· · · ·

  In this way Eric became ruler of the country, and after giving his mother a kingdom of her own (and then shutting her up in a bottle because she would not stay there) reigned without aging at all for thirty years, at the end of which time the realm was a wilderness. Deer ran through the streets of the town, and few there were to loose an arrow; wolves bred in wineries, and foxes in farrowing pens; undines from the sea came up the river ten leagues beyond the ford; the stonetrolls of the mountains were seen on the roads at noon; and goblins, excessively ugly and evil, with seventeen fingers on each hand and steel teeth, stood guard at the castle barbican. Throughout all this Eric was, needless to say, exceedingly happy.

  As for Thag, he had taken the dungeons for his own, but came out promptly whenever he was wanted and occasionally when he was not. He took the forms of a black and reeking mist, a crab covered with living slime, a dog with its fur afire, a fountain of sand, and many other things; and when Eric rode out hunting—on a unicorn or a hippogryph as often as not—he sometimes noticed that the castle was coming to resemble the skull of a bear, but it did not disturb him at all.

  King Charles (who had often assured Eric that his name was the foolish) stayed on with his queen, they having become Eric’s principal servitors (Thag excepted), and rejoiced in the possession of a son called Prince Robert who was the rightful heir, though he scarcely knew it. And while the king often mourned in secret for the palmy days of his pride, he comforted himself with the knowledge that he still commanded his castle and treasure—Eric had hardly spent a cent.

  Thus matters stood, until one evening when Eric was dining in the great hall by the light of a single guttering candle on a golden pricket, there appeared from nowhere three remarkable figures. The first was a blond girl of great beauty, who wore a diaphanous gown that left one breast bare. The second was a dark-haired woman, also of great beauty, with a white forelock that made Eric think of a night sky slashed by lightning; this woman was dressed in a white robe embroidered with gold, and carried a staff forked at the top like the horns of a bull. The third was a man, tall and muscular, grey-bearded and one-eyed. And as this man, the last of the three, appeared, there came from the dungeons a roar of anguish.

  Eric saw at once that these were not common folk (or he would have had them devoured), and rose and introduced himself and offered to share his dinner with the newcomers; but he had no sooner done this than his pet (ravens are long-lived birds—sometimes inconveniently so) came flapping in at a window and lit on the one-eyed man’s shoulder.

  “Now,” the one-eyed man said, “I see we are in some kind of castle,” and he began to examine the hangings and decorations, as if he were leaving everything to the woman with the staff.

  “I heard Thag roar,” she said, “at the moment we materialized. How long has he been here?”

  “Thirty years,” said Eric, so surprised that he never considered not answering.

  “Time flies rapidly here, then,” the one-eyed man commented. He had taken down a broadspear from the wall, and was fingering the edge as he spoke. “I thought we were close upon Thag.”

  “We were,” the woman told him, “but as you say, time can pass quickly here—thirty years between paragraph and paragraph, if need be.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the man, but before she could answer him the king and queen entered, followed by Prince Robert. They had been watching from an alcove, and the king (who was of the old belief, as the mighty usually are whether or not they will admit it) had decided to throw his sword.

  “Great Woden,” he said, “we cast ourselves upon your mercy, and on the mercy of serene Frigg and lovely Freya. The throne of this land is mine, mine to hold in my lifetime, mine to give by father-right to my son when I die. For half again a score of years have I been defrauded of it—slay the monster and grant me justice.”

  And Woden said, “What the Hell is he talking about?” and as he spoke the keystone of the great arch of the castle cracked, and a little sliver of stone no bigger than a fingernail fell ringing to the floor.

  “He thinks we’re the Norse gods,” the woman said, and the girl added, “Don’t you see, Daddy, we’re in a book.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Not more impossible than going backward in time. Look around at things: there’s the evil magician—that boy in the pointed hat—here’s the castle; there’s the true king, the fat lady is the queen, and that fellow who hangs his head and snivels is the prince. Thag is the monster in the crypt beneath the castle. We kill him and disappear, the magician gets pushed off a roof or something, and that’s the end.”

  Eric asked, “Are you saying that we are people in a book in whatever place you come from?”

  The one-eyed man nodded. “That’s what they’re saying—a fairy tale—I’m not sure I believe it.” He paused. “Are you well-read? At least by whatever standards are used here?”

  Eric nodded. “I’ve spent many happy hours in the castle library—it’s something we enchanters are expected to do, and I’ve come to enjoy it.”

  “Then tell me something. Do the characters in the books you have here ever read themselves?”

  Eric shook his head. “Never, to my knowledge. They’re always going somewhere.”

  “That might be it, then. In our world, you see, it would be quite possible for a character in a book to sit peacefully before his fire reading the short stories of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.” Just at that instant Thag rushed into the room in the form of a headless bear, blood spurting from the stump of his neck. “Do I kill him?” Woden asked Frigg.

  “A moment ago I would have said yes.”

  The bear stood upright before the one-eyed man, blood cascading over his shoulders and his extended paws.

  “Now you don’t—why not?”

  Freya-goldenhair touched his arm. “It will be the end of the story, won’t it, Daddy? And if we can’t be killed, how can Thag? He’s been here thirty years now, they say. Won’t this just turn him loose to go somewhere else?”

  “I don’t think this is where he really belongs,” the woman called Frigg said. “This is probably a very low energy level for him, as it is for us. And he’s asking you to do it, standing there with his chest exposed like that—if he’s not begging you not to. I don’t like it.”

  “Then the thing to do is to keep him here.” Like a fisherman impaling a pike, Woden drove his spear into the bear’s hind foot, pinning it to the oak floor of the hall. “Make it tight,” the woman called Frigg advised him, and with a spiky morgenstern he pounded the iron-shod shaft until the head was nearly buried in the wood.

  “Use him for your spells all you want,” the one-eyed man told Eric, “but if you let him go now I think he’ll disappear on you, and I know damned well I’ll come back here and make you sorry you did.”

  Eric bowed. “I understand, Magister.”

  (Frigg whispered to Freya, “There has to be a world that corresponds to each of our fictions, dear, since what never was nor will be is inconceivable. Still, I wonder what Thag really is.” And the bear became a snake pinned by the tail and struck an inch short of her heel.)

  “Magister,” Eric asked as the one-eyed man began to melt into the air, “what shall I call you? You said you are not Woden?”

  “My name is Harry Nailer.”

  Eric bowed again. “Hairy Nailer. It is fitting, Magister.” He was already thinking of the things he would do to the king.

  And as soon as the three were gone he did them; and lived, in the most literal sense of the words, Happily, Ever, After.

  The Nebraskan and the Nereid

  The Nebraskan was walking near the sea when he saw her. Two dark eyes, a rounded shoulder with a hint of breast, and a flash of thigh; then she was gone. A moment later he heard a faint splash—or perhaps it was only the fabled seventh wave, the wave that is stronger than the rest, breaking on the rocks.

  Almost running, he strode to the edge of the little bluff and looked east across the sea. The blue waters of the Saronikos Kolpos showed whitecaps, but nothing else.

  “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,” he muttered to himself, “When a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific—and all his men…” He groped for a moment for the final two lines, as he studied the bluff. “Looked at each other with a wild surmise—silent, upon a peak in Darien.” “Stout Cortez” chuckled as he clambered down the bluff with his tape recorder bumping his side. He was no rock climber, but the slope was neither high enough nor sheer enough to require one. He imagined himself describing his adventure in the faculty lounge. It was nothing.

  Nothing too was the evidence he found on the beach, in some places hardly wider than a footpath, that wound along the base of the bluff. There were a few seashells and a rusty tin that had once held British cigarettes, but that was all. No cast-off bikini, no abandoned beach towel, no footprints, nothing.

  He looked up to see a tall and rather angular woman with a canteen at her hip walking silently toward him along the strip of damp sand. He greeted her in his halting Greek, and she extended her right hand in a regal gesture, saying in English, “And a good morning to you, Doctor. I am Dr. Thoe Papamarkos. I am of the University of Athens. You are Dr. Cooper, and you are of an American university, but they do not know to tell me which.”

  “The University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Pleased to meet you, Dr. Papamarkos.” The Nebraskan was Lincolnesque himself, tall and pleasantly ugly.

  “And you are a folklorist. You must be, from what they report of you, that you walk about all day, ask questions of old people, make recordings of their stories.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And you?”

  She laughed softly. “Oh, no. I am not the competition, as you fear.”

  “Good!” He smiled.

  She touched the third button of her khaki shirt. “An archaeologist, I am. Do you know of Saros?”

  He shook his head. “I know this is the Saronic Gulf,” he said, “and I suppose it must be named after something. Is it an island?”

  “No. It was a city, a city so long ago that even in the time of Socrates there was nothing left but ruins and a temple for Poseidon. Think on it, please, Doctor. You and I, we think of that time, the Age of Pericles, as ruins. But to them, to Pericles and Plato, Themistocles and Aristides the Just, Saros was ancient, Saros was archaeology. Now I dig, with three men from the village to work for me. About five kilometers that way. There I hear of you, stories of the folklorist, and I think we should know of each other, probably we are the only truly educated people on this part of the coast, perhaps someday we may even help each other. No?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Certainly.” He discovered that he liked her. She was an old-maid schoolteacher, no doubt about it, with her graying hair tightly knotted in a bun. She could be Miss Twiddle from “The Katzenjammer Kids” or the Miss Minerva of Miss Minerva and William Green Hill. And yet—

  “And you,” she said. “Folklore is so interesting. What is it that you do?”

  He cleared his throat as he tried to think of some way to explain. “I’m trying to trace the history of the Nereids.”

  “Truly?” She looked at him sidelong. “You believe they were real?”

  “No, no.” He shook his head. “But do you know about them, Dr. Papamarkos? Do you know who they were?”

  “I, who search for the temple of Poseidon? Of course. They were the ladies, the maids in waiting at his court, under the Aegean. He was one of the oldest of all the old Greek gods. They were old too, very old, the Greek—what do you call them in English? Mermaids? Sea fairies? Tell me.” She hesitated, as though embarrassed. “I understand your English much better than I speak it, you must believe me. I was three years, studying at Princeton.” She unhooked the canteen from her belt and unscrewed the top.

  He nodded. “I’m the same way with Greek. I understand it well enough; I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t. But sometimes I can’t think of the right word, or remember how it should be pronounced.”

  “You do not want a drink of my water, I hope. This is so very warm now, but I have a nose disease. Is that what you call it? I must take my medicine to breathe, and my medicine makes me thirsty. Do you wish for some?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “And did I say it correctly? Mermaids?”

  “Yes, mermaids. Specifically, they were a class of nymphs, the sea nymphs, the fifty daughters of Nereus. There were mountain nymphs too, the Oreads; and there were Dryads and Meliae in the trees, Epipotamides in the rivers, and so forth. And old people, rural people particularly…”

  She laughed again. “Still credit such things. I know, Doctor, and I am not embarrassed for my country. You have these too, but with you it is the flying saucers, the little green men. Why should not my Greece have its little green women?”

  “But the fascinating part,” he said, warming to his subject, “is that they’ve forgotten all the names except one. Modern Greeks no longer talk about nymphs, or Oriads, Dryads, or Naiades. Only of Nereids, whether they’re supposed to have been seen in springs, or caves, or wherever. I’m trying to find out just how that happened.”

  She smiled. “Have you thought, perhaps only they still live?”

  When the Nebraskan got back to his tiny inn in Nemos, he stopped its dumpy little maid of all work and mustered his uncertain Greek to ask her about Dr. Papamarkos.

  “She does not live here,” the maid informed him, staring at the toes of his boots. “Over there. She has a tent.” She ducked through a doorway and vanished; it was not until some time afterward that it occurred to him that the Greek word for a tent also meant stage scenery.

  On the stairs, he wondered again if it might be possible. Dr. Papamarkos taking off her heavy belt, the soldierish pants and shirt. Flitting naked through the woods. He chuckled.

  No. The woman he had seen—and he had seen a woman, he told himself—had been younger, smaller, and—um—rounder. He suddenly recalled that Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, had married a Greek girl of nineteen at the age of forty-seven. He himself was still years short of that.

  The thought returned the next time he saw her. It was at almost the same spot. (He had been frequenting that spot too much, as he kept telling himself.) He heard a noise and turned, but not quickly enough. The faint splash came again. Once more he hurried, actually running this time, to the edge of the little bluff; and this time he was rewarded. A laughing face bobbed in the waves fifty yards out, a face circled by dark and floating hair. An arm rose from the sea, waved once, and was gone.

  He waited five minutes, occasionally glancing at his watch. Ten. The face did not reappear, and at last he scrambled down the bluff to stand upon the beach, staring out to sea.

  “Doctor! Doctor!”

  He looked around. “Hello, Dr. Papamarkos. What a pleasure to meet you again.” She was coming from the other direction this time, the direction of Nemos and his inn, and she was waving something above her head. It really was a pleasure, he realized. A sympathetic ear, an older woman, no doubt with a certain amount of experience, who knew the country… “Good to see you!”

  “And to see you, my friend. Oh, Doctor, my friend, look! Just look and see what we have found under the water.”

  She held it out to him, and after a moment he saw it was a glazed cup, still somewhat encrusted with marine growths.

  “And it is to you that I owe, oh, everything!”

  The background was red, the man’s head black, his curling beard and wide, fierce eye traced in a lighter color that might originally have been white. A fish, small and crude, swam before his face.

  “And on the back! See, beside the trident, the two straight scratches, the bar at the top? It is our letter π, for Poseidon. They have finer cups, oh, yes, much finer, at the museum in Athens. But this is so old! This is Mycenaean, early Mycenaean, from when we were yet copying, and badly, things from Crete.”

  The Nebraskan was still staring at the bearded face. It was crude, hardly more than a cartoon; and yet it burned with a deft energy, so that he felt the bearded sea god watched him, and might at any instant roar with laughter and slap him on the back. “It’s wonderful,” he said.

  It was as though she could read his thoughts. “He was the sea god,” she said. “Sailors prayed to him, and captains. Also to Nereus, the old sea-man who knew the future. Now it is to Saint Peter and Saint Mark. But it is not so different, perhaps. The fish, the beard, they are still there.”

  “You say you found this because of me, Dr. Papamarkos?”

  “Yes! I meet with you, and we talk of the Nereids, remember? Then I walk back to my dig.” She opened her canteen and took a healthy swallow. “And I kept thinking of them, girls frisking in the waves, I could almost see them. I say, ‘What are you trying to tell me? Come, I am a woman like you, speak out.’

  “And they wave, come, Thoe, come! Then I think, yes, Saros was a seaport, so long ago. But was the coast the same? What if the sea is higher now, what if the place where I dig was a kilometer inland then? They called it a city, a polis. But to us it would be only a little town—the theater open to the sky, the temple, the agora where one went to buy fish and wine, and a few hundred houses.”

  She paused, gasping for breath; and he remembered what she had said about having a “nose disease.”

  “I have no diving equipment, nothing. But we make a big strainer—you understand? From a fishing net. I tell my men, walk out until the sea is at your belts. Shovel sand so gently into the net. And today we find this!”

  Carefully, he handed back the cup. “Congratulations. It’s wonderful, and it couldn’t have come to a nicer person. I mean that.”

  She smiled. “I knew you would be happy for me, just as I would be so happy for you, should you find—I do not know, perhaps some wondrous old story never written down.”

  “May I walk you back to your camp? I’d like to see it.”

  “Oh, no. It is so far, and the day so hot. Wait until I have something there to show you. This is all I have worth showing now.” She gave him her sidelong look; and when he said nothing, she asked, “But what of you? Surely you progress. Have you nothing to tell me?”