The Secret Country (8 page)

“My lord,” said Benjamin to the King, “allow me.” He assisted the King into the end chair nearest the door. Ted, shaking off the paralysis with which the sight of Randolph had afflicted him, made a beeline for the chair at the other end, and was arrested by Benjamin’s voice.

“What dost thou think on so deep, my young lord, that thou canst not greet thy father?”

Ted, his face hot, turned slowly so as not to trip on Lord Justin’s robe, and made his way past amused and sympathetic faces to stand by the King’s chair. Benjamin looked the way Ted felt when Laura broke something: He was tired of it, but he was used to it. Ted, once more grateful for Prince Edward’s being an impractical daydreamer, bowed to the King.

“Sir,” he said, groping for his lines. This scene he had played, though it was not one of their favorites. He caught with the corner of his eye the expression on Andrew’s face. Andrew looked both pleased and pained. Ted had once seen a similar expression on his mother’s face when the child of a neighbor she disliked had spilled grape juice on a white velvet chair. She was unhappy that the chair was ruined, she said later, but it was almost worth it to see the consternation of the neighbor. The hell with you, thought Ted at Andrew, you won’t see my consternation.

“How does your honor for this many a day?” he asked the King.

“I thank thee, well,” said the King. His voice was a little husky, but it was not old. “And thou?”

“Very well, sir,” said Ted.

“How fare thy studies?”

“Some well, my lord, and some indifferent.”

“And which indifferent?”

Ted’s next line dealt with his inability to learn to handle a sword, but he balked. He did not want to admit to incompetence before Andrew. He looked involuntarily at Randolph, who was his fencing master.

Randolph surprised him by giving him a companionable wink and speaking. “Sire,” he said.

The King turned to him. Ted looked at them looking at one another, and shivered. They had known each other for a long time and they were fond of one another; Randolph was going to kill the King, and Randolph knew it now.

“His Highness thinks,” said Randolph, “because I have told him so, that he is but an indifferent swordsman. He grows smug when praised, my lord, and while a smug scholar is a fool, a smug swordsman is a dead man. But it were shameful for him to say before your council that he is an indifferent swordsman, and since it is not true, he shall not say it. He does very well, my lord. The blood of King John shows in him.”

The King, who had appeared pleased during most of this speech, scowled suddenly at the name of King John. Randolph raised an eyebrow at the King, and Ted recognized the gesture as a challenge.

“It delights my heart to hear thee say so,” said the King to Randolph, a little stiffly. Randolph nodded at him. The King turned back to Ted. “This likes me well,” he said, “that thou art skillful outside thy books. A bookish king is a shaky fortress.”

Ted, who had no lines for this scene because he had never played it, bowed again. From the corner of his eye he had seen Randolph wince at what the King said.

The King nodded at Ted in what Ted took for a gesture of dismissal, so he turned and made his velvet-encumbered way to the other end of the table. Andrew and Benjamin, finally, moved for their seats. Ted saw that Benjamin seemed taken aback, and that on Andrew’s face was a sort of outraged bewilderment, which made Ted want to laugh.

He dragged out his heavy wooden chair with a horrible scraping on the stone floor, and crammed himself and his robe into it.

Everyone he knew was at the other end of the table. On his right he had a lean young man, clean shaven, with a mass of red hair and a sardonic eye. If Ted had not heard the moustached man and Benjamin, he would have thought that this was Andrew. The young man grinned at him. Ted smiled back, not very well, and looked at the man on his left. This was a large, older man with very little hair on his head and a vast black beard. He, too, looked like Ruth and Ellen. Ted, struggling with his memory, produced triumphantly the knowledge that this was Conrad, Laura and Ellen’s father and, he thought, Randolph’s brother. That would explain, at least, why Randolph looked like Ellen.

King William, fifteen feet away, rang a bell, and everyone was instantly quiet.

“My lords,” said the King. His voice carried clearly down the long table; Ted might have been sitting next to him.

“We are met with ye this fourteenth day of June, in the forty-sixth year of our reign, the four hundred and ninetieth year since King John vanquished the Dragon King, that we may impart to ye such matters as ye may aid us in the resolution of.”

Ted, puzzled by a scratching sound at his elbow, looked around and saw that the young man on his right was scribbling with a quill pen on some thick stuff. Ted knew then who he was: Matthew, the King’s scribe. He was in fact much more like a secretary, but Ruth and Ellen had objected to this term, so he was called the Scribe. Ted, who had thought Matthew would take his notes on wax tablets and commit them to parchment only for presentation to the King’s library, felt chagrined, and wondered how he could keep Patrick from saying I-told-you-so.

“We have spoken to our scouts,” said the King, “those who returned at month’s end; their tale is all of disquiet. Keeping watch in their accustomed places, where from year’s end to year’s end only the sheep have walked, they have seen the very stones rise and hurl themselves through the air; they have discerned wisdom in the eye of the sparrow, malice in the call of the dove, cunning in the step of the hare.”

Ted sat with his eyes widening. Nobody he knew had written this speech. They had decided that the Dragon King had sent his shape-changers as harmless animals to spy out the southern reaches of the Secret Country, but they had never said it like this.

Conrad saw him staring, and leaned and spoke to him. “A speaketh as one in thy books, eh, lad?”

Ted grinned. That much was true. “Aye, my lord,” he said. From clear down the table he felt Benjamin’s glare, and he looked quickly back at the King.

“They say sorcery stalks our southern lands, as has not been since King John rode out to quell the Dragon King,” said King William.

“They say that the rivers stand in their beds or run uphill, that the very trees walk so that a man may wake of a dawn and find his cornfield a forest. They say the fish speak and the children are dumb.” The King stopped to clear his throat. The room was still except for the scratch of Matthew’s pen and the hiss of the torches. “They say there are plagues of man and dog and crop, and they say the people beg our aid.”

He stopped, and Andrew put out his hand palm up in the middle of the table.

“Our Lord Andrew,” said the King.

“Saving Your Majesty,” said Andrew. He said this less pleasantly than he might have, and Ted saw Randolph’s brows draw together. “If these tales did come at last month’s end, why a fortnight’s delay in the telling of them?”

“They also say,” said the King, quite pleasantly, “that Fence cometh, with better report and fuller. I have sent physicians to the ailing, but this bodes some strange eruption to our state, more than a plague of nature. We needs must conclude what mean these things and how we shall meet them.”

Andrew’s hand was still palm up on the table, and the King nodded to him.

“Sire,” said Andrew, “have our scouts seen these things themselves, or do they but repeat the tales of the wild, the ignorant, or the mad? I know well how the work of our guardians has turned to rumormongering in these fat and pursy times.”

Randolph flung his hand down upon the table with a crack that must have hurt his knuckles.

“Our Lord Randolph,” said the King.

“I,” said Randolph, with great precision, “have spoken to the scouts. Among them are Morgan, Gregory, and Suzanne. I think, my lord, you will allow that these are neither wild, nor mad, nor ignorant?”

Andrew nodded.

“They did indeed begin by hearing rumors,” said Randolph, “but they ended by being themselves besieged. Fence delivered them, or we might have no report at all. These are no idle tales, my lord. Our own men have seen these things, and some nearly died of it.”

Andrew took his hand from the table. He did not seem distressed. Randolph left his where it was, and the King nodded to him.

“Sire,” said Randolph. “Since I spoke with the scouts I have been studying the Book of King John. I have shown some part of it to the more trustworthy of the scouts. My lords,” he said, looking up and down the table with an economical movement that made every one of them sit forward, “the scouts agree with me that the things they have seen are precisely the warnings, in the Book of King John, of another rising of the Dragon King. His agents are among us, and we must prepare for battle.”

Conrad put his hand down.

“Our Lord Conrad,” said the King.

“My lords,” said Conrad, “I do not doubt these tidings, but I doubt their import. There has ever been grave doubt that indeed King John’s book is history and not fable. Nature does not teach us of such things as he has written. But she teaches much of sham and trickery. The only spells anyone has witnessed for a generation have been spells of illusion. Methinks these are none other than such.”

“And what then,” said Randolph, “is their import?”

“No doubt, my lord,” said Conrad, leaning across his neighbors so that he could see Randolph, “that some power in the south sends spies to us, and doth indeed contemplate an invasion. But how to meet that power is what we must contend. To meet these signs with King John’s tactics is to meet our end.”

Matthew’s hand came down on the table, still holding his pen, and startling Ted. Randolph quickly took his away, and Conrad’s stayed where it was.

“Our lord Matthew,” said the King.

“Two points,” said Matthew. “First, King John’s book is not the only record of his battle. Worthy generals filled pages with their wonder that he had won with such outlandish strategies. They quarreled with him bitterly about his battle plans, using just such speeches as we hear from Lord Conrad, and when they went to battle ’twas with the certainty that they but trailed a madman to his death and theirs.”

“Those documents,” said Conrad, “are but doubtful.”

“So are all documents,” said Matthew. “We can but use what we are given.”

He looked as if he would say more, but Ted, quaking, put his hand down on the table.

“Your Highness,” said the King.

“My lords,” said Ted. His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. Speech class would be nothing after this. “My lords, I have made a study of these documents. The men who seemed to doubt them were not scholars. They were renegade wizards who wished to make all men disbelieve in magic, that in secret their power might be greater. Nothing they say is to be trusted.” He took his hand away and wiped sweat from it onto Lord Justin’s robe.

Matthew and Conrad’s hands remained on the table, and both lords looked at the King.

“Your second point,” said the King to Matthew.

“Just this matter of wizards,” said Matthew, inclining his head to Ted. “I grant, my lord Conrad, that indeed there are spells of illusion which can deceive an ordinary man. But which of them can deceive Fence? If he says these things are real, then they are real.”

Conrad snatched his hand from the table as Andrew slapped his down again.

“Andrew,” said the King.

“Your pardon,” said Andrew, “but our young scribe is perhaps too honest in his own mind to perceive the crookedness of others.”

Ted stole a glance at Matthew, who was taking down Andrew’s words in a series of vicious stabs which could not have been good for the pen but which Ted was entirely in sympathy with.

“Prince Edward has spoken of renegade wizards,” said Andrew. “I submit, my lords, that those of whom he spoke were not villains, but honest men endeavoring to show forth the trickery of their fellows. I submit that all wizardry is but trickery, and all spells but illusion. That Fence says the signs reported by the scouts are real, means nothing unless Fence is to be trusted. My lords, no wizard is to be trusted.” Randolph’s hand came down on the table, very gently. Andrew went on. “They are no man’s servants; they pursue their own ends. The wizards of Fence’s Country were ever ready to aid our enemies. Shan himself served the Dragon King for a score of years. My lords, Fence is a traitor, using the ignorance of our ancestors as a trap to catch us in.”

Even in the uncertain and ruddy light of the torches, Ted could see that Randolph had turned red. The King looked toward Randolph and began to nod, but Benjamin put a hand on Randolph’s wrist, and Matthew put his own hand down quickly. The King surveyed them all for a moment. “Randolph?” he said.

“I yield to Matthew,” said Randolph, with no particular emphasis, but Ted shivered.

“Shan did not serve the Dragon King in his wars against us,” said Matthew, “and, even were Shan a blacker traitor than Melanie, that says nothing of Fence. Wizards go their own ways, they have no common goals, they are not a force, together. They cannot work together, and they dislike one another’s company.”

“So,” said Andrew, without permission, “they would have us believe.”

“Cease,” said the King. Andrew was silent, but only, Ted knew, because he had no more to say. “Matthew,” said the King, “write not that remark.”

“Sire,” said Matthew, “I would prefer to let it remain. I yield to Andrew, that he may have said it.”

“As you will,” said the King. Matthew’s pen scratched on. Benjamin lifted his hand from Randolph’s wrist, and Randolph moved the hand a little further out onto the table. “Randolph,” said the King with a trace of resignation.

“Andrew,” said Randolph. “With regard to Shan’s serving our enemies, may I remind you that he left the service of the Dragon King and aided King John in the battle against him, and that he later worked for us the Border Magic. He did these things because it was in plans to attack us that the Dragon King first revealed his true purposes and his madness.”