The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  Ted poked Ruth in the shoulder. She twitched once, opened her eyes, and made a horrible face at him. “Oh, God!” she said. “This is what I hate about traveling in the Hidden Land. Waking up like this and knowing I can’t have a hot shower.”

  “What did you dream about last night?” said Ted.

  He kept his voice low, and Ruth’s when she answered was lower also. “Hot water,” she said. “Are your legs asleep, or can I lie here and enter gradually into the true horrors of my state?”

  “Did you dream about anything else?”

  “You ought to have helped out in the Spanish Inquisition,” grumbled Ruth. She shut her eyes. “Let me think. Yes,” she said, and opening them again, she gave him an upside-down frown. “I dreamed of home. Not Australia, but the first farm. That’s odd. I haven’t dreamed of home since we’ve been here.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was playing the flute,” said Ruth, slowly.

  Ted’s heart jerked within him. “Well?”

  “It was Christmas Eve,” said Ruth. “You guys were there. It was nice. Except we were arguing over the music. Mom wanted ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ but Ellen and Laura insisted on this weird prayer. I didn’t know the music, but they insisted anyway. Then Laura actually took the flute away from me; and I saw it was the flute of Cedric and got very upset; but I didn’t think yet that this might be just a dream. Laura started playing a song I didn’t recognize, and Patrick started singing, and Ellie; and then I saw that Celia and Matthew and Fence were all there too, and they sang. And then you poked me.”

  “What was the prayer?”

  “‘And from the sword (Lord) save your heart, / By my might and power, / And keep your heart, your darling dear, / From Dogs that would devour. / And from the Dragon’s mouth that would—’”

  “‘You all in sunder shiver,’” said Ted, “‘And from the horns of Unicorns / Lord safely you deliver.’”

  “You too?”

  “Different setting,” said Ted. “Same song.”

  “Your mumbling,” said Andrew, sitting up and flinging off his hood, “waketh not the dead, but waketh me most rudely.”

  “Sorry,” said Ted. “Shouldn’t we be going, to wake the dead in earnest?”

  “Give you good morrow,” said Andrew.

  “What’s good about it?” said Randolph, without moving.

  “My sentiments exactly,” said Ruth. She sat up. “How far to the Gray Lake?”

  “A short walk only,” said Randolph. He opened his eyes. “There is a house there wherein we may find refreshment.”

  “Let’s go and find it, then,” said Ruth, standing up.

  Randolph and Andrew got up stiffly and went outside. Ruth shook out her skirts and held a hand down to Ted. “Your legs are asleep.”

  “Not as much as my brain,” said Ted. “Those dreams must mean something. I just can’t think what.”

  “Neither can I,” said Ruth. “Maybe the refreshment will revive our failing wits.”

  They came out blinking into the glittering sunshine. The trees around them were mostly oaks, and clutched still their dry brown leaves. The wind hissed in them. Their trunks were greened over with moss. A little ahead the wood grew up against tall gray rocks spotted with moss and lichen, the lichen delicate as lace, the moss as green as beryls. There was a cleft in those rocks.

  The floor of the forest was crisp oak leaves, with damp ones underneath. The path Randolph found and led them along was rocky and rather narrow. Randolph stopped at the cleft in the rocks, and everybody crowded behind him and looked through it. It was wide enough for three or four people to walk abreast. A bar of sunlight sharp and vivid as a piece of yellow silk fell halfway along the stone floor from the opening at the other end.

  Randolph, without saying anything, walked quickly through the cleft and out the other side, and they followed him, Ruth and Ted together and Andrew behind them. They came onto a little lawn of short grass and goldenrod. Beyond this, the slope dropped very swiftly, and through ribbons of mist Ted saw a winding water laid out like a sleeping snake, striped with water-weed and bordered by purple loosestrife and whole clouds of goldenrod.

  There was a house on the other side of the water. Tile for red roof tile, window for leaded window, graceful front and awkward wing and gray stone and white and faint yellow, it was a copy of the house at One Trumpet Street, Claudia’s house, that Ted and Laura had done their best to burn to the ground.

  “That’s where we may have refreshment?” said Ruth.

  “How not?” said Randolph, without turning. “Thou didst have’t in th’other house.”

  “Yes, but if Claudia wasn’t in that one, won’t she be here? I don’t want to be entertained by Claudia, thank you very much.”

  “’Tis not her house,” said Randolph.

  He started down the hill; and again, they followed him. Ted cast a quick look at Andrew. Claudia’s brother looked as he had looked in her other house: as if he felt creepy. It didn’t make him walk any slower, thought Ted. All these people appeared to be of the type that takes the earliest dentist’s appointment that offers itself, just to get it over with.

  They reached the shore of the lake, and turned right to walk around its near end. The flowering plants were pleasant to look at, and the little slosh of the waves on the shore was pleasant also; but Ted did not like the look of the lake. It was flat and shining, but it was not clear. The morning sun laid no glittering path across it. It looked like a Midwestern sky before a very bad thunderstorm.

  They walked up a narrow dirt path to the house. It had no lawn; goldenrod grew up to its foundations and covered half the steps to the porch. These had once been painted blue, but were weathered gray with only thin streaks of color remaining. The windows of the house were filmed with dirt, and drifts of leaves and dead grass lay in the corners of the porch.

  Edward said mellifluously, Egypt’s might is tumbled down / Down a down the deeps of thought. Oh, go to sleep, can’t you, thought Ted; and a whole concourse of voices rose up and answered him. Macbeth shall sleep no more; / To die: to sleep; / No more; and, by a sleep to say we end / The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to. We have come, last and best, to that still center where the spinning world sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest. Lay on thy whips, O love, that me upright, poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed May sleep. Knit up the ravelled sleeve of care, and scatter thy silver dew on every flower that shuts its sweet eyes in timely sleep. Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

  “Randolph!” shouted Ted over the din.

  “Though you bind it with the blowing wind,” said Ruth, “and buckle it with the moon, the night will slip away like sorrow or a tune.”

  “That is most certain,” said Randolph, turning from a gloomy perusal of the house.

  He took Ted and Ruth each by a shoulder, and said, “Now heed me. A little firmness shall set them packing. But fix your eyes on some common object and consider not its name, nor any word. Thereafter, but guard your thoughts and speak not to them, and you shall do very well.”

  Ted obediently looked at the black woolen hem of Ruth’s cloak, snagged in five places and spotted with mud. The voices quieted and vanished.

  “That’s better,” he said, and no chorus commented.

  “Yes, it is,” said Ruth.

  “Good; you have the knack of it,” said Randolph.

  “What is this yammering?” demanded Andrew. He had gone up the porch steps already, and nobody had paid much attention to him. He was quite pale, and his forehead was damp. “Why is the air full of voices?”

  “Oh,” said Ruth.

  Ted looked at her quickly, but she was frowning at the ground, so he turned back to Andrew. “What foul trick is this?” cried Andrew.

  “Peace, break thee off,” said Randolph.

  “Look, where it comes again!” said Andrew, wildly. “In the same figure like the king that’s dead!” He checked as if somebody had h
it him, and then ran down the peeling steps and seized Randolph by the shoulders.

  “Read me this riddle,” he said between his teeth, and shook Randolph.

  “A little firmness,” said Randolph, rather jerkily, but with no evident surprise or anger, “sets them packing. Do you smooth out your mind, my lord, but while one with moderate haste might tell a dozen, and they’ll quit you.”

  “Smooth out my mind,” said Andrew, as if Randolph had suggested something both impossible and repellent. “Drink up eisel; eat a crocodile.” He stopped shaking Randolph, but Ted saw his fingers close hard on the stained wool of Randolph’s cloak and on the flesh under it. “What foul place is this, that but requires we do divide ourselves from our fair judgment, without the which we are pictures or mere beasts?”

  “For the merest jot of time,” said Randolph. If Andrew was hurting him, he showed no sign of it. He put a hand over one of Andrew’s and said mildly, “What fear you? Are you so splenitive and rash that in so short a time reason shall flee you? How do you sleep? Think, man; you’re muddy-mettled with this yammering.”

  “Answer me again,” said Andrew.

  “I cannot,” said Randolph, still mildly. He wrenched himself out of Andrew’s grasp and took the porch steps two at a time. He strode hollowly across the porch, grasped the knocker of the door, and slammed it down with a violence Ted suspected he wanted to use on Andrew. The sound echoed inside the house.

  Randolph turned and said, “Andrew, there’s no answer that can please you. Shall I say, these are the grazing-grounds of the unicorns, whose meat is words and their drink music?”

  “Pah!” said Andrew.

  “Andrew,” said Ruth, to Ted’s surprise, “if you won’t think of nothing, try thinking of something nobody would ever write poetry about.”

  “Go to,” said Andrew.

  “Then will you let me try a superstition?”

  Andrew shrugged. Ted saw that he was hardly listening to her; even that “go to” might have been spoken to the clamoring voices.

  “Come up on the porch, then,” said Ruth. “I want to get everybody. Ted, you might have to help.”

  Ted followed her up onto the porch. It creaked alarmingly under all their weight. The door was gray and weathered, its carvings threaded with fine cracks. The knocker must originally have been brass; it was now green. This one was not the dead rat; it was a long, whiskery dragon holding in its formidable teeth the drooping and very dead-looking body of a unicorn.

  “That’s disgusting,” said Ruth.

  It made Ted very uneasy, but it also made him want to grin. He said, “If it is the unicorns yammering, I can see how somebody might get tired of them. And think of all their nasty jokes.”

  “It’s still disgusting.”

  “None answereth,” said Randolph, and put his hand on the door.

  “No, wait,” said Ruth. “Please, may I employ a superstition first? My mind mislikes me.”

  “Superstition mislikes me,” said Randolph, frowning.

  “I dreamt a prayer last night,” said Ruth, “and I want to say it, that’s all.”

  “What manner of prayer?” said Randolph.

  Ruth grinned at Ted and said, “‘And from the sword (Lord) save your heart, / By my might and power, / And keep your heart, your darling dear, / From Dogs that would devour.’”

  Ted said, “‘And from the Dragon’s mouth that would / You all in sunder shiver, / And from the horns of Unicorns / Lord safely you deliver.’”

  “Thou didst dream this?” said Randolph. Ted could not tell what he thought of it.

  “I dreamed it too,” said Ted.

  “They’re quiet,” said Andrew. His face cleared and settled into his usual calm. He bowed to Ruth and said, with no sarcasm that Ted could detect, “Lady, I do thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Ruth.

  Randolph looked from her to Ted to Andrew, with the face of somebody who is trying to remember a poem and has it all except for the first line. Ted felt the same way, but dared not indulge the wish to compare speculations with Randolph; not when Andrew was listening. He made a helpless face at Randolph.

  Randolph scowled at him. Then he shrugged, and said, “Let us go in.”

  Ted put both hands on the dry, rough wood of the doors, and pushed. They swung open, grating, and a cold gust of dusty air swept out onto the porch and clouded the clear smell of the morning. Randolph walked into the front hall with Ted on his heels. Before them on the left was a narrow flight of steps from which the faded remnants of red carpet hung dismally, and on the right a long hall whose walls were studded with picture hooks. There was no rug on the floor, only the thick gray dust.

  “Some have been here,” said Randolph.

  Ted looked more closely at the dust, and saw a line of footprints that looked as if they had come from ballet slippers, several lines of prints from cats or other small animals, and a number of odd impressions that looked more like craters on the moon than anything else. These all led down the long hall.

  Ted looked at Randolph, and they went down the hall also, with the other two behind them. It led to a sun porch running the whole width of the house at the back, whose three outside walls were all windows. From the windows of the right-hand wall they could see the fields of goldenrod staggering uphill to meet the brilliant sky. But the windows of the left-hand wall looked out on a view from High Castle: the glassy lake, the slopes of forest, the insubstantial mountains. And every little diamond-shaped pane in the back wall held a different picture.

  Ted took hold of Randolph’s wrist before he realized what he was doing. “Here,” he said. “Here’s where she does it.”

  Randolph wore a very Patrick-like expression, alert and interested. He moved closer to the back wall, towing Ted with him. He laid his other hand over Ted’s clutching one and said, without looking at him, “How may we govern what we see?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ted. “If you try to concentrate on a particular piece of a scene that’s there, you’ll be able to see it as if you were quite close to it. But I don’t know how you determine what scene is there in the first place.”

  They all peered at the wall; then Randolph put his hand on a pane right before Ted’s nose. Ted moved back a little and then, reluctantly, looked at the view it offered. He saw the topmost room of Apsinthion’s house, the one full of mirrors. A black night sky with three stars in it pressed against the skylight. The room was lit with the peculiar harsh glare of fluorescents. The man himself stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by bubbling pools of purple. He was laughing. They sounded angry, like tomato sauce that is boiling too fast. Ted recognized them. They were the water-beasts you could find around High Castle.

  The voice of the man in red came faintly out of the window.

  “I’m fire,” he said to the sputtering creatures, “and you are but the semblance of water melded with the actuality of earth. Wherefore shall you damage me? Who hath served you so discourteously as to send you to this comfortless house wherein no wish of yours may be gratified save that to be instantly gone again? May I make amends, I shall do so.” The water-beasts began a prolonged and confused sploshing and smacking; they sounded like a mudball fight on a very wet day.

  “That’s him, Randolph!” said Ted. “The man who sent us back.”

  “That,” said Randolph, “is no shape that I know.”

  Ruth said behind them, “Can he hear us?”

  Randolph said promptly, “My lord Apsinthion!”

  The man in the window did not look up.

  “Who might say he was fire?” asked Ruth.

  “Any one might say so,” said Randolph. His jaw dropped slightly; his hand fell away from Ted’s, and he turned and leaned heedlessly on the glass wall and looked at Ted and Ruth, and over their heads at Andrew lingering in the doorway. “Any one might say so,” said Randolph, with a startling exuberance, “but one only so saith truthfully.”

  Ted felt bewildered, and Ruth look
ed it.

  Andrew said resignedly from the doorway, “Belaparthalion,” in about the way an eight-year-old who has just discovered where his parents are hiding the Christmas presents might say, to a younger sibling, “Santa Claus.”

  Randolph turned around and addressed the wall again. “Belaparthalion,” he said.

  The man in red swung a mirror parallel with the floor, apparently to show the water-beasts themselves in it, and took no notice.

  “If Claudia put him in there,” said Ted, “probably only Claudia can get him out.”

  “He doesn’t look very upset,” observed Ruth.

  “That’s for the dragon-shape,” said Randolph.

  Ted backed up until he was standing next to Ruth, and looked the whole wall over. It seemed to have some method in its arrangement. The scenes from the front door’s carvings, from the tapestries in High Castle, were all there, two in each corner and the last one in the middle of the wall. Ted concentrated on that. All the animals fled from the center of the little diamond pane, where there was a ragged hole like a nail-tear in a shirt. Ted went quickly forward, but the pane was above his line of sight. “Randolph,” he said, “of your courtesy, look on this pane here and consider carefully the hole in the middle.”

  Randolph looked away from some window in the lower right corner, blinking a little. “Gladly, an thou wilt look on this one,” he said.

  Ted changed places with him, but watched him rather than the window. Randolph leaned his forehead against the glass and then jerked back. “It’s warm,” he said.

  “I know,” said Ted. “What do you see?”

  “Profound darkness,” said Randolph. “And a golden glow in its midst, like unto an apple of Feren in its color, but unto the sun drawn by an artist in its shape.”