The Hidden Land (29 page)

“Fence said there was a spell of finding and returning on it,” said Laura.

“And it seems upon thee as well,” said a husky voice behind them.

They turned around. Claudia stood on the porch of the house. She had a broom in her hand and a black cat at her feet. Like the ivory unicorn, she seemed too bright for her setting. She wore a red-and-white checked gingham dress that suited the house and yard well enough, but did not suit her at all.

Laura pulled on Ted’s arm. “Run,” she whispered. “Or she’ll do it now, what I saw in my vision.”

Ted had barely been able to hear her, but Claudia laughed. “That hath been done already,” she said. “That was but thy shadow I buried. Thou art more use to me above the earth, for all that thy flight from thy dream frets me sorely.”

“You mean it wasn’t real after all?” said Laura.

“Oh, aye, ’twas real, fear not,” said Claudia, with a most unpleasant glee in her voice; it made Ted like the glee of the unicorns better. “Soon thy horses will come back riderless to High Castle, and the page with thy missive to Fence will reach the top of the two hundred and eight steps. All things continue in their paths. Except my plans,” she said, “which the two of you have very handily thwarted. Now I have a fancy to know how and why two mere younglings from a world without sorcery, whom I thought to bend easily to my purposes, have so easily bent me to theirs. Will you not come in?”

She smiled beautifully as she asked this question. Ted, wanting more than anything else to run, came slowly forward and climbed the steps of the porch; and Laura came with him. If this is magic, thought Ted, I don’t blame Patrick for not believing in it.

The house was cool and smelled of cloves and cinnamon. Ted thought of the West Tower in High Castle. They followed the swish and rustle of Claudia down a long hall hung with odd dark pictures. In the middle of it glimmered a purple waterbeast, making a noise like a distant faucet dripping. It looked far stranger in this modern hallway than it ever had on the cold stones of High Castle. Laura stopped dead. Ted began to edge by the creature, but Claudia laughed and said something to it, and it ran in runnels through the polished floorboards and was gone.

They went on down the hall, to a doorway where another black cat sat. Claudia pushed the door open, and the cat graciously preceded them into the next room.

It was a sun porch running the whole width of the house at the back, and its three outside walls were all windows. From those of the right-hand wall they could see Claudia’s weedy side yard and the neighbors’ rosebushes and two toddlers covering themselves with mud. But the windows of the left-hand wall looked out upon the view Laura and Ellen had had from their bedroom window at High Castle: the glassy lake, the slopes of forest where they had hunted the unicorn, the insubstantial mountains and the high western sky. And each small diamond pane of each window of the back wall held a different picture.

Ted stared, and blinked, and stared again. Some of the scenes were those they had seen on the tapestries in the East Tower, when they solved the Riddle of Shan’s Ring. But these were not woven; these were real. He bent forward to look more closely.

Claudia laughed, more pleasantly this time. “You see,” she said.

“They’re moving,” said Laura.

Ted walked right up to one of the windows and put his hand on the glass and pressed his nose to it. It gave off a faint warmth that was not altogether pleasant. He stared down from a great height onto a vast flat field whereon the small figures of men struggled with one another and with strange shadowy shapes shot with fire. He squinted, trying to see more clearly, and the height seemed to diminish. One piece of the battle grew in his vision.

He watched his sister, her sword flaming blue, kill the creature that had killed him. He moved over a pane and saw a thin young man with black hair and decided eyebrows sitting in a vast field of goldenrod, pulling his boots on. His face was dazed and his hands shook. He must be Shan. He looked too much like Randolph. Ted moved over another six inches, and watched himself and Patrick, on the lawn beside the Pennsylvania farmhouse, mime the last fight between Prince Edward and Lord Randolph. He regarded the figures with a practiced eye and was appalled.

“They don’t know what they’re doing,” he said; and blanched. Indeed they had not known what they were doing.

“But I know,” said Claudia.

“Do you make things happen?” whispered Laura.

Claudia laid a long hand upon the pane where Ted had seen the battle. “Here in the Hidden Land I can but watch,” she said. The hand moved to the pane with Ted and Patrick. “Here, in your place, I can move matters. In the same way, here in your place you can but watch, but in the Hidden Land you can move. And,” she said, “if I move aught from here to here,” turning her hand from Pennsylvania to the Desert before the Mountains, where the battle with the Dragon King’s army played itself out again, “then in a little measure may I move the matters and minds of my own country as well. Wherefore,” she said, “having moved the five of you to my country, I gained a measure of power over that you walked on, and those you spoke to, and that you handled.”

Ted, struggling with a sense of outrage so violent that it threatened to prevent speech, said at last, “How did you move us?”

Claudia took from a table a round mirror like the one Fence had used the night she stood on his stairs with a knife. “With this,” she said, “one may look abroad, in time or distance. Having seen what would befall in my country, I bent your thoughts to enact it, that it might be familiar to you when you came upon it.”

“You mean we didn’t even make it up?”

“Too much you made up,” said Claudia, with a flash of anger. “That talent of mind that in my country turns to sorcery, in yours turns to this making up; and hard put to it was I to turn your thoughts to my desires. The sorrows you have had you brought on your own heads. Now, the strong-minded are a trouble; but the weak-minded avail me not. Wherefore I ask you to join freely with me, and be my companions not my playing-pieces.”

Ted and Laura stared at her; Ted was speechless with rage. Laura looked stunned.

“I have spoken freely with you,” said Claudia. “Will you not therefore favor me with the tale of your power and your plans, that you could so neatly check one to whom all the wizards of the Hidden Land are but green apprentices?”

Ted found himself wishing he could answer her. There might be worse things than to be her companions. He considered her glowing face, her smooth black hair, her eyebrows arched like the ears of a cat, her clever eyes. He remembered his dream, of having tea with Claudia and of being offered by her all the castles of the Secret Country, and the glory of them.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

Claudia, misunderstanding him, turned to the window again. “Come, then,” she said. “Look and listen.” Ted and Laura, still pulled by whatever spell she had used to bring them into her house, came and stood beside her, and peered into the diamond she pointed to.

“Time now flows for us as for them,” she said, “since you have removed your spells. Here is what befalls in the Hidden Land.”

Fence sat in his living room before the cold fireplace, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. A breeze from the narrow windows stirred his untidy hair. Someone knocked on his door. (Ted and Laura both jumped.) Fence lifted a hand, and the door swung open. One of the yellow-haired boys whom they had seen playing in the sun the day Fence came back, and later enacting the part of the eagle in the coronation play, Matthew’s son John, walked into the room. He was red, and breathing hard.

“My lord, a message from the Lady Ruth,” he said between gasps, and held a folded paper out to Fence.

Fence took it, turned it over, and quirked his mouth. Ted wondered what seal Ruth had used.

“Sit you down and have somewhat to refresh you,” Fence said absently, and opened the letter. His fingers tightened on it; he sat up straight; he leaped to his feet as he read.

“Randolph!” he shouted, and ran out the door. They could hear his footsteps receding in the echoing stair. The yellow-haired page gaped after him, shrugged, and reached for the wine bottle.

“So,” said Claudia. “Now, the Lady Ruth, who is of your country, whereof I may move its members, hath spoken to this page. Wherefore—” she said three odd words under her breath, and moved her hand before the little diamond pane.

They saw John, standing in the Banquet Hall, looking after Ruth, who ran across it and plunged out the door.

“To Fence’s Tower,” said the page, unhappily. He stood frowning, and began to shrug. In a moment he would resign himself and make the climb.

Claudia said three more words under her breath. The page’s face brightened, and he went up stairs and through passages until he came to the Mirror Room. Randolph sat there, just as Fence had, his elbows on his knees and his head buried in his hands. He looked up when the page burst in, but so calmly that Ted shivered. Randolph looked as if nothing would ever make him jump again.

“My lord, I have a letter for the Lord Fence,” said John, “but I sought him first in other places than his high rooms.”

“He was but lately here,” said Randolph.

Claudia muttered again, and Randolph’s face changed, just a little. Ted, in a burst of illumination like and unlike his remembrance of fencing and flowers, understood. Claudia had made the page think of seeking Fence elsewhere than in his high tower. She had made Randolph’s face change: what he said next, she would have made him say. Ted, in the out-bursting of an intolerable outrage, put his fist through the diamond pane.

It gave before his hand like cloth, not glass; but the sound it made was like smashing crystal. It broke outward, with a flash and a brilliance like that of the shattered Crystal of Earth. Behind it was a diamond of darkness.

“How dare you!” shouted Ted.

How dared she, how dared he, how dared Laura. All of them had done this. Sitting in a summer meadow, sequestered in the dusty attic during a thunderstorm, fishing in the scummy pond, year by year, they had hammered out the fates of others. Fence is so young, he surprises everybody with his wisdom; Fence is Randolph’s best friend; the King is very stubborn; Randolph poisons his wine; Edward is a milksop, but when his father dies he knows what he has to do; should he kill Randolph in the Council Chamber—no, let’s make it the rose garden, and we can use ours. And Claudia, you had to believe, had sat here in this house, turning their thoughts just a little, this way or that. Once she had seen what was to be in the Hidden Land, she must have worked on all of them, his sister and his cousins and himself, as she had just now worked on John and Randolph. And they in their turn, by means even Claudia did not know, had also worked on Fence, and Randolph, and William, and Edward, making them what they were, sealing their doom. But Claudia had known what she was doing, and they had not.

Ted put cold hands to his hot face, and felt suddenly that the air was the right weight again and his blood flowing as it ought. His limbs were his own again; the spell was gone. He could run from here, or smash more glass, or—

Claudia, who had been regarding the ruin of her wall with no sign of dismay, opened her mouth, and Ted hit her as hard as he could in the stomach. Claudia doubled up, gasping. Then he kicked wildly at the wall of windows. The air was full of light; the room rang with violent sound; and from the blackness where the windows had been tongues of red and green flame began to lick upward. Claudia straightened up and shouted, in no tongue they knew.

“Run!” yelled Laura, pulling at Ted’s arm.

Ted picked up Claudia’s mirror and hurled it through the view of the lake and the Enchanted Forest; and there came a noise and a shaking as if the house were coming down around their ears.

Ted and Laura ran, past a hissing cat and a wailing one, out the open door, down the porch steps, across the untended lawn. They dove through the gap in the hedge, staggered to their feet, and ran as hard as they could go. They were not many blocks away when they heard the wail of sirens.

Ted stopped and looked back.

“Don’t!” said Laura, and they ran on.

When Laura had fallen down for the third time, she agreed to stop, and they sat down on a bench at a bus stop, wheezing.

“I guess we fixed her,” said Laura.

“I hope so,” said Ted.

Laura took the ivory unicorn out of her pocket, and they looked at it. Its green eyes stared through them, enigmatic and unnatural. But something in its posture suggested the inhuman glee of the unicorns they had known.

“If we ever start forgetting, and thinking we imagined it,” said Laura, “or if Patrick tries to tell us any more about hallucinations when we see him next summer, we can look at this.”

“These fragments have we shored against our ruins,” said Ted; and as he spoke, felt the back of his mind, whence he had learned fencing moves and the names of flowers and quotations such as that, close up suddenly. Edward was gone.

“What?”

“It was a stupid thing to say. What about that ice cream?”

Laura shrugged. They sat on for a little in the hot air. A bus roared past, sweeping them with a cloud of evil-smelling grit and rattling the squashed paper cups and abandoned candy wrappers at their feet. Two young women went by; Laura recognized their makeup as a type her father had called “anguish moist and fever dew.”

“Ted,” she said, “I don’t suppose you’d rather you’d killed Randolph and stayed?”

“Laura!”
Ted, perilously close to wishing that very thing, stood up. “Let’s go get the ice cream, to strengthen us against the ordeal that lies ahead.” They might as well remember how to play. They would need all the fragments they could muster.

Up in the soggy air a cardinal whistled, clear and piercing.

Laura jumped up.