The Secret Country

by PAMELA DEAN

  “My lord,” said one of the hunters, “one who was ever of our company goes missing.”

  Ted was quite sure who this was, and he looked at Patrick. Patrick seemed poised between fury and fascination.

  “My lord, it grieves me to hear it,” said the King. “Who?”

  “The Lady Claudia does not ride with us.”

  “How did he know that so fast?” Ted whispered to Patrick.

  Matthew glared at them, and Patrick did not reply; he did manage to look eloquently disgusted.

  “My lord,” said the King, “I deeply regret that you were not informed, and that we sought not to replace her. We are hedged about with troubles, and our minds set on things other than festival. I crave your indulgence; this shall be remedied.”

  He looked away from the hunter, and his eye fell on Ruth, who stood between Matthew and Patrick, looking at the ground.

  “Milady Ruth,” said the King.

  Ruth looked at him warily. “Sire.”

  “I prithee take Claudia’s place in this game, that all be not cheated of their celebration. Thy hand dispatched her to the dungeon; come then and fill the gap thou’st made.”

  “Sir,” said Ruth, in a voice so low that Ted, just the other side of Patrick, could barely hear her. He saw Laura and Ellen, across the courtyard with Agatha, staring in bewilderment. “I did not dispatch Claudia to the dungeon on a whim,” Ruth went on, looking straight at the King and growing red, “but because it was needful. And I will never, in jest or in earnest, ask me who will, my lord, play such a part as she played yearly here. Do not ask me to.”

  The King seemed to have had no trouble hearing her; he turned red, too, and began to speak.

  “Ruth!” said Patrick, overriding the King. “It’s only a game!”

  Ruth stepped clear of Matthew, who had tried to take her arm. She glared at her brother; this time her voice carried to everyone.

  “It is a base treachery,” she said, not with the shrillness of Ruth when she was excited, but with the impressive deepness of Lady Ruth in a temper, “and I would not act such a part in the meanest theater in Telma!”

  Patrick closed his mouth, despair in his face. Ted, crazily, wondered what Telma was.

  Into the awful silence came Ellen’s voice.

  “I’ll do it,” she said.

  Ted jumped and looked at her. Laura was gaping at her; Agatha was regarding her with the kind of proprietary pleasure Ted had seen exhibited by mothers at school concerts. She had startled other people too.

  Patrick elbowed Ted. “Who did the maiden in the game?”

  “Ellen,” said Ted, wearily.

  “Yes, I know, but was she Princess Ellen or just—”

  The King cocked an eyebrow at Ellen, and gestured. She came across the cobblestones to him, looking defiant. The King looked down at her for a moment, and nobody breathed.

  “That was well done,” said the King. He turned to the hunter. “Will you take this maid to be of your company this day, that all things may be as they were first done and written?”

  “Will she be faithful?”

  “I pledge it,” said the King.

  “Ouch,” said Patrick in Ted’s ear. “If she should break it now.”

  “Shush!” said Ted violently; this entire ritual was new to him and he did not want to miss any of it.

  “Let her come, then,” said the hunter, beckoning, and Ellen went to stand with his tall grave men.

  “Here begins the Hunt of the Unicorn,” said the hunter.

  Three of his men put horns to their lips. Ted braced himself, but they blew more gently this time. Then they all began walking down the hill, through the terraces and gardens below High Castle, making for the Enchanted Forest. The inhabitants of High Castle fell in behind them in a babble of voices which sounded, to Ted, more strident than merry.

  “Ruthie’s going to get it,” said Patrick, on Ted’s right.

  “You shut the hell up,” Ruth said over Ted’s head to him.

  “No doubt she is,” said Matthew behind them, to Ted’s relief. “But must you talk about it here and now? For shame, all of you. If you cannot be merry together, have at least the grace to sulk separately. This is festival.”

  “I don’t care if I do get it,” said Ruth to Patrick, heatedly. “It’s a dirty rotten trick to call the animal when you know it has to show up because you’re all pure and innocent, and then let the hunters—who could never catch it on their own—come and kill it. They can cut my head off before I’ll do it.”

  “Ruthie,” said Ted, with sudden hope, “listen, okay—that’s how I feel about what I have to do.”

  “Claudia,” said Patrick, loudly, “doesn’t look very innocent to me.”

  “Do not slander the absent,” said Matthew, peaceably.

  “It’s not the same at all,” said Ruth to Ted.

  “I didn’t say it was, I said I felt the same.”

  Matthew, staring at them, opened his mouth.

  “My lord,” said Patrick to him, desperately, “are those wild strawberries?”

  “Where?” said Matthew.

  Patrick pointed ahead of them. Ted looked too, and saw that the grass beyond the last terrace was thick with flowers, as thick as the needlepoint his grandmother did. Among them he saw trails and clumps of the sharp-edged leaflets and pale yellow stars of the strawberry.

  “Indeed they are,” said Matthew.

  “We’ll have to come and pick them when they’re ripe!” said Patrick, with an exuberance foreign to Ted’s experience of his moods. He bounded down the last steps ahead of them and went knee-deep into bluebells.

  “Think again,” said Matthew. “Where even you lose the path, my prince, the strawberries in that field are perilous. This is the border of the Enchanted Forest.”

  “Where is the path?” said Ted. “Where’s the hunt?”

  They looked at him, and they looked ahead and behind. Up the hill among the terraces and fountains, no one walked. The bright meadow before them was empty of all but butterflies, and the eaves of the forest were full only of shadows. They heard the wind, and one lone cardinal, and their own breathing: no step, no laugh, no cry of hound or horn.

  “This is the first spell of the Enchanted Forest,” said Matthew. “Mayhap we are set for our own adventure.” He looked at Ruth. “My lady, you may yet play that part you refused. The Hunt of the Unicorn goes not always to the hunters.”

  “It doesn’t?” said Patrick. Ted winced, thinking that Patrick should know this already, but Matthew did not seem to think so.

  “One year when I was very young, it went to two of the king’s counselors and a village child,” said Matthew. He chuckled. “Oh, and the murmuring and whispering among the other ten of the counselors, and the dark looks and hints! My father was a counselor then, and he brooded over it in the evenings until the feast of Shan.”

  “Why did it go to them?” asked Ted. They had all stopped walking.

  “Why does the wind blow?” said Matthew.

  “Do you really think, my lord, that this time it could go to us?”

  “I won’t do it,” said Ruth. “I’ll throw rocks at it first.”

  “Even if you should accept the part,” said Matthew, “which among the rest of us would draw his sword?”

  “Not I,” said Ted.

  “Nor I,” said Patrick.

  Ruth, disgracefully, giggled. “You sound like the bad animals in the Little Red Hen.”

  Patrick grimaced at her, and Ted, whose parents did not like the traditional children’s stories, simply stared, but Matthew smiled.

  “Do you know the story?” demanded Patrick.

  “How old are you?” said Ted at the same time.

  Matthew looked at them in mild surprise. “Certainly I know it, and I am seven-and-twenty,” he said. Ted caught himself goggling, and looked at Ruth and Patrick, who were staring at Matthew as if he had tongues of flame above his head.

  “How long have you been a counselo
r?” Ruth asked.

  “Five years,” said Matthew.

  They went on staring at him.

  “Is there aught else you would know?” said Matthew, not unkindly. “If there is not, we had best be on our way. A show of effort likes the unicorns.”

  “But do they like it?” murmured Ruth, who, thought Ted, knew perfectly well that likes once meant pleases, and that Matthew was so using it. Ted poked her, and she grinned at him.

  “Keep thy distance from the maid,” said Matthew to Ted.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Ruth.

  “I had not thought,” said Matthew; he was beginning to look grim.

  “Neither had we,” said Ted.

  “Let’s go,” said Patrick. “Where’s the path?”

  Matthew stepped down into the grass, and, following him, they saw that there was indeed a path hidden in the flowers, barely wide enough for one person to stand on with his feet together.

  “Look,” said Ruth. “Periwinkles. But what are those? I wish we had Ellie with us.”

  “I’ve never seen so many flowers in my life,” said Ted, and could have bitten his tongue; he ought to be acting as if he had seen them every year since he could walk. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Matthew, but that young man only smiled at him.

  “There are none anywhere like these,” he said.

  “More bluebells,” said Ruth.

  They plowed on through the waist-high grass. The scent of flowers and greenness and grass baking rose to Ted. He felt as if he had the soul of summer almost in his grasp.

  “Watch it!” called Ruth.

  “Ow!” said Patrick.

  “Brambles,” said Ruth, ruefully, looking at her brother as he tried to pull them out of his tunic.

  Ted and Matthew came panting up.

  “You don’t want to come this way,” said Ruth.

  Ted, blinking, saw that they had come some considerable distance into the forest.

  “Nor do we,” said Matthew. “Here, hold still.” He caught hold of Patrick and began unwinding him. “Can you get out, my lady?”

  “Wait a moment, I think I see something,” said Ruth. “There’s a clearing on the other side of these bushes. I think. The sun’s coming in, anyway.”

  “You can’t get there from here,” said Ted, gloomily. He had liked the meadow better.

  “We can go around these things.”

  “That is the stream, not a clearing,” said Matthew.

  Patrick yelped.

  “I cry you mercy,” said Matthew.

  “It’s all right,” said Patrick, “as long as I’m out.” He sucked at a scratch on his wrist and looked over his hand at his sister. “Are you coming out of there?”

  “The path—” began Matthew.

  “Hush up a minute,” said Ruth, as if he were one of her siblings.

  They hushed. Thin and far they heard what might have been the crying of hounds, and then thin but clear the notes of the hunters’ horns.

  “Ah,” said Matthew. On his flushed and sweaty face was an enormous pleasure. “At least we shall not miss’t altogether.”

  Ruth crashed her way out onto the other side of the brambles and looked back at them. She was covered with scratches and her hair was coming down, but she looked as pleased as Matthew.

  “A little water clears us of this deed,” she said gaily, and plunged on into the underbrush.

  Matthew flung his hair back from his forehead and went after her. Ted and Patrick stood looking at each other.

  “They’re crazy,” said Patrick.

  “I guess,” said Ted. He thought he knew how they felt, and wondered why they had kept the feeling when he had lost it.

  He and Patrick plowed through the bushes, trying to steer around the worst of the brambles. Ted hit himself in the forehead with a tree branch.

  “God damn it!” he said, reeling back.

  “Hey,” said Patrick, “hey, Ted. Look at this tree.”

  Ted was dizzy, and he felt that sense of enormous outrage peculiar to people who have been hurt unexpectedly. “How the hell can I look at it when I’ve practically killed myself on it?”

  “Look at the fruit.”

  Ted, rubbing an aching and gritty forehead with a grimier hand, squinted at the vexatious tree. “Huh,” he said.

  Patrick held a fruit out to him. It was perfectly round and dull red, with a thick rind.

  “What’s that?”

  “I think it’s a pomegranate.”

  Ted stared at it, and an idea crept into his mind. “Patrick,” he said.

  “What?” said Patrick, warily.

  “Let’s see if two can play this game.”

  “What?”

  “Claudia’s changing things. Let’s change something ourselves.”

  “What the hell do you think I was trying to do with the Crystal of Earth?”

  “Not like that. Let’s try to add something new.”

  “We did that back at the beginning, when Ruth tried that story about Green Cave ceremonies on Benjamin.”

  “Not like that. Let’s decide, the way we used to, that something new is true.”

  Patrick looked skeptical.

  “Let’s say,” said Ted, deliberately, “that for every pomegranate seed we eat, any of the five of us, we all have to spend one month out of every year in the Secret Country.”

  “You can say it,” said Patrick, “but I won’t eat it. Besides, we’ve eaten them before; we’ve probably eaten ten years’ worth. Do you want ten years here for every one at home?”

  “Not just any pomegranate, then,” said Ted, dismissing the notion that there was something wrong with Patrick’s arithmetic. “Only the ones here. This is the Enchanted Forest.”

  “What do you want to come back for?” said Patrick. “What I want is to get out.”

  “I want out, too, so I don’t have to kill Randolph. But—but once I’m out of that I want to be able to get back in—I want to know if this is real, I want to know what’s going on.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Patrick, “if you think you can get out of killing Randolph if you come back. How do you know you just won’t come back right where you left off? What makes you think they’ll let you off so easy?”

  “Who?”

  Patrick shrugged.

  “Let’s say,” said Ted, “that while we are gone, then, time goes on here as it does at home with us, but that while we are here, the spell of Shan’s Ring holds.”

  The wind died among the leaves; the birds were still. Ted looked at the strange pointed leaves of the pomegranate tree. For a moment he was acutely conscious of his tangled hair, his torn tunic, his scratched legs. Then he felt full of confidence and power. The tangled ground sent a prickle through him, as the swords had done. He could do as he said. He dug with his thumbs at the fruit, unsuccessfully, and above his head a mockingbird began to sing. The breeze picked up again.

  Ted felt grimy but determined. “I can’t get it open.”

  Patrick put a hand to his knife. “One month a year for the rest of our lives? What if we get tired of it?”

  “Don’t you think we’ll get tired of that?” demanded Ted, waving his arm in what he thought was the direction of the well, the house, and the hedge.

  “But the rest of our lives? Look, why not one seed for one month, period? Every time we come back we can eat another if we want to.”

  “That’s risky.”

  “Your way’s worse.”

  Ted felt his certainty draining away, but he still wanted to do something, and still thought he had the power. “Well.”

  “And shouldn’t we ask the girls?”

  “Well—”

  “I’ve got a knife to cut it open with, but I want you to know what you’re doing.”

  Ted was shocked. Patrick had never acted this way before. Ted wondered if the Enchanted Forest was having an effect on both of them. But at the same time he felt that Patrick was behaving properly, however uncharacteristic of hi
m the behavior was. Ted thought, suddenly, that many of Patrick’s most exasperating habits might always have been caused by his wanting the rest of them to know what they were doing. He grinned at his cousin. The feeling of power steadied in him.

  “Never mind the pomegranates,” he said. “But stick around when I’m king, will you?”

  Patrick did not seem surprised. “Let’s go find the hunt,” he said.

  They made their way around the brambles and down a slight slope tumbled with stones and logs, and stood considering the stream.

  “Looks deep to me,” said Patrick.

  “Ruthie’s got longer legs.”

  There was a sudden clamor of hounds and a discordant bleat from one horn, and right out of the bushes across the stream from them leaped a unicorn. They sat down hastily, and the unicorn cleared the water, themselves, and the whole bramble patch with one leap. The hunters crashed through the bushes a bare five seconds behind it, made a tremendous noise of splashing and trampling, gained the opposite bank, and began plunging their way around the brambles. Behind the hunters crowded the hounds, and then Ellen, and then all the inhabitants of High Castle, flushed and gleeful.

  Ted and Patrick scrambled to their feet and turned around, and the scornful remark Ted had planned for the hunters and their clumsiness died in his throat. The unicorn had stopped just before the brambles, and stood waiting for the hunters under the pomegranate tree.

  Ted saw the animal framed in trees: plum, holly, hazelnut, hawthorn. When he had hit himself in the head with the pomegranate tree and proposed his plan to Patrick, he had seen nothing on the ground but sticks and stones, nondescript greenery and the offensive bramble. Now the ground blazed with the crowded blooms of daisy, marigold, primrose, yellow flag: incredible gold, but it was not so bright as that horn; there was flaming and jubilant white, but a mere field and moonlight color beside the coat of the unicorn.

  Ted had never paid any attention to the names of trees and flowers. He knew these because their names ran along under his mind as the names of the fencing moves had in his dream.

  A spear whished between Ted and Patrick and hit the ground with two thuds, to be swallowed up in flowers. A second one hit the pomegranate tree, shook there for a moment, and flopped meekly down. But a third grazed the neck of the unicorn. Hunters and hounds pushed past Ted and Patrick, who stood staring, to close on the unicorn, which shook itself like a man interrupted in his daydreams, whipped itself around, and kicked vigorously. Two hunters fell back onto several hounds. The dogs yelped and everyone who had not fallen laughed. The unicorn cleared them all again and went, with a shower of water that caught almost everyone, into the middle of the stream.