The Secret Country (39 page)

“I thought of a great way to put this one,” said Patrick into Ted’s ear. “ ‘Is King John/Putting us on?’ ”

Ted quelled him with a glare and managed not to giggle.

Conrad said,

 

 

“You know,” said Patrick, “they’re doing just what Randolph and Fence thought they shouldn’t.”

The unicorn said,

 

 

“You know,” said Ted, answering Patrick a little obliquely, “I don’t think the unicorns take this very seriously.”

“They don’t take anything seriously, if you look at their history,” said Patrick. “Ellie and her weird ideas.”

The lion turned its head and yawned at them, and Patrick was silent.

“Let the Third Riddler come forth,” said the huntsman.

Ruth came forward. No animals came with her. She did the unicorn a courtesy, and it inclined its head to her with a little chink of its collar. This pleased Ted immensely, and he saw that Patrick looked briefly smug.

“Who is Claudia, what is she?” said Ruth, and Patrick made a muffled snort. “Does your high court commend her?” finished Ruth, and sent Patrick a look almost as alarming as the lion’s.

The unicorn paused, flicking an ear. “Subtle, fair, and wise is she,” it said, and although its voice had no expression as human voices do, Ted could have sworn that somewhere in its answer there was a touch of delighted malice. “But none of ours did send her.”

A murmur rose from the crowd, and a number of animals snarled, whether to shut the people up or because they too found the answer odd, Ted did not know. He looked at Randolph. Fence had appeared beside him, and the two of them were carrying on a conversation with grimace and gesture. They both looked put out.

“ ‘Subtle, fair, and wise’?” demanded Ted of Patrick.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” said Patrick, gloomily.

“Hover through the fog and filthy air,” said Ted, completing the quotation.

They stared at one another, and the gaze of the lion did not stop them this time.

“You know,” said Ted, “there was an awful lot of fog and filthy air around before we locked her up.”

“Yes,” said Patrick, intently, and then shrugged. “Whatever that means.”

Ruth had made another courtesy and backed off. The unicorn stood up, shook itself and chinked its collar, and cast an indecipherable look upon the crowd. It leaped the fence, and was gone through the woods like a shaft of sunlight between cloud and drifting cloud. Ted looked around in some alarm, but the lion had disappeared.

CHAPTER 21

THE huntsman inclined his head to the crowd with a gesture like that of the unicorn. “Go to your feasting, then,” he said to them. “Meet we again next year?”

“Meet we again,” said the King.

The huntsman beckoned to his men. They moved into the thick of the forest. They went south, while the unicorn had gone north, but were gone almost as quickly as the unicorn. With their passing the quality of the light changed. It was still that of a clear summer day, just past noon, but it felt, at least to Laura, ordinary, as if it might have been in Illinois or Australia as well as in the Secret Country.

People began to chatter and laugh, and to move down an avenue of trees that had not been there before. They went in the direction the hunters had taken.

Laura had lost Ruth and Agatha in the crowd, so she hung back to wait for Ellen. But the hunt, it seemed, had not done with Ellen yet. Benjamin came up to where she stood by the empty circle of fence around the pomegranate tree. He led the white horse they had seen at the beginning of the hunt. Laura thought that, as horses went, it was beautiful, but after the unicorn it looked like a bad drawing.

Ellen seemed to think so too; she scowled at Benjamin and started to walk away. Laura hurried to intersect her path, tripped over a rabbit, and fell face first into a clump of brilliant red flowers. She sneezed.

“It is the honor due thee,” Benjamin said.

“For what?” demanded Ellen.

Laura sat up and watched them.

“Thou hast tamed the unicorn.”

Ellen opened her mouth, and shut it again. She looked as if she were remembering something, and the look stabbed Laura with jealousy as sharp as a splinter. Laura had hoped that the hunt would be even better than that morning, but she had barely seen the unicorn, let alone spoken to it. Knowing that she was a coward, she had admired equally Ruth’s refusal to be the hunt’s bait, and Ellen’s offer. But suddenly she thought that, if she herself had offered to be the bait, then she would be sitting there with that look of secret delight. Tears burned her eyes, but they were not the easy tears that turned to howls. Laura forced a swallow down her aching throat and stood up, grimly.

Benjamin made a stirrup of his hand, and Ellen stepped into it and swung herself astride the white horse. She petted its ear. “You poor thing,” she said.

Laura knew what she meant, but she was surprised when Benjamin did.

“She would not be as the unicorn,” said Benjamin.

He turned to lead the mare after the last of the hunting party, and Laura ducked behind a peach tree. She watched them out of sight, and set off to follow the unicorn.

Once she got out of the immediate area of the hunt, this was easy. The unicorn had left, in the brambly and branch-littered forest, a clean trail of flowers. Laura felt so fierce that she did not even mind stepping on them. Their trampled scent rose about her and made her dizzy. Even in the shade it grew hot, and sweat stung all her scratches.

It was extremely quiet except for the crackle and thud of her footsteps. All the animals in the forest seemed to have come to the Unicorn Hunt and stayed for the feast. After a time that probably seemed much longer than it was, she came to a real path, brown and beaten. The unicorn’s flowers grew on either side of it, so she followed it.

She was getting tired, and plodded along with her head down. It had certainly been a long time now. A wind began among the branches, swooped down, and blew a flurry of leaves past Laura, drying the sweat and blowing her hair into her eyes. She swiped it out of the way and looked up.

“Shan’s mercy!” she said. There was a sudden stillness in the forest, but she was too stunned to mind it.

All around her it was autumn. She did not know the names of the flowers that still bordered the path, but they were rust- and flame-colored, and so were the trees. The floor of the forest between them was piled with red and yellow and brown. Many trees already held bare black branches against a watery blue sky. The wind came back, a chill puff, and Laura shivered.

She looked along the brightly bordered path. Ahead, almost on the edge of her vision, rose a green hill topped with a wall or fence; the path led up the hill.

“Well,” said Laura, “it’s shorter to go on than to go back.” This was something Agatha often said to her and Ellen when they were tired of doing something and wanted to leave it unfinished.

The path led to an iron gate in a stone wall. The gate was heavy, but it opened outward. After she had tugged it the first few inches it swung wide suddenly, and she fell down the hill. The grass was soggy.

She trudged back up and went through the gate. Inside, making her blink after the thorny tangle of the forest, was a vast flat green space full of gravestones amid a riot of flowers. Some stones stood up, and some lay flat on the ground. Some were brilliant white, and some were gray, and some were green with moss.

Laura paused just inside the gate, biting her lip. This did not look like a place for unicorns. But it would be silly to go back without looking around. She trod sturdily across the close green turf. There were no walks here, no trees or bushes. Flowers were planted thick around each gravestone, but otherwise there was only the flat grass. Laura felt as if she were in the middle of a mosaic.

The first stone she came to had raw earth around it, and its flowers were less thick than those of its neighbors. It must be newer. Laura bent to look at the letters on the stone. She did not even recognize the alphabet, but a shiver crept up her backbone just the same. She turned away, and two rabbits shot across the grass.

Laura felt better; where there were animals, there might be unicorns. She methodically quartered the whole place, but nothing else moved, and the only marks on the grass were hers. She knew the letters on some of the stones, but the words they spelled made no sense to her.

Laura stood in the middle of the graveyard and thought. All she could decide was that she had gone the wrong way when she came to the path. She went back out through the gate and hauled at it unsuccessfully for a little while. She barked three knuckles, but she could not push it closed against the slope of the hill. Leaving it open made her feel that she was letting something soggy and unpleasant in from the forest, but there was nothing to be done about it.

Laura went back through the forest, faster than she had come. The wind was colder. She did not realize until she came to where the trail of flowers met the path how much she had expected it to be summer here. It was still autumn. The path did indeed run on both sides of the flower trail: Laura had turned right the first time, so now she took the other way.

After a few windings the path settled down beside the stream. Laura threw a few pebbles in, startling a school of silver fish, and tried whistling “The Minstrel Boy.” She still had not remembered why it was so familiar.

Nothing happened. Laura, with a vague idea of seeing farther, climbed a willow tree. Once there, she sat stolidly. The water mumbled along below her, the yellowing willow leaves hissed and fluttered. But not a bird, not a squirrel, not a rabbit moved or spoke anywhere. The wind died and the air sat like a damp blanket on her head.

She looked in all directions, but saw no white elusive shapes. She found that she was exasperated, and was pleased not to be afraid. A certain amount of thought produced the conclusion that, if she could not find the unicorns, she would have to make them find her. She had thought that the “Minstrel Boy” tune should do this. But as long as she was whistling . . . she imitated, as best she could, the song of a cardinal, and almost fell out of the tree as something landed pricklingly on her shoulder.

“Please,” she said to the cardinal, feeling not at all foolish for sitting in a tree in the middle of a wet woods and talking to a bird, “I’m looking for the unicorns.”

The cardinal rose from her shoulder and flew away. When she started to climb down to follow it, it came back and scolded her severely, so she stayed where she was. The cardinal darted off and returned in a very little time, not with a unicorn, but with Lady Claudia.

Ruth had said that Shan’s Ring would keep Claudia out of the way for a year and a day, but here she was. Laura found herself more resigned than surprised. It was just like Claudia. Then she scowled. Maybe it was not this fall, but next fall.

Claudia was collecting plants from the waterside and noticed neither the cardinal nor Laura. Laura was just as happy not to be noticed, but she felt she should trust the cardinal.

“Good afternoon,” she called, feeling foolish.

Claudia, with no evidence of surprise, gave Laura a smile that made her feel like a mirror Claudia was looking into, and came gracefully along the stony path. She was not dressed for walking, and wore slippers, not boots, but she seemed perfectly comfortable. Laura, whose hunting clothes were not elegant at their best and had suffered from the hunt and her subsequent ramblings, stopped feeling like an adventurer and began to feel rude and rumpled.

“Art thou stuck?” Claudia asked her, increasing the feeling.

“No,” said Laura, “I can see more from up here.” Claudia’s husky and insinuating voice, so strange in the wet and prickly forest, was familiar to her, but she did not know why. Ellen, she remembered, had recognized it, too, at the banquet.

“What wishest thou to see?” asked Claudia, looking straight up at her and sounding so like a fortune-teller that Laura shivered unexpectedly and again almost fell out of the tree.

“I was hoping to see a unicorn,” she said.

Claudia seemed amused. “It is too late in the year, mild autumn though this is,” she said. “They are all gone south for the winter.”

Laura was both disappointed and appalled. Unicorns should not migrate like robins; they should not have to pay attention to the weather. Claudia’s voice still nagged at her, but she could not place it. I must be going crazy, she thought, I keep recognizing things I can’t remember.

“Well, I was hoping,” she said.

Claudia shrugged. “I must be going on before the forest dries more,” she said. Her voice was not as eerie in its familiarity as the tune of “The Minstrel Boy,” but Laura had had enough of it.

“I’ll just sit here awhile longer,” she said.

Claudia nodded and went on her way.

Laura looked up and saw the cardinal a few branches above her, looking smug.

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

The cardinal beeped at her.

She looked down, and there was a unicorn standing in the water and drinking, with no more noise than the stream made going over the mossy rocks.

Laura’s first feeling was not relief or pleasure, but an outrage directed at Claudia for lying to her. Then she sat and watched the unicorn. It was browsing in the plants that Claudia had been gathering. The water where it stood was flashing with fish. Rabbits stood up along the banks, five squirrels ran down Laura’s tree, and hundreds of birds sat above her, singing. She looked over the heads of the rabbits and saw two stags standing among the trees. She looked back to the unicorn. Six butterflies shot out of the bushes and made a dance around its horn. Laura stared; it was too late for butterflies.