The Whim of the Dragon (20 page)

The Enchanted Forest did not act enchanted. It did not even keep off the rain. Laura realized that both its appearance before the Unicorn Hunt, when it had been wild and tangled, and its appearance afterward, when it had been park-like, were forms of holiday attire. Now they were seeing it in its everyday dress. It had enormous beech and oak and rowan trees; clear paths; a plenitude of yellow, white, or orange flowers like stunted chrysanthemums; a dearth of undergrowth, aside from the little bushes that look as if they ought to be growing seventy feet tall in a prehistoric forest, and turn bright red in the early fall; and convenient logs and rocks in clearings perfectly suited for building a fire and spending the night.

Laura stood under a beech tree and watched Celia and Fence build a fire. They had erected a little awning of oiled leather over it, to keep off the rain the trees let through. Fence thought this precaution unnecessary, but had given in, smiling, when Celia insisted. Ellen had gone to get water, and Patrick to find more wood. Matthew was unburdening the horses and covering them up with blankets.

Ellen trudged into the clearing, lugging a skin of water. “There’s more unicorn footprints by the stream,” she said.

Laura was grateful that Patrick was absent. Unicorns left flowering plants and trees behind them the way cats leave hair; Ellen had decided this morning to call these manifestations unicorn footprints, and Patrick, being Patrick, promptly began calling them fewmets. Laura suspected that he would have called them something considerably more vulgar if Celia had not had her eye on him. Laura hadn’t figured out why Patrick respected Celia when he scorned everybody else in High Castle, but it was a great blessing.

“What kinds of flowers?” Laura asked, rather tardily. Ellen had dumped her water into their camp kettle and was rummaging in the heap of saddlebags.

“White violets,” said Ellen, pulling out six little yellow apples and lining them up on a flat stone. “Forget-me-nots. Crocuses. And just in case you might think it’s spring, a huge great clump of Michaelmas daisies.”

“What’s a Michaelmas daisy?”

Ellen blinked up at her. “That’s weird,” she said. “They’re asters; kind of a dusty blue. But Princess Ellen calls them Michaelmas daisies.
Michael
-mass,” she added. “Not
micklemus
, which is how we say it.”

“What’s Michaelmas?”

“The feast of the archangel Michael,” said Ellen.

“Do they have archangels here?”

Celia came over to fetch the kettle, and Ellen said to her, “What’s Michaelmas?”

“September twenty-ninth,” said Celia, “is Michaelmas’s Day. ’Tis a feast of Heathwill Library; something to do with the end of the wizards’ wars.”

“Who’s Michaelmas, then?” said Laura.

“Prospero’s apprentice,” said Celia, simply.

“I can’t stand it,” said Ellen. “Michaelmas is a
person
?”

Celia smiled. “Some might dispute,” she said. “A walketh very like one. Of your courtesy, find me the jars of stew i’th’other pack.” She carried the kettle away to the fire.

Laura followed her. “What does Michaelmas’s name mean?”

“That Michael who hath been dismissed,” said Celia, straightening. “There were three named Michael on the Council of Nine when Heathwill Library was planned, wherefore they found other names for two of them.”

“Who dismissed the Michael who was dismissed?”

“Prospero. Ellen, the stew?”

Ellen leapt up with a start and began searching through the other bag. Laura, with several questions begging for resolution, chose at random, and said, “Who was Prospero?”

“Say not was,” said Celia. “He’s of the Council of nine that found Heathwill Library; a most formidable sorcerer once, and now the most terrifying of scholars.”

“Why’d he stop being a sorcerer?”

“A was of the Red School,” said Celia, accepting the earthenware pot Ellen handed her and beginning to pry off its wax seal. “And their tenets did lead him on to most dreadful acts; which, when he saw their issue, he did regret.”

“What acts?”

“A was Melanie’s eldest brother,” said Celia, rather shortly.

“Oh!” said Laura. He was one of the family that had killed a unicorn by treachery. Which was, of course, why he was alive still; the blood of a unicorn killed by treachery conferred immortality. Laura had always thought this a supremely stupid setup; it was one of the remnants of earlier games that Ted and Ruth had played before the rest of them were old enough, and they had insisted on retaining it. She wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to meet Prospero, no matter how regretful he was.

People having finished their various tasks, they sat around the fire and ate their stew. Laura recognized it from dinner at High Castle the night before. She also knew, having helped Celia unpack for lunch, that there was not much of it in their baggage. She had seen quantities of dried fruit, little square cakes with oatmeal and raisins in them, dried meat, and a few long-keeping vegetables like onions and potatoes. They would not eat this well for most of the trip, unless somebody shot a rabbit or something. Laura didn’t care for this notion.

And shot it with what, anyway? Nobody had a bow. Archery did not seem to be much practiced at High Castle. But there were arrow slits all over the castle. Laura looked sideways at Patrick, planning to ask him to read this riddle for her, and then she figured it out herself. The arrow slits must have been put in before the Border Magic, when it was still possible that an enemy army might besiege High Castle.

Laura came out of her reverie with a jerk as Ellen passed her a squashed apple tart. There wouldn’t be more of those, either. Laura savored it while she could, and listened to the others.

“How long do you think it’s likely to rain?” said Patrick.

“I’d thought it had cleared sooner,” said Matthew.

“Claudia?” said Patrick.

Celia said, “’Twould be a petty persecution.”

“Maybe it’s just a warm-up act,” said Patrick.

Nobody chose to take up this remark. Celia made tea out of half the hot water and passed the mugs around. In the wider spaces of the woods, the rain fell steadily, a background murmur very like the fire’s. In their clump of beech trees, an occasional huge drop hit somebody on the head.

Celia prepared to wash the mugs and the knives and spoons in the remaining hot water, and sent Laura and Ellen to the stream to wash the plates, exhorting them to be certain to scrub them well with sand.

“There’s sand by the unicorn footprints,” said Ellen, when they were safely out of Patrick’s hearing.

She led the way along a narrow path. On their left a vast, tumbled slope of round rocks and vivid green moss fell, nastily steep, into a misty valley of young trees. Laura was glad the plates were tin and wouldn’t break. She could hear water running at the bottom of the valley. She followed Ellen, and the path turned and dragged them slipping and stumbling down the rocky slope and disgorged them suddenly onto a flat grassy place overflowing with flowers. The stream hissed whitely over a little falls and widened into a pool whose glossy surface was perfectly still and unmoving. It had stopped raining. Or, thought Laura—picking her way among dusty blue and purple and dark red daisy-like flowers the size of the plates she carried; and clumps of white violets whose leaves were the size of her hand and their flowers as big as an ordinary daisy; and forget-me-nots of the proper size but of a blue almost luminous; and crocuses, gold and purple and white, the size of tulips—it just wasn’t raining
here.

They knelt at the stream’s edge, and scrubbed the plates. The remnants of the stew were remarkably clingy; Laura supposed they shouldn’t all have sat there brooding and let it get cold.

“I’d like to call a unicorn,” said Ellen, stacking her last plate with the others and rinsing her hands in the water.

Laura, who had two plates left, scrubbed harder. The water was cold but very silky to the touch. “Do you think we could have a drink?” she said.

“That won’t call a unicorn. What did you do to make the one you saw show up?”

“I didn’t make it show up,” said Laura. “I whistled ‘The Minstrel Boy.’ Then I whistled like a cardinal; and a cardinal came. I said to it, ‘Please, I’m looking for a unicorn.’ And it flew away, and made a fuss when I tried to follow it. So I waited, and it came back with Claudia. Claudia and I had a stupid conversation, and she told me that the unicorns had gone south for the winter, and she left. And I looked down and there was a unicorn standing in the water.”

Ellen stood up and shook water off her hands. She wore an expression unnervingly like Patrick’s when he was clicking through in his mind the possibilities of a given situation. “It was the cardinal,” she said. “I bet it was. Let’s whistle.”

“No!” said Laura, standing up in a hurry and dropping all her plates. “We don’t want them to know we’re here.”

“No; we don’t want them to know where we’re going.”

“Well, once they know we’re here they could follow us.”

“They could have been following us all along,” said Ellen.

Laura knew the sinking feeling of somebody who is going to lose an argument, because it isn’t really an argument at all. She said, “There’s no point in asking for trouble.”

“We don’t know it will be trouble,” said Ellen. She tipped her head back, and a little breeze stirred her crazy black hair. She whistled, clearly and accurately, the song of the cardinal. And a red bird dropped from the empty spaces of the forest and landed on her shoulder. It was the biggest cardinal Laura had ever seen. It was as large as a crow.

“Please,” said Ellen, standing very still, “we’re trying to find a unicorn.”

The cardinal rose off her shoulder and flew downstream. Before it had disappeared, they heard a regular sloshing, and a unicorn came wading through the water, unconcernedly, as if it were walking in a field of grass. Laura wondered if they really liked water so much, or just liked getting other people wet. Both the unicorns she had talked to had appeared in the water.

This one strode into the middle of the little pool and wheeled to face them. Laura looked at it carefully; its eyes were not gold, but violet. It was not Chryse, the one she had just told Ellen about. It might be the one she had talked to in the lake. She wondered if she and Ellen looked alike to the unicorns. Somehow she doubted it. She wished Ellen would say something; she had summoned the unicorn, after all.

The unicorn stood there with its head cocked as if it heard something in the distance. Laura became aware of stirrings and rustlings in the woods around them, as every animal that could tell a unicorn was here came out of its burrow or down from the sky. At least in this forest, the unicorn was the king of beasts.

It was extremely beautiful without seeming in the least unreal. Laura could feel its warmth from three feet away; it had whiskers on the sides of its nose; its eye, however purple, was properly liquid. The tuft of hair on the end of its tail was wet and draggled. But it looked so
clean.
No white animal looked truly white; white cows or horses had dingy yellow or gray casts to their coats, and sheep were just hopeless. Laura had seen white cats that were almost as clean as the unicorn. She wondered if unicorns groomed themselves like cats. She doubted that they would have the tongue for it. She watched the orange fish flash around the unicorn’s legs in the shallow water of the little pool, and thought of cats, dozens of cats, washing the unicorn until its coat gleamed. They would get hairballs you wouldn’t believe.

“The hair is not so coarse as that,” said the unicorn, in the clear and piercing voice of its kind. “Thou thinkst of horses.”

“No,” said Laura, startled into the truth; “goats.”

“What?” said Ellen.

“I should rather ask thee that, youngling,” said the unicorn. “Wherefore stoppest thou me?”

Laura distinctly heard Ellen gulp. “I hope we didn’t disturb you,” said Ellen.

The unicorn said, “Hoping not to disturb, wherefore didst thou send my messenger?”

“Because,” said Ellen, more boldly, “we weren’t sure he was your messenger. Can you tell us about the cardinals?”

The unicorn said, “ ‘I can’ must wait upon ‘I will.’ ”

“Do you know who we are?” said Ellen.

“I know who you do seem.” The unicorn took two steps toward them in the water and nuzzled the top of Laura’s head. The unicorn smelled like very clean, dry, crispy autumn leaves; which was to say, it smelled like Fence. Laura shivered just the same. The unicorn blew vigorously into Ellen’s hair, altering it very little, and backed up again. “You carry your seemings within,” it said, “but you are other. Read me your riddle and I will read you mine.”

“Don’t you mean that the other way around?” said Ellen.

The unicorn made a very odd noise, like somebody unpracticed trying to play a trumpet. “As courtesy to the visitor, no doubt,” it said. “No matter that the visitor be uninvited and a most pert intruder. Well. The cardinals serve whom they will and also whom they must. They must serve Belaparthalion; they do serve the Outside Powers, none knoweth by choice or upon compulsion; and they will serve us. Now, what of thy oddness?”

“That’s a very long story,” said Ellen.

Laura gave her a reproachful look. It was nevertheless true that the gray light was heavier than it had been, that it was getting very chilly, and that from every part of the stream except the pool in which the unicorn stood, wisps of mist were rising off the water. It was also true that telling their story to a unicorn might not be the wisest thing to do. Unicorns were odd; they could be malicious. The only one Laura knew to be well disposed toward the Secret Country was Chryse, and this was not she.

“I think we’re out of our depth,” she said.

“Thou standest not in the water,” said the unicorn, in a tone of mild pleasure.

“Contrariwise,” said Laura, startling herself, “I and my kinsmen stand in water so deep that every seventh wave doth choke us. An thou shouldst be that seventh wave, what then?” Whew, she thought, where’d that come from?