The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  “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.”

  “Oh, God!” breathed Ellen.

  Laura’s throat hurt her.

  “My lords,” said Fence, in a grating voice. “Do consider one thing other. Edward Fairchild died in June. Edward Carroll was slain in battle in August. Lady Ruth and Lord Randolph and I did bargain with the Guardian of the River for the life of Edward Fairchild; but we did receive back Edward Carroll.”

  “That’s easily mended,” said the lilting voice. “Do you give us Edward Carroll, and we shall give you Edward Fairchild. Do you give us the swords, and we shall give you two other children of your choosing. That is three of the five. Are we agreed?”

  Laura cast a stricken glance at Celia and Matthew. They sat like snow statues, as pale as their shirts, their enormous eyes on Fence as if daring him to say a word. Laura looked at him too, in time to see him drop his face into his hands. He sat that way for what seemed like forever. None of the Lords of the Dead moved or spoke.

  When Fence took his hands away, they revealed a face with nothing in it at all. “Nay,” he said. “We are not agreed. Edward Carroll is out of this reckoning. All five children do we require of you, my lords, or swords you shall have none.”

  “All five is too great a boon,” said the rich voice.

  “Fewer is too small,” said Fence.

  “Well, then,” said the rich voice, “we have come to the end of our speech together.”

  “Mind you,” said a voice that had not spoken in this room before, but that Laura had heard last from the mouth of a false Prospero, “should you at any time wish to change Edward Carroll for Edward Fairchild, that offer stands. All others we withdraw; should your mind alter, this must be all done again.”

  “Hold,” said the lilting voice. “Speak not so hasty. The payment for Edward Carroll hath not been made.”

  “Tell Randolph,” said Ellen, very softly, “to walk warily.”

  “Truly?” said Prospero’s voice. “You may make change and payment at once, an you will.”

  “I thank your gracious presences,” said Fence, dryly.

  Their gracious presences, quiet for once, did something very like standing up and walking out of the room. The door shut behind them. Nobody looked at anybody else.

  Laura’s hands hurt. She unclenched them and looked blankly at the red creases in the palms. They were cold and wet. Her heart was trying to hammer its way out of her throat. She could not settle to any feeling: not relief, because of Fence’s sorrow, and not sorrow, because of her own relief. They were all safe; and she hated being safe at such a cost.

  Finally, she made herself look at Fence. He was staring at the space of polished table between his clasped hands. In the bright, warm silence of the Reading Room, the scholar’s pen scratched busily. Laura wondered if she had even heard.

  CHAPTER 26

  MICHAELMAS got up and went after the shape-shifters, saying something about setting some guard over them.

  “Fence,” said Celia, in a wrung-out voice, “we should be gone from this place.”

  Laura had been listening to this suggestion all evening. But as Fence stood up without word and held the door open for the rest of them, she realized what it meant. No food; no rest; an uneasy seat on the jouncing horse, riding through the dark and cold—with, quite possibly, a host of practical, humorous, inhuman enemies at their backs. This time Ellen didn’t smile.

  They went without speaking back to Prospero’s room. The door stood open. Patrick was asleep on Prospero’s bed, with the cat on his stomach. All their luggage was piled in a corner, a blot on the room’s tidiness. Prospero sat at the desk with three leather-bound volumes the size of pattern catalogues at a fabric store laid out before him. He glanced up as they came in, took one look at Fence, and sat back in the chair, his austere, bearded face very grave.

  “No profit,” said Fence.

  “Fence, it’s not thy fault,” said Matthew.

  Fence walked over to the desk, and recited to Prospero the course of the bargaining for the lives of the royal children.

  “Indeed, Fence, I see no fault therein,” said Prospero. “Their offers were impossible to be taken up, but those are the most liberal terms I’ve heard from these lords in a century.”

  “Oh, aye, but look you,” said Fence, calmly. “An I angered them not, either they had been more liberal yet, did that liberality spring from a lessening of their habit and not from malice; or else they had been so ungenerous, did that liberality spring indeed from malice, that we were teased with no possibilities. Those terms they gave us will prick our dreams in years to come, so near were they to be accepted.”

  Laura’s burden of guilt, having this speech laden on top of it, gave way suddenly to an exasperation so pure there was no space for caution in it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she burst out. “You’re as bad as Randolph! You think everything has to be your fault.”

  “That were a pity,” Fence said. “One snick-snatching conscience is aplenty for Ted’s court, thinkst thou not so?”

  “Fence, leave it be for an hour!” said Celia. “Sort out the blame at leisure, do you have any again; but now let us be gone.”

  “No, peace a moment,” said Fence. He laid one hand on Prospero’s open book. “What work have you done here?”

  Prospero sat forward. “I have been nibbling at the shell of that hard nut, Apsinthion,” he said. “Look you on this page.”

  Fence sat down in the other chair and began to read. Laura tried to read the page upside down, but it looked as if even right way up it would be very difficult. It resembled the homework she dreamed of not doing, a handwritten list of words and definitions. Ellen walked around behind Fence, peered over his shoulder, said, “What hideous spelling,” and wandered away.

  After a moment Fence said, “There’s one new to me.”

  “Aye,” said Prospero. “Wormwood: the abode of a dragon.”

  “Well!” said Ellen.

  “But are dragons shape-shifters?” said Laura.

  “No; there’s the rub,” said Fence.

  “Well,” said Laura, “Apsinthion could have been the name of the house. But we didn’t see a dragon.”

&nbs
p; “The answer to the third riddle I have also,” said Prospero. “The Outside Powers.”

  “Well,” said Ellen, “it’d take an Outside Power to keep a dragon.”

  “What about the first question?” said Laura.

  Prospero shook his splendid wizard’s head. “Even the riddle is new to me,” he said. “If you will but sleep here for the waning of the night, I’ll search this matter for you.”

  “Matthew?” said Fence.

  Matthew, who had been moving restlessly in and out of the doorway, slowly shook his head. “Better we were gone,” he said. “If they reach an accord, they will be after us straight.”

  “They cannot be after you herein,” said Prospero.

  “We cannot linger herein; we have an errand in the north,” said Matthew.

  Prospero sighed. “Do you return this way, then,” he said, “and I shall have news for you. Eat something before you go.”

  After a brief discussion Matthew agreed that they could eat something. Prospero went off to arrange for it. Matthew took his place and he and Fence read in the large books. Patrick woke up and demanded an account of the bargaining. All he said to Ellen’s recitation was, “They sound crazy to me. You can’t bargain with crazy people.”

  “They aren’t people,” said Ellen, “so maybe they aren’t crazy.”

  “They might as well be,” said Patrick.

  The three of them sat on Prospero’s bed in a gloomy silence. Laura looked from the gems on the white cat’s collar to the golden globes of the lamps to the glowing caves of the coals in the fireplace. These last melted and brightened instantly. She saw a vast formal garden under a hot, bright sky. Around it reared high white walls, not the grayish white of High Castle, but brilliant, smooth, and blinding as snow in the sunshine. Two figures in the garden’s center crossed swords. One of them was tall and angular, with a wild mop of black hair, and moved with a reckless abandon all too familiar. Laura clenched her hands together. The other was tow-headed, yes, and moved more cautiously. But he was almost as tall as Randolph, and he had a moustache.

  Randolph and Andrew, fighting in a rose garden; but not the one at High Castle. This was not what she had hoped to see; she was looking for the young man in the bare room who quoted “James James Morrison Morrison.” This one she might have to do something about.

  “Fence?” she said. “Would they know some way here to counteract the pestilent spell-song?”

  “Oh, I know the way,” said Matthew. “One must but catch it in a fistful of fire. What we know not is the tune that maketh the fire-letters.”

  Laura sat very still. She remembered the tree in her dream, burning at the tune she played; and the young man, writing on a large sheet of waxy paper, quoting the same song. “I bet I know,” she said.

  Matthew came and sat on the bed. “Tell me,” he said.

  He looked extremely thoughtful when Laura had explained her reasoning. Patrick, however, just rolled his eyes.

  “What’s the matter with you?” said Ellen. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “No,” said Patrick, “I haven’t. She’s probably right. But God damn it, she shouldn’t be. It’s shoddy reasoning. It’s all intuitive. It’s not logical. It’s like poetry,” said Patrick, as if that were the worst thing he could think of.

  “It transcends logic, nitwit,” said Ellen.

  “It may,” said Patrick, “but you two sure don’t. You haven’t even gotten that far.”

  “Let’s try it,” said Laura to Matthew.

  They went over and rummaged in the pile of luggage. Laura’s pack was almost too cold to touch. She wrapped an extra shirt around her hand and cautiously lifted out the flute. Matthew said, “Prospero, may we have the use of paper?”

  Prospero gave him one huge waxy sheet of it, and pen and ink. Celia had built the fire into a towering forest of flames. Matthew moved to sit on the hearth, and dipped the pen into the ink bottle. Laura trailed after him and sat on the floor. She couldn’t play the flute through a shirt. She unwound the cloth and picked up the flute. It felt very heavy, but was no colder than the pack. Perhaps it would give her chilblains. She had always wondered what they were.

  Fence and Prospero had abandoned their books to watch; but when Laura looked inquiringly at Fence, he only smiled.

  “Now, Laura. If the whole of the song burned a tree,” said Matthew, picking up the pen, “one line thereof shall serve us well. Play the tune of the line the young man did speak, until I cease to write.”

  Laura did. Matthew wrote, covering both sides of the large sheet densely in minute characters. Finally he lifted the pen and nodded; he, or something, had timed his last line to end with hers. Laura laid the flute across her knees and caught her breath.

  Matthew flattened the paper and dropped it into the fire. It did not curl or discolor, but the lines of ink ran together, into the center, swirled like dirty water going down a drain, and then ran up, not down, and spun up the chimney. The fire sank back to a bed of orange. All the wood Celia had fed it was consumed already. Matthew fished out the paper and returned it to Prospero.

  If they were lucky, they had caught “Good King Wenceslas” in a fistful of fire. “Should I play ‘What if a Day’?” said Laura.

  Celia and Matthew looked inquiringly at each other. “Something stronger,” said Celia. “‘And From the Sword.’ ”

  “Laura?” said Matthew.

  “Say the words,” said Laura, “and I’ll see.”

  Matthew said precisely, “ ‘And from the sword, Lord, save thy heart by my might and power, and keep thy heart, my darling dear, from dogs that would devour. And from the Dragon’s mouth that would thee all in sunder shiver, and from the horns of Unicorns, Lord, safely you deliver.’ ”

  “Whose might and power?” said Celia. “If Laura playeth those words, Matthew, to whose might and power dost thou commend Randolph?”

  “It needs must be someone’s,” said Fence.

  “This is a message, of my wife,” said Matthew; “not a prophecy nor an abjuration.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Laura, listening to the back of her mind. She was both pleased and terrified that Randolph should be commended to her might and power; she knew, perhaps more clearly than anybody, what might happen to him. She would think very hard about the danger of Andrew and the warning of the unicorn, and perhaps these things would come to Randolph when he heard the message.

  “Play, then,” said Matthew.

  Laura played it through, holding up carefully her thoughts of Andrew and the unicorn. She liked the tune. She wondered if she would remember it, or any of them, if she ever got an ordinary flute into her hands. This one grew colder and colder as she played, as it had not when she played the phrase from “James James Morrison Morrison” for Matthew. She could hardly hold it for the last few notes; and dropped it gratefully.

  Prospero came back with their food, which was mugs of soup and an assortment of dumplings stuffed with everything from broccoli to raisins. They ate it; and thanked him; and packed up; and left Heathwill Library. At Prospero’s suggestion, they left without their horses, through a tunnel intended to supply the library in case of siege. Patrick, who was offensively cheerful and observant after his nap, was delighted with this means of egress; but the adults were too tired or preoccupied to answer his questions, and Ellen and Laura were too tired to be interested.

  Dawn found them in a very wild country, rocky and dusted with snow and full of evergreens. The sky was a piercing blue and there was no wind.

  Just before midday, when Laura had determined that she was going to die, and it was only a matter of whether she announced this fact first or simply fell in a piteous heap, they came to a long, low stone building with a brick chimney and one window. Nobody asked what it was doing there; they simply went inside. Laura only realized that she had gone to sleep by waking up again. It was sunset. They went on their way again.

  They walked all night, under a blazing of stars like sugar thickly sprinkl
ed 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.

  “Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost at his house in

  Berkley Square,

  And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the

  hair—

  A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,

  Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the

  Milky Way.”

  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.

  Now let us sport us while we may. I gave what other women gave that stepped out of their clothes. Alas, poor ghost, as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands, another damned, thick, square book. Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned. Where griping griefs the heart would wound And doleful dumps the mind oppress, There music with her silver sound With speed is wont to send redress.