The Secret Country

by PAMELA DEAN

  “Patrick,” said Ruth, “did you make this up?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “What are you so happy about, then?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Patrick, “and observing, not grubbing around on the floor, and I think there’s a connection between the riddle and the tapestries.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe—” began Ruth, and was interrupted by Ted.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “There’s a map of the Secret Country on that wall,” said Patrick, waving at the south wall of the room. “I think that’s for the first line, for the world.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be a picture of a trinket?” said Ted, but he had straightened up on his knees and was regarding Patrick hopefully.

  “Too vague,” said Patrick.

  “Just because you think—”

  “Let him finish, Ruthie,” said Ted. “What about ‘unvalued gold and sullen stone’?”

  “Well,” said Patrick, wilting a little, “that one I couldn’t figure out.”

  “Well, what’s next, then?” said Ted. “ ‘I am a trinket in the world, unvalued gold and sullen stone; but outside power is unfurled when outside Power I am hurled, and Time awry is blown.’ ”

  “Well,” said Patrick, “there’s a dragon—I thought that could be the outside power being unfurled.”

  Ted stood up with the lantern. “Where?”

  Patrick took him over to the middle of the north wall, stepping around Ruth and Ellen and Laura with a certain disdain, like a cat, thought Laura, walking on a wet floor. His shadow and Ted’s blotted out what they were looking at.

  “Huh,” said Ted. “It’s even unfolding its wings. ‘Outside power is unfurled.’ Okay. What next?”

  “‘When outside Power I am hurled,’” said Laura, who was becoming interested.

  “I couldn’t get that one either,” said Patrick. “But over here,” and he led Ted and the lantern along the north wall to its western edge, “there’s a tremendous storm, and it’s overturned a sundial, see?”

  “ ‘Time awry is blown!’ ” cried Laura, scrambling to her feet.

  “That’s only three lines,” said Ruth, “and even if—”

  “I couldn’t see a lot of the things on the tapestries,” said Patrick.

  Ted handed him the lantern, and Ted and Laura hovered along behind him as he inspected the hangings. He had to tell them several times to get their shadows out of his way. Ruth and Ellen stayed where they were, murmuring to each other.

  “Outside Power I am hurled,” muttered Patrick, moving light along a dismaying wealth of pictures.

  “The tapestries,” Laura observed after a time, “go all the way up to the ceiling.”

  “They wouldn’t put clues above eye level,” said Patrick.

  “Yes, but whose eye level?” said Ted. “They’re all very tall.”

  “Ruth,” said Patrick, “come over here, please. You’re not Benjamin but you’ll have to do.”

  “This is crazy,” said Ruth, but she came over. Ted gave her the lantern, taking the torch from her and finding it a socket in the wall.

  At the west corner of the north wall, she discovered a subsidiary tapestry, a long narrow one. It was hung over the main tapestry, which at that point was frayed and ragged. It contained nine panels, bordered with a design of climbing plants and an occasional animal of some indeterminate type between cat and rabbit. In the first panel, a young man in disheveled clothes, and with what Laura thought of as decided eyebrows, sat at the feet of an old man. The old man was clearly a wizard. He had beard, robe, staff, and an assortment of peculiar instruments that Patrick said were astrological but that looked to Laura like Patrick’s own chemistry lab.

  In succeeding panels, the young man changed his disheveled clothes for a wizard’s robe and staff and began taming animals. In the third panel he enchanted a cat, in the fourth he and the cat collared a dog, in the fifth the three of them acquired a horse, in the sixth they subdued an eagle. In the seventh they spoke with a unicorn, but in the eighth the unicorn was not there. Man and animals stood around something which looked more like a hole in the tapestry than part of the weaving. This appearance may have been due to the light, which was wavering more than ever now because Ruth’s arm hurt.

  The man held his staff pointed at the hole, and red fire leaped from its tip. The cat’s tail was fluffed, the eagle’s beak opened in a scream. Every other animal had its ears flat to its head.

  In the ninth panel, the man was gone, with a lightning bolt where he had been standing. All the animals were bounding away from the hole in the tapestry as hard as they could go.

  “Think he was hurled outside power?” asked Patrick, after a long silence.

  “Who is that?” said Ruth. “Does anybody remember that story?”

  Nobody did. Even Shan had not come to such an end as that.

  “For now,” said Patrick, “that’s one more clue. Good thinking, Ted.”

  “It was my idea,” said Laura, who did not usually have them.

  “Look,” said Patrick, “before we forget what we’re doing—”

  “What are we doing?” asked Ruth.

  “There are five lines,” said Patrick, “so there are probably five clues. And luckily there are five of us. So I want somebody to stand in front of each of the clues we’ve found so far. Not you, Ruthie, you’ve got to hold the lantern up.”

  After a certain amount of shuffling and muttering, and one quarrel over where exactly a particular clue had been, they got Laura positioned in front of the map of the Secret Country, Ellen in front of the dragon unfurling its wings, Patrick in front of the tremendous storm, and Ted in front of the ninth panel of the wizard’s story.

  “Now,” said Patrick, “ ‘unvalued gold and sullen stone.’ ”

  Ruth went around and around the room, holding the lantern high and grumbling. Then she went around holding it at eye level and grumbling. Then she took Patrick’s place in front of the tremendous storm, and made him go around holding the lantern at his eye level. He did not grumble, but he kept finding scenes he thought were perfect for the line in question. Since the others thought the scenes were nothing like it, the argument became heated.

  Patrick was particularly obstinate about a scene, on the east end of the south wall, in which the sun was rising or setting behind a range of dark mountains. Patrick said the sun was setting, Ruth and Ellen that it was rising. This difference was due to Patrick’s insistence that the mountains were the Dubious Hills, out of which came the stone which was set in Shan’s Ring. That would be the sullen stone; he said the sun was the unvalued gold. Ruth and Ellen said that the mountains were the Dwarves’ Chairs, a northern range which was full of jewel mines and therefore had no sullen stones. They also scorned his suggestion about the sun. They could recite more facts than he could, but he was more stubborn. Laura sat down on the floor and wished they were all in New England.

  “Why don’t we try my way?” said Patrick at last, setting the lantern down and startling Laura from a doze. “Then if it’s wrong we’ll look some more.”

  “What do you want to do?” asked Ruth.

  “Everybody start moving into the middle of the room. Try to take the same-size steps.”

  “That’s silly,” said Ruth. “We’ll just end up in the middle of the room.”

  “The room’s not symmetrical,” said Patrick, smugly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I looked at it. Besides, you can see even from the outside.”

  “Oh,” said Laura, pleased. “Is this the lopsided tower?”

  “Yes,” said Patrick. “Now try to take the same-size steps.”

  “Laurie’s the littlest,” said Ted. “Get up, Laurie.”

  They watched her take a few steps and measured them by the stones in the floor. Then they did as Patrick asked. This eventually brought them into a huddle somewhat to the northeast of the room’s middle, staring at their own shadows on the floor.<
br />
  “Don’t move,” said Patrick, and fetched the lantern.

  “There it is!” crowed Laura, bending over, and was hit in the head by Ted’s elbow as he too reached for the ring.

  “Ow!” she said.

  Ted held the ring close to the lantern. The brass glittered a little. The round black stone reflected no light. It looked, Laura thought, unnervingly like the hole-in-the-tapestry that had blasted the magician. She wanted nothing to do with it, but it was no use saying so.

  “Patrick,” said Ruth, “are you sure you didn’t make this up?”

  “Yes!”

  “I don’t see how you could have figured it out.”

  “I’ve got a brain.”

  “I never thought so.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “Come on,” said Ted, “let’s get out of here and get this over with.”

  Laura, who had been watching him as he tried the ring on all his fingers and discovered that it was too big for any of them, observed, “You’ll lose it.”

  “First we have to decide who’s going,” said Patrick. He sounded faintly uneasy, and Laura wondered what he had done. He had sounded that way when, having spent a day being angry at the others, he had come back to inform them that he had turned Fence’s robe into a sail and lost it in the pond.

  “We can’t all go,” said Patrick, “because the swords don’t work that way.”

  Laura found herself enormously pleased with this statement. She did not think she could take one more trip in the dark, especially on horseback. The others, however, did not look pleased, especially Ted.

  “It was my idea,” said Ruth.

  “I’ve got the ring,” said Ted.

  “I can get it away from you,” said Lady Ruth.

  Laura wished she were elsewhere. Ted was clearly taken aback, but he rallied quickly. “You can not,” he said, “and anyway it would make noise.”

  “So?” said Ruth.

  “That’s why I should do it!” cried Ted. “Nobody takes this seriously but Pat, and he’s only doing it to be obnoxious. I don’t trust you guys.”

  “If you take it seriously,” Patrick said to him, “you should let Ruth do it. She’s the sorcerer.”

  “But she doesn’t know anything.”

  “Neither do you,” said Ruth, heatedly. “This was my idea and I want that ring. Besides, I can come and go as I please. You’ll get in trouble if you do that. And you’ve got a fencing lesson tomorrow.”

  Ted sagged. “It won’t take long to change the time,” he said, without conviction. “We could get back before seven in the morning.”

  “Don’t count on it,” said Ruth. “Everything seems to go wrong around here.”

  “If you screw this up,” said Ted, “I’ll—”

  “I promise you I won’t,” said Ruth, sounding more like herself and less like a haughty and impatient adult.

  Ted sighed heavily and handed her the ring. She put it on, and it fit.

  “Well, come on, Ellie,” said Patrick.

  “What makes you think you’re going anywhere?” said Ted, rounding on him.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” said Patrick.

  “You’ve got a fencing lesson tomorrow too.”

  Patrick looked blank. “But Ruth and Ellen can’t go by themselves.”

  “Look,” said Ruth, “I’m older than you, and I’m bigger than you, and there’s nothing out there anyway. If we’re going to have this argument every time I want to do something I’ll just stay home when I get there.”

  “That’s a very good idea,” said Ted, but nobody seemed to pay any attention to him. Laura, who was feeling better because nobody had so much as mentioned horses to her today, thought she would wait a little longer before deciding to quit. Besides, she thought glumly, she could decide to quit, but that didn’t mean they would let her. They hadn’t let Ted the last time he suggested it.

  Ruth recovered the torch and they went down the stairs. It was colder than it had been on the way up. The beast was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER 9

  TED dreamed that night that he was fighting Randolph in the rose garden, by moonlight. He had not yet been he had expected it to. He had the moon in his eyes, and the grass was wet.

  These were the only things that bothered him. He knew exactly what to do with the sword. It was both longer and lighter than the one Laura had found under the hedge, and it fit into his hand as one piece of a jigsaw puzzle fits into its neighbor.

  He was fighting in the same way he tied his shoes or rode a bicycle: easily and without thought. Randolph was making motions with his sword, which seemed to one part of Ted to be incredibly tiny and frighteningly quick. But most of him knew how to counter them almost before the incredulous part had noticed them at all. Somewhere far in the back of his mind, almost like a voice outside, the names of Randolph’s moves and of his own were flicking by, too quick and faint to catch. Their boots squeaked a little on the wet grass, and their light blades hissed more than clanged as they came together, and they breathed a little hard. And that was all the sound in the whole sweet silver garden.

  Ted suddenly knew that he had Randolph. He did something with his wrist, ignoring the part of him that demanded to know what it was and refused to kill Randolph anyway. He lunged straight at Randolph with a force that should have put the sword through him. And froze, fully extended (whatever that meant, the incredulous part of him thought), his sword stretched foolishly in the empty air, three inches from Randolph.

  Ted was momentarily outraged. He knew his reach was longer than that. Then he saw on Randolph’s face not fear, nor relief, but a sort of sick disappointment; he knew that if Randolph went on standing there, he could still kill him. And then someone’s hand clamped onto his shoulder from behind.

  Ted flung himself around, swinging the sword as if it were a stick of wood, and found that he was in bed, and had caught Patrick across the face with the flat of his hand.

  Patrick was too stunned to say anything, which gave Ted no reason not to apologize. “Sorry,” he said. “I was dreaming.”

  Patrick touched his cheek carefully and pulled his hand away as if he expected to find blood on it. “I had bad dreams too,” he said, “but I didn’t hit you.”

  “Did you?” said Ted. “What about?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Patrick. “I think you must have knocked them out of my head.”

  “They can’t have been that bad, then.”

  “Well, they were weird, anyway. Something about the Crystal of Earth.”

  “The what?” said Ted, rubbing his eyes. It was barely gray outside, but Patrick had managed to light a lamp.

  “I’m not sure what it is; I think Ruth and Ellen know. But it’s dangerous. I think it’s a kind of magical globe of this place, and if you break it, it’s like blowing up the country. What’d you dream?”

  “I dreamed I knew how to fence and was killing Randolph.”

  “Well, at least that makes sense,” said Patrick.

  “Why’d you wake me up so early?”

  “I thought we should go down to our lesson early so we won’t look as if we’ve never been there.”

  “They’ll know soon enough we haven’t,” said Ted. “Unless I can remember enough of that dream.”

  “Well,” said Patrick, “I was thinking, I bet they’d believe us if we acted like we’d been bewitched and lost our memories, or parts of them.”

  “Benjamin’d think Ruth did it,” said Ted. “He’s already asked me if she bewitched me. Ruth’s in enough trouble already.”

  “They’ll probably think we’re bewitched whether we try to act like it or not,” said Patrick, shrugging.

  “Where are we supposed to go?”

  “Outside,” said Patrick. “And I think it’s somewhere on the north side, where it’s cooler.”

  “And what’re we supposed to wear?”

  “I thought we should wear our jeans,” said Patrick, who already had his on. “Ever
ything else I could find looked too good to get all hot and sweaty and cut up in.”

  Ted, gazing a little blearily around the room, realized that Patrick had emptied all six oak chests onto the floor. The princes seemed to have a lot of clothes, many in colors Ted would not have been caught dead in. He started to chide Patrick for making a mess, and then the last thing his cousin had said suddenly registered. “What makes you think,” Ted demanded, “that we’re going to get cut up?”

  “Well, we don’t know how to fight back.”

  “The swords aren’t bated.”

  “What?”

  “I mean they aren’t sharp. This is just practice. You know, like fencing demonstrations at home. They have little red and blue plastic buttons on the tips.”

  “They don’t have plastic here. I think we should wear our jeans.”

  “Benjamin’ll kill us,” said Ted.

  “He won’t be up.”

  “Heh. I bet he never sleeps.”

  “Huh,” said Patrick, arrested in the act of putting his T-shirt on. “Maybe he doesn’t. He is from Fence’s Country.”

  “What?”

  “Well, wizards don’t sleep, do they? I mean, Thomas Edison hardly ever slept.”

  “Edison wasn’t a wizard!” said Ted, wondering if Patrick had finally gone crazy.

  “They called him one.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “You mean Fence isn’t like Thomas Edison,” said Patrick, the T-shirt falling from his hand to mingle with the velvet cloaks and linen shirts he had strewn on the floor.

  “No! He’s not a scientist; he doesn’t invent things!”

  “Well, what the hell good is he, then?”

  “He’s a magician,” said Ted, exasperated almost beyond bearing. “He casts spells. He has power. He can do things.”

  “What things?”

  Ted opened his mouth and shut it again. It had just seemed right to have a wizard on the King’s council. This did not seem the time to rehearse the deeds of Shan, who had gotten himself into a great deal of trouble in his time. “Well,” Ted said, “he can fight other magical things.”

  Patrick shrugged.

  “He can tell whether things are real or illusion.”