The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  On the sixteenth day of the awful weather, which had been broken twice, once by a day of watery sunshine and once by an inexplicable thunderstorm, Ruth took her courage in both hands and went looking for Randolph.

  He was not in the Council Room, where Ted and Fence had buried the long table in books and grinned vaguely when she poked her head in the door. He was not in his own room, though the door stood open and a yellow dog thumped its tail from the hearth, where the fire was bright and new. He was, inevitably, in Fence’s tower, so that by the time she knocked on the door her courage had leaked away with her breath but she was bolstered by the belief that he was not there, and as soon as he had failed to answer she could be comfortably irate and give up for the day.

  “Come in,” his voice called.

  Ruth shoved her hair back and pushed the door open. Randolph, in two cloaks and a blue velvet hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, was also immersed in books. He looked up with the expression of pleased inquiry he reserved for Fence; it slid into blankness and then into a pleasant neutrality.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” said Ruth. “But there’s something I can’t remember, and I’d rather ask you than Meredith.”

  Randolph put his pen back into the ink bottle and slid his hands into his sleeves. His breath made faint clouds in the air.

  “For heaven’s sake!” said Ruth. “You’ve got a splendid fire in your own room for the dog to get spoiled by.” She made for the fireplace.

  “It burneth not except by Fence’s command,” said Randolph. “There’s a quilt, if you’re cold.”

  “Never mind,” said Ruth.

  “What’s the question?”

  “Did you promise Meredith we’d be married before the year was out, or before a year was out?”

  Randolph grinned. “A year,” he said.

  “All right. Now look. What are the choices?”

  “To send thee home, can we contrive it,” said Randolph. “To tell all to Meredith and beg her release us from this bond. To marry, and make the best of it.”

  “If you send me home,” said Ruth, “I’ll be safe, but as far as Meredith is concerned, you’ll have broken your word.”

  Randolph looked blank, and then extremely uneasy. “We might marry first,” he said. “Then send thee home. Thou wouldst be safe, as thou sayest.”

  “But I’d be married,” said Ruth. “To somebody I’d never see again. So would you.”

  Randolph shrugged. “For me, that makes no matter,” he said. “’Twould keep me from the plague of marriage for policy.”

  “And you wouldn’t, you think, when I was gone, ever want to marry anybody for any other reason?”

  Randolph was silent. The rain clattered on the windows and the wind thumped the tower like an irate child kicking a locked door. Ruth was cold. The scolding she had given him for sitting here with the fire out replayed itself in the middle of her mind and sounded sillier every time it went by.

  “No,” said Randolph. He gestured at Fence’s footstool. “Wilt thou sit down and recover from the staircase?”

  Ruth sat, because she felt shaky.

  “Now,” said Randolph, “if thou thinkst to marry at home, I’d not prevent it. It was not what Meredith had in her mind when she did extract this promise; but ’tis possible to marry for a term only; for five years, or ten.”

  “Five,” said Ruth, “would do me fine, and prevent my enacting some folly in my rash and splenitive youth.”

  “Well, then, we’ll do’t so,” said Randolph.

  “Not,” said Ruth, “that I have anybody in mind at home.” And that, of course, she ought not to have said. Randolph looked at her with a kind of thoughtful puzzlement.

  “Have you not, then?” said Randolph. “And yet you said to the Dragon King that your heart was given already.”

  “Isn’t it permissible to lie to one’s enemies?”

  “Did you so?”

  She had done enough lying to Randolph to last her a lifetime. “No,” said Ruth. “I didn’t lie.”

  Randolph pushed back the chair and stood up. Ruth watched him with trepidation. He looked like somebody who was about to do something foolhardy for the sheer joy of it. His face was not happy, precisely, but held rather the beginnings of wildness: Ellen, aged seven, just before she threw her favorite doll into the pond because the thought of Patrick’s face when she took up his dare held more attraction than the doll did. It was not a matter of spite, but the choice of a brief delight over a longer, settled content. Glory over length of days, thought Ruth suddenly, and pressed her hands together, hard.

  Randolph walked over to the window and contemplated the darkness. Ruth could hear the little hiss of the torches burning. He was, no doubt, burying his crazy impulse, whatever it was. In the end, she couldn’t stand it and spoke to him.

  “What are you looking at?” she said.

  Randolph turned and leaned on the window frame. Above his dark head the carved story of Shan gleamed dully. “Faintheartedness,” he said. He walked across the room, and with no particular flourish, knelt on the floor a yard away from where she sat on the stool. “Let’s put this matter on some better footing,” he said. “Ruth. If I should ask thee, wouldst thou marry me?”

  Ruth’s breath clogged in her throat. “Faint heart,” she said in a strangled voice, “never won fair lady.”

  Randolph smiled. “Wilt thou marry me?” he said.

  “So much,” said Ruth, “for the faint heart. Now.”

  “The fair lady,” said Randolph, “is here.”

  “Wait,” said Ruth. “I’m sure you can make pretty speeches. Don’t do it yet. I’d hate them to go around and around in your head for weeks afterward. Randolph. I would love to marry you. Don’t say anything. I am sixteen years old and I have a brain full of turnips. I don’t know when people marry in this country, but in mine they do it at twenty, or later.” She paused because she was out of breath.

  Randolph had not moved. He said gravely, “I’m fond of turnips.”

  “Oh, go to!” said Ruth.

  “I understand you,” said Randolph. “It may be wise. Four years would settle many matters. We would marry, to fulfill our word; you must then do as you will.”

  “I could go to Heathwill Library and study something,” said Ruth.

  Randolph said, “An we do find the means to send you home?”

  “I was thinking of staying,” said Ruth, “anyway.” There. She had said it. What would Patrick say? She added, “If they’ll have me. I just wish you could meet my parents.”

  “So,” said Randolph. “This rubble being cleared, what’s thy answer, lady?”

  “I’ll marry you,” said Ruth.

  The fireplace bloomed suddenly with yellow light, and warmth flowed over them. “I am sorry I was so long,” said Fence’s mild voice. “Ted and I have found what we sought.”

  Ruth and Randolph looked at him. Fence, his arms full of books and a too-large blue cap on his head, peered at them from under it with a gaze as sharp as the Nightmare Grass. He said to Randolph, “She is too young.”

  Randolph said, “Four years.”

  Fence smiled, and dumped the books on the nearest chest, and looked at them again. Ruth couldn’t have moved, but she thought Randolph’s knees must be getting sore.

  “Shall I give you solitude,” said Fence, “or a celebratory glass of wine?”

  Ruth looked at Randolph, and her bones turned to water. “Wine,” she said, “an it please you.”

  It was the seventeenth of November, and still raining. The Council Room was full of books, but somebody had cleared enough chairs for the assembled company. They left Fence the chair at the head of the table, but he did not take it. He was blazing with excitement, as none of them had ever seen him. When they were seated, and almost before they were quiet, he began to speak, without preliminaries.

  “Were any of us who sought this knowledge,” he said, looking at Patrick, “of an experimental temper, we had had it long since. But
we have burrowed this month in Shan’s writings, and Melanie’s, and then asked again for Ted and Laura’s account of how they did arrive here, in the Mirror Room, sans any sword.” He looked at Ted.

  Ted said, “Purgos Aipos is an old name for High Castle.”

  “Oh, good grief!” said Ruth. “You put your hand on the mirror, and you say, ‘Apsinthion’; and you come out in the stark man’s house.”

  “And then,” said Patrick, sourly, “you can just take the first flight to Australia. No problem.”

  “Hold a moment,” said Fence. “Patrick; Ellen; Ruth. Hath your house any name?”

  They looked at him blankly. Their parents didn’t name things. Ted said, “My father calls it the Coriander Castle.”

  “What?” said Ruth.

  “Coriander,” said Ted, “stands for hidden merit.”

  “He would,” said Patrick. “And it’s going to work too; you know it.”

  “When shall we essay this?” said Fence. “Need you a few days’ grace, to find if you will go or stay?”

  Nobody answered him. Fence said, “You must know that you are, every one, most heartily welcome to stay.”

  “We will lose Patrick,” said Randolph.

  “I’m afraid you will,” said Patrick. “I find I prefer the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It doesn’t talk back.”

  “What about the civil war?” said Laura. “If Prince Patrick turns up missing?”

  “It’s time for truth,” said Fence. “Andrew, mark you, who was to begin this war, is away, and hath had in the interim an education. Fear us not.”

  “I don’t think,” said Ellen, “that anybody needs time for cogitation.”

  “Wait just a moment,” said Ruth. “Is all this glumness justified? Who says we can do this only once?”

  “The Dragon King,” said Fence.

  Ted put his head in his hands. The three particular kinds of provocation, impossible of occurrence.

  “The use of these mirrors,” said Fence, “as the use of all of the magical artifacts of Melanie, doth awake the Outside Powers. The first use troubleth their sleep; the second maketh them to stir; and the third doth send them roaring.”

  Apsinthion had told them that, thought Ted; and they had not understood him.

  “So,” said Patrick, “we can all go to Australia, and everybody except me can say good-bye to parents. And then everybody except me can come back. And the Outside Powers will have but stirred in their sleep.”

  “One only,” said Fence. “Three uses, to awaken one. But they have been so recently roused, ’twere folly to—”

  “But the next time you use those mirrors,” said Patrick, disregarding him, “be it in two years or two hundred, the Outside Powers will emerge roaring. Give me strength. You couldn’t pay me to stay here.”

  “I don’t hear anybody offering,” said Ellen, absently.

  “There aren’t any magic mirrors in our house,” said Patrick. “How do you propose to get there?”

  “There will be,” said Fence. “One magic mirror maketh another, by their property of reflection.”

  “Never mind,” said Patrick. “Can we get this over? Can we just go and do it now?”

  “Of a certainty,” said Fence, and got up.

  The five of them followed him along the drafty passages of High Castle, to the Mirror Room. Fence and Randolph would be coming to Australia with them, to lend what Ellen, or possibly Princess Ellen, called verisimilitude to an otherwise drab and unconvincing narrative. “Not drab,” Patrick had remarked, “but about as unconvincing as you can get. Do you really think a short guy in a wizard’s robe and a tall one got up like Hamlet are going to put any twentieth-century parent’s mind at ease?” Ted thought of this, trailing behind his shorter cousin’s vigorous stride; watching the way Ruth and Randolph walked close together without touching; and the way Ellen stuck next to Laura and talked incessantly at her. If they could see us come out of that mirror, it should help, he thought. He plunged forward and caught up with Patrick.

  “Pat? Where is the mirror in your new house?”

  “Well, there’s one in the bathroom,” said Patrick, as if he had been expecting the question. “But we wouldn’t most of us fit through it. There’s a full-length one on the back of my parents’ closet door; and a mirrored wall in the dining room. And a full-length one in Ruthie’s room. Take your pick.”

  In the Mirror Room, three black cats slept in an untidy heap on Agatha’s sewing table. Ellen scratched them all behind the ears. Fence made for the Conrad tapestry, and twitched it aside.

  “Fence?” said Ted. “Can we choose which mirror we come out?”

  “Maybe,” said Fence. “You might hold in your mind’s eye the room you think best suited to’t.”

  “The dining room, Ruth and Ellen,” said Patrick.

  “Join hands,” said Fence. “Now.” He laid his hand on the mirror. “Castle Coriander.”

  And he stepped through the mirror, drawing Ruth, Randolph, Patrick, Ted, Laura, and Ellen after him.

  The surface of the mirror gave before Ted’s hand like cloth. He stepped through, and the feel of cloth tattered and diminished. He saw a high-ceilinged, handsome room, flooded with early sunlight and furnished with a table and chairs he recognized. It was warm and smelled pleasantly of coffee and pancakes. The table was laid for four. Three of them sat there already: a tall abstracted man with dust-colored hair and a vague face, Ted’s Uncle Alan; a little black-haired man with very blue eyes, his father. Ted’s uncle had not noticed them yet. His aunt, who was sitting directly across the table from the mirrored wall they had walked out of, dropped her knife with a clatter and said, “Mother of God!”

  “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” said an ironic voice in the doorway; and there, in her old green bathrobe with her long brown hair falling over it in rats’ tails, just like Laura’s, stood their mother, her hands full of mugs and in her face a kind of horrified delight.

  Laura ran at her, and she obligingly dropped the mugs, one of which broke, and hugged her daughter. “What are you doing—” she said, and stopped, and put Laura a little away from her. “Honey. You’ve grown too. What is going on here?” She looked over Laura’s quivering head, found Ted unerringly, and grinned at him. Then she stood up. “I see two strangers here,” she said. “Sirs? What does this mean?”

  Ruth walked around the table and tapped her father on the shoulder. “Daddy,” she said.

  “Awake, are you?” said Ted’s Uncle Alan. “I think there are some pancakes left.”

  “Alan, look at the mirror,” said Aunt Kim.

  He looked up. “Ted,” he said, in a pleased tone. “And Laura. You didn’t tell me they were coming,” he said to his wife.

  “Oh, God!” said Ruth, and burst out laughing.

  “Oh, God, exactly,” said Ted’s father. “Teach me to call names. Mary Rose in triplicate, and Thomas the Rhymer in duplicate. And who are the rest of them? They look halfway responsible next to the bunch of you.”

  “Mother,” said Ruth, in a shaking voice where laughter almost met tears, “this is Fence, and this is Randolph. This is my mother, Mistress Kimberly Carroll; and my aunt, Mistress Nora, and my father, Master Alan, and my uncle, Master Thomas.”

  Ruth’s mother stood up. “Alan,” she said, “I think we need some more chairs.”

  “I think,” said Ted’s father, standing up too, “that we need some more coffee.”

  “They drink tea,” said Ted.

  “They can drink coffee for once,” said his father, eyeing him steadily. “Let them be a little off balance too.” He held out a hand suddenly, and Ted bolted forward and fell on his neck, like a proper prodigal son.

  There was a certain amount of sniveling all around, and an appalling amount of talk, and a staggering interrogation under which Fence and Randolph bore up very well. Ted’s parents, he was relieved to see, believed the story, in the end. His aunt did not, but seemed willing, possibly through mere exhaustion, to l
et them continue to their conclusion. It was hard to tell with his Uncle Alan, who might not consider disbelief a barrier to, or belief a reason for, anybody’s action. So Ruth explained that all of them except Patrick were going back to the Hidden Land; and the yelling started. Ruth and Ellen and Patrick’s side of the family were great yellers.

  Very few speeches into it, Ted and Laura’s side of the family plunged precipitately into the living room, dragging a reluctant Fence, shut the door, fell into whatever chairs were nearest, and stared at one another in a worn-out silence.

  “Now let’s try again,” said Ted’s mother.

  “No, wait,” said Ted. “Fence. Have you got an immigration quota?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Can they come too?” He had not been able to ask it in the other room. His aunt and uncle would never come.

  There was another sort of silence. “Why not?” said Fence. He looked cautiously at Ted’s father, who had been calling him a variety of names Ted had never heard before, and at Ted’s mother, who had been steadily disregarding him, and said, “You’d be heartily welcome; heartily.”

  “I can’t think why,” said Ted’s mother.

  “If these were mine,” said Fence, gently, “I’d fight as hard as this to keep them.”

  “Mom,” said Laura. “They all talk like Shakespeare there.”

  “Well,” said their mother, on a shaky laugh, “then there’s no more to be said, surely?”

  “Oh, Lord,” said their father. “What time is it in Illinois? We’ll have to call Kathy and Jim and tell them—something.”

  “Blame it on us,” said Ted. “They’ll believe anything about us.”

  “Do you think they’re going to call the police in there?” said Ted’s mother.

  “They’ll think of it,” said his father, “and Randolph will point out that all seven of them can simply step back through the mirror before anybody so much as picks up the telephone.”

  “Tom,” said their mother, “are we in fact going to do this?”

  Ted’s father put his head in his hands. “If we did,” he said. “Power of attorney. Thank God we signed one before we left. We need to sell the house and most of the contents. Kim and Alan should have some of the good stuff. We’ll have to make a list. Now. Why are we doing this?”