"Yes," answered Jim, "but how did you know that?"
She waved one hand negligently over the gold bricks, garments, jewels, and other items scattered over the bed.
"Oh, there'd be a great deal more of these things here, if you'd been awake earlier," she said. "I told my fish to watch you very carefully and start giving you things as soon as you woke up."
"I see," said Jim. "Well, that takes care of me. Your day is much more interesting, anyway, I'm sure. Tell me about it."
"Well, I can't just lie around all the time the way you can, darling," said Melusine. She placed a comforting hand on Jim's forearm, "not that I begrudge you being able to lie around. I want you to have the best of everything. But for me—well, this is really a very big lake you know, much deeper than it looks from on top and I have my hands full taking care of it. My dear little people—my fish and the other underwater creatures who live here—are all very good; but they'd never really keep a tidy lake unless I had charge of things."
She turned her compelling eyes on him for a moment. Jim nodded to show he thoroughly understood.
"So I'm always busy moving around the lake and making sure that everything is the way it should be," she went on. "Now, today—or rather the part of the day, the night and the part of a morning you've been sleeping—I've been busy all around the lake. The deep-growing waterweeds are doing just fine; but the weeds up near the surface are not quite as happy as they should be. There are three rather small streams that feed into this lake, as well as some natural springs of water in the lake bottom itself; but this last winter was rather dry. Not much snow piled up; and the result was that the lake level has dropped just a bit. Not much, you understand; not enough to hurt my high-growing weeds—those like the bulrushes that stretch up out of the water—but enough to make them feel a little uncomfortable, particularly those already at their full height."
She paused and sighed.
"There's always something," she said. "Well, naturally, there isn't much I could do about the streams unless I wanted to travel up each one of them to their source. But I did cause the lake-bottom springs to work a little harder and put out some more water. I think that in about four or five days, the bulrushes will be completely happy again. Then there was the matter of the bones of the last dragon I drowned in the lake."
She stopped and made a face.
"I hate even to look at their ugly bones; and all my fish know that. They're supposed to go down and fan mud and silt, as much as they can, over the bones until they're hidden; but they haven't been working at it as they should. I hate to be hard on them; but I did talk to the ones in the immediate area of those bones pretty sternly. However, after I'd lectured them, I used some of my own abilities to bring silt up over the bones, this one time. I'm sure they'll do better next time."
"I'm sure," echoed Jim. "How could anything not put out extra effort after you had spoken to it like that?"
"Nothing, of course," Melusine agreed. "They all promised to do better, and I know they will. The thing is, we had several dragons all at once about a month ago and there was quite a bit for them to eat so they didn't get it all cleaned up earlier. So it wasn't completely their fault. At any rate that's takes care of. Then I checked on the pearl nursery; and that's coming along fine. I do prefer freshwater pearls to that hideous saltwater kind that georges seem to like—oh, I don't mean georges like you, James. Much less sensitive georges, the way most of them are. Almost as bad as dragons, some of them."
"I know," said Jim. "Some of us georges—but then, it's not for me to say. I really wish I could see this marvelous lake of yours. You make it sound so real that I can almost imagine it."
"You would?" Melusine stared at him. "You're a most strange man, James. But I'd love to show it to you. I really adore my little lake and I've never actually had the chance to show it off to anyone. We can go right now, if you want. That is, if you're rested and if your headache is over?"
"I'm just fine," said Jim, "and I can't wait to see the rest of the lake."
"Come along then," trilled Melusine, floating off the bed. Jim found himself floating with her. She had him by the wrists again.
"You don't have to hold on to me," said Jim, as she towed him through the palace and out into the lake bed. "I'll come along with you."
"Oh, that's right," Melusine let his wrist go. "Just concentrate on staying with me, and you won't have to bother walking."
Jim did so; and found she was right. Together they moved out through a patch of tall, feathery, underwater weeds, and emerged finally into an open space beyond. Black, flat, and level, it seemed to stretch off until its farther parts were lost in the shimmer of the water.
"These are my mud-flats," said Melusine. "It's the lowest part of the lake. Aren't they beautiful?"
"Er—yes," said Jim. "They're so… so…"
"Thick and clean," Melusine supplemented for him. "I know what you mean. It's a continual job making sure that everything that lands on them gets covered up or pushed down under the surface. But I don't think there's a better stretch of mud-flats anywhere, certainly not in France."
"I can believe you," said Jim.
They floated over the mud-flats.
"The far end of the lake is shallower," Melusine said as they went along. "That's where the oyster beds are, and a lot more of the vegetation. It's also where those dragon bones were that I had to speak sharply to those fishes about. Usually I try to get the dragon bones down to the mud-flats. They disappear so nicely into the mud. They're gone in a day or two. That's the trouble in a way. Just about anything on the mud-flats gets sucked down so quickly. I want to make sure that my fish have all they want to eat off the dragon before what's left gets taken out here. If there's any weight at all left to the carcass it pops down out of sight almost while you watch."
She laughed suddenly, a high, happy gust of girlish laughter.
"Can you imagine what it's like when a full-sized dragon happens to fall directly into the mud-flats? It almost never happens, but can you imagine it?" Melusine said. "They just go right down. You should see the expression on their faces—that is if you can call what they have, faces!"
"Oh, yes," said Jim, "that reminds me. I never did ask you why you dislike dragons so much."
"Well," said Melusine, "for one thing they're about as far from underwater as you can get. They’re not even on land most of the time but up above it in that terrible stuff called air. Not that air is completely bad, I mean. I can breathe it myself, of course, but it can really be very nasty stuff, dry and sour and smelly."
They had reached the far end of the mud-flats now and were entering a territory carved into small gullies and mounts, all leading generally upward. Melusine showed him her pearl oysters—all of which obediently yawned open at her command, and contorted their soft inner parts to display their pearls. Jim duly admired them; and then carefully investigated the various waterweeds to which she introduced him.
They had started out followed by the horde of the little fishes that usually hung around her in the palace; but these had fallen behind shortly after they had ventured out over the mud-flats; and now the only fish they saw were of varying sizes, right up to some monster pike. One of these must have been four-and-one-half feet long, estimated Jim. It swam up to her, made a sort of bow of obeisance in the water-air, then swam away again after being spoken to and petted by Melusine.
At last, Melusine turned back.
"Isn't it all wonderful?" Melusine sighed, as she and Jim skimmed along together over the lake bottom.
"It certainly is," agreed Jim with feeling. In fact there was reason for the feeling; because in the process of examining this end of the lake, he had seen that it would be much easier to climb out here than to mount the almost vertical underwater shore walls where he had first entered it.
If he could get away from Melusine and get this far, he told himself, he should have no trouble climbing up to the top of the lake and getting out on the land again. Then onc
e on land he would take his chances of getting away from her. Possibly, after a short distance, beyond the point where she could sense that a dragon was nearby, he could turn himself back into one and fly well beyond her reach in a hurry.
As they sped back over the mud-flats toward the palace his mind was fumbling at what felt like the outline of a solution to the magical command—spell seemed like entirely the wrong word, to him now—that would keep air around him, if he got away from Melusine. He had made subtle little tests while she was enthusiastically showing him around, deliberately going some distance from her, to see how far away he had to get before he lost the envelope of water turned to air that she evidently produced for him. The critical distance did not seem much more than about ten feet.
On the other hand, back at the palace, even when she had been gone, he had continued to be surrounded by a breathable atmosphere. And there was still the curious matter of the fish seeming to swim through this atmosphere as if it were actual water.
But that was a minor question. The solution to his breathing underwater by use of his own magic had just taken form in his mind.
What he needed was something he could imagine out of his own experience—and he suddenly had it, out of an experiment in his chemistry class back when he had been in high school. It was the simple experiment in which a metal armature had been lowered into ordinary water and an electric current run through it. Bubbles of gas had been produced at either end as the water broke down into the two gases—hydrogen and oxygen—which were its component parts. The formula had been simple.
2H2O → 2H2+O2
In fact, the process suggested a ridiculous little rhyme to him.
I'm an O2 armature, thin or stout,
Come, you little O2 bubbles, pop right out!
It was a terrible poetry, but it let him visualize what he needed. Secretly, as they went along, he extended an arm on the side away from Melusine, who was chattering away in any case, and not noticing. He wrote on the inside of his forehead.
ME→ O2 ARMATURE
Immediately, bubbles began to stream up from the ends of his fingertips. Hastily, he rewrote the command inside his forehead, reversing it. The bubbles ceased immediately.
He sighed silently with relief. One problem solved.
Now he needed the answer to that other question, which was how to leave the lake without Melusine knowing.
He woke suddenly to the fact that at the moment, however, neither problem was the immediate one. He should be concentrating on what he could do to elude what was clearly on Melusine's mind as they got closer and closer to the room with the large bed. He could not pull the headache trick again. Even if she might give in to it a second time, she would certainly begin to get suspicious. It was too bad he did not know some way to put her into a deep sleep—or at least make her so sleepy that the thought of lovemaking would be put off for a while. His mind galloped desperately down that particular trail.
The only thing that came to mind was the fact that he had mastered Carolinus's trick of turning wine into milk as a treatment for his stomach ulcer. One of the first little pieces of magic that Jim had tried after he got back from seeing Carolinus and learning how to turn himself from a dragon back into a human being again and vice versa, had been the business of trying to turn wine into milk, himself.
Jim liked milk as much as he did not care for grapes. But milk was not something ordinarily on the menu at Malencontri. In fact nobody, including the servants as far as he knew, drank it. Although out in the cottages, the people who belonged to his estate probably chewed or swallowed anything that was food at all, since the idea was to keep themselves alive with whatever was available.
At any rate, he had never quite gotten up the courage to order milk for himself at Malencontri. Instead, he had striven to master Carolinus's turning wine into milk.
And succeeded.
It had turned out to be rather simple. He understood more now how it could be. He already knew what milk tasted like, and he could imagine the taste on his tongue. He also knew what wine tasted like. It was fairly simple therefore to write on the inside of his forehead:
WINE→MILK
And have whatever vessel he was holding turn white and prove to contain milk instead.
The reason he had been able to do it so easily, he was beginning to understand now, was because both wine and milk could be clearly envisioned by him. Now, if only Melusine drank milk; he could change it to wine in her stomach, and possibly she might get drunk. Drunk enough so that she would lose interest in affectionate embraces with Jim. Although, come to think of it, if she was at all like these other medieval characters, he would probably have to fill her full of wine to make her pass out.
Unfortunately, he was sure that she did not drink milk. Down here under the lake would be the last place that a cow would be available—or anything else that gave milk for that matter. Some of the sea mammals produced milk; but this was a freshwater lake.
By this time they were back in the palace and approaching the bed. They settled down on it.
"My love," said Melusine, looking at him amorously, "you're quite right. I love you all the more for being interested in my lake."
"That's good," said Jim. "I mean I'm very happy; because I feel exactly the same way."
"You do?" she said; and her magical attraction shot up a good thousand watts.
Jim's mind searched desperately for a way out. Today's trip around the lake had only reinforced his original instinctive conviction that once he had given in to Melusine's emotion, he would be hooked by it and never have the courage and will to get away from her. His mind scrambled desperately once more and, under the pressure of great emergency, as minds will do, came up with an idea.
"Why don't we have a little wine together, first," he said. "We can toast our being together today, looking at the lake, the lake itself. I think it's a fine idea. Don't you?"
"Why… yes," said Melusine. She was kneeling as before, at his side on the bed. "You are most unusual James; and you do have the finest ideas."
She turned to the little school of fish that was always hovering around her here.
"Wine," she ordered, "and two crystal goblets. The very finest crystal goblets I have."
She beamed at Jim.
The wine came, the small fish struggling with the full bottle, which they put down on the bed beside her, along with two very ornate, convoluted goblets of a type of sculptured glass Jim had not seen anywhere so far in this world.
"I think we ought to have two bottles, don't you?" asked Jim.
"Why not," said Melusine with a trace of a giggle. She clapped her hands and looked at her fish. "Another bottle."
"And something to open them with," suggested Jim.
"Pooh!" said Melusine with a soft wave of her hand. "If I tell a bottle to open up, it'll open up."
She picked up one of the ornate glasses and handed it to Jim, picked up the other in her left hand and picked up the bottle in her right.
"Cork!" she said, frowning at the top of the bottle, "come out!"
The cork obediently popped up in the air, leaving the top of the bottle open. Melusine filled her own glass, then filled Jim's. She evidently, Jim saw, liked white wines that fizzed. She set the bottle back down on the bed.
"Now stand upright," she warned it.
She turned away from the bottle and raised her glass to clink it with Jim's.
"To us, beloved," she said.
She drank. Jim drank. As he had suspected, the wine was a champagne—a rather sweet champagne, but an unusually tasty one. Even he, in his human body, found himself appreciating it.
They looked at each other, their glasses half-empty.
"Oh, I'm so happy," said Melusine, with a slight glisten in her eyes. "I’ve got my lovely lake and I've got lovely you and everything is going to be perfect forever and ever."
For a moment, inexplicably, Jim's conscience struck him. He had seen this individual before him talking cheerfully abo
ut pulling down dragons to their death and making sure their bones were well sunk into the mud-flat. At the same time, she teemed so wholeheartedly happy and deeply in love with her lake and him at this moment, that he suddenly felt like a dirty dog for thinking about escaping from her.
He put that feeling away from him as the last emotion he should feel, if he was going to escape.
He reached for the wine bottle, refilled their glasses, and set the bottle down. It stayed upright on its own this time.
"To your magnificent lake and all the magnificent plants and creatures in it," he said.
Again they drank, about half as much as they had drunk the first time, but still a noticeable amount.
The fish arrived with the second bottle and set it down beside the one already opened. It emulated the open one by standing upright. The fish then rose and circled just above their heads.
"This is just wonderful," said Melusine, as they finished the first bottle. Jim had been right. She did drink like the rest of the medieval people he had met. "The most wonderful day I ever bad. Have some more wine."
She filled Jim's still three-quarters-full glass to the brim and completely refilled her own empty one.
"And, that's the difference," she said, leaning toward Jim. The wine in her glass started to slosh out, stopped in midair, turned around, and went back into the glass again. "Nobody before has ever understood what it's like to be Melusine. Nobody has the slightest understanding of Melusine. Poor Melusine!"
"Yes," said Jim, a little absently, "it must be hard. It must be very hard for you."
Most of his mind was off busily trying to put together an idea that had come to him on the wings of the memory of Carolinus's changing wine into milk. The recall did not come easily. Just to look good, he had drunk about a glass and a half of wine, himself; and these glasses were deceptive. They must hold at least a good pint of liquid each.
Jim concentrated. What was necessary was that he transmute something that was nonintoxicating into something that was intoxicating.
The Dragon Knight Page 24
