Land of Unreason (28 page)

            Locked in the heart of the
icy dome, distorted by curvature and refraction, was something dark and
shapeless. Barber lit near it and shivered for the first time in Fairyland in
the constant current of cold air flowing outward. Whatever lay at the heart of
that gelid bubble remained ineluctable, for practical purposes invisible, as he
walked round, trying to peer in.

            Ice. If this were the last,
it was also the hardest of his tasks, to try to make something of this
outrageous glacier. There was no way of dealing with the damned thing,
especially with the wand left behind to plug the hole of the eagle eggs. It was
utterly silent, impressive, remote, like death. Not for nothing had Dante had
the last and most terrible of his infernal circles an icy one; no wonder Oberon
thought the princes of this place his ultimate and deadliest Enemy. Barber
himself began to experience a sense of depression, of utter futility such as he
had seldom experienced. He would a dozen times rather have dealt with the
tricky activity of the kobolds, the treacherous violence of Hirudia, or even
endless swarms of double-headed eagles. There seemed simply nothing he could do
to those glasslike walls.

            Wait for day and the sun to
melt it? It could not be long delayed, the moon was paling to its close,
already the stars shone brighter. But, no, that held no promise of success. The
cold dome came down flush to the ground, with a thin rim of dry grass around it
and beyond that meadow, bespeaking the thought that this was no ice he knew but
some unreasonable variety that did not melt in the sun.

            His teeth were chattering
with cold. Perhaps the only way of penetration was the obvious one. He stepped
up to the smooth surface at random and swung his sword. It bit deep; great
fragments tinkled and clashed away with every stroke. The ice was soft or
brittle or both. He marked out with his eye space enough to give him a good
tunnel and fell to hewing, the work warming him.

            But as the shards broke out
and fell away it became apparent that the ice was not homogeneous in quality. A
large irregular lump at the heart of the area on which he was working turned
the edge of Barber's blade while the material around it shattered and cascaded
away. This adamantine lump was something over Barber's own size, and as it took
form beneath the undirected sculpture of his sword it became apparent that it
was about his own shape.

            With a crash of glasslike
crystals, ice avalanched away from the lump, leaving it standing in the mouth
of the shaft like a snow man in high relief. It was, in fact, exactly a snow
man, or better, an ice man, of imposing stature, faceless under a domed glassy
headgear, with a club over its shoulder.

            And it began to move;
sluggishly with creaking ice sounds, detaching itself from the remaining
matrix, shifting the club.

            Barber stumbled back in
alarm, his feet skidding on the unmelted fragments beneath. His sword would not
bite, and the wand was far away.

            But the creature apparently
had no aggressive intentions. After one step it became immobile in its former
pose. The starshine shimmered on a film of water, flowing down from some unseen
source over the surface and around the ice giant. It froze as it descended and
in a moment or two the surface on which Barber had labored was as smooth as
ever. The air was cold.

            Barber walked fifty paces
around the circle of the wall and began chipping again. The ice broke away with
the same ease, and as easily as before did an ice giant, complete with club,
emerge. Once more the film of water flowed smoothly down and filled the wound.
Barber stepped close and touched his hand to the current; it was icy-cold and
stung like brine in the wounds the twig had made.

            He stepped back, grimacing
with pain and shaking off the shining drops. As he did so a couple of them fell
on the rose in his buttonhole, the double rose he had plucked at the
luchrupan's tree. With a faint sissing sound they dissolved into steam.

            Barber stepped back to
consider and found that the ends of his now long red beard were covered with
tiny particles of rime. Once more he experienced the baffling sense of standing
at the edge of discovery, yet somehow lacking the clue that would unlock
knowledge. Perhaps the key lay once more in Malacca's injunction to leave his
imported habits of thought for those that went with the environment.

            But what did that mean in
the present case? As a devotee of the mathematically logical approach favored
by the newer school of science, he set himself to examine the fundamental
assumptions on which he had been working. The first thing that he discovered
—somewhat to his own surprise—was that he had been accepting chance as
causation. There was something wrong about this; as wrong as his earlier
assumption that because the formulas of this existence did not jibe with those
he knew, the whole thing was utterly without logic or reason.

            Oberon and, still more,
Imponens had given him a glimpse of a Fairyland ruled by laws as definite as
any he knew, though of a different order. They related more to matters accepted
figuratively or not accepted at all in the world he was accustomed to call
"his." Probably astrology and numerology would be exact sciences
here. Assuredly, he could reject the idea that mere chance had carried him to
the encounters with Malacea or the kobolds or the world under the water. The
monkeys would write Shakespeare before such a series could come about by
accident.

            What he had to do was
discover the chain of causation and apply it to the present circumstance,
shivering outside that dome of ice beneath a cold sky from which the moon had
gone, and only faintly tinged with coming day.
The three places.
It had
something to do with that; and he was convinced that the third place lay before
him, hidden in that impassive hood of ice. Had the others anything in common;
was it possible to establish any series?

            Apparently not. The first
place lay in the heart of the hills and he had reached it by a toilsome journey
on foot; the second, under the Pool, and he had attained it by a special
adaptation or metamorphosis into a frog. Here was the third, which he hardly
could have reached at all without this other special adaptation of wings ...
Hold on a minute; had not that gauzy-winged fay he met in the skies said
something about: "We have in us the light elements, Fire and Air?"
Here was series, the series of the Empedoclean elements—Earth for the first
place, Water for the second; he had vanquished Air in dealing with those double-headed
eagles. Fire would surely be the antidote to the ice that stood before him.

            It was at this point that
Fred Barber remembered how the icy brine had hissed when it touched his rose.
The finding of that flower could be no more chance than the other events of the
series.

            Fred Barber plucked the rose
from his coat and advanced to the wall of ice, holding it in front of him. As
far as his fingers could tell it was an ordinary blossom, but when he came near
the ice there was a hiss and crackle, and water flowed down in a young torrent,
welling out over the grass. A cloud of vapor rose from it.

            The rose melted a deep
hemispherical pit in the face of the ice dome, and of the ice man who had been
there before there was no sign. Barber stepped into the cavity, holding his new
weapon before him. Beneath his feet was slippery ice and around them gathered a
runnel of coldly steaming water. A step at a time carried him forward into the
tunnel he was melting, a passage out of dark into dark, with just the faintest
shimmering of rainbow hues where the rising day behind shot a few beams
through. All had a bluish cast, as though this were the permanent and natural
color of that grim place.

            It must have taken half an
hour to reach the dark core of that berg, and an uncontrollable fit of
shivering had overtaken him, not entirely due to cold. His foot felt an edge;
he bent, holding the rose downward, and melted a coating of ice from a granite
step, immemorially ancient, and rutted deep with the pressure of many feet.
Other steps rose beyond it, leading up to a monumental double door of bronze.
Down them the melting water cascaded.

            When he had cleared the ice
from it by using the rose again, Barber perceived that the door bore a coat of
arms—the same, with crowns and double-headed eagles that he had now seen twice
before. But this time it was partly overlaid with a more recent plate in plain
brass, into which lettering had been deeply incised. Barber bent to examine it
in the tricky, pulsing light that came through the ice from the gathering day:

-

"This
is the veritable Wartburg. Let him enter who has a high heart and the four
elemental spells; but not unless he can bear the eyes of the Redbeard."

-

           
There was
something strange about that inscription, but not until he had already laid
hand on the door to push it open did Barber realize that neither letters nor
words had been English. They were old German, a language he did not know—or did
he? The building itself had a curious mental atmosphere, as though it possessed
a memory of its own, independent of his, and were trying to communicate with
him, tell him a great and happy secret. He pushed the door.

            It opened slowly, with a
musical tinkle of unmelted ice from the hinges. He was in a hall, high, wide and
deep, blue-dim at the far end, pale blue along the high windows between the
dark uprights. A huge table ran its whole length, a table in white-streaked
stone that would be marble. At the near end a figure was seated with its back
to Barber, in a chair of horn, curiously mosaicked together. The figure was
wearing a dark robe and a tall, conical hat, dark blue and sprinkled with
stars.

            As Barber came level with
him, he perceived this individual was leaning forward with his elbows on the
table and his chin cupped in his hands. A beard lay on the table; the face
above it was that of Imponens or any other learned doctor in philosophy, with
wide-open eyes staring straight ahead. But he did not answer when Barber spoke
and shook his shoulder, and the body beneath the robe felt cold.

            Barber shuddered slightly
and went on down the hall, wondering whether he heard a noise behind him.
Toward the far end his eyes focused on figures there. For there were many—a
whole row of boys standing against the farther wall, clad in medieval page
costumes and with hair to their shoulders, staring stiffly before them like the
man in the conical hat. Barber noted that the line had one gap; but what caught
and held his eye was the figure in front of the gap.

            For this figure also
occupied a seat at the table, but the seat was a great carved ivory throne,
sweeping up in tall lines to carved double-headed eagles on the pillars at the
back. The man himself was leaned forward in an attitude of sleep, his forehead
on one arm and chin on the table, and a tall crown of mingled gold and iron,
set with jewels, had rolled from his head. All round face and arm lay a great
mat of beard, and deeper still, seeming to pass right into the substance of the
table itself; and even in that dimness Barber could see that it was red.

            A thrill of passionate
expectancy, as though he were on the threshold of something at once splendid
and terrible, ran through him. He stepped to the table and saw, just beyond the
extended fingers, a brass plate let into its top. (Was that a sound again
behind him?) Straining his eyes Barber bent close and read:

-

"He
shall gain the triple grace

Who
reaches this as the third place"

-

           
Clomp.

            Barber whirled. Ice men,
faceless and menacing, their clubs held aloft, were flooding through the
doorway by which he had entered. They deployed into a line across the hall,
both sides of the table, and came marching down with ice-creaking steps,
ponderous and irresistible.

            Barber snatched for the
kobold sword, remembered it would not bite on their hardness. The rose? He was
surprised to discover it was no longer in his hand; he must have dropped it at
the door or when he shook the shoulder of that figure at the other end of the
table. For a moment panic jarred through him; then he perceived that the
terrible regiment bearing down on him had a gap in its line, the gap caused by
the table itself.