The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  “Didn’t the people who made it think that the children of men might come along at an inopportune moment?”

  “Inopportune for whom?” said Belaparthalion. “Look you, the breaking of this crystal, from within or from without, doth destroy the image you see within it. How should the maker of the crystal think that any trapped within might choose such destruction?”

  Oh, brother, thought Patrick. “Is this a whim of yours?” he said.

  “No,” said Belaparthalion. “A sacrifice, an you will, but not a whim.”

  Patrick chewed over this for a while, and gave up. “Well, look,” he said. “If I destroy the image of you I see, what is going to be left?”

  “Break the crystal,” said Belaparthalion, in the precise tone of somebody initiating a knock-knock joke, “and find out.”

  Chryse had told him to talk to it. This was what happened when you talked to it.

  Patrick lifted his hand and smashed it down hard into the gray light. It gave before him like cloth, not glass, but with a tremendous shattering sound. A crystalline wheel of bright spray spun through the air. There was a crack of thunder, a blast of hot air, and a tremendous flash of colorless light against which Patrick shut his eyes. When he opened them, every surface in the room sparkled with splinters. On the wooden table where the globe had rested sat a man. He was not very tall; he had black hair and green eyes; he looked like Fence and Randolph. He wore a red robe and red boots. There were no shards of glass on him.

  “Greetings,” said Patrick, brushing cautiously at his hair. The splinters, that looked so sharp, felt like threads and scraps of cloth, and drifted easily down from his combing hands. “Are you called Apsinthion?”

  “Sometimes,” said the man in red. His voice held still the faint echo of laughter, but his face was grim.

  When they came out of the house and walked down the hill to where Chryse was placidly cropping the wildflowers around the Well, Patrick found out why. Chryse suddenly flung up her head, laid her ears back, and like a string quartet badly out of tune, said, “What judgment would step from that to this? Could you on that fair mountain leave to feed, and batten on this moor?”

  This did not make a great deal of sense to Patrick, but the scorn and horror in Chryse’s voice were plain to anybody.

  “That fair mountain was a prison,” said Belaparthalion, “wherefrom this moor, howsoever damp and displeasing to thee, hath been a refuge.”

  “A refuge,” said Chryse, “that will come down on your head at the first breath of wind. Is this your duty? Is this the manner you preserve this fair small kingdom from the hawks of song?” It lowered its head, and the early sunlight flashed off that horn as if it had been a mirror.

  “This fair small kingdom shall do well enough,” said Belaparthalion, “when Shan’s and Melanie’s swords are raised in its defense.” Patrick noticed that he did not come close to Chryse.

  “Those swords,” said Chryse, “are for safekeeping, not for use.”

  “Those swords, dear cousin,” said Belaparthalion, “are for translation, not for battle. I am old in craft, Chryse, and what I have lost in the dragon-form will return to me a thousandfold in these two swords.”

  “Excuse me,” said Patrick, keeping between him and them what would have been a safe distance if the only threat they could offer had been physical. “Shouldn’t we be getting back?”

  Chryse turned on him, its head still dangerously lowered. “Thou,” it said, “hast much to answer for.”

  “I did,” said Patrick, “what you told me.”

  “When did the children of men ever so?” said Chryse; but it lifted its head again. There was a long pause. The wind blew softly in the long grass. Patrick shook the rest of the shards of Belaparthalion’s crystal from his clothing.

  “Well,” said Chryse; and that same note of laughter was in its voice now also. “Cousin: will you ride on my back?”

  Belaparthalion did not look amused; but he nodded, and beckoned to Patrick. Patrick came forward, trying not to look as reluctant as he felt. Those two were still angry at each other; what Chryse thought was funny he didn’t know, but he doubted that it boded well. Belaparthalion gave him a lift up onto Chryse’s back. Patrick gasped. The man in red’s hands were fever-hot and as dry as snakeskin. Belaparthalion got up behind him, and the brisk autumn air in their vicinity became balmy. Patrick wondered if Belaparthalion were sick. If he were, it seemed unlikely that he would live long. If he didn’t, Patrick had killed him.

  The trip back seemed slower to him, possibly because he was so hot. They stopped at last, and around them was the clearing in the pine woods where they had left the others. The others had built a fire. The air smelled of woodsmoke, and a little of tea. Matthew and Celia were sitting on the ground on the far side of the clearing. They had brushed away all the pine needles from a spot about three feet square, and were drawing diagrams in the dirt beneath. Fence and Ellen and Laura sat around the fire, looking glum.

  Laura saw them first. Why her face should light up like that at the sight of the man in red, Patrick couldn’t fathom. He felt pleased with himself, just the same, until he remembered how angry Chryse had been. The red man slid to the ground, and Patrick followed. Laura stood up.

  “Well met!” said Belaparthalion to Laura.

  “Sir,” said Laura. “Patrick, where’d you find him?”

  “Let me introduce you,” said Patrick, resignedly. “This is Laura, pro tem princess of the Hidden Land. Laura, this is Belaparthalion.”

  Laura stared. Then she did Belaparthalion a pretty good courtesy, considering her disarray and her basic clumsiness. Patrick grinned at her; and his sister Ellen came around the fire, so he introduced her too, and she provided her overdramatic bow. Fence was still sitting on the ground, and Patrick could not discern his thoughts in his round, solemn, deceptive face. Fence, thought Patrick, should have been his first lesson in appearances, if he had had the sense to learn it.

  “Fence,” said the man in red; and he pushed, smiling, between Laura and Ellen, and sat on the ground too, rather closer to the fire than Patrick thought advisable. Even if his flesh wouldn’t burn, his clothing might.

  “We saved you some tea,” said Laura, “but it’s mostly cold.”

  “That’s fine,” said Patrick. “I’m warm enough.” He took the tin cup they gave him and drank the tea. Then he sat down and prepared to watch the fireworks.

  Laura knew from his face that he expected something interesting to happen. What Patrick found interesting, she usually found appalling. She sat down next to him, a safe distance from Fence and the red man, who were looking at each other steadily. Chryse folded herself to the ground in a posture that looked relaxed almost to the point of abandonment, like a cat about to roll on its back; except that she had her ears flat to her head, which in either a cat or a horse meant no good. Laura wished somebody would say something. After a few minutes, she said something herself.

  “Chryse answered your riddles,” she said to Belaparthalion.

  His head came around. He looked startled, and then amused. “In change for what?” he said.

  “A tale thou knowest,” said Chryse, in a precise plucking of sounds like somebody tinkering with a harp.

  “I wonder,” said Belaparthalion.

  “Thou wert in’t,” retorted Chryse. Yes, she was very cross indeed. Laura wondered what about.

  “That I was in’t by no means requires that I know’t.”

  “We’ll tell it you also,” said Fence, “do you tell us how you came in this shape.”

  “And how you came to be in a globe in the House by the Well of the White Witch,” rattled Patrick, for Fence’s benefit.

  “Done,” said Belaparthalion, briskly. “Every dragon hath a man-shape, but few do employ it; it doth weaken us. Now Melanie, who is an old enemy of mine, did discover how to fling a dragon into his man-shape, and she did so to me, and then did imprison the dragon-shape in that globe wherefrom Patrick did so graciously rescue
me.”

  “Why now?” said Fence.

  Belaparthalion shrugged.

  “How long were you thus?”

  “She did so divide me on the eighth day of June last.”

  Fence looked across the fire at Ellen and Laura. Laura said, “We showed up on the fourteenth.”

  “And we showed up a couple of days earlier,” said Ellen.

  “She did desire, then,” said Belaparthalion, “that we not meet.”

  “And now that we have, what of it?” said Patrick.

  “First,” said Fence, “to the business of the Hidden Land. Lord, will you in exchange for the swords of Shan and Melanie given to you and Chryse, conspire with Chryse for the good of the Hidden Land against the devices of the Dragon King?”

  “I will so,” said Belaparthalion.

  Fence closed his eyes for a moment. Laura thought suddenly that, to him, this might be the most important of all the things they were doing. Claudia, anybody could see, was a worry; the deaths of the royal children were a grief; the connection between this strangers’ game and Fence’s own reality was a puzzle. And of course something would have to be done about all of it. But this one thing he had at least ensured, that the Dragon King would trouble the Hidden Land no longer.

  “Having given this word,” said Chryse, very coldly, “do you tell us how you will keep it, in so puny a form and with so dulled a perception.”

  “Sweet cousin,” said Belaparthalion, in no very affectionate voice, “being neither man nor dragon, you do hold too low the powers of either. Fear me not.”

  “I am in this oath also,” said Chryse, “and must supply your deficiencies, an your own strength be unequal.”

  “When thou seest my deficiencies,” said Belaparthalion, “ask me again.”

  “I do see them now,” said Chryse. “Some do approach, and yet you hear them not.”

  Fence, looking resigned, called Celia and Matthew. They stood up, brushed pine needles off themselves, and came over to the fire. “Here’s Belaparthalion,” Fence said to them, “and the Lords of the Dead are coming.”

  “Good morning!” said Matthew, with a kind of good-natured ruefulness, and smiled at the man in red.

  “Is that one pro tem also?” said Belaparthalion to Patrick.

  “No, he’s permanent,” said Patrick. “Lord Matthew, Scribe to the King and King’s Counselor. Matthew, this is your very own guardian dragon; show some respect. And this, my lord dragon, is Lady Celia, King’s Counselor and musician.”

  Celia did Belaparthalion a courtesy; Matthew said to Fence, “What’s amiss?”

  There was a certain amount of crashing, and a flurry of unicorns bolted into the clearing, shied briefly at the clump of people, and converged on Chryse, hooting and chiming.

  “What, they?” said Celia.

  “I think that’s just the cavalry,” said Ellen. “So to speak.”

  “How can you tell?” said Patrick.

  “Because,” said Ellen, “the Lords of the Dead are of the sort of shape-shifter that is held to one kind of form only. They can’t turn themselves into unicorns. Right, Fence?”

  “Right,” said Fence, absently. He cast his gaze around the clearing. Laura, following it, saw suddenly where the swords of Shan and Melanie still lay as Celia had unwrapped them. Their glow had dimmed with the rising of the sun, but now they were blazing in unkind colors that pressed sparks under one’s eyelids and obscured the plain shapes of the trees.

  Oh, come on, thought Laura, not now. But she was caught. She looked unwillingly upon a cluttered room bright with lamplight. Claudia sat at a round table, dressed in blue velvet, her black hair falling down her back, working with tiny tools at a band of tarnished metal. As Laura watched, she picked up a dull black stone from off the table and fitted it into the socket of the band. She had just made Shan’s Ring, or something very like it. Then she picked up a red-and-blue wooden top that lay on the table, and pulled toward her a little carved clock. She took blue and green stones and made a circle around the clock and the top. She set the pendulum of the clock swinging. She spun the top with an unthinking expertise behind which Laura saw, with a jolt, hours of playing; how strange to think that Claudia had ever been a child. Then she tossed the ring into the air and caught it again, grinning.

  Somebody wiry who smelled like burning leaves took Laura under the arms and swung her off her feet, and the sight tattered and vanished. Fence had grabbed her and deposited her with the rest of the party at one edge of the clearing. The whole of the empty space was thronged with unicorns. She looked frantically for the swords. Matthew, a little farther back in the trees, was holding Shan’s, swinging it casually in one hand as if it were a skipping-rope. Fence touched the top of Laura’s head and, when she looked up at him, showed her the green glow of Melanie’s sword, thrust through his belt under the muddy black cloak.

  “Where,” said Ellen, “are the Lords of the Dead going to stand, when they come?”

  “Where’s Belaparthalion?” said Patrick.

  “He’s standing with Chryse,” said Fence. “Patrick. What’s their quarrel?”

  Patrick, keeping a wary eye on the unicorns, and raising his voice from time to time to be heard over a sudden blare of horn or organ, a trilling as of two hundred piccolos, a quivering barrage as of somebody dropping a harpsichord down a cement stairwell, answered this question with more detail than was usual with him. Laura was seized with equal parts of envy and of relief that she had not been faced with such a choice.

  “ ’Sblood!” said Ellen, when he had finished. “That was stupid, but it certainly wasn’t cowardly.”

  “Why stupid?” said Fence. “If Belaparthalion said this was not his whim, then ’twas not. I do not know, however, what this translation meaneth, nor what benefit Belaparthalion hopeth to gain from Melanie’s sword sufficient to salve him for the loss o’the dragon-shape.”

  “And that’s Chryse’s quarrel,” said Patrick.

  “But if that’s our Apsinthion,” said Laura, “and Apsinthion is the Judge of the Dead, then—”

  “He answered to Belaparthalion,” said Patrick, stubbornly.

  “Fence?” said Laura. “Could he be both?”

  “I trust not,” said Fence.

  Matthew stepped forward, grabbed Fence by the arm, and pointed southward. “Look there,” he said.

  A soberly dressed, harmless-looking crowd of people was coming through the trees. There were nine of them. They wore neither cloaks nor swords. A shiver went up Laura’s spine. The unicorns melted away to the other side of the clearing, and the nine people walked to where the party from the Hidden Land stood. The light of the sun seemed flatter; Laura felt oppressed; and in several quick glances upward, she saw that a yellow flame stood in all their eyes. They nodded amiably at the party from the Hidden Land, and then turned their backs.

  A lilting voice Laura knew addressed the unicorns, “Hail, blithe spirits!” it said. “We mean you no ill, but seek one of our own.”

  “None of your own is here,” said Chryse’s voice. A swelling chorus in the back of the mind added, How shall I your true love know from another one?

  “Lady, he is. Apsinthion!” said the rich voice, imperatively.

  The man in red made his way through the unicorns like a setter breasting a field of daisies, and halted in the small space left in the center of the clearing. “You’re far from your wonted ways,” he said to them.

  “No further than thou,” said the austere voice.

  “I have been out before,” said the man in red, “while you were sleeping. For I did think, how should I judge the dead who had not seen the living?”

  “That’s your affair,” said the rich voice. “But we do hear that you hold in trust somewhat that we desire.”

  “You may not have’t,” said the man in red.

  “We do not wish it,” said the lilting voice. “We wish it silenced. Do you swear never to use it in any wise?”

  “Peace, break thee off,�
�� said Chryse’s voice, in precisely the tone Laura’s father would use to say, “Now just a God damn minute!” She, too, pushed through the mill of unicorns until she stood next to the man in red. The inward chorus said peacefully, Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! Laura saw one or two of the Lords of the Dead rub at their foreheads, and hoped that the poetry was giving them a headache.

  “Belaparthalion,” said Chryse, and there was very little music in her voice. “What art thou?” There is no art, said the chorus, To find the mind’s construction in the face.

  “I am the man-shape of a dragon,” said the man in red. “I am the Judge of the Dead. And, though thou would it were not so, I am thy cousin.”

  “The Judge of the Dead,” said Chryse, with less music yet, “is an Outside Power.” The chorus was silent.

  The man in red said, “That is so.”

  “I do not well understand this,” said Chryse. “But I do understand well indeed that you and I are sworn to guard the Hidden Land ’gainst the depredations of the Outside Powers. I’ll do my duty well, then, to guard it ’gainst thee.”

  The unicorns, still silent, foamed backward among the trees and quivered there, white in the shadows. Chryse backed away and lowered her silky head, with its golden eyes and its whiskered nose and its long, sharp, mortal horn.

  Fence dragged Melanie’s sword from his belt. “My lord!”

  The man in red reached back a hand, and Fence slapped the hilt into it. The sword flashed like breaking glass as he touched it. He took it between his two palms and extended it toward Chryse. “I cry you mercy,” he said. “This will do naught but ill.”

  Chryse said, with a full complement of melody ringing behind her words, “All may yet be very well.”

  Laura looked wildly at Fence. His fists were clenched and his eyes were enormous, but he seemed to feel that he had done all he could when he gave the sword to the red man. But all that did was even the odds. One of the guardians of the Hidden Land was going to kill the other. Some guardians. They were behaving irresponsibly in the extreme. But Laura’s outrage was not enough to make her tell them so; nor were they likely to listen. Stealth would have to serve.