The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  “And in the midst of the golden glow?”

  “A sword that shineth blue, and in its hilt three blue stones.”

  “Like Shan’s sword. Is there anything in the sword?”

  Randolph was still for a long time. Ted looked at the pane Randolph had assigned him. It showed a moonlit clearing in an evergreen forest. Somebody stooped and lit a fire; the red light washed up cheerily and Ted saw that it was Claudia. She sat down on a stump, and three black cats climbed into her lap, complaining. She laughed and said to them in the throaty voice Ted remembered, “There shall be fish tomorrow.”

  Ted looked at the wedge of the black sky visible in the upper part of the pane, and stared at it until it widened and filled the whole diamond. It was full of stars.

  “Naught within the sword,” said Randolph.

  “See if you can identify these constellations,” said Ted.

  Randolph knelt beside him and stared obediently. “Those are northern stars,” he said. “As you might see at the furthest tip of Fence’s Country, in the realm of Belaparthalion.”

  “So Claudia and her cats are right where the rest of them are going?”

  “Or have been; or will be. Saidst thou not that, in that other house, were scenes both past and present and to come?”

  “We’d better warn them just in case,” said Ruth.

  “What we need’s a ladder, or a stool,” said Ted. “Somebody ought to peruse every one of these panes.”

  “Do you begin on the lowermost,” said Randolph, “and one shall relieve you.”

  “I’ll bring you some tea,” said Ruth, “if there’s any to be had.”

  Ted thanked her. The rest of them trooped out, and he settled down to his task. It was worse than looking something up in The Oxford English Dictionary. There were distractions everywhere. Any pane on which he fixed his attention would stir to life and begin its slow progression; but most of them held nothing that he recognized. Many showed only empty landscapes. He went back to the pane that held Claudia and her campfire, but she just sat there petting her cats while the fire died. She might do something in five hours, or five minutes, but how could you tell? Ted went on watching her anyway. The voice he thought of as Edward’s, and which was beginning to distinguish itself from those other voices, said, For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

  “That,” said Ted, “is what got us into this mess.”

  Nor are we out of it.

  “Is that really you?” said Ted. “Edward Fairchild, heir to the throne of the Hidden Land?”

  To err is human, said Edward dimly; and Ted felt his shadowy presence dim also and go out. He shook his head and went back to staring at the windows.

  CHAPTER 23

  MICHAELMAS’S room had a large table that he was using as a desk, an even larger round table with chairs set about it, several extraneous chairs, a wardrobe, and a collection of chests and cabinets. On the chairs were papers, books, very small sundials and astrolabes, crumby plates, mold-scummed teacups, and sleeping cats. These last didn’t want to be sat on, but were amenable to being scooped up and put on one’s lap. Laura and Matthew and Patrick each got a cat, gray, orange, and orange-striped, respectively. Celia might have had a large and scruffy black one, but she looked at it and sat on the table instead.

  The man in the yellow robe, who Ellen said was Michaelmas, had picked up his pen again while they shuffled through his belongings to find the chairs, and wrote placidly until they were all seated. Laura noticed that none of the grown-ups tried to recall his attention, and that he looked up and spoke just as Patrick evidenced an intention of saying something.

  The man in yellow said, “Wherefore do you grace us with your presence?” He did not say this ironically, nor as if he meant it, but, Laura thought, like the “May I help you?” salespeople use. He looked from Celia to Fence and back again, as if the rest of them didn’t matter.

  “We seek the answers to three riddles,” said Fence.

  “The other party,” said Michaelmas, hunting among the piled scrolls on his desk and knocking a mug to the floor, “seeketh knowledge of Shan’s Ring, and of the swords of Shan and Melanie.”

  Patrick, who had been slumped as far down in his chair as he could get without falling out of it, sat up abruptly. Laura and Ellen looked at each other. Fence had Shan’s Ring; Ruth had left it for him when they made their unsuccessful attempt to leave this place behind them. Celia had the swords of Shan and Melanie in her baggage; but Fence had plans for them. They also happened to be the only sure way the five children had to get home again.

  There was a less-than-friendly silence. Fence stood up. “Did they bring these objects for your examination?” he said.

  Michaelmas gave him his full attention. “No,” he said.

  Fence said, “Give me some light.”

  Michaelmas, seeming not in the least put out at being spoken to so peremptorily, gazed the room for a moment and said, “Light breaks where no sun shines.”

  Warm golden light sprang out at them from ceiling, from floor, from every corner. It was not dazzling, but it did startle. Laura saw, when she had recovered, that there was a large number of things rather like grapefruit, strung or just lying around the room. They all glowed. Disordered though the room might be, there were no cobwebs in it and no dust.

  “Thanks,” said Fence, and fished in his pouch. He walked up to the man in yellow’s table and laid two objects on it. “This is my ring of sorcery,” he said, “and this is the Ring of Shan. Had the other party any such tokens?”

  “They are not required,” said Michaelmas. But he looked intently at the two rings, one of shining silver with a luminous blue stone in it; the other, clouded brass with a black rock of the sort anybody might pick up out of a flowerbed. Then he held out his hand. “May I look at them?”

  Fence scooped them up and dropped them into his palm. There was less inimical silence while Michaelmas looked them over, held them up to the light, and finally took a lens out of the drawer of his table and examined them through that. The silence was broken by impatient-sounding footsteps in the hall, heralding the appearance of a middle-sized woman in a blue robe, with a bunch of keys at her wrist and a wool cap on her head.

  “Michaelmas!” she said. She had a vigorous voice, a sharp face, and brown hair in braids. “You’ve lit up every mage-light in the library. Use the morn in russet mantle clad; it doesn’t reach so far.” Then she looked around the room and seemed about to make some apology; and then she said, “Celia!”

  “Chalcedony,” said Celia, with quieter but very real pleasure; and she got off the table and hugged the woman.

  “What strange names they have here,” said Ellen to Laura.

  “Madam,” said Fence, “sawst thou the party that did arrive yesternight?”

  “You are that party,” said Chalcedony, perplexed. She let go of Celia and considered the rest of them. “All except Celia. What makest thou from High Castle one day late?”

  “Michaelmas,” said Fence; the man in yellow looked up. “Who made up the other party?”

  “All save thou,” said Michaelmas.

  He and Chalcedony stared at each other.

  “There!” said Fence. “That’s better than tokens.”

  There was a meditative silence. Celia and Chalcedony moved into a far corner and began talking in low voices. Fence and Matthew shook their heads at each other. Michaelmas began rummaging again in the mess on his desk.

  “You know,” said Patrick, cheerily, and Laura jumped. “It’s all very well sitting here making deductions; but why don’t we just find these characters and ask them what the hell they think they’re doing?”

  “I’d sooner go without seeing them,” said Fence, not to Patrick but to Matthew. Matthew nodded. Fence said to Michaelmas, “Where have you quartered them?”

  “Atop the westernmost block,” said Michaelmas, still rummaging.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said
Patrick.

  “Can we resolve our riddles and be gone by morning, we shall do so,” said Fence.

  “You never did say if you thought the Dragon King sent them.”

  “I trust he hath,” said Fence. “If they answer to him, at least they do answer.”

  “Fence, where’s your spirit of adventure?” said Ellen, entering the fray with such suddenness that Laura jumped again.

  Michaelmas looked up from his search and said to Fence, “Speak your riddles.”

  Fence said, “What beast is it the unicorns pursue each summer? Before what beast doth winter flee? What beast maketh that which putteth the words to the flute’s song?”

  Michaelmas sat back in his high, cushioned chair and whistled. “And you think to be gone by morning,” he said.

  “You know them not?”

  “I know one only, the second.”

  “But,” said Laura, seized with irritation, “they’re a matched set. They all have the same answer. What’s the answer to the second one?”

  “The dragon,” said Michaelmas. “But look you, this is clean impossible. The unicorns pursue not the dragon; nor maketh the dragon that which putteth words to the flute’s song.”

  “Are you sure?” said Laura. “Because the one who gave us the riddles said that when we knew these things, then what manner of thing he was we would know also. And he talked as if he could fly; and he had a red light in his eyes.”

  “Where met you this man?” said Michaelmas.

  He had found what he was looking for: a large brass bell. He rang vigorously, and Chalcedony came across the room and took it out of his hand.

  “The cook’s asleep,” she said. “It’s late. I’ve tea in my room.”

  She went out, and came back with a tray, giving Laura time to wonder if she had said too much to Michaelmas about the man in red. Fence didn’t seem disturbed.

  The tea was extremely strong, and unsweetened, but it was hot. Laura decided that, if she really couldn’t stand to drink it, she would leave it sitting on the floor to get moldy, and nobody would know the difference.

  “Where she met this man,” said Fence, when they were all settled, “is all entangled with the matter of Shan’s Ring. Now, I’d meant to tell you of that; ’tis knowledge you can sift better than we, and of a sort that does belong in this Library. But I’d as lief th’other party had it not.”

  “Had it never, or not for this present time?” said Michaelmas.

  “Not for this present time.”

  Michaelmas looked over Laura’s head to where Chalcedony sat on the table with Celia. Laura craned over her shoulder in time to see Chalcedony looking whimsical. Chalcedony said, “How long must this present time endure?”

  “A year and a day,” said Fence.

  Both Michaelmas and Chalcedony fell upon this proposal with scorn, and there followed about twenty minutes of wrangling. Laura, comfortably ensconced with a purring cat in a cushioned chair so big that she could pull her legs up into it, a chair that moreover was not jogging her anywhere at a pace too fast for comfort, did not pay them much attention. Both members of the Library staff appeared to view with horror the notion of hiding knowledge from anybody, even an unknown group of shape-shifters that had impersonated the party from the Hidden Land and made off with their boats. Patrick tried to enter the fray and was abjured to shut up, unsuccessfully by Ellen and successfully by Fence. Laura dozed, hearing dimly the four of them snapping “Nine months!” “A fortnight!” “Six months!” at one another like people bargaining in a market.

  Laura shot to wakefulness as her relaxing hand tipped the mug and spilled warm tea all over her knees. It wouldn’t show on the dark green of her hose. Michaelmas’s cushions, however, were of yellow silk with a fetching border of running squirrels. She mopped surreptitiously at them with the hem of her cloak.

  Fence said, “Until spring, then,” and Michaelmas nodded.

  Laura decided to drink the rest of her tea. It would be safer inside her; and she might need to stay awake.

  Fence explained what Ruth had discovered about Shan’s Ring, and what, he kindly said, Patrick and Laura had discovered about the swords of Shan and Melanie. Laura, listening to him, was stricken with a combination of admiration and horror. He wasn’t lying. You couldn’t say he was lying. But he conveyed the impression that Laura’s own world was a third version of the Secret Country, as the glassy place Ruth had gotten into was a second version of it. This concept was apparently a pet theory of Michaelmas’s; he thought that, if there were a second version devoted to bargaining with unicorns, there must be a third one devoted to bargaining with dragons. Chalcedony pointed out, in the tone of one who has said this before and knows she will have to say it again, that never in the history of the world had anybody bargained with a dragon or any dragon evidenced the slightest desire to bargain with anybody. Michaelmas agreed with her but seemed not to think it mattered.

  Laura was interested to see that Fence agreed with him and Celia did not. Matthew, if he had an opinion, did not vouchsafe it. He said, “Forget not the man in the stark house.”

  Fence gave him a look half-grateful and half-impatient, and told Michaelmas about the man in the stark house, who, in addition to the characteristics mentioned by Laura earlier, wore red, and used cardinals as messengers, and knew three riddles about the unicorns, and used mirrors as if they were windows, and called himself Apsinthion.

  “I would I could see his face,” said Michaelmas.

  Laura had to clear her throat, it was so long since she had spoken. “My lord, he looks like Fence and Randolph,” she said.

  She felt silly as soon as she had said it, but Michaelmas looked suddenly alert. “In what particulars?” he said.

  Laura rallied her courage, gave herself time to think even though Patrick was bumping his foot impatiently against the leg of his chair, and spoke. “He had black hair, but it was straight like Fence’s,” she said. “He was sh—as tall as Fence. He had Randolph’s hands and nose, and his chin, but his eyes were round like Fence’s. His voice wasn’t like either of theirs, but I recognized something about it.”

  “High or low?” said Michaelmas.

  “Low,” said Laura, “and rather crackly.” She heard him in her mind’s ear, saying, Oho. Sits the wind in that quarter? “Oh,” she said. “It wasn’t his voice, it was the way he said things.” She stared at Michaelmas. That dry voice, talking as if everything it said were a joke you weren’t getting. “In the way of unicorns,” said Laura.

  “Would their fancy take them so far?” said Michaelmas to Fence.

  “To wear red?” said Fence. “To come under a roof in that place wherein dragons may bargain?”

  Laura didn’t see why not, but Michaelmas seemed to find this a cogent argument. “The other, then,” he said, slowly. “Well, Fence, what are thou and Randolph, commingled?”

  “An ill fighter and a worse wizard,” said Fence, dryly.

  “What’s amiss with Randolph, then?” said Chalcedony. “He was your excellent good student when I saw him last.”

  “I jested,” said Fence, very shortly indeed.

  Laura looked quickly at Chalcedony. She seemed doubtful, but said no more. Fence was getting careless; things must be weighing on him.

  “Well,” said Fence, and stood up. “You have your knowledge, the which you may impart to any visitors you will, in the spring. We have the answer to one riddle, and with that, I think, we must content ourselves and depart. I had rather have these meddlers behind me than ahead of me. Can you direct their researches into some byway of detail, Michaelmas, until we’re a day gone?”

  “You can’t go unsatisfied,” said Michaelmas. “Stay but an hour; Prospero’s your man for riddles; I’ll wake him.”

  “You’ll—” began Chalcedony, and looked at Celia, and shut her lips.

  “There’s no need, i’truth,” said Fence.

  “I’truth, there is,” said Michaelmas, standing up also. He was as tall as Benjamin, but
half as broad. “We’ve sent no one hence so soon since Shan came to us; and that once will serve us a mort of years. Sit down. Those who shadow you are long abed, awaiting report from some three of our apprentices. And that,” said Michaelmas, coming around his desk and frowning, “might have been a sign to me, had I been quicker. When did the scholars of High Castle send apprentices to do their reading for them? Well,” he said again, and putting a hand on Fence’s shoulder bore him back into his chair. “Rest, and I’ll bring Prospero.” He left.

  “Rest,” said Fence; he sounded as if he were going to follow it up with “Ha!” but in fact he said, “Celia? Thou mayst take this chance to hobnob with thy schoolfellow.”

  “If she can spare the odd hour,” said Celia.

  “Gladly,” said Chalcedony.

  They went out together, Celia bestowing on Fence as she went by a very curious look, compounded of wryness, reproach, and irritation. Their footsteps sounded on the stone floor outside, and a door opened and closed again. The two rings on the desk winked in the golden light, and burst suddenly on Laura’s eyes like a display of fireworks. Huge shapes of fire blossomed against a starry sky. They illuminated, falling, the massive bulk of a square castle set in the middle of a sheet of water. Blue and green and red and yellow shot streaming across the sky and rippled blurrily on the surface of the water. Very faintly, she heard Ted’s voice cry, “Have at you now!”

  She blinked, breathing hard, and the two rings winked tranquilly at her.

  “What’s the matter?” said Ellen.

  “Fence,” said Laura, “don’t you think you should take those rings back?”

  “No doubt,” said Fence, and coming forward he picked them up and dropped them into his pouch. His mild gaze lingered on Laura, but he said nothing. Ellen glared at her, but she didn’t say anything either. Laura expected to be tackled later. She ought to tell them about this vision, right now. Some reluctance she could not define nor defeat closed her throat. The dread of her dreams was with her still, the baseless feeling that Fence was not a safe repository of confidences.