The Whim of the Dragon Read online

  “Good,” said Ellen, when he had finished. “Let’s do it. I knew it was wrong to leave.”

  “Good?” said Ruth. “Claudia can look at a piece of glass and make Randolph do what she likes, Claudia did make us do what she liked, and you say good?”

  “So let’s get her,” said Ellen.

  “You won’t make Ted fight Randolph?” said Ruth to Fence.

  “Stars in heaven, lady, why should I meddle so?”

  “Randolph’ll make Ted fight Randolph,” said Patrick.

  “I’ll strive to prevent him,” said Fence.

  “Well, I’m willing to risk it,” said Ted. “Do remember, can’t you, that the red man said everything we were afraid of would happen if we didn’t go back?”

  “It can’t all happen,” said Patrick. “You can’t kill Randolph if you aren’t there.”

  “Ruth’s letter told Randolph how to get here,” said Ted.

  Ellen stood up. “Well, let’s go,” she said.

  “I’m in the middle of an experiment,” said Patrick.

  “Does he have to come?” said Ruth to Ted. “If he was missing, wouldn’t that be an excuse to go after Claudia?”

  “We have been after Claudia,” said Fence, poking one arm out of his cloak and wiping rain off his forehead. Laura stared at the shift and glimmer of his starry sleeve, waiting for one of the points of light to swell into vision. Nothing happened. Fence went on talking, in a tone of wry patience. “We have accusations. Mind you that she tried to stab me on the stairs.”

  “Besides,” said Laura, “won’t your parents miss you and Ellen?”

  “Sure they will,” said Ruth, grinning maliciously. “Pat can explain to them.”

  “You better watch it,” said Patrick. “Our parents aren’t suspicious, but Ted and Laura’s are.”

  “That’s true,” said Ruth, sobering at once. “Mom just thought we’d grown and she hadn’t noticed until now; she’s been awfully busy trying to run this blasted farm. And we’d have to dye our hair green and put safety pins through all our finger-joints before Daddy would notice. But your mother called me Mary Rose, and your father called Patrick Thomas the Rhymer.”

  Laura thought that Patrick was about as unlike Thomas the Rhymer as anybody could get, and just managed to turn her laugh into a snort.

  “It isn’t funny,” said Ruth, undeceived. “They’ve read all the right books. They think we’ve been in Elfland, and that’s really not so far off the mark.”

  “It is,” said Patrick, in his most annoying voice, “about as far off the mark as you can get. Time stands still in Elfland and goes along as usual here. By that definition, this is Elfland.”

  “Well, it is for Fence,” said Laura.

  “Don’t think about it,” said Ruth, a little wildly, not to Fence but to the rest of them. “I just meant Patrick’s right. They’re suspicious.”

  “They were joking,” said Ted. “They do it all the time.”

  “Not just joking,” said Ruth. “Believe me.”

  “Well, okay, so it’s all or nothing,” said Patrick. “So persuade me to come back.”

  “Patrick,” said Ellen, “you can’t get anything done while we’re gone anyway, because we’ll have to fix the time again.”

  “I told you,” said Patrick, “we didn’t fix it last time.”

  “No, that’s right,” said Ted. “Laura and I left home at night, and when we got back home it was afternoon.”

  Patrick said, “We left here in the daytime, and when we got back it was night. We’d lost twelve or thirteen hours.”

  “Well, that’s not so bad,” said Ellen.

  “You’ve got a remarkably selective memory,” said Patrick. “Shall I recite for you what Dad said? And what Mom did?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ted. “The red man fixed the time for us, and I bet that holds for the whole planet.”

  “That’s really persuasive, Ted,” said Patrick.

  “What’s the matter with you?” said Laura. She had to say something violent to squash her impulse to run over that hill, or in whatever direction was necessary, and find her parents, and forget about adventure and philosophy and riddles. She went on, loudly, “So what if we get in trouble? Isn’t it worth it to save the Secret Country? Why don’t you worry about the rest of this when we’ve done the important stuff?”

  Ted looked at her; he knew what was wrong. “Well?” he said to Patrick. “What is the matter with us?”

  “You are soft in the head,” said Patrick. “I am practical. Why should I want to save the Secret Country?”

  Fence stared down at Patrick, who still knelt with his arm around the dog. “Consider it,” said Fence, in a light and very terrible voice, “the price of thy fencing lessons and thy room and board these three months.”

  “I’m not at all convinced,” said Patrick, perfectly coolly, “that you roomed and boarded anything except my imagination.”

  Laura felt a shiver go over her skin. When all this was only a game, Patrick had played Fence, and he had used just such a tone and just such a level look from cold blue eyes as he was turning on Fence now. Fence had an altogether less alarming face, but his demeanor made up for it.

  “The lunatic, the lover, and the wizard,” said Fence, “are of imagination all compact. What art thou, then, that setteth the housing of thine so low?”

  “Jesus Christ!” said Patrick, passionately. Nobody reproved him for swearing. “Don’t quote Shakespeare at me! All right. All right. I’ll come back. But I promise you, I am not leaving again no matter who doesn’t want what to happen until I have figured out what the hell is going on. Is that clear?”

  “Abundantly,” said Ruth, in her dryest tones.

  “And also,” said Patrick, “I want to test whether time stands still here while we’re in the Secret Country.”

  “Okay,” said Ellen. “You just take off your nice watch and leave it out in the rain, and we’ll come back tomorrow and see what time it says.”

  “It’s good to two hundred meters,” said Patrick, calmly. He unbuckled the strap and laid the watch down in the vivid grass, where it said, in evil red characters, 8:45.

  “Is it a bargain, then?” said Patrick, looking up at Fence.

  “Oh, of a certainty,” said Fence, still in that voice. “For I most earnestly desire these discoveries also.”

  “All right,” said Ted, whom this exchange seemed to have made extremely uneasy. “Send Shan home, Patrick, and let’s go.” Laura remembered other bargains and their outcomes, and didn’t blame him. He caught her glance, and shrugged resignedly, as their mother would do when their father got silly. Then he said to Fence, “Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 5

  IT was dark when they got back to High Castle. They had missed supper. Fence spoke to the yellow-haired boy who was stationed in the stables for just such emergencies, and then hustled them up the two hundred and eight steps to his rooms in the South Tower. Their way was lit by purple torches that made everybody look a little sick.

  Fence had added what Patrick would have called security precautions since Ted was last here on Midsummer Eve. Then Fence had used one plain key. This time he had one plain and two jeweled. He was slow with them, as if he were not yet used to the arrangement.

  Ted stood pressed against the cool stone wall with Laura and the others crowding the steps behind him, and considered the door itself. Its dark wood was carved with one of the puzzles of High Castle: eight scenes starting at twelve o’clock and proceeding clockwise to an enigmatic conclusion. They showed a young man with decided eyebrows talking to a wizard. Then, wearing a wizard’s robe himself, he captured or cajoled a cat, a dog, a horse, an eagle, and a unicorn. In the last scene, the unicorn was gone but all the other animals and the man stood looking at an object like a stylized sun. This story was repeated all over High Castle in carving and tapestry and even around the border of Fence’s dishes. But sometimes it had this ending, with the sun, and other time
s ended with an irregular patch like a flaw in the piece in question, from which all the animals were running away.

  Ted remembered that he was not playing Edward, who had known this story all his life. “Fence?” he said. “Who is that in the carving?”

  Fence pulled the last key out of the door and pushed it open. A rush of warm air laden with the smell of old ashes and snuffed candles slid past them.

  “That,” said Fence, leading them into his parlor, “is Shan, as you must well—” He broke off, and made a sign in the air with his hand. Light, good wholesome yellow light, bloomed from three lamps on the walls, and flames crept up under the logs in the fireplace. The fire caught better than it should have; there was no kindling.

  “Sorry,” said Ted to Fence.

  “I know it,” said Fence. “There’s no help.”

  “He looks like Shan, but our story about him is different.”

  The others surged into the room behind them, unwontedly quiet. Fence stood in the middle of his parlor, on the bearskin, and looked at Ted with a pained expression that verged on the desperate. “Is there no end to this?” he said.

  He ushered them to seats around the table, in the plain dark chairs with their blue cushions, Ruth and Ellen and Patrick on one side and Ted and Laura on the other. He sat down himself at one end of the table, with his back to the fire and his face to the door. Then he looked them over one by one, with the expression of somebody who is searching in the lost-and-found, among a dozen red mittens, for his own with the frayed right-hand thumb and the chocolate stain on the left cuff. Nobody would look at him except Ted.

  “So,” said Fence. “You’re very like them. But the copyist hath erred, here and there.”

  “Who is the copyist?” said Patrick.

  “Claudia,” said Laura.

  “Not Claudia alone,” said Fence. “She hath too few years, for so much knowledge. That she doth is forbidden, or not yet arrived at in the careful labors of the true wizards. Hath trod a hard path and a long, that would take the road less traveled by.”

  “And that,” said Ellen, as if she couldn’t help it, “has made all the difference.”

  “Stop showing off,” said Ruth, sharply.

  Fence looked at her quickly. “Showing off what?”

  “You sound to us,” said Ted, “as if you’re quoting poetry half the time. Not just you—not just thou, but all of you.”

  “This thy William Shakespeare was a poet, then, and I did presently recite from him?”

  “Yes; but you just recited from Robert Frost,” said Ruth.

  “I do not know,” said Fence, with considerable emphasis, “to read this riddle.”

  “Well,” said Ted, “that’s the least of our worries.”

  “Save that, ’til it be solved, we bear the millstone of Prince Patrick,” said Fence, quirking the corner of his mouth in the way he had.

  “Not prince,” said Patrick.

  “Amend me not,” said Fence. “Thou art the prince to all save me and Randolph, and mayhap some few others ’twere good to tell’t.”

  “What all,” said Ted, “do we have to do?”

  “Two matters strictly of the Hidden Land,” said Fence, looking to his right at Patrick, who looked blandly back at him but turned rather red, “we must not neglect, for they are pressing: the embassy to the Dragon King; and the messengers to Chryse and Belaparthalion, trying whether, in change for these swords of yours, they will put some rein on the plunging ambition of that prince.”

  “Can you do them without us?” said Ted, leaning forward a little to see beyond Laura’s head, which she had propped on both hands. Nobody seemed likely to care that she had her elbows on the table. “Because what we need to do is to track down Claudia and find out how she found us and brought us here and what the connection between our country and yours really is.”

  “We also,” said Laura, “need to find out who the red man is.”

  “And we need to get your kids back from the dead,” said Ellen, “so we can go home again.”

  Fence bit his lip, and then seemed to give up, and grinned. “All our ways may lie together. To discover the red man, ’twere best to read in the library in Fence’s Country. And that lies between here and the haunts of Chryse and Belaparthalion. To consult with the dead while being still alive, some must travel to the Gray Lake. And that lies between here and the realm of the Dragon King.”

  “That’s easy,” said Ellen.

  “Too easy,” said Patrick.

  “How so?” said Fence. “Power and knowledge are two, but as twin compasses are two; one makes no show to move, but doth, if th’ other do.”

  This baffling utterance, with which Fence seemed rather pleased, was accorded a blank silence. Ted realized that he, not Fence, had asked the last pertinent question. He looked at Fence, who appeared expectant.

  “I would like,” said Ted, “to get it into everybody’s head that it’s essential to go on pretending we’re the royal children. Is it true, Fence, that they say, ‘Walk not in the Hidden Land, it will take all you have and laugh you to scorn for having nothing?’”

  “Travel not,” said Ruth.

  “Oh, aye,” said Fence. “They say so. Fence’s Country and the Outer Isles do have a better welcome for strangers; but ’tis not as strangers that you’ll be chastised, if matters run amiss, but as usurpers.”

  “Usurpers do away with the rightful claimant,” said Patrick.

  “By some accounts, you have done so. If you have power o’er matters in this land, is not Claudia but another of those matters?”

  “But she wasn’t in our game at all,” said Ted.

  “Fence,” said Laura. “The night of the Banquet of Midsummer Eve, I asked you, who is that snake lady. And you said you thought I knew her. I didn’t.” Fence regarded her steadily, and she added, “We didn’t like her, either.”

  “Child,” said Fence, “fret not on me. But there are others will say, on the heels of such dissembling as the five of you have performed this summer, what is that, or any tale of thy ignorance, save another instance of’t?”

  Laura put her head down and stuck the end of one braid into her mouth. Fence turned his innocent gaze upon Ruth, who was scowling, and said, “My lady, thou in especial art endangered.”

  “Don’t I know it!” said Ruth.

  “Canst thou then think of putting off thy duties for a while?”

  “Well, I don’t mind,” said Ruth. “My duties would make it hard for me to go anywhere. But is it fair to Lady Ruth?”

  “If Lady Ruth should walk again where fair or unfair concerns her, I’ll see to her reinstatement,” said Fence.

  Ruth made a face. “Now I just have to manage Meredith.”

  “I’ll speak to her,” said Fence.

  “Thank you.”

  “Do we want to get cut off from the Green Caves like that?” said Patrick. “If the cardinals are minions of the Green Caves, and the Green Caves people are stingy about sharing their knowledge—” He looked at Fence, who nodded. “Well, then, unless Ruth is one of them, we may not have much chance of solving that part of the mystery.”

  Ruth said, “I don’t have to resign immediately.”

  “We’ll do’t when the time is right,” said Fence.

  There was another silence, broken by the sound of footsteps and breathing and a thump on the door as of somebody kicking it. Fence got up and unlocked it, and let in Randolph and the yellow-haired page, both carrying trays and panting. They set the trays at the end of the table. The boy started to fill mugs from a large jug, and Randolph said, “I thank thee, I’ll do the rest.” The page gave him a startled look and left.

  Randolph poured for all of them, with extreme care. It occurred to Ted that he wanted to defer the moment of greeting. Ted looked at Ruth, who was staring at the table; at Ellen, who was trying to catch Randolph’s eye because she was genuinely glad to see him; at Patrick, who was gazing fixedly at Randolph as Shan had stared at Fence. Ted didn’t blam
e Randolph for stalling.

  Randolph finally sat down at the other end of the table, with Laura on his right and Ruth on his left, his back to the door. He raised his mug. “To deception,” he said, “and to its confounding.” He drank without offering to click mugs with anybody. The rest of them drank too. It was the Secret Country’s version of lemonade, too full of cinnamon and nutmeg for Ted’s taste.

  Fence put his mug down and said, looking hard at Randolph, “In your true guises, you are all welcome to High Castle.”

  Randolph sat without responding. His hair and the dark blue of his clothes swallowed the lamplight; only his eyes, greener than Fence’s, the green of Ruth’s or Ellen’s, gleamed a little, and the golden contents of his goblet as he turned it between his palms. Ted suddenly realized that Randolph was wearing no jewelry. It had all been connected with his study of magic, and he was no longer Fence’s apprentice. Randolph finally said, in a much quieter voice than Ted was used to from him, “What others must we doom to this conspiracy?”

  Down the length of the gleaming table, over the plates of meat pies and cheese pies and spinach pies, over the bowls of grapes and peaches and the little hard yellow apples of the Hidden Land, Fence’s eyes met Randolph’s and held them. “Benjamin,” he said.

  And Randolph flinched. His voice was perfectly even. “Have we not broke sorrow enow to him to last a lifetime, without this burden also?”

  “Consider his lifetime,” said Fence. “I’ll tell him; don’t trouble yourself. Who besides?”

  “If there’s a learned pane in this window we piece together,” said Randolph, “ ’twere best have Matthew.”

  “That is to have Celia also,” said Fence.

  Randolph nodded.

  “What about Agatha?” said Laura.

  “They were very dear to her,” said Fence.

  “She doesn’t act like it!” said Ellen, in astonished tones.

  Fence looked at her briefly, but did not answer. Randolph, Ted realized, was acting as if he were having a private conference with Fence, and did not want to acknowledge the remarks of the five of them. Ted couldn’t blame him, but that did not make this treatment easier to take.