Read Land of Unreason for Free Online Page A

royal
palace!" Oberon was hopping around the room like one of the tree
frogs. "Devils burn him! Scorpions sting him! Lightning fry him! The
sanguine little cheat, the stinking blackguard!"
     
                Barber gave up and put his
fingers in his ears. When the torrent had died down a trifle, he removed them
and asked, "Why doesn't Your Majesty tan his hide? Sounds as though he
needed discipline."
     
                "Discipline him?
Titania dotes on him in extremis, and he's her ward. I can do nothing,
though he intends murder most foul, without oversetting what little law remains
in this plagued land. Ah, faugh! Never wear a crown, Barber fellow; 'tis light
enough on the brow, but on mind and heart heavy." He yawned. "To bed;
get you gone, the third arch by the left if the room's still there after this
last foul shaping. An elf will attend you."
     
                Barber left the king
unlacing his shoes and singing away to himself quite cheerfully:
     
    -
     
    "But
when I came, alas! to wive,
    With
hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
    By
swaggering could I never thrive,
    For
the rain it raineth every day."
     
    -
     
                The room was
still there, but with neither glass nor curtains to the windows, and the level
lines of a morning sun streaming across the floor. Apparently the nocturnal
fairies went to sleep as naturally in a glare of sunlight as mortals did in
darkness. Barber wondered if he could do the same. He thought maybe he could,
having been up all night, and turned back the covers of the enormous
silk-covered bed that nearly filled the room. As he lay down it occurred to him
that there was something particularly undreamlike in falling asleep in a dream;
and that going calmly to sleep was hardly in tune with any form of insanity.
This gave him a fine sense of satisfaction in the actuality of the experience
that was registering itself on his senses till he remembered that Oberon had
described the experience itself as utterly lawless. Even the means of getting
back to his own world—if this were the illusion and not that—would presumably
be adventitious. Still trying to unravel the logical difficulties this
involved, he drifted off.
     
    -
     

CHAPTER
IV
     
                A gentle clearing of the
throat awakened him. The sound went on and on, as diminutive as a mouse's alarm
clock. Barber ignored it till he found he would have to turn over anyway, then
opened his eyes.
     
                A small, wizened elf with a
leather bag in one hand stood by his bed. "Gweed morrow, young sir,"
said this mannikin. "I'll be the tailor royal. His Radiance bade me attend
ye."
     
                Barber slid out of bed, his
toes searching futilely for slippers that were not there. The elf whipped a
tape measure, its markings spaced unevenly as though an inch were sometimes one
length, sometimes another.
     
                "Hm," said the
tailor. "Ye're an unco great stirk of a mortal. But I'll fit ye; I'll
jacket ye and breek ye and cap ye." He began pulling clothes from the
bag-underwear and a shirt and a pair of trunks that bulged around the hips. All
went well till Barber began trying on jackets with pinched waists and
leg-of-mutton sleeves. His squarish, straight-lined torso had no median joint
to speak of. The elf grunted, "Too muckle wame," thrust the largest
of the jackets back into the bag, muttered something, and took it out again.
     
                This time the waist was all
right, but Barber complained: "It's still tight across the back of the
shoulders."
     
                The elf helped him take the
jacket off and felt of his shoulder blades. Barber was conscious that the
probing fingers touched a little point of no-sensation, like an incipient boil,
on each scapula. The tailor whistled. "Heuch! Ye'll be having a rare pair
o' wings afore ye're mickle older. I maun make ye a wingity coat."