The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  It seemed a very long time ago. Laura scowled. Sneaking down the stairs, she had fallen over her shoes; the refrigerator in the moonlight had looked like a polar bear; they had argued over whether, since they had deserved to be sent to bed without supper, they could take any food with them now; they had argued over whether it was right to bring a flashlight to the Secret Country, where such things were unknown—

  “It was night,” said Laura.

  “And it’s not night now. Shan’s Ring was supposed to bring us back within five minutes of the time we left.”

  And from the scanty and anonymous evergreen shrubs that failed to decorate the ugliness of the gas station, a cardinal whistled its ascending song.

  “I told you,” said Laura. From a distance of perhaps three feet, careful to make no sudden move, she addressed the cardinal. “Mysterious servant of unknown forces; minion of the Secret Country. What’s going on?”

  “They can’t talk!” said Ted, with an enormous and hurtful scorn.

  Laura looked sideways at him and decided that half of it was fear. She was frightened herself. “Can you take us to someone who can tell us what’s going on?” she said to the bird.

  It flew halfway down the street and alighted on the wrought-iron arm of a bus-stop bench.

  “Come on,” said Laura. She grabbed Ted’s hand. “How else are we going to find out what’s wrong with the magic?”

  “We’re finished with magic,” said Ted.

  The cardinal began to sing again.

  “Maybe,” said Laura, in the manner of the Secret Country, “magic hath not finished with us.”

  This had sounded merely clever as she said it, but watching Ted hear it she thought it had an ominous ring, and wished she had kept her mouth shut.

  “You know what Shan said,” she offered. “If say No you will, then say it as late as may be.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  Laura gulped. It had come from the back of her mind, the part that knew more than she, and recognized things she had never seen. “I guess Princess Laura read it somewhere,” she said.

  “You’ve still got Princess Laura? Because Edward’s gone.”

  This was extremely disconcerting. Laura had Princess Laura still in the back of her mind, and Laura thought the cardinal meant something more than natural. Ted no longer had Edward, and Ted thought the cardinal was just a cardinal. “So,” said Laura, with a hideous feeling in her stomach, “I better go by myself.”

  Ted stared at her and gave a most unpleasant laugh. “Serve you right if I let you.” There was a monstrous pause. “Feel free,” said Ted.

  The cardinal hooted at them and rose fluttering from the bench. Laura was not sure she could move. She looked at Ted. He was looking at the cardinal, with about the same expression as he had worn long ago when he found out that Laura, reading his enormous copy of The Mysterious Island in the bathtub, had dropped it in the water.

  “By the mercy of Shan,” said King Edward, between his teeth, “may we not all rue this day. Come on, Laurie.”

  The cardinal had an upsetting understanding of traffic lights, sprinklers, children playing softball in the street, unsteady fences, unfriendly dogs, irate bicyclists, and the other hazards encountered by two people following a bird through unfamiliar territory. It led them through the little business district where they had bought their ice cream, past streets of huge old houses and huger older trees, through empty back yards and down crooked alleys, across a busy street, under a freeway, down a clean, white, empty road and into a housing development so new that half the houses had no lawns yet. The houses were very large, somewhat odd, and extremely expensive-looking. The cardinal shot past them all, waited in a little stand of trees the bulldozers had missed, and with one last triumphant whistle perched on a mailbox and folded its wings.

  Ted and Laura panted up, sweating and red-faced. They stared past the cardinal over a long slope of blowing grass, at the top of which stood a house. It was like a stack of wooden blocks that somebody had brushed against: untidy and lop-sided, but not actually fallen over. Its windows were round or triangular, its winding flagstone walk absolutely bare.

  “Gah!” said Laura. “What an ugly house!”

  “Lucky for us, maybe,” said Ted. “You liked the Secret House. Remember who lived in that.”

  Laura looked at the mailbox, which said, in gold letters, APSINTHION. “The name’s ugly too,” she said.

  “Maybe the Apsinthions won’t like ours, either,” said Ted.

  They walked up to the blank wooden door and pushed the button beside it. Inside the house they heard a melodious but disorganized rattle, as if somebody had poured a handful of marbles into a glass jar.

  The door opened inward, and a man from one of Laura’s visions stood smiling at them. No, magic had not done with them.

  Beside Laura, Ted jumped. Laura went on staring. The man, glimpsed so briefly in a vision she had hoped she wasn’t having anyway, really did, under this more leisurely examination, look like Fence and Randolph. He was short, as Fence had been. He had Fence’s straight brown hair, better cut; but Randolph’s sharper face. The long hand that held the edge of the door was Randolph’s. The grin was Fence’s, and so were the round green eyes. Randolph had had almond-shaped eyes, usually narrowed. In Randolph’s face, the eyes of Fence looked less ingenuous.

  Stop thinking about Fence and Randolph as if they were dead, Laura told herself. She looked at the man’s eyes again for reassurance. They held a tiny spark of red. Perhaps, Laura thought hopefully, it’s just the way the light hits them. But he wore a red robe too. In style it was like the ones they had grown accustomed to at High Castle. But it was red, and so were his boots. Nobody at High Castle had worn red, except Claudia.

  The man watched them looking him over, and the glint in his eyes deepened. He was still smiling.

  Ted cleared his throat. Laura wondered how long they had been staring. “My lord,” said Ted, “the cardinal brought us.”

  “In his name, be welcome,” said the man, and he stood aside to let them in. His raspy voice was only vaguely familiar.

  Ted took her by the hand, and they walked boldly past the man into his house. Pale polished floors stretched all around them, gleaming in the light from high windows. Out of the corner of her eye Laura saw red cushions, and black, and white; and dark wooden tables.

  The man in the red robe shut the door behind them with a hollow boom. Laura, starting, saw Ted jump too.

  “Who are you?” said the man in red.

  Ted hesitated. “Edward Carroll,” he said, and, defiantly, “crowned King of the Secret Coun—the Hidden Land. This is the Princess Laura, my sister, as royal as I.”

  The Princess Laura, alerted by his tone, worked this out and grinned.

  The man in red stood still, as Fence would do if you startled or intrigued him. “The name of the royal house of the Hidden Land,” he said, “is Fairchild.”

  “So it is,” said Ted.

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  SHE 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.

  Nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal. All is amiss. Love is dying, Faith’s defying, Heart’s denying. Nothing shall come amiss, and we won’t come home ’til morning. Mark what is done amiss.

  She fixed her eyes on the red gingham c
uff 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.”