean." Barber stood up; the wind from the mountains was
slightly chill about him, and the onrushing clouds were heaving huge shadows
across the desert ahead.

            "Not even a longhair?
You mean you got
brains?"
It stood clapping, but trembling slightly
in the wind. "Come on, be a satchel, be an alligator. Buddlydoop,
buddlydoop."

            The storm was coming on fast
now, and Barber thought he could make out lines of rain beneath the clouds. All
round and past him more of the dust whirlwinds were dancing, revealing now an
arm, now a leg or a curious face. But they didn't seem to be getting away from
the storm. "You wouldn't care to come with me, would you?" asked
Barber.

            "Who, me? Not when
there's greasepots can sling a potful. I'm a rug-cutter; come on, gang, bite
your nails." A dozen other individuals joined it in a spinning maze of
acrobatics.

            "But wait," said
Barber, "won't that storm—"

            "Aw, go get a
permit!" The dust devils whirled around him, singing:

-

"What
do we want with books of knowledge?

Spin,
you hep-cats, spin;

You
don't learn to spin in college;

Spin
the livelong day ..."

-

           
When that gets
here we'll all have whiskers." With a shout of derisive laughter they were
off. The storm was still rushing on, but now the hills stood out, black against
its underedge. Barber tried walking toward them by the dust devil's method,
backward, with his head over his shoulder. It gave him a frightful crick in the
neck, but he found that by walking a hundred paces while watching over one
shoulder and then changing to the other, he could ease the difficulty.

            The storm, after all, proved
one of those summer thundershowers, with a terrifying play of lightning along
its front, a wind that tore briefly at him before it passed, and only a few
big, wet drops. But as he changed from one shoulder to another to watch the
nearing hills, he could see how it had swept away all the dust devils right before
it, or beaten them out of existence. However, there would doubtless be more,
and they were not very human anyway.

-

            Dust devils were not the
only things to think about.

            Long before the hills were
high about him, Barber was conscious of their clamor on that still air. The
rhythm was set by an insistent metallic beat, up and down the scale like a set
of tuned tympani, so near waltz time that he found himself thinking "The
Blue Danube" to it. But as the sounds drew nearer and louder a melody
joined the resonance; a chorus of many male voices from tenor to bass, singing
indistinguishable words. The air was now gay, now melancholy, but always in the
same fascinating three-quarter beat; for a bar or two Barber would catch the
hint of something familiar in it.

            Around him the ground was
soaring into steeps and declivities; the soapy green shrubs of the desert had
given place to scrub oak, birch and pines, then full-standing trees, their arms
black-green in the westering light. Definitely among the hills now, he turned
to walk forward in a more normal fashion, and was relieved to find the
landscape had ended its antics, but the ceaseless song and drumming now changed
direction, coming from one side, then the other. As he opened out a thickly
wooded draw a great burst of the music came charging down at him; among the
trees in that direction were freshly cut stumps, and high up in the side of the
hill a glare of warm red light challenged the dying sun among the branches. An entrance
of some kind—should he chance it? He hesitated for a moment, then decided
against. After all, he
could
return, there was not the vaguest hint of a
plan in his mind. Even if he made one, whatever lay beyond the next spur would
probably cause him to modify it. He pressed on, noting that along here the
ground was seamed with little paths, crisscrossing among the trees, pale in the
fading gloom. From a hill on the left another rollicking chorus swept at him,
another beam of red light plashed across a fan of tailings at an entrance to
the hills.

            As he stood looking at it
the thought came to him that one of the most striking things about Fairyland
was its sameness. There was no escaping an experience; whatever one did,
whichever way one turned, it was repeated until a solution had been found. Like
the case of Three-eyes on the road here. Apparently whatever force controlled
his destiny was driving him toward those cave entrances. Wondering whether he
had solved the problem of Malacea satisfactorily, he turned toward the entrance
and began to climb.

            Just before his head came
level with it a new note, high and piping, joined the roaring melody of the
chorus. It was a bird song, a nightjar, perfect in time and melody, and Barber
recognized the tune as that of the "Waldweben" from
Siegfried.

           
Ominous. But no
use turning back now. He drew a breath, heaved himself across the rubble heap
and stepped into—

            A short passage, with a
smooth-polished stone floor, slanting slightly down into a great hall whose
upper reaches were lost in smoky dimness. It was filled with tables and lined
with guttering red torches in brackets. Every seat at all those tables was
occupied by a little man, but there was no type resemblance—some cleanshaven
with round, jolly, cherubic faces, some skinny with goatbeards, some with jowls
and pointed mustaches. They had mugs of beer before them, and barmaids in
bright dresses were hurrying among the tables with more. As Barber watched, a
fat elf pinched one of the girls on the buttock. She jumped, tripped and came
down with a crash; one of the dwarfs at the nearest table emptied his beer mug
on her head, and as the dripping face came up, those near by burst into roars
of laughter, clinging to each other's shoulders, helpless with merriment.

            The incident passed
unnoticed in the general uproar, for the singing Barber had heard during his
approach was now clear as coming from the throats of these drinkers, who were
pounding out the time with their mugs. But it was not quite the joyous concord
he had heard from a distance. Every little group of kobolds and sometimes every
kobold in a group was working away on a different song, flatting hideously.
Whatever pretense to harmony the din could make was accidental, the result of
one set of voices striking into the right note to accord with those of another
lot six tables away. Only the metallic waltz beat of the drumming, louder now,
lay under and united the clashing sounds.

            Barber was granted time to
observe so much before the kobolds at the nearest table noticed him. They
stopped singing and stared at him with slack jaws, whispering and pointing,
drawing more after them till silence spread across the room like ripples on a
pool. It had nearly reached the far end, where the doors through which the
barmaids came were barely visible, when three kobolds, neatly uniformed in
gray, came hurrying toward him. The leader wore a badge in complicated gold
filigree. He bowed low before Barber, and said: