The Whim of the Dragon Page 4

  “Oh, that’s logic indeed,” began Fence, in a tone of exasperated amusement; but he was overridden.

  “That,” said Randolph, not loudly at all, “is the outside of enough. Begone from here and do your worst, or stay and regard ours. There are dungeons in High Castle deep enough for the likes of you.”

  Laura thought that Ted should have known better than to threaten Randolph.

  “All right,” said Ted. “All right. May I remind you of something? You—both of you—swore me an oath.”

  Randolph’s face was so terrible that Laura looked away from it. But Fence, after a moment of anger as monumental as Ted’s, simply sat down on the floor in the midst of his black wizard’s robes and laughed until he cried.

  There was a petrifying pause. Laura looked only at Fence. His giving up of dignity hurt less than Ted’s dirty tactics or Randolph’s loss of control. He had never been very dignified anyway. When he stopped wheezing and pushed his hair out of his red face, Laura, greatly daring, edged around Ted, sat down beside Fence, and offered him her handkerchief.

  “Shan’s mercy,” said Fence, taking it and blowing his nose vigorously. “Shan’s mercy on the lot of us, it’s better than we deserve. Thy lessons from Edward were well learned, my lad.”

  “Faugh!” said Randolph, still not loudly. “Had they been well learned, I were dead long since.”

  Fence looked up at him, all hilarity gone. “No,” he said. “Those were your lessons. Not Edward’s. And not mine.”

  They were going to start arguing again. Laura looked hopefully at Ted.

  Ted took a very deep breath and pushed his fists into the pockets of his jeans. Laura knew he wanted to yell. But you didn’t yell at Fence and Randolph. As King Edward, Ted might have come to it in the next few months; and they might have let him get away with it. But as Ted, he had to start all over; worse than that, because they didn’t want him. All the kindness and trust he had had from them these three months had been for Edward, and the actions that they had approved of were not, now, marks in his favor but rather evidence of betrayal.

  “You’d better go,” said Fence again. “And of your courtesy, save your ill-wishing for more worthy foes.”

  “Now look,” said Ted, not yelling. “I didn’t come back here for my health. A sinister man came close to making us come back. He asked three riddles you haven’t even considered, and he gave us one quotation from your world and one from ours. You’re not thinking. All you want to do is get rid of us. I wouldn’t want to look at us either, if I were you. But we didn’t kill those kids. Claudia did it. And she did to us the exact same things that we did to you—but she knew it. We’re as mad at her as you are.”

  Laura admired this logic. He should have tried it before the threats.

  Fence quirked the corner of his mouth and looked at Randolph, who, without noticing, slapped his hand down on Agatha’s table and started to speak. Fence, with his habitual gesture, put a hand on Randolph’s wrist. Randolph turned on him with a ferocious expression. Fence took his hand away.

  “I would cry you mercy,” said Randolph to Fence, “were there mercy in the universe to nick the edge of my iniquity.”

  “Take less pleasure in thy mouthings,” said Fence, in an astonishingly deadly voice, “and thou shalt have mercy enow.”

  There was a pause worse than the last one. Then Randolph said, “What, a villain that mouthes not?” and without waiting for an answer, turned to Ted. Laura saw that Fence looked more relieved than otherwise.

  “Do we grant,” said Randolph to Ted, in a cooler voice than he had used with Fence, “that until we have studied what to do, ’tis better for the country that nothing seem to be amiss, will you in turn agree that you are nowise trained for statecraft and that for you to take up your duties would be disaster?”

  “Well,” said Ted, “I don’t know about disaster, but I don’t really want all my duties. What do you propose to do?”

  “Randolph is Regent,” said Fence.

  “I have told you, no,” said Randolph.

  “What about you, Fence?” said Laura. “Can’t you help Ted?”

  “In the end,” said Fence, “what Edward orders, that must we accomplish. But if you will agree to take my guidance, Edward, and to gainsay my advice only under desperate conditions, I think we will deal very well.”

  “That’s fine with me,” said Ted, quickly.

  “Excellent,” said Fence. “Now. For all to seem as it was, it is needful that we retrieve your companions from their exile. They are gone by way of the green sword under the bottle trees, and may be recovered by that means?”

  “Well, yes and no,” said Ted. Laura was rather taken aback by the speed with which plans were being made, but Ted seemed to be following them well enough. “We can get to where they are that way. But then we’ll have to persuade them to come back.”

  “It liked them well enough before,” observed Randolph.

  “It didn’t like Patrick,” said Ted. “He’s like Andrew—he doesn’t believe in magic. Being here just drove him crazy.”

  “Well, we will try what persuasion we may,” said Fence. “And in any case ’twere folly to leave so potent a weapon lying about in the woods like an abandoned doll.”

  Laura thought this was unfair, given all the trouble they had taken to make sure Fence knew where the swords were.

  “What means of persuasion do you suggest?” said Ted.

  “I had thought to come with you,” said Fence.

  Laura let out a delighted chortle. Ted started at Fence for a moment. “Be warned,” he said, “that Laura and I have never been to Australia. We won’t know how to act, necessarily.”

  “How to act,” said Fence, “will be to find those three privily and speak to them so. Where cometh out this path to Australia?”

  “I think Patrick said the back forty.”

  Fence looked patient.

  “It’s on a farm,” said Ted, who had only the faintest idea of what a back forty was himself.

  “Well enough,” said Fence. “I was born on a farm.”

  Ted and Laura both stared at him. He picked up Ruth’s letter from the table where Randolph had thrown it, and held it out to them. It did not take them long to read it. Laura admired the style. They handed it back to Fence, and he stood up shaking out the folds of the absurd starry robe he wore. “What do we stay for?” he said.

  They left Randolph sitting in the dim room among the glints of polished wood and glass and the muted colors of the tapestries. Laura preferred not to wonder what he was thinking.

  At the head of the stairs Fence paused. “Garments,” he said. He fingered the shoulder of Ted’s shirt, and smiled very faintly. “You never had these from the West Tower,” he said. “Men go garbed thus in your country?”

  “Yes,” said Ted, smiling back.

  “Well,” said Fence, “to the West Tower we must go, all the same, and find somewhat more suited to a farm.”

  The warm, cinnamon-scented air of the West Tower enclosed them comfortingly. Late sunlight blazed in through its nine windows, some gold as it ought to be, and some a violent pink reflection off the outer walls of High Castle. The room was piled and heaped and hung with clothes, most even less suited to a farm in Australia—or anywhere else—than Fence’s robe.

  Fence seemed to know his way about, and quickly found a plain muslin shirt. But they could not locate anything resembling trousers. Ted, appealed to, said firmly that a shirt and hose would be even odder than the starry robe.

  Laura remembered suddenly that, if it were June in Illinois, it would be winter in Australia, and that even in the twentieth century some people wore cloaks in winter. Fence received this information dubiously, but said he’d as lief swelter in a cloak as rummage here any further. They found a black cloak for Fence, and a red one for Laura, who remembered Claudia and wished it were any other color, and a green one for Ted, and went down to the stables, where the grooms had looked at them oddly but consented to pack t
he garments into saddlebags and saddle two horses.

  “Why not three?” said Fence.

  “Laura can ride with me,” said Ted, climbing onto Edward’s horse. “Can you give her a boost?”

  Fence did as he was asked, but looked at Laura once she was safely behind Ted. “Wherefore this unaccustomed shyness?”

  “I hate horses,” said Laura, with violence. She hated horses, and Princess Laura loved them, and it was an enormous relief to be able to tell the truth for once.

  Fence’s face closed up like a brand-new paperback. Maybe, she thought, they should just keep on playing their parts.

  The day was cooling into evening as they rode away from High Castle. The distant eastern sky was piled with little round clouds, and above that was an improbable dark blue. It was too early for stars. Three crows flapped slowly over their heads, and some little bird whistled and piped in the grasses. The huge plain still gave off its scents of baked grass and dust. Laura felt very odd. Not four hours ago she and her brother and their cousins had ridden this way, resolved to give up the Secret Country. It seemed beyond the bounds of reason that now she and Ted were going to Australia with Fence. For the first time since she came to this country, the power and presence of magic, the difference it made in plans and actions, became clear to her.

  When they came to the Well of the White Witch, the western sky was still spilling color, but it was dark enough for them to see the Well’s glow. Like those unexpected and disconcerting walls of High Castle, it was a vivid pink granite. It lit the tall grass around it as if it were a bonfire.

  “Fence!” called Ted. “We usually leave the horses here.” He persuaded their own horse to stop. Laura wondered if the horses they escaped on had managed to get home yet.

  Fence had turned his horse back to them and dismounted. He came over and held up his hands for Laura, who slid down and managed to land on her feet. Ted dismounted. “Oh, hell,” he said. “Ruth always whispered sorcerous words at the horses.”

  “Well, my powers are other,” said Fence, “but I have speech enow for that.” He laid his hand on the neck of Ted’s horse and said, “Thou, my steed, may graze thy fill, for I must dismount and walk.” He went over to his own horse and repeated it.

  Ted and Laura stared at each other in the glow of the well. Their mother had sung that song to them.

  “What spell is that, Fence?” said Ted.

  “One of Shan’s,” said Fence. He pulled the three cloaks out of the saddlebags and handed them around. He put his own on, so Ted and Laura followed suit. Fence said, “Now lead on.”

  They climbed the bank above the Well, and went lightly along the wooden bridge over the little stream, and slid and scrabbled along the stream’s edge until the bottle tree bulged out of the darkness at them.

  Fence put both hands on its smooth bark and whistled under his breath. “I can well believe,” he said, “that where this tree is native, all the seasons are upsodown.”

  Ted rummaged cautiously in the hollow made by the bottle tree’s many trunks, and drew up Melanie’s sword by its jeweled hilt. It was not glowing.

  “I am tame,” said Fence, as Ted hesitated. “Pronounce.”

  “We all need to hold onto the sword,” said Ted, “and then somehow duck under this mess and come out the other side.”

  “We’re none of us so large as we might be,” said Fence, cheerfully. “Do you lead the way, and we’ll set the Lady Laura between us.” His voice faltered a little on Laura’s title, and Laura thought that Fence had almost forgotten that they were not his own royal children.

  They arranged themselves as he had said, wound their hands around the hilt of the sword, and ducked awkwardly under the bowed branches of the bottle tree. Then they were squelching over short grass that soaked Laura’s tennis shoes, and blinking in a gray light, and shivering in a straight, hard wind that whipped her hair back so fast it hurt as if Ted had pulled it.

  Compared to winter in Pennsylvania this was paltry. The grass was still bright green, almost the color of Melanie’s sword when that weapon chose to display its light; and in this colorless world, the grass seemed to glow itself. The squelchy land rolled away before them, up and down and up again in a towering slope touched here and there with shapely pale trees. Their bark was peeling off in long strips, as though the wind were tearing them to pieces. A fence, also shaking in the wind, and rattling a little, ran down the middle of the slope and then bent sharply away from them.

  “It isn’t just winter,” said Ted, tipping his head up at the gray sky and shaking the hair off his face. “It’s morning.”

  “That’s tidy,” said Fence, a little absently. “How late do your cousins arise?”

  “I don’t know, in the winter,” said Ted, and then, catching Laura’s appalled glance, “Oh, hell.”

  “School,” said Laura. “What day is it?”

  “By my reckoning,” said Fence, gently, “it is the fifth day of September in the four hundred and ninetieth year since King John threw o’er the Dragon King.”

  A red bird flew out of the bottle tree, circled the three of them, whistling, and took off over the hill. Well, thought Laura, that’s that.

  “That’ll fetch them,” said Ted, somewhat too smugly.

  Fence caught hold of Ted’s cloak. “What knowest thou?”

  “We keep being rescued by cardinals.”

  Fence let his breath out and shook the fold of the cloak a little. “What art thou?” he said.

  “Ask Claudia,” said Ted.

  A maniacal barking made itself apparent, the persistent yap of a collie. A black-and-white streak, flapping behind it a long yellow leash, shot down the hill and halted three feet away from them, growling like a cageful of tigers. Laura stared. Shan was a lazy dog who wouldn’t even run races with you.

  Fence stood quite still, keeping hold of Ted’s cloak. “Is this thy rescue?” he said.

  “It’s just Shan,” said Ted. “Good dog, Shan, good boy.” The dog, a nondescript, sharp-nosed, shaggy creature who had looked much more like a collie when he was a puppy, wagged his tail and went on growling. Laura supposed he remembered her and Ted, but didn’t care for Fence.

  Fence said, “Thy dog’s called Shan?”

  “It’s Ruth and Ellen and Patrick’s dog.”

  “They weren’t allowed to call him Prospero,” offered Laura.

  Fence turned and stared at her; Shan growled louder and Fence took no notice. “Prospero?” said Fence.

  “Prospero,” said Laura, bravely, “is a magician in a play.”

  “Thy play? Thou hast made him up also?”

  “No, William Shakespeare did.”

  “Shan!” yelled a distant and familiar voice.

  “Here they come,” said Ted.

  Three figures came over the hill, two short and one tall. Ruth was not wearing a skirt, as had been her wearisome custom when they played together, but she was, to Laura’s eyes, very oddly dressed in gray corduroy pants, pink legwarmers already splotched with mud, pink-and-gray running shoes, and many layers of shirts of pink or gray or white whose tails hung out at varying lengths and made her look as if she were wearing a jester’s costume. Laura thought she ought to tie bells to all the hems.

  Patrick and Ellen, on her heels, were dressed reassuringly in brand-new jeans—Aunt Kim must have noticed that the old ones were too small—battered red corduroy jackets, and dirty tennis shoes. Ellen had found, somewhere, a black wool beret like the velvet caps the pages wore in High Castle. Patrick had a blue stocking-cap falling out of his jacket pocket. Ellen’s and Ruth’s cloudy black hair tangled in all directions in the wind. Patrick’s pale brown, straight hair was only a little ruffled. All three of them wore bulging knapsacks.

  Ellen caught Laura’s glance immediately, with a look half of greeting and half of alert bewilderment. Patrick was so expressionless Laura knew he was upset. Ruth looked the way she used to if you burst into her room without knocking when she was writing her journal.


  “What are you doing here?” demanded Ruth, stopping next to the dog. Her harried glance brushed Fence, faltered, and settled firmly on Ted.

  Patrick got down on his knees in the wet grass and laid an arm across the dog’s back. Shan stopped growling. Ellen grinned at Fence, but Patrick did not look at any of them. Laura supposed that seeing Fence in his own back yard was upsetting all Patrick’s theories.

  “That’s a fine greeting,” said Ted to Ruth.

  “We’re going to miss the school bus.”

  “Ruth,” said Ellen. “They brought Fence. Forget about the school bus.”

  “You have to come back,” said Ted.

  “No way in hell,” said Patrick, still without looking up.

  “There’s a fine, open spirit,” said Fence. All three of them jumped at the sound of his voice.

  “Fence, is it really you?” said Ellen, peering at him from under her hat.

  “Turn that question on thyself,” said Fence, rather sharply.

  “Oh, hell,” said Ruth. “You read my letter.”

  “Wherefore writ, if not to be read?”

  “Well, but I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

  “It sounded fine,” said Ted.

  “It sounded stupid,” said Ruth. “I was in a terrible hurry.”

  “It was well enough,” said Fence.

  “Fence,” said Ruth, “I’m sorry.”

  “Thou hast said so already, in the letter,” said Fence, and smiled. “Be of good cheer. The fault’s not yours. But in good earnest we desire you back, to play your parts yet for a little while.”

  “Ellen has now missed her bus,” said Patrick, “and Ruth and I will miss ours in ten minutes.”

  “You’d better tell us,” said Ellen.

  It was beginning to rain, but nobody suggested finding shelter. They stood there with misty drops gathering on them while Fence told Ted and Laura’s story.