The Whim of the Dragon (11 page)

Ruth stuck her feet, which had gone to sleep some time ago, ungracefully out in front of her. “Oh,
Lord
,” she said. She had thought the cardinals were servants of the Green Caves. The Green Caves people, however mysterious and testy, were benevolent. The Red Sorcerers were another thing entirely. Several centuries ago, they had made themselves so unpopular that the quarreling, backbiting, bitterly independent members of the other three schools had ganged up on them and tossed them out of the middle lands. Red Sorcerers were said to infest the seacoast countries, and to be allowed grudgingly in the Outer Isles. But not in the Hidden Land.

But Claudia wore red. Ruth jumped up, scattering books; and then made herself sit down again. Fence and Randolph must know this already. And Benjamin; what had Benjamin said to Ted? “I would not come between the cardinal and its charges. If thou art one.” Those were not the words of someone who had discovered that the messengers of an outcast school of sorcery were abroad in his adopted country. And Randolph had said to Patrick, when a cardinal’s interruption saved him from having to practice fencing, “I knew ’twas folly to allow rival magics in this castle.” But the rival magics were the Green Caves and the Blue Sorcery. And these rooms were for Dwarves, who were not Red Sorcerers; and yet there was a cardinal on the hearthrug.

“You are about as dumb as they make them,” Ruth said aloud. There was no need to sneak around like this. All she had to do was ask Fence and Randolph.

Except that Fence and Randolph either had not known or had not wanted to tell her. To her suggestion that she prowl around a little, trying if she might discover more about the cardinals, they had returned only the bland silence that implies consent.

“Jerks,” said Ruth, bitterly. She shoved the three books back into their place, stood up, and, leaning on the marble mantelpiece with its useless candles in their silver holders, she said, “O’Driscoll drove with a song / The wild duck and the drake / From the tall and the tufted reeds / Of the drear Hart Lake. / And he saw how the reeds grew dark / At the coming of night tide, / And dreamed of the long dim hair / Of Bridget his bride.”

And walked, with the brisk thoughtless stride of habit, across the room, and stretched her arm up as far as she could, and tipped down a thin volume minus its binding, tied up with blue ribbon.

All of the books were copied by hand; the Secret Country had not yet discovered the glories of moveable type. The copyists, for the most part, had a tidy and invariable script; you often forgot, reading it, that somebody had painstakingly traced every letter with the sharpened quill of a goose feather. But this book was written in longhand, rather cramped and spiky. Ruth sat down in the nearest chair and began to read.

It began in the midst of a sentence. “. . . air is fulle of Voyces,” it said. The spelling was abominable here, too, but it was consistent. If the writer spelled “only” as “onlie,” he did so every time.

Ruth found neither enlightenment nor much entertainment in this work; but she plodded through all of it. “To banish such Voyces,” she read, “it is above all Else necessarie that thou banishest wordes from the threshold of thy mind and heart. These Voyces do gain their powre from chance wordes thy mind or mouth shall let fall.”

As she read on, it seemed likely that it was some lesson of the Blue Sorcerers; it spoke of the habits of cats and dogs and horses and eagles, and how to address them with one’s Inmost Voice. That subject exhausted, the writer began a dissertation on the nature of enchanted weapons, and ended suddenly in the middle of a paragraph.

“Bother!” said Ruth, and slammed the book back into its place. There was nothing in its vicinity that looked like what had come before or after it. “Well,” said Ruth, “let’s hope third time pays for all.” She scowled at the rug; she was running out of poetry. She cast around in her memory, and grinned. “Egypt’s might is tumbled down / Down a-down the deeps of thought; / Greece is fallen and Troy town, / Glorious Rome hath lost her crown, / Venice’ pride is naught. / But the dreams their children dreamed / Fleeting, insubstantial, vain, / Shadowy as the shadows seemed, / Airy nothing, as they deemed, / These remain.”

And thoughtlessly she took from the table before her, from under five or six tumbled volumes, a fat black book stamped with gold lettering:
On the Mingling of Sorceries as They Had Been Paints on a Palette, its Benefits and Disasters.

“Well, hallelujah!” said Ruth. Having no hat, she flung her handkerchief into the air and, when it fell back down onto her head, burst out laughing.

Fence did not laugh. Fence, whom Ruth sought over all the first two levels of High Castle and finally found, resignedly, in his own room at the top of his two hundred and eight steps, was appalled. He knew the book, but he had not known that the sorcerers of the Green Caves possessed a copy. Nor had he known that the short history of the Dwarves existed, or that the origins of his own knowledge might be as those red volumes claimed. It was hard to say which discovery upset him more.

“I’d thought there was one copy only,” he said, holding the fat black book in one hand and absently pouring wine for Ruth with the other.

Ruth pushed her glass under the effervescent pale stream and said, “Thank you, that’s enough. Why are you so surprised? Didn’t you tell us that those purple water-things were the result of combining Green and Blue sorcery?”

“No,” said Fence, putting the bottle down and looking up sharply, “you told us.”

“You didn’t deny it,” said Ruth.

“It’s true,” said Fence, paging through the book. “But look you, we had thought that was the only instance of such meddling, for that the results were so ill. Claudia’s knife wherewith she made to stab me below was also of that combination, wherefore we knew her to be renegade. But that the cardinal began as the Red Magicians’ servant is ill news, and fresh. More’s amiss than Claudia.” He shut the book. “Read you aught else?”

Ruth described the fragment bound in blue ribbons. Fence’s face darkened. “That,” he said, “is the journal of Shan. If they came by it honestly, they had given it into our keeping.” He stood up. “Rest here. I think I must speak with Meredith.”

“Fence, you can’t! She’ll kill me!”

“Well,” said Fence. “What keys and knowledge are needful, to find this library?”

“No keys,” said Ruth. “It’s in the old wine cellars.”

“I might wander there, as well as anyone,” said Fence. “Fear me not, I’ll contrive some tale.” He grinned. “And this also may serve as the reason whereby I shall remove you from their influence. You need not resign, lady; we’ll forbid you their company.”

Ruth, full of profound misgivings that she could barely articulate even to herself, got up quickly. “Fence, is this wise? Do you want to start a major fight between two schools of magicians on the eve of your departure?”

“Better late than never,” said Fence, grimly for him. “I’ll see you at supper.” And he tucked the book under his arm and went out, slamming the heavy door behind him.

A
FTER the council, Ted and Patrick retired to their room, where Patrick lay on the rug and read
Inherit the Stars
, and Ted sat in the window seat and read the book Celia had given him.

Its framing narration was written for ten-year-olds; but it quoted copiously from Shan’s journals, from later commentators on them, and from a variety of other sorcerous and historical works that were hard for Ted to puzzle out and would have been far too much for a ten-year-old. Maybe you were supposed to begin with the framework and grow gradually into the quotations. Ted plowed doggedly through them whether he understood them or not; maybe they would wake up Edward’s knowledge, or spur Edward to make some enlightening remark.

He was reading the story of the wizard and the animals. The old man in all the tapestries and carvings was Prospero, who had been Master of the Red School, where Shan had started out as an apprentice. In pursuit of his studies, he had been sent to a place called Griseous Lake, to watch a song happen. This made no sense to Ted, but there was no explanation. He had lost his horse and arrived too late for the song, as the result of which a young Blue Sorcerer had died. At Griseous Lake, he had met Melanie, and after a time had quarreled with her because she had made him immortal. Ted, remembering that immortality came from the blood of a unicorn killed by treachery, could understand a reluctance to profit from such a deed; but Shan, besides that, seemed also to object to immortality itself.

The Red Sorcerers all had animal companions, whom they called fellows. One of the early tasks of an apprentice was to find his inner ear, wherewith he could understand his fellows, and his inner voice, wherewith he could speak to them. Shan, who had been clumsy and backward in this regard, achieved both voice and ear suddenly in the course of gaining his immortality. He had not meant to cheat, if you could call that cheating, and he did not want the immortality anyway. But the Red School dismissed him from its service.

He had taken from the body of the dead Blue Sorcerer anything he thought the man’s friends might find valuable. He accordingly took this collection to the Blue School, which welcomed him happily and invited him to join its ranks instead. His first task was to discover exactly what had happened to the Blue Sorcerer. That was a separate story, which Ted reluctantly skipped because it had little to do with Shan.

The discovery took Shan about ten years, during which he made up his quarrel with Melanie. He still had his fellows with him, cat, dog, horse, and eagle. He had refused to tell what few secrets of the Red School he knew to the Blue Master, but he found himself telling them to Melanie. Melanie, who had a long-standing grudge against the unicorns, enlisted the aid of a dragon and managed to turn a unicorn into a fellow. When Shan found out, he was outraged; Melanie refused to release the unicorn, and moreover had told the Blue School about her achievement. The Blue School was half fascinated and half horrified; it was certainly very pleased to get the information it had wanted about the methods of the Red School. Shan spent much fruitless effort seeking a way to free the unicorn, and finally, at the unicorn’s request, killed it. Then he resigned from the Blue School before they could kick him out.

“What a hideous story!” said Ted.

“It’s suppertime,” said Patrick.

Ted told him about it on the way downstairs, and had the satisfaction of seeing Patrick blanch. They found their respective sisters in the crowded hall. Ted sat down next to Ruth and requested that she pass the salt.

“Do
you
know where Fence is?” she said, pushing the heavy cut-glass salt cellar in his direction so carelessly that she spilled its silver spoon and a good pile of salt. Ellen made an exasperated noise and began spooning the spilled salt back into the cellar, along with a few crumbs and some cat hair.

“I haven’t seen him since this morning,” said Ted, looking away from this operation and concentrating on Ruth’s face. She seemed to be trying not to cry, and Ted felt it necessary to justify having lost track of Fence. “I’ve been reading.”

“So have we all,” said Ruth, darkly. “Fence has gone to beard Meredith in her den, and he said he’d see me at supper.”

She explained what had happened. Ted couldn’t blame her for worrying. It was Fence’s nature that, if he said he would see you at supper, then he would see you at supper. Ted said, “Where’s Meredith’s den, Ruthie? Should we go rescue him?”

“What do you suppose we can do against a bunch of sorcerers?” said Patrick.

“Quite a lot, probably,” said Ruth. “They’re sworn to abjure violence, and there are five of us. But we aren’t supposed to know anything about it.”

“Where’s Randolph, then?” said Laura.

They all looked around; it was crowded in the Dragon Hall, and all the red and pink light made it hard to recognize people. Ellen finally located Randolph by standing on the bench. He was sitting with Matthew and Celia at one of the shorter tables to the right of the fireplace.

“Benjamin’s with them,” said Laura, also standing, rather precariously, on the bench.

Ted got up. Sure enough, between Randolph’s wild black head and Celia’s smooth, braided one loomed, six inches higher than either of them, the graying, dark head of Benjamin and his big, brown-clad shoulders. Matthew, sitting across from the three of them, caught Ted’s eyes and favored him with a steady, if blank, look, probably intended to tell Ted to behave without attracting Benjamin’s attention.

“Well, he’s got to look at us sometime,” said Ted, and started to climb over the bench.

Ruth caught hold of the hem of his shirt and dragged him back down, upsetting her ale into her plate. “Not today,” she said. “We were specifically ordered to leave him alone today.”

“Do you want to help Fence, or don’t you?”

There was a furious silence.

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” Ellen said. “You’re the King, aren’t you? Get a page to fetch Randolph.”

At a formal banquet Ted would have thought of this himself. There would have been pages everywhere, and he would have been stuck up at the head of the table feeling silly. But in this hall you served yourself and sat where you pleased. “Seest thou any pages?” he said.

“I see John,” said Ellen.

“Well, wave to him and then get down off that bench before Benjamin sees you. Laura, get down before you fall down.”

Laura got down. Ellen also did as she was told with remarkable meekness. John came up to them smiling, leaned over the table, and said to Ted, “How may I aid you?”

“Could you, of your courtesy, go to Lord Randolph and tell him—privily,” added Ted, “that I need to speak to him?”

John looked not as if he were going to refuse, but as if he were puzzled. Ted said, on impulse, “Benjamin is vexed with us.”

John grinned a grin of perfect comprehension and said, “As Your Majesty wills it,” in a tone that any one of the five of them might have used, playing. Then he charged across the crowded room to Randolph. Randolph got up promptly, crossed the room, sat down next to Ted with his back to the table, and said, “What is your gracious will?” in a perfectly serious voice.