The prostrate man, a potbellied sergeant with a President Cleveland mustache, looked offended.
"You're in the Grand Union of the Five Counties. Population 7200. 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 ill, surnamed the Wonder worker."
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," hrumphed 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, stubbily, treeless plain. There, far ahead, but clearly visible, stood the castle of King Gorm the Wonder worker, 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 crowned 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. Multi-ringed 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."