The Complete Compleat Enchanter (12 page)

“You’re damn right, I dare! If you’re going to use your special powers, I won’t play.”

A smile slowly spread across Heimdall’s face. “Young Harold, you do not lack for boldness, and I have said before that you show glimmerings of wit. In truth, I have slowed up your steed; it is not meet that one of the Æsir should be beaten at aught by a mortal. But come, let that one go, and we will begin again with new mounts, for I fear that animal of yours will never again be the same.”

It was not difficult to catch more roaches. “Once more I shall name mine Gold Top, after my horse,” said Heimdall. “It is a name of good luck. Did you have no favorite horse?”

“No, but I had a car, a four-wheeled chariot. It was called—” began Shea, and then stopped. What was the name of that car? He tried to reproduce the syllables—nyrose, no—neelose, no, not that, either—neroses, nerosis—something clicked into place in his brain, a series of somethings, like the fragments of a jigsaw puzzle.

“Heimdall!” he cried suddenly, “I believe I know how we can get out of here!”

“That will be the best of news,” said the Sleepless One, doubtfully, “if the deed be equal to the thought. But I have looked, now, deeply into this place, and I do not see how it may be done without outside aid. Nor shall we have help from any giant with the
Time
so near.”

“Whose side will the trolls be on?”

“It is thought that the trolls will be neuter. Yet strange it would be if we could beguile one of these surly ones to help us.”

“Nevertheless, something you said a little while back gives me an idea. You remember? Something about the skill of the gods at reading the thought it lies behind the lips?”

“Aye.”

“I am—I was—of a profession whose business it is to learn people’s thoughts by questioning them, and by studying what they think today, predict what they will think tomorrow in other circumstances. Even to provoke them to thinking certain things.”

“It could be. It is an unusual art, mortal, and a great skill, but it could be. What then?”

“Well, then, this Stegg, I don’t think we can get far with him, I’ve seen his type before. He’s a—a—a something I can’t remember, but he lives in a world of his own imaginings, where he’s a king and we’re all his slaves. I remember, now—a paranoiac. You can’t establish contact with a mind like that.”

“Most justly and truly reasoned, Harold. From what I am able to catch of his thought this is no more than the truth.”

“But Snögg is something else. We can do something with him.”

“Much though I regret to say it, you do not drown me in an ocean of hope. Snögg is even more hostile than his unattractive brother.”

Shea grinned. At last he was in a position to make use of his specialized knowledge. “That’s what one would think. But I have studied many like him. The only thing that’s wrong with Snögg is that he has a . . . a feeling of inferiority—a complex we call it—about that nose of his. If somebody could convince him he’s handsome—”

“Snögg handsome! Ho, ho! That is a jest for Loki’s tongue.”

“Sssh!
Please, Lord Heimdall. As I say, the thing he wants most is probably good looks. If we could . . . if we could pretend to work some sort of spell on his nose, tell him it has shrunk and get the other prisoners to corroborate—”

“A plan of wit! It is now to be seen that you have been associating with Uncle Fox. Yet do not sell your bearskin till you have caught the animal. If you can get Snögg sufficiently friendly to propose your plan, then will it be seen whether confinement has really sharpened your wits or only addled them. But, youngling, what is to prevent Snögg feeling his nose and discovering the beguilement for himself?”

“Oh, we don’t have to guarantee to take it all off. He’d be grateful enough for a couple of inches.”

Eight

When Snögg came on duty at nightfall, he found the dungeon as usual, except that Shea’ and Heimdall’s cell was noisy with shouts of encouragement to their entries in the great cockroach derby. He went over to the cell to make sure that nothing outside the rules of the prison was going on.

Shea met his suspicious glower with a grin. “Hi, there, friend Snögg! Yesterday I owed Heimdall thirty million crowns, but today my luck has turned and it’s down to twenty-three million.”

“What do you mean?” snapped the troll.

Shea explained, and went on: “Why don’t you get in the game? We’ll catch a roach for you. It must be pretty dull, with nothing to do all night but listen to the prisoners snore.”

“Hm-m-m,” said Snögg, then turned abruptly suspicious again. “You make trick to let other prisoner escape, I—
zzzzp!”
He motioned across his throat again. “Lord Surt, he say.”

“No, nothing like that. You can make your inspection any time.
Sssh!
There’s one now.”

“One what?” asked Snögg, a little of the hostility leaving his voice. Shea was creeping toward the wall of his cell. He pounced like a cat and came up with another cockroach in his hand. “What’ll his name be?” he asked Snögg.

Snögg thought, his little troll brain trying to gasp the paradox of a friendly prisoner, his eyes moving suspiciously. “I call him Fjörm, after river. That run fast,” he said at last.

“That where you are from?”

“Aye.”

Heimdall spoke up. “It is said, friend Snögg, that Fjörm has the finest fish in all the nine worlds, and I believe it, for I have seen them.”

The troll looked almost pleased. “True word. Me fish there, early morning. Ho, ho! Me wade—snap! Up come trout. Bite him, flop, flop in face. Me remember big one, chase into shallow.”

Shea said: “You and Öku-Thor ought to get together. Fjörm may have the best fish, but he has the biggest fish story in the nine worlds.”

Snögg actually emitted a snicker. “Me know that story. Thor no fisher. He use hook and line. Only trolls know how to fish fair. We use hands, like this.” He bent over the floor, his face fixed in intense concentration, then made a sudden sweeping motion, quick as a rattlesnake’s lunge. “Ah!” he cried. “Fish! I love him! Come, we race.”

The three cockroaches were tossed into the center of the circle and scuttled away. Snögg’s Fjörm was the first to cross the fine to the troll’s unconcealed delight.

They ran race after race, with halts when one of the roaches escaped and another had to be caught. Snögg’s entry showed a tendency to win altogether at variance with the law of probability. The troll did not notice and would hardly have grasped the fact that Heimdall was using his piercing glance on his own and Shea’s roaches and slowing them up, though Snögg was not allowed to win often enough to rouse his sleeping suspicions. By the time Stegg relieved him in the morning he was over twenty million crowns ahead. Shea stretched out on the floor to sleep with the consciousness of a job well done.

When he awoke, just before Snögg came on duty the next night, he found Heimdall impatient and uneasy, complaining of the delay while Surt’s messenger was riding to demand the sword Head as ransom. Yet it speedily became obvious that the Snögg campaign could not be hurried.

“Don’t you ever get homesick for your river Fjörm?” asked Shea, when the troll had joined them.

“Aye,” replied Snögg. “Often. Like ’um fish.”

“Think you’ll be going back?”

“Will not be soon.”

“Why not?”

Snögg squirmed a little. “Lord Surt him hard master.”

“Oh, he’d let you go. Is that the only reason?”

“N-no. Me like troll girl Elvagevu. Haro! Here, what I do, talk privacy life with prisoner? Stop it. We race.”

Shea recognized this as a good place to stop his questioning, but when Snögg was relieved, he remarked to Heimdall: “That’s a rich bit of luck. I can’t imagine being in love with a female troll, but he evidently is—”

“Man from another world, you observe well. His thoughts were near enough his lips for me to read. This troll-wife, Elvagevu, has refused him because of the size of his nose.”

“Ah! Then we really have something. Now, tonight—”

When the cockroach races began that night, Heimdall reversed the usual process sufficiently to allow Snögg to lose several races in succession. The long winning streak he later developed was accordingly appreciated, and it was while Snögg was chuckling over his victories, snapping his finger joints and bouncing in delight that Shea insinuated softly: “Friend Snögg, you have been good to us. Now, if there’s something we could do for you, we’d be glad to do it. For instance, we might be able to remove the obstacle that prevents your return to Elvagevu.”

Snögg jumped and glared suspiciously. “Not possible!” he said thickly.

Heimdall looked at the ceiling. “Great wonders have been accomplished by prisoners,” he said, “when there is held out to them the hope of release.”

“Lord Surt him very bad man when angry,” Snögg countered, his eyes moving restlessly.

“Aye,” nodded Heimdall. “Yet not Lord Surt’s arm is long enough to reach into the troll country—after one who has gone there to stay with his own troll-wife.”

Snögg cocked his head on one side, so that he looked like some large-beaked bird. “Hard part is,” he countered, “to get beyond Lord Surt’s arm. Too much danger.”

“But,” said Shea, falling into the spirit of the discussion, “if one’s face were altogether changed by the removal of a feature, it might be much easier and simpler. One would not be recognized.”

Snögg caressed his enormous nose. “Too big—you make fun of me!” he snapped with sudden suspicion.

“Not at all,” said Shea. “Back in my own country a girl once turned me down because my eyes were too close together. Women always have peculiar taste.”

“That true.” Snögg lowered his voice till it was barely audible. “You fix nose, I be your man. I do all for you.”

“I don’t want to guarantee too much in advance,” said Shea. “But I think I can do something for you. I landed here without all my magic apparatus, though.”

“All you need I get,” said Snögg, eager to go the whole way now that he had committed himself.

“I’ll have to think about what I need,” said Shea.

The next day, when Stegg had collected the breakfast bowls, Shea and Heimdall lifted their voices and asked the other prisoners whether they would cooperate in the proposed method of escape. They answered readily enough. “Sure, if ’twon’t get us into no trouble.” “Aye, but will ye try to do something for me, too?” “Mought, if ye can manage it quiet.”
“Yngvi is a louse!”

Shea turned his thoughts to the concoction of a spell that would sound sufficiently convincing, doing his best to recall Chalmers’ description of the laws of magic to which he had given so little attention when the psychologist stated them. There was the law of contagion—no, there seemed no application for that. But the law of similarity? That would be it. The troll, himself familiar with spells and wizardry, would recognize an effort to apply that principle as in accordance with the general laws of magic. It remained, then, to surround some application of the law of similarity with sufficient hocus-pocus to make Snögg believe something extra-special in the way of spells was going on. By their exclamation over the diminishing size of Snögg’s nose the other prisoners would do the rest.

“Whom should one invoke in working a spell of this kind?” Shea asked Heimdall.

“Small is my knowledge of this petty mortal magic,” replied Heimdall. “The Evil Companion would be able to give you all manner of spells and gewgaws. But I
would
say that the names of the ancestors of wizardry would be not without power in such cases.”

“And who are they?”

“There is the ancestor of all witches, by name Witolf; the ancestor of all warlocks, who was called Willharm. Svarthead was the first of the spell singers, and of the giant kindred Ymir. For good luck and the beguiling of Snögg you might add two who yet live—Andvari, king of the dwarfs, and the ruler of all trolls, who is the Old Woman of Ironwood. She is a fearsome creature, but I think not unpleasant to one of her subjects.”

###

When Snögg showed up again Shea had worked out his method for the phony spell. “I shall need a piece of beeswax,” he said, “and a charcoal brazier already lit and burning; a piece of driftwood sawn into pieces no bigger than your thumb; a pound of green grass, and a stand on which you can balance a board just over the brazier.”

Snögg said:
“Time
comes very near. Giants muster—when you want things?”

Shea heard in the background Heimdall’s gasp of dismay at the first sentence. But he said: “As soon as you can possibly get them.”

“Maybe tomorrow night. We race?”

“No—yes,” said Heimdall. His lean, sharp face looked strained in the dim light. Shea could guess the impatience that was gnawing him, with his exalted sense of personal duty and responsibility. And perhaps with reason, Shea assured himself. The fate of the world, of gods and men, in Heimdall’s own words, hung on that trumpet blast. Shea’s own fate, too, hung on it—an idea he could never contemplate without a sense of shock and unreality, no matter how frequently he repeated the process of reasoning it all out.

Yet not even the shock of this repeated thought could stir him from the fatalism into which he had fallen. The world he had come from, uninteresting though it was, had at least been something one could grasp, think over as a whole. Here he felt himself a chip on a tossing ocean of strange and terrible events. His early failures on the trip to Jötunheim had left him with a sense of helplessness which had not entirely disappeared even with his success in detecting the illusions in the giants’ games and the discovery of Thor’s hammer. Loki then, and Heimdall later had praised his fearlessness—ha, he said to himself, if they only knew! It was not true courage that animated him, but a feeling that he was involved in a kind of strange and desperate game, in which the only thing that mattered was to play it as skillfully as possible. He supposed soldiers had something of that feeling in battle. Otherwise, they would all run away and there wouldn’t be any battle—

His thoughts strayed again to the episode in the hall of Utgard. Was it Loki’s spell or the teardrop in his eye that accounted for his success there? Or merely the trained observation of a modern mind? Some of the last, certainly; the others had been too excited to note such discordant details as the fact that Hugi cast no shadow. At the same time, his modern mind balked over the idea that the spell had been effective. Yet there was something, a residue of phenomenon, not accounted for by physical fact.