The Whim of the Dragon (3 page)

Laura saw him trying not to grin, and worked that out too. Apsinthion
didn’t
like their name.

“Oho,” said the man. “Sits the wind in that quarter?”

“Did you expect this?” Ted asked him.

“Expectation,” said the man in red, “foils perception.”

“What do you perceive?” said Ted. Laura admired this response.

“That you are of two minds, to go or stay.”

“Did you send the cardinal for us?” said Ted. Laura recognized the resigned determination of the voice he used in Twenty Questions, a game he despised.

“I send the cardinals to bring me news,” said the man in red. “I have had stranger news than you in my time, but not in this place.”

“The news isn’t
about
this place,” said Laura, when Ted was silent. “Did you send the cardinal before?”

“Where?”

“In this place,” said Laura, realizing that “The Secret House” would mean nothing to him. “To One Trumpet Street,” she added. She wondered if addresses meant anything to him either. There had been none on his mailbox.

“Oh, criminy!” said Ted. “Laura! One Trumpet Street?”

Laura scowled at him. She knew that tone.

“One trumpet—one horn. Unicorn!”

“What a stupid joke.”

The man in red took three steps forward and laid a hand on Ted’s shoulder. Laura wondered why he flinched; the man was hardly touching him.

“What knowest thou of unicorns?”

“What should I know, if I’m King of the Hidden Land?”

“What thou shouldst know hadst thou been heir thereto, is no matter; what thou dost know as a stranger, I would be told, and quickly.”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

“We’ve
been
telling him, Ted,” said Laura.

“Well, maybe we should stop.”

“He’s been telling us, too.”

“A just observation,” said the man in red, letting Ted go. “And yet perhaps what you wish to know, I have not told. Will you tell me, what beast is it the dwellers of High Castle pursue each summer?”

“The unicorn,” said Laura, pleased with herself. She felt Ted glaring at her.

“What beast flees not the winter?”

“The unicorn!”

“And what beast hath given its voice to the flute?”

“The unicorn,” said Laura, desolately.

“Well done. Now. What beast is it the unicorns pursue each summer?”

Ted and Laura looked at each other.

“Before what beast doth winter flee?”

Ted made an angry noise between his teeth.

“What beast maketh that which putteth the words to the flute’s song?”

Ted looked thoughtful for a moment, but said nothing.

“Well,” said the man in red. “When you know these things, then what manner of thing I am you will know also.”

“
Did
you send the cardinal to One Trumpet Street?” asked Laura.

“Tell me what it did there, and I will tell thee if ’twas of my sending.”

“Laura, shut up,” said Ted.

“It made me trip,” said Laura, recklessly, “and fall through a hedge.”

“Shut
up
!” said Ted. “As your sovereign lord, I command you!”

“That,” said Laura, bitterly, “is a dirty trick.”

“But needful, perhaps, to kings,” said the man in red, with surprising mildness. He cocked his head, studying them. “Thy sister is wise,” he said to Ted. “By the terms of my most carelessly offered bargain, I must tell you that, indeed, the cardinal was of my sending.”

“Did you mean—” said Laura; then she remembered her oath of fealty and the order just delivered, and closed her mouth hard.

“I think,” said the man in red, “that we must endure long speech with one another. Will you sit down?”

Laura hesitated, a hundred parental warnings about accepting hospitality from strangers coming tardily to mind. If Ted remembered these, he showed no sign. “Thank you,” he said, rather grimly.

They followed the red-robed man across the room and sat down on cushions.

“Have you drunk of the Well of the White Witch?” said the man.

“What will you tell me if I tell you that?” said Ted.

“Only that it is therefore safe for you to drink the sole refreshment I have to offer.” He looked them over and smiled again. “My messengers set perhaps too swift a pace for the wingless.”

“Thank you,” said Ted. “We’d like some water.”

The man in red left the room.

“Do you know him?” whispered Ted.

“No. I saw him in a vision. He was reading the book where the dragon burned down the Secret House.”

“And now we’ve burned it down again,” said Ted.

“He looks like Fence and Randolph.”

“Maybe he’s an ancestor. Are Fence and Randolph related?”

“‘Wizards have no kin,’” quoted Laura.

“They’ve got to come from somewhere.”

“I know. I just meant it might be hard to find out.”

“It’s impossible to find out, here. Unless he tells us.”

“Why shouldn’t we tell him stuff?” said Laura.

“Because we don’t know whose side he’s on, dimwit!”

When Ted started calling names, you could continue on into a satisfactory quarrel, but you were unlikely to actually get anything accomplished. Laura kept her mouth shut, and the red man came back into the room carrying a tray.

It was lacquered a brilliant blue, and as the man took from it the thick familiar mugs of High Castle, Laura saw on its flat surface the stylized figure of a red running fox. The emblem of the Fairchild family, the royal sigil of the Hidden Land.

“Have you a right to that?” demanded Ted, sounding very like King Edward.

The man turned his head and looked quite fierce for a moment; Laura was glad he wasn’t looking at her. Then he let his breath out and took a drink from his mug.

“More right than thou,” he said, amiably.

“I’m bound by an oath, at least,” said Ted.

“I also,” said the red man.

“Look,” said Ted. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“I,” said the red man, “need go nowhere. It is thou, and thy sister, that must needs go.”

“Where?” said Laura.

“To the Hidden Land, to finish out thy tale.”

“We don’t want it to finish,” said Ted.

“It will finish without you,” said the red man. “All you have striven to abolish will come to pass, while you dally and eat sweetmeats.” His tone stung like dust blown on a high wind.

“The cardinal showed us the sweetmeats!” said Laura, hotly.

The man smiled, and drained his mug. “The cardinal hath his humor also,” he said.

Laura took a drink from her own mug. Clear, icy, piercing, the water of the Well slid down her throat. She remembered the baked-grass smell of the plain, the heat in the air wavering like water, the sun striking awful visions from the distant windows of the Secret House, her cousins squabbling, Benjamin riding over the horizon with the dreaded horses. She desired more than anything else to be back in the Hidden Land.

“Will all we want to abolish come to pass,” said Ted, who had been staring at the floor for some time, “if we go back?”

“You are able to prevent it.”

Ted and Laura looked at each other. That they were able did not mean that they would.

“Why should we believe you?” said Ted. He took a swallow of water, and Laura saw him blink. “Can you prove this? Who are you?”

“Come upstairs,” said the red man.

S
HE stood in a dusty room and scowled. The cats sat on the floor and sneezed. The water-beasts, whose notion of tidiness was that one spoke to them properly, oozed and burbled in a mild discontent caused by having been moved.

She strode across to the window, stumbling slightly on a clutter of bones. The cats, flowing after her, stopped and began to circle the pile, sniffing. Claudia looked through the grimy glass. Where she should have seen the tops of trees, the vanishing and reappearing slide of the little stream, the round pink dot of the Well and a vast stretch of baked brown grass, there lay the enigmatic expanse of the Gray Lake. Its flat dark surface took the peaceful evening sky and mirrored it into the semblance of an approaching storm. Its long shape was lavishly fringed with goldenrod. Beyond it, steep yellow-clad slopes wandered away, and above them mountains lost themselves in mist.

The air was full of voices. “Something’s amiss,” she said, to make sure, and instantly they echoed and answered her.

She fixed her eyes on the red gingham cuff of her dress, where the machine-made lace staggered like a badly drawn rune; and the voices stopped. She had found them useful and pleasant once; but they were mockery as often as they were counsel, and there was no manner of telling which from which.

She turned to the mirrors in her mind, but their power was dimmed. She had been bound here once. And in any case, the blue flame, whereby she knew the hearts of the children, burned here also, but like the conflagration of a summer forest after lightning. Even if they had seen or heard tell of this place, the children’s little flicker, that gave her the best part of her power, would be lost in the larger burning. To tamper with this greater fire would give notice to those she wished, for a while yet, to avoid.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker
, said the voices.

“So, my old enemies,” she said, and chuckled.

She stepped around the fascinated cats, avoided the water-beasts, and walked down the long hall to the rooms at the back of the house. Faintly beneath the smell of dust and water, the scent of cinnamon still lingered. The voices said,
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

She laughed; and, as often happened, this silenced them.

The room of mirrors was glittering clean. She moved from one little diamond pane to another, until she found what she sought. The youngest girl and the oldest boy, staring in awe, fear, and suspicion at a man in a red robe.

“And my old friends too!” said Claudia.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!
She scowled again, considering that. Some of the voices spoke mere gibberish, and not any foreign tongue she knew the sound of. But even in those that spoke most clearly, odd words would surface from time to time. English dead. What sort of dead were those? The sort that walked, perhaps. As she did, and the man in red also.

She laid her hand upon the glass. “Burning one,” she said, “knoweth Chryse what thou art about?”

The children did not hear her, but he did. He only smiled.

With the spatter and drum of rain on a roof, the water-beasts rampaged into the room behind her and demanded the explanation she had promised. She smiled too.

“That one, children,” she said, and showed them the man in red. “Not the little ones whom you have seen before. That one.”

U
PSTAIRS in the house of Apsinthion was a room of mirrors. They were everywhere, in frames carved and gilded, or plain and unstained, or worked silver, or jeweled gold. Little ones lay on all the furniture. Large ones swung gently on stands of wood or metal. They held a hundred copies of the red ceiling, the polished wooden floor, the sunshine falling through the windows, the summer sky of Illinois that lay flat against the glass of the skylight like a layer of paint.

“Oh, God,” said Ted to Laura, as they stood arrested in the doorway. “Is he like Claudia?”

Laura pointed silently at the mirror they stood before. It showed only themselves. They walked into the room, avoiding the first mirror and finding themselves again in a larger one. Their host appeared behind them in that mirror and waved his hand at it. A wash of blackness went down its surface, and they saw, as if they rode across the plain at a distance, High Castle with the mountains at its back. For a moment Ted thought they were looking at a sunset, and then he knew. High Castle was burning. Fire leapt from every wall, and met itself in the moat as half a tower fell hissing. The outer walls that should hide the moat from view were down already.

“Did we do that?” said Laura. She sounded as if she were sure of it. Ted supposed that if you spent your whole life breaking things without meaning to, you might easily believe that any catastrophe was your fault.

“Your absence will do’t,” said Apsinthion.

“How?” said Ted. He felt Laura looking at him, probably admiring his composure. Never mind that his hands were shaking.

“Lord Andrew hath his suspicions even now,” said the man in red. “Think you what he will tell the council: What is easier to believe, those things writ i’the letter Fence hath, or that Fence and Randolph plot against all the royal house?”

“Benjamin’d have better sense—” said Ted.

“Oh, aye,” said the red man, in Benjamin’s manner exactly. “Benjamin, and Agatha, and Matthew. Hence civil war, and Randolph’s death; a land divided, and no certain heir.”

“Can you send us back?” asked Ted.

“I can.” He met Ted’s eyes in the mirror. The little flame in his obscured the pupils. “But know that other powers may so sort themselves that I cannot send you home again.”

Laura’s face grew shocked, and she stared into the mirror. Apsinthion tucked his hands up in the sleeves of his robe and seemed prepared to stand behind them as long as was needful.

Ted tried to think. He looked around Apsinthion’s house, which was congenial to him in a remarkable degree. You could have a place like this yourself, he thought. After college. He had just started junior high. Ted sighed.

He thought of his one or two brilliant teachers (usually in subjects he didn’t like or wasn’t good at), one or two cruel or foolish ones, the rest amiable and forgettable; the other kids, with their peculiar preoccupations: television, video games, sports, clothes; nothing that was both real and beautiful. Vacations: reading, hiking, bicycling, watching television to see if it had gotten any better, quarreling with Laura, plotting with Laura new twists for the Secret Country, and waiting, waiting for the summer when they could return to their best reality. This summer, as blank as the television screen when the set was off, and promising even less.