The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  Nobody chose to take up this remark. Celia made tea out of half the hot water and passed the mugs around. In the wider spaces of the woods, the rain fell steadily, a background murmur very like the fire’s. In their clump of beech trees, an occasional huge drop hit somebody on the head.

  Celia prepared to wash the mugs and the knives and spoons in the remaining hot water, and sent Laura and Ellen to the stream to wash the plates, exhorting them to be certain to scrub them well with sand.

  “There’s sand by the unicorn footprints,” said Ellen, when they were safely out of Patrick’s hearing.

  She led the way along a narrow path. On their left a vast, tumbled slope of round rocks and vivid green moss fell, nastily steep, into a misty valley of young trees. Laura was glad the plates were tin and wouldn’t break. She could hear water running at the bottom of the valley. She followed Ellen, and the path turned and dragged them slipping and stumbling down the rocky slope and disgorged them suddenly onto a flat grassy place overflowing with flowers. The stream hissed whitely over a little falls and widened into a pool whose glossy surface was perfectly still and unmoving. It had stopped raining. Or, thought Laura—picking her way among dusty blue and purple and dark red daisy-like flowers the size of the plates she carried; and clumps of white violets whose leaves were the size of her hand and their flowers as big as an ordinary daisy; and forget-me-nots of the proper size but of a blue almost luminous; and crocuses, gold and purple and white, the size of tulips—it just wasn’t raining here.

  They knelt at the stream’s edge, and scrubbed the plates. The remnants of the stew were remarkably clingy; Laura supposed they shouldn’t all have sat there brooding and let it get cold.

  “I’d like to call a unicorn,” said Ellen, stacking her last plate with the others and rinsing her hands in the water.

  Laura, who had two plates left, scrubbed harder. The water was cold but very silky to the touch. “Do you think we could have a drink?” she said.

  “That won’t call a unicorn. What did you do to make the one you saw show up?”

  “I didn’t make it show up,” said Laura. “I whistled ‘The Minstrel Boy.’ Then I whistled like a cardinal; and a cardinal came. I said to it, ‘Please, I’m looking for a unicorn.’ And it flew away, and made a fuss when I tried to follow it. So I waited, and it came back with Claudia. Claudia and I had a stupid conversation, and she told me that the unicorns had gone south for the winter, and she left. And I looked down and there was a unicorn standing in the water.”

  Ellen stood up and shook water off her hands. She wore an expression unnervingly like Patrick’s when he was clicking through in his mind the possibilities of a given situation. “It was the cardinal,” she said. “I bet it was. Let’s whistle.”

  “No!” said Laura, standing up in a hurry and dropping all her plates. “We don’t want them to know we’re here.”

  “No; we don’t want them to know where we’re going.”

  “Well, once they know we’re here they could follow us.”

  “They could have been following us all along,” said Ellen.

  Laura knew the sinking feeling of somebody who is going to lose an argument, because it isn’t really an argument at all. She said, “There’s no point in asking for trouble.”

  “We don’t know it will be trouble,” said Ellen. She tipped her head back, and a little breeze stirred her crazy black hair. She whistled, clearly and accurately, the song of the cardinal. And a red bird dropped from the empty spaces of the forest and landed on her shoulder. It was the biggest cardinal Laura had ever seen. It was as large as a crow.

  “Please,” said Ellen, standing very still, “we’re trying to find a unicorn.”

  The cardinal rose off her shoulder and flew downstream. Before it had disappeared, they heard a regular sloshing, and a unicorn came wading through the water, unconcernedly, as if it were walking in a field of grass. Laura wondered if they really liked water so much, or just liked getting other people wet. Both the unicorns she had talked to had appeared in the water.

  This one strode into the middle of the little pool and wheeled to face them. Laura looked at it carefully; its eyes were not gold, but violet. It was not Chryse, the one she had just told Ellen about. It might be the one she had talked to in the lake. She wondered if she and Ellen looked alike to the unicorns. Somehow she doubted it. She wished Ellen would say something; she had summoned the unicorn, after all.

  The unicorn stood there with its head cocked as if it heard something in the distance. Laura became aware of stirrings and rustlings in the woods around them, as every animal that could tell a unicorn was here came out of its burrow or down from the sky. At least in this forest, the unicorn was the king of beasts.

  It was extremely beautiful without seeming in the least unreal. Laura could feel its warmth from three feet away; it had whiskers on the sides of its nose; its eye, however purple, was properly liquid. The tuft of hair on the end of its tail was wet and draggled. But it looked so clean. No white animal looked truly white; white cows or horses had dingy yellow or gray casts to their coats, and sheep were just hopeless. Laura had seen white cats that were almost as clean as the unicorn. She wondered if unicorns groomed themselves like cats. She doubted that they would have the tongue for it. She watched the orange fish flash around the unicorn’s legs in the shallow water of the little pool, and thought of cats, dozens of cats, washing the unicorn until its coat gleamed. They would get hairballs you wouldn’t believe.

  “The hair is not so coarse as that,” said the unicorn, in the clear and piercing voice of its kind. “Thou thinkst of horses.”

  “No,” said Laura, startled into the truth; “goats.”

  “What?” said Ellen.

  “I should rather ask thee that, youngling,” said the unicorn. “Wherefore stoppest thou me?”

  Laura distinctly heard Ellen gulp. “I hope we didn’t disturb you,” said Ellen.

  The unicorn said, “Hoping not to disturb, wherefore didst thou send my messenger?”

  “Because,” said Ellen, more boldly, “we weren’t sure he was your messenger. Can you tell us about the cardinals?”

  The unicorn said, “ ‘I can’ must wait upon ‘I will.’ ”

  “Do you know who we are?” said Ellen.

  “I know who you do seem.” The unicorn took two steps toward them in the water and nuzzled the top of Laura’s head. The unicorn smelled like very clean, dry, crispy autumn leaves; which was to say, it smelled like Fence. Laura shivered just the same. The unicorn blew vigorously into Ellen’s hair, altering it very little, and backed up again. “You carry your seemings within,” it said, “but you are other. Read me your riddle and I will read you mine.”

  “Don’t you mean that the other way around?” said Ellen.

  The unicorn made a very odd noise, like somebody unpracticed trying to play a trumpet. “As courtesy to the visitor, no doubt,” it said. “No matter that the visitor be uninvited and a most pert intruder. Well. The cardinals serve whom they will and also whom they must. They must serve Belaparthalion; they do serve the Outside Powers, none knoweth by choice or upon compulsion; and they will serve us. Now, what of thy oddness?”

  “That’s a very long story,” said Ellen.

  Laura gave her a reproachful look. It was nevertheless true that the gray light was heavier than it had been, that it was getting very chilly, and that from every part of the stream except the pool in which the unicorn stood, wisps of mist were rising off the water. It was also true that telling their story to a unicorn might not be the wisest thing to do. Unicorns were odd; they could be malicious. The only one Laura knew to be well disposed toward the Secret Country was Chryse, and this was not she.

  “I think we’re out of our depth,” she said.

  “Thou standest not in the water,” said the unicorn, in a tone of mild pleasure.

  “Contrariwise,” said Laura, startling herself, “I and my kinsmen stand in water so deep that every seventh wave doth ch
oke us. An thou shouldst be that seventh wave, what then?” Whew, she thought, where’d that come from?

  “I?” said the unicorn, rather sharply. “I made not this bargain.”

  Both the unicorn and Laura looked at Ellen, who cleared her throat and said, “I’ll keep it; but may I ask counsel of those wiser than I am?”

  “Ask,” said the unicorn, with a great deal of humor.

  Ellen stared at it, and then stared at Laura. Laura looked back at her, shrugged helplessly, and then grinned. “Ask what harm will be done,” she suggested. Maybe the unicorns liked ironic situations even when the irony was against them.

  Ellen said slowly, “We know thee not. How if to tell us our tale does us harm, or harm to those we love?”

  “Bring on thy counselors,” said the unicorn; “this counsel is beyond my ken.”

  “I’ll be right back,” said Ellen, and before Laura could move she had scrambled up the slope and disappeared, leaving Laura on the stream’s edge with a unicorn and a motley collection of birds, squirrels, fish, foxes, and badgers. On the other side of the water they lined the bank like a shelf of stuffed animals, they held so still. On her side, Laura could hear them rustling up on the hill, but the only creatures she could see were well up in the trees.

  Laura decided that she might as well sit down. She did so very carefully, both because of her horse-battered muscles and because of the animals. As soon as she was quiet again, three squirrels ran down the nearest tree and sat a foot away from her on the sand. She hoped the badgers and the foxes would stay farther back. But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, said a distant voice in her mind. It wasn’t Princess Laura. She wondered if it were the unicorn. She didn’t want to ask. It would only end in another awkward bargain that nobody could see the consequences of. Ellen was brave, but sometimes she seemed to have no sense.

  Ellen sprinted up the rocky path at a reckless pace, panting, and scattering before her dozens of startled small animals. The squirrels swarmed up the trees and scolded her, and farther overhead than that she heard the harsh, laughing voice of a crow. She could also hear her traveling companions before she was halfway back to the camp. They were singing rounds.

  Ellen burst into the clearing. “Come quickly!”

  Celia and Patrick stood up, and Patrick said, “Where’s Laura?”

  He was taking his commission from Ted seriously. Ellen felt a twinge of doubt; but in what safer company could she have left Laura? The unicorns might confuse her, but they would never hurt her. Patrick was starting to look murderous, and Celia’s and Fence’s expressions to change from exasperation to concern. Ellen squashed the temptation to make them all squirm, in compensation for not trusting her, and said, “She’s fine. There’s a unicorn, and it wants us to tell it everything!”

  “I doubt that,” said Fence, dryly.

  “I’m afraid I made a mess of things,” said Ellen, “but you can tell me about it later. Just come on.”

  While the grown-ups were exchanging a variety of glances and mutterings, Patrick came over and said, “What’s going on, Ellie?”

  “It’s your fault,” said Ellen. “I was testing a hypothesis. But it was right, and then I had a unicorn to deal with. You can’t just say, ‘Thank you so much, go away now’ to a unicorn, the way you can with atomic particles.”

  “You can’t say that to them, either,” said Patrick. “The trouble with you is that you are treating a problem in sociology, or diplomacy, as if it were an exercise in physics. Have a little sense. Atomic particles aren’t sentient.”

  “I think magic is like that,” said Ellen. “It seems to have personalities in it.” She explained what she had done, and Patrick snorted.

  “That wasn’t magic,” he said. “You weren’t testing a magical hypothesis. You were just—”

  “Ellen,” said Celia. “Fence and I had best bear thee company. Patrick, speak not so sharp to thy sister, but help Matthew in the rigging of the tents.”

  “Ha!” said Ellen.

  “Gloat not,” said Celia. “What’s this but the very thing Patrick is forbidden to do?”

  Ellen didn’t know if she meant speaking sharp, or experimenting with the Secret Country. It was not the time to ask. She led Fence and Celia down the steep path to the stream. Laura had sat down; otherwise everything was as it had been. Laura looked around when she heard them, and her face was relieved.

  “Give you good even,” said Fence to the unicorn.

  “My sister speaketh well of thee,” said the unicorn. Ellen wondered if it meant Chryse.

  “I joy to hear it,” said Fence, very gravely.

  “Lady Celia,” said the unicorn, “when thou returnst, do thou sing more merry.”

  “As you will,” said Celia.

  “So, then,” said the unicorn, “these are thy counselors?”

  “They are,” said Ellen.

  “Ask their counsel, then,” said the unicorn.

  “Should we tell the unicorn who we are?” said Ellen.

  “Mercy, child,” said Celia, swiping a loosened strand of yellow hair off her scarred forehead and sitting down on a rock. A pigeon and two mice scuttered off behind her. The unicorn made a little whistling noise at them, and the mice came out of the clump of asters they had hidden in and sat by Celia’s right boot. Celia didn’t look at them. “How should I know?” she said to Ellen. “Thy story’s odd, but not o’er-merry. How like the unicorns but half a loaf?”

  “Fence,” said Ellen, feeling impatient.

  “How madest thou this tangle?” said Fence to Ellen.

  “Out of curiosity and thoughtlessness,” said the unicorn.

  “Is such advantage to thy credit?” demanded Fence.

  The unicorn considered him with a large, purple, dubious eye; but when it spoke, it sounded on the verge of laughter. “We’ll take the cash,” it said, “and let the credit go.”

  Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum, said some other voice, dimly. Ellen saw that Laura jumped and Celia rolled her eyes, and surmised that they had heard it too.

  Fence said, “These two are strangers; they know thee not.”

  “They shall,” said the unicorn. “Wherefore, first must I know them. Tell thy tale, black maiden; thy fair cousin’s cold.”

  Tom’s a-cold, came the distant voice, that was neither inside your head nor outside it. Do poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes.

  Ellen felt rather cold herself. “Couldn’t Fence tell it?” she said. “He’ll take less time than I would.”

  Love’s not Time’s fool, remarked the voice.

  “Hold your tongues,” said the unicorn, mildly.

  Everybody was quiet, including the voice. The unicorn said, “Very well, then Fence shall tell’t.”

  Celia sat down by Laura; Ellen, feeling disgraced without knowing what she would have wanted to do differently, stayed lurking in the background with the bolder squirrels; and Fence came to what would have been front stage, center, if the unicorn had been a theatre audience, and began to speak.

  He did in fact deliver an admirably abbreviated account of their story; its flaw was that it stated as facts a number of things Ellen thought were just conjecture. He described their game briefly, and said that the power of their thoughts had been so great that Claudia had become aware of them, and knitted them unawares into her schemes. He said that she had killed the real royal children in order to allow the five who had played them into the Secret Country. Everything else he told scrupulously.

  The unicorn stood perfectly still during this recitation, with its eye bent on Fence in a way Ellen thought should unnerve him. It looked skeptical, but as if it were willing to put up with much for the sake of a good story. When Fence had finished, it said, “This is none of our doing. What name did the red man give himself?”

  Fence looked at Laura, who said, “Apsinthion.”

  “Wormwood,” said the unicorn. “My lord Fence, knowest thou not that name?”

  Fence stood ve
ry still, in the way he had; then he smacked his hand into his forehead. “The Judge of the Dead,” he said. “Oh, this likes me not. Wormwood indeed! That’s the unchanciest power I know.”

  Let the galled jade wince. The worm is your only emperor for diet, said the distant voice. Others joined it. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Then worms shall try this—

  “Hold your tongues!” said the unicorn in the water, in a way that chilled Ellen’s skin like an ice cube going down her back. “Be of good cheer, thou wizard. Anyone may put on a name, as one may put on a red robe and an aspect somewhat like thine and somewhat like thy student’s. Where’s he?”

  It asked this question reflectively, but Ellen saw Fence jump. “He goeth south, with an embassy to the Dragon King, whom lately we bested in battle.”

  “Bid him have a care,” said the unicorn.

  There was a long pause; Ellen saw that Fence was quite simply frozen where he stood, and that Celia was appalled. It meant something, then, if a unicorn told someone to have a care. Whom were they talking about? Fence’s student; was that Ted, or Randolph? Probably Randolph. Fence gave himself a little shake, and bent his knee. “More thanks than I can say,” he said.

  “Thou shalt say it in time,” said the unicorn.

  Ellen didn’t like the sound of this. She said, “Excuse me. Was your answer about the cardinals or your reading of our riddle, or can you tell us more? I mean,” she amended hastily, “will you?”

  “Ask,” said the unicorn, pleasantly enough.

  “Several cardinals have done mysterious things,” said Ellen, and we’d like to know on whose orders they did them.”

  “Say on.”

  “First of all,” said Ellen, “in our world, a cardinal showed Ted and Laura the Secret House.”

  “Spare those stories,” said the unicorn. “All events in your own world you must lay on the doorstep of the Outside Powers. We have no kingdom there.”

  “Drat!” said Ellen. “Sorry. Okay. The first day we came here, Benjamin cross-examined Ted about why he was acting so oddly. And a cardinal whistled, and Benjamin stopped.”