Land of Unreason Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  LAND OF UNREASON

  L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP

  and

  FLETCHER PRATT

  BAEN BOOKS

  Land of Unreason

  L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

  On Midsummer's Eve, as everybody knows, you should leave a bowl of milk out for the fairies. Unfortunately-or fortunately-Fred Barber, an American diplomat convalescing in Yorkshire, didn't take the obligation with proper seriousness. He swapped the milk for a stiff dose of Scotch. So he had only himself to blame if the fairies got a bit muddled. Barber found himself in an Old English Fairyland. At the Court of King Oberon, to be precise. His task: penetrate the Kobold Hills, where it was said that swords were being made, and discover if an ancient enemy has returned. And if it has, Fred will have to deal with it (or them) with no proper instructions if he ever wants to get back home!

  OBERON AND TITANIA RECEIVED HIM COLDLY

  “We have a deed to lay on you, a commission to execute,” said King Oberon. “It’s the kobolds. We fear they’re making swords again to ruinously vex our realm. The beat of forging hammers comes from their hills, and has a droll ring to it, as though they were not working good honest bronze but—iron.”

  He let the last word fall slowly; as he did so one of the footmen started and dropped a plate.

  “I still don’t see—” started Barber.

  “Why, halt ’em, thwart ’em! They would forge swords at every opportunity, which would set all Fairyland at the most horrid strife and bloodletting. We of pure fairy blood cannot go to the Kobold Hills, which stink of the curst metal. Thus you’re our emissary.”

  “And if I do, can I get back where I came from?”

  LAND OF UNREASON

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1942 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Copyright © renewed 1969 by L. Sprague de Camp

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Published by arrangement with Bluejay Books Inc.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  260 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10001

  First Baen printing, January 1987

  ISBN: 0-671-65612-0

  Cover art by Neal McPheeters

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by

  Simon & Schuster Trade Publishing Group

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10020

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-346-1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  To John D. Clark,

  another hard-boiled rationalist, and

  for all we know, another Fred Barber.

  CHAPTER I

  As the torn clouds trailed out in wisps and streaks, the moon seemed to rock among them with a boatlike motion, rising over the Pennine moors. Small wonder, thought Fred Barber, that peoples as far apart as Assyria and Hawaii made it the celestial ship of their mythology. One needed only a certain ignorance of the true character of natural phenomena, a certain practical familiarity with the effect of wave motion on a floating craft—provided, of course, that the common craft of the country, the thing one instinctively thought of when someone said “ship,” were round, with high ends . . .

  Beside him Mr. Gurton grunted, spat into a warm night redolent of broom and dog rose, and reached across to knock his pipe against the doorpost. The few last live sparks in the heel traced an intricate patter down the dark.

  “Time were,” remarked Mr. Gurton, “when I’d have said that looked beautiful. Nah all a man can think of is t’damned Jerries on our necks befoor moornin’.”

  As though to furnish a comment on the relative unimportance of Jerries in a world that held higher things, a voice called from within: “Sooper’s ready.”

  Barber crushed out his cigarette and took two steps toward the door. As he turned, the tail of his eye caught in the moonlit landscape a flicker of something that did not belong. He froze, at gaze. It was there, all right—a jagged row of crimson flashes climbing up the sky from some point below the horizon. Barber caught his breath.

  “Leeds is catchin’ it,” said Mr. Gurton’s low-pitched, evenly stressed voice. They stood watching for a moment till the dull boom, boom, beroom drifted to them along the avenue of sound made by the valley of the Aire. Then Gurton, with a sudden jerking movement, as though the noise had released him from a spell, flung the door open.

  It snapped to behind them, and with an extra tug to ensure its tightness Gurton led the way down a passage illuminated only by an overflow of light from the living room. He jerked his thumb at a curtained door as they passed it. “Bloody fine world to bring a nipper oop in,” said he.

  Mrs. Gurton accosted them at the entrance to the living room, a thin-faced woman with hair pulled tight back and nervous hands. “Ssh, Jock,” she said, “don’t you know it’s St. John’s Eve? They say ’twill bring t’child bad loock all his life long to talk so abaht him tonight.” She managed a smile in Barber’s direction, but there was a hint of earnestness in the voice and the movement with which she caught her apron.

  Gurton smiled slowly. “Nah, lass,” he said, with the patience of a man going over the gambits of a long-familiar argument, “that’s nowt boot superstition. What would vicar say?” He sighed. “Maybe t’flashes we saw were nowt boot fairy-fires.”

  Boom, Boomity, Boom.

  They began to eat. Barber, surveying the soggy meal before him, reflected that he was becoming a culinary chauvinist. Spanish cooking burned his insides. It was probably invented to enable Spanish cooks to conceal the fact that they were serving horse meat instead of the beef they were given money to buy. “Si, señor,” said Ramon, the cook at the Seville consulate, when Barber explained to him the mysteries of two-inch-thick broiled steak, the night the Congressman from Texas came for dinner. “Si, señor,” and it had indubitably been horse meat and the Congressman’s wife was sick. With a certain grim amusement Barber recalled his own horrified realization that the man was on the Foreign Relations Committee, and the black scowl with which the Congressman regarded that horse-meat steak meant that Fred Barber’s career in diplomacy was probably over. It had seemed very important at the time, that horrible dinner, much more important than the fact that they were using ersatz coffee in Germany and selling butter to buy guns. . . .

  Boom. Boomm!

  “That were Bradford,” remarked Mr. Gurton.

  Oh, hell, why couldn’t the war let him alone? Why couldn’t he let the war alone? They would be at it again, half the night. Must everything he did, everything he ate or touched or thought, remind him of it, keep him lying sleepless and twisting? There was the bottle of Scotch, of course, kept aside for an emergency, which might be tonight. The thought was more disquieting than comforting. That was the insomnia cure he had been trying to get away from. That was why he was here.

  He wished he had gone on to Scotland, as he had planned, instead of letting young Leach talk hi
m into finishing his convalescence in a Yorkshire cottage. “I know just the place for you.” Damn young Leach for a plausible, well-intentioned ass! It was the plausible, well-intentioned people who made the real trouble in the world, not the malicious ones. If Chamberlain had not been . . .

  Mr. Gurton set his knife against his plate with a small clink and looked at the clock. It read 10:45. He said: “Let’s have t’savory, lass.” As Mrs. Gurton was taking away the remnants of his supper, he remarked apologetically to Barber: “You see, t’foor-to-midneet chap on ma drill press is a lazy booger; ’as a rotten ’abit o’ lettin’ it roon dry, and I want to get theer i’ time to see her well-oiled oop.”

  Boom!

  The dishes rattled slightly. The savory was a slice of toast upon which reposed a small and very dead sardine. Mrs. Gurton said: “I kept your toast ’ot special, Mr. Barber.”

  “Thanks ever so much,” said Barber. It was lukewarm. Mr. Gurton picked up his sardine with a long, knobby, oil-blackened hand. It vanished and his own decently frigid toast with it.

  Lukewarm, thought Barber, with his mind divided into two parts. One part ran desperately around a great black hole that was the war and all the things that came up out of it and went down into it. Lukewarm, said the other part, and he tried to distract himself with the question of why Luke should be less warm than the other evangelists. Why not Matthew-warm, Mark-warm, John-warm? Why the evangelists for that matter? Why not Adolf-warm, which would be hell-hot? . . .

  Boomboom.

  Mr. Gurton rose and put on a cloth cap, with a creased and sagging peak that shadowed all of a cadaverous face except his long chin. He said: “You’ll not worry, Mr. Barber. Unless they come this way to bomb Keighley, all’s well ’ere. Good neet.” His brisk tread hardly showed the limp as he went to get his bicycle and pedal off to work.

  Mrs. Gurton looked after him calmly. The door banged, and all at once a stream of conversation burst from her lips, as though the small stimulus of the sound had released a spring that held her tongue prisoner. The war, the war, Barber’s mind kept saying to him from the background, his ears only partly registering this monotonous flow of sound.

  “. . . ma aunt’s yoong man. I remember ’e were ’urt i’ t’ gurt war, joost t’way Jock ’ere, only it were a shell and noot a aeroplane bomb that fell i’ t’trench joost when they were ’avin’ breekfast and ’e were eatin’ ploom-and-apple, and always after that whenever ’e ’eered a sharp sound like a mauter-car backfirin’ it made him retch, and ’e did say it were all because he saw a black cat . . .”

  Taptap.

  Bombs that tapped? No, door. Mrs. Gurton was opening it. The lamplight fell dimly on a small boy with the plucked look English small boys have and a bicycle, and an anxious, excited face. He should be calmed with light conversation. “Calm them with light conversation before undertaking the diplomatic approach,” Barber’s old chief in the State Department had told him before letting him go out on his first mission, vice-consul at Seville. The boy was talking in a high voice:

  “Please, moom, a gurt bomb ’it near t’ Winstanley’s ’oose, and Mrs. Winstanley’s ’urt soomat nasty and Dr. Thawley says please would you coom . . .”

  “Wait a bit,” said Mrs. Gurton. Barber saw the eyes regard him sharply over her shoulder as she picked up her shawl.

  He stood up a little too quickly; his head began to throb. He said: “Can’t I—”

  “Nah, Mr. Barber, remember what t’doctor telled you; s’ouldn’t strain yoursen. You go off to bed like a good lad.” She was out the door before he had a chance to argue—the back door, on some errand, then in again, through the house and out the front door into the warm light, where things went boom-boom.

  Barber slumped back into the uncomfortable chair, his legs spreading to find an easier angle. His head ached. It was not that one feared death after having the possibility so long as a familiar companion. It was this damned waiting for it or anything else decisive to happen. It would be almost a relief. “Fate worse than death”—he had laughed with the rest of the audience at the line when it had been used in a comedy revival of an old-fashioned melodrama. Well, there were fates worse than death. One of them was living on and waiting to drop dead after being clipped on the head by a bomb splinter or piece of shrapnel (he had never learned which) as you ran out of the Embassy into the night when the German raiders came. British or German? German or British? Somebody had thrown into that night a missile that struck a neutral American in a quarrel that was none of his own. Diplomatic immunity did not, he reflected, exist in the material world. It was a purely spiritual quality, and he was feeling sorry for himself, which . . .

  Boom. Boom.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake! Why couldn’t they let up? Why couldn’t anybody let up? If he had been more sure of Kaja, of where she might be spending that night when the bombers came, he wouldn’t have run out of the Embassy. If he could be more sure of Kaja now, he wouldn’t be miserable. He allowed his mind to dwell on Kaja, pleasant thought, her red hair and long silky legs, and the fact that although she had a straight nose and Hungarian name and claimed to be from Budapest, she was unquestionably Jewish.

  Kaja, pleasant thought, always looking light enough to fly. The fragment of a song occurred to him—“I wonder who’s kissing her now”—and he smiled wryly. Anybody who could buy her enough scotch. Kaja preferred scotch to champagne. It was a good drink, scotch. Useful when a man couldn’t sleep.

  He got up, more slowly this time, and dug out his bottle of Scotch, pouring himself a hefty dram.

  He swashed it around in the glass, staring at the pale orange liquid. Useful stuff, but only up to a limit. What was his limit? The limit of a diplomatic career which had already reached its limit when he fed horse meat to the Congressman. Oh, damn! Oh, hell! It might have been all right but for this war, might have been forgotten if foreign affairs had not become so tense that every member of the service was forced, so to speak, to operate in a show window, with his name constantly under Congressional scrutiny. And Kaja . . .? He lifted the glass.

  Beroom.

  And set it down again. With a trick of automatic memory his mind had jerked back to the picture of Mrs. Gurton going out the back door. She had had something in her hand, a bowl, a bowl of . . . milk. Milk? The Gurtons didn’t keep a cat. Why milk to the back door?

  Fred Barber remembered that Mrs. Gurton had said this was St. John’s Eve, the twenty-third of June, the day before Midsummer Day. Oh, yes, something in The Golden Bough. You leave milk out for the Little People that night, especially if there is a baby in the house, for unless the Little People receive their tribute they are likely to steal the child and leave a changeling. Interesting survival; who would have believed that a woman whose husband ran a drill press in a munitions factory and who herself went to nurse a neighbor through a bomb wound, would leave milk at the door for fairies? Almost worth writing a sardonic little note about, to be sent to the New Yorker which would return him a check no doubt, to be spent on scotch for Kaja.

  Milk.

  Fred Barber liked milk, a fact which he concealed with the most painful care from the gay, interesting, mocking crowd in London. He had been brought up on a drink of milk before bedtime. It made him sleep. But the war and milk rationing had made him go without, like many others to whom milk was more of a hobby than a necessity. Mrs. Gurton could have it for the baby of course. But if she were going to give it to the fairies, why, Fred Barber argued to himself with a grin, he was as good a fairy as any who would be abroad that night. The mission of fairies was to bring gifts and he was bringing the Gurtons a pound sterling a week.

  Milk. The mere idea of drinking it instead of the scotch gave him a sense of virtue and power. What was it Nietzsche had said: “Every conquest is the result of courage, of hardness towards one’s self? Well, he would conquer, in spite of the crack on the head. His mind flashed back to the determination with which he had set out on his career. If he could recover some of that, the old
pep, a little crack on the head wouldn’t matter. He could demonstrate a capacity for hardness to himself, recall the sense of destiny that had filled him once. To hell with the scotch, and Kaja too. He strode to the door, his mind so intent on the peculiar nobleness of using milk instead of scotch as a sleeping powder that he carried the glass with him.

  The moonlight showed the bowl, sure enough, a pale circle beside one of the flowerpots that lined the back of the cottage. Barber stuck his finger in the bowl and tasted. It was milk—trust Mrs. Gurton. He set down the glass, and as the bombs in the distance continued their infernal beat, lifted the bowl in both hands, drinking slowly and with relish.

  Over the edge of the vessel he could see the red glow that marked something burning in Bradford, with searchlight beams flickering cobwebby above. And what would the fairies of St. John’s Eve do now, poor things, with no milk, and bombs falling on their heads? Fred Barber set the bowl down, and then grinned like a small boy in the dark as inspiration came to him. They could drink scotch!

  He poured the slug of scotch into the bowl, watching the last dregs of the milk weave through it, and chuckled at the thought of Mrs. Gurton’s expression when she found the milk of which she had robbed the baby so mysteriously transmuted. The delicious sense of languor in every limb that presaged instant slumber was still wanting, as it had been ever since his injury, but he knew now it would come, he was at peace.

  The trouble with these English feather beds, though, was not merely that they were too warm for the twenty-third of June, but also that you went right on down through the softness till you hit a bump. There was one under his hip and he shifted position to avoid it. Wonderful people, these English—his carefully cultivated cynicism broke down when he contemplated them. Fairies and machine shops and courage under bombings—like something out of a poem by Walter de la Mare. Or Masefield. Yes, especially Masefield.