The Whim of the Dragon (37 page)

They walked all night, under a blazing of stars like sugar thickly sprinkled on a cake, and in the spaces between their sticky clusters a sky so black it looked to Laura like a pit she could fall into. The land they traveled over seemed to her a tiny, made thing, a clutter of gravel held together with ice and the little feathery sticks of the evergreens. She kept drowsing off and then jerking awake, because it was not sleep she would fall into, but the endless empty sky. After the third time this happened, she was seriously considering tickling Patrick as a diversion, when Ellen said from beside them, “Can’t we sing?”

Celia laughed. “How please both a dragon and a unicorn?”

“I was thinking of pleasing myself,” said Ellen. “Something long and rousing.”

“Kipling,” said Patrick.

“Oh, well thought!” said Ellen, and promptly began to sing.

 

Patrick had joined in before the end of the first line. Laura knew she couldn’t sing, but in this cold wilderness she didn’t care. She came in on the second line. Among the three of them they made a creditable chorus, she thought, for volume if not for sweetness; but they did not get much further. The clear and tuneful voices of Patrick and Ellen, and even Laura’s fainter and more wavery pipe, struck echoes like slivers of ice from all the naked rocks, and those echoes struck more; every word they sang burst into a shower of others, not only in the freezing air but in the warm depths of her mind.

Those last few words, spoken honestly with flesh and breath, falling naturally on the real air that Laura moved in, left behind them a frozen silence. The wind had died; the party from the Hidden Land stood in a perfect stillness, their soundless breath congealing in the dark air, and looked at the speaker.

Laura recognized the unicorn, by its gold eyes and by something in the timbre of its voice. It was Chryse. She seemed much larger; and, as with the other unicorn they had spoken to, although she did not shine herself, there was light around her. But her breath, too, made clouds in the frosty air, and from the wicked horn with its spiral of violet there hung a dingy tendril of dead vine.

“That,” said Chryse in her ringing voice, “is the oddest music that ever I was summoned—” She broke off. Laura had never heard a unicorn do such a thing. “Fence,” said Chryse. “What dost thou here among the barren rocks?”

“Seeking your gracious presence, lady,” said Fence. Laura, accustomed to the way in which he had spoken to the other unicorns and to the Lords of the Dead, with that threadbare courtesy just covering his wariness, his disdain, his distrust, actually looked away from the unicorn to stare at Fence. He meant it. This one he respected.

“My brothers sent me word thou wast at Heathwill Library,” said Chryse.

“Heathwill Library,” said Fence, “is an abode of monsters. The Lords of the Dead do take their ease behind its walls.”

Chryse made an abrupt and discontinuous sound, like a cat walking on a keyboard. There was an uneasy silence. “The strangest summons,” said Chryse at last, “and the strangest news. What are these others with thee? Will you come and take what ease I can afford you?”

“Lady,” said Fence, “for this relief much thanks.”

They followed Chryse on a winding path through ice and rocks, and down into a valley that held a little wood of pine trees. It was much warmer here. They trudged up to a thick hedge of some evergreen, and shrugged off their packs. Matthew stacked them under the hedge, and Laura said to Ellen, “What kind of hedge is that?”

“Yew,” said Ellen.

Fence joined them and said quietly, “Be somewhat scanter of thy knowledge in converse with Chryse. Do not lie, but do not speak more than you must.”

“I’m sure Chryse knows what kind of a hedge it is,” said Ellen, rather testily.

“It will like her an thou answerest thus pertly,” said Fence, unruffled, “but beware. She’ll lead thee on to those delights, and thou wilt speak more than thou shouldst. Thou mayst strew dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.”

“I thank you for your good counsel,” said Ellen, and did him a courtesy.

“Oh, go your ways,” said Fence.

Matthew and Celia joined them. Fence said, tilting his head and looking from her to Matthew and back again, “Look the two of you to my weaknesses.”

He walked away, and they all followed him, to a wide clearing where a pale light as of the moon behind clouds told them Chryse was waiting. She invited them to sit down, and Laura at least was very glad to do so. The pine needles were thick on the ground and very soft. Laura thought belatedly that it was perhaps impolite to sit while Chryse stood, and also that they would all have stiff necks from looking up at her. But once they were all seated in a half-circle—Matthew, Celia, Fence, Laura, Ellen, and Patrick—Chryse lay down neatly, as the unicorn they had hunted last summer had done, her forelegs stretched out before her like a cat’s and her plumy tail spread fanlike on the scattered needles. She did not look smug; she looked expectant.

“You are welcome,” she said. “Make me known, Fence, to your companions.”

“Lord Matthew,” said Fence, “King’s Counselor of the Hidden Land.”

Chryse looked down her long white horse’s nose at Matthew, and said, “They speak well of thee in Heathwill Library.”

“Celia,” said Fence, while Matthew seemed to be struggling with a reply, “Onetime Queen’s Counselor, and the King’s Counselor and musician.”

“And Belaparthalion speaks well of thy music,” said Chryse.

Celia smiled; Fence said, “Laura.”

“Well met,” said Chryse. If she noticed the sudden absence of title or designation, she didn’t mention it. Laura was not sure she was relieved. Chryse said, “Thou hast played the flute of Cedric and found the unicorn in winter, bereft of the cardinal.”

“But, lady,” said Laura, startled into speech, “it’s October.”

“Is it?” said Chryse.

“Ellen,” said Fence.

Chryse said, “Thy spirit liketh my sister.”

“Hers liked me too,” said Ellen.

“And Patrick,” said Fence.

Chryse said, “Think on’t.”

Laura, bewildered, looked at Patrick, who was scowling, but not in the manner of somebody who has been presented with a senseless remark.

“Well met,” said Chryse again. “Now. What meaneth this embassy?”

Fence cleared his throat, pushed his hood back from his face, and spoke of the action of the Dragon King that had led to the war in August. He told of the doubts Andrew had sown among the King’s Council; he told of the death of the King, which he termed “doubtful” and managed to imply it might have been in some way engineered by the Dragon King. He described the battle. He told of the death of Conrad, the only experienced general the Hidden Land had. He told of the death of the new King, and the bargain made with the Judge of the Dead for his release. Chryse, who after all had been there, interrupted him at this point.

“That was ill done,” she said. “For we did not receive Edward.”

Fence looked as if he wondered how she knew. He said, “I myself, lady, am loath to lose Randolph. But that is by the way, save as an instance of the farflung trouble the meddlings of the Dragon King have caused us, who have troubled him nothing. There is no honor in him; no statecraft will bind him to be quiet. Wherefore we come to give you a gift, and to ask in return the gift of your intervention. Celia?”

Celia reached under her cloak and drew out a wrapped bundle. She spun the long windings of cloth from it as if she were unrolling a carpet, and the swords of Shan and Melanie tumbled to the ground and lay there shining in pale blue and ghostly green. The stones on their hilts winked like stars between clouds. They sparkled in green and blue; but it was gold and red that Laura saw in them, a huge glow of gold light and a red, sinuous form coiled in the middle of it like a worm in an apple. She blinked, and the sparkles steadied, and the glimpse was gone.

Chryse stood up. “Glory and trumpets,” she said. “I will have these swords. For my part, an you give them up, I’ll read the Dragon King a prohibition shall stay him to the shape of a polecat until all these deeds are but a song the minstrels cannot trace to’s makers. But my part is not all. We’ll find Belaparthalion by and by. Now, look you; I will have also more knowledge than thou, Fence, didst tell my sister, touching these swords and their history. Is there aught thou wouldst have of me in return for that tale?”

“Fence!” said Ellen. “The three riddles.”

“What!” said Chryse, in alert and joyful tones. “Riddles all Heathwill cannot read?”

“Dangerous conjectures,” said Patrick, leaning across Laura and addressing Ellen in a disgusted voice, “in ill-breeding minds.”

“Thy tongue breeds iller,” said Fence.

“Fence,” said Chryse, in a voice that for the first time held no shadow of laughter. “Thy dealings with us were ever circumspect.”

“How, lady,” said Fence, in a pleading tone laced lightly with irritation, “should they be otherwise?”

“Dost thou know,” said Chryse, still soberly, “what time’s gone by since any trusted us?”

“That same that’s passed,” said Fence, as if he were painstakingly explaining long division to a slow pupil, “since you did warrant it.”

“An you try us not,” said Chryse, with the humor back in her tuneful voice, “how may you know do we warrant it or do we not?”

“Is this not wonderful?” said Fence. He sounded rather desperate; but there was a touch of irony in his voice also. “You have pleased it so, to punish me with this, and this with me, that I must be your scourge and minister.”

“Thou art a wizard,” said Chryse.

Nobody moved or spoke; Laura’s nose itched, and she would not have scratched it for anything. The two swords on the ground, like stained glass through which the sun is shining, cast little motes of blue and green in all directions, blemishing Chryse’s white coat and making the clearing look like a scene under water. Laura squeezed her eyes shut briefly, and in the dazzle of red and yellow afterimages she saw again the golden glow and the red snaky thing within it. These things were in a tower room, but not any in High Castle. The golden glow was a great globe; the red snaky thing in it was a dragon, all whiskered and tendriled and shot with streaks of black. It was looking at her out of one black eye with a pupil as red as a garnet.

Nothing in any of her visions had looked at her before.
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
said a crackling voice, like no voice she had ever heard in the back of her head. The sight snapped out suddenly, as if the dragon and not she had ended it. Laura opened her mouth, remembered Fence’s abjurations to Ellen, and shut it again.

The silence stretched on a little longer. Then Fence said, “Ellen. Ask thy riddles.”

“What beast is it,” said Ellen, “the unicorns pursue each summer?”

Well, thought Laura, Chryse should certainly know the answer to that one.

“The dragon,” said Chryse.

“And before what beast doth winter flee?”

“The dragon,” said Chryse.

“And what beast maketh that which putteth the words to the flute’s song?”

There was another silence. “The dragon,” said Chryse, and chuckled richly, like three low notes of a pipe organ.

“The dragon?” said Ellen. “Not—ow!”

Patrick had leaned over and hit her in the arm; but it was Fence who said, “Hold your tongue.”

“Heathwill thinketh otherwise?” said Chryse.

“Send to them, lady, and ask,” said Fence.

“Well,” said Chryse. “Tell your tale.”

Fence told it, appealing occasionally to Matthew or Celia or Laura, and once to Patrick, but never to Ellen, for details. The sun came up before he had finished. Chryse twitched her tail from time to time, somewhat as a cat might do and somewhat as a horse might. She made no comment when he had finished.

“That,” said Patrick, with relish, “is a packet of news and no mistake.”

Chryse made an obscure hooting sound. Laura wasn’t sure what it meant. Chryse said, “Fear not this bargain, Fence. I’ll call Belaparthalion.” She stood up, with considerably more grace than any of the rest of them, scrambling hastily to their feet at Fence’s urgent gesture, could manage. Then she put her long white head back, like a donkey about to bray, and made sounds far more melodious.

In Laura’s mind the words marched along with the music. “Wake: the silver dusk returning / Up the beach of darkness brims, / And the ship of sunrise burning / Strands upon the eastern rims. / Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, / Trampled to the floor it spanned, / And the tent of night in tatters / Straws the sky-pavilioned land.”

Which was very impressive, but Belaparthalion did not come. Laura was afraid that she knew why. “When you know these things,” the man in red had said, “then what manner of thing I am you will know also.” He had not said, I am the thing that is the answer. If he was indeed a dragon-keeper, she had just seen the dragon he kept. That tower room had not looked as if it were in the bare, blocky, modern house she and Ted had visited; but it might be. She might have seen Belaparthalion; but she might have seen some other dragon, in the present or the future or the past.