The Hidden Land

by PAMELA DEAN

  One by one the people in white walked over the short dry grass to the Well, and lowered a bucket, tossed in a ring, said a phrase or two, peered into the bucket, took it to the pages, and became part of the crowd. Ruth did all these things as if she were buying a box of cookies at the corner grocery: except that when she peered into her bucket her eyes got big and she made a muffled and not very dignified squeak. After the pages had emptied her bucket she put her hand down into it, brought it up with the fist clenched, and searched the crowd with her eyes.

  She found Laura and Ellen and Patrick, and came toward them as fast as her long skirt would let her. Nobody else seemed to notice her.

  “Where’s our water?” demanded Ellen.

  “They’ll get to you,” said Ruth. She breathed as though she had been running. “Look at this.” She opened her hand. On her damp and grubby palm there lay, its gilt flaking off to show dull gray and its stone scratched and cloudy, the little dime-store ring she had given the Well on their first day in this country.

  Laura’s breath went out of her. Even before the dull gleam of the cracked gilt blossomed into vision, she felt a swift conviction of disaster. The vision did not comfort her. She had a brief frozen glimpse of Claudia, and the man who looked like both Fence and Randolph, fighting with knives in a swirl of wet leaves. Then Ellen pulled at her and they were all pushing through the crowd to the woods.

  “Laurie, have you got your sword?” said Patrick, in the tone of someone who is not asking for the first time.

  “Sure,” said Laura. “Ruthie, what does that ring mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ruth, viciously pushing between a plump man in leather and a tall woman in white. “But,” she added as they gained the edge of the woods, “I feel kicked out.”

  “Yes,” said Laura; and she was not sorry. She patted the hilt of the stolen sword, and wished there had been a way to say good-bye to Fence and Randolph.

  They tramped hollowly across the wooden bridge and scrambled along the edge of the stream toward the house. Laura tripped twice—the sword’s weight put her off balance—but did not fall into the water.

  “Where’s Ted?” she said after the second of these mishaps.

  “Randolph was talking to him,” said Patrick. “Ellie and I can test our sword anyway. Our bottle-tree is just the other side of the house.”

  They went along through the coolness to the clump of bottle-trees. Even in her horror and bewilderment, Laura was fascinated by them. They looked as if they had been made, probably by a mad sculptor, rather than grown. Patrick and Ellen floundered about under their bulging trunks and got thoroughly scratched, but the sword took them nowhere except to the other side of the clump. They made Laura try with their sword, and then with her own, and got nowhere still. Neither sword made her arm prickle, but even in the sunlit forest their blades glowed faintly.

  They went back to the bridge and found a highly irritated Ted awaiting them. He took the news about the swords and the bush with equanimity, but when Ruth showed him her gimcrack ring he looked appalled.

  “Something here has found us out,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t suppose it can tell anybody else,” said Patrick, “and anyway, it wouldn’t have to know anything except that that isn’t the right kind of ring. Look, let’s see if either sword will get anybody through the hedge.”

  “I guess we’re lucky it’s not worse,” said Ted, as they slithered along the bank again.

  “What’s not worse?” said Patrick.

  “Well, Ruthie isn’t really a sorcerer of the Green Caves, and she did draw water from that Well. Could have been a lot worse.”

  “I did lose my Ring of Sorcery, though,” said Ruth.

  Ted stopped dead. Ellen bumped into him, and Laura fell over Ellen. “Oh, God,” he said, ignoring the indignant cries and scrabblings behind him, “does that mean you can’t bring me back from the dead?” Laura stopped trying to get up, and listened.

  “I don’t think so,” said Ruth. She scowled. “Of course not,” she said, more strongly. “I’ve never seen any of the Green Caves people use theirs to do magic. It’s a symbol, and it can be a defense against—well, it can be a defense. But nobody uses it for any of the spells I’ve been taught. It’s like an ID card. We have to show it for a ceremony.”

  “Well,” said Ted, “there won’t be any ceremonies ’til after the battle and we’ll think of something by then. Come on.”

  No matter who crawled under the hedge with which sword, it was still the Secret Country on the other side. These swords would take nobody home.

  “Well,” said Ted, “that’s that.”

  They stood looking at one another. Patrick seemed indignant, Ellen cheerful, Ruth thoughtful, and Ted worried. Laura found herself wanting to try the swords again, in the way she would want to look again for a lost shoe which just had to be there. She wondered if she could sneak away and go back to High Castle. She would probably get lost, and it would be galling to have to ask for an escort, not to mention explaining herself to all the people back there who had wanted to go to the battle but were obliged to stay home. Besides, Claudia was at High Castle. Better to be as far as possible from Claudia and the Secret House.

  Nobody had anything to say, and they began to drift back toward the camp. Oh, well, thought Laura. Maybe Ruth can bring me back if Claudia kills me. And that was not part of the story, so perhaps they could go home before it happened. Tripping on the first plank of the wooden bridge and catching herself with a hand on the rail, she thought that she would not like to be killed even if Ruth could bring her back. She wondered if Ted felt the same way.

  They had missed their breakfast, and were all five scolded by Agatha.

  “Well,” said Ruth, as the army reformed itself and they had to return to their places, “at least she didn’t say anything about Ted and me.”

  “Maybe she’s on your side,” said Ellen.

  The army swung a little to the west to cross a larger bridge than the wooden one. They took an amazingly long time to get across. Then they settled down to walk the lumpy and thinly forested lands behind the Secret House. There was a road of sorts, not as good as the one that led north from the Well to Fence’s Country. At first Laura saw houses and fields of grain and cows grazing, but as they went on south the signs of habitation dwindled and vanished, and the land grew hillier and wilder-looking.

  Laura’s knee gave out completely after a few hours, and Agatha put her in a wagon among the bedding and tents, with Ellen for company. Most of the army was ahead of them, which made it rather dusty where they were. But to see the long line glinting with color and sun on metal was worth a little dust. Laura and Ellen looked at one another, and Ellen grinned.

  “This,” said Ellen, “is an adventure.”

  And for all her fears of what might happen after, Laura thought so, too.

  CHAPTER 10

  THEY came to the end of the hills that evening, and made their first night’s camp just outside the last forest, on the edge of a plain that seemed to Laura to go on forever. Supper at Agatha’s fire was dull. Ellen tried to get her to talk about being Queen’s Counselor, but Agatha acted as if the request were an insult. Laura could not see how anyone who had ever been a Queen’s Counselor could sit around a fire at the edge of the woods and talk about sewing, but Agatha did it. Laura and Ellen gave each other speaking looks until that was boring, too. Before they could fall asleep or do something desperate, a boy about their age came to say that the King wanted them. Laura still went cold when she heard that. She and Ellen got up and followed the boy to Ted’s fire. He and Patrick and Matthew and Randolph and Fence were there.

  Fence turned out to be a good storyteller, and Randolph could play something like a recorder, which sounded much better than most of the instruments in High Castle. Matthew, to Laura’s immense surprise, could sing, which he did at Fence’s request when, after six stories, Fence’s voice began to give out.

  The first song he sang, she
did not know. But at the first notes from the recorder, she saw Patrick, on Ellen’s other side, shoot upright from his lounging position, scattering Ellen and Fence with dry leaves. Laura looked quickly at Ted, who was on her other side, but almost on the other side of the fire as well, next to Randolph. He was frowning.

  The song’s tune was sprightly; its words otherwise:

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hath done,

  Home art gone, and ta’ en thy wages.

  Patrick poked at Ellen and whispered.

  “Shut up,” said Ellen, a little too loudly.

  Fence, sitting cross-legged in his wizard’s robe just beyond Patrick, gave them all a quelling glance. They subsided. Laura wanted to hear the song, in any case; Patrick would have to wait.

  Fear no more the frown o’ the great;

  Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;

  Care no more to clothe or eat;

  To thee the reed is as the oak:

  The scepter, learning, physic, must

  All follow thee, and come to dust.

  The whistle piped obediently its flourish, and in the pause between verse and verse Matthew said, “Randolph?”

  Randolph, on the other side of the fire, lowered the instrument to his knee; the ring on his hand flashed, and then the silver curve of his circlet sparked in the firelight as he turned his head to look at Matthew.

  Matthew sang, “Fear no more the lightning-flash,” but Laura only half-heard him. It was happening again. The first blue glint from Randolph’s ring blurred and widened, and in place of the red fire and the sharp-shadowed faces of her brother, her cousins, and her inventions, she saw Lord Andrew. He stood in a bare, round room through whose windows showed only the high and empty sky. He leaned his hands on a plain wooden table, staring at its surface, on which lay a scattering of splinters and colored glass. The splinters came from a vicious gash in the tabletop, as if somebody had hit it with an axe—or a sword. You could not tell from looking where the bits of glass came from, but Laura knew. This was how the room in the North Tower had looked, after Patrick broke the Crystal of Earth. Except that Andrew had not been there.

  Randolph’s circlet gleamed again as he moved his head, and the vision was swallowed in firelight. Randolph was singing now, in a voice lighter than Matthew’s, and one that sounded somehow less trained, but was very clear.

  “Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone.”

  “Fear not slander,” sang Matthew, “censure rash.”

  “Thou hast finished joy and moan.” Randolph’s voice faltered a very little; perhaps he had been out of breath from his playing. Laura looked at Ted again. He was staring at Randolph as if he expected him to begin doing cartwheels.

  The next lines Matthew and Randolph sang together, as Laura’s mother and father did, as though they were used to it:

  All lovers young, all lovers must

  Consign to thee, and come to dust.

  Laura wondered where Ruth was; Ruth, whose lover Randolph was supposed to be, except that Randolph had seemed to prefer Claudia.

  Then Matthew, “No exorcisor harm thee.”

  And Randolph, “Nor no witchcraft charm thee,” and his voice cracked on the word “witchcraft” and barely recovered for the end of the line.

  Matthew, his face anxious, went on, “Ghost unlaid forbear thee,” and Fence’s voice rose and mingled with his.

  “For the love of heaven, Matthew, something cheerier.”

  The stories he told had been funny ones, thought Laura. She did not understand what was happening. She looked from one to another of them. Matthew was obviously upset. Fence’s face was quite calm, and Randolph’s hidden in shadow as he bent his head to the recorder again.

  “Patrick Spens,” said Matthew, quickly, and they began it.

  Laura knew this one, and was pleased. It did unsettle her, a little, to hear a Scottish song in the Secret Country. She smiled at Ted, but he was still staring at Randolph.

  The King sits in Dumferling toune,

  Drinking of the bluid-red wine,

  Oh, where shall I find a steely skipper

  To sail this gallant—

  The music of the recorder wavered, squawked, and fell silent. Matthew was silent also.

  “I cry you mercy,” he said after a moment.

  “No, I cry you,” said Randolph. His voice was steady. “My skill is someways rusty. Fence?”

  “Not, I think, the whistle,” said Fence, cheerfully. He looked around. Laura saw that the boy who had brought her and Ellen had disappeared.

  “Patrick?” said Fence. “Of your courtesy, will you go to my tent and bring me the lute you find there?”

  “Gladly,” said Patrick; he sounded excited.

  He got up and walked off. Randolph unscrewed the two pieces of the whistle and began to dry them carefully, as Laura’s mother would do with her recorder. Ted watched him as if he had never seen anybody do such a thing. Matthew and Fence, looking at one another, might have been holding a long conversation by telepathy, if there had been telepathy in the Secret Country. The fire popped and rustled. In the otherwise utter quiet that had overtaken them, Laura could hear laughter and singing at other fires, and a discreet chinking that puzzled her for a moment. Then she saw, dimly in the trees behind Fence, the two armed and mailed men who stood watch there, one facing the camp and the other the dark woods.

  Laura’s sense of happy adventure was beginning to suffer. She was disturbed, as always, by any anxiety or discord among the grown-ups; and the guards had reminded her what she had managed to forget: that they were going to a battle, not to a picnic. She looked at Ellen, who was scowling at the fire.

  Ellen looked back at her, and leaned over. Her sense of adventure seemed to be suffering, too. She looked worried.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” she said in Laura’s ear. “Maybe he is sorry.”

  Then Laura understood. No witchcraft charm three, and Randolph had killed the King with a magical poison. The King sat in Dumferling town, drinking of the blood-red wine. And Randolph had put the poison in the wine.

  “What will they think?” she whispered back. The song’s the thing, she thought wildly, wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the counselor.

  “Just that he misses the King and doesn’t want to be reminded of what happened,” said Ellen, serenely confident as always.

  “Well, he’d better watch out.”

  “They think he’s wonderful,” said Ellen, a tinge of the usual scorn returning to her voice. “They’ll never guess.”

  Laura, whose other self, the Princess, had loved Randolph almost as much as she loved Fence; who would have loved him that much herself had not what she knew made her afraid of him, opened her mouth and closed it again. Even if arguing with Ellen would make Ellen change her mind, which was not often the case, she could not do it here. She said instead, “What’s the matter with Patrick?”

  “He thinks the song proves something.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Shakespeare.”

  “So what?”

  “He thinks,” said Ellen, exasperation in her voice as she struggled to explain Patrick’s thoughts, which were never either simple or pleasing, in a whisper, “that it doesn’t mean anything if they sound like Shakespeare, or even if they say some lines from Shakespeare once in a while, but if they sing a whole song from Shakespeare, then we did make all this up.”

  “He’s crazy,” said Laura, automatically. She had other things to worry about.

  Patrick, looking no crazier than usual, came back with Fence’s lute, and after an amiable period of argument during which first Fence and then Matthew tried to tune it, and Randolph was finally obliged to take a hand, they settled into an uneventful evening of music. They gathered gradually a large audience and a number of helpful voices, trained and untrained. Agatha could sing, so could Conrad, so could all Matthew’s family, so could Andrew. Ben
jamin could not, but nobody seemed to care.

  Laura, a disappointment to two musical parents, kept her mouth shut. Patrick’s argument was gaining force as the songs followed one another through the dark hours of the evening. She knew almost all of them. Her father had records full of them. “There lived a wife in Usher’s Well/A wealthy wife was she.” Her mother sang them around the house, baking bread or bathing the dog or painting the ceiling in the back hall that cracked every spring. “A lady lived by the North Sea shore/Lay the bent to the bonny broom.” Her parents sang them together in the evenings, when she and Ted were in bed. “A holiday, a holiday, in the first month of the year/Lord Donald’s wife rode in to town, some holy words to hear.” Her mother sang them to her when she had the mumps. “ ’Twas in the merry month of May/When green buds all were swelling/Sweet William on his death-bed lay/ For love of Barbary Allen.” She sang them to Ted when Ted broke his wrist. “O what can ail thee, knight at arms,/Alone and palely loitering.” Her father, who very seldom sang by himself, could occasionally be heard warbling one or two when engaged in some particularly vexatious duty, like fixing the fence where Laura had run into it with her bicycle. (The bicycle had been beyond fixing.) “Young women they run like hares on the mountain.”

  Laura sniffed hugely, and then swallowed hard. Ellen knew these songs, too; she was singing them, grinning, her anger at Patrick and her misjudgment of Randolph no longer troubling her.

  Oh, tell to me, Tam Lin, she said,

  Why came you here to dwell?

  The Queen of Fairies caught me,

  When from my horse I fell.

  Laura’s parents had not seen her for perhaps two weeks, if she understood what Ruth and Ellen had meant to do with Shan’s Ring, and if they had really done it. Actually, she had not seen her parents for three months. She had been furious when they parted from her, going callously off to Australia to visit Ruth and Ellen and Patrick and their parents, as they always did in the summer—but leaving Ted and Laura at the mercy of the cousins on the other side of the family, the wrong cousins, who watched television and played hide-and-go-seek.