The Whim of the Dragon (35 page)

Ellen shook her arm again, and she gave up. Michaelmas was delivering an admiring account of Fence’s dealings with the two false Prosperos, for the benefit of the real one and Matthew. They greeted it with blank silence during which Laura sat down on the bed, careful to miss the cat. Prospero’s embroidered black robe swam giddily before her eyes, behind a gloss of gray light and redness.

“What’s the matter?” said Michaelmas, sharply.

“Fence, I’d credited thee with more sense,” said Matthew, in a tone so unlike him that Laura forgot her vision completely.

“What do we need those characters for?” said Patrick.

“Matthew?” said Fence. “I see we do need them. What’s the matter? Sit down, man, thou’rt like suet.”

“Yon shape-shifters you all so blithely did offend,” said Matthew, “are the Lords of the Dead, come forth from their dominion for the first time since it was laid down. A fine welcome you gave to them.”

“You didn’t hear them,” said Ellen. “They had terrible manners and they didn’t care beans about us. They were miffed because we’d woken them up.”

“We require a boon of them,” said Matthew.

He looked at Fence until Fence sat forward and opened his mouth; then Matthew said suddenly, “I cry you mercy; I had done the same had I been here.”

“No doubt,” said Fence. “Do you do otherwise when you come to ask our boon.”

Matthew looked as if he were going to object; Patrick said, “How do you know they’re the Lords of the Dead?”

“I came upon two of them in the kitchen,” said Prospero.

“You’ve seen them before, then?”

“How does seeing them before help?” demanded Ellen. “They’re shape-shifters; they can look like anybody.”

“There’s a little fire in the eyes,” said Prospero.

This kept getting worse. “The man in the stark house had a little fire in his eyes,” Laura said.

“Of what nature?” said Prospero.

“Red,” said Laura.

“Triangular, or i’the’shape of a diamond?”

“I don’t know,” said Laura, regretfully.

“For future reference,” said Patrick, “which is which?”

“The triangular flame defineth the Lords of Death.”

“Prospero,” said Fence. “Is the Judge of the Dead among them?”

“I know not,” said Prospero. “I got no speech of them.”

“Wiser than I,” said Fence. “Well, we’d best get it now. Matthew?”

Matthew looked around at all of them. “Said the rest of you aught to discomfit them?”

“I asked them what the hell they thought they were doing,” said Patrick.

“Aught else?”

The rest of them shook their heads.

“Well, then,” said Celia from the doorway, “Patrick and Fence shall stay here and beguile Master Prospero with the tale of our adventures; for our poor part, we’ll seek out these lords and beg their favor.”

“I think not,” said Matthew. “Fence, they’ll not hear me. I am neither a wizard nor a king.”

“I begin to think I’m neither also,” said Fence.

“They will tell you otherwise,” said Matthew.

They looked at each other for some time; and then Fence nodded. “Come, then,” he said.

Ellen, Chalcedony, and Celia moved from the door, with an alacrity that Laura found disturbing. She herself went on sitting on the bed, hoping to be forgotten. But Fence looked back at her quite kindly and said, “Come, lady; this concerneth thee closely.”

Laura got up and went out the door in the others’ wake. “Well, Mistress Chalcedony,” said Fence, as they reached the juncture of the two halls and headed for the staircase again, “what ground wilt thou choose for this battle?”

“The Reading Room,” said Chalcedony. “Any such company will think thrice, e’en on the verge of breaking all its oaths, afore ’twill do damage there.”

“What if somebody’s studying there?” said Ellen.

“Then he’ll garner a spectacle,” said Fence.

Ellen caught Laura’s eye and grinned at her. Laura shook her head and looked away. Celia and Matthew were holding hands again, and carrying on a complex and wordless conversation with their eyes. Laura and Ellen were accustomed to referring to such behavior, in their parents or in the older kids at school, as “making goo-goo eyes.” But there was nothing gooey about this exchange of glances. Laura wished she knew what they were worried about; or perhaps she didn’t.

They went back the way they had come, and turned into the room across the corridor from Michaelmas’s chamber. It was furnished with three large tables in the middle and a series of carrels, exactly as you could find in a modern library, along the walls. The furniture was heavy and beautiful, and perhaps half the material on the shelves was in the form of scrolls rather than bound books. The polished floor was scattered with intricately worked rugs; the light was warm and golden, not the harsh glow of fluorescents. But in its essentials, it looked like a library. Laura felt better immediately.

In a far corner of the room, somebody in a green robe and a black hat was scribbling furiously. Michaelmas went over and spoke to her quietly. She laughed, and appeared to thank him, and went back to scribbling.

“Well,” said Ellen, sitting down sideways at one of the tables. “We’re here. Who’s going to round them up?”

“We who know the Library,” said Chalcedony; and without further ado, she and Michaelmas made for the door. Ellen’s voice arrested them halfway through it.

“Wait! Can we look at the books?”

“Wash your hands first,” said Chalcedony. “Celia can show you.” And they were gone.

The five remaining looked soberly at one another. Ellen did not clamor to be shown where to wash her hands. Matthew said, “I would we knew how th’other party fareth.”

“They’ll have been to the land of the dead for nothing,” said Ellen. “Unless the Lords of the Dead can be two places at once.”

Matthew smiled a little. “Not to my knowledge,” he said.

Laura sat down next to Ellen and leaned back in the chair. The ceiling of the room was beamed and plastered. The wood was carved, the plaster molded; both were painted. The wood showed hunting scenes, and people building castles and making brooms and kneading bread and mending a wagon wheel. The plaster was formed into a series of medallions. Laura found the running fox of High Castle on its blue background; there were also an owl perched in a thornbush, and a mountain hare sitting up on the bank of a stream, and three brindled hounds with their tongues hanging out, each scene stylized and cleverly fitted into the confines of its circle. And there was also a scarlet curve of dragon with, horribly, a unicorn drooping from its toothy mouth. The dead unicorn looked like pictures Laura had seen of antelope being dragged away by the lions that had killed them. Its open eyes were picked out in gold paint.

Laura couldn’t look away from them; and suddenly the glitter strengthened and spread. Good, thought Laura, maybe she could figure out what she was supposed to see in the young man’s bare room. But what she saw was Claudia, in the back room of her house, leaning on the diamond-paned glass. She still wore the checked dress. Now she raised her hand to the glass, grimaced, and dropped it again. Then she smiled. She looked like somebody who has decided to eat a piece of chocolate cake despite a New Year’s resolution to lose ten pounds. She went on watching her windows. Laura tried to see what she saw. A stone wall, a shelf of books, a golden globe for a lamp. Meredith’s domain in High Castle? Heathwill Library? Some place other?

Laura blinked her way back to the Reading Room to find everybody except Fence staring at her. Fence had leaned his head against the high back of his chair and closed his eyes.

“I thought you were seeing things again,” said Ellen. “What were you seeing back in Michaelmas’s room?”

Laura told her instead of what she had seen in Prospero’s room. Urged to tell what she had just seen, she told what she had seen in Michaelmas’s room. She did not want to tell Fence about Claudia, even if he didn’t seem to be paying any attention. Nobody had any comment. The woman at the far end of the room rustled her papers. It grew so quiet that they could hear the scratching of her pen. Laura was sleepy. It must be almost morning.

“Matthew?” said Ellen. “Do you want us to say anything to the Lords of Death?”

“Heaven love you, not a word,” said Matthew. “Indeed, I’ll say naught myself. Celia and Fence have the lighter touch.”

“Oh, much thanks,” said Celia.

There was a commotion in the hall outside. Five people came in, all scowling. It was hard to tell what they looked like; they were like sketches, or cartoon drawings, or the artistic efforts of a five-year-old. They made Laura’s eyes hurt.

Matthew jumped to his feet and bowed; so Laura and Ellen scrambled out of their chairs and made the best courtesies they could manage, given their clothing and the inadequate warning. Celia stood up more naturally and bowed from the waist.

“The rest come by and by,” said one of the newcomers, in a rich contralto Laura would have known again, she thought, in ten years, or fifty.

“Sit you down, then, and wait in comfort,” said Celia.

The newcomers settled themselves at the end of the table, displacing the party from the Hidden Land. The dim voice in Laura’s head said,
Move down; I want a clean plate.

The newcomers began talking among themselves, in some language Laura did not understand, but recognized. It was that maddening tongue, used in the Secret Country’s ceremonies, that one felt always just on the edge of understanding. It was less vexing this time because all of the speakers had such breathtakingly beautiful voices. Well, thought Laura, that made sense. They had come here to talk, so they had expended their arts on their voices and kept the appearance to a minimum.

She looked at Matthew and Celia, who were standing stiffly at about the middle point of the long table. They, it was clear, could understand the maddening language perfectly, and the lovely tones in which it was spoken were not mitigating in the least their reaction to what was being said. Fence had opened his eyes and appeared to be listening, but not to be disturbed by what he heard.

The voice in her head said, more clearly,
Is’t not possible to understand in another tongue? You will to’t, sir, really.

There was a burst of unintelligible speech in the corridor, and four more indeterminate shapes spilled into the room, followed by Michaelmas. The four sat down next to the first five; Fence got up and marched down to the head of the table; and Celia, Ellen, Laura, and Michaelmas sat at the foot, separated from the nine strangers by an empty chair or two, and from Fence by an appalling stretch of polished table.

All nine went on talking. Fence did not call them to order. It took them about ten minutes to calm down, during which Ellen amused herself by drawing cats with a stick of charcoal and some scraps of paper that she found in a drawer of the table, and the voice in Laura’s head said,
The sun was shining on the sea, / Shining with all his might: / He did his very best to make / The billows smooth and bright.

Finally the hubbub died and the shape with the rich contralto voice turned to Fence. “You have a grievance?”

“That’s for you to determine,” said Fence.

“Tell your tale,” said a clear, lilting voice.

Fence told it, without adornment, and without explaining who the extra royal children were or where they came from.

“Five at one swoop,” said the rich voice, consideringly. “This Claudia is bold.”

Fence grew red; Laura could see that, all the way at the other end of the enormous table. He said nothing. The lilting voice said, “But we are cautious. Five at one swoop, back to the world of light? For what consideration?”

“For Shan’s Ring,” said Fence.

A babble of almost-sense broke out. Fence sat with his hands folded, his round face blank but rather light. The yellow light shone on the table, and on the almost-present shapes of the Lords of the Dead. A new voice, deep and resonant, said, “The River’s Guardian hath been offered this token already, and hath refused it, on the ground that it was too eagerly given.”

“I,” said Fence, with considerable force, “give it not eagerly. We have but this year discovered its purpose and its power; a century of study might, an we were fortunate, show us its uses; a millennium of study might show us to avoid its dangers. It is my dear desire to have this thing.”

There was another babble.

The lilting voice said, “Yet how will it profit us?”

“If you possess it, then none other doth so,” said Fence. “Wherefore you will have peace from its thunderings.”

“What bargain,” said the rich voice, apparently not to Fence, “made we with Shan concerning this thing?”

“Oh, hell, oh, damnation, oh
perdition
!” breathed Ellen.

“Hush,” whispered Celia.

“What did you make up?” hissed Laura.

Fence looked down the table at them, and they all shut up. The lilting voice said, “That it be left as an heirloom of his house, and a weapon against Melanie, whom he could not vanquish.”

“Offer us some thing other,” said the rich voice.

“Will you take,” said Fence, “the swords of Shan and Melanie?”

Matthew shot bolt upright in his chair, his shocked face flaming. Celia slammed her arm across his chest, and whatever he had been about to say turned into a huffing kind of choke. The mass of light and shadow that was the shape-shifters seemed to drift in his direction.

“We cry you mercy,” said Celia, breathlessly; and they all turned back to Fence and broke out in their maddening speech.

“What’s he thinking!” whispered Matthew.

“I know not,” said Celia. “Don’t cross him. Our division is their opportunity.”

“So is his madness,” said Matthew; but then he was silent.

The rich voice said, “That is our dear desire. For each sword, you may retrieve one child.”