The Secret Country

  It probably wouldn’t really be that easy, but Ted felt even tireder by now, and another discussion with Patrick would be too much.

  “And just when will that be?”

  Ted shrugged. “Well, either before the battle if we don’t want to have anything to do with that, or before I’m supposed to kill Lord Randolph, because I certainly don’t want to have anything to do with that.”

  “Last time we mentioned it you didn’t want to have anything to do with the battle.”

  “I guess I still don’t,” said Ted, slowly. “But if you’re right about something working to make the story come out, then there’s really nothing to be afraid of, is there?” Even as he asked the question, he remembered Laura’s ideas about waiting for the worms to come. He put the thought away.

  “Only killing Lord Randolph,” said Patrick, with a nasty grin. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “Stop sounding like Agatha.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Well,” said Ted, “why shouldn’t we be able to fight this thing, whatever it is? Especially now that its—its secret agent—is out of the way.”

  “If you fight it,” said Patrick, “what’s to keep it from getting fed up and letting us all get killed after all?”

  “I still think you’re crazy,” said Ted, whose patience was wearing thin. He did what was almost always a mistake, and told Patrick what he really thought. “This is real, and I think we can do things to make it different.”

  “Explain how it fits in with the game, then.”

  “Well,” said Ted, “we’ve all been acting as if we put this here, out of our heads. What if it put itself into our heads somehow?”

  Feet pounded up the stairs.

  “Here it comes,” said Patrick, and sprang off the table.

  Ted was expecting guards. But it was Ruth, Ellen, and Laura who burst into the room. They all looked absolutely wild; windblown somehow, Ted thought, and furious.

  Ruth opened her mouth, and Patrick spoke first. “How’d you find us?” he said mildly.

  Ruth clamped her mouth shut; she was clearly fighting to keep from either shrieking at him or slugging him.

  “The noise came from here,” said Ellen, “and it just pulled us along.”

  “Did you think you were home?” asked Ted.

  “Maybe for a minute,” said Laura. “Ellen thought so, but I don’t see how anybody could tell anything with all that noise.”

  “I thought so too,” said Ruth, very quietly.

  She had been looking around the room while the others talked, and now she stooped under the table and picked up a shard of colored glass. She held it up to the light, and behind her on the bare wall sprang the figures of an old man in wizard’s garb with a young man at his feet. They were wavery, as if they were under water, but the colors were brilliant and the scene easy to recognize. It was one of the earlier scenes from the tapestry in the West Tower.

  “Again!” said Ellen, almost in a wail. “I’m not even sure I blame you for smashing it. Did it have the hole or the sun, Patrick?”

  “What did you smash?” demanded Ruth.

  Patrick looked straight at her, and Ted, who had been trying to think of a plausible lie to save them much anger and more argument, saw that Patrick wanted to tell her the truth, and was relishing the moment.

  “The Crystal of Earth,” said Patrick.

  Ruth flew at him and shook him. “You idiot! You are so stupid! You are so stupid I could kill you!”

  She smacked him across the face. Laura burst into tears. Ellen, crying, “Cut it out, Ruthie!” flung herself at them, fell over a chair, and knocked them both over.

  Ruth stood up. “You are so stupid I don’t have to kill you, you’ll do it yourself,” she said, calmly.

  “I’ll tell you who’s stupid,” said Patrick from the floor. “You didn’t even bother to find out why I did it.”

  There was a bright red mark on his cheek, and he was considerably ruffled, but he managed to exude great dignity. Ted was not sure whether to cheer for him or kick him. Probably it would make no difference to Patrick.

  Ruth tossed her head. Ted had never seen her do anything like that, even when she was Lady Ruth.

  “Well, why did you?” Ellen asked Patrick. She was still on the floor herself.

  “Because Fence and Randolph have the swords,” said Patrick. He looked so pleased that Ted would not have minded smacking him too.

  Ruth looked up from patting Laura. “And how did they get them?”

  Patrick told the story with aplomb, but it did not help his case with Ruth.

  “I said you were stupid,” she remarked. She looked at Ted. “And so are you. Don’t you have any better sense than to play with magic swords?”

  “Don’t you have any better sense than to play with magic rings?” Ted said bitterly.

  “That’s different. It was necessary. You just got those swords out of laziness because you didn’t want to learn fencing.”

  “You just used the ring out of laziness because you didn’t want to learn sorcery,” said Patrick.

  “That’s not true!” cried Ellen. “She had an emergency. You were just practicing.”

  Patrick shrugged and stood up. “What’s the matter with Laura?”

  “I want to go home,” said Laura.

  “Don’t we all,” said Patrick.

  “No,” said Ruth.

  “It occurs to me,” said Patrick, “that we ought to get out of here. Why didn’t the guards come running when I broke that thing?”

  “You made me forget, screaming and fighting,” said Ellen, “but everybody was frozen, like somebody stopped the movie. We couldn’t stop to look at them because the noise was bringing us here, but they were just stopped in the middle of what they were doing.”

  “Lucky for us,” said Patrick. He looked at Ted. “Add another one to your list.”

  “What list?” said Ruth irritably.

  “Not now,” said Ted. “It’s another one of his theories. If he tells you now you’ll probably kill him.”

  “All right, later,” said Ruth. “But look, Patrick. You’ve got to stop doing things like this on your own. You could’ve killed us all. And it’s not fair.”

  “I don’t care about fair,” said Patrick. “I just want us to stay in one piece.”

  “We won’t if you run around doing things without thinking.”

  “It wasn’t without thinking. I thought about it for days. I just didn’t expect to need it.”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “Not now,” said Ted.

  “All right,” said Patrick. “Let’s discuss something easier, like how to keep Laura from breaking her neck on the Unicorn Hunt.”

  “I’m not going,” said Laura.

  “It’s not just Laura,” said Ruth. “Ellie and I can’t—what?”

  “Not going.”

  “It’ll be fun,” said Ellen, sounding outraged.

  “Banquet of Midsummer Eve was supposed to be fun.”

  “Didn’t you like it?” said Ellen, surprised.

  Laura was silent.

  “Anyway,” said Ruth, “Ellie and I can’t ride that well, either, Pat. Rocks and hills and trees, and galloping.”

  “I think,” said Ellen, frowning, “that Agatha and servants and old people walk on behind with picnic baskets or something. Maybe we could go with them?”

  “I don’t think any of us should ride,” said Patrick.

  “Well, maybe we could all go with the walkers, then,” said Ruth.

  “I can ask Agatha,” said Ellen.

  “And now can we get out of here?” said Patrick. “I suppose the guards will have to unfreeze sometime, and they might remember that something odd happened.”

  “Well, don’t leave the evidence lying around like that,” said Ruth.

  She supervised Ted’s sweeping the shards of the Crystal of Earth into one pile. They all stood around looking at it. Ted felt the sadness o
f having broken something beautiful, and wondered whether Laura felt like that all the time.

  “They’re bound to find out about this sooner or later,” he said. “I wonder why it wasn’t guarded.”

  “I wonder why it didn’t work,” said Patrick.

  After some halfhearted argument, Ruth was allowed to bundle up the pieces of the Crystal of Earth in Ellen’s pinafore and bear them away to her room. Patrick wanted to bury or hide them somewhere, but Ruth said shortly that she would feel better being able to keep an eye on them.

  Ted and Patrick went back to the practice swords, and had little to say to one another.

  CHAPTER 19

  ON the day of the Unicorn Hunt Laura woke up at dawn with her ivory unicorn clutched in one hand. Ellen had objected to Laura’s sleeping with it, maintaining that she, Laura, would certainly let go of it in her sleep and she, Ellen, roll over on it and be gouged. But Laura had been stubborn. Now, wriggling her hand to get rid of the lines and creases left by the statue, she decided that Fence really had put a spell of finding and returning on it.

  She climbed out of bed and went over to the window. She tried to be quiet. If she couldn’t sneak out and hide herself before Ellen woke up, Ellen would make her go to the Unicorn Hunt. The floor was chilly, but no more than you would expect of a stone floor in the early morning. She put her head out into the pale air.

  The sky was faint and pure. The long thin sunlight of early morning spread like a blanket over the treetops, but the roots of the Enchanted Forest were blue with shadow, and High Castle reared its massive height over the lake so that the lake too was dark. Or was it? Laura almost fell out of the window. There were hundreds of them, a sea of cloudy manes and spiral horns, and they shed about them a substantial light. The trees in the sunshine were more ephemeral than they. Laura jumped down from the window seat and made for the door.

  “Ellen!” she yelled. “Wake up!” She jerked open the door and ran in her nightgown down the passage, down the back stairs, and out into the light.

  “Good morrow, Child of Man,” said the unicorn.

  “Good morning,” said Laura, staring.

  “What do you wish?”

  “I only wanted to watch,” said Laura, and bit her tongue, wondering if this was an admission that she had never seen a unicorn. “And to greet you,” she said.

  “That was gracious,” said the unicorn.

  Laura was embarrassed, and said nothing.

  The unicorn too was silent. The others had drifted away, elusive as the things that crowd the edges of your vision. This last one slid farther into the lake, and Laura grabbed handfuls of her nightgown and waded into the water. It was shockingly cold.

  The unicorn said, “We do not regard the Children of Men with such awe as you give to us, and you are only a child, who will grow only to a woman. But you seem to me full of some power, as if we were the transient thing and you the lasting. But this is not so. What power is in you?”

  I made you up, thought Laura. But looking at the unicorn, she could not believe that she had. It was enormous and solid. Its breath was warm on the top of her head. It had whiskers on the sides of its nose. The long horn with its spiral of violet gleamed and slanted, cold and dangerous, as the animal moved its head. Laura, sinking slowly into gravelly mud, looked up into its inquiring eye—violet, as Fence had said, and with an upright pupil like a cat’s—and felt herself a slight and wavering thing. She remembered the exasperating line from Hamlet that Ted quoted at her when she could not understand his explanations, and she shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “I never dreamed you in my philosophy.” The unicorn took two paces backward, drenching Laura to the waist.

  “Certainly you did not,” it said, but it sounded startled.

  “Oh, don’t go away,” pleaded Laura.

  “You will see me again,” said the unicorn. “Today is the hunt.” It wheeled around like a leaf in a whirlpool and fled after the rest of the herd.

  Laura, backing away slowly, as if she were retreating from an audience with a king, tripped over her nightgown and sat down with a tremendous splash in the shallows of the lake.

  She trudged back upstairs, leaving a trail of sand and water, and dripped into their bedroom. Ellen sat in the middle of the unmade bed with a very red face, trying to braid her hair. “Shan’s mercy!” she said fiercely as Laura entered.

  “Don’t swear,” said Laura.

  “That’s not swearing,” said Ellen crossly as she looked up and stared. “What happened to you?”

  “I talked to the unicorns!”

  “In the water?”

  “I tried to wake you up.”

  “Well, you did, but you were already gone.”

  “And I have to talk to Patrick.”

  “You’d better dry off first,” said Ellen. “He won’t be very pleased if you go dripping cold water on him. Did you go swimming?”

  “No. I just talked to one of them for a minute. Oh, Ellie, you should have seen.”

  “Was it like the Secret?”

  “Much better,” said Laura. “We didn’t know anything about it at all. Those are real unicorns.”

  “Are you going to start arguing with Patrick?” demanded Ellen.

  “I’m just going to tell him.”

  “Well, let’s get dressed first.”

  “What in?” asked Laura, stopping in the act of untying the bow at the neck of her nightgown. “I refuse to go in the woods in one of those dresses.”

  Ellen bounded out of bed and went over to the wardrobe.

  “They’re special festive clothes,” she said, “like the ones for the banquet. So if we can find two more outfits that look alike, I’ll bet that’s it. No, don’t you come over here, you’ll get everything all wet. Why don’t you go dry off.”

  Laura dripped obediently into their bathing room. Today, for some reason, the towels were black, but they were still linen. Laura wrapped herself up in one and wished for a mirror. Agatha had a hand mirror which she used to show Ellen and Laura what she had done to their hair, although Laura did not think that a protest on their part would make her change the hair. Ruth had a hand mirror in her room. The only other one Laura had seen was Fence’s, which was probably not a mirror at all. There was a room called the Mirror Room, but in fact its walls were covered with tapestries.

  Laura stalked out of the bathing room, intoning, “I am the Demon Queen.”

  Ellen, who had her arms full of green stuff, favored her with the remark, “You don’t have any warts.” She dumped the clothes on the bed. “These must be the right ones,” she said. “See, they’ve got short skirts and no lace, and they’re all loose. This one is bigger, it must be mine. Here.” She threw the other dress across the bed to Laura and began climbing out of her nightgown. “Did you hang up that wet nightgown?” she added.

  “Claudia doesn’t have any warts,” said Laura, dropping the towel in a heap on the floor and pulling the dress over her head. “And she’s a demon queen.”

  “She’s somebody awful,” said Ellen.

  “I want my tennis shoes,” said Laura.

  “They’re in Agatha’s mending basket,” said Ellen. “And the cat ate one of the laces. They’d look funny with that dress anyway.” She went over to the wardrobe again. “Here. Green boots. Or moccasins. Or something.”

  “Too heavy,” said Laura.

  “There are brambles out there,” said Ellen. “Agatha said if we tried to wear our sandals like we did last year, she’d leave us behind with bread and water.”

  “Oh, well.” Laura sat down and took the boots. “Did we wear sandals last year?”

  They put the boots on, with some trouble, as the laces were complex. “Let the cat eat these,” mumbled Laura. Then they went to find Patrick.

  He was sitting in the middle of his bedroom floor, lacing his boots up with a sort of pleasurable concentration on his face. He was wearing a tunic of the same color and material as their dresses, and his boots were gr
een too.

  “Agatha says both Ted and Ruth can’t come with her party,” said Ellen.

  Patrick looked startled. “Oh,” he said. “I should have thought of that. But will she let Laurie go?”

  “Sure. Everybody except Ted, or except Ruth. So one of them has to ride.”

  Patrick finished his boots and frowned. “Who rides better, Ted or Ruth?”

  “Ruth,” said Ellen, loyally.

  Patrick shrugged. “I think Ted should go with the main hunt. He’s the prince, after all.”

  “I’ll tell Ruth to come with us, then,” said Ellen. “Agatha says if we’re late we’ll be left behind.”

  Patrick shrugged again.

  “Where’s Ted?” asked Ellen.

  Patrick pointed to a lump in their wildly untidy bed. “He won’t get up. He had bad dreams last night, and spent hours walking the battlements, or something.”

  “Well, tell him he has to ride today.”

  Laura, who had been fidgeting around, said, “Patrick, we didn’t make up those unicorns.”

  “No, of course we didn’t. The Greeks did,” he said. “Or was it the Middle Ages?”

  “But you said—”

  “We didn’t,” said Patrick. “Not the way we made up Lord Randolph. Not the idea of unicorns. But we put them here. It doesn’t make them any realer, Laurie, just because somebody else made them up, does it?”

  “You don’t make any sense at all!” said Laura, crossly, and bolted into the hall. She was not sure, now, that she could describe her early morning experience to anyone. She certainly could not describe it to Patrick. She wondered what he would say if she told him that the unicorn had seemed to think that she had made it up.

  “I hope,” said Ellen, joining her, “that you’re not going to be nasty all day.”

  “Who’s nasty?” said Laura, astonished.

  “Never mind,” said Ellen, eyeing her sideways as they went down the stairs. “Sometimes you act just like Princess Laura.”

  Laura considered this all the way down to the dining hall, and became pleased with herself. She thought that High Castle must be rubbing off on her somehow. She thought about riding horses, and liked the idea no better than she ever had. The rubbing off must be slow.