The Whim of the Dragon Page 3

  CHAPTER 3

  UPSTAIRS in the house of Apsinthion was a room of mirrors. They were everywhere, in frames carved and gilded, or plain and unstained, or worked silver, or jeweled gold. Little ones lay on all the furniture. Large ones swung gently on stands of wood or metal. They held a hundred copies of the red ceiling, the polished wooden floor, the sunshine falling through the windows, the summer sky of Illinois that lay flat against the glass of the skylight like a layer of paint.

  “Oh, God,” said Ted to Laura, as they stood arrested in the doorway. “Is he like Claudia?”

  Laura pointed silently at the mirror they stood before. It showed only themselves. They walked into the room, avoiding the first mirror and finding themselves again in a larger one. Their host appeared behind them in that mirror and waved his hand at it. A wash of blackness went down its surface, and they saw, as if they rode across the plain at a distance, High Castle with the mountains at its back. For a moment Ted thought they were looking at a sunset, and then he knew. High Castle was burning. Fire leapt from every wall, and met itself in the moat as half a tower fell hissing. The outer walls that should hide the moat from view were down already.

  “Did we do that?” said Laura. She sounded as if she were sure of it. Ted supposed that if you spent your whole life breaking things without meaning to, you might easily believe that any catastrophe was your fault.

  “Your absence will do’t,” said Apsinthion.

  “How?” said Ted. He felt Laura looking at him, probably admiring his composure. Never mind that his hands were shaking.

  “Lord Andrew hath his suspicions even now,” said the man in red. “Think you what he will tell the council: What is easier to believe, those things writ i’the letter Fence hath, or that Fence and Randolph plot against all the royal house?”

  “Benjamin’d have better sense—” said Ted.

  “Oh, aye,” said the red man, in Benjamin’s manner exactly. “Benjamin, and Agatha, and Matthew. Hence civil war, and Randolph’s death; a land divided, and no certain heir.”

  “Can you send us back?” asked Ted.

  “I can.” He met Ted’s eyes in the mirror. The little flame in his obscured the pupils. “But know that other powers may so sort themselves that I cannot send you home again.”

  Laura’s face grew shocked, and she stared into the mirror. Apsinthion tucked his hands up in the sleeves of his robe and seemed prepared to stand behind them as long as was needful.

  Ted tried to think. He looked around Apsinthion’s house, which was congenial to him in a remarkable degree. You could have a place like this yourself, he thought. After college. He had just started junior high. Ted sighed.

  He thought of his one or two brilliant teachers (usually in subjects he didn’t like or wasn’t good at), one or two cruel or foolish ones, the rest amiable and forgettable; the other kids, with their peculiar preoccupations: television, video games, sports, clothes; nothing that was both real and beautiful. Vacations: reading, hiking, bicycling, watching television to see if it had gotten any better, quarreling with Laura, plotting with Laura new twists for the Secret Country, and waiting, waiting for the summer when they could return to their best reality. This summer, as blank as the television screen when the set was off, and promising even less.

  If he went back, he could be a king (falteringly, and for a little while), rescue five children from the land of the dead (perhaps), save Randolph from the unicorns (how?), live in High Castle (until they threw him out because he wasn’t real). If you want to save people, join the Peace Corps, he thought. If you want adventure, be an astronaut.

  No. The Secret Country was smoothed to the contours of his mind (or they to it). However he balked at its refusal to conform to his plot, however bizarre the vistas it had yet to reveal to him, whatever the Outer Isles and Fence’s Country were really like, they would speak to him (or he to them) in ways that the Moon or Mars never could. Even if he became a doctor and cured everyone in sight, the accomplishment would be hollow beside dragging five royal children from the shadows to which he himself had, perhaps, consigned them. That was the point. He was responsible for the Secret Country.

  He turned to his sister, who was chewing the end of her left braid and looking close to tears. She hated being at the Barretts’ more than he did. She hated school more too. She was not stupid, and could have been perfectly happy sitting at the back of some classroom, reading and writing and spelling and learning the names of all the presidents of the United States before anybody else had figured out what a president was. But when they tried to teach her spelling with a modified Bingo game that required you spell your word at the top of your voice, she was doomed. Laura, thought Ted, wouldn’t shout in front of twenty-five other third-graders if it would win her a million dollars.

  Had the Secret Country been even worse for her? She had been endowed with peculiar powers, and required to shout about them, but perhaps Fence and Randolph were an easier audience than her peers.

  Oh, hell, thought Ted. He had forgotten their parents. They might have gone off to Australia without him, but that was hardly comparable to vanishing into an imaginary country without leaving so much as a farewell letter. And if he and Laura did leave a farewell letter, everybody would think they had gone crazy, or been kidnapped, or both.

  “Shan’s mercy,” he said.

  “Not yet,” said the man in red.

  Laura jerked her head around and fixed wet eyes on Ted. “We have to go back,” she said.

  “Don’t cry about it!”

  “I’m not crying at you,” said Laura, with dignity. “I saw something in the floor.”

  The man in red took two paces away from them, frowning. Laura said, “I saw Fence killing Randolph.”

  “I suppose you’d rather see me doing it?”

  “You show him,” said Laura to the man in red. “It sounds stupid when I say it.”

  “That is a grave failing,” said the red man, clinically.

  You creep, thought Ted. “You’d better show me,” he said.

  The man shrugged once, like Fence, and walked across the floor to the most ornate of the wall mirrors. Its carved wooden frame was six inches wide, showing the story of an old man and a young man and a group of animals: cat, dog, eagle, horse, unicorn. In the center of the top piece was a gilded sunburst.

  Ted and Laura looked at each other.

  The man in red tilted his head at the mirror, which abode unchanging, giving them his slight form and enigmatic face, Ted’s tousled head at his shoulder, and at Ted’s shoulder Laura’s fraying braids and wet blue eyes.

  “Purgos Aipos Autika,” said the man; or something like it.

  The interior of the mirror wavered and steadied. Fence and Randolph faced one another in the rose garden. It was late autumn and early evening, and the rain poured down around them, so that the scene was blurred as if the mirror needed dusting. But their swords blazed, blue and green, and springing back from the blades the raindrops sparked like fireworks.

  “No, never mind,” said Ted, reflecting that he would rather trust Laura than the red man, and not caring to see more.

  “But, Ted—”

  “It’s okay, I believe you. But what if we can’t get home?”

  “He didn’t say we couldn’t get home,” said Laura, violating one of the tenets of good manners by referring to their host as if he were not present. “He said he couldn’t send us home again. There’s still the swords.”

  “That’s true,” said Ted. “And now that we don’t have to pretend anything, we should be able to get Fence to let us use them.” He turned to the man in red. “But how do we prove anything to Fence and Randolph?”

  “Ask them the three riddles,” said Apsinthion. “They will have more need than you to find the answers. Also,” he said, slowly, “tell them this. To Fence, ‘All may yet be very well.’ And to Randolph, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall.’”

  “Claudia?” said Ted.

  Their h
ost smiled. “I’ll set you on your journey,” he said.

  “Wait a minute,” said Ted. “The last time we left, we set up magic so we’d only be gone five minutes here. But it didn’t exactly work. And we can’t just disappear. Our parents would worry.”

  “What manner of magic?” said the man in red.

  “Shan’s Ring.”

  “Thou?”

  “Well, Ruth, actually.”

  “Lady Ruth of the Green Caves?”

  “Uh—”

  “Another changeling?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Now who’s telling too much?” demanded Laura.

  “We’re trusting him to send us back.”

  Laura was silent.

  “I’ll strike you a bargain,” said the red man. “By your oaths to the Hidden Land, use not Shan’s Ring even in direst peril. And I’ll blow time awry for you, that you be not missed.”

  “What’s wrong with Shan’s Ring?”

  “All too little,” said the red man, with a wry face, as if he were making a joke. “It doth wake powers that are better sleeping.” He frowned. “How often hath this thing been used?”

  Ted thought about it. He couldn’t remember exactly what Ruth had done to change the time. “Two or three times, I think.”

  “Three will do’t,” said the man in red. “Walk warily.” He frowned again. “It may be,” he said, “that that use did but awaken me. But wake not the others; in especial, wake not more than one. If they confer together, touching the disturbance, they will seek you to your peril.”

  “Okay,” said Ted, “I promise.”

  “And thou, Princess?”

  Laura hesitated, frowning. Then her face cleared. “Yes,” she said. “I promise, by my oaths to the Hidden Land, not to use Shan’s Ring.”

  “Then come away,” said the man in red.

  Ted wondered what Laura was thinking about. If it had been Ruth or Ellen or Patrick, he would have wondered what she was up to, but Laura was not a schemer: the trouble was to get her to do anything, not to keep her from doing too much.

  The man stopped beside a tall, narrow mirror with a plain silver frame. They walked over to him, a little slowly. He smiled. “Purgos Aipos Nun,” he said, and then, to Ted, “Go quickly.”

  Ted turned sideways and stepped carefully into the mirror. It gave before his shoulder like cloth, and he put his head out into cloth-smelling dimness and the sound of weary voices. He stepped through and was instantly entangled in heavy material. He pushed at it, and it parted for him. He was behind the Conrad tapestry in the Mirror Room at High Castle. Fence sat on Agatha’s sewing-table, and Randolph sat on the floor. They did not look at one another.

  Laura bumped Ted from behind and said frenziedly, “The house is flooding! Purple water!”

  “Shut up!” Ted didn’t care what was happening back at the stark house. Their business was with Fence and Randolph, who now knew a great many awful things about them.

  Fence and Randolph looked up, and then stared. Randolph stood up. There was no expression on his face at all, but Laura stopped trying to talk.

  “Edward?” said Fence.

  “No,” said Ted, his throat hurting him. “It’s just me.”

  “Wherefore,” said Randolph, as if he were demanding an explanation for the back gate left open and the dog lost, or perhaps a large hole dug in the back yard without permission, “art thou returned?”

  CHAPTER 4

  LAURA was so shocked by Randolph’s tone of voice that she forgot about the purple water. There was a calculation in the way Fence and Randolph looked at her that had not been there before. They knew who she was now; or, no. They knew who she wasn’t.

  Ted said, “We were sent back, by a man in a red robe.”

  Laura saw Fence’s head come up, like that of a cat who hears you open the refrigerator. But Randolph said, in the same unfriendly voice, “Wherefore did you let him do so?”

  “He said that if we didn’t, everything we strove to prevent would come to pass.”

  “Who was he?” said Fence. His voice was merely neutral, but in him this was as great a change as the hostility in Randolph.

  “The mailbox said Apsinthion.”

  “That’s wormwood,” said Fence, with a kind of skeptical surprise. “What manner of man was he?”

  Laura wished they could all sit down. But the room contained one sewing-table, on which Fence was still sitting, and Agatha’s high-backed chair with the tapestry cushions, on which she would have felt wrong sitting even before they left.

  “He looked like you and Randolph,” said Ted, “only mixed together. He had a house full of mirrors.”

  Fence and Randolph turned to one another; for a bare instant everything seemed familiar. Then Fence looked away, sharply, and said to Ted, “What else?”

  “Okay,” said Ted. He began with their encounter with Claudia in the yard of her house, in their own world; and ended with their stepping through the mirror into this room. At no point in his narrative did Fence or Randolph ask for any clarification. Randolph, in fact, showed no reaction whatsoever. Fence took the story in as though he were judging it for a contest. Ted saved the three riddles and the messages for last. The riddles evoked no response. “All may yet be very well” made Fence roll his eyes. “La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall” produced, finally, a reaction from Randolph.

  “What tongue is that? What mean those words?”

  “French,” said Ted, gloomily. “I don’t know.”

  “Two unhandily returned is already two more—” said Randolph; Fence glanced at him and he stopped.

  “It sounds,” said Laura, “like it means ‘the beautiful lady who never says thank you.’ ”

  Fence actually smiled at this, but Randolph went on looking at the floor. Fence said, “Wherefore may we regard these words if we know them not?”

  “It’s Randolph who’s supposed to regard them,” said Ted. “You’re supposed to regard Shan’s. All may yet be very well.”

  “Anyone may quote Shan,” said Fence, “and most have.”

  The devil, thought Laura, can cite Scripture for his purpose. But Shan wasn’t Scripture—was he?

  Ted must have been thinking something similar; he said, “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some?”

  Fence slid down from the table and strode across the room in a swirl of black. He stopped in front of Ted, and the smell of burning leaves engulfed Laura two feet away. If Ted grew a little more, thought Laura crazily, he would be able to look Fence right in the eye. Fence appeared merely intent, but his voice was furious. “Where read you that?” he said.

  “I read it in the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians,” said Ted. “But Edward’s remembering it.”

  Laura did not know what Ted had hoped to achieve with this revelation. She herself was relieved; she thought of the dead Prince Edward as an ally. Fence said, “Dear heaven,” in the tone of a man whose child has brought home a stray python.

  “What’s the matter?” said Randolph.

  “Edward speaks to him,” said Fence, without looking around.

  “How?” said Randolph to Ted, not altogether as if he were prepared to believe him.

  “In the back of my mind, somehow, or underneath.”

  “I suppose,” said Fence wearily to Laura, “that the Princess Laura speaks to thee also?”

  “Yes,” said Laura.

  “That’s why I thought we might be able to get them back,” said Ted. “We seem to be connected.”

  “Fence?” said Randolph; Laura concluded that, whatever Fence understood, Randolph did not.

  “You have not read in that book either,” said Fence, turning and staring at him. “But Edward hath.”

  “What book?” said Ted.

  “This speaking of Edward in the backward of your thoughts,” said Fence, “is a devising of Melanie, that she worked on Shan without his will. He wrote on it in his reports to the Blue Sorcerers, sa
ying, ‘I must be all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.’”

  Laura doubted that that was what Saint Paul had been talking about, but this was no time to say so.

  “What bearing hath this on the present issue?” Randolph said.

  “A moment,” said Fence, and to Ted, “A cardinal did deliver you to this man in red?”

  “Then let his minions have the care of them,” said Randolph.

  “Randolph, for the love of heaven!” said Fence. “There’s no blame on the children.”

  “Is there not?” said Randolph. He jerked a wad of paper out of the long jacket he wore and flung it down on Agatha’s table. The top sheet was covered with Ruth’s round, back-handed writing. She wrote that way because a teacher had once chided the left-handed Patrick for doing it.

  “Didn’t Ruth say we didn’t know?” demanded Ted.

  “Evil done unknowing yet hath evil effect,” said Randolph.

  “Randolph,” said Fence, “that is ice so thin thy feet are wet e’en now. Let be.”

  “We thought we might be able to make it up to you,” said Ted.

  Scorn drew itself along Randolph’s face like ink spilling on the white tiles of a bathroom floor, and Laura felt cold.

  “Randolph,” said Fence; and Randolph shut his mouth. “How?” said Fence to Ted.

  “Have you told anybody about that?” asked Ted, pointing to Ruth’s letter.

  “No.”

  “All right. So we can prevent the civil war by pretending we’re the real royal children. And maybe we can tell you enough about our game for you to figure out what Claudia’s doing and why. And maybe we can get your royal children back for you.”

  “It was bravely done,” said Fence, in the kindest voice he had used yet. “But we will do well enough. Do you go to your homes and regard us not.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” said Ted. Laura recognized the signs of a monumental fury, and could not decide if she wanted to keep quiet or help him out. “How in the hell,” said Ted, “do you expect us to regard you not? We’ve lived with you for three months; and we lived with you for years before that, really. You’re part of our lives whether you like it or not. And I promise you,” finished Ted, in a dire tone Laura had seldom heard out of him, “that we’ll use whatever power we have to make your lives miserable if you don’t let us stay and help.”