The Hidden Land (15 page)

“Claudia wasn’t there, was she?”

“No.”

Trumpets blew around them.

“I have to go,” said Patrick. “Have you got your sword?”

Laura nodded, and went back to Ellen and Agatha to be scolded for tearing her clothes.

It took much longer to march to the Well of the White Witch than it had taken to ride there. Laura began by being grateful that they were not riding horses, but a few hours into the morning her knee began to bother her.

“Why didn’t they bring the horses?” she snarled at Ellen.

“Horses are afraid of dragons,” said Ellen.

Laura, thinking that that was very sensible of the horses, put her hand to the hilt of the sword and wondered if it would take them home.

They reached the Well of the White Witch at around breakfast time, according to Laura’s stomach. The Secret House sat lumpily on its hill in the sun, and the light gleamed off its many windows.

Laura blinked and was caught. The spark of sun on glass shrank to a pinpoint surrounded by shadows. The pinpoint came closer, bobbing oddly. Claudia’s face sprang up behind it, and Laura realized that she was carrying a candle down a flight of steps. She had something over her shoulder. She came forward, and the candlelight showed a cellar. Its floor was of great blocks of stone, like the floors at High Castle. Two of these had been propped up. Darkness gaped below them. Claudia tumbled her burden onto the floor and turned to set the candle on a shelf.

“Shan’s mercy!” said Laura. As Claudia moved the candle, it had shown Laura her own face in a tangle of hair on the cellar floor. She looked like a rag doll.

“What, what?” said Ellen’s voice beside her. “Don’t say that, Agatha’ll hear you. Did you stub your toe?”

Patrick came up behind and took each of them by an elbow. Laura screeched, and then stood dumbly shivering.

“Shhh!” said Patrick. He drew them behind a supply wagon, out of Agatha’s range. She was unpacking something from another wagon, but kept glancing around for them.

“Ted says Randolph says we have to stay here long enough to tell the Well what we’re doing—”

“What?” said Ellen.

“That’s what he said. And eat some breakfast. So look. Ruthie has to help with the Well. But the minute that’s over, you guys slip away and meet us by the wooden bridge, over in the trees, remember? Don’t forget the swords.”

“Are we going home?” said Laura. Oh, God, she thought, let the swords work.

“Well, I don’t think we decided. But we have to find out if it’s possible.”

Ellen jogged Laura’s elbow. “Come on, let’s get close to the Well so we can see Ruthie.”

Laura came with her, hugging her elbows.
Mother, mother, make my bed/Make for me a winding sheet/Wrap me up in a cloak of gold/See if I can sleep.
They didn’t play that when they thought she could hear it, and they didn’t sing it at all. But she had heard. Patrick tagged along with them. They sat in the dry brown grass a few feet from the Well, and examined it.

“Still looks wrong,” said Ellen. “I can’t get over that pink.”

Laura looked up the hill she had rolled down, and then squinted sideways at the house. In case they were not going home, she had better see just what Claudia was up to.
She set him in a golden chair/She gave him sugar sweet.
Laura stared at the mullioned windows, the odd sprouting round towers with their drapes of ivy, the red-tile roof going in humps like somebody’s drawing of the ocean, until her eyes watered. But she saw nothing except what was there.
She laid him on a dressing-board / And stabbed him like a sheep.

A trumpet blew, and Laura jumped. There was a solid circle of people around the Well now. The trumpeter stood on the other side of it from them. Behind him came a line of people in white, mostly women, but with one or two boys. They blocked Laura’s view, and everyone else was standing formally, so she stood up, too. After a moment Patrick and Ellen joined her.

Each person in white carried a wooden bucket with a rope. The first three took the lid off the Well and leaned it against the side. Patrick and Ellen and Laura looked at each other, remembering their first meeting in this country. The first woman lowered her bucket into the Well and then spoke for some time in the infuriating, almost-sensible language Laura had heard at the King’s funeral. She heard Ellen’s indignant muttering beside her.

The woman took a ring from her finger and dropped it into the Well, talked for a little longer, and raised the dripping bucket.

“Ruthie can’t do that by herself,” whispered Patrick.

“She has to,” said Ellen.

The woman peered into her bucket and seemed satisfied. She carried it over to a group of pages, who dipped into it with a silver dipper and began to fill silver cups and hand them around to the crowd.

One by one the people in white walked over the short dry grass to the Well, and lowered a bucket, tossed in a ring, said a phrase or two, peered into the bucket, took it to the pages, and became part of the crowd. Ruth did all these things as if she were buying a box of cookies at the corner grocery: except that when she peered into her bucket her eyes got big and she made a muffled and not very dignified squeak. After the pages had emptied her bucket she put her hand down into it, brought it up with the fist clenched, and searched the crowd with her eyes.

She found Laura and Ellen and Patrick, and came toward them as fast as her long skirt would let her. Nobody else seemed to notice her.

“Where’s our water?” demanded Ellen.

“They’ll get to you,” said Ruth. She breathed as though she had been running. “Look at this.” She opened her hand. On her damp and grubby palm there lay, its gilt flaking off to show dull gray and its stone scratched and cloudy, the little dime-store ring she had given the Well on their first day in this country.

Laura’s breath went out of her. Even before the dull gleam of the cracked gilt blossomed into vision, she felt a swift conviction of disaster. The vision did not comfort her. She had a brief frozen glimpse of Claudia, and the man who looked like both Fence and Randolph, fighting with knives in a swirl of wet leaves. Then Ellen pulled at her and they were all pushing through the crowd to the woods.

“Laurie, have you got your sword?” said Patrick, in the tone of someone who is not asking for the first time.

“Sure,” said Laura. “Ruthie, what does that ring mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Ruth, viciously pushing between a plump man in leather and a tall woman in white. “But,” she added as they gained the edge of the woods, “I feel kicked out.”

“Yes,” said Laura; and she was not sorry. She patted the hilt of the stolen sword, and wished there had been a way to say good-bye to Fence and Randolph.

They tramped hollowly across the wooden bridge and scrambled along the edge of the stream toward the house. Laura tripped twice—the sword’s weight put her off balance—but did not fall into the water.

“Where’s Ted?” she said after the second of these mishaps.

“Randolph was talking to him,” said Patrick. “Ellie and I can test our sword anyway. Our bottle-tree is just the other side of the house.”

They went along through the coolness to the clump of bottle-trees. Even in her horror and bewilderment, Laura was fascinated by them. They looked as if they had been made, probably by a mad sculptor, rather than grown. Patrick and Ellen floundered about under their bulging trunks and got thoroughly scratched, but the sword took them nowhere except to the other side of the clump. They made Laura try with their sword, and then with her own, and got nowhere still. Neither sword made her arm prickle, but even in the sunlit forest their blades glowed faintly.

They went back to the bridge and found a highly irritated Ted awaiting them. He took the news about the swords and the bush with equanimity, but when Ruth showed him her gimcrack ring he looked appalled.

“Something here has found us out,” he said.

“Well, I don’t suppose it can tell anybody else,” said Patrick, “and anyway, it wouldn’t have to know anything except that that isn’t the right kind of ring. Look, let’s see if either sword will get anybody through the hedge.”

“I guess we’re lucky it’s not worse,” said Ted, as they slithered along the bank again.

“What’s not worse?” said Patrick.

“Well, Ruthie isn’t really a sorcerer of the Green Caves, and she did draw water from that Well. Could have been a lot worse.”

“I did lose my Ring of Sorcery, though,” said Ruth.

Ted stopped dead. Ellen bumped into him, and Laura fell over Ellen. “Oh, God,” he said, ignoring the indignant cries and scrabblings behind him, “does that mean you can’t bring me back from the dead?” Laura stopped trying to get up, and listened.

“I don’t think so,” said Ruth. She scowled. “Of course not,” she said, more strongly. “I’ve never seen any of the Green Caves people use theirs to do magic. It’s a symbol, and it can be a defense against—well, it can be a defense. But nobody uses it for any of the spells I’ve been taught. It’s like an ID card. We have to show it for a ceremony.”

“Well,” said Ted, “there won’t be any ceremonies ’til after the battle and we’ll think of something by then. Come on.”

No matter who crawled under the hedge with which sword, it was still the Secret Country on the other side. These swords would take nobody home.

“Well,” said Ted, “that’s that.”

They stood looking at one another. Patrick seemed indignant, Ellen cheerful, Ruth thoughtful, and Ted worried. Laura found herself wanting to try the swords again, in the way she would want to look again for a lost shoe which just had to be there. She wondered if she could sneak away and go back to High Castle. She would probably get lost, and it would be galling to have to ask for an escort, not to mention explaining herself to all the people back there who had wanted to go to the battle but were obliged to stay home. Besides, Claudia was at High Castle. Better to be as far as possible from Claudia and the Secret House.

Nobody had anything to say, and they began to drift back toward the camp. Oh, well, thought Laura. Maybe Ruth can bring
me
back if Claudia kills me. And that was not part of the story, so perhaps they could go home before it happened. Tripping on the first plank of the wooden bridge and catching herself with a hand on the rail, she thought that she would not like to be killed even if Ruth could bring her back. She wondered if Ted felt the same way.

They had missed their breakfast, and were all five scolded by Agatha.

“Well,” said Ruth, as the army reformed itself and they had to return to their places, “at least she didn’t say anything about Ted and me.”

“Maybe she’s on your side,” said Ellen.

The army swung a little to the west to cross a larger bridge than the wooden one. They took an amazingly long time to get across. Then they settled down to walk the lumpy and thinly forested lands behind the Secret House. There was a road of sorts, not as good as the one that led north from the Well to Fence’s Country. At first Laura saw houses and fields of grain and cows grazing, but as they went on south the signs of habitation dwindled and vanished, and the land grew hillier and wilder-looking.

Laura’s knee gave out completely after a few hours, and Agatha put her in a wagon among the bedding and tents, with Ellen for company. Most of the army was ahead of them, which made it rather dusty where they were. But to see the long line glinting with color and sun on metal was worth a little dust. Laura and Ellen looked at one another, and Ellen grinned.

“This,” said Ellen, “is an adventure.”

And for all her fears of what might happen after, Laura thought so, too.

T
HEY came to the end of the hills that evening, and made their first night’s camp just outside the last forest, on the edge of a plain that seemed to Laura to go on forever. Supper at Agatha’s fire was dull. Ellen tried to get her to talk about being Queen’s Counselor, but Agatha acted as if the request were an insult. Laura could not see how anyone who had ever been a Queen’s Counselor could sit around a fire at the edge of the woods and talk about sewing, but Agatha did it. Laura and Ellen gave each other speaking looks until that was boring, too. Before they could fall asleep or do something desperate, a boy about their age came to say that the King wanted them. Laura still went cold when she heard that. She and Ellen got up and followed the boy to Ted’s fire. He and Patrick and Matthew and Randolph and Fence were there.

Fence turned out to be a good storyteller, and Randolph could play something like a recorder, which sounded much better than most of the instruments in High Castle. Matthew, to Laura’s immense surprise, could sing, which he did at Fence’s request when, after six stories, Fence’s voice began to give out.

The first song he sang, she did not know. But at the first notes from the recorder, she saw Patrick, on Ellen’s other side, shoot upright from his lounging position, scattering Ellen and Fence with dry leaves. Laura looked quickly at Ted, who was on her other side, but almost on the other side of the fire as well, next to Randolph. He was frowning.

The song’s tune was sprightly; its words otherwise:

 

Patrick poked at Ellen and whispered.

“Shut up,” said Ellen, a little too loudly.

Fence, sitting cross-legged in his wizard’s robe just beyond Patrick, gave them all a quelling glance. They subsided. Laura wanted to hear the song, in any case; Patrick would have to wait.