The Whim of the Dragon (25 page)

The man in brown and two children in yellow came back out of the gate, leading three nondescript brown horses. One had a white blotch on its nose and another had three white stockings. They looked as bored as the Secret Country horses. But the Secret Country horses suddenly flared their nostrils and put their ears back and showed the whites of their eyes. Laura felt the one she and Patrick were sitting on jump and tremble. Celia said something in some language Laura didn’t recognize, and the horses stood still; but they kept their ears back and looked distinctly uneasy.

“No closer,” said Fence.

The three leading the strange horses stopped where they were. Fence and Matthew came forward, cautiously. Fence said, in an extremely prosaic voice, “They’ll shape me in your arms, Janet, / A dove, and but a swan: / And last they’ll shape me in your arms / A mother-naked man. Cast your green mantle over me, / I’ll be mysel’ again. Wherefore,” said Fence, much more vigorously, “thy mantle, Ellen.”

Ellen stood up in her stirrups, pulled off her green woolen cloak, and flung it at Fence, who caught it neatly and in his turn hurled it at the three horses. It billowed hugely, like a queen-sized bedsheet being snapped open, and settled over all three horses and one of the little girls. There was a tremendous commotion from under the green folds, and a certain amount of heaving and stamping. The man in brown backed hastily off the road, climbed the slope until he came to an evergreen with branches like the rungs of a ladder, climbed that too, and appeared to settle in to watch the fun. Laura wanted to emulate him, but Patrick was holding the miserable horse firmly where it was, and she would attract attention if she got off.

The heaving mantle slumped suddenly to the road, to the accompaniment of a huge blast of hot air and a pelting of dust. Laura and Patrick both sneezed; Ellen coughed; the grown-ups just put their hands over their eyes.

When the dust had settled, Ellen’s half-sized green cloak lay meekly in the middle of the road. The man in brown sat in the tree and laughed. One child crouched in the ditch, gaping.

“Wow,” said Patrick. Laura couldn’t remember ever having heard him say that. Patrick did not like to appear impressed.

“Wherefore laugh you?” shouted Matthew to the man in the tree.

“I feared they were monsters,” gasped the man; Laura realized that he was not so much amused as hysterical. “I thought them poisonous, direful, dangerous; and what were they but a puff of air and a screeching as of cats?”

“What were they but concerned elsewhere?” said Fence, grimly. He walked forward, picked up Ellen’s cloak, and shook it briefly. The child in the ditch sneezed. “So, thou’rt real enough,” said Fence. Laura deduced from this that shape-shifters didn’t sneeze, and that Ellen’s mantle had known which creatures were shape-shifters.

Fence helped her back onto the road. She backed away from him and ran, which Laura thought ungrateful.

“What about the other kid?” said Ellen.

“An she’s gone, she’s one of them,” said Fence. He surveyed his party. “Celia,” he said, “I do commend thy stubbornness. I think we must stay the night.”

In the little town, they were given a square room, about ten feet by ten, with a stone floor and a fireplace, and tapestries on the walls. The tapestries had largely to do with quarrying rock and building castles. Nobody seeming inclined to trust the food offered by the denizens of the town, they ate their usual rations, except that Celia crumbled up the oatcake in boiling water and made porridge. It was hot, and as far as Laura was concerned, that was all you could say for it.

After this vexing meal, Laura and Ellen sat on a pile of all their bedclothes, looking dismally through one of Patrick’s physics books and trying to find something to laugh at. Ellen rather liked “mean acceleration,” but Laura was not finding anything very funny. Mean acceleration just sounded like what a horse did when it wanted you to fall off. They had a branch of candles to read by; its light was bright but rather wavery. Patrick had the fire, and was, infuriatingly, reading the only piece of fiction he had brought along.

Matthew and Celia were sitting on two more wooden stools, holding hands, their heads leaning against one of the quarry tapestries and their eyes shut. Fence had spread a battered map the size of a game of Twister out on the floor, and was kneeling in the middle of it, scowling.

“Fence,” said Matthew, “Heathwill will furnish us a newer map.”

“The man of Feren,” said Fence, “did say the road ran halfway to the House of Belaparthalion.”

Laura looked up from an uninspiring picture of two wooden carts with roller-skate wheels being smashed together to demonstrate the conservation of momentum, straight into the firelit swirls of Fence’s robe. She saw Claudia and three black cats standing in tree-dappled sunshine on the bank of a stream. The cats were fishing; Claudia appeared to be making sarcastic remarks, which they ignored. She was still wearing the red checked dress in which she had greeted Ted and Laura on their return to Illinois. It was limp. Claudia looked different. She was still elegant, as she leaned against a rowan tree and laughed at her cats. She was one of those people of whom Laura’s mother said that they had elegant bones. But the conscious grace she had displayed even walking in the damp woods gathering herbs was missing. She was somehow more likeable and less alarming than Laura had seen her. She cocked an eye at the wet-footed cats, shook her head, sat down on a convenient rock, and picked a white crocus the size of a tulip.

Laura leaned forward to see better, and found herself staring at a mud-smeared nebula on Fence’s gown. She rubbed her eyes. Claudia was where they had been the night before. Why should she be following them on foot, with three cats?

“Laura Kimberly Carroll,” said Ellen, glancing up from the physics book and fixing her with a look as stern as any of Agatha’s, “what is the matter with you?”

Laura shrugged.

“Fence,” said Ellen. “She’s seen something.”

“Seen what?” said Fence, to Laura.

It was no trouble to tell her visions once she was cornered. She obliged. This one was not very dramatic, except for Claudia’s location. Her attempt to describe in what way Claudia seemed likeable was not a success. Ellen and Patrick stared at her, and Celia made a very sharp remark, for Celia, about people who killed children but cherished cats.

“You never should have called that cardinal, Ellie,” said Patrick, laying his pen down. “I bet that’s how she found out where we were.”

“But how could she get there so fast?” said Ellen. “I think she was following us all along.”

“With three cats?” said Laura. “Cats that fish?”

“Well,” said Matthew, who still had not opened his eyes, “if travel one must with cats in the wilderness, let them by all means be cats that fish.”

“I wish we knew more about her powers,” said Patrick.

“Her greatest deeds meseemeth are performed with the aid of the windows in her house,” said Fence. “She hath none now.”

“She can escape the spell of Shan’s Ring,” said Ellen.

“Or,” said Patrick, rather smugly, “the spell of Shan’s Ring has a limit to it.”

“She knows what I taught her, and what Meredith taught her,” said Fence. “That sufficeth to follow us, but not to catch us.”

“Let’s go in the morning early, all the same,” said Matthew.

“Wherefore,” said Celia, “let us to bed now.”

“Celia,” said Laura, with a silent apology to her sore hands, “shouldn’t we try to send the message about Belaparthalion?”

Celia got up, came across the room less briskly than usual, and examined Laura’s hands. “Well,” she said, “an it be short, and we have the horse-salve for it after.”

“That stuff smells awful,” said Ellen. “I have to sleep with her.”

“Canst thou play the flute?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Well, then,” said Celia.

Laura dug the flute’s case out of her bedding and took out the mouthpiece. It hurt her hands with a cold throb, not so much on the surface as in the bones. She dropped it onto the physics book. Celia touched it with the tip of her finger, let her breath out softly, and, picking up the mouthpiece in one hand and the next piece in the other, began fitting the flute together.

“No use, I’ll warrant, in warming this?” she said.

“No,” said Laura.

“Well,” said Celia, “may there be much music, excellent voice, in this little organ.”

She handed it back to Laura. Laura put it to her lips hurriedly. It played “Good King Wenceslas.” Always before, she had played the flute. She had not always known how she played it, or what, before she started, she would be playing; but it was she who had played. This was the flute. Ellen stared at her, and then at Patrick, who had closed his book and was looking exasperated. But Matthew leapt from his resting place with a face full of consternation, and Fence stood up in the middle of his map, both exclaiming disjointedly.

Laura stopped after one round of the tune, laid the flute down on the physics book again, and shook her hand hard.

“May heaven confound them!” said Celia.

“What’s the matter?” said Patrick.

“That’s a pestilent song,” said Matthew; “it’s a spell that turneth messages from their ways, delivering them amiss.”

“Who hath set it?” said Fence.

“Worse, who in th’ other party shall know of’t?” said Celia. “Will Lady Ruth warn her other, or be silent?”

“I wouldn’t count on anything,” said Patrick. “The help we get from our others is erratic.”

“Can Andrew play the flute?” said Celia.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Fence, with an astonishing bitterness; “but then, what is that?”

He flung this last remark at Matthew, but Matthew only pressed his hand over his high forehead and back into his flaming hair, and shook his head, and walking across the room, stooped for the flute and picked it up.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said, hefting the flute with one hand and patting Celia’s arm with the other. “This showeth either an unpracticed hand, or a confident. There are spells little harder that do merely twist a message into some plausible semblance, whereby those receiving it may keep unsuspecting. This spell saith most loud that one desireth our silence.”

“Claudia’s confident, I imagine,” said Patrick.

“And in some matters, it may be, unpracticed also,” said Fence, more calmly.

Ellen said, “Does this mean Randolph got the earlier message telling him to watch out?”

“It should,” said Fence, frowning. “Celia?”

“It should,” said Celia, not very confidently.

“You people are so vague,” said Patrick. “Why is that?”

“Because magic is an art, not a science, smart-ass,” said Ellen.

“And none of us is master of this art in special,” said Celia. “Matthew is a scholar, who knoweth but may not perform; I but dabble; in his own field Fence knoweth much but in this he must be cautious. Content you until we are come to Heathwill Library. Its council may be more sharp than thou desirest.”

Laura rubbed her stinging hands together. It was infuriating not to be able to send a message. It was enough to make you wish for a telephone.

“Frown not so earnest,” said Celia; Laura jumped. “Come to bed; we must be up betimes.”

Laura dreamed about home again. She had lost her third bus ticket in two months, and was afraid to tell her parents. She had been using her allowance as bus money, but Ted caught her at it. She was having a furious argument with him, in which he promised to help her talk their parents out of cutting her hair if she would confess to the loss of the bus ticket. When she wouldn’t agree to this, Ted threatened to tell Fence. Even in the dream this seemed odd to Laura. She had a powerful feeling, though, that telling Fence would be disastrous. She was trying to explain this to Ted when Celia shook her awake. She got up extremely indignant, with no one to vent her outrage on.

They left when the sun had barely cleared the eastward hills and the mist from the river hung blurrily in all the valleys. Laura went on feeling cross. She also felt shy of Fence, as if she were in fact keeping some secret from him because it would hurt her to have him know of it.

“If this is a good road,” she said to Patrick, “I’d hate to see a bad one.”

“It’s a road,” said Patrick. “The point is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.”

Ted had once said something similar about a batch of cookies from which Laura had omitted the salt and baking soda. She bared her teeth at Patrick’s sleek head, so like her brother’s; and leaned her forehead into the slick nylon of his purple pack, trying to think of something soothing. Somewhere very far away, a voice remarked,
Can honor’s voice provoke the silent dust, / Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?

Laura jerked her head up and looked wildly around. The countryside revealed itself in layer after layer of tree-furred hills, all red and yellow and orange, as the mist dwindled. The sky was a murky blue that set off the brilliant trees better than a cleaner color would. Three crows swooped by on the left, lower than the road but high above the bottom of the valley whose upper rim they rode along. Another voice, closer, said,
Where shall we gang and dine the day-O?

“Fence!” said Laura, and the caution of her dream caught her by the throat. She heard herself say, “When’s lunch?”

“When we arrive at Heathwill Library,” said Fence. He was riding next to them, and he frowned a little, as if he knew that was not really the question she wanted to ask.

“Are we that close?” said Patrick.

“We’ll be there by sunset.”

Not marble,
said the distant voice, in a tone that clutched Laura’s heart and made her tighten her grip on Patrick,
nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme; / But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.