The Secret Country

by PAMELA DEAN

  Ted and Patrick turned around again and craned their necks to see over the crowd. Behind the unicorn on the banks of the stream and far up the thinly wooded slopes grew feverfew, love-in-a-mist, and forget-me-nots; down into the water crowded cattails and plantain and water soldiers. Water lilies covered the stream from bank to bank.

  “What happened to the trees?” demanded Patrick in a whisper. “It was dark over there before, they were so thick.”

  Two hounds bolted into the midst of the water lilies, snapping at the flanks of the unicorn. It put its head down, graciously, and touched the throat of one and the side of the other with its horn. The touch did not even ruffle their fur, but both of them yelped, much more loudly than they had when the hunters fell on them. They backed out of the stream in a flurry of water and fell over onto their sides, neatly and identically.

  The unicorn looked at the hunters, daring them to move. One of them stepped to the water’s edge and raised his spear; the unicorn moved its head the barest distance, as if it had heard something far off, and knocked the spear aside with its horn. The hunter leaped backward, shaking his hand and gasping. Two more hunters moved forward. The unicorn slid out of the stream like a wisp of morning fog and was gone up the opposite slope. Two spears crashed into the underbrush far behind it, and several people groaned.

  “This is worse than usual,” said one of the counselors; Ted thought a minute and remembered that this was Conrad.

  “Remember that this is the unicorn’s sport as well as ours,” said Matthew, whom Ted had not noticed before.

  “Even so, it could choose less brambly ways.”

  The master huntsman looked around at the company and raised his eyebrows. “Beaten so soon?” he said.

  “Early, but not easily,” said Randolph.

  Ted wondered what had been happening to them while he and the others looked at the flowers, and while he and Patrick debated over the pomegranate.

  “Well, if you choose to begin your feasting at noon and not at sunset, what is that to me?” The huntsman looked them over again. “Ellen,” he said.

  Ted followed his gaze and saw Ellen standing between Ruth and Agatha. She was bedraggled, and had lost her boots.

  “Sir?” she said.

  “Make thy garden.”

  Ellen came forward slowly, her great cloud of hair standing out in all directions and her eyes like a cat’s. She went by Ted and Patrick as if they were two more trees and strode barelegged into the brambles.

  Ted, watching her progress, saw that as flowers had grown wherever the unicorn stood, all around Ellen the brambles were covered with roses. It was not that they sprang suddenly into being. They were not gone one minute and there the next. It was like looking at a tree and thinking that it was a bear, and then suddenly realizing that it was only a stump after all. Roots and lumps and oddities you had ignored when you thought it a bear, because they did not fit the bear shape, suddenly assumed their proper importance, so that you wondered now how you could have ever thought the stump was a bear.

  In the same way, as the change in the mind from stump to bear takes no time, so, suddenly but not unnaturally or magically, for it was his eyes changing, not the forest, the tangled sprawl of brambles became a hedge of roses.

  There was an arched opening in the hedge, and through it Ted saw a garden and a fountain.

  “Well,” said Patrick in Ted’s ear, “she always was good with the garden.”

  A rabbit hopped over Ted’s foot, and another, and two more. He watched them lollop through the arch in the hedge, and then he saw two pheasants balancing on the rim of the fountain. A wanking and a flapping from behind made him wince, and two mallards landed noisily in the stream. Two white ducks came more sedately after them.

  “Criminy,” said Ted as Patrick’s fingers dug into his arm. He wondered if Patrick realized he was doing this: It was a most uncharacteristic gesture. Finding it more comforting than otherwise, he did nothing to disturb it.

  Two lions came drifting through masses of violets and cornflowers and the three shadings of the periwinkle. Behind them, treading delicately in the path they had made, was a stag. Caught in its antlers were trailing ribbons of green leaves. A hissing made Ted look from the stag back to the stream, where two ruffled swans and a serene heron now paddled and sailed. Ted looked at Patrick.

  “There must be a forest fire somewhere,” said Patrick, but he did not sound as if he believed it.

  The heron came out of the water right next to Ted and began to preen itself. Ted jumped, and hit his elbow: He was standing under a peach tree. He had thought it just another brambly bush, and a danger only to the shins.

  “Come along in,” said Matthew behind him. Ted was holding up the procession.

  Ted obeyed him. The fountain had several intriguing but not pleasant stone heads, of no clear family. They spat torrents of water back into the stream, which had suddenly developed a branch of itself in the garden. The smooth lawn around it was aswarm with animals. Ted saw foxes, and squirrels, and one lynx, staring down one of the hounds from a nest of pimpernel and ground cherries.

  The crowd of people was quite silent, and the animals were so still that Ted wondered if they were illusory. Then the breeze shifted, and he caught a whiff of lion. He was not sure whether he recognized it from trips to the zoo, or whether the back of his mind was telling him things again.

  Ellen stood under an apple tree just beyond the fountain. She looked bemused. The unicorn turned its head one way and then the other, surveying its serene animals and its sweaty pursuers. Then it knelt and dipped its horn into the stream. The bowl of the fountain was hidden in roses. In the silence Ted could hear water trickling. Ellen sat down in the grass and held out her hand to the unicorn.

  “Please come,” she said. She did not speak very loudly, but in that quiet she did not have to.

  The unicorn stood up and looked at her. It reminded Ted of a cat deciding whether to obey you. Then it lowered its head and went to her. It slid to its knees with a movement very like a cat’s, certainly more like a cat’s than a horse’s, and laid its great head on her knee. Ellen was as pale as the unicorn. She put a hand on its ear and burst into tears.

  A cluster of hounds bowled over the rabbits and birds and swarmed upon the unicorn. The birds squawked, the hounds barked, and Ellen shouted, “Get away!” Two hunters picked her up from under the unicorn’s head and put her down in a cloud of milk thistle.

  The master huntsman put his spear to the breast of the unicorn. The unicorn flung itself into the air with a terrible cry, its horn flashing, but the hounds fastened themselves on its flanks and bore it down. The unicorn seemed to hover a moment, its shadow a dark stain on the green lawn. Then it dropped to earth with a force that shook the forest from end to end.

  Birds flew shrieking from the trees. The animals vanished into the brush and flowers. The bowl of the fountain burst and soaked everyone’s feet. People put their heads in one another’s shoulders, cringing. The sunlight darkened and went gray.

  In the silence that followed, they looked at the unicorn. It lay in the dimness, shining with its own light. The hounds, the only moving things in all the landscape, stood four feet away from it and extended their long heads, sniffing cautiously. The master huntsman, his bright colors quenched, stood like a figure in a tapestry, staring not at the unicorn but at his fallen spear.

  After a long time one of the hounds whined, and the huntsman moved. He looked over the fallen unicorn at his group of men, and gestured with his hand. Two hunters carrying long horns pushed through the group of rigid hounds to stand before the unicorn. They blew their horns, and in a blare and flash of gold the sun came back. The unicorn stood up like a flower opening and bowed its head to the hunters. People shook themselves and began to murmur, and all the animals crept out of the bushes, twining and rubbing on people’s ankles as they went, and fawned upon the unicorn.

  Patrick let go of Ted’s arm. “I’d hate to see a real hunt,” he sa
id.

  One of the hunters crossed to where Ellen still sat in the milk thistles, and bowed to her. She stood up with a rebellious air and looked at him. He held out to her a gold collar. Ellen took it and looked at the unicorn.

  Ted watched her across the broken fountain, which still gurgled cheerfully to wet all their feet. He had been observing Ellen’s expressions ever since she had been old enough to play with him, and he recognized this one. He knew, with a dreadful certainty which threatened to turn to laughter, that Ellen was going to throw the collar right into the stream. Beside him Patrick drew in his breath.

  Ellen, with a wild grin, lifted her arm, and froze as the unicorn came toward her and bowed its head for the collar.

  “That’s right,” said Patrick, under his breath. “The unicorn wouldn’t like it.”

  Ellen put the collar around the unicorn’s neck, fumbled, and fastened it with a distinct and final-sounding click.

  “Not for them,” she said, in a voice that could probably be heard back at the castle, “but for you.”

  The unicorn said something in her ear, but Ted could not hear it. They turned together, Ellen’s hand hooked in the collar, and sloshed peacefully past the fountain and across the garden, followed by the hunting party and an exaltation of animals.

  In the middle of the garden was a peculiar tree with a fence around it. It was another pomegranate. Ellen led the unicorn inside the fence, came back outside, and shut the gate on it. The unicorn lay down neatly, its forelegs stretched out before it like a cat’s and its plumy tail draped over the fence. It looked smug.

  Ted and Patrick, by dint of pushing and elbowing, managed to find themselves places at the front of the throng. There were a fox and a lion in front of them, but the fox was not in the way and Ted did not feel like disputing with the lion. Patrick did not seem to like being so close to it.

  “You can’t trust them even when you think they’re tame,” he informed Ted.

  The lion turned around and yawned at him.

  Ted’s stomach quivered, but he also wanted to laugh. “You should be more polite, then,” he said.

  The master huntsman made his way through all the live things and stood near the fence. “Let the First Riddler come forth,” he said.

  “I hope,” said Patrick, “that somebody told the King about Shan’s Ring.”

  King William came gravely out of the crowd with a cardinal on each shoulder, and stood outside the fence before the unicorn. He did not bow, probably because of the cardinals, but he inclined his head.

  “Who are these who come from the south

  On the eagle’s wing with the lion’s mouth?”

  “What?” said Patrick.

  The King had taken his counselors by surprise too. Ted, by craning his neck, could see that Andrew was pleased, Matthew astonished, and Randolph furious. He could not see Fence.

  The unicorn’s head came up a little, and it fixed the King with its great eye as if it hoped to make him back down. The King stood patiently. The cardinals, against his white hair, looked as if they had been cut out of cardboard.

  At last the unicorn spoke. Its voice was clear and piercing, like the sound of a flute. It said,

  “These are the stuff of foolish dreams;

  these are far more than they seem.”

  Ted looked as if by compulsion at Randolph, who smote his forehead in exasperation. A lynx leaped at the swinging tassel of his sleeve. It missed and landed upon two squirrels. They scolded. It spat at them. The unicorn looked at them and they quieted down like guilty children. Randolph was bright red, and Ted felt a treacherous laugh welling up in him. He began to wonder if he could get through this ceremony without disgracing himself. The crowd was remarkably quiet. Many people were grinning, but no one laughed or spoke.

  The King retired back into the crowd, grinning himself, and the master huntsman said, “Let the Second Riddler come forth.”

  “All the riddles on the same day?” whispered Patrick.

  “Put it on your list,” said Ted.

  Conrad came forward, followed by a number of ducks that muttered behind him like a gossipy chorus.

  “I thought of a great way to put this one,” said Patrick into Ted’s ear. “ ‘Is King John/Putting us on?’ ”

  Ted quelled him with a glare and managed not to giggle.

  Conrad said,

  “Did King John write in earnest or in jest?

  Are those who shun his works the worst or best?”

  “You know,” said Patrick, “they’re doing just what Randolph and Fence thought they shouldn’t.”

  The unicorn said,

  “King John wrote as he thought he knew.

  His readers are as mixed as you.”

  “You know,” said Ted, answering Patrick a little obliquely, “I don’t think the unicorns take this very seriously.”

  “They don’t take anything seriously, if you look at their history,” said Patrick. “Ellie and her weird ideas.”

  The lion turned its head and yawned at them, and Patrick was silent.

  “Let the Third Riddler come forth,” said the huntsman.

  Ruth came forward. No animals came with her. She did the unicorn a courtesy, and it inclined its head to her with a little chink of its collar. This pleased Ted immensely, and he saw that Patrick looked briefly smug.

  “Who is Claudia, what is she?” said Ruth, and Patrick made a muffled snort. “Does your high court commend her?” finished Ruth, and sent Patrick a look almost as alarming as the lion’s.

  The unicorn paused, flicking an ear. “Subtle, fair, and wise is she,” it said, and although its voice had no expression as human voices do, Ted could have sworn that somewhere in its answer there was a touch of delighted malice. “But none of ours did send her.”

  A murmur rose from the crowd, and a number of animals snarled, whether to shut the people up or because they too found the answer odd, Ted did not know. He looked at Randolph. Fence had appeared beside him, and the two of them were carrying on a conversation with grimace and gesture. They both looked put out.

  “ ‘Subtle, fair, and wise’?” demanded Ted of Patrick.

  “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” said Patrick, gloomily.

  “Hover through the fog and filthy air,” said Ted, completing the quotation.

  They stared at one another, and the gaze of the lion did not stop them this time.

  “You know,” said Ted, “there was an awful lot of fog and filthy air around before we locked her up.”

  “Yes,” said Patrick, intently, and then shrugged. “Whatever that means.”

  Ruth had made another courtesy and backed off. The unicorn stood up, shook itself and chinked its collar, and cast an indecipherable look upon the crowd. It leaped the fence, and was gone through the woods like a shaft of sunlight between cloud and drifting cloud. Ted looked around in some alarm, but the lion had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE huntsman inclined his head to the crowd with a gesture like that of the unicorn. “Go to your feasting, then,” he said to them. “Meet we again next year?”

  “Meet we again,” said the King.

  The huntsman beckoned to his men. They moved into the thick of the forest. They went south, while the unicorn had gone north, but were gone almost as quickly as the unicorn. With their passing the quality of the light changed. It was still that of a clear summer day, just past noon, but it felt, at least to Laura, ordinary, as if it might have been in Illinois or Australia as well as in the Secret Country.

  People began to chatter and laugh, and to move down an avenue of trees that had not been there before. They went in the direction the hunters had taken.

  Laura had lost Ruth and Agatha in the crowd, so she hung back to wait for Ellen. But the hunt, it seemed, had not done with Ellen yet. Benjamin came up to where she stood by the empty circle of fence around the pomegranate tree. He led the white horse they had seen at the beginning of the hunt. Laura thought that, as horses went, it wa
s beautiful, but after the unicorn it looked like a bad drawing.

  Ellen seemed to think so too; she scowled at Benjamin and started to walk away. Laura hurried to intersect her path, tripped over a rabbit, and fell face first into a clump of brilliant red flowers. She sneezed.

  “It is the honor due thee,” Benjamin said.

  “For what?” demanded Ellen.

  Laura sat up and watched them.

  “Thou hast tamed the unicorn.”

  Ellen opened her mouth, and shut it again. She looked as if she were remembering something, and the look stabbed Laura with jealousy as sharp as a splinter. Laura had hoped that the hunt would be even better than that morning, but she had barely seen the unicorn, let alone spoken to it. Knowing that she was a coward, she had admired equally Ruth’s refusal to be the hunt’s bait, and Ellen’s offer. But suddenly she thought that, if she herself had offered to be the bait, then she would be sitting there with that look of secret delight. Tears burned her eyes, but they were not the easy tears that turned to howls. Laura forced a swallow down her aching throat and stood up, grimly.

  Benjamin made a stirrup of his hand, and Ellen stepped into it and swung herself astride the white horse. She petted its ear. “You poor thing,” she said.

  Laura knew what she meant, but she was surprised when Benjamin did.

  “She would not be as the unicorn,” said Benjamin.