Continuum 4, page 15
part #4 of Continuum Series
“Well,” said the king, “how do you do, boy? Where has everyone gone?”
“I believe most of them have run away,” Eric told him. “But a good many have been eaten.” Then the raven, Gnip, came and settled on his shoulder.
The king dropped to his knees at once. “I perceive you are a magician,” the king said, “and that that bird is your puissant familiar; and I confess that it has always seemed to me that were I a magician I would choose to return to that very age at which you manifest yourself; but I would think you must find the raiment you have selected rather chill — I can show you better.”
In this way Eric became ruler of the country, and after giving his mother a kingdom of her own (and then shutting her up in a bottle because she would not stay there) reigned without aging at all for thirty years, at the end of which time the realm was a wilderness. Deer ran through the streets of the town, and few there were to loose an arrow; wolves bred in wineries, and foxes in farrowing pens; undines from the sea came up the river ten leagues beyond the ford; the stonetrolls of the mountains were seen on the roads at noon; and goblins, excessively ugly and evil, with seventeen fingers on each hand and steel teeth, stood guard at the castle barbican. Throughout all this Eric was, needless to say, exceedingly happy.
As for Thag, he had taken the dungeons for his own, but came out promptly whenever he was wanted and occasionally when he was not. He took the forms of a black and reeking mist, a crab covered with living slime, a dog with its fur afire, a fountain of sand, and many other things; and when Eric rode out hunting — on a unicorn or a hippogryph as often as not — he sometimes noticed that the castle was coming to resemble the skull of a bear, but it did not disturb him at all.
King Charles (who had often assured Eric that his name was the foolish) stayed on with his queen, they having become Eric’s principal servitors (Thag excepted), and rejoiced in the possession of a son called Prince Robert who was the rightful heir, though he scarcely knew it. And while the king often mourned in secret for the palmy days of his pride, he comforted himself with the knowledge that he still commanded his castle and treasure — Eric had hardly spent a cent.
Thus matters stood, until one evening when Eric was dining in the great hall by the light of a single guttering candle on a golden pricket, there appeared from nowhere three remarkable figures. The first was a blond girl of great beauty, who wore a diaphanous gown that left one breast bare. The second was a darkhaired woman, also of great beauty, with a white forelock that made Eric think of a night sky slashed by lightening; this woman was dressed in a white robe embroidered with gold, and carried a staff forked at the top like the horns of a bull. The third was a man, tall and muscular, gray-bearded and one-eyed. And as this man, the last of the three, appeared, there came from the dungeons a roar of anguish.
Eric saw at once that these were not common folk (or he would have had them devoured), and rose and introduced himself and offered to share his dinner with the newcomers; but he had no sooner done this than his pet (ravens are long-lived birds — sometimes inconveniently so) came flapping in at a window and lit on the one-eyed man’s shoulder.
“Now,” the one-eyed man said, “I see we are in some kind of castle,” and he began to examine the hangings and decorations, as if he were leaving everything to the woman with the staff.
“I heard Thag roar,” she said, “at the moment we materialized. How long has he been here?”
“Thirty years,” said Eric, so surprised that he never considered not answering.
“Time flies rapidly here, then,” the one-eyed man commented. He had taken down a broadspear from the wall, and was fingering the edge as he spoke. “I thought we were close upon Thag.”
“We were,” the woman told him, “but as you say, time can pass quickly here — thirty years between paragraph and paragraph, if need be.”
“What do you mean?” asked the man, but before she could answer him the king and queen entered, followed by Prince Robert. They had been watching from an alcove, and the king (who was of the old belief, as the mighty usually are whether or not they will admit it) had decided to throw his sword.
“Great Woden,” he said, “we cast ourselves upon your mercy, and on the mercy of serene Frigg and lovely Freya. The throne of this land is mine, mine to hold in my lifetime, mine to give by father-right to my son when I die. For half again a score of years have I been defrauded of it — slay the monster and grant me justice.”
And Woden said, “What the Hell is he talking about?” and as he spoke the keystone of the great arch of the castle cracked, and a little sliver of stone no bigger than a fingernail fell ringing to the floor.
“He thinks we’re the Norse gods,” the woman said, and the girl added, “Don’t you see, Daddy, we’re in a book.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Not more impossible than going backward in time. Look around at things: There’s the evil magician — that boy in the pointed hat — here’s the castle; there’s the true king, the fat lady is the queen, and that fellow who hangs his head and snivels is the prince. Thag is the monster in the crypt beneath the castle. We kill him and disappear, the magician gets pushed off a roof or something, and that’s the end.”
Eric asked, “Are you saying that we are people in a book in whatever place you come from?”
The one-eyed man nodded. “That’s what they’re saying — a fairy tale — I’m not sure I believe it.” He paused. “Are you well-read? At least by whatever standards are used here?”
Eric nodded. “I’ve spent many happy hours in the castle library — it’s something we enchanters are expected to do, and I’ve come to enjoy it.”
“Then tell me something. Do the characters in the books you have here ever read themselves?”
Eric shook his head. “Never, to my knowledge. They’re always going somewhere.”
“That might be it, then. In our world, you see, it would be quite possible for a character in a book to sit peacefully before his fire reading the short stories of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.” Just at that instant Thag rushed into the room in the form of a headless bear, blood spurting from the stump of his neck. “Do I kill him?” Woden asked Frigg.
“A moment ago I would have said yes.”
The bear stood upright before the one-eyed man, blood cascading over his shoulders and his extended paws.
“Now you don’t — why not?”
Freya-goldenhair touched his arm. “It will be the end of the story, won’t it, Daddy? And if we can’t be killed, how can Thag? He’s been here thirty years now, they say. Won’t this just turn him loose to go somewhere else?”
“I don’t think this is where he really belongs,” the woman called Frigg said. “This is probably a very low energy level for him, as it is for us. And he’s asking you to do it, standing there with his chest exposed like that — if he’s not begging you not to. I don’t like it.”
“Then the thing to do is to keep him here.” Like a fisherman impaling a pike, Woden drove his spear into the bear’s hind foot, pinning it to the oak floor of the hall. “Make it tight,” the woman called Frigg advised him, and with a spiky morgenstern he pounded the iron-shod shaft until the head was nearly buried in the wood.
“Use him for your spells all you want,” the one-eyed man told Eric, “but if you let him go now I think he’ll disappear on you, and I know damned well I’ll come back here and make you sorry you did.”
Eric bowed. “I understand, Magister.”
(Frigg whispered to Freya, “There has to be a world that corresponds to each of our fictions, dear, since what never was nor will be is inconceivable. Still, I wonder what Thag really is.” And the bear became a snake pinned by the tail and struck an inch short of her heel.)
“Magister,” Eric asked as the one-eyed man began to melt into the air, “what shall I call you? You said you are not Woden?”
“My name is Harry Nailer.”
Eric bowed again. “Hairy Nailer. It is fitting, Magister.” He was already thinking of the things he would do to the king.
And as soon as the three were gone he did them; and lived, in the most literal sense of the words, happily, ever, after.
Edgar Pangborn
Mam Sola’s House
THE two-sided image gazed into Patric Jonz from the window of an odd-goods shop, as they call such places in Filadelfia. He lounged in and bought it with a flurry of scholastic enterprise; his eyes and fingers had hungered for it. Having recently become secretary to the Curator of Antique Visual Arts at the Filadelfia Museum, Patric was making an earnest effort to develop a blind of scientific and aesthetic perceptions. He was always after developing something — memory, muscles, sexual staying power, executive ability — a splendid trait in young people, especially young secretaries.
Patric was twenty-three, born in 612. That was the year of the Trenton Convention when Penn, allied with Conicut, Nuin, and the other northern countries, took over the doddering Katskil Empire and established the Eastern Federation for all time or anyhow quite a while. It was the decade when the refinement of sailing ships made possible regular trade and communication with Europe and other far places, and we began to hear talk of a world federation and other marvelous dreams. Patric was a child of his age and would have said so himself. He enjoyed the coincidence that his life had started with the Convention that really did seem to have secured a lasting peace.
The image had a look of enormous age. To Patric’s eye it was far out of harmony with his apartment’s spanking new seventh-century decor. The two faces, blackened and lithified by fire — maybe its smoke had dissolved into the sky when mammoths were roving the grasslands? — viewed time and change with a tolerance that reduced anything so brief as a century to a flurry and a squeak. Patric had first removed everything from the mantel except the image. But then the two-faced god reduced the entire living room to modern banality. His nice brass-and-glass whale-oil lamp became flashy and meretricious, the pewter candlesticks gingerbready. His wool rug, an import from Main — too new, though it faithfully followed a patchwork pattern from the nineteenth century of the Christian period. And the scrolled woodwork, and — (O God, and O misery that he had to rent the damned place furnished!) — the plaster cherubs, the buggerly great frieze of plaster cherubs all around the room with fig leaves clinging to their theoretical rods and grooves by the power of faith alone! For you can’t have everything, and our seventh century was after all an age that would give no offense even to that dear good lady of the faraway nineteenth, who was, among other things, Empress of India, and whose name for the moment escapes me. And the embroidered Holy Murcan texts framed under glass and glued to the wall in the sanitary modern manner so that viruses and drafts and unfavorable auras can’t collect behind them. The late husband of the landlady Mam Gebler had paid 300 Penn dollars, pre-Convention value, inciting a journeyman artist to commit those cherubs. As for the texts, Mam Gebler’s Aunt Essie — Esmeralda, the one who died of a kidney stone as big as your fist — had Done Them Herself.
There was no place for the image in Pat’s bedroom except the bureau top. Primordial deities don’t get on well with comb, brush, loose coins, bachelor socks. Aunt Essie had done another text especially for that room, by the way, the year Mr. Gebler died leaving hell’s own pile of furniture and a passel of debts, which moved Mam Gebler to let out the place in furnished apartments for gentlemen with references. This text declared: THOU GOD SEEIST ME. Aunt Essie might have fucked up the spelling, but her anaphrodisiac intent was plain. She must have planned it as a defense for Mam Gebler’s chambermaids. It wouldn’t have stopped Patric, who had invented sex seven or eight years earlier, but Mam Gebler never hired any chambermaid who wasn’t ugly as dammit and meaner than a bobcat. Patric, by his own admission, was a lover of beauty and an admirer of kindness.
He quit trying to fit the image to the apartment, and began carrying it in the pockets of shirt or loincloth. Sometimes when he undressed it clonked on the floor. The image took no harm from that, being tough as granite from fire and the ages.
It stood no taller than a big chessman and weighed five ounces. Surely the maker’s tools had been his fingers. The sex parts of both male and female sides were sketched in rude bas-relief against the blob of shared trunk and fused thigh-region, and the gouges told endearingly of fingernail work. It did not quite suggest a fertility image to Patric’s scientific eye. In his reading Patric could find no reference to a true hermaphroditic god of antiquity. On both sides the arms were folded above the navel, dim marks indicating hands. Allowing for two sets of elbows, the artist had sculptured the forearms about half natural length. The blunt thigh-region ended flattened so the image could stand upright. The bottom was irregular as though someone had pressed the wet clay against a flat surface without trimming it.
Patric showed it one day to his venerated employer, the Curator Dr. (Sir) Winfield Hamlin, who placed it in the paper-leaved jungle of his desk and cleared his throat in long rattling blasts, mainly a device for keeping Patric’s mouth shut while he reflected. “Ah, yes, there was a fad for things resembling this, fifty-odd years ago — time of the Republic — you know? Sixth-century catchpenny trash. A lot of it originated here in Penn, naturally. But Yankee ingenuity also intervened — hrrr. A Boston style — yes — or was it Cambridge — bushwa-type art with a learned flavor for the tourist trade.”
“Yes, I know, Sir Winfield — an expression of Harvard indifference perhaps. However, I didn’t think this —”
“Of course not. Obviously old. Genuine. Don’t confuse me. Aaargh.” Dr. Hamlin shoved long knotty fingers through his dense white-sprinkled hair and clenched his domineering brows. “Where in hell’d you find it, Jonz, mind if I ask?”
“Dever’s Odd-Goods on Brod Street. Buried among the tourist stuff… Could it be Old-Time, sir?”
“Hhrraaa.”
“I mean of course, early Old-Time. That is —”
“Hr.”
“Could it, Sir Winfield, antedate the Christian era?”
“How you do go on! It is primitive art,” said Dr. Hamlin, whipsawed in the fantastic difficulties of thinking while young people talk. “Of course. Hwaargh (ptui). Of course it antedates the Christian period, the Greek, the Egyptian, Assyrian, Mohenjo-Daro, the whatever. Wha’d Dever want for it, mind if I ask?”
“A dollar.”
“Ass. Dever, I mean.” Ghastly upheavals and realignments took place in the ragged moccasin-leather of Dr. Hamlin’s face, possibly the onset of a sneeze. His attenuated frame, six feet five when fully unwound, fidgeted in the hard small chair which the Museum felt to be suited to its executives and department heads because it kept them awake. The facial temblor resolved itself into a gaunt and demoralizing smile. “Jonz — or Patric if I may — this thing of course is of no value, but had you considered — rrr — donating it to the Museum? Quite possible some stray corner could be found.”
Patric thought: Why, the old son of a bitch! — so now I know; or do I? He retrieved the clay image and rubbed it with his thumb, seeing Sir Winfield wince and look away. “I don’t know, sir. I’ve grown sort of attached to it.”
“Quite natural, my boy. One often does, to these worthless things. In the presence of prehistory and all that bullshit. You know, it’s possible the Museum might undertake to underwrite some infinitesimal solatium, a quid pro quo as it were — hard to say.”
Beginning to feel dizzy with a sense of power, Pat inquired with the bloody bluntness of youth: “How much?”
“Why, good God, my dear boy, I couldn’t possibly — oh, some trifle, some nominal sum for the record. Hwaargh! The trustees have board meetings about things like that. I, of course, would be the logical one to bring it up before the — uh — the board.”
“I see. Perhaps I ought to think it over.”
“By all means,” said Sir Winfield in a weak voice. “Thought is the power that raises man above the beasts, if that’s where he is.” As Patric was politely escaping, he recovered partially, and roared a suffering addendum: “Don’t you go showing that thing to any of my honored colleagues! You know there isn’t one of those sods that wouldn’t steal you blind!”
“I wouldn’t think of it, sir.”
“The goddamn board might go to five bucks.”
“I must certainly think it over.”
“You do that.”
Ordinarily Patric dropped a penny in the hat for the beggar at the corner of Brod and Duli, but heading homeward toward the plaster cherubs that evening, he forgot. A placard certified the beggar to be a war veteran blinded at the battle of Ramapo in 602. Bare ends of thigh-bone showed how a surgeon had lopped them in a race with gangrene. A broad patch covered his eyes. Stung by neglect, the beggar mumbled a tired curse or two, learning not much from the lazy noise of Patric’s receding steps. Patric Jonz was thinking about time, prehistory, civilization, the multiple faces of love and truth, and — How much MORE than five bucks is it worth?
The June air hung heavy with the scent of roses. From yards facing south, protected against the occasional frosts of winter, Patric also caught the bacchanal sweetness of blooming orange trees. Late sunlight was blessing the old city — four and a half centuries old at least, thought to be standing only a few miles from the site of a submerged metropolitan center of Old Time, that perplexing slice of backward infinity called by the Holy Murcan Church the Pagan Era, by others the Late Christian Period. A few have called it the Golden Age of Science, or just the Golden Age, and some with more justice call it the Age of Spoliation, since the earth ever since then has been poorer than a straw-fed mule.
By the old church on Mark Street Patric made his usual pause. The venerable building enjoyed a lawn and garden space inside a six-foot brick wall; the weathered yellow bricks and the wheel-and-spire tower of the church were now reflecting a beginning crimson of sundown. The church sheltered a chapter of the ancient order of Franklinites, an enclave of strict piety in an increasingly secular age, vowed to silence and notorious for good works.
