The Secret Country

by PAMELA DEAN

  They were still running when they reached the rendezvous. If Laura had not tripped on the skirt of the dress Agatha had made her wear that day, they would probably have run right past their relations and ended up in Conrad’s Close, which would have pleased neither of them. It was said (by Agatha, in the course of a long and impassioned lecture) to be haunted by the ghost of Conrad’s bitterest enemy, who had actually died in the Nightmare Grass, and whose ghost therefore appeared to everybody it saw as what Conrad’s enemy had feared most when alive.

  As it was, Laura tripped, Ellen stopped and went back for her, and they both blinked in a sudden blaze of green from Patrick’s sword.

  “You don’t have to run yourselves to death even if you are late,” said Ruth from behind her brother.

  Laura, sitting on the cold stone floor and panting for breath, looked at her green-tinged face and would have run again if she had been standing.

  “There was something,” said Ellen, “some beast.” She stopped to breathe.

  “Where?” demanded Patrick. “Is it following you?”

  “I didn’t hear it,” said Laura doubtfully.

  Ellen pointed in the direction they had come. “We thought it was at the bottom of the West Tower, but—”

  “South,” said Patrick, disgustedly. “That’s Fence’s tower, you ninnies, and whatever he left to guard it wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “It’s probably just a handful of moonlight and six rhymes,” said Ruth.

  “Where’s Ted?” asked Laura.

  “He’s guarding the way we came,” said Patrick. “Some of the catlike guards might walk this way sometimes. I hope nobody heard you guys charging along.”

  “I don’t think anybody except Fence uses that part of the castle,” said Ruth.

  “It didn’t look like it,” said Ellen. “All dusty.”

  “I’ll get Ted,” said Ruth. “Give me the sword, Patrick, please.”

  “Why didn’t you bring a torch or a lantern?” asked Ellen. “We tried to get one but they wouldn’t let us, and the candles just blew out. It’s awfully windy in this place.”

  “Ted’s got the lantern,” said Ruth. “He didn’t want to stand where the guards might come, holding this weird sword.”

  Patrick handed her the weird sword, and she went off down the hall in a halo of green. Laura leaned against the hospitably open door to the West Tower’s stairs and tried to peer up them. There was a faint glow on the wall of the first turn.

  “How was your first day at High Castle?” Patrick asked them.

  “Benjamin said we couldn’t have anything but bread and water,” said Ellen, “but Agatha brought us pasties.”

  “They were awful,” said Laura.

  “They were not.”

  “Do you have any left?” asked Patrick. “Because Ted and I don’t have any Agatha, and—”

  “Ellen ate them all,” said Laura.

  “What happened to Ruthie?” asked Ellen.

  “They turned her over to Meredith, who’s the head sorcerer of the Green Caves at High Castle. They scolded her and turned her from a journeyman back into an apprentice. Don’t ask her about it. She’s furious.”

  Laura could well imagine. Ellen seemed unimpressed.

  “We were actually lucky to be punished,” said Ellen. “It meant no lessons. Whoever decided we should have lessons in the summer?”

  “You think you’re unhappy,” said Patrick. “Ted and I have a fencing lesson with Randolph first thing tomorrow, and he thinks he’s been teaching Ted for three years and me for one, and we don’t know anything about it at all.”

  “Well,” said Ellen, “we don’t know anything about the history of the Outer Isles, either.”

  “The what?”

  “The Outer Isles. I made them up one day when it rained and you guys were all playing cards.”

  “How many more things like that are we going to run into?” demanded Patrick. “If I’d had any idea you were all going around making things up on your own—”

  “Weren’t you?” asked Ellen.

  “No!”

  “You’re weird.”

  Patrick’s reply to this was forestalled by the return of Ted and Ruth, who came clattering down the corridor in a muddle of green light from Patrick’s sword and yellow from Ted’s lantern.

  “Why are you so loud?” said Ellen.

  “It’s these boots,” said Ted. “They’re heavy. Don’t you have any?”

  Ellen stuck her foot into the circle of lantern light and showed him her soft leather shoe.

  “That’s much better for sneaking around in,” said Ted.

  “Lady Ruth has some of those,” said Ruth, “but they’re not warm enough for this place. They might fit you.”

  “What’s Patrick got?” said Ellen.

  “Boots,” said Patrick. “But I know how to walk.” He took his sword back from Ruth and sheathed it, and a new set of darker shadows sprang up around them.

  “Where’s my sword, Laurie?” said Ted.

  “It’s not yours,” said Laura. Ellen’s reminder that they were likely to get in trouble over their lessons, and the fact that Ted was no longer guarding against discovery by the guards, were making her feel frightened again. As a result, she felt uncompromising. “It’s under the bed. I had to tell Benjamin it was a toy.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “No,” said Ellen.

  “Well, he let me keep it.”

  “He kept looking at those stones on the handle,” said Ellen.

  “Hilt,” said Patrick. “Take care of that sword, you guys. We can’t get you back if you lose it.”

  “Let’s go,” said Ted, holding the lantern up. They started up the narrow stairway, first Ted, then Ruth, then Patrick, then Ellen, and then Laura.

  There was indeed a torch burning just beyond the first turn of the stairway, high up on the wall. There was also another beast. Laura could not see it, but she could hear it gurgle.

  “Back up!” said Ted’s voice, echoing a little in the stairwell. “Patrick, the sword—”

  The sword rang as Patrick drew it, and the beast made a noise like a bucketful of water thrown into a patch of mud. All of this sounded hollow and horrible.

  “What’s it doing!” cried Laura, retreating back around the corner so that Ellen would not knock her over.

  “I can’t see, they’re all in the way,” said Ellen. She sounded like someone who has discovered that he has chosen a bad seat at the movies, and Laura, who wanted to take off down the stairs and find a bed to hide under, marveled at her.

  “Give me the sword,” said Ted’s voice.

  “You get out of the way,” said Patrick’ s. “You believe in this stuff. It’ll probably drown you.”

  The beast produced a remarkable imitation of a water balloon hitting a hot sidewalk from a long way up.

  “Will you give it here!”

  “Will you move!”

  “Will you wait!” said Ruth’s voice. Laura, two steps farther down than she had been when the water balloon hit, froze, looking up at their shadows on the wall.

  “Does anybody remember anything like this?” said Ruth.

  “No,” said Ted. “Give me the sword.”

  “It sounds,” said Ellen, “like the one we met at Fence’s tower.”

  “Does it look like it?”

  “You’re in the way.”

  “Well, come on up.”

  Ellen disappeared around the corner and her shadow joined the tangle on the wall. The beast bubbled like a coffee percolator for a moment, slurped once, and stopped.

  “Hey, Laurie!” called Ellen, reappearing around the bend. “Come and look at this.”

  Laura shook her head. “One’s enough.”

  “I want you to see if you think it looks like the other one. It’s not doing anything.”

  “It’s gurgling!”

  “Well, maybe we sound like that to it too. Come on.”

  Laura, feeling as if someone el
se had broken the bathroom window and she were going to get the blame, came slowly up the stairs she had sneaked down, and stood next to Ellen.

  The beast, taking up three or four steps, sat in the torchlight, looking like a pool of water with a scum of purple fur. It had no eyes, no legs, no up or down, and no edges. There were spots that were clearly step, and spots that were clearly beast, and an odd zone between that was not clearly anything. It bubbled gently at Laura from somewhere inside itself.

  “Yes,” said Laura, and went back down a step.

  “Handful of moonlight, huh?” said Ellen.

  “Why should Fence care what happens to the West Tower?” wondered Patrick.

  “Maybe it’s not Fence’s beast,” said Ellen.

  The beast made a sudden sucking noise and they all jumped.

  “Are you Fence’s beast?” Ellen asked it.

  The beast was quiet.

  “Whosever you are, we’d be obliged if you’d let us by.”

  The beast made precisely the same noise that the other beast had made at Laura and Ellen, folded and swirled in on itself like water going down a narrow space, and disappeared. Patrick leaned over and put his hand on the steps where it had been.

  “Not wet,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” said Ted.

  “I want to know whose fault that was.”

  Ted started up the steps, carrying the lantern with him. Ruth followed. Patrick stood between them and Ellen and Laura, still holding the sword and staring at the empty steps under the torch.

  “Move, please,” said Ellen.

  “I bet you made this up.”

  “I did not. Move.”

  Patrick flattened himself against the wall, Ellen went by him after the rapidly diminishing glow of Ted’s lantern, and Patrick looked at Laura. “Did you make this up? It’s your tower.”

  “It’s not my tower!” said Laura, feeling that the one thing worse than that oozy beast would be to be blamed for its existence. “I don’t make up beasts. I don’t like them. Can we go up?” she added, trying to behave like Princess Laura. “They’ll find the ring, and it’s my job to find the ring.”

  “You’re all crazy,” said Patrick, sheathing the sword, and he went ahead of her up the steps.

  They went around and around, past the open doors of the rooms with old clothes and old weapons, up to the third landing. Laura wished for a quiet afternoon to rummage. It seemed unlikely that she would ever get one, if quiet meant not having to worry about some grown-up, somewhere, who would yell at her when she came back. There was a bench on the landing and another torch on the wall above the bench. Ellen was sitting on the bench, and Ted and Ruth were having an altercation about the door, which was shut.

  “What’s going on?” said Patrick. Laura sat down next to Ellen.

  “Door won’t open,” said Ted. “There’s no lock or handle on this side and it won’t open.”

  “It’s supposed to be open,” said Laura.

  “What do they need a beast for if the door won’t open anyway?” said Ellen.

  “Why is everything around here three times as hard to do as it should be?” said Ted, leaning on the door. Laura looked at his tired face in the torchlight and was still reminded of Randolph, whom she still had not met. She and Ellen had seen only Benjamin and Agatha, and a few amused guards, since they came to High Castle.

  “Why don’t you ask it to open?” she said to Ted. “The beast moved when Ellen asked it to.”

  Ted rolled his eyes at the ceiling, turned his face against the carved wooden surface of the door, and addressed it sarcastically. “I prithee open,” he said.

  And fell into the darkness of the West Tower’s third room, dropping the lantern. The lantern rolled in crazy circles exactly as a dropped flashlight will do, went out, and clanged against the far wall. Laura and Ellen held each other, and Ellen laughed until the tower echoed, and Laura pretended that she had not been scared half out of her wits.

  “Shut up,” said Patrick, taking Ted by an arm and hauling him up again.

  Ted shook himself free and advanced upon Laura menacingly. “Very funny, Laurie,” he said. “You made this up, didn’t you?”

  “No,” said Laura. “This isn’t supposed to be a magical castle and I didn’t make up any of this.”

  “Leave her alone,” said Ruth.

  “I thought you thought this was real,” said Patrick, “so how can she have made it up anyway?”

  Ted wheeled on him. “I do think it’s real. I also think we made it up. It’s real now. Somehow, things got out of hand. And once they did, then things could start happening that we didn’t make up.”

  “And you say I have silly theories.”

  “We have a ring to find,” said Ruth.

  Ted turned away from Patrick as if Patrick were something he had decided not to buy. “Laurie, where’s the ring supposed to be?”

  “It’s in a casket.”

  “What?”

  “In a lead casket,” said Laura, stubbornly.

  “She means like in Merchant of Venice,” said Ellen. “A box, is all.”

  “I wish we’d never heard of Shakespeare,” growled Ted as he stamped into the tower room and retrieved the lantern. He stood on the bench, displacing Laura and Ellen rather roughly, lit the lantern from the torch, and handed the lantern down to Ruth. Then he took the torch from its socket. “Where is this casket?” he asked Laura.

  “In a niche in the north wall.”

  Ted strode into the tower room, trailed by the others, and made a minute inspection of the north wall. It was empty except for three arrow slits.

  “Are you sure it’s north?”

  “No.”

  Ted made for the west wall, muttering.

  “Watch out, you’ll set the tapestries on fire,” said Ruth as the light of the torch showed up a crowd of colors and shapes.

  “Give me the lantern,” said Ted, thrusting the torch at her, and disappeared under the tapestries.

  “Why’s he so grumpy?” Ellen asked Laura.

  “He’s always grumpy.”

  “But Prince Edward is meek and gentle.”

  “Heh,” said Laura.

  They watched the disturbance under the tapestries that was Ted looking for the niche. It came around to the door, and Ted emerged, looking ruffled and indignant. “There’s not a darn thing under there,” he said. “You’re crazy, Laurie.”

  “I am not.” She was sure she had remembered properly. She felt indignant herself; somebody had tampered with her tower.

  Ted crossed to the south wall, disappeared under the tapestries, and came out where they stopped for the east wall. “Not there either,” he said. “Lead casket indeed.”

  Laura eyed him, but he did not seem disposed to come at her menacingly again.

  “Now what do we do?” he said, sitting on the floor. Then he stopped. He held the lantern closer to the floor, and Laura saw something glitter faintly. Ted moved the lantern, and more glitters sprang up. “Oh, God,” said Ted, in such heartfelt tones that no one reproved him.

  “What?” said Ruth.

  “Look at the floor,” said Ted, tragically. “‘Unvalued Gold.’ ”

  They all stooped and looked at it in the light of Ruth’s torch. Embedded in the smooth gray stone were rings, dully gleaming brass rings, hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands, patterning the floor in circles, in diamonds, in cloverleafs, in scallops and whorls.

  “Whose idea was this?” said Patrick, and he sounded almost as terrible as Lady Ruth.

  “I’m not sure it has to be anybody’s,” said Ruth.

  “Of course it does,” said Patrick. “They’re just scared to admit it.”

  Everybody looked at Laura.

  “It’s not mine!” she said. “I told you mine, and it’s all messed up.” They all stood and glared at one another in the flaring light.

  “Well,” said Ted, “I guess we’d better start looking. Just hope it’s good and loose, wherever it
is.” He took himself and his lantern back to the door, got down on his hands and knees, and began methodically sweeping his hands across the floor.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Patrick, arresting the other three in the act of joining Ted.

  “Well?” said Ruth.

  “This is clearly not a place for storing old jewelry,” said Patrick. “There’s none here. So if there’s no old jewelry here, probably Shan’s Ring isn’t here either.”

  “The old clothes were in the right place,” said Laura.

  “And there are brass rings here,” said Ruth, “and Shan’s Ring is a brass ring.”

  “We might as well keep looking,” said Ted. “We can’t do anything else tonight.”

  He went back to his task. Ruth held the torch for Ellen and Laura, and they crawled doggedly across the floor, one on either side of her, picking at myriads of brass rings. Laura, scraping her fingertips and acquiring little round imprints on her knees and the heels of her hands, began to feel put upon.

  They had advanced about two feet across the floor in this fashion when Patrick, who had been standing and watching them, spoke again.

  “Wait a minute,” he said.

  Laura stopped crawling and began rubbing her knees.

  “What now?” said Ruth, without stopping.

  “Assuming Shan’s Ring is here,” said Patrick, “there must be a pattern to this.”

  Ruth sighed audibly, and Patrick went on. “You always hide things with a pattern. You don’t just dump them down somewhere and hope you remember where you put them.”

  “You don’t,” muttered Ruth, sitting back on her heels. But he had caught Ted’s interest.

  “What kind of pattern?” Ted asked him, still on the floor with his lantern.

  “In the riddle,” said Patrick, promptly. Laura, catching the pleased note in his voice, guessed that he had figured the whole thing out before he spoke. Just like Patrick, she thought.

  “ ‘I am a trinket in the world,’ ” quoted Ted. “Well?”

  “Maybe it’s an acrostic,” said Patrick. “Or maybe it has a code in it. We should write it out and work on it.”

  “That could take weeks,” said Ruth.

  “Well,” said Patrick, still with that pleased note in his voice, “maybe there’s a clue in the riddle about where on this floor Shan’s Ring is.”