Free Land of Unreason by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt Page A

that
which had carried him past Cyril and back to the fork where Three-eyes held
forth. He cursed a faulty sense of orientation and craned his neck to catch a
glimpse of the thorn hedges, but a grove of impossible potted elms cut them
off, if, indeed, they were there at all. Carry on.
     
                There were long shadows
across the path that hinted of a setting moon. Barber was reminded that he had
been walking all night without food. He was not hungry yet, for that matter, but
if he were going to eat at all it had better be now. When Oberon's royal
chamberlain had handed him one of the ever-filled foodbags carried by Fairyland
travelers, it was with the warning that he had better use it before sunrise. A
single shaft of sunlight striking the thing was liable to cause a kind of minor
shaping. "I mind me well," the chamberlain added in a low voice,
"of the bag our gracious lady and Resplendency took on her journey to the
Marshes of Meraa. 'Tis no disrespect to mark that she's of careless habit; let
the dawn beams on't. Hoi The thing physicked her preciously with a fine
reducing diet—carrots uncooked, salads, and wee brown biscuits." Barber
had no difficulty in imagining Titania faced with a situation like that; the
explosion would—make the bombing of Bradford look weak. The bombing which
seemed as remote now as the discovery of the North Pole.
     
                He brushed the crumbs from
his lap and stood up. The shadows had lengthened and run together as he ate,
the moon was a cooky with a piece bitten out, at the very edge of the horizon.
There was still no sign of the sun that had driven away the previous night's
moon; perhaps even the ephemerides of Fairyland did not run on schedule. In the
weakened light the path was harder to trace. He strained forward to follow
it... and was swallowed in a dark as intense as though he had suddenly gone
blind.
     
                Something slightly chilly
brushed past his face from overhead, and he felt a rush of the most horrible
fear. To stand there in dark worse than a London blackout and be struck at from
above! Something else tapped him gently on one shoulder, like a falling leaf or
an insect, and his mind began to fill with pictures of giant winged spiders. He
brushed at the shoulder—nothing, and the something touched his leg. All around
were sounds and soft whisperings. Fred Barber jumped and would have run—but
where? in that maze of hedges and unknown traps. He would have given anything,
done anything, to be back at the Adelphi with the air-raid alarm screaming and
the Heinkels coming over. This was worse than being bombed, worse than lying in
the hospital with a head wound, wondering if you were going nuts, worse than—
     
                Without any preliminary
graying of the sky a big red sun jumped up and flooded the whole queer, smiling
landscape with light. Another touch came on Barber's hand; he looked down and
saw it damp with a big drop of simple rain, and between him and the sun were
the slanting silvery lines of a shower.
     
                Barber laughed, too happy
with relief to feel shame, and looked up. There was not a cloud in the sky. The
rain was coming out of nowhere, faster now, and making a gorgeous triple
rainbow against the coming day. He would be soaked—but what of it? The path
curved clear before him and he stepped out along it, twirling the wand. When it
reached the top of its arc, the rain, though coming faster than ever, didn't
seem to strike him. He experimented a little, and discovered that when he held
the wand point up it deflected the rain from a circle quite big enough to keep
him dry. A practical piece of magic; but he was getting tired, and the rather
heavy meal he had taken from the chamberlain's bag made him sleepy.
     
                Besides, it was not very
likely that he would find any more natives abroad from whom he could obtain
directions. Better rest up. He trotted