The Face in the Frost (6 page)

“Oh yes. The lake,” said Roger without looking up. He was determined to be nonchalant until Prospero asked him one question. “All right,” said Prospero, drawing a deep breath. “How
did
you know the screen was rusted through?”

“A very simple matter, my dear Prospero. You made that screen twenty years ago. It has been in the tunnel for three years. So I looked in
Captain Monkhouse’s Table of Rust
Rates
, one of the books in the ship’s library, and I calculated the rest with the aid of my little pocket hygrometer.”

“Little pocket hygrometer! I don’t believe you.”

Roger held up a turnip-shaped gold watch on a long twisted chain. The large ticking bulb was covered with glassy warts, crystal-domed dials that told lunar eclipse dates, the rate of rainfall on the third planet out from Alpha Centauri A, and, incidentally, the time.

“I’m sorry I asked,” said Prospero, grinning. “Tell me, how far off is sundown?”

Roger squinted at the watch. “Oh, about twenty minutes.”

“Hmm,” said Prospero. “I do hope no one is out fishing on the lake. I’m not sure what I’d do if I saw a wee little ship scooting past my rowboat, but I think I might be tempted to smack it with an oar.”

A few minutes later the
Actaeon
floated out onto the windy blue-shadowed water of a little round lake. On the shore were high tossing willow trees and thick clumps of those strange telescoping green reeds that can be pulled apart into sections. In the western sky, a tall light-seamed thunder head was slowly rising to meet two sculptured pink-gray clouds. The
Actaeon
, spinning and at times heeling over dangerously, was swept by the harsh gusts into a squeaking forest of reeds near the shore, where it soon was lodged tight.

Prospero peered through the yellow-banded green columns and listened. From the dark bushes on the shore came voices.

“Of course, it’s a duck. What else would it be?”

And then the other voice, rumbly and sarcastic:

“Really? How many ducks do you know that spin around and around while they swim?”

“Shut up. You’ll scare it away.”

Now, Prospero and Roger could see two hunched men in the olive light; one of them was quite fat. Probably off-duty soldiers, since they both wore wide-brimmed pot helmets and carried crossbows. “I’ve always hated duck hunters,” whispered Prospero. “I wonder if there’s something I can do...let’s see... Oh, good grief! If I had thought of it back there we wouldn’t have had any trouble with that troll!” He hit himself on the head with the flat of his hand. “I wonder if I would have thought of it things had
really
come to a crisis. Oh, well...”

“What
are
you talking about?” said Roger.

Prospero took off his hat, smoothed down his hair, put the hat back on again, and shook his sleeves back.

“Just watch,” he said. “Oh, by the way, how much time do we have now?”

“About three minutes, if your almanac is right.”

“Just enough time,” said Prospero as he began to make rapid hand passes over the deck. Roger heard him chanting in a low voice, and caught the Celtic word for Greek fire couched between two old Dutch swear words. Suddenly, there was a long, loud, ripping crash, as pinpoints of fire shot from the thirty-two cannon of the
Actaeons.
 
A great bluish cloud rose over the ship and the guns went off again. One hunter jumped up and ran, stumbling through the thorn bushes, screaming “Yaaaaaah! Spirits from the vasty deep!” The other fainted, and when he came to, he saw a pair of bearded men standing over him. Both were wet to the waist and laughing. The shorter had just crammed a toy boat into his Gladstone bag.

“Could you tell us,” said Prospero politely, “which of the absurd, small, foolish countries of the South we are in?”
 

He knew very well where he was, but he wanted to hear the soldier’s reply.

The prostrate man, a potbellied sergeant with a President Cleveland mustache, looked offended.

“You’re in the Grand Union of the Five Counties. Population 7,200. Our motto is ‘
Si quaeris terram amoenam, circumspice
.’ That’s Latin. We don’t think our country is small.”

“You can think what you like,” said Roger as he helped the man up. “I believe your king is Gorm III, surnamed the Wonderworker.”

The sergeant was beginning to recover his stuffy composure, and he would have leveled his crossbow at these two intruders if he had been able to find it. Prospero had thrown it into the middle of the lake.

“Well,” harumphed the sergeant, “you seem to know so much, maybe you can tell me what you’re doing here. There’s three feet of stinking water in King Gorm’s dungeons, and you’re going to be sitting in it.”

“Oh, stop!” said Prospero impatiently. “King Gorm converted his dungeons into handball courts, and he uses his rack to stretch taffy. Now, take us to him or I’ll make your mustache light up.”

The guard looked at Prospero for a minute, and then he shrugged. “Oh well, you live in a poor little country and nobody cares if people make fun of you. Come on. It’s about two miles.”

Prospero and Roger, led by the puffing sergeant, followed a sandy path that wound through scratchy thorns and springy green burdock boughs. Soon, after they had crossed an acre of dung-spotted cow pasture, they were walking on one of the main highways of the South Kingdom, the Great South Road. It was one of the works of Godwin I, and it was paved with hexagonal granite blocks, some of which were stamped with the King’s arms and the phrase “Good Roads.” Every hundred miles or so you would find by the roadside a statue of Godwin, crowned, seated, and with his hands on his knees, in the Egyptian manner, resting after his conquests. What conquests were referred to would be hard to say, since Godwin inherited the South Kingdom through a series of dynastic perversions, freaks, and mishaps much too tedious to discuss here.

At any rate, the road took the three men through a small chestnut forest, over rain-grooved stones covered with green spiny pods, and out onto a broad, stubbly, treeless plain. There, far ahead, but clearly visible, stood the castle of King Gorm the Wonderworker, a not very invulnerable fortress that just stood, naked, there in the middle of the plain, without protecting wall, barbican, or moat. For years, the castle had simply been a tall stone box fringed with battlements, but at the southeast corner, Gorm had added a tall fieldstone tower, capped by a paneled ice cream-cone roof. On three levels were long lancet windows with malachite sills, but they were blacked out from the inside by heavy brown curtains. Prospero and Roger knew very well what the tower was for, and they laughed at the sight of it.

Before long, the wizards stood outside the mahogany front door of Gorm’s castle, and they waited as the sergeant pounded importantly on the varnished dark wood. Very soon there was a screeching of bolts and a clatter of chains, and the door opened. In the light of a torch that he carried himself stood a small, wizened, eagle-beaked man in a black velvet gown. A chain of linked gold medallions hung loosely around his neck.

“There’s a couple of old men here that say they’re wizards,” said the sergeant. “They want to see the King.”

“The King,” said the old man in an artificially cadenced voice, “is drowned deep in drafts of doom. With thrilling thoughts, he is thrust through, pierced with the press of pointed pinions.”

“Nahum,” said Prospero, “we do not have time for Anglo-Saxon verse. Is he in the tower?”

The old man looked at them both, coughed, and raised his eyebrows. Though he did not drop his manner, he waved them in. “Hither may ye come, by light of draft-blown cressets, and herein may ye find our crownèd King, with weight of statecraft almost bent to earth.”

He led the wizards through a long drafty hall lined with shields, axes, and stuffed falcons. At the end of the corridor was an obviously new door, framed by a high lapis lazuli arch. On a ledge overhead was a bas-relief showing the earth supported by two toads; around the globe was a banner that said “MY WORKS PREVAIL.” Nahum, the seneschal, rapped lightly on the paneled door. After about five minutes, the door was opened by a vague-looking middle-aged man in a stiff gold brocade robe covered with seed pearls arranged in geometric designs. His moon face was clean shaven, and he wore thick rimless glasses that made his eyes swim like huge protozoa.

Nahum bowed and spoke. “Most intransigent monarch, two wanderers, whose years hang about them like millstones, though their wisdom rattles beads in the nursery of the mind, seek humble access to your cloud-bedizened person.”

The wavy eyes grew bigger behind the bottle glass. “Oh, good heavens! It’s Prospero and Roger. Come in. Nahum, you should stop studying rhetoric books and go back to Beowulf. I like the alliterative style better.”

Nahum bobbed again. “My crest is cropped by croaking cranes. I go to drown in doleful dumps, dead-drunk with drearihead.” He turned and left.

Prospero and Roger entered a dark echoing silo that seemed to be full of humming, crackling fireflies. The tower had only one room, and the walls, ringed by galleries at intervals, rose a hundred feet to the conical roof. In the great dark void above the wizards’ heads hung tiny galaxies, solar systems, and nebulae. Checkered, spotted, and marbled planets moved around flaring orange suns the size of Ping-Pong balls. Multiringed Saturns were surrounded by clouds of pinhead moons, and three-tailed comets roared through spinning clusters of stars with a noise like toy locomotives. Gorm was a magician, but an introspective one, a model-railroad hobbyist. Now, he stood staring delightedly up at the clicking, clanging, flashing pinball machine he had been working on for forty years.

“We’ve been having some trouble with Sector 8,” he said, waving a wooden pointer. “A couple of planets are doing a horn-pipe, and before long—apocalypse! I think we must blame the terrible black planet Yuggoth, which rolls aimlessly in the stupefying darkness. Ooop! Watch out!”

All three hit the floor as a five-pronged comet, looking like a Chinese kite, came whooshing down at them. It dusted the floor with its tails and roared up again into the sparkling indoor night. Prospero picked himself up. “Gorm, I know you want us to stay for a supernova or something, but we’re in a hurry. Do you have the key to the Hall of Records?”

Gorm looked vague. “Key...‘there was a door to which I had no key’...very fine, Persian decadent writers. Made handsome rugs too, some of them. Oh, yes. The curator has one, but visiting hours are from two to two-thirty Monday through Wednesday, and he is not likely to be around. No, I shouldn’t think so. But I have a key. Keep it on a chain around my neck. If he
is
there, show it to him and tell him I sent you. Are you sure you can’t stay? One of these galaxies is going to go off in a little bit.”

“Thanks,” said Prospero, “but we’ve got to get going. As it is, it’ll be midnight when we get there. I wish I could tell you what’s going on, but I’m not sure of anything myself.”

King Gorm looked at Prospero with a sad smile. “You know, the trouble with you is that you don’t have any purpose in your life. Always running in and out.”

He reached inside the heavy pearled neckband of his gown and pulled out a long chain, at the end of which hung a snaggle-toothed brass key. He took the key off the chain and handed it to Prospero. “I hope you’ll excuse the mess inside the Hall,” said Gorm. “I never can get the curator to straighten things up. The last time I was there I found him correcting books to prove that my universe here was the best one ever made. I hit him with a copy of Ptolemy, and he’s been testy ever since.”

A staticky mechanical voice from high up in the tower burst in: “...cool and cloudy this evening with snow in spiral nebulae. Total solar eclipse in galaxies 3, 5, and 6, followed by meteor showers. Observers are advised to take cover. Supernova will obliterate Galaxy 12 later tonight, this being no great loss since it never did work right anyway...(click)... Thank you.”

Prospero and Roger edged toward the door, shouting thanks at King Gorm, who was still squinting up at the ceiling. And then they were gone. Out on the plain, a few minutes later, they stopped and looked back at the castle. The tower roof flipped suddenly up like the lid on a beer stein, and a fizzing skyrocket shot up. When it burst, little green stars spelled out “So Much for Galaxy 12,” and pinwheels on parachutes floated down to earth, whistling
Anacreon in Heaven.

Prospero shook his head. “Well, at least,
he’s
happy. Come on, it’s getting late.”

They were back on the South Road, which ran straight for several miles and then dropped into a narrow cleft between two low, crumbling, prehistoric forts made of flat unmortared stones. Occasional lightning flashes lit the spreading western thunder head, showing fantastic cloud-cliffs and tumbling gorges. Dull rumbles in the distance. It was midnight by Roger’s watch when they saw a low black shadow in the pines and junipers at the side of the road. A powdery dirt path ridged with tree roots led to the one-story stone building.

The Hall of Records looked like an abandoned cottage. Mossy hatchet-shaped slates scalloped the roof, and one broken windowpane was patched with a waxed vellum sheet from a psalter. The peeling orange door sank into a ground-level sill, and the jawless skull of a groundhog chewed the dirty white lintel. Prospero pulled out the key—it glowed a little in the faint moonlight—and he pushed aside the tin cup that covered the rusty lock.
Crrrrrunk!
and the key went all the way around, but he had to kick the door several times before it scraped in, following a curving groove in the wooden floor.