Wall of Serpents
Incomplete Enchanter 03
(1953)*
L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt
Contents
FOREWORD
THE WALL OF SERPENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
THE GREEN MAGICIAN
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Book information
FOREWORD
Readers familiar with the genre of literature known as heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery stories, are aware that its roots lie in late nineteenth-century England. Long before these action-packed fantastic tales received a name, they were being penned by British writers such as William Morris and Lord Dunsany; and, in the first half of the present century, by E. R. Eddison and the master of heroic fantasy J. R. R. Tolkien.
Although Edgar Rice Burroughs with his novel A Princess of Mars (1917) and his other John Carter stories might be considered a precursor, the real founder of the genre in America was Robert E. Howard, a gifted young Texan. In the early 1930s, Howard created CON AN, the mighty barbarian who bestrode an ancient continent with unsheathed sword and fought his way to kingship.
Heroic fantasy was still unnamed in 1938 when Tolkien brought out his children's book, The Hobbit. Although it was an instant success, both in England and in the United States, his more ambitious adult fantasy trilogy, Lord of the Rings, received little acclaim when, in 1945, a hardcover edition was published in America. Only when a paperbound reprint appeared ten years later did the work rise like a rocket into the ranks of all-time best sellers, where both it and the final Tolkien work, The Simarillion, remain to this day.
Perhaps less well-known is the fact that, a few years after Robert E. Howard's death, a pair of authors, L. Sprague de Camp (1907 - ) and Fletcher Pratt (1897 -1956) working in collaboration, became outstanding early creators of heroic fantasy in America.
(Murray) Fletcher Pratt came from a background far removed from that of his younger collaborator. Son of an upstate New York farmer, he was born on an Indian Reservation near Buffalo. As a high school student, this pint-sized youth—five foot three—became a prizefighter in the flyweight class. He also held a job as a librarian in the local public library, only to find that the head librarian disapproved of an employee who was a professional fighter.
After a year at Hobart College, at Geneva, New York, Pratt had to leave school for lack of money. He worked as a newspaper reporter and spent a year in Paris with his second wife, Inga Stevens Pratt, before settling down in New York to a life of free-lance writing.
As a young writer, Pratt held several fringe jobs. One was translating foreign science fiction stories for the publisher of Wonder Stories, Hugo Gernsback. When Mr. Gernsback failed to pay him as promised, Pratt would withhold the final chapters of the novel or story he was translating until the publisher ran out of stalling time and paid him what was owed.
As the years passed, Fletcher Pratt became a self-taught scholar of considerable attainments. He hit his stride with a distinguished book about the War of 1812, The Heroic Years, and a popular history of the American Civil War, Ordeal by Fire. A man of many interests and an extraordinary sense of fun, Pratt and his wife surrounded themselves with cages full of squealing marmosets and a never-ending stream of friends and visitors.
L. Sprague de Camp, born in New York City, was educated in private schools there, in the South, and in California. He attended California Institute of Technology, earning his degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1930, and took his Masters in Economics from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1933.
De Camp's post-college years were spent as an engineer in the Adirondacks, a patent expert, and a lieutenant-commander in the United States Naval Reserve during the Second World War. Stationed in Philadelphia at the Air Materials Center, he, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov fought the war with flashing slide rules and, with their wives, spent weekends together whenever their gasoline ration permitted.
In 1938, several years before coming to Philadelphia, Sprague de Camp met Fletcher Pratt when a mutual friend, John D. Clark, brought him around to one of Pratt's famous naval war games. The Pratts were then living in a ground-floor apartment with a small garden in a remodeled brown-stone house in the West 20s. Once or twice a month, the Pratts would invite all and sundry to spend an evening crawling around on hands and knees, moving model warships into range of "enemy ships." Then all players would relax with a glass of beer while umpires painstakingly measured the distances, marked the damage to the ships, and removed "sunken" vessels from the parquet floor.
From this stranged beginning, a lifetime friendship grew; and Fletcher invited Sprague—then just starting his literary career—to collaborate on several tales in which the hero won the day by means of his agile brain, rather than by his bulging thews. The results of this collaboration were two individual novels, The Land of Unreason (1942) and The Carnelian Cube (1948) and a series of five stories written between 1941 and 1950 about the adventures of Harold Shea, a brash young psychologist who finds himself in a succession of fantasy worlds where magic works and^ magical formulae can be worked out with mathematical precision, if only one has the head for figures.
In the first of these novels, "The Roaring Trumpet," the unheroic hero finds himself in the world of Norse mythology during the twilight of the gods. In the second, "The Mathmatics of Magic," Shea's boss, Dr. Chalmers, and a friend,
Walter Bayard, join the peripatetic psychologist on a jaunt into the midst of Spenser's Faerie Queene. Soon thereafter, Harold Shea's adventures continue in "The Castle of Iron," during his visit to the chivalrous cosmos of Ariosto's Italian verse romance Orlando Furioso.
When these stories appeared in Unknown in 1940 and 1941, they received such wide acclaim that the first two were shortly published by Henry Holt as a book entitled The Incomplete Enchanter.
Spurred by this success, de Camp and Pratt wrote two more Harold Shea tales. The first, "The Wall of Serpents," appeared in June 1953 in a short-lived publication called Fantasy Fiction; the second, "The Green Magician," was published in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, Number Nine, October 1954. In the first story, Shea explores the world of Finnish myth; while the second takes him to the emerald isle of Irish legend. These final stories of the series were brought out as Wall of Serpents in a 1,500 copy edition, published by Avalon Press in 1960.
Although in 1975 Ballantine gathered together the first three tales of Shea's adventures under the somewhat misleading title The Compleat Enchanter, the remaining two have, for a quarter of a century, been unobtainable by all save a few well-heeled collectors. It is, therefore, for the enjoyment of a whole new generation of readers that Phantasia Press has prepared this edition of Wall of Serpents, a book which might have borne the title The Enchanter Compleated. Readers may be interested to learn that all five tales are presently being published in England, Germany, and Italy.
The jacket for the present book was designed by George Barr.
May 10, 1978 Catherine Crook de Camp
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THE WALL OF SERPENTS
Chapter 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
for 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 pspsionics."
"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, Atlantes or Astolph."
"Not I. But come, sir, let us reason together on this." She led the way into the living room 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 any more 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 Kalevalal"
"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 sub-arctic 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 ansata 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 front yard."
"Harold!"
"Huh?"
"The slot-hounds are surely on the trail. Two men in a police car sought to follow me on my way home."
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