The Nightmare Had Triplets (39 page)

    Elair waited, clenching his hands. He thought about the sea-green color of Fergail’s eyes and about the red color in the curved lips of Fergail and about the black and yellow color of the flames which would burn Oina. He said then,—

    “I shall not ask.”

    “But why not, Elair?”

    “Because, Oina, in the first place, logic points out that I cannot settle any matter in which the Norns have a finger. In the second place”—his voice broke—“I cannot leave you, most dear and brave and most untruthful of children.”

    Thus speaking, he took Oina in his arms. When her lips were free, she declared gravely, “Your will is my will, Elair.”

    Well, and that night, while Elair slept, Oina arose from her bed. She took up Elair’s broad dagger, and she tiptoed out of the gray house to the clay pathway in front of the gray house. She cut from the pathway two of Elair’s footprints; she painted them with cinnabar, the color of her heart’s blood, speaking the Married Woman’s rune; and in the oven she placed these two footprints, saying:

    “Burn, O footsteps of Elair! Burn and bake firm, O footsteps of my beloved! Harden and Become fixed for all time! Let there be no varying henceforward in the footsteps of Elair! So may the footsteps of Elair not ever depart from the clay of this pathway. So shall his dear folly be forevermore the happiness of my heart, and all his needs, even until this tall man dies, shall be tended faithfully by my busy hands.”

    In this way did the weak conquer the strong; and so was Elair the Song-Maker led to abandon his wide adventurings and become a married man. In his heart was Fergail firmly enthroned, as the most beautiful and the wisest and the most worshipful of all women. And in his keeping stayed the gold phial with which his adored Fergail might be won at any moment, whensoever he chose to leave Oina.

    Well, and that, he reflected, that might come about, by-and-by; but at this special instant, with a baby on the way, and with the clearing which Elair was now extending northerly from the gray house only half done, that must wait. Then their son was born; and no mortal could have deserted Oina just now, in her proud happiness, Elair reflected, as he set about his spring plowing.

    For the champion whom kings had praised, and whom queens had not left unrewarded, had turned farmer now, since a man must needs fill in his time somehow in this ever-peaceful forest. His sword and his pistols and his suit of battle lay by unused; in his little home, in his tilled neat fields, and in his well-tended cattle, Elair’s interest became deeper and yet more deep. Just temporarily, he had put by his harp of maple-wood and its too loud music, as being impractical with a baby in the house; and later, after his son Conan was not any longer a baby, Elair did not return straightway to his song-making, what with one thing and another.

    For example, one of his first needs was to dispose of Urc Tabaron’s thaumaturgies. When Elair went into the untidy huge room in which the wizard had conducted his studies, then Elair stood confounded by the profusion of magic-working materials heaped up at every side pell-mell. His mother Airel of the Brown Hair had worked magic, it was true, in her own small way, so that in childhood Elair had picked up a fair smattering of the first principles of magic. But here were the materials amassed, during a century-long lifetime, by an untiring student and a supreme master of all abstruse arts; and Elair simply did not know what to do with such priceless and such highly dangerous implements.

    So he experimented most warily; and although he made some disastrous mistakes, yet he got many pleased hours of diversion from the garnered wisdom of his father-in-law.

    Now Elair conjured up, at one time or another, hundreds of white or black or gray spirits, with the various formulae which he found recorded in Urc Tabaron’s neat tremulous handwriting; and all these immortals came promptly to serve the desires of Elair. Even the supreme genii of the Sixth Hour obeyed the magic of Urc Tabaron.

    These genii were eager to make Elair the ruler of all this world (just as Elair’s sublime father had once been, Elair reflected), and to reveal to Elair the occult virtues of plants and of precious stones, of fire and air and earth and water, of milk and salt. Nay, they proffered yet more: for Tabris, the leader of these genii, said that all created nature would henceforward keep no secrets from Elair. The mysteries of form would be penetrated by him, and the illusive vestures of time and of space would be laid aside for his benefit, declared Haatan, the Lord of Concealed Treasures: and while Elair did not grasp precisely what Haatan might mean, the proposal sounded fair enough, and even generous.

    In brief, these seven celestial spirits offered him omniscience, and omnipotence also, in regard to all earthly affairs, with a composure which Elair at first regarded as a thought strange, until he had recollected that to these great genii a planet must seem very little, if at all, more valuable than a pebble. In their keeping were many thousands and, it might be, millions of planets.

    And in any case, Elair had no special need of a planet. He wanted Fergail. He explained therefore his more modest requirements, asking of the genii simply a plan by which he and his wife Oina and his love Fergail might all live together happily.

    —Whereafter the seven genii replied, in abashment, that the mathematics of heaven had not ever mastered the problem of dividing one man between two women without an untidy and huge remainder of discord.

    They vanished then, so that no trace remained of Susabo, the Lord of Voyages, or of Nitika, the Lord of Gems, or of Zaran, the Lord of Vengeance, or of any one of these seven supreme genii. And Elair, after shaking gravely his rowan-crowned head, set about charms of a more diabolical nature.

    So was hell emptied of the seven spirits who had served Urc Tabaron in the lower branches of his art. So to Elair came Barbatos (that same fallen angel whose tongue was cut out by Michael) riding in a fiery chariot and carrying in his left hand a viper; Agares, Duke of the East, as yet defiantly bearing the forfeited sword of an archangel; Phobetor, in the shape of a dusky green cloud; Beleth, mounted on a pale horse, sounding harshly an iron trumpet; Focalor, who had three heads, like the head of a cat, of a Knight Templar, and of a peacock; Haop, who in most respects resembled a four-footed raven, except that he had also the tusks of a boar; and Gurson, who appeared to-day in the form of a pallidly beautiful boy, with scaly black wings, riding on the back of a camel.

    “And what would you be doing here, gentlemen?” Elair demanded, with a vast politeness, of this most horrible assemblage.

    They replied to him reverently; but not wholly in words.... No; for beyond their speaking was a not quite heard music, Elair reflected. He seemed aware of a great sea of malevolent, and fierce, and lascivious music, like a sea that followed with high-hearted lustiness after a leprous moon and all the dear poisons of the moon’s cold corruption, a sea which agonized under perverse tides of moon-maddened ecstasies,—raising everywhere, beneath winds that had come out of worlds less innocent than ours, their proud waves of flashing and bitter and evil beauty. Through that frantic sea of music, hell spoke; hell called to Elair, rejoicingly and half wooingly; and the foul greatness of hell delighted him, even in the teeth of his sedate better judgment, by its horrifying magnificence... Well, and now it was as though across this immense insane sea of infernal music—as sprucely as trim little paper boats, Elair reflected—that the brisk answers of Elair’s servants came to him.

    “We desire, sir,” said Beleth, “to instruct you in the languages of all mankind and of the even lower animals.”

    “Likewise,” declared the three heads of Focalor, “in all abstract sciences; in moral philosophy; in sooth-saying with judicious reservations; in every practical use of theology; and in the wax modeling of your adversaries so that, as the wax melts, they also will waste away with disease.”

    “We will show you,” Haop croaked, genially, “how to control pestilences most fatally; and how to employ bankers and libels and stars of the fourth magnitude with equal destructiveness.”

    Phobetor said, “We will teach you the most generally popular methods of secret murder and of blighting crops and of souring the milk of a cow and of provoking small earthquakes.”

    “You may learn from us,” put in Agares, brandishing terribly his huge sword, “how to release tempests from blue skies and any moderately sinful person from purgatory; and to induce among your unfriends boils or insanity or rheumatism, whichever you may elect.”

    “In addition,” said Gurson, “we will reveal to you the ten best recipes for controlling the desires of women; and I assure you that some of these recipes have been known now and then to work.”

    “Come now,” replied Elair, brightening, “but that sounds more promising; for we need only a plan by which my wife Oina and my heart’s love Fergail and I too may all live together without inconvenience.”

    “Master,” these fiends then entreated, piteously, “do you permit us to return to our own place! The simple arithmetic of hell has not ever managed to add one man to two women with real comfort for anybody concerned; and we, who have lived tolerably enough, for so many centuries, in eternal torment, dare not abide the result of your dreadful experiment in this middle class home.”

    Elair sighed; and dismissed them.

    Well, and afterward, now that neither good nor evil seemed able to help him, he nevertheless continued to seek knowledge with the recipes and the odd paraphernalia of Urc Tabaron. In this way did Elair gather together many stray bits of miscellaneous information.

    He learned, for example, how to draw up the dead from out of their graves, how to control good and bad luck, and how to make himself invisible with the aid of a stone found in the hoopoe’s nest. He learned how to consult the Five Beryls of Baphomet, which answered all questions as to all happenings; and he learned how to compound the three ointments which enabled Elair, after a little practice, to fly about in the air as freely as a bird does. He learned how to control the Pythonic Word, the Mystery of the Salamanders, the Grotto of the Gnomes, and the ambiguous seraphim of the Heavens of Gad. Moreover, he learned how to cure epilepsy with three iron nails, how to win law suits with a bit of hematite, how to heal burns with currant jelly, and how to avert the dangers of travel with a turquoise.

    The great trouble was that, out of so much diverse knowledge, Elair got no knowledge to his own purpose. No; for his late father-in-law (Elair decided) had been at bottom unpractical. Virtually omniscient, Urc Tabaron had been satisfied, in just one point, to fall short of omniscience. At no time had he devoted his undeniable talents to the sensible and the philanthropic task of finding out how to induce two women to share one man equally and amicably. That omission was disastrous. It vitiated all Elair’s knowledge-seeking: for what Elair wanted was a way in which to win Fergail with the charmed Water of Airdra without deserting his wife and child; what he got were irrelevances about how to control lightnings, subdue kings, create gold, and induce posies. There was no sense in an outcome so flatly inconsequent; and Elair saw that no one of Urc Tabaron’s arts was of any real use to Elair.

    It was then that, in his forthright way, Elair took action. He carried the paraphernalia of Urc Tabaron to a safe distance from the gray house, he piled up all in a great heap, and he set fire to the dead wizard’s belongings.

    It is
probable that no other person ever made such a bonfire as Elair kindled. For in the piled heap, which reached to Elair’s shoulder, were talismans, philtres, fetishes, amulets, and divining rods; magic lamps, rings, caskets, carpets, spectacles, mirrors, and belts; wishing-caps, and caps of darkness; the black robes of a conjuror, and the white robes needed for necromancy; as well as two pairs of seven-league boots, and one pair of red tarask-skin gloves in which to hold thunder bolts.

    Then Elair brought out of the gray house the skulls of eight parricides; and the dried head of a black cat which (according to Urc Tabaron’s attached memorandum) had been fed upon human flesh for five days before being slaughtered; and a moonstone, about the size of an orange, which was surmounted by a cross and inscribed with the names of three seraphim; and a copper censer, containing a mixture of ambergris, storax, camphor and aloes, which mixture had been properly steeped for seven days in yet another mixture, of the blood of moles and of goats and of bats; and the little finger of St. James the Less; and a half-dozen candles made from the fat of ravished nuns, which candles were set in a pair of ebony candlesticks carved in the shape of a crescent; and a bit of the Holy Manger, duly autographed by the Three Magi; and a leaden cap adorned in bas-relief with the ill-omened sign of Saturn; and yet other strong and dangerous tools for the working of wizardry.

    After that, Elair fetched out, and he placed upon the top of this strange scrap-heap, the books of magic, each one of which had been interleaved by Urc Tabaron with notes many times more valuable than were the books themselves. Here were the Great and the Little Albert, the Enchiridion, the Red Dragon, the Black Hen, the Grimoire of Pope Honorius, the Magical Venus, the Treasure of the Old Man of the Pyramids, and the Secrets of the Brown Druid, and dozens of yet other books. Far more important, though, here were the unique and the priceless three manuscript volumes in which Urc Tabaron had written down the invocations, and the magical recipes in general, which had made Urc Tabaron supreme among wizards.

    Now to all these august matters Elair laid fire; and he began to burn everything painstakingly. While he was thus engaged, a grave voice spoke from behind Elair, saying,—