The Hidden Land (23 page)

“What stones?”

“It had those blue stones in the handle—in the hilt, but now it’s all smooth.” She tilted it to catch the sunlight. “And the blade used to be blue and shiny, and now it’s just ordinary.”

“Well, maybe you used up its magic.”

“Whence came that?” demanded Randolph, returning from his abstraction.

“Fence’s armory,” said Laura boldly.

“As well for us that it did,” said Randolph. “What brought him to give it thee?”

“Well . . .”

“Shouldn’t we be getting back?” said Ted. “I want to thank Ruth and Fence. And do they even know it worked?”

Randolph smiled. “They have the word of the Judge of the Dead. But that is always a slippery thing. Come, then.”

Randolph led them through the remnants of the battle in a random zigzag; probably, thought Ted, guiding them away from the worst sights. The ones they passed close by were bad enough. Ted looked aside at Laura, struggling along with the heavy sword, and was visited by an unexpected emotion.

“Would you mind holding my hand?” he asked her.

Laura gave him an astonished look and did as he asked.

When they were out of the area that had been fought over, Randolph asked Laura, with a grave politeness, to do him the favor of running ahead and bespeaking some stew for all three of them, “for, although thou hast fought most bravely this day, yet we two have fought longer.”

Laura bowed to him and went on ahead.

“My lord,” said Randolph, stopping Ted with a hand on his shoulder, “for all that she did bravely, and for all that her sword seemed made to deal with such shape-changers, I know the sorcery to deal with them; and had she not turned both our sights away from the battle, thou hadst not been killed and this dilemma would not now be upon us.”

Ted laughed, before he knew he was going to. “That
would
happen,” he said. He heard himself giggle, and stopped quickly. “I think it’s my fault,” he said, “because she didn’t swear fealty to me, you see, and I didn’t notice. And then I told El—the Lady Ellen that she couldn’t fight and bound her not to by her oath of fealty, you see, and so the Lady Laura got mad.” He snickered again.

Randolph’s mouth had fallen open somewhere in the middle of this speech; when Ted had finished, he blinked and closed it.

“So how can I scold her?” said Ted, laughter giving way to helplessness. It was one thing to have the story go differently than you expected. It was one thing, when you tried to make it go differently, to have that very attempt make it go as you had expected but hoped it wouldn’t. But this business of having something that never did happen in the original story, and that had not been done to stop something in the original story, be responsible for the occurrence of something that did happen in the original story, was another thing, and one thing too many.

“My lord, in some wise the fault is mine,” said Randolph. “I charged myself to see that all of useful age did swear to thee, and methinks I was mistaken in useful age.”

“I didn’t think of it either,” said Ted. “But look—however it happened, how could you let them take you instead?”

“Because it is in the nature of things that they will take me very soon,” said Randolph, looking him straight in the eye. “Thy use for me is drawing to its conclusion; and Fence, though he knoweth not what he knoweth, doth draw near to his conclusions touching the King’s death.”

“Why’d you try to get me to agree to kill you, then?”

“I did not,” said Randolph; “that was a condition made by the Judge of the Dead. It is also,” he said, dropping his hand from Ted’s shoulder, “a condition made by the laws of the Hidden Land, whereof thou art King. Think on it.” And he went on ahead of Ted into the camp.

T
HERE was a great deal of cheerful confusion in the camp. Ted was swept into his share of it by Ruth, Ellen, and Patrick, who did not actually run and hug him, but did surround him, talk at him, and show a disposition to tug at his sleeves and help him take off his corselet. He wondered briefly why this garment had not turned the sword-thrust that had killed him. Probably the sword had been magic; certainly its wielder had.

Out of the usual tumble of their conversation he managed to discover that Patrick had a slash on his leg from some horned creature, and a bruise on his side from he was not sure what. He seemed both exultant and subdued; at least, thought Ted, many of his most Patrick-like qualities were subdued. He had gotten through the battle so well largely because Ellen, at the last minute, had insisted on his having her magic sword.

“But you weren’t used to it!” said Ted.

“I took it
and
the ordinary sword,” said Patrick, “and lost the ordinary one in the first five minutes. But the magic one seemed to know how to fight all the strange creatures by itself. And Benjamin,” he said, grimacing, “stuck to me like a piece of gum and took care of all the normal soldiers.” On his dusty face was an expression compounded of glee and puzzlement. Ted wondered if he could possibly have enjoyed the battle. Now was not the time to ask; it would only remind Ellen that she had been prevented from fighting.

“Matthew and Randolph did the same to me,” said Ted.

“Did the stones come out of your hilt, too?” Laura asked Patrick.

Patrick showed her that they had not; Ellen demanded to know what Laura had meant by “too”; and Ted was just as pleased to be dragged by Randolph away from the rising tide of Ellen’s indignation and into a brief Council about what councils should be held.

He was not glad for long. He wanted most desperately to collect his fellow-imposters and discuss with them what Randolph had done about the bargaining, what Claudia appeared to have done to their other selves, and what they proposed to do about it all. It was galling to him to be saddled, on top of these burning responsibilities, with innumerable kingly duties that could far better be performed by others.

Fence and Randolph wanted to leave half the army behind to deal with any strays from the Dragon King’s; they wanted it decided whether to bury the dead where they were, or take them back, or bury some and take some back; they wanted to settle whether an envoy should be sent to the Dragon King’s court, and if so, who it should be and what he should say.

Ted could not find fault with these wants, but he wished they would leave him out of it. Just when he could have done with being ignored, they had to bring him in on everything. He knew nothing about the army, but he had to sit for hours listening to Fence and Randolph and the pitiful remnants of his own King’s Council wrangling over which pieces of it should be left behind and with what precise instructions.

No doubt it would be good for a new King. But Ted had no patience with it when he had not decided to be King. It now seemed impossible to him that, knowing where Edward was and being able to talk to him, they should be unable to get him back where he belonged.

Besides, it was almost unbearable to sit and look at all the empty seats. Of the counselors he had lost, he remembered only Conrad well; he had not lost any of the game’s favorites. Nor, perhaps unfortunately, had he lost Andrew, who had not so much as a scratch. But along with him, he had only Randolph (with his arm in a sling); Julian (who limped); Jerome, Matthew, Benjamin (all of whom had their heads bandaged); and Fence (who seemed very gloomy and was not a proper counselor anyway). He missed the cheerful temper and practical mind of Conrad. So, he found, did everybody else. With the exception of Benjamin, of the erratic temper and anomalous position, Conrad had been the only counselor of very great age or experience; nobody else seemed to be over thirty. Ted no longer found the idea of appointing new and untraditional counselors quite so appealing.

Except for Fence, Randolph, and Benjamin, who acted toward him precisely as they always had, the counselors did not seem to find Ted very appealing either. The answer to the puzzle of their constraint and odd glances was obvious once he thought of it; but it took him a day and a night and half another day to think of it. It was, of course, hard to act normally around someone who had been brought back from the dead by sorcery. As far as he could tell, only his Council, his sister, and his cousins knew about that.

Randolph told Ted that, with his gracious permission—that part sounding like an order, not a request—they were to camp three days and four nights in the round valley between the desert and the mountains.

On the first day after the battle Ted found out who had been killed, and was taken by Randolph and Fence to visit those who appeared to wish they had been. The Secret Country seemed to have remarkable methods for curing bodily wounds, but the wounds inflicted by the Dragon King’s minions must have been mostly mental. Those who had been hurt had dreams worse than any of Ted’s. Fence, however, seemed more at home with these dreams, interpreting them handily and offering numerous methods, from potions to poetry, of preventing their return.

Ted stayed close to Fence during this visit; at first, because he had been braced for horrors of one sort, and then because he began to be visited by those of another. He knew quite firmly, if vaguely, that hospitals had been terrible, verminous, filthy places before the advent of modern medicine. You could hardly expect modern medicine in the Secret Country; therefore he had been steeled for filth and vermin and the stench of gangrene. He found nothing of the sort. Agatha grumbled about the desert dust and sand that crept into everything, but all this did was give the hospital tents the air of a slightly neglected but very tidy attic. For the most part things were clean, airy, and decorous.

But nobody was happy, or even restful. Fence, who had flung off his gloom like an old cloak when he ducked into the first tent, could make people smile, but the moment he moved on they stopped smiling. There was an atmosphere of dread such as Ted had never known and would not, perhaps, have recognized had it not been for that part of his mind which knew some of what Edward had known. That underlayer of his thoughts was not susceptible to search; he recognized the feeling of the hospital tents without for a moment knowing what he recognized, or what had happened to Edward to make this state known to him.

“What’s the
matter?
” he exploded at Fence, the moment they were outside again.

“They have bad dreams,” said Fence.

“Yes, I know, but for heaven’s sake!”

“Those are the war wounds of sorcerers,” said Fence. “Be glad thou hast chosen another way.”

 

The evening of that day and most of the next were taken up with the disposition of the army. Then everyone wrangled over what to do with the bodies of the dead. Ted, during a break for food, took Randolph aside and asked if they could not all be brought back, as he had been. Randolph asked him if he cared to choose who should die in their stead. Ted, his suspicions satisfied and his conscience hurting him, apologized. The Council finally decided to bury in the valley those who had no families, and to take back with them those who did, so that the families could have the consolation of a funeral. Ted thought that if he were a family he would not find a funeral consoling.

That evening they discussed whether they ought to send an envoy to the Dragon King. They held their councils in the pavilion that had been set up, before the battle, to keep the rain off the cook-fires. It still smelled of woodsmoke and a batch of burnt bread. They sat on folding stools of wood and canvas, the ingenuity of which had both delighted and enraged Patrick; and leaned their shabby elbows on a series of long, narrow tables that also folded, but were less ingenious. To them clearly from outside came the smells of the stew the ousted cooks were making; a few tired voices and a few vigorous; and distantly the sound of a lute, two recorders, and an indeterminate number of voices singing mournfully a shapeless tune.

 

“The best you may hope for,” said Benjamin in his abrupt voice, “is to waste yon villain’s time and patience as he hath wasted ours. You’ll stir in him neither regret nor fear.”

Agatha’s voice sang alone:

 

“But leave him alone,” said Randolph, “and you’ll stir contempt.”

“We have that already,” said Fence.

All the voices rose:

 

Ted, not wishing to consider Phlebas, and made courageous by impatience, said, “Isn’t it a little late to send him a protest? We should have done that when Fence came back and told us about all the signs of his spies in the South.”

“Certainly we should have,” said Randolph, “but your father forbade it.” His face and his bandage were both dirty, and his eyes narrowed as if his head hurt him, but his voice was as usual. “Besides, we should send more than protest. We have won a great battle, my lord, and we should press upon the Dragon King terms such that we need not fight another.”

“How can you make terms with somebody who has no honor?” said Ted, bewildered.

Fence looked up.

“By force, how else?” said Randolph. “In this matter, force sorcerous.”

Ted saw Fence wince and look troubled. Randolph looked over at him, apparently expecting him to give details, as if this were a plan they had worked out between them. He caught the end of the wince, and his face set as if the headache had gotten worse. Fence’s eyes widened suddenly and he leaned forward. Randolph’s gaze dropped before the wizard’s: not quickly or sneakily, but with considerable deliberation. Fence’s face flushed, and he turned to Ted.