Her Majesty's Wizard
Christopher Stasheff
CHAPTER 1
Matthew Mantrell leaned forward across the little table in the campus coffee shop and tapped the sheet of rune-covered parchment before him. He tried to put some of the urgency he felt into his voice.
"I tell you, Paul, this is important!"
Paul just sighed and shook his head, reaching for the last of his coffee. He didn't even glance at the parchment.
Somehow, Matt never had been able to make others take him seriously. He was tall enough, he thought, over medium height, and fencing practice had kept him lean and wiry. But his eyes were an honest, warm brown-like his hair. His nose was out of Sherlock Holmes-but from Watson, not Holmes. He looked, unfortunately, good-natured, friendly, and kind.
Across the table, Paul put his cup down and cleared his throat. "As I remember it," he said, "you're supposed to be working on your doctorate. How long since you did any research on your dissertation?"
"Three months," Matt admitted.
Paul shook his head. "Then you'd better get on the stick, man. You don't have that much more time."
It was true. He had a month of the spring semester left, plus the summer. After that, it was out into the wilderness of two-year college teaching, with little or no research time, probably never to emerge into the light of a Ph.D. and eventual professorship. He shuddered at the thought, but screwed up the remnants of determination and declared, "But this is important! I feel it in my bones!"
"So what are you going to tell your committee? That you dropped everything because-so you say-this piece of manuscript fell out of an old copy of the Njaal saga while you were poking around in the library stacks?"
"It did!"
"So how come nobody else ever found it? They've been sifting that library for fifty years. How do we know it isn't a hoax?"
"It's in runes..."
"Which you-and who knows how many others-can write." Paul shook his head slowly. "One scrap of parchment, with runes spelling out words in a language that sounds like a mess of German, French, maybe Old Norse, and probably some Elvish and Barsoomian worked in."
"Yeah, but I feel it's a real tongue." Matt managed a tight smile. "The words just don't make sense - yet."
"So you've been trying to translate it from root words for three months, without a bit of luck." Paul sighed. "Give it up, man. June's next month. Your fellowship will be up, and none of your dissertation done. There you'll be, without a degree, and not much chance of getting one, either."
He looked at the clock and got to his feet, clapping Matt on the shoulder. "Gotta run. Good luck, man-and pull your head back to reality huh? Or as close as we can ever get."
Matt watched him shoulder his way out of the coffee shop. Paul was right, from the hard-headed, practical point of view. But Matt knew he was, too. He just couldn't substantiate it. He sighed and pulled out his silver ballpoint pen to have another try at playing acrostics with the speech sounds in his manuscript.
He looked down at the parchment, and everything else dropped from his mind. He felt, illogically, that if he just stared at the black brush strokes, just repeated those alien phonemes again and again, they'd start making sense. Ridiculous, of course! He had to reason it out, starting with the root words and locating their place in the family of human languages.
He caught himself repeating the syllables again and stared at the blank notebook page beside him. Start with root words. Lalinga -- the first word of all. Well, lingua was Latin for tongue or language, and la was the feminine article in the Romance languages. But the next words didn't seem to fit the pattern. Lalinga wogreus marwold reigor ...
He leaned back, taking a very deep breath. He'd slipped into it again, chanting the meaningless symbols ...
No, not meaningless! They would make sense! He was sure of it. If he could just find the key ...
Dangerous, some remote, monitoring part of his mind gibed. Very dangerous; that way lie dragons. And insanity ...
Matt buried his face in his hands, thumbs massaging his temple. Maybe Paul was right; he had been working this over too long. Maybe he should just drop it ...
But not without one more try. He sat up straight again and took a firmer grip on the pen. Now, one more time.
Pull back, the remote part of his mind warned. You're in too deep; you'll never get out...
But Matt couldn't let go-underneath it all, somehow, the weird words were beginning to make sense. He head filled with roaring-and beneath it, like a, harmonic, the noise seemed to modulate into words:
The whole room seemed to be darkening, with only the scrap of parchment lighted; and even there, the runes were writhing, blurring, starting to run together...
The page darkened, left him enveloped in a formless, lightless limbo. He lurched to his feet, then sagged against the wall, squeezing the hard, cool cylinder of the silver pen like a talisman; but the words thundered on in his head:
Worlds whirled, suns swerved across limbo, wheeling him about like a dervish. Nausea struck as the floor swung out from under his feet. His knees tried to give; Matt clutched at a beam in the wall, holding himself up, trying to force his eyes open.
It passed; the spinning suns slowed, his feet touched hardness, then pressed up. Bit by bit, the churning universe ground down toward a halt...
Matt leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths, letting the dizziness pass and the nausea ebb. Paul was right; he had been working too hard ...
A hand clasped his shoulder. "Here, countryman! Stand away!"
Matt looked up, irritated-at a florid, beefy face with a full beard, a puffy beret, and a fur-trimmed woolen robe over a linen tunic.
The hand shook his shoulder, almost knocking him down. "D'ye hear me? Stand away from my shop!"
Matt stared, unbelieving. The meaning was clear and familiar, but the words weren't English.
They were the language of the manuscript fragment...
He looked around, dazed. How had he. gotten outside? Especially this outside-a narrow street, half-timbered houses with second stories sticking out over the cobblestones ...
Where was he?
"Alms, goodman! Alms for the poor!"
Matt looked down into a grimy, grease-stained wooden bowl about a foot below his nose. There was a hand holding it-a filthy, scabby, dirtcrusted hand. The arm attached to it went with the hand perfectly, scab for scab and crud for crud. He followed it down to a motley collection of rags and a hideous, emaciated, grizzled old face, with a filthy woolen strip tied across the eyes.
The beggar gave the bowl an angry, impatient shake. "Alms, countryman! Give me alms! For charity's sweet sake, goodman -- alms!"
The man went with the scene. The gutter was filled with garbage and sewage, a magnet for mangy dogs and scrofulous pigs.
While Matt watched, a rat shot out of a pile of garbage, and a mutt leaped on, it with a happy yelp. Matt shuddered and looked away; a sudden wave of dizziness swept him, and he clutched at the wall again, leaning against it.
"He's ill!" The beggar sounded as if he were on the verge of panic; definitely overreacting, Matt thought dizzily.