The Whim of the Dragon (28 page)

T
ED dreamt that he was at a school concert with his parents; Laura was playing the flute of Cedric. She was playing “Good King Wenceslas,” with more flourishes than Ted had thought it possible to wring out of a flute; but the music teacher, who was sitting next to his mother, was extremely angry because Laura had been supposed to play “What if a Day,” whatever that was. The music teacher was explaining all this to Ted’s mother in an angry whisper; Ted’s mother kept trying to shut the music teacher up so she could hear Laura. Then the sixth-grade choir filed onto the stage. Ted suddenly realized that Laura was wearing one of her Secret Country dresses; and he was jolted out of his pleasant dream-state, wherein everything was as it had been before their cousins moved to Australia.

Then the sixth-grade choir sang not “Good King Wenceslas,” but something that jarred uncomfortably with it. Ted caught snatches of the words. “Cannot a chance of a night or an hour cross thy desires?” Laura’s playing faltered, and then steadied. The choir sang, “All our joys are but toys, Idle thoughts deceiving.” Laura stopped playing and stood looking thoughtful. “None have power of an hour in their lives’ bereaving,” sang the sixth-graders.

Laura grinned and lifted the flute again. She played a song Ted had never heard; but the words to it rose out of the back of his mind, and covered the sounds of his mother arguing with the music teacher and of the choir still singing.
And from the Dragon’s mouth that would / You all in sunder shiver / And from the horns of Unicorns / Lord safely you deliver.

Edward’s voice rose triumphantly, with the piercing sound of the flute. Light flashed off the silver thing, and hurt Ted’s eyes. He blinked, and opened them again on a dazzling shaft of sunlight. One little ray had found its way into their clutter of rocks, and it had to hit him in the eye. Around him the blanketed forms of his traveling companions breathed gently. Ruth had her head on his knees. Her face was dirty, and her hair was wilting into a semblance of what other people’s hair looked like. Ted remembered vividly the time Ruth had decided that not washing it for a month would make it straight and flat, and the reaction of his aunt Kim to this proposal.

He was afraid that if he looked at Ruth any longer, Edward would wake up and behave badly. He raised his eyes and considered the rest of them. Andrew lay beyond Ruth, on his stomach, with his face in his folded arms, lank brown hair leaking out from under the blanket pulled over his head. Randolph was sitting up against a rock near the opening of this rocky hollow, his arms around his knees and his head tipped over at an uncomfortable angle, as if he had not intended to sleep at all. His face was scratched and his hair looked like Ruth’s.

Ted poked Ruth in the shoulder. She twitched once, opened her eyes, and made a horrible face at him. “Oh, God!” she said. “
This
is what I hate about traveling in the Hidden Land. Waking up like this and knowing I can’t have a hot shower.”

“What did you dream about last night?” said Ted.

He kept his voice low, and Ruth’s when she answered was lower also. “Hot water,” she said. “Are your legs asleep, or can I lie here and enter gradually into the true horrors of my state?”

“Did you dream about anything else?”

“You ought to have helped out in the Spanish Inquisition,” grumbled Ruth. She shut her eyes. “Let me think. Yes,” she said, and opening them again, she gave him an upside-down frown. “I dreamed of home. Not Australia, but the first farm. That’s odd. I haven’t dreamed of home since we’ve been here.”

“What happened?”

“I was playing the flute,” said Ruth, slowly.

Ted’s heart jerked within him. “Well?”

“It was Christmas Eve,” said Ruth. “You guys were there. It was nice. Except we were arguing over the music. Mom wanted ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ but Ellen and Laura insisted on this weird prayer. I didn’t know the music, but they insisted anyway. Then Laura actually took the flute away from me; and I saw it was the flute of Cedric and got very upset; but I didn’t think yet that this might be just a dream. Laura started playing a song I didn’t recognize, and Patrick started singing, and Ellie; and then I saw that Celia and Matthew and Fence were all there too, and they sang. And then you poked me.”

“What was the prayer?”

“‘And from the sword (Lord) save your heart, / By my might and power, / And keep your heart, your darling dear, / From Dogs that would devour. / And from the Dragon’s mouth that would—’”

“‘You all in sunder shiver,’” said Ted, “‘And from the horns of Unicorns / Lord safely you deliver.’”

“You too?”

“Different setting,” said Ted. “Same song.”

“Your mumbling,” said Andrew, sitting up and flinging off his hood, “waketh not the dead, but waketh me most rudely.”

“Sorry,” said Ted. “Shouldn’t we be going, to wake the dead in earnest?”

“Give you good morrow,” said Andrew.

“What’s good about it?” said Randolph, without moving.

“My sentiments exactly,” said Ruth. She sat up. “How far to the Gray Lake?”

“A short walk only,” said Randolph. He opened his eyes. “There is a house there wherein we may find refreshment.”

“Let’s go and find it, then,” said Ruth, standing up.

Randolph and Andrew got up stiffly and went outside. Ruth shook out her skirts and held a hand down to Ted. “Your legs
are
asleep.”

“Not as much as my brain,” said Ted. “Those dreams must mean something. I just can’t think what.”

“Neither can I,” said Ruth. “Maybe the refreshment will revive our failing wits.”

They came out blinking into the glittering sunshine. The trees around them were mostly oaks, and clutched still their dry brown leaves. The wind hissed in them. Their trunks were greened over with moss. A little ahead the wood grew up against tall gray rocks spotted with moss and lichen, the lichen delicate as lace, the moss as green as beryls. There was a cleft in those rocks.

The floor of the forest was crisp oak leaves, with damp ones underneath. The path Randolph found and led them along was rocky and rather narrow. Randolph stopped at the cleft in the rocks, and everybody crowded behind him and looked through it. It was wide enough for three or four people to walk abreast. A bar of sunlight sharp and vivid as a piece of yellow silk fell halfway along the stone floor from the opening at the other end.

Randolph, without saying anything, walked quickly through the cleft and out the other side, and they followed him, Ruth and Ted together and Andrew behind them. They came onto a little lawn of short grass and goldenrod. Beyond this, the slope dropped very swiftly, and through ribbons of mist Ted saw a winding water laid out like a sleeping snake, striped with water-weed and bordered by purple loosestrife and whole clouds of goldenrod.

There was a house on the other side of the water. Tile for red roof tile, window for leaded window, graceful front and awkward wing and gray stone and white and faint yellow, it was a copy of the house at One Trumpet Street, Claudia’s house, that Ted and Laura had done their best to burn to the ground.

“
That’s
where we may have refreshment?” said Ruth.

“How not?” said Randolph, without turning. “Thou didst have’t in th’other house.”

“Yes, but if Claudia wasn’t in that one, won’t she be here? I don’t want to be entertained by Claudia, thank you very much.”

“’Tis not her house,” said Randolph.

He started down the hill; and again, they followed him. Ted cast a quick look at Andrew. Claudia’s brother looked as he had looked in her other house: as if he felt creepy. It didn’t make him walk any slower, thought Ted. All these people appeared to be of the type that takes the earliest dentist’s appointment that offers itself, just to get it over with.

They reached the shore of the lake, and turned right to walk around its near end. The flowering plants were pleasant to look at, and the little slosh of the waves on the shore was pleasant also; but Ted did not like the look of the lake. It was flat and shining, but it was not clear. The morning sun laid no glittering path across it. It looked like a Midwestern sky before a very bad thunderstorm.

They walked up a narrow dirt path to the house. It had no lawn; goldenrod grew up to its foundations and covered half the steps to the porch. These had once been painted blue, but were weathered gray with only thin streaks of color remaining. The windows of the house were filmed with dirt, and drifts of leaves and dead grass lay in the corners of the porch.

Edward said mellifluously,
Egypt’s might is tumbled down / Down a down the deeps of thought.
Oh, go to sleep, can’t you, thought Ted; and a whole concourse of voices rose up and answered him.
Macbeth shall sleep no more; / To die: to sleep; / No more; and, by a sleep to say we end / The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to. We have come, last and best, to that still center where the spinning world sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest. Lay on thy whips, O love, that me upright, poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed May sleep. Knit up the ravelled sleeve of care, and scatter thy silver dew on every flower that shuts its sweet eyes in timely sleep. Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

“Randolph!” shouted Ted over the din.

“Though you bind it with the blowing wind,” said Ruth, “and buckle it with the moon, the night will slip away like sorrow or a tune.”

“That is most certain,” said Randolph, turning from a gloomy perusal of the house.

He took Ted and Ruth each by a shoulder, and said, “Now heed me. A little firmness shall set them packing. But fix your eyes on some common object and consider not its name, nor any word. Thereafter, but guard your thoughts and speak not to them, and you shall do very well.”

Ted obediently looked at the black woolen hem of Ruth’s cloak, snagged in five places and spotted with mud. The voices quieted and vanished.

“That’s better,” he said, and no chorus commented.

“Yes, it is,” said Ruth.

“Good; you have the knack of it,” said Randolph.

“What is this yammering?” demanded Andrew. He had gone up the porch steps already, and nobody had paid much attention to him. He was quite pale, and his forehead was damp. “Why is the air full of voices?”

“
Oh
,” said Ruth.

Ted looked at her quickly, but she was frowning at the ground, so he turned back to Andrew. “What foul trick is this?” cried Andrew.

“Peace, break thee off,” said Randolph.

“Look, where it comes again!” said Andrew, wildly. “In the same figure like the king that’s dead!” He checked as if somebody had hit him, and then ran down the peeling steps and seized Randolph by the shoulders.

“Read me this riddle,” he said between his teeth, and shook Randolph.

“A little firmness,” said Randolph, rather jerkily, but with no evident surprise or anger, “sets them packing. Do you smooth out your mind, my lord, but while one with moderate haste might tell a dozen, and they’ll quit you.”

“Smooth out my mind,” said Andrew, as if Randolph had suggested something both impossible and repellent. “Drink up eisel; eat a crocodile.” He stopped shaking Randolph, but Ted saw his fingers close hard on the stained wool of Randolph’s cloak and on the flesh under it. “What foul place is this, that but requires we do divide ourselves from our fair judgment, without the which we are pictures or mere beasts?”

“For the merest jot of time,” said Randolph. If Andrew was hurting him, he showed no sign of it. He put a hand over one of Andrew’s and said mildly, “What fear you? Are you so splenitive and rash that in so short a time reason shall flee you? How do you sleep? Think, man; you’re muddy-mettled with this yammering.”

“Answer me again,” said Andrew.

“I cannot,” said Randolph, still mildly. He wrenched himself out of Andrew’s grasp and took the porch steps two at a time. He strode hollowly across the porch, grasped the knocker of the door, and slammed it down with a violence Ted suspected he wanted to use on Andrew. The sound echoed inside the house.

Randolph turned and said, “Andrew, there’s no answer that can please you. Shall I say, these are the grazing-grounds of the unicorns, whose meat is words and their drink music?”

“Pah!” said Andrew.

“Andrew,” said Ruth, to Ted’s surprise, “if you won’t think of nothing, try thinking of something nobody would ever write poetry about.”

“Go to,” said Andrew.

“Then will you let me try a superstition?”

Andrew shrugged. Ted saw that he was hardly listening to her; even that “go to” might have been spoken to the clamoring voices.

“Come up on the porch, then,” said Ruth. “I want to get everybody. Ted, you might have to help.”

Ted followed her up onto the porch. It creaked alarmingly under all their weight. The door was gray and weathered, its carvings threaded with fine cracks. The knocker must originally have been brass; it was now green. This one was not the dead rat; it was a long, whiskery dragon holding in its formidable teeth the drooping and very dead-looking body of a unicorn.

“That’s disgusting,” said Ruth.

It made Ted very uneasy, but it also made him want to grin. He said, “If it is the unicorns yammering, I can see how somebody might get tired of them. And think of all their nasty jokes.”

“It’s still disgusting.”

“None answereth,” said Randolph, and put his hand on the door.

“No, wait,” said Ruth. “Please, may I employ a superstition first? My mind mislikes me.”

“Superstition mislikes me,” said Randolph, frowning.

“I dreamt a prayer last night,” said Ruth, “and I want to say it, that’s all.”

“What manner of prayer?” said Randolph.

Ruth grinned at Ted and said, “‘And from the sword (Lord) save your heart, / By my might and power, / And keep your heart, your darling dear, / From Dogs that would devour.’”