The Whim of the Dragon (29 page)

Ted said, “‘And from the Dragon’s mouth that would / You all in sunder shiver, / And from the horns of Unicorns / Lord safely you deliver.’”

“Thou didst dream this?” said Randolph. Ted could not tell what he thought of it.

“I dreamed it too,” said Ted.

“They’re quiet,” said Andrew. His face cleared and settled into his usual calm. He bowed to Ruth and said, with no sarcasm that Ted could detect, “Lady, I do thank you.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Ruth.

Randolph looked from her to Ted to Andrew, with the face of somebody who is trying to remember a poem and has it all except for the first line. Ted felt the same way, but dared not indulge the wish to compare speculations with Randolph; not when Andrew was listening. He made a helpless face at Randolph.

Randolph scowled at him. Then he shrugged, and said, “Let us go in.”

Ted put both hands on the dry, rough wood of the doors, and pushed. They swung open, grating, and a cold gust of dusty air swept out onto the porch and clouded the clear smell of the morning. Randolph walked into the front hall with Ted on his heels. Before them on the left was a narrow flight of steps from which the faded remnants of red carpet hung dismally, and on the right a long hall whose walls were studded with picture hooks. There was no rug on the floor, only the thick gray dust.

“Some have been here,” said Randolph.

Ted looked more closely at the dust, and saw a line of footprints that looked as if they had come from ballet slippers, several lines of prints from cats or other small animals, and a number of odd impressions that looked more like craters on the moon than anything else. These all led down the long hall.

Ted looked at Randolph, and they went down the hall also, with the other two behind them. It led to a sun porch running the whole width of the house at the back, whose three outside walls were all windows. From the windows of the right-hand wall they could see the fields of goldenrod staggering uphill to meet the brilliant sky. But the windows of the left-hand wall looked out on a view from High Castle: the glassy lake, the slopes of forest, the insubstantial mountains. And every little diamond-shaped pane in the back wall held a different picture.

Ted took hold of Randolph’s wrist before he realized what he was doing. “Here,” he said. “Here’s where she does it.”

Randolph wore a very Patrick-like expression, alert and interested. He moved closer to the back wall, towing Ted with him. He laid his other hand over Ted’s clutching one and said, without looking at him, “How may we govern what we see?”

“I don’t know,” said Ted. “If you try to concentrate on a particular piece of a scene that’s there, you’ll be able to see it as if you were quite close to it. But I don’t know how you determine what scene is there in the first place.”

They all peered at the wall; then Randolph put his hand on a pane right before Ted’s nose. Ted moved back a little and then, reluctantly, looked at the view it offered. He saw the topmost room of Apsinthion’s house, the one full of mirrors. A black night sky with three stars in it pressed against the skylight. The room was lit with the peculiar harsh glare of fluorescents. The man himself stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by bubbling pools of purple. He was laughing. They sounded angry, like tomato sauce that is boiling too fast. Ted recognized them. They were the water-beasts you could find around High Castle.

The voice of the man in red came faintly out of the window.

“I’m fire,” he said to the sputtering creatures, “and you are but the semblance of water melded with the actuality of earth. Wherefore shall you damage me? Who hath served you so discourteously as to send you to this comfortless house wherein no wish of yours may be gratified save that to be instantly gone again? May I make amends, I shall do so.” The water-beasts began a prolonged and confused sploshing and smacking; they sounded like a mudball fight on a very wet day.

“That’s him, Randolph!” said Ted. “The man who sent us back.”

“That,” said Randolph, “is no shape that I know.”

Ruth said behind them, “Can he hear us?”

Randolph said promptly, “My lord Apsinthion!”

The man in the window did not look up.

“Who might say he was fire?” asked Ruth.

“Any one might say so,” said Randolph. His jaw dropped slightly; his hand fell away from Ted’s, and he turned and leaned heedlessly on the glass wall and looked at Ted and Ruth, and over their heads at Andrew lingering in the doorway. “Any one might say so,” said Randolph, with a startling exuberance, “but one only so saith truthfully.”

Ted felt bewildered, and Ruth looked it.

Andrew said resignedly from the doorway, “Belaparthalion,” in about the way an eight-year-old who has just discovered where his parents are hiding the Christmas presents might say, to a younger sibling, “Santa Claus.”

Randolph turned around and addressed the wall again. “Belaparthalion,” he said.

The man in red swung a mirror parallel with the floor, apparently to show the water-beasts themselves in it, and took no notice.

“If Claudia put him in there,” said Ted, “probably only Claudia can get him out.”

“He doesn’t look very upset,” observed Ruth.

“That’s for the dragon-shape,” said Randolph.

Ted backed up until he was standing next to Ruth, and looked the whole wall over. It seemed to have some method in its arrangement. The scenes from the front door’s carvings, from the tapestries in High Castle, were all there, two in each corner and the last one in the middle of the wall. Ted concentrated on that. All the animals fled from the center of the little diamond pane, where there was a ragged hole like a nail-tear in a shirt. Ted went quickly forward, but the pane was above his line of sight. “Randolph,” he said, “of your courtesy, look on this pane here and consider carefully the hole in the middle.”

Randolph looked away from some window in the lower right corner, blinking a little. “Gladly, an thou wilt look on this one,” he said.

Ted changed places with him, but watched him rather than the window. Randolph leaned his forehead against the glass and then jerked back. “It’s warm,” he said.

“I know,” said Ted. “What do you see?”

“Profound darkness,” said Randolph. “And a golden glow in its midst, like unto an apple of Feren in its color, but unto the sun drawn by an artist in its shape.”

“And in the midst of the golden glow?”

“A sword that shineth blue, and in its hilt three blue stones.”

“Like Shan’s sword. Is there anything in the sword?”

Randolph was still for a long time. Ted looked at the pane Randolph had assigned him. It showed a moonlit clearing in an evergreen forest. Somebody stooped and lit a fire; the red light washed up cheerily and Ted saw that it was Claudia. She sat down on a stump, and three black cats climbed into her lap, complaining. She laughed and said to them in the throaty voice Ted remembered, “There shall be fish tomorrow.”

Ted looked at the wedge of the black sky visible in the upper part of the pane, and stared at it until it widened and filled the whole diamond. It was full of stars.

“Naught within the sword,” said Randolph.

“See if you can identify these constellations,” said Ted.

Randolph knelt beside him and stared obediently. “Those are northern stars,” he said. “As you might see at the furthest tip of Fence’s Country, in the realm of Belaparthalion.”

“So Claudia and her cats are right where the rest of them are going?”

“Or have been; or will be. Saidst thou not that, in that other house, were scenes both past and present and to come?”

“We’d better warn them just in case,” said Ruth.

“What we need’s a ladder, or a stool,” said Ted. “Somebody ought to peruse every one of these panes.”

“Do you begin on the lowermost,” said Randolph, “and one shall relieve you.”

“I’ll bring you some tea,” said Ruth, “if there’s any to be had.”

Ted thanked her. The rest of them trooped out, and he settled down to his task. It was worse than looking something up in
The Oxford English Dictionary
. There were distractions everywhere. Any pane on which he fixed his attention would stir to life and begin its slow progression; but most of them held nothing that he recognized. Many showed only empty landscapes. He went back to the pane that held Claudia and her campfire, but she just sat there petting her cats while the fire died. She might do something in five hours, or five minutes, but how could you tell? Ted went on watching her anyway. The voice he thought of as Edward’s, and which was beginning to distinguish itself from those other voices, said,
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

“That,” said Ted, “is what got us into this mess.”

“Is that really you?” said Ted. “Edward Fairchild, heir to the throne of the Hidden Land?”

To err is human,
said Edward dimly; and Ted felt his shadowy presence dim also and go out. He shook his head and went back to staring at the windows.

M
ICHAELMAS’S room had a large table that he was using as a desk, an even larger round table with chairs set about it, several extraneous chairs, a wardrobe, and a collection of chests and cabinets. On the chairs were papers, books, very small sundials and astrolabes, crumby plates, mold-scummed teacups, and sleeping cats. These last didn’t want to be sat on, but were amenable to being scooped up and put on one’s lap. Laura and Matthew and Patrick each got a cat, gray, orange, and orange-striped, respectively. Celia might have had a large and scruffy black one, but she looked at it and sat on the table instead.

The man in the yellow robe, who Ellen said was Michaelmas, had picked up his pen again while they shuffled through his belongings to find the chairs, and wrote placidly until they were all seated. Laura noticed that none of the grown-ups tried to recall his attention, and that he looked up and spoke just as Patrick evidenced an intention of saying something.

The man in yellow said, “Wherefore do you grace us with your presence?” He did not say this ironically, nor as if he meant it, but, Laura thought, like the “May I help you?” salespeople use. He looked from Celia to Fence and back again, as if the rest of them didn’t matter.

“We seek the answers to three riddles,” said Fence.

“The other party,” said Michaelmas, hunting among the piled scrolls on his desk and knocking a mug to the floor, “seeketh knowledge of Shan’s Ring, and of the swords of Shan and Melanie.”

Patrick, who had been slumped as far down in his chair as he could get without falling out of it, sat up abruptly. Laura and Ellen looked at each other. Fence had Shan’s Ring; Ruth had left it for him when they made their unsuccessful attempt to leave this place behind them. Celia had the swords of Shan and Melanie in her baggage; but Fence had plans for them. They also happened to be the only sure way the five children had to get home again.

There was a less-than-friendly silence. Fence stood up. “Did they bring these objects for your examination?” he said.

Michaelmas gave him his full attention. “No,” he said.

Fence said, “Give me some light.”

Michaelmas, seeming not in the least put out at being spoken to so peremptorily, gazed the room for a moment and said, “Light breaks where no sun shines.”

Warm golden light sprang out at them from ceiling, from floor, from every corner. It was not dazzling, but it did startle. Laura saw, when she had recovered, that there was a large number of things rather like grapefruit, strung or just lying around the room. They all glowed. Disordered though the room might be, there were no cobwebs in it and no dust.

“Thanks,” said Fence, and fished in his pouch. He walked up to the man in yellow’s table and laid two objects on it. “This is my ring of sorcery,” he said, “and this is the Ring of Shan. Had the other party any such tokens?”

“They are not required,” said Michaelmas. But he looked intently at the two rings, one of shining silver with a luminous blue stone in it; the other, clouded brass with a black rock of the sort anybody might pick up out of a flowerbed. Then he held out his hand. “May I look at them?”

Fence scooped them up and dropped them into his palm. There was less inimical silence while Michaelmas looked them over, held them up to the light, and finally took a lens out of the drawer of his table and examined them through that. The silence was broken by impatient-sounding footsteps in the hall, heralding the appearance of a middle-sized woman in a blue robe, with a bunch of keys at her wrist and a wool cap on her head.

“Michaelmas!” she said. She had a vigorous voice, a sharp face, and brown hair in braids. “You’ve lit up every mage-light in the library. Use the morn in russet mantle clad; it doesn’t reach so far.” Then she looked around the room and seemed about to make some apology; and then she said, “Celia!”

“Chalcedony,” said Celia, with quieter but very real pleasure; and she got off the table and hugged the woman.

“What strange names they have here,” said Ellen to Laura.

“Madam,” said Fence, “sawst thou the party that did arrive yesternight?”

“You
are
that party,” said Chalcedony, perplexed. She let go of Celia and considered the rest of them. “All except Celia. What makest thou from High Castle one day late?”

“Michaelmas,” said Fence; the man in yellow looked up. “Who made up the other party?”

“All save thou,” said Michaelmas.

He and Chalcedony stared at each other.

“There!” said Fence. “That’s better than tokens.”

There was a meditative silence. Celia and Chalcedony moved into a far corner and began talking in low voices. Fence and Matthew shook their heads at each other. Michaelmas began rummaging again in the mess on his desk.