The Hidden Land (7 page)

“He does not think it now,” said Fence.

Ruth was the first to recollect her part. Glaring at Patrick, she said, in strained tones. “What happened? I didn’t know his Majesty was unwell.”

“He was not,” said Fence. He looked around at them again, and seemed to abandon whatever gentle measures he had settled on, in the face of their abnormal calm.

“The King was poisoned,” he said, “with a sorcerous brew.”

He went on looking at them, and they stared back. Laura thought again about howling, but she was shocked, not grieved. She wondered if Ted was killing Randolph yet. He had not wanted to; but he had not wanted Randolph to poison the King, either. So much for wishing on the Enchanted Forest, she thought. We unbroke the Crystal of Earth, but everything else is going to happen.

“Well,” said Patrick, “who did it, then?”

Fence buried both hands in his robes, and his face, which had become more normal when their response perplexed him, turned remote again. “We know not,” he said.

“Heh,” said Patrick.

“What we may discover, you and your brother the King shall know,” said Fence. Patrick’s mouth fell open, which seemed to afford Fence a very dim and distant amusement, the way Laura’s father would sometimes smile when you told him a joke while he was reading. Fence addressed Ellen and Laura. “Agatha hath other business than you.”

“We can put ourselves to bed,” said Ellen.

Fence regarded her with curiosity. “How commendable in you,” he said.

Ellen, unaccustomed to sarcasm from this quarter, said, “No, not at all,” like a society lady, thought Laura. Then she looked appalled.

Patrick snickered, and Ruth pulled his hair. He pushed her hand away.

“Cut it out!” he said.

“Children,” said Fence.

“I’m sorry we’re so unbecoming,” said Patrick, sourly.

“So am I,” said Fence.

They squirmed under his gaze, even Ruth, and looked at the floor.

“Whatever wildness possesseth you,” said Fence at last, “tame it by tomorrow.”

“You began it,” said Patrick, “making Ellie look silly.”

“And you shall end it,” said Fence. He turned and went from the room, closing the door behind him with a thud that missed being a slam but was not a neutral noise.

“Patrick,”
said Ruth.

“What’s the use of playing any more?” demanded Patrick. “It didn’t work; the King’s dead!”

“You don’t have to make Fence any more unhappy than he already is.”

“He’s not even real!”

Ruth picked up the skirts of her white dress and advanced on him. “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that after all the things that have gone different and all the things that have gone wrong and even after
this
you can sit there and say this is all out of our own heads?”

“Yes!” shouted Patrick, standing his piece of the floor defiantly. Ruth stopped coming toward him. “And the reason it’s going wrong and different is that some of us are sick in the head!”

Laura would not have spoken for anything. There was a brief but profound silence. Ellen broke it by twisting around on the bed and regarding her brother as if he were a spider that she would have liked to step on had she not been afraid it would run up her leg.

“Who,”
she said ominously, sounding very like Ruth, “is sick?”

“Ted and Ruth,” said Patrick. “And they’re the oldest, so you and Laura think whatever they say, and I can’t do anything by myself to keep things straight.”

“Why,” said Ruth, in a flat tone, “are we sick.”

“You’re important here and you want to stay that way. So you want it to be real.”

“Why,” said Ruth, more angrily, “even if that’s true, is it sick?”

“Megalomania,” said Patrick, scaring Laura; it sounded like some kind of cancer.

“
You’re
sick!” said Ellen. “You think you’re the only one who can be right, and we’re all against you.”

“Paranoia,” said Ruth, with a sort of melancholy pleasure in knowing the word.

Laura knew that word herself, but she wasn’t pleased. It was unwise to enter a family fight, but she was finding this one too much for her.

“I think you’re all horrible,” she said. “How can you stand there and call names when—”

“I didn’t mean to call names,” said Patrick. “I was trying to bring you to your senses so we can do something. You’re no use if you go on thinking this stuff is real.”

“What do you want to do?” asked Ruth.

“Get out of here!”

“But I need to see what
happens!
” said Ellen.

“For God’s sake!” said Patrick. “This isn’t a book.”

“Oh, no?” said Ruth. “I thought you said it wasn’t real?”

It still surprised Laura to see Patrick nonplussed. Ellen and Ruth looked at him with a tentative sort of triumph, as if they were quite sure they were right but expected him to come up with a slippery answer.

He had an answer, but it did not seem slippery to Laura.

“It’s happening
to
us,” he said. “It isn’t good for us. It’s going to hurt
us,
and
we’re
real.”

“Why isn’t it good for us?” demanded Ruth. “Why shouldn’t it teach us things and make us better people?”

“I guess there’s no reason it shouldn’t,” said Patrick, “but it isn’t. It’s making all of you—all of us—unreasonable. And emotional and grumpy. And name-calling. And callous,” he added. “The King’s dead and Ellie thinks he’s real and she’s not even sorry, she just wants to hang around and see what else happens.”

“Now look,” said Ellen.

“Be quiet,” said Ruth. She addressed Patrick. “Lots of things that are good for the soul make people unreasonable.”

Patrick sat down on the bed in a despairing movement. “It’s not good for the soul,” he said, “to think you’re important when you’re not.”

“Seems to me you think
you’re
pretty important,” said Ellen. “You think you could make all this happen.”

“I think
we
could. And that’s not important, it’s just normal imagination gone bad. Because it
isn’t
happening, we just—”

“Who made up Lady Claudia, then?” asked Ruth.

“How should I know? What with everybody running around making up just anything and not even telling anybody, somebody could have made her up and forgotten all about her. Or just decided she wasn’t a good idea.”

“Why didn’t that decision stick, then?” asked Ruth. “Some of them did. Laura isn’t a prince.”

“Just as well,” said Laura, briefly entertained. Real as everything here had always looked to her, right now she would be just as pleased if everything—even the unicorns—were imaginary. “Hey,” she said, recalled, as always, to her primary problem in this country, “if it’s all in our heads, why can’t I ride a horse like we said I could?”

“Because you think it’s real.”

“So what? If the King’s real, why can’t me riding horses be real, too?”

“Because you know you can’t!”

“I knew the King wasn’t real, too, before we got here,” said Laura.

Patrick seemed to be struggling with another way to make his point, and there was a pause during which Ellen fell asleep on Ruth’s knee.

“I don’t really care,” Ruth said suddenly to Patrick, “what you think, but I would appreciate it if you would act as though this were real. It seems to me, since you’re in no danger of thinking you’re important, that you have less to lose by acting as if this were real, even if it isn’t, than you would have by acting as if it weren’t real, when it was.”

Laura and Patrick looked at her in astonishment. This was a far better Lady Ruth than she had ever achieved, even at the height of her acting.

“Since you won’t pay any attention to my arguments anyway,” said Patrick.

“That’s right.”

“I guess so,” said Patrick.

“Thank you.”

“What do we do now?” asked Laura.

“Go to bed, I think,” said Ruth, looking at Ellen.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Ted?”

“I don’t think,” said Ruth, “that Ted is going to feel like talking to anybody.”

 

In the clear gray morning, Fence, Ted, and Randolph straightened their backs and rubbed their eyes. The whole long council table was littered with books and maps and scribbled bits of parchment. The candles were pools in the bottoms of their holders. Ted felt like a pool in his chair. If he had not been exhausted he would have been terrified. He did not understand a third of what he had been told. He had never been fond of military history; what he liked were the tactics of single fights, like the one Prince Edward was supposed to have with Lord Randolph in the rose garden. Even if he had known about battles he would have been bewildered by the peculiar blend of normal and magical fighting that Fence and Randolph seemed to think the best way to manage things.

He had gathered something of the magnitude of their problem. Fence and Randolph, for all their youth, seemed to know a great deal about the art of war. Precepts, examples from history, episodes from their own experience, came easily to their tongues. But half their well-taught and successfully exercised theories foundered on the rock of sorcery. Neither of them had ever fought a sorcerous battle. Fence was a sorcerer, but not in the school of the Dragon King. He did not know, and apparently neither did anybody else, by what principles the Dragon King ordered his powers. He did not know his enemy; and that, said Randolph, somewhere in the cold dregs of the night, was the first rule of war.

“What about all those spies?” Ted asked.

“King John says,” said Fence, “that of the information your spies gather about a sorcerous opponent, it is necessary to discount half.”

“Which half, he saith not,” said Randolph. He was still pale, and there were two lines of pain or weariness between his eyebrows; but he smiled at Fence with all his old charm, and Ted saw that this was an old argument between them.

“Indeed he does,” said Fence.

“Ah,” said Randolph, “but which half one cannot tell until one hath the whole; and we have not the whole.”

“We were not permitted it,” said Fence, not smiling at all; and Ted knew he spoke of the King.

As they talked on, and the west wind drove the clouds over the plain and the huge stars of the Secret Country bloomed from the clearing sky, Ted found that those precepts rescued from the rock of sorcery would drown in the whirlpool of what ought to have been the Secret Country’s greatest strength: the Border Magic. To meet your enemy before he was ready, on ground of your choosing; to attack him in his weak places, so that he must abandon his strong ones to defend them; to feint back and forth over large stretches of ground until you had exhausted him—all these things would give you the victory. But because of the Border Magic, the armies of the Secret Country could do none of them.

If an army of enemies set foot in the Secret Country, the Secret Country would become a wasteland. Wherefore those wishing to defend it must fight its enemies where its enemies chose to gather. It was true that the Border Magic defeated from the start all those whose intent was to own the Secret Country, to live in it, to usefully occupy it in any way. But the Border Magic opened up vast new opportunities for the vengeful, the mischievous, the malicious. The Dragon King, by all accounts, was all three. And King John had nothing to say about the Border Magic, because the Border Magic had been contrived after his time.

“Who
by?
” asked Ted, with considerable resentment. This was not so much for the contriver as for the ruthless manner in which his own invention, of which he and Patrick had been so proud, had been logically dismantled and shown to be like a badly thrown boomerang, that not only recoils upon its wielder, but smacks him in the forehead and leaves him helpless in the hands of his enemies.

Fence shut King John’s Book and pushed his damp, flattened hair out of his eyes. His round face was a little sunken; Ted could see the line of his cheekbone, and realized with a lurch of the heart that in some curious and sidelong way, Fence looked like Claudia.

“By the unicorns,” said Fence, “and by the Outside Powers. The Outside Powers owed the unicorns a boon, and this was what the unicorns asked of them.”

“A joke, then,” said Ted.

“Perhaps. Or in part.”

Ted stood up and stretched. “Fence,” he said, “if King John’s Book is so little use, why did you make such a fuss about using it?”

“It had been of far greater use,” said Randolph out of the depths of his chair, “had we been free to gather intelligence as it bade us during these months the Dragon King hath stumbled about our borders like a cow with the staggers.”

Fence chuckled. “Well, I gathered some little store. And we are free now to gather what we may,” he said. “Edward. We stray from our path. Randolph, the map.”

Now they were silent, and the first thoughtful murmur of awakening birds came in the windows with a stir of morning air. Ted resigned himself to a blind trust in his counselors, and looked at the two of them.

“Well,” said Fence to Randolph, “when will we march?”

“Should we not have the coronation before the battle?”

“I’d rather not,” said Ted, unable to be as blind as he would have liked.

“That is not the question,” said Randolph.

“I, too, had rather not,” said Fence.

Randolph frowned at him.

“There is no time,” said Fence, “and it is not necessary.”

“No?” said Randolph.

“More men believe in the Book of King John than in the speeches of Lord Andrew.”

“Think you not,” said Randolph, with some difficulty, “that to delay the coronation would make men to think we had doubts of the Prince in this matter of the poisoning?”

“To hasten the coronation and damage the war thereby,” said Fence, “would make them to think we had doubts of the Regent.”