The Hidden Land (20 page)

“Not seriously enough, or he wouldn’t let Andrew keep that company.”

“Couldn’t he put it where it can’t do any harm?”

“If he can afford to waste twenty-four men, sure.”

“How big
is
the Dragon King’s army?”

Patrick looked at him, and looked away.

“How’d you get the Peonies to talk to you?” said Ted hastily.

“Childish blandishments,” said Patrick, grinning, and showed Ted a blue-eyed stare that made him look closer to ten than to thirteen.

“Never mind,” said Patrick, looking secretive.

There seemed no conversation possible that did not suddenly develop pitfalls.

“Let’s go practice fencing,” said Ted.

 

On the third day, the day they expected the Dragon King, Fence got them all up before dawn. Ted sat hunched over a fire, eating lumpy oatmeal brought to him by Agatha, and watched the clear red light chase the stars down behind the mountains. It was chilly. The mountains looked forbidding, and the bare land before them parched and miserable in the growing light. Ted had a cold knot in the center of his stomach, which the oatmeal did nothing to alleviate. He wondered how soon he would be killed.

There was a great deal of purposeful bustle going on, which no one had bothered to explain to him. Ted became irritated. Even if your minions had it all their own way, they might do you the courtesy of telling you what they were up to. Thinking of minions reminded Ted of Ellen, and he thought of going and telling her once more that she was not to fight in the battle. But if he insulted her by the reminder, she might go just to spite him.

In the end he found Agatha. She was wearing a sword, which suited her very well, and building up fires, which suited her equally well. I bet she
was
a good Queen’s Counselor, thought Ted. I wonder why the King didn’t want her.

“The Lady Ellen,” he said to her, “has thoughts of fighting in the battle.”

The moment he had said it he was sorry. This was the ultimate betrayal: going to a grown-up to solve a problem. Especially in the Secret, even if it was not the Secret they knew, it seemed reprehensible. But surely letting Ellen get herself killed would be worse. Agatha looked at him with resignation, and assured him that Ellen would be far too busy with carrying water and rolling bandages to sneak off to the battle. Ted thanked her and crept off to be collared by Fence and Randolph.

Both of them seemed perfectly calm, though Ted did notice, again, that Randolph was thinner than he had been and looked as if his head hurt. If it did, this did not stop him from giving Ted and Patrick a brisk and compressed lecture on how they were to conduct themselves during the battle. Ted was to fight with Matthew’s company, whose badge was a bloom of lilac. He was to stay with the company. People wearing a yellow feather were messengers: if one told him to do something, he was to do it; and if he saw anything amiss, he was to find a messenger and so inform him. Patrick was to do likewise, except that he would be with Benjamin’s company, whose badge was a daisy.

Ted, receiving these instructions silently, thought of his mother, when he was much younger, delivering him to a birthday party with mild reminder not to throw the present at Adam Simmons no matter what Adam said to him; to say “please” when he wanted something and “thank you” when he was given something, whether he wanted it or not; and to inform his hostess he had had a nice time even if he had hated every child there and his dumb sister Laura could have made a better cake.

These reflections made him feel worse rather than better.

They left a body of soldiers with the camp and moved the main army out a mile or so into the desert, since the surveyors they had brought were not as sure as they ought to have been about where the borders of the Secret Country were. Randolph, most uncharacteristically, snapped at them, and was rewarded with a lecture from Fence concerning the possible actions of sorcery upon geography. Patrick, whom Ted and Fence and Randolph had collected on their way, shut his mouth on the suggestion that this was because none of the five children who had made up this story knew the first thing about surveying, doing so in such a way that Ted knew exactly what he was not saying. This did not improve Ted’s temper.

When the army was safely into the desert it sat down and waited. Ted saw people playing cards and dice and chess, and other things he did not recognize.

“They must be crazy,” said Patrick.

He sounded so resentful that Ted stared at him. Patrick was scared, too. This was alarming. Ruth was the only one of his three cousins who had ever seemed to be afraid of anything. It was probably good for Patrick to be frightened, but Ted wished he had not noticed it.

“Cheer up,” he said stiffly. “It isn’t real, after all.”

“There’s nothing either good nor bad,” said Patrick, venomously, “but thinking makes it so.”

“Start thinking, then,” said Ted, and walked away before he could say something nastier, or be sorry he had said anything.

He almost fell over Randolph and Fence, who sat a little apart, drawing lines in the sand and putting pebbles on them and murmuring to each other.

“Those don’t look like any battle plans I ever saw,” said Ted over Fence’s shoulder.

“This is wizardry,” said Fence tranquilly. “I have neglected my apprentice of late.”

Ted looked at the ring on Randolph’s finger.

“What ails thee?” Fence asked him, without even looking around.

“I’m nervous,” said Ted truthfully, and sat down in the sand.

“This will occupy your mind,” said Fence, and shifted so Ted could see. “These are spells of opening and closing. When thou comest to cast them,” he said to Randolph, “’twere best thou hold the patterns in thy mind. To draw the runes is to do much damage. The Dragon King draweth runes for them, and he shattereth mountains.”

“Oh, wonderful!” said Ted. “Could he shatter us, too, if he liked?”

“No,” said Fence crisply, “he could not—not in this manner. Where is thy scholar’s abstraction? That is not the point.”

“Fence, have some heart,” said Randolph.

“That is neither for scholars nor for wizards,” said Fence, with an austerity that seemed to chill the growing heat of the desert.

“And for friends?” said Randolph. Ted looked away from his searching and ironic eyes.

Fence flung his hands up. “You are both a trial,” he said.

“No doubt,” said Randolph.

Ted, seeing far away something even worse than the look in Randolph’s eyes, sprang to his feet, scattering sand. “Look!”

They looked to the east, squinting at the early sun. Crawling across the desert were a line of black specks and a cloud of dust. Crawling across the sky was another line of specks. Fence and Randolph snatched up helmet and sword and were gone in opposite directions, shouting. Ted looked down at the pattern they had left in the sand, and shivered.

 

The Lilacs, when they came to fetch him, seemed rather preoccupied and subdued. Ted had somehow expected them to be pleased that theirs was the company chosen to fight with the King. A very little reflection, as they trudged to their appointed place in the desert between the Daisies and the Mallows, showed him that this expectation had been foolish. They might be blamed if anything happened to him. Even if his protection was delegated solely to Matthew, that would keep Matthew from doing whatever else he was supposed to do as captain of a company. Ted was a charge and a nuisance, that was all. Well, Edward wouldn’t have been any better; he was much shyer than Ted and hated fighting.

Matthew, having arranged his men in a peculiar pattern that made no sense at all to Ted, came up to him and smiled the smile of a parent who was about to take you in for a tetanus booster because you could not remember what you had stepped on.

“Hast been told of shape-shifters?” said Matthew.

They were always harder to understand when they got excited or worried. “I don’t think so,” said Ted.

“To kill them once sufficeth not; thou must kill each of their shapes.”

“How many do they have?” asked Ted, saw the face of the scholar begin to overtake Matthew’s soldierly mask, and added quickly, “Generally?”

“Seven or nine,” said Matthew.

“Great.”

“The spies say there are many.”

“Great,” said Ted, and was immediately sorry. This wasn’t Matthew’s fault.

Matthew looked down at him without anger. His fair skin was already red with the heat. “I wish for my books also,” he said softly.

Ted found it easy to smile at him. This was what Patrick would call a lovely irony. The last thing Ted wished for was his books. He was in one of his books, in the most exciting chapter of all, and wished earnestly to be—where? Not back at the Barretts’, being polite and watching television. Not even on the Pennsylvania farm, playing at war in the meadow. He was extremely frightened; but while he wished he was somewhere else, he could not think where.

“All may yet be very well,” said Matthew, as if he wished it were something better.

“My lord,” said one of his men, in the tone of somebody asking for the salt. “They come.”

The battle was not like a riot. Ted could not see what in the world he was doing, nor very much of what anyone else was trying to do to him.

Matthew’s carefully laid-out pattern disintegrated within ten minutes. In that time, three squat scaled things came at Ted, who swung at them all and missed, and were dispatched by Matthew.

“Aim lower!” shouted Matthew. He was two feet away and Ted could barely hear him. The din was unbelievable, worse than the tornado that had flattened the old barn three years ago. It had that huge rattling sound like a train, compounded with the sound of six hundred three-year-olds beating on pots with spoons, shrieks, growls, and hisses as of a record-breaking cat fight, and other screams that were like nothing Ted had ever heard and that obliterated instantly what little levity he had left in him.

He swiped the sword at another scaled creature, obediently aiming lower, and succeeded in changing it into an enormous snake. He managed to cut off this one’s head, but not with any of the moves so painstakingly taught him by Randolph. He used the good, solid motion his mother had shown him when he demanded to be allowed to chop wood.

The snake fell into two pieces and the churned sand around it darkened with green. Somebody else must have killed it several times already, or else the Dragon King was using cut-rate monsters.

“Edward!” yelled Matthew.

Ted stopped staring and backed up hastily while Matthew killed the wolf that had sprung at him. Matthew actually did use a fencing move, except that he had altered it by—The wolf disintegrated quietly into a shower of stones, Matthew shouted again, urgently, and Ted stopped thinking.

Once he had cleared his mind, the sword seemed to come to life; or more likely, that undercurrent of knowledge from Edward was able to work its way up and direct his arm. Every time he tried to analyze what he was doing, he missed his aim and had to be rescued by Matthew. After the third rescue, Ted stopped trying to analyze anything. The day grew hotter. What Ted remembered best of the morning was just the acute discomfort of sun and sweat and thirst and the irritating way his helmet-strap rubbed his ear.

Fence found him at noon, said six short words which disposed of the snaky thing he was fighting, and made him come back to camp and have something to eat. Laura brought it to him, staring at his sword and clothes.

“Who’s winning?” asked Ted through a mouthful of dust. It was the first thing he had said since, “Look!”

Fence shrugged, scattering sand and debris from his shoulders. Thin in the background against the vast silence of the desert the noise of the battle went on. Ted felt a reluctance to go back to it akin to the reluctance one has to go on hiking after a rest stop. He felt torpid. Fence got up and went away.

“Where’s Ellie?” Ted asked Laura.

“Washing bandages,” said Laura to the ground.

“You’ll stop her, won’t you, if she tries to go fight?”

“Agatha won’t let her,” said Laura, but this seemed to have been the right thing to say. At least she looked at him.

“She’s too quick for Agatha,” said Ted, and Laura smiled at him.

Fence came back with pen and paper and a writing-board. “The enemy’s sorcerers being for the moment discomposed,” he said, “and Conrad having the soldiers well in hand, ’tis time for thy challenge to the Dragon King.”

“What?”

“Who hath conducted thy education?” said Fence, despairingly.

“You can’t mean challenge the Dragon King to single combat?”

“Thou needst not fight thyself,” said Fence. “Thou hast a champion, my lord.”

“Well, who?”

“I for the arcane, Randolph for the mundane.”

“Great,” said Ted, but he took the materials. In the end Fence, having explained that the single combat was to spare any more slaughter than had already taken place, and having failed to explain why it was not issued before any slaughter had happened, had to dictate the letter to him. He wondered what Fence would think of the Roman alphabet, but Fence, scanning the paper when Ted had done, seemed not to think it strange. He went off to arrange for its delivery.

“Laurie,” said Ted, “do you remember anything about a challenge?”

“Only once or twice,” said Laura. “We had to stop having the single combat after you stuck Patrick in the shoulder with the branch, because the Dragon King got to choose the weapon, and Patrick wouldn’t choose anything smaller. And then for a while we said that
Edward gave
the challenge, but the Dragon King didn’t care about honor so he refused it. And then it seemed dumb to give it if we couldn’t have the fight, so we just stopped.”

“But nothing about a king’s champion?”

“Uh-uh.”