Land of Unreason (24 page)

            "But look here,"
he said, "haven't you just furnished me with the best possible argument
against staying with you? How can I stick to the task, whatever it is, and go
off with you, too?"

            Her eyes suddenly stared
into vacancy and her voice went to a whisper. "It's true," she said
slowly, "true I might have known that to set my love on one of the great
ones would be to share his hard rule of achievement before enjoyment. Go,
then." She gave him a little push with the flat of her hand and Barber
felt as though he had struck a child. "Go and tell your new love that
Malacea the dryad sends her hate ... No, wait. At least you shall kiss my arm
that you burned with your Metal and make it well."

            She held it out and Barber
obediently kissed the place where the burn was now swelling to blister.
Somewhat to his surprise it immediately became as smooth—and as
semitransparent—as the other arm.

            He turned to his clothes
with a trace of irresolution and began to pull them on. Malacea had turned her
back to him, and did not look round even when he was, with some difficulty,
buttoning the jacket around the bases of his wings. As he stood on tiptoe
before leaping away into flight he could see that her head had sunk forward and
her shoulders were shaken with sobs.

            With each powerful stroke
his big new pectoral muscles bulged out the front of his jacket. He cleared the
trees easily, and straightened away in level flight across the forest through
which he had toiled on foot. Bat wings might not be pretty, but they were
certainly efficient about getting one over territory. Barber did a loop and a
couple of barrel rolls just for the hell of it, and zoomed along, savoring the
pleasure of this new physical motion, all his depression fled. So he was near
to fulfilling the prophecy of the redbeard, was he? What prophecy? Everyone
seemed to know of it; there was that tune Malacea and then Arvicola had
sung—devilish odd, now that he thought of it, that denizens of such different
worlds should have the same air and same words. There had been something about
a redbeard, too, on that big tomb in the graveless graveyard, the one that bore
the same strange heraldic design as the door in the Kobold Caverns.

            It all tied together somehow
and somewhere. Barber experienced the maddening sense that comes just before
the climax of a good detective story, of having all the clues laid out before
him, but being unable to interpret them into a meaningful pattern. Or did he
have all the clues? There seemed one missing from the set; he ought to be doing
something, having some authority he did not now possess. The accomplishment of
whatever he had to do waited on that; even if what he had to do was only to get
back where he belonged through one more of these insane permutations. Perhaps
the clues never would make sense in this impossible cosmos. He thought of the
pebbles, and clapping his wings behind his back in irritation, did a
fifteen-foot drop.

            Long black striding shadows
beneath hinted of moonset, and he guessed it must be near dawn till he
remembered Malacca's counsel to forget his imported habits of thought. But what
time was it, then? —or since time appeared a matter of no consequence, which
way lay Oberon's palace? He flapped and soared easily—the motion was no more
difficult than walking—while he considered the question. A thin haze of cirrus
diluted the moonlight above him; neither Fawcett's farm nor the Kobold Hills
were visible.

            But wasn't there something
moving up there to his right? He spiraled toward it.

            As he approached the vision
resolved itself into a small female sprite sailing nonchalantly along on gauzy
wings.

            "Beg pardon,"
Barber called up, "could you—"

            "Why, 'tis the King's
hew changeling!" she cried. "And alate—not to mention barbed like a
centaur. Well met! What's toward?"

            "Why, I'd like to find
my way to the palace."

            "There to cozen more
fays with unmeant gambits in the game of love, I'll be bound." She laughed
at him and did a couple of butterfly flip-flops.

            "No ... Say, aren't you
the girl who was in Oberon's apartment when Titania came home?"

            "Nay, not I; 'twas no
more than one of our band— Idalia. But an you think to hold matters secret in
Fairyland, Sir Changeling, let me undeceive you. The very trees are sib to all
that stirs. How else would I know that you're but newly come from the embrace
of the apple sprite, Malacea?"

            Barber wondered if his flush
was visible in the moonlight and on the wing. "I assure you, I—"

            "Come sir, no
hoity-toity manners; the whole matter's exposed. The world knows that your
conscience is clear enough—which swinish commodity you seem to value highly,
being mortal—but I cannot say as much for your courtesy."

            "But look here, do you
mean to tell me that everyone knows everything that happens to everyone
else?"

            "To be sure, witling,
in so far as they are interested enough to discover."

            "Then Queen Titania
knew all the time that Oberon had this Idalia at the palace?"

            "She were marvelously
less than the Queen's Resplendency did she not."

            "Then why didn't she
make a fuss when she came in? And why was it necessary for me to get Idalia out
of there so fast? Sounds like Dinkelspiel to me."

            "Soft, soft, you'd
choke the goose to death to make him cough eggs from 's crop. Why, as to take
your first question first, since it holds the nub of the mater—because she
could not; the laws of conduct forbade, there being no trace of Cousin Idalia
within the apartment."

            "Oh." Barber
digested that' for a moment, flying along beside her, and reflecting that he
had heard something of the same kind before. "Very convenient laws. Who
makes them?"

            The fay went off into a long
peal of laughter, curiously soft in the unechoing sky. "Makes 'em? Why,
child, they're laws natural and were made with the world ... Stay, I do forget
you're of mortal kindred, who live by other rules. Tell me, is it good fact, as
some say, that in the land you come from all the dumb world follows an
immutable procession, as the sun arriving punctually on hour or the seed
producing nought but the tree that bore it?"

            "Why, certainly."

            "Even so the laws of
conduct. When I laughed but now had you laughed with me, we must have spent
half the night tumbling and playing awing through these light airs. For we be
winged, you and I; have too much in us of the light elements, Fire and Air, to
be restrained from joy by the troubles of the earth-bound court."

            "What's wrong with the
court?"

            "What's not? The worst
and heaviest of the shapings; all's confusion, and the King's Radiance fears
some deadly doom. And so, farewell; I'm for a new master."

            "Wait a second!"
cried Barber. "I'd like to get to the palace, and I'd like still more to
see you again. How do I go about it?"

            "Ask the wind—or your
Malacea." And off she went, at a speed he could not match.

-

            Which direction he should
take was left pretty much in the air, Barber thought, wishing there were
someone around to appreciate the pun. If the fay were bound away from the court
it would not do to follow her; and from what he had learned of the singular
geography of Fairyland, it seemed probable that if he followed her back track
he would reach some very interesting place, but not the one he was looking for.
The thing to do was think in terms of his environment—"lay aside those
stiff mortal thoughts" as Malacea had advised. What would a Fairy lander
do?

            Use the wand, he answered
himself, letting it slide from his hand. It fell, not straight down but sliding
and twisting down an invisible gradient like a falling leaf, as though trying
to hold itself in one direction. Barber did a power dive in time to catch it
before it reached the treetops and slanted up again, holding the loop of the
wand loosely in a crooked forefinger. "All right," he ordered it,
"suppose you show me the way."

            The wand thrust itself out,
flatly horizontal, and Barber flew along in the direction it indicated. Beneath
him the forest began to thin out into clumps and groves, then altogether wore
away into a rolling plain, with only a tree here and there, black in the waxing
light. Now outcroppings of rock began to jut through the grass of the plain,
growing in size and frequency till Barber found himself flying low over a
rugged crag country, which presently sprang up in peaks as angular as the
mountains of the moon. Not a sign of the smooth parkland and monstrous potted
trees that he remembered.

            Off ahead the sky was
lightening. The country below, now all gorge and precipice, threw up a tor that
stood with scarred sides across his line of flight. On its top, black against
the Prussian-blue gloom that precedes sunrise, something good, too regular in
outline to be the work of nature. A castle—ugly and squat in contour, with
thick unpierced curtain walls and disproportionately small towers at the
angles, like a prison. A Dracula castle—no, that would have the fascination of
the weird, something Gothic out of Aubrey Beardsley, while this was as hideous
as a factory town. The wand led him straight to it, and as he planed in for a
landing at the gate he saw Oberon's blue-and-gold oriflamme hanging listlessly
from a staff.

            The gate was heavy wood,
bound with metal in a finicking and tasteless design. It was locked; there was
no answer to either Barber's shout or his hammerings, but when he thought of
the wand again and applied it, the gate creaked grudgingly just wide enough to
let him enter. He found himself in a courtyard with a little dry grass sticking
up through cobbles, and the first thing he noticed was the slobbering hobgoblin
with overlarge knee joints who had admitted him. The second was Oberon, Titania
and Gosh, coming down the steps of the donjon.

            As they crossed the bailey
Barber had full time to note that, if he had changed his journey, there was
still more pronounced a change in them, and all for the worse. Oberon looked
older and balder, with a hunched and gnarled appearance hard to put a name to;
one of those things you were sure you saw till you looked straight at it, when
it vanished. Titania's pale glory of complexion had become a dead white, the
ruffles at her neck were a little askew and the gold broidery of her sleeves
tarnished. The good-natured impishness of Gosh's face had given way to a fixed
malignant sneer, as though he could not wait to grow up into a ruffian and a
killer.

            And as with master, so with
man. The train that followed the royal pair was an assemblage of crapulous horrors,
not a winged fairy in the crew. Some limped, some had gargantuan hands or
chins, some tails, and all deformities. Barber recognized Imponens with
difficulty; the acrobatic philosopher was hobbling along on a cane, with the
corners of his mouth drawn down, and only just lifted his foot out of the way
as a huge centipede scuttled from under the feet of another of the crew.

            The King stretched out his
neck and scrooged up his eyes, peering at Barber as though he could not see
well. "No, tell me not," he said. "Memory's as good as ever, a
faculty independent of mutations, which does not decay. Ha, I have it—you're
the latest changeling, Barber."

            "Just back from the
Kobold Hills, at your service, and reporting complete success." He managed
a salute with the wand. Around the King the court burst into squeaks and
murmurs and Oberon almost smiled.

            "Well done, then; you
have our favor. Success were needed at this pass, sorely needed. Even a tiny
gobbet goes far to restore our joy."

            "Joy is but the absence
of pain," croaked Imponens, but Barber had already begun with: "Is
this your new palace?"

            "Aye," said
Oberon, "though we had not the planning oft. Come, we'll change tales and
wring each other's vitals—" He reached out to take Barber's arm and lead
him toward the frowning keep, then drew back. "You have the Metal about
you. Leave it by the gate, my lord Barber; 'twill at least be some barrier to
the bugs and bewitchings that now do plague us."