This was the meeting I’d half dreamed about, half feared for almost twenty years. I couldn’t think of this Nome as “it.” He looked down at us from an elevation of fifteen feet, counting the height of the throne itself. His crystalline crest seemed finer and higher, the fluting on his chin longer, and he looked to me to be somewhat larger than the others around the room, or those escorting us. In the shadowy light of the stupendous throne room, with my overexcited imagination working at double time, I could almost see the halo of white hair and long beard. This was Ruggedo, sometimes called Roquat, the Red—the Nome King.
I shook my head to clear it. I might not be able to keep from giving him the name in my mind, but there wasn’t any other connection. This was a first contact between humans and whatever this race really was, and I wouldn’t help matters any by letting kids’ stories influence my behavior. And whatever they were, they had a lot of things in their civilization that we hadn’t the faintest clue about. Behind the throne we could see bizarre and distorted shapes; things that looked like they might have been living things of the same general sort as the Nomes and rockworms, but jammed together, intertwined and almost sculpted in ways that hurt my eyes to look at.
“Father,” I said into the radio. “We’re about to meet the Nome King.”
“Then mind your manners, son.”
Ruggedo (as my mind still insisted on calling him, lacking any better name) had leaned forward with interest as I talked with my father. He leaned back slowly and studied us as we were brought up the ramps until we stood before him, a mere twenty feet from the being who was clearly in charge of this entire underground world. His head tilted slightly, as though he were a bird trying to see us with one eye, and then another. Now I could see there was, in fact, one strong similarity between the real and the fictional Nome King: Ruggedo did, indeed, hold a heavy, elaborate scepter with a great glittering red crystal at its end.
“That thing gives me the creeps, Clint.” Jodi spoke in an undertone, having wisely shut off her high-frequency transducer.
I just nodded. She wasn’t talking about the King, but about the shapes behind the throne which we could now see much more clearly. This was not a good thing. It was something inherently unsettling, seeming a blend of the living and the living rock, shapes almost like attenuated Nomes blending into rockworms and other . . . things of even less familiar outline, like an unholy blending of Bosch and Giger. My earphones hummed and murmured with whispered sounds of the Nome language and with other things, like barely audible whines, interference, and subliminal voices.
We stood there a moment, each side regarding the other in motionless silence, broken only by the sounds that even our transducers couldn’t render into recognition. I took the time to study the King closely. Even though he was clearly larger than his subjects, the Nome King still wouldn’t stand taller than Evangeline; I guessed him at no more than five feet tall. The body was almost spherical, with variegated geometric patterns of black, green, brown, and yellow making it look almost as though he wore clothing, at least from a distance; up close, it was much more a natural mottling of the skin. Round, slender arms and legs, with rocky sheathing that had the appearance of thin clothing on their bodies, completed the resemblance to Baum’s Nomes, as envisioned by John R. Neill. The crystal growths on the head, up close, didn’t really bring hair to mind. They shimmered with multiple colors—the King’s seemed predominantly violet, amethyst perhaps—and the immobile eyes and stony tube jutting from the chin emphasized the alien nature of the creature.
Finally, the Nome King leaned forward on his scepter and spoke.
“So, you are the people who speak in the air!”
7. Underground Understandings
Neither Jodi nor I really know precisely what we did in that moment. That clearly spoken English sentence stunned me so much that all I know for certain is that we stood there for a while, staring at him with our mouths literally hanging open. Just as we started to recover, the King suddenly began to emit a series of whooping noises which, after a moment, we realized must be laughter.