CHAPTER 22
TED dreamt that he was at a school concert
with his parents; Laura was playing the flute of Cedric. She was
playing “Good King Wenceslas,” with more flourishes than Ted had
thought it possible to wring out of a flute; but the music teacher,
who was sitting next to his mother, was extremely angry because
Laura had been supposed to play “What if a Day,” whatever that was.
The music teacher was explaining all this to Ted’s mother in an
angry whisper; Ted’s mother kept trying to shut the music teacher
up so she could hear Laura. Then the sixth-grade choir filed onto
the stage. Ted suddenly realized that Laura was wearing one of her
Secret Country dresses; and he was jolted out of his pleasant
dream-state, wherein everything was as it had been before their
cousins moved to Australia.
Then the sixth-grade choir sang not “Good King
Wenceslas,” but something that jarred uncomfortably with it. Ted
caught snatches of the words. “Cannot a chance of a night or an
hour cross thy desires?” Laura’s playing faltered, and then
steadied. The choir sang, “All our joys are but toys, Idle thoughts
deceiving.” Laura stopped playing and stood looking thoughtful.
“None have power of an hour in their lives’ bereaving,” sang the
sixth-graders.
Laura grinned and lifted the flute again. She
played a song Ted had never heard; but the words to it rose out of
the back of his mind, and covered the sounds of his mother arguing
with the music teacher and of the choir still singing. And from
the Dragon’s mouth that would / You all in sunder shiver / And from
the horns of Unicorns / Lord safely you deliver.
Edward’s voice rose triumphantly, with the piercing
sound of the flute. Light flashed off the silver thing, and hurt
Ted’s eyes. He blinked, and opened them again on a dazzling shaft
of sunlight. One little ray had found its way into their clutter of
rocks, and it had to hit him in the eye. Around him the blanketed
forms of his traveling companions breathed gently. Ruth had her
head on his knees. Her face was dirty, and her hair was wilting
into a semblance of what other people’s hair looked like. Ted
remembered vividly the time Ruth had decided that not washing it
for a month would make it straight and flat, and the reaction of
his aunt Kim to this proposal.
He was afraid that if he looked at Ruth any longer,
Edward would wake up and behave badly. He raised his eyes and
considered the rest of them. Andrew lay beyond Ruth, on his
stomach, with his face in his folded arms, lank brown hair leaking
out from under the blanket pulled over his head. Randolph was
sitting up against a rock near the opening of this rocky hollow,
his arms around his knees and his head tipped over at an
uncomfortable angle, as if he had not intended to sleep at all. His
face was scratched and his hair looked like Ruth’s.
Ted poked Ruth in the shoulder. She twitched once,
opened her eyes, and made a horrible face at him. “Oh, God!” she
said. “This is what I hate about traveling in the Hidden
Land. Waking up like this and knowing I can’t have a hot
shower.”
“What did you dream about last night?” said
Ted.
He kept his voice low, and Ruth’s when she answered
was lower also. “Hot water,” she said. “Are your legs asleep, or
can I lie here and enter gradually into the true horrors of my
state?”
“Did you dream about anything else?”
“You ought to have helped out in the Spanish
Inquisition,” grumbled Ruth. She shut her eyes. “Let me think.
Yes,” she said, and opening them again, she gave him an upside-down
frown. “I dreamed of home. Not Australia, but the first farm.
That’s odd. I haven’t dreamed of home since we’ve been here.”
“What happened?”
“I was playing the flute,” said Ruth, slowly.
Ted’s heart jerked within him. “Well?”
“It was Christmas Eve,” said Ruth. “You guys were
there. It was nice. Except we were arguing over the music. Mom
wanted ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ but Ellen and Laura insisted on this
weird prayer. I didn’t know the music, but they insisted anyway.
Then Laura actually took the flute away from me; and I saw it was
the flute of Cedric and got very upset; but I didn’t think yet that
this might be just a dream. Laura started playing a song I didn’t
recognize, and Patrick started singing, and Ellie; and then I saw
that Celia and Matthew and Fence were all there too, and they sang.
And then you poked me.”
“What was the prayer?”
“‘And from the sword (Lord) save your heart, / By
my might and power, / And keep your heart, your darling dear, /
From Dogs that would devour. / And from the Dragon’s mouth that
would—’”
“‘You all in sunder shiver,’” said Ted, “‘And from
the horns of Unicorns / Lord safely you deliver.’”
“You too?”
“Different setting,” said Ted. “Same song.”
“Your mumbling,” said Andrew, sitting up and
flinging off his hood, “waketh not the dead, but waketh me most
rudely.”
“Sorry,” said Ted. “Shouldn’t we be going, to wake
the dead in earnest?”
“Give you good morrow,” said Andrew.
“What’s good about it?” said Randolph, without
moving.
“My sentiments exactly,” said Ruth. She sat up.
“How far to the Gray Lake?”
“A short walk only,” said Randolph. He opened his
eyes. “There is a house there wherein we may find
refreshment.”
“Let’s go and find it, then,” said Ruth, standing
up.
Randolph and Andrew got up stiffly and went
outside. Ruth shook out her skirts and held a hand down to Ted.
“Your legs are asleep.”
“Not as much as my brain,” said Ted. “Those dreams
must mean something. I just can’t think what.”
“Neither can I,” said Ruth. “Maybe the refreshment
will revive our failing wits.”
They came out blinking into the glittering
sunshine. The trees around them were mostly oaks, and clutched
still their dry brown leaves. The wind hissed in them. Their trunks
were greened over with moss. A little ahead the wood grew up
against tall gray rocks spotted with moss and lichen, the lichen
delicate as lace, the moss as green as beryls. There was a cleft in
those rocks.
The floor of the forest was crisp oak leaves, with
damp ones underneath. The path Randolph found and led them along
was rocky and rather narrow. Randolph stopped at the cleft in the
rocks, and everybody crowded behind him and looked through it. It
was wide enough for three or four people to walk abreast. A bar of
sunlight sharp and vivid as a piece of yellow silk fell halfway
along the stone floor from the opening at the other end.
Randolph, without saying anything, walked quickly
through the cleft and out the other side, and they followed him,
Ruth and Ted together and Andrew behind them. They came onto a
little lawn of short grass and goldenrod. Beyond this, the slope
dropped very swiftly, and through ribbons of mist Ted saw a winding
water laid out like a sleeping snake, striped with water-weed and
bordered by purple loosestrife and whole clouds of goldenrod.
There was a house on the other side of the water.
Tile for red roof tile, window for leaded window, graceful front
and awkward wing and gray stone and white and faint yellow, it was
a copy of the house at One Trumpet Street, Claudia’s house, that
Ted and Laura had done their best to burn to the ground.
“That’s where we may have refreshment?” said
Ruth.
“How not?” said Randolph, without turning. “Thou
didst have’t in th’other house.”
“Yes, but if Claudia wasn’t in that one, won’t she
be here? I don’t want to be entertained by Claudia, thank you very
much.”
“’Tis not her house,” said Randolph.
He started down the hill; and again, they followed
him. Ted cast a quick look at Andrew. Claudia’s brother looked as
he had looked in her other house: as if he felt creepy. It didn’t
make him walk any slower, thought Ted. All these people appeared to
be of the type that takes the earliest dentist’s appointment that
offers itself, just to get it over with.
They reached the shore of the lake, and turned
right to walk around its near end. The flowering plants were
pleasant to look at, and the little slosh of the waves on the shore
was pleasant also; but Ted did not like the look of the lake. It
was flat and shining, but it was not clear. The morning sun laid no
glittering path across it. It looked like a Midwestern sky before a
very bad thunderstorm.
They walked up a narrow dirt path to the house. It
had no lawn; goldenrod grew up to its foundations and covered half
the steps to the porch. These had once been painted blue, but were
weathered gray with only thin streaks of color remaining. The
windows of the house were filmed with dirt, and drifts of leaves
and dead grass lay in the corners of the porch.
Edward said mellifluously, Egypt’s might is
tumbled down / Down a down the deeps of thought. Oh, go to
sleep, can’t you, thought Ted; and a whole concourse of voices rose
up and answered him. Macbeth shall sleep no more; / To die: to
sleep; / No more; and, by a sleep to say we end / The heartache and
the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to. We have come,
last and best, to that still center where the spinning world sleeps
on its axis, to the heart of rest. Lay on thy whips, O love, that
me upright, poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed May sleep.
Knit up the ravelled sleeve of care, and scatter thy silver dew on
every flower that shuts its sweet eyes in timely sleep. Life death
does end and each day dies with sleep.
“Randolph!” shouted Ted over the din.
“Though you bind it with the blowing wind,” said
Ruth, “and buckle it with the moon, the night will slip away like
sorrow or a tune.”
“That is most certain,” said Randolph, turning from
a gloomy perusal of the house.
He took Ted and Ruth each by a shoulder, and said,
“Now heed me. A little firmness shall set them packing. But fix
your eyes on some common object and consider not its name, nor any
word. Thereafter, but guard your thoughts and speak not to them,
and you shall do very well.”
Ted obediently looked at the black woolen hem of
Ruth’s cloak, snagged in five places and spotted with mud. The
voices quieted and vanished.
“That’s better,” he said, and no chorus
commented.
“Yes, it is,” said Ruth.
“Good; you have the knack of it,” said
Randolph.
“What is this yammering?” demanded Andrew. He had
gone up the porch steps already, and nobody had paid much attention
to him. He was quite pale, and his forehead was damp. “Why is the
air full of voices?”
“Oh,” said Ruth.
Ted looked at her quickly, but she was frowning at
the ground, so he turned back to Andrew. “What foul trick is this?”
cried Andrew.
“Peace, break thee off,” said Randolph.
“Look, where it comes again!” said Andrew, wildly.
“In the same figure like the king that’s dead!” He checked as if
somebody had hit him, and then ran down the peeling steps and
seized Randolph by the shoulders.
“Read me this riddle,” he said between his teeth,
and shook Randolph.
“A little firmness,” said Randolph, rather jerkily,
but with no evident surprise or anger, “sets them packing. Do you
smooth out your mind, my lord, but while one with moderate haste
might tell a dozen, and they’ll quit you.”
“Smooth out my mind,” said Andrew, as if Randolph
had suggested something both impossible and repellent. “Drink up
eisel; eat a crocodile.” He stopped shaking Randolph, but Ted saw
his fingers close hard on the stained wool of Randolph’s cloak and
on the flesh under it. “What foul place is this, that but requires
we do divide ourselves from our fair judgment, without the which we
are pictures or mere beasts?”
“For the merest jot of time,” said Randolph. If
Andrew was hurting him, he showed no sign of it. He put a hand over
one of Andrew’s and said mildly, “What fear you? Are you so
splenitive and rash that in so short a time reason shall flee you?
How do you sleep? Think, man; you’re muddy-mettled with this
yammering.”
“Answer me again,” said Andrew.
“I cannot,” said Randolph, still mildly. He
wrenched himself out of Andrew’s grasp and took the porch steps two
at a time. He strode hollowly across the porch, grasped the knocker
of the door, and slammed it down with a violence Ted suspected he
wanted to use on Andrew. The sound echoed inside the house.
Randolph turned and said, “Andrew, there’s no
answer that can please you. Shall I say, these are the
grazing-grounds of the unicorns, whose meat is words and their
drink music?”
“Pah!” said Andrew.
“Andrew,” said Ruth, to Ted’s surprise, “if you
won’t think of nothing, try thinking of something nobody would ever
write poetry about.”
“Go to,” said Andrew.
“Then will you let me try a superstition?”
Andrew shrugged. Ted saw that he was hardly
listening to her; even that “go to” might have been spoken to the
clamoring voices.
“Come up on the porch, then,” said Ruth. “I want to
get everybody. Ted, you might have to help.”
Ted followed her up onto the porch. It creaked
alarmingly under all their weight. The door was gray and weathered,
its carvings threaded with fine cracks. The knocker must originally
have been brass; it was now green. This one was not the dead rat;
it was a long, whiskery dragon holding in its formidable teeth the
drooping and very dead-looking body of a unicorn.
“That’s disgusting,” said Ruth.
It made Ted very uneasy, but it also made him want
to grin. He said, “If it is the unicorns yammering, I can see how
somebody might get tired of them. And think of all their nasty
jokes.”
“It’s still disgusting.”
“None answereth,” said Randolph, and put his hand
on the door.
“No, wait,” said Ruth. “Please, may I employ a
superstition first? My mind mislikes me.”
“Superstition mislikes me,” said Randolph,
frowning.
“I dreamt a prayer last night,” said Ruth, “and I
want to say it, that’s all.”
“What manner of prayer?” said Randolph.
Ruth grinned at Ted and said, “‘And from the sword
(Lord) save your heart, / By my might and power, / And keep your
heart, your darling dear, / From Dogs that would devour.’”
Ted said, “‘And from the Dragon’s mouth that would
/ You all in sunder shiver, / And from the horns of Unicorns / Lord
safely you deliver.’”
“Thou didst dream this?” said Randolph. Ted could
not tell what he thought of it.
“I dreamed it too,” said Ted.
“They’re quiet,” said Andrew. His face cleared and
settled into his usual calm. He bowed to Ruth and said, with no
sarcasm that Ted could detect, “Lady, I do thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Ruth.
Randolph looked from her to Ted to Andrew, with the
face of somebody who is trying to remember a poem and has it all
except for the first line. Ted felt the same way, but dared not
indulge the wish to compare speculations with Randolph; not when
Andrew was listening. He made a helpless face at Randolph.
Randolph scowled at him. Then he shrugged, and
said, “Let us go in.”
Ted put both hands on the dry, rough wood of the
doors, and pushed. They swung open, grating, and a cold gust of
dusty air swept out onto the porch and clouded the clear smell of
the morning. Randolph walked into the front hall with Ted on his
heels. Before them on the left was a narrow flight of steps from
which the faded remnants of red carpet hung dismally, and on the
right a long hall whose walls were studded with picture hooks.
There was no rug on the floor, only the thick gray dust.
“Some have been here,” said Randolph.
Ted looked more closely at the dust, and saw a line
of footprints that looked as if they had come from ballet slippers,
several lines of prints from cats or other small animals, and a
number of odd impressions that looked more like craters on the moon
than anything else. These all led down the long hall.
Ted looked at Randolph, and they went down the hall
also, with the other two behind them. It led to a sun porch running
the whole width of the house at the back, whose three outside walls
were all windows. From the windows of the right-hand wall they
could see the fields of goldenrod staggering uphill to meet the
brilliant sky. But the windows of the left-hand wall looked out on
a view from High Castle: the glassy lake, the slopes of forest, the
insubstantial mountains. And every little diamond-shaped pane in
the back wall held a different picture.
Ted took hold of Randolph’s wrist before he
realized what he was doing. “Here,” he said. “Here’s where she does
it.”
Randolph wore a very Patrick-like expression, alert
and interested. He moved closer to the back wall, towing Ted with
him. He laid his other hand over Ted’s clutching one and said,
without looking at him, “How may we govern what we see?”
“I don’t know,” said Ted. “If you try to
concentrate on a particular piece of a scene that’s there, you’ll
be able to see it as if you were quite close to it. But I don’t
know how you determine what scene is there in the first
place.”
They all peered at the wall; then Randolph put his
hand on a pane right before Ted’s nose. Ted moved back a little and
then, reluctantly, looked at the view it offered. He saw the
topmost room of Apsinthion’s house, the one full of mirrors. A
black night sky with three stars in it pressed against the
skylight. The room was lit with the peculiar harsh glare of
fluorescents. The man himself stood in the middle of the room,
surrounded by bubbling pools of purple. He was laughing. They
sounded angry, like tomato sauce that is boiling too fast. Ted
recognized them. They were the water-beasts you could find around
High Castle.
The voice of the man in red came faintly out of the
window.
“I’m fire,” he said to the sputtering creatures,
“and you are but the semblance of water melded with the actuality
of earth. Wherefore shall you damage me? Who hath served you so
discourteously as to send you to this comfortless house wherein no
wish of yours may be gratified save that to be instantly gone
again? May I make amends, I shall do so.” The water-beasts began a
prolonged and confused sploshing and smacking; they sounded like a
mudball fight on a very wet day.
“That’s him, Randolph!” said Ted. “The man who sent
us back.”
“That,” said Randolph, “is no shape that I
know.”
Ruth said behind them, “Can he hear us?”
Randolph said promptly, “My lord Apsinthion!”
The man in the window did not look up.
“Who might say he was fire?” asked Ruth.
“Any one might say so,” said Randolph. His jaw
dropped slightly; his hand fell away from Ted’s, and he turned and
leaned heedlessly on the glass wall and looked at Ted and Ruth, and
over their heads at Andrew lingering in the doorway. “Any one might
say so,” said Randolph, with a startling exuberance, “but one only
so saith truthfully.”
Ted felt bewildered, and Ruth looked it.
Andrew said resignedly from the doorway,
“Belaparthalion,” in about the way an eight-year-old who has just
discovered where his parents are hiding the Christmas presents
might say, to a younger sibling, “Santa Claus.”
Randolph turned around and addressed the wall
again. “Belaparthalion,” he said.
The man in red swung a mirror parallel with the
floor, apparently to show the water-beasts themselves in it, and
took no notice.
“If Claudia put him in there,” said Ted, “probably
only Claudia can get him out.”
“He doesn’t look very upset,” observed Ruth.
“That’s for the dragon-shape,” said Randolph.
Ted backed up until he was standing next to Ruth,
and looked the whole wall over. It seemed to have some method in
its arrangement. The scenes from the front door’s carvings, from
the tapestries in High Castle, were all there, two in each corner
and the last one in the middle of the wall. Ted concentrated on
that. All the animals fled from the center of the little diamond
pane, where there was a ragged hole like a nail-tear in a shirt.
Ted went quickly forward, but the pane was above his line of sight.
“Randolph,” he said, “of your courtesy, look on this pane here and
consider carefully the hole in the middle.”
Randolph looked away from some window in the lower
right corner, blinking a little. “Gladly, an thou wilt look on this
one,” he said.
Ted changed places with him, but watched him rather
than the window. Randolph leaned his forehead against the glass and
then jerked back. “It’s warm,” he said.
“I know,” said Ted. “What do you see?”
“Profound darkness,” said Randolph. “And a golden
glow in its midst, like unto an apple of Feren in its color, but
unto the sun drawn by an artist in its shape.”
“And in the midst of the golden glow?”
“A sword that shineth blue, and in its hilt three
blue stones.”
“Like Shan’s sword. Is there anything in the
sword?”
Randolph was still for a long time. Ted looked at
the pane Randolph had assigned him. It showed a moonlit clearing in
an evergreen forest. Somebody stooped and lit a fire; the red light
washed up cheerily and Ted saw that it was Claudia. She sat down on
a stump, and three black cats climbed into her lap, complaining.
She laughed and said to them in the throaty voice Ted remembered,
“There shall be fish tomorrow.”
Ted looked at the wedge of the black sky visible in
the upper part of the pane, and stared at it until it widened and
filled the whole diamond. It was full of stars.
“Naught within the sword,” said Randolph.
“See if you can identify these constellations,”
said Ted.
Randolph knelt beside him and stared obediently.
“Those are northern stars,” he said. “As you might see at the
furthest tip of Fence’s Country, in the realm of
Belaparthalion.”
“So Claudia and her cats are right where the rest
of them are going?”
“Or have been; or will be. Saidst thou not that, in
that other house, were scenes both past and present and to
come?”
“We’d better warn them just in case,” said
Ruth.
“What we need’s a ladder, or a stool,” said Ted.
“Somebody ought to peruse every one of these panes.”
“Do you begin on the lowermost,” said Randolph,
“and one shall relieve you.”
“I’ll bring you some tea,” said Ruth, “if there’s
any to be had.”
Ted thanked her. The rest of them trooped out, and
he settled down to his task. It was worse than looking something up
in The Oxford English Dictionary. There were distractions
everywhere. Any pane on which he fixed his attention would stir to
life and begin its slow progression; but most of them held nothing
that he recognized. Many showed only empty landscapes. He went back
to the pane that held Claudia and her campfire, but she just sat
there petting her cats while the fire died. She might do something
in five hours, or five minutes, but how could you tell? Ted went on
watching her anyway. The voice he thought of as Edward’s, and which
was beginning to distinguish itself from those other voices, said,
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad
stories of the death of kings.
“That,” said Ted, “is what got us into this
mess.”
Nor are we out of it.
“Is that really you?” said Ted. “Edward Fairchild,
heir to the throne of the Hidden Land?”
To err is human, said Edward dimly; and Ted
felt his shadowy presence dim also and go out. He shook his head
and went back to staring at the windows.