“He’s gone mad,” yelled Mary. “He even grabbed the horn.”
“I’ll cave him in,” screamed Jones, “if he damages that rifle.”
Bucket bristled with tentacles. He seemed to be a metal body suspended from many tentacles, bearing some resemblance to a spider dangling in a sagging, broken web. Tentacles seemed to have issued from each of the holes that perforated his body.
Now the tentacles were pushing them along, herding them across the ledge, to where the path wound up from the gorge.
“He’s got the right idea,” said Gib. “Let’s get out of here.”
Down in the gorge there was a howling and screaming. Some of the women and children had either fallen or had scrambled down in the darkness, escaping from the ledge. The group of Old Ones who had been huddled against the wall were moving out, but very cautiously.
As Cornwall and the others came to the path, Bucket pushed them along. He handed the horn back to Mary, the ax to Gib, the bow to Hal, and the sword to Cornwall. Jones’ rifle he hurled out into the center of the ledge.
“Why, goddamn you!” frothed Jones. “I’ll bust you up for scrap. I’ll dent you out of shape—”
“Move along,” growled Cornwall. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Bucket snapped out a twirling tentacle, wrapped it around the bear roasting on the grill, holding it well up in the air. Drops of sizzling grease spattered on Cornwall’s face.
“Now we get supper,” said Oliver, licking his chops.
“And,” said Sniveley with relief, “we’ll not have to eat any demon meat.”
36
“We’re safe here,” said Hal. “They can’t try to follow us. They’re no great shakes, I’d judge, at prowling in the dark. And they’re scared purple of the gorge.”
“You’re sure this is the gorge they spoke of?” asked Cornwall.
Jones nodded. “It is the one I followed out of the university. I must have passed right by the Old Ones’ camp and not even noticed it. And now, suppose you tell me about this robot of yours? If I had a sledge at hand, I’d do some hammering on him. Although I do admit he managed to get us out of a tight spot in a most efficient manner. I only wish he could have warned us a bit ahead of time.”
“He couldn’t warn us,” said Hal. “He can’t talk.”
“That was a good gun,” Jones mourned. “It set me back a heap. What made him do it, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t try to answer that,” said Cornwall. “He’s not been with us very long, and I suppose he’d have to be with us for years before we began to understand him. Apparently he thought it was not a good idea for you to retain your weapon. I can’t agree with him, of course, but he must have had a reason.”
“Maybe it was because this thing you call a weapon was too far out of its time,” said Sniveley. “Maybe he felt it had no right to be here. There’s a name for something like that. Anachronism, I think, although that doesn’t sound quite right.”
“Much as I regret losing it,” said Jones, “I must admit that I feel no great compulsion to go back to get it. If I never see an Old One again, it will be much too soon. And in any case it is probably out of kilter. This Tin Bucket of yours did not toss it easily. When it hit, it bounced.”
After traveling for miles, stumbling down the gorge in the light of a sickly moon, they had finally stopped to build a fire in the shelter of a huge pile of tumbled boulders. They had feasted on the bear and then had settled down to talk.
“I’m dying to know what is going on,” said Jones. “Perhaps now you’ll tell me.”
Lounging against a boulder, Cornwall told the story, with much help from the others, especially Sniveley.
“The rings of fire,” said Jones. “Most intriguing. They sound very much like the flying saucers with which my world is both amused and plagued. You say they were destructive.”
“Extremely so,” said Cornwall. “They pulverized a castle.”
“After the Chaos Beast was dead.”
“We think it was dead,” said Hal. “It seemed to most of us that we experienced abundant evidence it was. We are considerably unsure why the wheels of fire incident should have come about. By and large we are inclined to believe the attack was aimed at Bucket. They probably figured they would hit the castle about the time that he was hatched. As it chanced, we speeded up the hatching by a few hours’ time.”
“The Chaos Beast must have known the danger,” said Jones. “That is why it ordered the people of the castle to haul Bucket out as soon as it was dead.”
“Bucket probably knew as well,” said Gib. “He was the one who insisted that we leave the castle.”
Jones asked, “Have you had any chance to study this stormily born robot? Have you any data on him?”
Cornwall frowned. “If you mean by data, facts and observations laboriously arrived at, the answer is no. I would suspect your world is much more concerned with data than we are. We know only a few things—that he seems to be made of metal, that he has no eyes and yet can see, that he cannot talk nor does he eat, and still it seems to me …”
“He gave us warning to flee the castle,” said Gib. “He turned himself into a packhorse for us, carrying more than his share when we crossed the Blasted Plain. He destroyed the magic of the demon trap and this night he extracted us from a situation that could have cost our lives.”
“And he plays with Coon,” said Mary. “Coon likes him. And I don’t think we should be talking like this about him, with him just standing over there. He must know what we are saying, and it may embarrass him.”
Bucket didn’t look embarrassed. He didn’t look like anything at all. He stood on the other side of the fire. All his tentacles were retracted with the exception of one that was half-extruded, the end of it shaped in an intricate, boxlike form, resting on what one might think of as his chest.
“That tentacle is a funny business,” said Oliver. “I wonder if it has any meaning. Are we supposed to notice it and get some meaning from it?”
“It’s ritual,” said Sniveley. “Some silly ritualistic gesture, probably done for some satisfaction that its symbolism may afford him.”
Jones squinted at him. “I think,” he said, “he is not of this earth. I think the Chaos Beast was not of this earth, either, or the wheels of fire. I think that here we deal with alien beings from deep outer space. They all came from some distant star.”
“How could that be?” asked Cornwall. “The stars are no more than celestial lights set by God’s mercy in the firmament. From a magic world, perhaps, from some place hidden and forbidden to us, but not from the stars.”
“I refuse,” Jones said icily, “to conduct a seminar for you on what the astronomers of my world have discovered. It would waste my time. You are blind to everything but magic. Run up against something that you can’t understand and out pops that all-inclusive concept.”
“Then,” Hal said, soothingly, “let us not discuss it. I agree there can be no meeting of the minds. Nor is it essential that there should be.”
“We have told you our story,” Mary said. “Now, why don’t you tell us yours? We went seeking you, to ask if you would join us in our journey across the Blasted Plain, but we found you gone.”
“It was Cornwall’s doing,” said Jones. “He dropped a hint about a university. He did not seem to place too much emphasis on it, but he was wonderfully intrigued. Although he did not say so, I had the impression that the university was in fact his goal. So, in my devious and unmoral way, I decided I’d steal a march on him.”
“But how could you know the location of it?” asked Cornwall. “And how could you have gotten there?”
“The location,” said Jones, grinning. “Mostly a guess. I studied a map.”
“But there are no maps.”
“In my world there are. In my world these are not the Misty Mountains, nor the Blasted Plain. They are normal geographies settled by normal people, surveyed and mapped and with roads running into the far reach
es of them. So I used the machine that enables me to move between my world and yours and went back to my world. There I studied the maps, made my guess, had my machine trucked—by that I mean I used another machine to move my traveling machine to the point in my world that corresponds with the same terrain I believed the university was located in your world. If this all sounds confusing …”
“It does,” said Sniveley, “but proceed in any case.”
“I then came back to this world, and my guess had been a good one. I landed only a couple of miles from the university. I spent a few days there, enough to know I needed help. As I told you, I found books and documents, but couldn’t read a word of them. Then I thought of you. I knew you would try to make it across the Blasted Plain, and I hoped that Cornwall, with his years of study at Wyalusing, might be able to read the books. And I also had a hunch you might need some help. So I started out. You know the rest of it.
“The university? I’ve never seen anything quite like it. One huge building, although from a distance it has the look of many buildings. A place you might think fairies had built. A place, Sir Mark, such as your magic might have built. It looks like froth and lace, as if the hand of man had no part in it.…”
“Perhaps,” said Sniveley, “the hand of man had not.”
“There were farmlands and garden plots about it, and, while the crops had all been harvested, it was quite apparent that someone had worked to grow the crops and to take in the harvest. There was cattle. There were pigs and chickens and a few rather scrawny horses—peacocks, ducks, geese, pigeons. Enough animals and fowl and farmland to feed a substantial population. But there was no one there. At times, as I prowled about, it seemed there was someone watching, and at times I thought I caught sight of figures scurrying out of sight, but no one came forth to greet me, no one watched me leave. They, whoever they might be, were hiding from me.”
“We are glad, of course,” said Sniveley, “to have heard this tale from you, for it is a most intriguing one. But the question now is what do we do?”
“We have to go on,” said Cornwall. “We can’t go back across the Blasted Plain. Without horses we would never make it.”
“There are the Hellhounds, too,” said Gib.
“We can’t go back, you say,” said Sniveley. “That’s because you are dying to see the university. The point of it is that you should not see it, none of us should see it. You have your holy places and we have ours, and many of ours have been desecrated and obliterated. The university is one of the few places we have left, and it is left only because the knowledge of its existence has been closely guarded.”
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Mary, “but I am going on. My parents passed this way, and if they are still alive, I mean to find them.”
“Your parents,” said Jones. “I know but little of them. I searched the Witch House for some evidence of them but found nothing. I would wager that if you strung that witch up by her heels and built a good fire underneath her, there’d be evidence forthcoming. But I had not the stomach for it. Up in my world there is no record of them, of anyone other than myself who has come into this world. But from what little I have heard I would gather they are people from my world. Perhaps people who were born some centuries after me. For witness: I must use a technological contraption to travel here, and there is no evidence they used a machine at all. In the centuries beyond my time investigators from my world may be able to travel here without benefit of machinery.”
“There is a great deal in what Sniveley has to say about the university’s sacred status,” Cornwall said with a judicious air. “We should not intrude where we are not wanted, although the hard fact of the matter is, that we have nowhere else to go, I think everyone is agreed we can’t go back. Not only are there the Hellhounds on the Blasted Plain, but now there are the Old Ones as well. By morning they will have retrieved their spears and regained their courage. I doubt very much they’ll follow us down the gorge, for their fear of it seems quite genuine; but I would think it might be dangerous for us to attempt to make our way back past them. The best we can say, Sniveley, is that we pledge ourselves to keep our lips forever sealed and that we will commit no desecration.”
Sniveley grumbled. “It’s nothing I would count on, for most people, given a chance, become blabbermouths. But I suppose it must be accepted, for we are forced to it. I agree we can’t go back the way we came.”
“It was a wild goose chase all around,” said Cornwall, “and I am sincerely sorry that we made it. I feel responsible.”
“The fault was mostly mine,” said Gib. “I was the one who insisted that I must deliver with my own hands the ax made by the Old Ones.”
“It was no one’s fault,” said Mary. “How could anyone have ever guessed the Old Ones would react as they did?”
“So we go on,” said Hal. “I wonder what we’ll find.”
Somewhere far off a wolf howled, and, listening to the howl in the fallen silence, they waited for another howl to answer, but there was no answer. The fire was burning low, and Hal threw more wood on it.
Up the gorge a twig snapped loudly in the silence and they leaped to their feet, moving away from the fire.
A tattered figure came blundering down the gorge, his staff thumping on the ground as he walked along. The ragged raven clutched his shoulder desperately, and behind him the little white dog limped faithfully along.
“My God,” exclaimed Cornwall, “it is the Gossiper. We had forgotten all about him.”
“He intended that we should,” Sniveley said nastily. “He slips in and out of your consciousness. It is the nature of him. Now you see him, now you don’t. And when you don’t see him, you never even think of him. You forget him easily because he wants you to forget. He is a slippery character.”
“Dammit, man,” Jones bellowed at the Gossiper, “where have you been? Where did you disappear to?”
“If my nostrils do not deceive me,” said the Gossiper, “there is good roast meat about. A very gorgeous roast. I hunger greatly.…”
“Hell,” said Jones, “you forever hunger greatly.”
37
It was late afternoon and they were almost through the gorge when the first dot appeared in the sky. As they stood and watched, there were other dots.
“Just birds,” said Gib. “We are getting jumpy. We are almost there but are convinced from what the Old Ones told us that something is bound to happen. You said we were almost through the gorge, didn’t you, Master Jones?”
Jones nodded.
“What bothers me about those dots,” said Hal, “is that the Old Ones talked about Those Who Brood Upon the Mountain. And the things that brood are birds, hatching out their eggs.”
“You came through the gorge,” Cornwall said to Jones, “and nothing happened to you. Nothing even threatened you.”
“I’m convinced,” said Jones, “that it was only because I was going in the right direction. It would seem logical that whatever’s here is here to protect the university. They’d pay no attention to someone who was leaving.”
There were more dots now, circling but dropping lower as they circled.
The walls of rock rose up from the gorge’s narrow floor, shutting out the sun. Only at high noon would there be sunlight in this place. Here and there trees, mostly cedar and other small evergreens; sprouted from the rock faces of the wall, clinging stubbornly to little pockets of soil lodged in the unevenness of the rock. The wind moaned as it blew along the tortuous course the gorge pursued.
“I don’t like this place,” said Sniveley. “It puts a chill into my bones.”
“And here I stand,” lamented Jones, “without a weapon to my hand other than this driftwood cudgel I managed to pick up. If I only had the rifle. If that stupid robot had not thrown away my rifle …”
The stupid robot stood unperturbed by what Jones had said—if, indeed, he had heard what had been said. All his tentacles were retracted except for the one on his chest, which lay a
rranged in a boxlike fashion.
The dots were dropping lower, and now it could be seen that they were enormous birds with a monstrous wingspread.
“If I only had my glasses, I could make out what they are,” said Jones. “But, no, of course, I haven’t got my glasses. I persuaded myself that I had to travel light. It’s a goddamn wonder I brought anything at all. The only two things I had that counted were the rifle and the bike, and now both of them are gone.”
“I can tell you what they are,” said Hal.
“You have sharp eyes, my friend.”
“He has forest eyes,” said Gib. “A hunter’s eyes.”
Hal said, “They are harpies.”
“The meanest things in the Enchanted Land,” screeched Sniveley. “Meaner than the Hellhounds. And us out in the open.”
Steel rasped as Cornwall drew his blade. “You’re getting good at that,” Hal said nonchalantly. “Almost smooth as silk. If you’d practice just a little.”
The harpies were plunging down in a deadly dive, their wings half-folded, their cruel, skull-like human faces equipped with deadly beaks thrust out as they dived.
Hal’s bowstring twanged, and one of the harpies broke out of the dive and tumbled, turning end for end, its folded wings coming loose and spreading out limply in the air. The string twanged again, and a second one was tumbling.
The others waited for them and the Gossiper, backed against a rocky wall, held his staff at ready. The little lame dog crouched between his feet and the raven reared on his shoulder, squalling.
“Let me get just one good crack at them,” said the Gossiper, almost as if he were praying or, more likely, talking to himself. “I’ll crack their stupid necks. I hate the filthy things. I need not be here, but I cannot go away right yet. I’ve greased my gut with this company, not once but twice, and my Fido and their Coon get along together.”
“Get down,” Cornwall told Mary. “Close against the ground. Stay right here beside me.”
Sniveley and Oliver had hastily gathered a small pile of rocks and now stood on either side of it, with rocks clutched in their hands.