The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  Those last few words, spoken honestly with flesh and breath, falling naturally on the real air that Laura moved in, left behind them a frozen silence. The wind had died; the party from the Hidden Land stood in a perfect stillness, their soundless breath congealing in the dark air, and looked at the speaker.

  Laura recognized the unicorn, by its gold eyes and by something in the timbre of its voice. It was Chryse. She seemed much larger; and, as with the other unicorn they had spoken to, although she did not shine herself, there was light around her. But her breath, too, made clouds in the frosty air, and from the wicked horn with its spiral of violet there hung a dingy tendril of dead vine.

  “That,” said Chryse in her ringing voice, “is the oddest music that ever I was summoned—” She broke off. Laura had never heard a unicorn do such a thing. “Fence,” said Chryse. “What dost thou here among the barren rocks?”

  “Seeking your gracious presence, lady,” said Fence. Laura, accustomed to the way in which he had spoken to the other unicorns and to the Lords of the Dead, with that threadbare courtesy just covering his wariness, his disdain, his distrust, actually looked away from the unicorn to stare at Fence. He meant it. This one he respected.

  “My brothers sent me word thou wast at Heathwill Library,” said Chryse.

  “Heathwill Library,” said Fence, “is an abode of monsters. The Lords of the Dead do take their ease behind its walls.”

  Chryse made an abrupt and discontinuous sound, like a cat walking on a keyboard. There was an uneasy silence. “The strangest summons,” said Chryse at last, “and the strangest news. What are these others with thee? Will you come and take what ease I can afford you?”

  “Lady,” said Fence, “for this relief much thanks.”

  They followed Chryse on a winding path through ice and rocks, and down into a valley that held a little wood of pine trees. It was much warmer here. They trudged up to a thick hedge of some evergreen, and shrugged off their packs. Matthew stacked them under the hedge, and Laura said to Ellen, “What kind of hedge is that?”

  “Yew,” said Ellen.

  Fence joined them and said quietly, “Be somewhat scanter of thy knowledge in converse with Chryse. Do not lie, but do not speak more than you must.”

  “I’m sure Chryse knows what kind of a hedge it is,” said Ellen, rather testily.

  “It will like her an thou answerest thus pertly,” said Fence, unruffled, “but beware. She’ll lead thee on to those delights, and thou wilt speak more than thou shouldst. Thou mayst strew dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.”

  “I thank you for your good counsel,” said Ellen, and did him a courtesy.

  “Oh, go your ways,” said Fence.

  Matthew and Celia joined them. Fence said, tilting his head and looking from her to Matthew and back again, “Look the two of you to my weaknesses.”

  He walked away, and they all followed him, to a wide clearing where a pale light as of the moon behind clouds told them Chryse was waiting. She invited them to sit down, and Laura at least was very glad to do so. The pine needles were thick on the ground and very soft. Laura thought belatedly that it was perhaps impolite to sit while Chryse stood, and also that they would all have stiff necks from looking up at her. But once they were all seated in a half-circle—Matthew, Celia, Fence, Laura, Ellen, and Patrick—Chryse lay down neatly, as the unicorn they had hunted last summer had done, her forelegs stretched out before her like a cat’s and her plumy tail spread fanlike on the scattered needles. She did not look smug; she looked expectant.

  “You are welcome,” she said. “Make me known, Fence, to your companions.”

  “Lord Matthew,” said Fence, “King’s Counselor of the Hidden Land.”

  Chryse looked down her long white horse’s nose at Matthew, and said, “They speak well of thee in Heathwill Library.”

  “Celia,” said Fence, while Matthew seemed to be struggling with a reply, “Onetime Queen’s Counselor, and the King’s Counselor and musician.”

  “And Belaparthalion speaks well of thy music,” said Chryse.

  Celia smiled; Fence said, “Laura.”

  “Well met,” said Chryse. If she noticed the sudden absence of title or designation, she didn’t mention it. Laura was not sure she was relieved. Chryse said, “Thou hast played the flute of Cedric and found the unicorn in winter, bereft of the cardinal.”

  “But, lady,” said Laura, startled into speech, “it’s October.”

  “Is it?” said Chryse.

  “Ellen,” said Fence.

  Chryse said, “Thy spirit liketh my sister.”

  “Hers liked me too,” said Ellen.

  “And Patrick,” said Fence.

  Chryse said, “Think on’t.”

  Laura, bewildered, looked at Patrick, who was scowling, but not in the manner of somebody who has been presented with a senseless remark.

  “Well met,” said Chryse again. “Now. What meaneth this embassy?”

  Fence cleared his throat, pushed his hood back from his face, and spoke of the action of the Dragon King that had led to the war in August. He told of the doubts Andrew had sown among the King’s Council; he told of the death of the King, which he termed “doubtful” and managed to imply it might have been in some way engineered by the Dragon King. He described the battle. He told of the death of Conrad, the only experienced general the Hidden Land had. He told of the death of the new King, and the bargain made with the Judge of the Dead for his release. Chryse, who after all had been there, interrupted him at this point.

  “That was ill done,” she said. “For we did not receive Edward.”

  Fence looked as if he wondered how she knew. He said, “I myself, lady, am loath to lose Randolph. But that is by the way, save as an instance of the farflung trouble the meddlings of the Dragon King have caused us, who have troubled him nothing. There is no honor in him; no statecraft will bind him to be quiet. Wherefore we come to give you a gift, and to ask in return the gift of your intervention. Celia?”

  Celia reached under her cloak and drew out a wrapped bundle. She spun the long windings of cloth from it as if she were unrolling a carpet, and the swords of Shan and Melanie tumbled to the ground and lay there shining in pale blue and ghostly green. The stones on their hilts winked like stars between clouds. They sparkled in green and blue; but it was gold and red that Laura saw in them, a huge glow of gold light and a red, sinuous form coiled in the middle of it like a worm in an apple. She blinked, and the sparkles steadied, and the glimpse was gone.

  Chryse stood up. “Glory and trumpets,” she said. “I will have these swords. For my part, an you give them up, I’ll read the Dragon King a prohibition shall stay him to the shape of a polecat until all these deeds are but a song the minstrels cannot trace to’s makers. But my part is not all. We’ll find Belaparthalion by and by. Now, look you; I will have also more knowledge than thou, Fence, didst tell my sister, touching these swords and their history. Is there aught thou wouldst have of me in return for that tale?”

  “Fence!” said Ellen. “The three riddles.”

  “What!” said Chryse, in alert and joyful tones. “Riddles all Heathwill cannot read?”

  “Dangerous conjectures,” said Patrick, leaning across Laura and addressing Ellen in a disgusted voice, “in ill-breeding minds.”

  “Thy tongue breeds iller,” said Fence.

  “Fence,” said Chryse, in a voice that for the first time held no shadow of laughter. “Thy dealings with us were ever circumspect.”

  “How, lady,” said Fence, in a pleading tone laced lightly with irritation, “should they be otherwise?”

  “Dost thou know,” said Chryse, still soberly, “what time’s gone by since any trusted us?”

  “That same that’s passed,” said Fence, as if he were painstakingly explaining long division to a slow pupil, “since you did warrant it.”

  “An you try us not,” said Chryse, with the humor back in her tuneful voice, “how may you know do we warrant it or d
o we not?”

  “Is this not wonderful?” said Fence. He sounded rather desperate; but there was a touch of irony in his voice also. “You have pleased it so, to punish me with this, and this with me, that I must be your scourge and minister.”

  “Thou art a wizard,” said Chryse.

  Nobody moved or spoke; Laura’s nose itched, and she would not have scratched it for anything. The two swords on the ground, like stained glass through which the sun is shining, cast little motes of blue and green in all directions, blemishing Chryse’s white coat and making the clearing look like a scene under water. Laura squeezed her eyes shut briefly, and in the dazzle of red and yellow afterimages she saw again the golden glow and the red snaky thing within it. These things were in a tower room, but not any in High Castle. The golden glow was a great globe; the red snaky thing in it was a dragon, all whiskered and tendriled and shot with streaks of black. It was looking at her out of one black eye with a pupil as red as a garnet.

  Nothing in any of her visions had looked at her before. To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, said a crackling voice, like no voice she had ever heard in the back of her head. The sight snapped out suddenly, as if the dragon and not she had ended it. Laura opened her mouth, remembered Fence’s abjurations to Ellen, and shut it again.

  The silence stretched on a little longer. Then Fence said, “Ellen. Ask thy riddles.”

  “What beast is it,” said Ellen, “the unicorns pursue each summer?”

  Well, thought Laura, Chryse should certainly know the answer to that one.

  “The dragon,” said Chryse.

  “And before what beast doth winter flee?”

  “The dragon,” said Chryse.

  “And what beast maketh that which putteth the words to the flute’s song?”

  There was another silence. “The dragon,” said Chryse, and chuckled richly, like three low notes of a pipe organ.

  “The dragon?” said Ellen. “Not—ow!”

  Patrick had leaned over and hit her in the arm; but it was Fence who said, “Hold your tongue.”

  “Heathwill thinketh otherwise?” said Chryse.

  “Send to them, lady, and ask,” said Fence.

  “Well,” said Chryse. “Tell your tale.”

  Fence told it, appealing occasionally to Matthew or Celia or Laura, and once to Patrick, but never to Ellen, for details. The sun came up before he had finished. Chryse twitched her tail from time to time, somewhat as a cat might do and somewhat as a horse might. She made no comment when he had finished.

  “That,” said Patrick, with relish, “is a packet of news and no mistake.”

  Chryse made an obscure hooting sound. Laura wasn’t sure what it meant. Chryse said, “Fear not this bargain, Fence. I’ll call Belaparthalion.” She stood up, with considerably more grace than any of the rest of them, scrambling hastily to their feet at Fence’s urgent gesture, could manage. Then she put her long white head back, like a donkey about to bray, and made sounds far more melodious.

  In Laura’s mind the words marched along with the music. “Wake: the silver dusk returning / Up the beach of darkness brims, / And the ship of sunrise burning / Strands upon the eastern rims. / Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, / Trampled to the floor it spanned, / And the tent of night in tatters / Straws the sky-pavilioned land.”

  Which was very impressive, but Belaparthalion did not come. Laura was afraid that she knew why. “When you know these things,” the man in red had said, “then what manner of thing I am you will know also.” He had not said, I am the thing that is the answer. If he was indeed a dragon-keeper, she had just seen the dragon he kept. That tower room had not looked as if it were in the bare, blocky, modern house she and Ted had visited; but it might be. She might have seen Belaparthalion; but she might have seen some other dragon, in the present or the future or the past.

  The others were milling around, shaking the blood back into their feet, yawning, and scanning the sky. Laura looked up too, but there were only two crows. Chryse stood still, her head cocked as if she were listening for the beat of scaly wings.

  Fence was watching Chryse. The irrational dread of Laura’s dream clutched at her stomach. There was something that Fence must not find out; that was what that dream had told her. Fence had intimated to them all there were things Chryse ought not to find out, that they should say as little on any subject as they could get away with. Both these circumstances and all the natural inclinations of her character told Laura to keep her mouth shut. But she thought also of her talk with the unicorns, long ago it seemed now, when they had hinted to her in their cheerful way what might be the consequences of a failure to shout abroad every vision she had.

  “Chryse,” said Laura, not caring if it was rude. “What color is Belaparthalion?”

  “Red, curdled with black,” said Chryse, readily.

  “Somebody’s got him,” said Laura. “I saw him. He’s in a big, glowing golden globe.” She paused to disentangle her tongue, thinking, with a saving lightness, say that five times fast. “In a high room somewhere; a house, I think, not a castle. At least, the walls aren’t stone. And he says, ‘To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’”

  “Does he so?” said Chryse, slowly, and with a very unpleasant intonation. “Melanie’s elder brother said so also.”

  “Chryse,” said Fence, very gently, “have a care.”

  He and Chryse looked at each other, and Celia and Matthew looked at the two of them.

  “I know where to seek him,” said Chryse, suddenly. She took four strides for the edge of the clearing, and paused. “I can carry one,” she said.

  “Laura?” said Fence. “ ’Twas thy vision.”

  It seemed impossible to refuse. Well, Laura thought, it hadn’t killed her last time. She took a step toward Chryse, and considered again. The worst thing about being a coward was the risk that you would choose the wrong moment to stop being one.

  “I’ll go if you think I should,” she said to Fence. “But Ellen would like to go; and you, or Matthew, or Celia, might be a lot more use.”

  “But not Patrick,” said Patrick; his voice was unperturbed, but he had chosen to say something.

  “Send Patrick!” said Ellen. “He’s the one who needs it.”

  “Patrick is incorrigible,” said Matthew. “I’ll go, Fence.”

  “Lady?” said Fence.

  And Chryse, the omnipresent glint of humor magnified and shining like the sun in every syllable, said, “Patrick likes me well. Let him come and be witness.”

  CHAPTER 27

  IF Claudia is Melanie,” said Randolph, rubbing the thumb and finger of one hand under his eyes, until they met at the bridge of his nose, which he pinched vigorously. He dropped his hand, looking no better for the exercise.

  Ruth had lost track of the number of times it had been said. She sat, with Randolph and Ted, back on the floor of Claudia’s diamond-paned sun porch, because it was cleaner there, and warmer, and because they hoped the windows might still show them something useful. Andrew was ostensibly exploring the rest of the house, also in search of something useful. He had not ranted anymore; he had not even asked quietly for some explanation. Perhaps the King and the dead children had told him something. Ruth was glad to be out of his presence. She thought his docility in the face of such discoveries boded no good.

  Randolph had not finished his sentence. Ruth decided to sum up for him. “She’s about five hundred years old,” she said, “infinitely accomplished in Sorcery, marvelous wise in the ways of the unicorns, and bears a grudge against the Hidden Land and everyone in it that you never have explained properly but that we will grant to be weighty. What else?”

  “She’s not Andrew’s sister,” said Randolph.

  “Unless Andrew’s not Andrew,” said Ted.

  “He might really have been the villain all along,” said Ruth, cheered. Then she scowled. “But I doubt it. He rings true, if you know what I mean. There was always something sleek and odd about Claudia, but Andrew I beli
eved in.”

  “Yes, so did I.” Ted pushed the thick hair out of his eyes. “So Andrew’s just one more victim.”

  “Well, he might still be a spy for the Dragon King.”

  “Okay, leave him on the suspected list. Back to Claudia. Randolph, if she’s so old and has such great sorcerous knowledge, why’d she have to apprentice herself to Fence and Meredith?”

  “Her knowledge is of the Red School, now dispersed,” said Randolph. “Each school hath its secrets that the others know not. One of the dearest goals of Heathwill Library is to abolish this secrecy, but they have not achieved it yet. Also, there surfaceth from time to time new knowledge; easier to pry it from some teacher of the art than to seek it out laboriously oneself.”

  Ruth looked at him. There was an edge of malice and disillusion in his voice that you had to expect, but that disturbed her just the same. Randolph and Claudia had kept company for almost a year; he had presumably been fond of her, and he was no doubt thinking now of all she had pried out of him: not only the knowledge, but the trust, the time, the confidences which remembering would scald the heart once he knew to whom he had so blithely given them. Damn Claudia, thought Ruth.

  “Why did she lock Belaparthalion up in a golden globe?” said Ted.

  “He’s a protector of the Hidden Land, with Chryse, against the Outside Powers, and what other capricious forces may measure a ladder ’gainst our bulwarks.”

  “But she didn’t lock Chryse up somewhere?” said Ruth.

  “Who can say?” said Randolph.

  “Well, she hadn’t, as of our bargaining for Ted’s life.”

  “Melanie is an old enemy of the unicorns,” said Randolph. “And the unicorn is cannier than the dragon.”

  “That’s what’s been bothering me!” exclaimed Ruth, smacking her hand down on Claudia’s hardwood floor. “I thought Melanie was dead. I thought Belaparthalion killed her because she broke her word to Shan.”