The Whim of the Dragon (42 page)

A lilting voice Laura knew addressed the unicorns, “Hail, blithe spirits!” it said. “We mean you no ill, but seek one of our own.”

“None of your own is here,” said Chryse’s voice. A swelling chorus in the back of the mind added,
How shall I your true love know from another one?

“Lady, he is. Apsinthion!” said the rich voice, imperatively.

The man in red made his way through the unicorns like a setter breasting a field of daisies, and halted in the small space left in the center of the clearing. “You’re far from your wonted ways,” he said to them.

“No further than thou,” said the austere voice.

“I have been out before,” said the man in red, “while you were sleeping. For I did think, how should I judge the dead who had not seen the living?”

“That’s your affair,” said the rich voice. “But we do hear that you hold in trust somewhat that we desire.”

“You may not have’t,” said the man in red.

“We do not wish it,” said the lilting voice. “We wish it silenced. Do you swear never to use it in any wise?”

“Peace, break thee off,” said Chryse’s voice, in precisely the tone Laura’s father would use to say, “Now just a God damn minute!” She, too, pushed through the mill of unicorns until she stood next to the man in red. The inward chorus said peacefully,
Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
Laura saw one or two of the Lords of the Dead rub at their foreheads, and hoped that the poetry was giving them a headache.

“Belaparthalion,” said Chryse, and there was very little music in her voice. “What art thou?”
There is no art,
said the chorus,
To find the mind’s construction in the face.

“I am the man-shape of a dragon,” said the man in red. “I am the Judge of the Dead. And, though thou would it were not so, I am thy cousin.”

“The Judge of the Dead,” said Chryse, with less music yet, “is an Outside Power.” The chorus was silent.

The man in red said, “That is so.”

“I do not well understand this,” said Chryse. “But I do understand well indeed that you and I are sworn to guard the Hidden Land ’gainst the depredations of the Outside Powers. I’ll do my duty well, then, to guard it ’gainst thee.”

The unicorns, still silent, foamed backward among the trees and quivered there, white in the shadows. Chryse backed away and lowered her silky head, with its golden eyes and its whiskered nose and its long, sharp, mortal horn.

Fence dragged Melanie’s sword from his belt. “My lord!”

The man in red reached back a hand, and Fence slapped the hilt into it. The sword flashed like breaking glass as he touched it. He took it between his two palms and extended it toward Chryse. “I cry you mercy,” he said. “This will do naught but ill.”

Chryse said, with a full complement of melody ringing behind her words, “All may yet be very well.”

Laura looked wildly at Fence. His fists were clenched and his eyes were enormous, but he seemed to feel that he had done all he could when he gave the sword to the red man. But all that did was even the odds. One of the guardians of the Hidden Land was going to kill the other. Some guardians. They were behaving irresponsibly in the extreme. But Laura’s outrage was not enough to make her tell them so; nor were they likely to listen. Stealth would have to serve.

“Fence!” she whispered. “Give me Shan’s Ring.”

Fence had plunged his hand into his belt-pouch before the surprised look was off his face. He pressed the ring into her hand. Laura, plucking bad poetry out of her memory, breathed. “And Shan’s sword.” He wouldn’t do it. A peculiar magical artifact, sure; but not a weapon. But Fence drifted backward, as if to give the combatants more room, and pulled Matthew with him.

Chryse and the man in red had begun to circle each other. Laura wondered if they would actually have a fencing match, with the horn serving as a sword, or if Chryse would charge and stab with that horn and the man in red fend for himself as best he could. If Chryse wanted to show him his weakness, she might succeed.

Fence edged up beside Laura and said, “It’s beneath my cloak. What mean you to do?”

“Blow time awry,” said Laura, “so everybody can think. Hand me the sword.”

She still thought he would not do it. She could not explain her reasoning, if he should ask. Patrick would not call it reasoning at all. Chryse moved suddenly and drove the needle-sharp icicle of her violet-spiraled horn straight at the red man’s breast. He skittered to one side; Celia, right in Chryse’s path, did not move, and Chryse stopped in a shower of pine needles.

“Think, lady,” said Celia, the scar standing out on her forehead.

Chryse backed without looking at her and lowered her horn again. And the hilt of Shan’s sword, so perfectly sized for a ten-year-old’s hand, tingled from Fence’s hand into Laura’s nervous grip. Laura took three steps forward, dropped Shan’s sword onto the ground between the combatants, stepped back, hurled Shan’s Ring into the air, and gabbled, “I am a trinket in the world, unvalued gold and sullen stone, but Outside Power is unfurled, when outside power I am hurled, and time awry is blown.”

Chryse and Belaparthalion stood still, Chryse in a graceful pose that any sculptor would have been proud of, and the man in red with one foot in the air and the sword arrested between one useful position and another. Their eyes were alarming; so wide and empty that neither of them seemed to be there at all. Laura remembered Claudia, staring on the steps of Fence’s tower with a knife in her fist.

“Nice work,” said Patrick, a little hoarsely. “But they’re going to be just as mad when they wake up.”

“I thought,” said Laura, “that if we got the unicorns to surround Chryse and took the sword away from Belaparthalion, we could calm them down enough to explain what’s going on.”

“Excellent,” said Fence; there was congratulation in his voice, but also a definite irony. “Now we’ve only to find out that we must explain to them.”

“I thought,” said Laura, coming back to his comforting vicinity, “that the Lords of the Dead could tell us.”

“The Lords of the Dead,” said the piercing voice of a unicorn, from the froth among the trees, “have been sleeping.”

“The Lords of the Dead,” said the lilting voice, “wish only to go on sleeping. Give us these raucous swords and we’ll trouble you no longer.”

“And also that shrieking ring,” said the rich voice.

The unicorns made a sound like an entire acre full of wind chimes. It came to Laura that they were laughing. She hoped the Lords of the Dead would not notice.

“Know you aught of the Judge of the Dead?” said Fence, to the soberly dressed party generally.

“He is of the Outside Powers,” said the lilting voice.

“Are dragons also of the Outside Powers?” said Fence, patiently.

“Dragons,” said the rich voice, “are not so much as of the immortals. We have seen dragons beneath the earth; Apsinthion hath judged them; do you ask him.”

“By and by,” said Fence.

“So Chryse’s charges are true,” said Celia.

“How came matters to this pass?” said Matthew.

“That would we know also,” said the lilting voice.

“Well, Apsinthion aka Belaparthalion ought to know,” said Ellen. “He’s the one who’s fish and flesh. So to speak.”

“Why should he know?” said Patrick. “You might as well say, when we got into this country we should have known what was going on, just because it happened to us.”

You might as well say,
chorused the unicorns,
that “I sleep when I breathe” is the same thing as “I breathe when I sleep.”
There was a pause, and as the white horde drifted and nodded just a little in the direction of the Lords of the Dead, they added,
It
is
the same thing with you.
Laura and Ellen burst out laughing. Patrick, who scorned Lewis Carroll, rolled his eyes at them.

“Well, we’d better figure out something,” he said. “We don’t know how long this spell lasts.”

“Come to that,” said Matthew, gently, “we know not how to remove it. Laura, why not have used ‘From the horns of Unicorns’?”

“Because that wouldn’t have done Chryse any good,” said Laura. “He was mad at her by that time.”

“True,” said Fence. “And very well done.”

Laura began to feel foolish just the same. There was no use in averting a crisis if all you achieved was a limbo. She looked at the two arrested figures, and at the sword of Shan where it lay among the dry brown needles. She unclenched her cramped hand from around Shan’s Ring, and held it out to Fence. And she remembered something.

“Hey!” she cried. “You unicorns! Didn’t I do it? Didn’t I change time of my own power?”

“What hast thou seen and not told?” said one of them.

Laura felt herself turning red. She dropped the ring into Fence’s palm and sent and stood on the far side of an immense pine tree. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She thought of Cedric’s flute. No, this could not be called the end. This was a silly situation, but it was hardly the end. The stupid tears dazzled her vision.

She groped inside her cloak to find a piece of shirt clean enough to wipe her eyes on, and the blur of sun and saltwater sharpened suddenly into a scene that was not the green pine woods with their dusty shafts of sunlight. It was the massive castle she had seen once at night, garlanded with fireworks; and folded within one corner of its vast stretch of walls, between the low outer wall with its bristling of towers and the high, thick inner wall, lay the formal rose garden she had also seen before. Andrew and Randolph crossed swords; a clump of brightly dressed people watched. Then Ted flung himself out of the crowd, yelling something she could not hear, and with his own sword struck to the ground the crossed blades of Randolph and Andrew. A figure with flying black hair grabbed Andrew from behind. And Randolph lifted his sword again and lunged at Ted.

It was what they had come back here to avert. And she could tell, by the length of Ted’s hair, by the clothes they wore, festive clothes she had helped Agatha pick out for the embassy to wear at the court of the Dragon King, that it was happening soon; or perhaps it was happening now.

“Fence!” shouted Laura, and bolted around the tree. “Listen. Ted is fighting Randolph in the Dragon King’s rose garden. We’ve got a magic ring, a magic sword, and a magic flute; can’t we do something?”

“This is a present vision?” said Fence.

“I don’t know. It’s not very future.”

“Let’s not take the risk, for God’s sake,” said Patrick.

“You’re a wizard; do something.”

“I can’t fly through the air!” snapped Fence. He drove both hands into his hair and strode between Chryse and Belaparthalion, ducking under the vicious horn as if it were a dangling vine. He plunged in among the unicorns, gesticulating. Laura could not hear clearly what he was saying in his light voice, but the replies of the unicorns were clear.

“We can take thee.”

“Aye, we can take you all.”

“But upon one condition; that thou releasest our sister.”

Fence’s reaction to that was louder. “An I release thy sister, will you stand surety for the safety of her enemy there?”

“That is her affair and thine, not ours.”

“Shan’s sweet mercy!” shouted Fence. “I am making it your affair. I will release her only on that condition.”

“He can’t release her anyway,” said Patrick.

“Shut up,” said Ellen.

“An you release her not, we carry you nowhere,” said a unicorn.

“I’ll give you Shan’s Ring,” said Fence, in less furious but carrying tones.

The little knot of the Lords of the Dead stirred. In very mellow tones, a unicorn said, “The bargain made touching that ring precludes our having it.”

Something in the voice alerted Laura. It wanted to be argued with; it wanted to coax some particular statement out of them, so that it could take the ring. She pushed through the crowd of unicorns and caught Fence by the hand. His burning-leaf smell mingled with the spicy scent of the unicorns. “Listen,” said Laura. “Shan’s Ring was supposed to save the Hidden Land from the machinations of Melanie. But she made the sword that woke you up; she made Shan’s Ring too.” Fence’s hand jerked in hers; he had not known that. “This is
all
a machination of Melanie,” said Laura; and stopped. That was not true; and her intuition failed her suddenly. It had all been so clear in her head.

But the unicorn said, “Well enough. Now what of the second condition, that that ring become an heirloom of Shan’s house?”

Once again, you could tell that it hoped for the point it made to be properly countered. Laura’s invention had dried up.

“The children of Shan’s house,” said Fence, with a terrible grim triumph, “are below the earth. That condition’s forfeit.”

The unicorn was taken aback by this; but the rich voice of a Lord of the Dead said, “’Twere better you gave it to us.”

“What will that profit me?” roared Fence, without turning.

“First, we will deliver all present to the court of the Dragon King. Second, we will deliver Shan’s Ring to Edward Fairchild, that both conditions of the bargain be met.”

There was a small silence.

“Well, fair ones?” said Fence. “White ones? Drinkers of verse? What say you to that?”

“Give it them,” said the unicorns, in overlapping waves. “We’ll have no peace else.” Even in the midst of her anxiety, Laura thought how curious it was that magical creatures wanted sleep and peace more than they wanted anything else.

Fence said, “Stand you witness to this bargain?”

“We do.”

Fence turned around. “Done,” he said to the Lords of the Dead.

The Lords of the Dead did not believe in preliminaries. Being delivered by them was not like riding a unicorn. It was a great deal more, Laura thought, like being picked up by a tornado. Darkness stabbed about with red fire, howling voices, and a vast noise of distant water overtook her. Dwindling down the distances of her mind, the unicorns remarked,
I pray you pass with your best violence.