The Wall of Serpents

L. Sprague de camp

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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 tin-plated 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 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 out-flank 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 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, woollen 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 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.”

“Oh-oh. What happened?”

“I spun sprackly wise about a few corners and so eluded them for the time, but …”

“Oh, boy. They’ll have your license number and be here any time.”

“A pox and a murrain on them! What is there more to assemble? I’ll have all ready in half an hour’s space.”

“Not half an hour. Now. Stay there! No, don’t try to put on those new clothes now. Hug the bundle and it’ll come along with us. Get your bow and stuff.”

He jumped up and ran up the stairs. Presently his voice came, muffled from the depths of a closet. “Belphebe!”

“Yes?”

“Where the hell are those thick wool socks of mine?”

“In the big carton. You haven’t used them since last winter.”

“Okay … And that yellow scarf? Never mind, I found it …”

Minutes later, he reappeared in the living room with his arms full of clothing and equipment. To Belphebe he said, “Got your bow? Good. And plenty of arr—”

The front doorbell rang.

Belphebe took a quick look out the window. “’Tis they! There squats their car! What’s to do?”

“Beat it for the Kalevala, quick. Sit on the rug beside me and hold my hand with one hand and your duffel with the other.”

The bell rang again. Shea, throwing himself into the lotus posture of yoga, concentrated on the cards in front of him.

“If A is not not-B, and B is not not-A …”

The room went out of focus.

There was nothing in front of him save the cards, arranged in a square of five cards on a side. Twenty-five cards.

“… and if C be the Land of Heroes, the Kalevala …”

On went the spell. The cards dissolved into a million little spots of light, whirling in a rigadoon of their own mysterious meaning. Shea tightened his grip on Belphebe’s hand and his bundle of gear.

There was a sensation of being borne, featherlight, along the avenues of a gale. Colors. Sounds that could not quite be heard. A feeling of falling. Shea remembered how he had been scared witless the first time this happened to him—and how at the end of it he had landed in Norse myth at the Ragnarök instead of the Irish myth he had desired …

The whirling lights sorted themselves out into a fixed pattern, solidified, materialized. He was sitting in long, worn grass, with Belphebe and a couple of piles of clothes beside him.