“Goodness gracious, I am somewhat at a loss,” said Chalmers. “You’re certain you made the passes correctly, Harold? Hmmm—what was your poetic element?”
Shea described how he had used elements from Shakespeare and Swinburne.
“Oh, I am relieved. The explanation is quite simple. Like all semi-Mohammedan universes, this one is extremely poetic, and since you employed highly inspired poetry, the effect was somewhat beyond your original calculations. This also suggests a means of relief from our present situation. Do you happen to recall any lines from the major poets having to do with motion or progress?”
“How would Shelley do?” asked Shea.
“Quite well, I believe. Are you ready? Very well, suit the rhythm of your recitation to my movements.” He began to make the passes with his hands as Shea recited:
“My coursers are fed on the lightning,
They drink at the whirlwind’s stream,
And when the red morning is brightening
They have strength for the swiftness I deem:
Then ascend with me, children of ocean!”
The result was somewhat unexpected. The four horses on which the party from Carena had come bounded straight into the air as though on springs and before anyone could stop them, and leaped at Atlantès’ collection of monsters, who scattered in all directions, but not rapidly enough to keep themselves from squashing under the flying hooves like so many tomatoes. Roger whooped with laughter; Chalmers looked a trifle dismayed. “I confess—” he began, and then stopped, looking up.
Against the fading evening sky Duke Astolph on his hippogriff was soaring in to a four-point landing. He addressed Shea: “Did you summon me, old man? I hope it’s important; that children of ocean spell is deuced wracking, but being English I couldn’t well resist. Oh, I see; a spot of trouble with our old friend Atlantès.”
The proprietor of Carena sneered unpleasantly from outside the pentacle. “O noble and puissant lords, now there is no help for it but that you release to me my beloved nephew, the pearl of Islam. For know that I am of greater power than all magicians of the Franks, save Malagigi alone, and he lies still in durance.”
Astolph cocked his head on one side. “Indeed,” he said. “Do you want to be released, Roger?”
The pearl of Islam seemed to be having difficulty with his breathing. He looked at the ground, then at Bradamant, then quickly away. “By Allah, nay,” he finally managed to get out.
Astolph turned to the enchanter. “Tell you what I’ll do, old thing; I’ll make you a sporting proposition. I believe Sir Harold’s friend here wants his lady to receive human form. I’ll take you on in a contest to see who can do it, winner take all, including Roger.”
“By Allah, ’tis some Frankish trick,” said Atlantès.
“Suit yourself, old man. I can transport them all away from you on Buttercup, you know.” He scratched the hippogriff behind the ears.
The magician lifted his hands to heaven. “I am afflicted by the sons of Satan,” he wailed. “Nevertheless I will even accept this offer.”
Both he and Astolph began making rapid passes. The Duke suddenly vanished, and a mist condensed out of the air around the pentacles, growing and growing until the spectators could no longer see one another. The air was filled with rustlings.
Then the mist thinned and vanished. Florimel had vanished from her own pentacle and stood in that of Atlantès. The latter said: “Behold—” and stopped as Astolph reappeared with a man as tall as himself; a man with a long white beard, neatly combed, and a mane of white hair. He was dressed with formidable correctness in cutaway, pinstriped trousers, and spats, with a tophat at a rakish angle on his head and a pink carnation in his buttonhole.
“Permit me,” said Astolph, “to present the Honorable Ambrose Sylvester Merlin, C.M.G., C.S.I., D.M.D., F.C.C., F.R.G.S., F.R.S., F.S.A., and two or three et ceteras.”
Merlin said in a deep bell-like voice: “That girl’s a sham of some sort. Just a trick, and I’ll fetch the right one back.” He whipped a wand out of an interior pocket, traced his own pentacle and began incanting. Again the mists thickened, this time shot with little lights. Five minutes later, they cleared and there were two Florimels, identical in dress, pose and appearance.
Merlin calmly slipped his wand in his pocket and stepped to the nearest girl. “This one’s the real one, mine. Are you not, my dear?” He lifted his plug hat courteously.
“Aye, good sir.” She gave a little squeal of pleasure. “And I do feel that blood, not snow flows in my veins.”
Merlin held out a finger. A yellow flame appeared at the tip, bright in the dusk. He held up Florimel’s arm and ran the flame quickly along it. “Observe. No more reaction than any normal person.” He blew the flame out. “Must be off, Astolph. That numismatic exhibition at the Phidias Club.”
“Many thanks, old man,” said Astolph. Merlin vanished.
“Spawn of the accursed!” shouted Atlantès. “Here stands the veritable Florimel.”
Shea noted that Chalmers was making passes. The other Florimel, the one in Atlantès’ pentacle, blinked once or twice as though just awakened, and turned into the peasant girl Shea had seen weeping at the roadside near Pau. Polacek gave a gurk. “Hey, Cassie!” he called.
The girl gave one glance, and leaped for him, crying: “Oh, my wolfie!”
“I should say that settled the matter,” said Astolph. “Come along, Roger.”
“Nay!” said Atlantès. “May my hair turn to scorpions if I permit this!”
“Ah, but you can hardly prevent it, you know,” said the Duke imperturbably. “Your spells won’t hold these people anymore. Laws of magic, you know; you made an agreement and spells to keep from fulfilling it will fail.”
“By the seven imps of Satan, Sir Duke, there was no agreement that I should not have your head,” said Atlantès and raising his wand, began to incant again. So did Astolph.
Shea touched Chalmers on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I think there’s going to be fireworks.”
The three psychologists and their ladies turned their backs on the disputants and through the lulling dark started toward Pau. They had not gone fifty paces when there was a crack like a cannon shot and the landscape flashed with electric blue. One of the magicians had thrown a thunderbolt at the other.
“Hurry!” said Chalmers. They ran. Crack followed crack, merging into a frightful thunder. The earth began to quiver beneath them. A boulder came loose from the hillside and lolloped down past.
As they ran they glanced back over their shoulders. The side of the hill was hidden by a huge, boiling thundercloud, lit from beneath with flashes, and a forest fire was already spreading from its base. A piece of the mountainside came loose and slid. Through the repeated thunderclaps they heard the piercing sound of Astolph’s horn.
“My word,” said Chalmers, slowing down. “I—ah—perceive . . . that some further steps in rejuvenation will be necessary before I can indulge in much more athletics. I should mention, Harold, the reason why Atlantès was so very anxious to detain us. Apparently he has not yet learned the secret of interuniversal apportation, however adept he may be in other respects.”
“I bet he never does learn it now,” said Shea, a little grimly, looking back to where the battle between the two magicians had now settled down to a mere tornado.
“It would be just as well,” said Chalmers.
“Say, you two,” remarked Polacek, “while you’re speaking about that, what about Walter?”
“Holy smoke!” said Shea. “He’s been back there in Xanadu eating honey for a week and he doesn’t like it.”
A grin spread slowly over the face of the Rubber Czech. “That isn’t all,” he remarked. “Remember how long we were in Xanadu? It was hours, though it couldn’t have taken Doc more than a few minutes to find out that he’d made a mistake.”
“Goodness gracious!” said Chalmers. “Then Walter has been there a month or more. I must certainly
address myself to the problem.”
“What I want to know,” said Shea, “is how we’re going to get that cop back to Ohio. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
He squeezed Belphebe’s hand.
THE WALL OF SERPENTS
One
The mail was neatly stacked on the table in the front hall. Belphebe said: “Mrs. Dambrot is having cocktails on the fifteenth. That’s Thursday, isn’t it? And here’s a note from the maid, poor wretch. The Morrisons are having a lawn party Sunday and want us to come. This one’s really for you, it’s from that McCarthy wittold who was in your class last semester, and he wants to know when he can call on us and talk about ps-psionics.”
“Oh, that,” said Harold Shea. He pushed back his black hair and stroked his long nose.
“And will we subscribe five dollars to the Guild for . . .”
“Hell!” said Shea.
She cocked her head to one side, eyeing him from under arched brows. He thought how pretty she was and how remarkably she had adapted herself to his own space-time continuum since he had brought her from the universe of the Faerie Queen, and later rescued her from that of the Orlando Furioso, whither his collaborator Chalmers had accidentally snatched her while angling for Shea to help him out of a private predicament.
“My most sweet lord,” she said, “I do protest you want in courtesy. When you cozened me to wed with you, ’twas with fair promise that my life would be a very paradise.”
He slipped an arm around her and kissed her before she could dodge. “Life anywhere with you would be a paradise. But lawn parties! And the home for homeless poodles, five dollars!”
Belphebe laughed. “The Morrisons are gentle folk. There will be lemonade and little sandwiches. And we shall probably play charades, ’stead of being pursued by barbarous Moors.”
Shea seized her by both shoulders and looked intently at the expression of wide-eyed innocence she had assumed. “If I didn’t know you better, kid, I’d say you were trying to persuade me to get out of it somehow, but getting me to make the proposition. Just like a woman.”
“My most dear lord! I am but a dutiful wife, that loves but to do her husband’s will.
“When it’s the same as your own, you mean. All right. Ohio bores you. But you don’t want to go back to Castle Carena and that gang of tinplated thugs, do you? We never did find out who won the magical duel, Atlantès or Astolph.”
“Not I. But come, sir, let us reason together on this.” She led the way into the livingroom and sat down. “In serious sooth, though we are but newly returned and though this Ohio be a land of smiling peace and good order, I think we too lightly promised each other to wander no more.”
“You mean,” said Shea, “that you can take only so much peace and good order? I can’t say I blame you. Doc Chalmers used to tell me I should have taken to politics or become a soldier of fortune instead of a psychologist, and damned if . . .”
“It is not solely that whereon I think,” she said. “Have you any word further on your friends who were lately with us?”
“I haven’t checked today, but none of them had come back yesterday.”
She looked worried. In the course of their incursion into the continuum of Ariosto’s Orlando epics, they had left no less than four colleagues and innocent bystanders scattered about sundry universes. “That were a week complete since our return.”
“Yes,” said Shea. “I don’t know that I blame Doc Chalmers and Vaclav Polacek for staying in the world of the Orlando Furioso—they were having a good time there. But Walter Bayard and Pete the cop were stuck in Coleridge’s Xanadu the last I know, and I don’t think they were having a very good time. Doc was supposed to send them back here, and he either couldn’t make it or forgot.”
Belphebe said: “And there are those who would take it amiss if they did not come? Even as you have told me that the police sought you out when I was missing in the land of Castle Carena?”
“I’ll say so. Especially since one of them is a cop. In this land of peace and good order it’s a lot more dangerous to monkey with a policeman than with a professor.”
She looked down and moved one hand on the edge of the couch. “I feared as much . . . Harold.”
“What’s the matter, kid?”
“There is a kind of knowledge we woodlings have that those in the cities do not know. When I went abroad today, I was followed both here and there without once being able to see by whom or for what purpose.”
Shea leaped up. “Why, the dirty skunks! I’ll . . .”
“No, Harold. Be not so fiery-fierce. Could you not go to them and tell them the simple truth?”
“They wouldn’t believe it anymore than they did the last time. And if they did, it might start a mass migration to other space-time continua. No, thanks. Even Doc Chalmers hasn’t worked out all the rules of transfer yet, and it all might turn out to be as dangerous as selling atomic bombs in department stores.”
Belphebe cupped her chin in one hand. “Aye. I do recall how we were ejected from my own dear land of Faerie, never to return, in spite of your symbolic logic that changes all impressions the senses do receive. Yet I like the present prospect but little.” She referred to Shea’s final desperate spell in his conflict with the wizard Dolon. Dolon had been destroyed, but Shea had worked up so much magical potential that he had been thrown back into his own universe, dragging Belphebe with him.
Belphebe’s brows went up. “Never before have I known you so lacking in resource. Or is it that you do not wish to go? Hark!—is there not some frame of thought, some world to which we could remove and find a magic strong enough to overcome this of Xanadu? Thus we might outflank our trouble rather than essaying to beat it down by assault direct.”
Shea noticed that she was assuming the question of whether she should accompany him to be settled, but he had now been married long enough to know better than to make an issue of it.
“It’s an idea, anyway. Hmm, maybe Arthurian Britain. No—all the magicians there are bad eggs except Bleys and Merlin. Bleys is pretty feeble, and Merlin we couldn’t be sure of finding, since he spends a lot of time in our own continuum.” (Merlin had put in an appearance in the final scene of their Orlandian adventure.) “The Iliad and Odyssey haven’t any professionals except Circe, and she was a pretty tough baby, not likely to help either of us. There aren’t any magicians to speak of in Siegfried or Beowulf . . . Wait a minute, I think I’ve got it. The Kalevala!”
“What might that be?”
“The Finnish epic. Practically all the big shots in it are magicians and poets, too. Vainamoinen could be a big help—‘Vainamoinen, old and steadfast . . .’ A guy with a heart the size of a balloon. But we’ll need some equipment if we go there. I’ll need a sword, and you had better take a knife and a good bow. The party might get rough.”
Belphebe glowed. “That lovely bow of the alloy of magnesium, with the sight, that lately I used in the contest for the championship of Ohio?”
“N-no, I think not. It probably wouldn’t work in the Finnish frame of reference. Might turn brittle and snap or something. Better use the old wooden one. And wooden arrows, too. None of these machine-age steel things you’re so crazy about.”
She asked: “If this Finland be where I think, will it not be uncomfortable cold?”
“You bet. None of that perpetual summer you had in Faerie. I’ve got enough backwoods clothes to do me, and I’ll make out a list for you. This sounds like a breeches-and-boots expedition.”
“What kind of country would it be?”
“Near as I can make out, it’s one vast subarctic swamp. A flat land covered by dense forest, with little lakes everywhere.”
“Then,” she said, “boots of rubber would serve us well.”
Shea shook his head. “Nothing doing. For the same reason that you shouldn’t take that trick magnesium bow. No rubber in this mental pattern. I made that mistake among the Norse gods and nearly got my ears beaten off for it.”
“But . . .”
“Listen, take my word for it. Leather boots, laced and well greased. Wool shirts, leather jackets, gloves . . . you’d better get a pair of those mittens that leave one finger free. After we get there, we can get some native clothes. Here’s the list—oh, yes, woolen underwear. And drive slow, see?”
He looked at her as sternly as he could manage. Belphebe had a tendency to drive the Shea Chevrolet as though she were piloting a jet fighter.
“Oh, I’ll be a very model of prudence.” She shifted from foot to foot.
“And while you’re gone,” he continued, “I’ll get out the symbol cards and grease up our syllogismobile.”
###
When Belphebe returned two hours later, Harold Shea was squatting cross-legged on his living-room floor with the cards laid out in front of him. They looked something like the Zener ESP cards, except that the symbols were the little horseshoes and cruces ansatae of symbolic logic. He had ordered these cards on the Garaden Institute’s money when he brought Belphebe from Faerie into his own continuum, and they were ready on his return from the Orlando Furioso. They ought to make the task of leaping from one universe to another considerably easier than by drawing the symbols on blank cards or sheets of paper. Beside him lay a copy of the Kalevala, to which he referred from time to time as he tried to sort out the logical premises of the continuum for proper arrangement of the cards.
“ ’Lo, sweetheart,” he said abstractedly, as she came in with the big bundle, “I think I’ve got this thing selective enough to drop us right into Vainamoinen’s frontyard.”
“Harold!”
“Huh?”
“The slot-hounds are surely on the trail. Two men in a police car sought to follow me on my way home.”
The Complete Compleat Enchanter Page 43
