The Secret Country (14 page)

Patrick unbuckled the sword belt and held it out to Ruth, who gathered the whole thing up in her arms as if it were a bundle of laundry.

“And bring more marshmallows,” said Ted.

“Pig,” said Ellen to Laura, and she and Ruth trudged off into the dark.

Laura felt much less safe when they were gone.

“Well?” said Ted to Patrick.

“I don’t know,” said Patrick. Laura blinked; this was the second time in two days and the second time in her whole life she had heard Patrick say that. This time, though, he did not sound defeated; he sounded, rather, as if he meant to do something about it, immediately.

“I really have to meet some of these people; maybe that will tell me something,” he said.

“It sure told me something,” said Ted, “but you don’t believe it.”

“You know what we could do,” said Laura, moved both by a genuine interest in her idea and by an impulse for mischief.

“What?” said Patrick.

“Me and Ted,” said Laura, “could use our swords to meet you here, and then we could use your sword to get to Australia, and then we could just play, there, the way we always did.”

“That’s a terrible waste,” said Patrick, “when we’ve got this whole wonderful hallucination to play with.”

“Ted doesn’t think it’s so wonderful.”

“Ted doesn’t think it’s a hallucination,” said Patrick.

“Just wait,” said Ted.

“Besides,” said Patrick to Laura, “we don’t know if that business with the swords would work anyway. Maybe your sword only works for you and Ted and ours only works for us.”

He leaned over the fire to put another stick on it, and the red light hollowed his eyes and made crevices in his face. Ted made the kind of noise you make, if you are not ticklish, when someone pokes you in the ribs.

“What?” said Patrick.

“You look like the King,” said Ted. “You look just like the King.”

“Did I ever play him?” asked Patrick.

“No,” said Laura, “you said he was a dimwit and you wouldn’t. Is he a dimwit, Ted?”

“No,” said Ted.

“Ha,” said Laura to Patrick.

“I wish he was,” said Ted, “it would make things easier.”

“And after all the trouble we went to to make them hard,” said Patrick.

“That was a game.”

“And so is this.”

“You wait,” said Ted.

“What’s that?” demanded Patrick.

They all listened. Clearly, over the crackle of their fire, they heard a steady and ominous tramping, overlaid with the crack of twigs and the rustle of branches. Someone large was coming through the wood.

Ted struggled, muttered, stood up, and drew his sword. It blazed out blue, subduing the firelight. Laura saw flicker in the depths of the light faces and other bright blades and, dimly, a rearing shape like a horse, but snakier. Her eyes watered, and she looked away for a moment. The tramping grew quieter, but it did not stop.

“Laurie,” said Ted, “hold one of those dry branches in the fire till it catches, for a weapon.”

“Don’t be silly, she’ll burn herself,” said Patrick. “Just take a good heavy piece of wood, Laura.”

He took one himself and stood up. Laura looked up at their two figures, lit crazily by the light of the fire, and did not know whether to be reassured by their courage or frightened by their stupidity. Whatever was coming, could they really fight it with a little sword and a stick of wood?

With two sticks of wood, she amended, rummaging in their pile of branches. Most of them were small and light and tended to crumble when dragged out of the tangle. Maybe they should all run. Laura looked briefly out over the dark fields and, at the thought of running across them with something after her, felt cold. There was nowhere to go. She wished she were back at the Barretts’. Something was coming down the hill.

“What on earth are you doing?” said the tramper, crossly, and Ruth stepped into the firelight.

“Getting ready to hack you up,” said Patrick. “You sounded like a large, dangerous—”

“I feel like one,” said Ruth, and sat down with a flump.

“Well?”

“It didn’t work,” said Ruth. “We didn’t change the time. I missed the bus to my flute lesson. Mom wouldn’t drive me because I need to learn responsibility. So I asked if I could take a taxi and pay for it myself—that’s responsible, isn’t it?” Ruth hurled a stick into the fire. “So she said I needed to learn thrift too.”

“Where’s Ellen?” asked Patrick.

“Weeding the broccoli,” said Ruth, with a sort of grim satisfaction. She sounded, thought Laura, exactly like Lady Ruth telling the unicorns what she thought of them.

“I don’t suppose you brought the marshmallows,” said Ted.

Ruth sighed. “I’m sorry, I forgot.”

“I should hope you did,” said Patrick. “Catastrophes falling on our heads, Ted, and you worry about marshmallows.”

“You’ve eaten lately,” said Ted.

“Put that sword away, for pity’s sake,” said Ruth, “and let’s decide what we’re going to do.”

“I want mine back, please,” said Patrick. Ruth gave it to him, and he put it back on.

“Without Ellen?” said Laura.

“She said she’d hurry. Let’s talk about it, at least.”

“What can we do?” said Ted, putting his sword away.

“Maybe you should leave the sword out,” said Ruth. “It’s better than a flashlight. Patrick, does ours do that?”

“Don’t,” said Laura. “It hurts my eyes.”

“It does?” said Patrick.

“It’s probably magic light,” said Ruth, “and we shouldn’t use it until we know what it means.”

Patrick promptly pulled his sword out. It pulsed a green with too much yellow in it to be pleasant, but not enough to be ugly. Laura stared, but saw no shapes in the light or in the blade.

“Huh,” said Patrick, interested, “they’re not the same.”

“That one hurts
my
eyes,” said Ruth. “Put it away.”

“Do you see things in it?” asked Laura.

“What?” said Ruth.

Patrick sheathed his sword and sat down. “Now. What are we going to do?”

“What can we do?” repeated Ted, still standing. The firelight lit up his face from below. Laura thought once again that he looked like Randolph, or as she imagined Randolph, but she kept her mouth shut.

“We should collect as much information as we can,” said Patrick, “and see if we can manage to be in on all the action.”

“We are all going to be out of action for the rest of the summer,” said Ted, “if we disappear one more time and get any grown-ups anywhere any madder than they already are.”

“I bet we could fix that somehow,” said Patrick. “Let’s figure out how the swords work and then we’ll see.”

“You can’t take them apart like a stereo amplifier, Patrick,” said Ruth.

“I don’t mean that,” said Patrick, “although I would like to see what’s in these blades. And there could be lots of miniature circuitry in the hilts—”

“Patrick,” said Ruth, awfully, “I forbid thee to meddle with those swords.”

Patrick looked at her, and she looked back at him, and the fire crackled.

“The swords aren’t real anyway, according to you,” said Ted to Patrick, “so why be interested?”

“I have a new theory,” said Patrick. No one asked him what it was. He went on. “Either we’re having a hallucination, or what’s happening can be explained scientifically. Maybe this could all happen without magic.”

“I still forbid you,” said Ruth.

“What did you mean about finding out how they work if you didn’t mean taking them apart?” asked Laura.

“I want to run some tests,” said Patrick, “and see who can go where with these things, and where you can get to from where else, and things like that.”

“Do we have to do it in the dark?” asked Laura, who did not like the idea.

“I suppose you could sneak out at night, so it’d be light here,” said Ted to the others.

“We’ll have to once things get going,” said Ruth. “Most of what happens is in the daytime, except the banquets and reviving Prince Edward.”

“I don’t expect to need reviving,” said Ted, shortly.

“But we don’t want to miss the banquets,” said Ruth.

“Look,” said Patrick. “Let’s not waste the time we’ve got. We’re already in trouble—you guys sneaked out, and Ruthie missed her flute lesson. Let’s do something now that we’re here.”

“We do need a light, though,” said Ruth.

“It was stupid not to bring a flashlight,” said Patrick, “but I forgot it would be dark here.”

“
We
brought one,” said Laura.

“Where is it?”

“It turned into a lantern.”

“What?” said Patrick.

“It did not,” said Ted. “I dropped it in the stream, and we found a lantern in the stream.”

“Listen,” said Laura.

“You’ve got your money,” said Ted. “You shut up.”

“I will not,” said Laura, incensed at the idea that he was paying her to lie. “It blew up and turned into a lantern.”

“Like your watch!” said Ruth to Patrick.

“My watch didn’t blow up,” said Patrick skeptically.

“But it did change.”

“Heh,” said Patrick. “Well, where’s this lantern?”

“Under the hedge,” said Ted. “And the wick’s wet.”

“We’ve got a whole fire to light it with,” said Patrick.

The lantern, when Ted fetched it back to the fire, submitted to being lighted, but it was not as good as a flashlight. There was no way to direct the light toward what you wanted to see, and if you moved the lantern too quickly, it went out. Even if it had been a flashlight, one would not have been enough for four people. One lantern was even less enough for four people who insisted on scrambling in the dark through the woods from hedge to bottle trees and back again.

Laura, who was always last, could tell by the light where the others were, but not how they had gotten there, and by the time they all collapsed beside their fire again, she had a collection of scratches and bruises. She was also sure that she had left half of her hair hanging from tree branches and tangled in bushes. Since she had steadfastly refused to do more than follow the rest of them around, she had not the remotest idea of what the rest of them had found out.

“This fire’s almost out,” said Patrick, cautiously putting a few twigs on the coals and blowing at them.

“That’s better than burning up the plain,” said Ruth, “which it could have done for all we knew. We’d better learn to be responsible.”

“You’re just mad about your flute lesson,” said Patrick, “and—hey!”

“Well?” said Ruth.

“You didn’t have to go to your flute lesson.”

“I couldn’t go,” said Ruth, with irritation. She was sounding more like Lady Ruth all the time. Laura’s eldest cousin had never snapped at anyone.

“Yes, exactly,” said Patrick. “You get nervous about your flute lesson, so your mind creates a hallucination that makes you not have to go.”

“Patrick,” said Ruth, “stop it.”

“But think about it.”

“Just to avoid a flute lesson?” said Ted. “All of this, for that?”

“Stop it,” said Ruth.

“I wish Ellen were here,” said Patrick, peaceably. “She could write down what we’ve discovered about the swords.”

“It’s nothing useful,” said Ruth. “We can’t use our sword, or theirs, to get to America, and they can’t use ours, or theirs, to get to Australia. And the only way to get to the Secret Country from home or to home from the Secret Country is to hold on to the sword; you can’t hold on to someone who is holding on to the sword and get through that way. I still don’t see how this helps at all.”

“You just never know,” said Patrick, “so you can’t know too much.”

“But what are we going to do?” said Ruth.

“What’s happening next that we want to get in on?” asked Patrick.

“Fence comes back,” said Laura.

“There are some things before that,” said Ted. “The Banquet of Midsummer Eve is the next big thing, I think.”

“Fence comes back in the middle of it,” said Laura.

“When’s Midsummer Eve, anyway?” asked Ted.

“Midsummer’s Day is June the twenty-first,” said Patrick, “so the Banquet is the twentieth.”

“We’re okay until next week, then?” said Ted.

“Nonsense,” said Ruth, “if we’re gone from here for a week they’ll—”

“What’s after the Banquet?” asked Patrick.

“Another big council,” said Ted.

“And the Unicorn Hunt,” said Laura, happily, “and the Riddle Game.” She thought she would even be willing to put up with the horses if she could really go to the Unicorn Hunt.

“Now look,” said Ruth. “We can’t possibly manage that. We’d have to be gone for three days, one for each riddle. I keep telling you, this whole thing is hopeless unless we can change the time.”

“Well,” said Patrick, “we can’t do anything outside the Secret Country. So what sources of power are there in the Secret Country?”

“Wizards,” said Laura.

“Minions of the Green Caves,” said Ruth.

“Could you change it?” Patrick asked her.

“I don’t think so,” said Ruth. “It’s not my talent, and besides, I’m only a student. And I don’t even know what I’m supposed to know, and even if I did know, I still wouldn’t know it. I mean—”

“Could Fence do it, then?”

“Even if he could,” said Ted, “why should he?”

“We’d have to explain everything, I guess,” said Ruth. “I don’t like the idea.”

“He’d believe us, I bet,” said Laura.

“Don’t count on it. He’s a grown-up,” said Ted. “They always ask why and they never believe you.”

“He’s not a normal grown-up,” protested Laura.

“How would you know? I suppose you think Benjamin and the King and Randolph aren’t normal grown-ups, either? You just try sitting through a council with them.”

“Unicorns?” said Laura, who had never liked the council scenes even in the game. “Unicorns never ask why.”