The Hidden Land
Page 23
“Time now flows for us as for them,” she said, “since you have removed your spells. Here is what befalls in the Hidden Land.”
Fence sat in his living room before the cold fireplace, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. A breeze from the narrow windows stirred his untidy hair. Someone knocked on his door. (Ted and Laura both jumped.) Fence lifted a hand, and the door swung open. One of the yellow-haired boys whom they had seen playing in the sun the day Fence came back, and later enacting the part of the eagle in the coronation play, Matthew’s son John, walked into the room. He was red, and breathing hard.
“My lord, a message from the Lady Ruth,” he said between gasps, and held a folded paper out to Fence.
Fence took it, turned it over, and quirked his mouth. Ted wondered what seal Ruth had used.
“Sit you down and have somewhat to refresh you,” Fence said absently, and opened the letter. His fingers tightened on it; he sat up straight; he leaped to his feet as he read.
“Randolph!” he shouted, and ran out the door. They could hear his footsteps receding in the echoing stair. The yellow-haired page gaped after him, shrugged, and reached for the wine bottle.
“So,” said Claudia. “Now, the Lady Ruth, who is of your country, whereof I may move its members, hath spoken to this page. Wherefore—” she said three odd words under her breath, and moved her hand before the little diamond pane.
They saw John, standing in the Banquet Hall, looking after Ruth, who ran across it and plunged out the door.
“To Fence’s Tower,” said the page, unhappily. He stood frowning, and began to shrug. In a moment he would resign himself and make the climb.
Claudia said three more words under her breath. The page’s face brightened, and he went up stairs and through passages until he came to the Mirror Room. Randolph sat there, just as Fence had, his elbows on his knees and his head buried in his hands. He looked up when the page burst in, but so calmly that Ted shivered. Randolph looked as if nothing would ever make him jump again.
“My lord, I have a letter for the Lord Fence,” said John, “but I sought him first in other places than his high rooms.”
“He was but lately here,” said Randolph.
Claudia muttered again, and Randolph’s face changed, just a little. Ted, in a burst of illumination like and unlike his remembrance of fencing and flowers, understood. Claudia had made the page think of seeking Fence elsewhere than in his high tower. She had made Randolph’s face change: what he said next, she would have made him say. Ted, in the out-bursting of an intolerable outrage, put his fist through the diamond pane.
It gave before his hand like cloth, not glass; but the sound it made was like smashing crystal. It broke outward, with a flash and a brilliance like that of the shattered Crystal of Earth. Behind it was a diamond of darkness.
“How dare you!” shouted Ted.
How dared she, how dared he, how dared Laura. All of them had done this. Sitting in a summer meadow, sequestered in the dusty attic during a thunderstorm, fishing in the scummy pond, year by year, they had hammered out the fates of others. Fence is so young, he surprises everybody with his wisdom; Fence is Randolph’s best friend; the King is very stubborn; Randolph poisons his wine; Edward is a milksop, but when his father dies he knows what he has to do; should he kill Randolph in the Council Chamber—no, let’s make it the rose garden, and we can use ours. And Claudia, you had to believe, had sat here in this house, turning their thoughts just a little, this way or that. Once she had seen what was to be in the Hidden Land, she must have worked on all of them, his sister and his cousins and himself, as she had just now worked on John and Randolph. And they in their turn, by means even Claudia did not know, had also worked on Fence, and Randolph, and William, and Edward, making them what they were, sealing their doom. But Claudia had known what she was doing, and they had not.
Ted put cold hands to his hot face, and felt suddenly that the air was the right weight again and his blood flowing as it ought. His limbs were his own again; the spell was gone. He could run from here, or smash more glass, or—
Claudia, who had been regarding the ruin of her wall with no sign of dismay, opened her mouth, and Ted hit her as hard as he could in the stomach. Claudia doubled up, gasping. Then he kicked wildly at the wall of windows. The air was full of light; the room rang with violent sound; and from the blackness where the windows had been tongues of red and green flame began to lick upward. Claudia straightened up and shouted, in no tongue they knew.
“Run!” yelled Laura, pulling at Ted’s arm.
Ted picked up Claudia’s mirror and hurled it through the view of the lake and the Enchanted Forest; and there came a noise and a shaking as if the house were coming down around their ears.
Ted and Laura ran, past a hissing cat and a wailing one, out the open door, down the porch steps, across the untended lawn. They dove through the gap in the hedge, staggered to their feet, and ran as hard as they could go. They were not many blocks away when they heard the wail of sirens.
Ted stopped and looked back.
“Don’t!” said Laura, and they ran on.
When Laura had fallen down for the third time, she agreed to stop, and they sat down on a bench at a bus stop, wheezing.
“I guess we fixed her,” said Laura.
“I hope so,” said Ted.
Laura took the ivory unicorn out of her pocket, and they looked at it. Its green eyes stared through them, enigmatic and unnatural. But something in its posture suggested the inhuman glee of the unicorns they had known.
“If we ever start forgetting, and thinking we imagined it,” said Laura, “or if Patrick tries to tell us any more about hallucinations when we see him next summer, we can look at this.”
“These fragments have we shored against our ruins,” said Ted; and as he spoke, felt the back of his mind, whence he had learned fencing moves and the names of flowers and quotations such as that, close up suddenly. Edward was gone.
“What?”
“It was a stupid thing to say. What about that ice cream?”
Laura shrugged. They sat on for a little in the hot air. A bus roared past, sweeping them with a cloud of evil-smelling grit and rattling the squashed paper cups and abandoned candy wrappers at their feet. Two young women went by; Laura recognized their makeup as a type her father had called “anguish moist and fever dew.”
“Ted,” she said, “I don’t suppose you’d rather you’d killed Randolph and stayed?”
“Laura!” Ted, perilously close to wishing that very thing, stood up. “Let’s go get the ice cream, to strengthen us against the ordeal that lies ahead.” They might as well remember how to play. They would need all the fragments they could muster.
Up in the soggy air a cardinal whistled, clear and piercing.
Laura jumped up.
“Laurie, no.”
The cardinal swooped down and perched on the chipped wrought-iron armrest of the bench. It fixed them with a round black eye that seemed far too intelligent for the size of its braincase, for its kind as they knew it here. Then it flew up, darted down the street, circled, landed on a telephone booth, and whistled so shrilly it hurt their ears.
“Oh, come on, come on!” said Laura.
The cardinal flew off, far too high and fast for them to follow. Ted laughed through a tight throat. It seemed that even imagination was no friend to them now. They could stumble from day to day, thinking they saw summons after summons back to the Hidden Land. But they had lost the Secret Country.
“There’s ice cream in that direction,” he said to his sister, firmly. “Lee’s Drug. Our last omen.”
They looked at one another. Tears trembled in Laura’s eyes; but the familiar deep breath she took was not to release them in wailing, but to give her the steadiness to speak. Oh, wonderful, thought Ted. Next summer, I can tell Patrick that this was good for Laura’s soul.
“Chocolate,” said Laura.
“Pistachio,” said Ted, at random.