COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 378
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The war was young yet. The Germans had not yet unleashed the full terror of their blitz. Nor had America yet thrown her strength into the balance. The raiders came over the Channel to blast England into submission, but already the RAF was meeting their challenge.
In a year, John Argyle thought, he would be old enough to fly too. A long time, of course—a year. Before then the war might be won—or lost. Sitting by the fire in the chill of the evening, he turned the pomander over and over in his hands, watching its jewels glinting many-colored and remembering his conversation with the museum curator from America. A secret spring ... He fingered the fretted gold hopefully, pressing it here and there. Firelight blazed from the gems. Hypnotic, almost. He held the pomander up, turning it slowly, enjoying the play of light and color.
Golden Apple ... the Golden Apples of Idun, that gave eternal youth to Valhalla's gods. Magic. There might be something inside this from the very old days, if he could only find the spring. His fingers pressed and slipped over the golden surfaces ... he felt something move a little ...
Noiselessly, upon smooth hinges, the pomander opened in his hands. And suddenly, like a twilight veil there in the London flat, the spell of ancient sorcery began to drop, layer by layer, about him.
He was staring into the shining opened hollow of the globe ... Reflections moved there, so bright, so enchanting that everything else in the room fell back into shadows. Little shapes of color so pure, so clear ... But they were distorted shapes, the curves of the hollow disguising them. He did not glance behind him for the source of those moving reflections. He knew that nothing in the room could be casting such colors as these. Nothing had substance but these moving bits of brightness ...
Not even the earth underfoot. It shifted unstably as he walked ... He was taking long, sliding strides that carried him over a shaking land dizzily while everything around him quivered. The air was grey smoke that shook too, in long, slow waves. Only the pomander's shining mirror in his hands held its image clearly, and he thought after a while that the little broken shapes moving within it were beginning to take form ...
For a long while he must have gone striding and stumbling through the dusk, the earth shaking underfoot, the pomander held up before him like a Grail. He could see in it now that somewhere a lawn was green as velvet, with yellow sunshine falling over trees and over the walls of a strange, stiff little castle whose banners stood out as if upon a gale. He could not see it clearly yet, but the image was taking shape ...
Then in one last, long stride his foot struck solid ground. Sunshine poured down about him like a tent of warmth, and suddenly the reflections in the pomander were bodiless no longer. They were real reflections, mirroring the scene around him. The velvet lawn, spangled with small, flat, starry flowers, the castle with its straining barriers, the deep woods beyond. And over the flowery lawn someone was moving toward him, someone who glittered in the sunlight.
He was not at all surprised. He was beyond surprise, or outside it. From first to last he had no feeling of strangeness or unreality here, not even questioning in his mind whether it were all a dream. He knew it was not. He knew it was real. He drew a long breath of the sweet sunny air and looked upon a little world of preposterous familiarity. Perhaps the fact that he had seen it all before so many times helped make its reality clear to him.
For this was the world of old missals and tapestries and church paintings, the same stiff little scenes he had so often encountered before, painstakingly traced by the loving, inexperienced hands of medieval artists. Here were the trees and fountains he had seen in the bright pages of Froissart and twined into the capitals of old Malorian texts. The lawn was strewn with the same unreal, flat flowers that Botticelli painted beneath the feet of his dancing nymphs. And over the grass a girl was hurrying now.
She was very slim in the bell of her swaying skirts, and she was blindingly golden in the sunlight, the gown standing out about her stiff with the richness of its embossed and embroidered fabric. A stiff, flat collar of hammered gold lay across her shoulders, and she wore a golden crown pierced with fleur-de-lys patterns. Beneath it her pale hair streamed smoothly about a sad little lifted face whose great black eyes looked anxiously into his.
"You did come back!" she called. "Oh, you did come back! You remembered!" And then, because she was near enough now to see his face, her hurry slackened and her shoulders drooped beneath the golden collar. She said in a different voice, "Who are you?"
He did not answer. He could not. He stood appalled by the knowledge that through all her speech she had not once opened her lips. Not once.
And yet she had spoken in a voice that was very sweet, very clear ... and not exactly in English. Not in any language at all. The thought behind her speech was as clear in his mind as her golden figure was clear in the sunshine, but she had used no words. And he had no time to marvel over it, because something that had been nagging at the fringes of consciousness sprang suddenly now into full clarity. Hers was not the only "voice" that spoke here. The air was heavy with "voices," not easy to catch because they had no human focus. Distorted pictures flashed by through his mind of many thoughts—winged thoughts in the sunny upper air, with the green world tilting below. Deep, soft, shadowy thoughts of woodlands and brown sliding water and solitude. Grassroot thoughts, tiny, distorted, unfocused. He had been hearing them as one hears the noises of a summer night, many small sounds blending into stillness. He knew the little minds that must lie behind them, the hares and the birds and the foxes so dear to medieval artists. He could not see them, but he caught the voices of their minds.
And then, for just one glancing moment, a thought as red and dangerous as fresh wet blood flashed through every other thought that wavered in the air. Flashed, and was gone. There was no counterpart for the thinker of that terrible thought in any medieval picture he had ever seen. A dumb, blind, murderous thought, keen as a sword in the sunlight, but keen for killing and for no other purpose. No intelligence in it. Only murder.
Then it was gone, and the girl was stooping to pull a flower from the grass, her skirts collapsing about her in a great golden billow. It was a little six-pointed star of a flower, yellow petaled, with yellow leaf and stem, and in its heart a quivering triangle of scarlet. And he remembered suddenly something he had never known he knew until this moment—how the four queens of the card deck carry flowers in their stiff little fists. Small flowers like this one ...
"You have never been here before, have you?" said the girl in her clear and voiceless speech. "No one ever comes back, of course ..." She peered up at him. She had a medieval face, with a round, childlike forehead and a soft, small mouth and the great, dark, sidelong eyes, a little sad now. She twirled the flower between her fingers and looked at him. "They never come back," she said again.
"Who?" he asked, his voice sounding strangely loud in this silent world of thoughts. And he was watching the woods restlessly, waiting a repetition of that dangerous flash he had caught a moment ago. "Who never comes back?"
"No one," said the girl. "Not even the Sorceror, any more. I'm glad, anyhow, that you are not old, like him."
"You'll have to tell me about the Sorceror," Argyle said gently. "I don't know anything about this world, you know."
She looked up at him with a puzzled smile.
"It seems strange to hear you say so, when you stand there in the Sorceror's clothing. But I can see that you speak the truth."
Argyle looked down in surprise. He was wearing something unfamiliar, a stiff tunic as fantastic as her gown, heavy with golden embroidery and medieval in cut and richness. Only the pomander remained now to link him with a London that might have been a dream ...
"Others have come in the Sorceror's garments," the girl said, and shrugged a little beneath the golden collar. "Two of them were old, and I did not care when they went away. The young man—well, he went away very quickly, before I could tell him the way back. I was sorry. I thought for a moment when I saw you ... but you are young too, aren't you? Perhaps you'll stay."
"Perhaps," Argyle said. "I'd like to stay ... Why did the young man leave so quickly?"
"He did not wish to die," the girl said, and smiled, twirling the flower. "Death must be a curious thing. Nothing ever dies here except those from outside."
"And what," demanded Argyle, "do they die of?"
"They die of the Snake," the girl told him thoughtfully, and looked down at the yellow flower. "The Sorceror put it here when he built the world. I think he meant it to keep out everyone but himself and me. But now ..." She sighed. "It does seem lonely here sometimes. The world is so small, and no one lives here any more except the Snake and the little creatures and me."
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"Who was the Sorceror?" Argyle asked, fascinated. The girl put out her hand and took his in her smooth, cool fingers.
"Come up to the castle with me. The Sorceror has forgotten us long ago. He must be dead by now. Or has time gone by outside? There is no time here, you know. He wanted it that way. He dreaded old age ... So here it is always Now. But once you step outside, through the Shaking Land—you forget. It has something to do with time. It was only by accident the Sorceror found the way to come back, and after that—" She glanced up at him again, her small mouth quirking. "Shall I tell you how he found the way back? Not yet, I think. Or perhaps I shall ..." Her smile promised that she would. Her fingers tightened on his.
"What about the Snake?" Argyle asked, his eyes searching the trees.
"Oh, I think it must be asleep now. It would have come for you sooner than this if it knew you were here at all. Perhaps in the castle I can hide you for a while." She said it unconcernedly. Death meant nothing to her, nor the passage of time. And Argyle could do nothing but walk beside her over the flowery grass, the unfamiliar tunic stiff against his knees as he moved.
All this was not a dream. It was vividly real, but he felt no terror yet of the danger he knew must come for him soon. The girl's fingers were warm in his, and her small, sad face enchanted him, smiling up as they walked through the sunny silence toward the castle.
He knew presently what she meant when she said that it must always be. Now in this nameless world. For time had no meaning. They might have been hours approaching the castle gate, or only seconds. The vague, unfocussed thoughts of the little beings who peopled the world drifted idly through the air. Now and then a flash of murderous brilliance slashed across them and was gone. The Snake, perhaps, in its dreams ... But the girl's sidelong eyes were eloquent upon his, and her twining fingers soft, and the sad little face touched his heart with its loneliness and its strangeness.
"Presently you will go," she said, after a while. "And I shall be alone again. If I tell you the secret of the way back—would you come? I should like you to come."
"Tell me," he said. "I promise. I'll come back."
And so she told him. It was very simple. She led him by the hand into the castle hall and through it into a round, paneled room with a desk in its center and a quill pen sitting in a little carved box of sand. There was parchment paper on the desk, and a well of purple ink.
"These are the Sorceror's," said the girl. "But I think he must be dead ... You can only come back if you remember, so you must write down the way and the secret of the pomander, and write down what lies inside the Shaking Land, so you will know your promise again, and remember me ... Sit down and write, John Argyle, and may you never forget as the others did. Please, John Argyle, remember me!"
So he wrote, with that plaintive little voice ringing in his mind. "Please remember me!" Its poignancy disturbed him as he scratched the quill of the long dead Sorceror over the Sorceror's parchment sheets, putting down the girl's beauty and her loneliness so that he could not forget them again, putting down the strange beauty of this world, and the menace of the Snake, so that he would remember that too ...
He covered three sheets with the purple ink, while time stood still in the silence of the enchanted castle. Not until he had nearly finished did an obvious thought occur to him.
"Why should you stay here?" he asked her, striking the quill back into its box of purple-stained sand. "Why not come back with me?"
She shook her gold-crowned head. "Finish," she said. "Fold up the parchment, and put it in the pomander, because that is the only thing you brought here and the only thing you can take away. No, I can't go with you. I belong here. I would die in the Shaking Lands. Nothing can leave this world, and nothing can live here very long except the Snake and me." Her sigh shook the golden collar about her shoulders.
Argyle, crackling the parchment sheets, looked up sharply. He had caught a flashing thought, keener than her own, in the quiet air of the room.
"The Snake?" he said. The girl straightened, her eyes going unfocused and faraway. Then she nodded.
"Soon," she said. "You will come back, though? Presently perhaps it will sleep again, after you have gone. And I shall be lonely. You will not forget?"
"I promise," said Argyle. "I'll come back. But—"
Sharp and keen through the quiet the thought of murder flashed. A bright crimson thought, so that Argyle could almost see the color in the air. It was time to go. Time to go fast! He stuffed the crackling sheets into the pomander.
"Show me the way," he said. And she obeyed, moving swiftly in her stiff golden skirts. Her fingers clung to his almost desperately, and her unhappy little face looked up at his so that she stumbled as she pulled him out of the room and down the hall to the door. And then they were running across the grass, with danger making the air electric behind them from the forest.
The shining flowers flashed past underfoot. The Shaking Lands loomed up dim before them, grey air wavering in a wall beyond the sunshine, and the earth shifting beneath it. The girl pressed his hands hard around the pomander. Tiptoeing, she laid her arms about his neck, brushing his mouth with hers.
"Please come back. Please remember me!"
Beyond her, he caught one bright and terrifying glimpse of a scarlet shape gliding out from among the trees. A shape of dreadful beauty, colored like blood and of so pure and clear a tint that the redness quivered like life itself. He could scarcely take his eyes away from it.
"Run!" called the girl. "And—remember!"
But Argyle was in no hurry to run. He was remembering what she had told him of the Shaking Lands, and the possibility of victory over the Snake suddenly dazzled him. If he could lure it out here into the dizziness and the dimness of this border limbo, perhaps ...
It came writhing toward him as he stood waiting in the shadow, its crimson like the flow of fresh blood over the green grass. It was beautiful as the Serpent in Eden must have been beautiful, and as dangerous as that first Snake. It lifted its lovely shining head and hissed at him soundlessly, and the murder in its mindless brain shook him so that he turned to run ...
And it followed. Its terrible, singleminded purpose was like lightning in the dim air around him, flashing the voice of its thought into his brain. And that alone was frightening enough, without those great sliding coils following, following as he ran. The unstable earth shook beneath his slipping feet. He clutched the pomander and stumbled on, glancing back now and then to see the scarlet blur following purposefully behind, closer every time he looked.
From far away the girl's voice echoed in his brain, "John Argyle—come back to me! Remember me, John Argyle!"
But it was a very distant voice, more a memory than a thought, and already he could see the gleam of firelight ahead where he had left that room in London a timeless while ago. Smoky memories were curling lazily through his mind—smoky—dissipating ...
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That was the way it must have ended, though the writing ended sooner. Maybe the Snake died out there in the Shaking Lands, I thought. Maybe the way was open now for him to go back. As he had gone ... For I knew that he had kept his promise at last, that he and the girl were standing, at this very moment perhaps, on the strange green grass among the flowers, with medieval sunlight pouring down around them, and no Snake to spoil their Eden ...
The scream of sirens from outside woke me out of that particular vision. I came back with a jolt into this world again, hearing the wardens' whistles and seeing the light go on outside the windows as New York came back to life.
There was a click from the wall. I jumped. The lights that went on showed me John Argyle, one hand on the switch and a look of stunned disbelief making his face empty.
Looking at him, I knew all in one glance exactly what had happened. I knew, I think, even quicker than he. He was still stupefied by the surprise of it. But as he looked beyond me, I saw understanding dawn upon his face, and before I turned I knew what must hang on the wall behind me. I knew what he was seeing there. A mirror, and his own face. A face that the girl in the magical land had not remembered ...
