The Whim of the Dragon (10 page)

“Well,
does
Shan’s Ring magnify the power of your mirrors?” demanded Patrick.

“Not ours,” said Fence. “Shan’s were, it may be, made differently.”

Patrick scowled. “What about the riddle?” he said.

“We solved that,” said Ruth.

“I don’t think so,” said Patrick. “I think that was fortuitous. I think blowing time awry is a side effect, and every time we use Shan’s Ring we do we don’t know what.”

“The red man,” said Laura, “said it worked too well and woke up powers that were better off sleeping.”

“What powers?” said Fence. “Only the Outside Powers do sleep.”

“But Benjamin said they were rising,” said Ellen, “before we ever found Shan’s Ring.” She seemed to give up. “Your turn,” she said to Fence.

“This matter’s too long for talk,” said Fence, “but I would you’d write me the story of your game as you did most commonly play’t out. In its departures from our history we may find answers.”

Laura thought this would be tedious; but it was clever of Fence to avoid asking them to talk about the game, in front of people who didn’t know what Randolph had done. “You should get another question, then,” she said.

“In this game,” said Fence, “how were events ordered?”

They all looked helplessly at one another. Fence said, “Tell me of a small thing only.”

“Fire-letters,” said Matthew. “Had you those?”

Ellen laughed. “Oh, yes,” she said. “That was my fault. Ted and Patrick sneaked off and built a bonfire without me, and I got so mad they had to make up the fire-letters on the spot.”

Matthew looked as if he wanted to withdraw the question. Randolph said, “
This
is how our very lives are ordered?”

“Or the other way?” said Laura, quickly.

“Yes,” said Patrick, with an approving glance. “
Because
in the Hidden Land there are fire-letters, when Ted and I needed to calm Ellen down with some intriguing thought, fire-letters came into our minds.”

Ellen started to say something; Laura shook her head, hard; and Ellen closed her mouth. Laura was relieved. This was no time for the old argument about who had put what into whose head. However distasteful it might be to the five of them to think that their wonderful game had been slipped into their heads by Claudia, it was far worse for the characters of the game to think that all their actions and all their history had been dictated by a bunch of children in unwitting collaboration with a renegade sorcerer. Until they knew which way—if either—it had gone, it would be better for the people who had to live in the Hidden Land to think that power flowed from them to Laura’s world, and not the other way around.

“I think we should take a break,” said Ted.

“Well, we must all to our studies,” said Fence, pushing his chair back. “Bear yourselves meekly, I beg of you; and should you see Benjamin, stand aside from his path.”

S
HE dozed in the dusty house. The windows of her mind were open. If anything happened that concerned her, she would dream of it. The six cats dreamed now, twitching, and gave her sleep a faint background of breathless rushing and the taste of blood. The water-beasts were lavishly entertained by the courtesies of the man Apsinthion; their smugness mingled with the cats’. The voices that abode in this place sang lullabies. This did not mean that they had forgiven her, but that they could, for a time, forget.

The music that summoned her burst in like a shower of hail. She had sprung to her feet before her eyes opened. No echo drifted in the sun with the dust motes. The cats slept on. The voices altered and proclaimed,
The way was long, the wind was cold, the hemlock umbrels tall and fair, whilst we have slept we have grown old, his house is in the village there.

She looked intently at her left ankle, with the cat scratch, and the smear of dirt on the bone, and the little faint scar from the unicorn’s hoof. The voices ceased. One instrument could reach so into her sleep; and one person knew what music to play on it. The music was old and well loved; anyone might play it; that might be chance. But play it on that flute? She stood up and went along the dim hall to the back room, and found after a moment’s thought a pane on the upper right of the back wall.

“Cedric,” she said. “Thy playing troubleth me.”

Her second lover had long, dark hair and green eyes and looked more like Randolph than she had remembered. He gazed out of the little diamond pane at her, and the red stone in the ring he wore glared at her like the eye of an angry wolf. He said, in his snug, deep voice, “When art thou?”

“In September of the four hundred and ninetieth year since King John defeated the Dragon King.”

“In August of that eventful year,” he said, laughter limning his voice, “I did give my flute away. Look elsewhere for the source of thy discomfort. I’ll trouble thee no more.”

“You will trouble me always,” she said; for what use, after all, could he make of this weakness now?

“Thou troublest thyself,” he said.

“Who had the flute from thee?”

“Laura,” said he. “Princess of the Secret Country.”

“Thou fool,” said Claudia. “The Princess of the Secret Country died in June. That was a creature of mine.”

“I do not think so,” he said. “Look again.” And he turned and walked away from her. She leaned her forehead on the soft, warm glass and stared at him with all her strength. The clearing in the forest where he had stood formed itself for her, each dead brown needle as precise as a jewel on the merchant’s velvet. But she could not bring him back.

To think of following him into the dark backward and abysm of time, leaving her plots half-woven, strings dangling from the loom, was foolish. But her smile was not for its foolishness. She was tired. The tools she had brought to finish out the pattern were rebellious. One of them had the flute of Cedric. It was too late to make improvisations in the pattern. They would look like mistakes. They would be mistakes. Unless this should be not the weaving’s border, but its middle.

“Look again,” he had said. She laid her hand on one of the larger panes in the left-hand wall. “Purgos Aipos,” she said. She could not step through, but she could see. The creature Laura was afraid of the water-beasts; but she loved cats.

W
HEN the council was over, Ruth took her green-bound book up to her own room, where she locked the door and curled up in a tall, carved chair liberally supplied with cushions. She had filched the cushions from around High Castle. Lady Ruth must have enjoyed being uncomfortable.

Ruth opened the book and was disappointed. The section concerning the Green Caves was a collection of translated extracts from works she had already, painfully, read in their original tongues. Celia had been kind, but she couldn’t have been thinking. How did she suppose Ruth had gotten through three months as an apprentice?

Ruth laid the book down and sat looking at the room. Lady Ruth had a huge rag rug in green and red and blue; an undersized bed covered with a silk quilt in the same colors, with blue wool curtains; twelve narrow tapestries depicting the plants most precious to the Green Caves in excruciating and, given the medium, unbelievable, detail; three deep, narrow windows overlooking the vegetable garden; the chair, the table, a hanging cabinet full of glassware, and two chests in dark wood. Unlike the Princesses Laura and Ellen, she had no dolls, musical instruments, or abandoned sewing projects. Whatever Lady Ruth did besides sleep and dress in white, she did it elsewhere; and whatever she owned that was not practical, she kept it elsewhere.

Ruth had never bothered to find out where, if anywhere, Lady Ruth kept the appurtenances of her life. But it was with this in mind, rather than the useful intention of finding out what she could before she was barred from the Green Caves by her resignation, that she went downstairs again.

The actual Green Caves were far to the west in a place called, predictably, the Cavernous Domains. The members of the school of Green Sorcery in High Castle had possession of the original wine cellars, the ones built for the inner white castle. These were naturally rather damp, but it was the skill of this branch of sorcery to turn such attributes to an asset. Ruth wended her way down and inward to one last cold, dusty stair, pushed open a wooden door stoutly bound with iron, and entered into a warm place of light and greenery, a circumscribed botanical garden.

Ruth went briskly past all its riches, through another iron-bound door, and into a long corridor carpeted in yellow and lavishly lit with golden lamps. There she stopped, considering. The first room on the right was the apprentices’ library; the second was Meredith’s study; the third was the journeymen’s library; the fourth was a refectory. The first room on the left was the potting room; the second was where they dried the herbs; the third was where the artists worked; and the fourth led to a suite of guest chambers for visitors who preferred to sleep underground. If the game and reality ran together in this instance, those chambers had been furnished for the Dwarves.

Ruth walked down the hall and put her hand to the door of the guest-chambers. It opened readily and she stepped inside and shut it. There were two dim purple torches here, one to either side of the doorway; and one of the golden lamps at the far end of the room. It had been meant for Dwarves, all right. Ruth tried all the chairs and benches, one after the other, like Goldilocks. The room was tidy, but smelled of damp and stone and some odd medicinal thing that might have been the torches burning, or might not.

Ruth tried the door at the other side of this sitting-room. It also opened, and showed her a square hallway off which opened three more doors. Two of these led to sleeping rooms, each with four small beds and four chests and four purple torches. The third led to a larger room lit powerfully with a dozen golden lamps. Ruth took one look, bolted inside, and shut the door hard. On the hearthrug was worked a large and perfectly recognizable cardinal.

All the walls were lined from the floor to the twelve-foot ceiling with shelves, and all the shelves were crammed with books. There were books on the floor amid the cushions. There were books on the table in the center of the room and on all chairs around it. If this library was like the others in High Castle, there was no card catalogue. If you were lucky, there would be an index, arranged by some useless criterion such as the date on which the book had entered the library. Any index would be in the charge of Meredith, who would, presumably, hand it over to her guests.

She wouldn’t hand it over to Ruth. Ruth had disgraced herself back in June, when she had, to all appearances, revealed to Ellen and Patrick one of the protective sorceries the Green Sorcerers had planted around High Castle. Meredith had demoted her to apprentice and kept her there.

Ruth leaned on the door. What was it that had made her think to come here? Lady Ruth knew; but Lady Ruth’s knowledge, like this library, had no card catalogue. Ruth could read the old language the books of the Green Caves were written in, with frequent recourse to a dictionary. She could, when trapped into some ceremony of the Green Caves, make any responses that Lady Ruth had once been assigned. She couldn’t remember them beforehand and spare herself apprehension. And she could not, now, call into the lighted spaces of her mind the reason she had come to this library.

She walked forward into the room and began turning over the books on the table. She thought doggedly about other things: the Australian accent that made even the plainest of the boys at school worth listening to; the fact that she had forgotten to sew the middle button back onto her denim skirt; how Shan had chewed up her copy of
The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
Finally, in desperation, she began reciting poetry. She didn’t know much, unlike Ellen, who memorized it with the same speed and dispatch with which she ate chocolate. “With blackest moss the flower-plots / Were thickly crusted, one and all,” she announced to the cold, swept fireplace. “The rusted nails fell from the knots / That held the pear to the garden-wall.”

And with the same thoughtless assurance, the same swift walk of habit, with which she used to make for the science fiction shelf in the library at home, Ruth walked to the shelves on the right of the fireplace, knelt down, and extracted from the middle of the bottom shelf three small volumes bound in red.

“Bingo!” said Ruth, unpoetically; and she sat down on the hearthrug, folded her legs up under the full white skirt, and began to read.

The books were written in a relatively plain English. The spelling was abominable. They were titled
A Short History of the Dwarves
; but the Dwarves, Ruth thought, might have found it a rather narrow and unrepresentative history. They were really the story of the impingement of the sorcerous methods of the Dwarves on the philosophy of the schools of sorcery in these central lands: the Hidden Land, Fence’s Country, the Dubious Hills, the Great Desert, the Kingdom of Dust, and the Forested Slopes. The Dwarves had chosen three animals, the raven, the marten, and the sunfish; and by some combination of magic and what sounded to Ruth like genetics, had bred them to be magical beasts, capable of acting as spies and messengers but having in them, like the dragon or the unicorn, an unchancy element that would play you false when you could least afford it.

The Dwarves, who had a fondness for green growing things but a dislike for living aboveground, had traded knowledge with the sorcerers of the middle lands. So now the Dwarves had botanical gardens under the earth, and the Green Caves had the services of snakes and fishes and the little burrowing mouse; while the Blue Sorcerers, like Fence and Randolph, could call upon the cat, the dog, the horse, or the eagle. The Yellow Sorcerers might tame the lesser hawks, the squirrel, or the black bear. And the Red Sorcerers had made intelligent, useful, and unchancy the red deer, certain finches, and the cardinal.