“I think we should take a break,” said Ted.
“Well, we must all to our studies,” said Fence, pushing his chair back. “Bear yourselves meekly, I beg of you; and should you see Benjamin, stand aside from his path.”
CHAPTER 7
SHE dozed in the dusty house. The windows of her mind were open. If anything happened that concerned her, she would dream of it. The six cats dreamed now, twitching, and gave her sleep a faint background of breathless rushing and the taste of blood. The water-beasts were lavishly entertained by the courtesies of the man Apsinthion; their smugness mingled with the cats’. The voices that abode in this place sang lullabies. This did not mean that they had forgiven her, but that they could, for a time, forget.
The music that summoned her burst in like a shower of hail. She had sprung to her feet before her eyes opened. No echo drifted in the sun with the dust motes. The cats slept on. The voices altered and proclaimed, The way was long, the wind was cold, the hemlock umbrels tall and fair, whilst we have slept we have grown old, his house is in the village there.
She looked intently at her left ankle, with the cat scratch, and the smear of dirt on the bone, and the little faint scar from the unicorn’s hoof. The voices ceased. One instrument could reach so into her sleep; and one person knew what music to play on it. The music was old and well loved; anyone might play it; that might be chance. But play it on that flute? She stood up and went along the dim hall to the back room, and found after a moment’s thought a pane on the upper right of the back wall.
“Cedric,” she said. “Thy playing troubleth me.”
Her second lover had long, dark hair and green eyes and looked more like Randolph than she had remembered. He gazed out of the little diamond pane at her, and the red stone in the ring he wore glared at her like the eye of an angry wolf. He said, in his snug, deep voice, “When art thou?”
“In September of the four hundred and ninetieth year since King John defeated the Dragon King.”
“In August of that eventful year,” he said, laughter limning his voice, “I did give my flute away. Look elsewhere for the source of thy discomfort. I’ll trouble thee no more.”
“You will trouble me always,” she said; for what use, after all, could he make of this weakness now?
“Thou troublest thyself,” he said.
“Who had the flute from thee?”
“Laura,” said he. “Princess of the Secret Country.”
“Thou fool,” said Claudia. “The Princess of the Secret Country died in June. That was a creature of mine.”
“I do not think so,” he said. “Look again.” And he turned and walked away from her. She leaned her forehead on the soft, warm glass and stared at him with all her strength. The clearing in the forest where he had stood formed itself for her, each dead brown needle as precise as a jewel on the merchant’s velvet. But she could not bring him back.
To think of following him into the dark backward and abysm of time, leaving her plots half-woven, strings dangling from the loom, was foolish. But her smile was not for its foolishness. She was tired. The tools she had brought to finish out the pattern were rebellious. One of them had the flute of Cedric. It was too late to make improvisations in the pattern. They would look like mistakes. They would be mistakes. Unless this should be not the weaving’s border, but its middle.
“Look again,” he had said. She laid her hand on one of the larger panes in the left-hand wall. “Purgos Aipos,” she said. She could not step through, but she could see. The creature Laura was afraid of the water-beasts; but she loved cats.
CHAPTER 8
WHEN the council was over, Ruth took her green-bound book up to her own room, where she locked the door and curled up in a tall, carved chair liberally supplied with cushions. She had filched the cushions from around High Castle. Lady Ruth must have enjoyed being uncomfortable.
Ruth opened the book and was disappointed. The section concerning the Green Caves was a collection of translated extracts from works she had already, painfully, read in their original tongues. Celia had been kind, but she couldn’t have been thinking. How did she suppose Ruth had gotten through three months as an apprentice?
Ruth laid the book down and sat looking at the room. Lady Ruth had a huge rag rug in green and red and blue; an undersized bed covered with a silk quilt in the same colors, with blue wool curtains; twelve narrow tapestries depicting the plants most precious to the Green Caves in excruciating and, given the medium, unbelievable, detail; three deep, narrow windows overlooking the vegetable garden; the chair, the table, a hanging cabinet full of glassware, and two chests in dark wood. Unlike the Princesses Laura and Ellen, she had no dolls, musical instruments, or abandoned sewing projects. Whatever Lady Ruth did besides sleep and dress in white, she did it elsewhere; and whatever she owned that was not practical, she kept it elsewhere.
Ruth had never bothered to find out where, if anywhere, Lady Ruth kept the appurtenances of her life. But it was with this in mind, rather than the useful intention of finding out what she could before she was barred from the Green Caves by her resignation, that she went downstairs again.
The actual Green Caves were far to the west in a place called, predictably, the Cavernous Domains. The members of the school of Green Sorcery in High Castle had possession of the original wine cellars, the ones built for the inner white castle. These were naturally rather damp, but it was the skill of this branch of sorcery to turn such attributes to an asset. Ruth wended her way down and inward to one last cold, dusty stair, pushed open a wooden door stoutly bound with iron, and entered into a warm place of light and greenery, a circumscribed botanical garden.
Ruth went briskly past all its riches, through another iron-bound door, and into a long corridor carpeted in yellow and lavishly lit with golden lamps. There she stopped, considering. The first room on the right was the apprentices’ library; the second was Meredith’s study; the third was the journeymen’s library; the fourth was a refectory. The first room on the left was the potting room; the second was where they dried the herbs; the third was where the artists worked; and the fourth led to a suite of guest chambers for visitors who preferred to sleep underground. If the game and reality ran together in this instance, those chambers had been furnished for the Dwarves.
Ruth walked down the hall and put her hand to the door of the guest-chambers. It opened readily and she stepped inside and shut it. There were two dim purple torches here, one to either side of the doorway; and one of the golden lamps at the far end of the room. It had been meant for Dwarves, all right. Ruth tried all the chairs and benches, one after the other, like Goldilocks. The room was tidy, but smelled of damp and stone and some odd medicinal thing that might have been the torches burning, or might not.
Ruth tried the door at the other side of this sitting-room. It also opened, and showed her a square hallway off which opened three more doors. Two of these led to sleeping rooms, each with four small beds and four chests and four purple torches. The third led to a larger room lit powerfully with a dozen golden lamps. Ruth took one look, bolted inside, and shut the door hard. On the hearthrug was worked a large and perfectly recognizable cardinal.
All the walls were lined from the floor to the twelve-foot ceiling with shelves, and all the shelves were crammed with books. There were books on the floor amid the cushions. There were books on the table in the center of the room and on all chairs around it. If this library was like the others in High Castle, there was no card catalogue. If you were lucky, there would be an index, arranged by some useless criterion such as the date on which the book had entered the library. Any index would be in the charge of Meredith, who would, presumably, hand it over to her guests.
She wouldn’t hand it over to Ruth. Ruth had disgraced herself back in June, when she had, to all appearances, revealed to Ellen and Patrick one of the protective sorceries the Green Sorcerers had planted around High Castle. Meredith had demoted her to apprentice and kept her there.
Ruth lea
ned on the door. What was it that had made her think to come here? Lady Ruth knew; but Lady Ruth’s knowledge, like this library, had no card catalogue. Ruth could read the old language the books of the Green Caves were written in, with frequent recourse to a dictionary. She could, when trapped into some ceremony of the Green Caves, make any responses that Lady Ruth had once been assigned. She couldn’t remember them beforehand and spare herself apprehension. And she could not, now, call into the lighted spaces of her mind the reason she had come to this library.
She walked forward into the room and began turning over the books on the table. She thought doggedly about other things: the Australian accent that made even the plainest of the boys at school worth listening to; the fact that she had forgotten to sew the middle button back onto her denim skirt; how Shan had chewed up her copy of The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Finally, in desperation, she began reciting poetry. She didn’t know much, unlike Ellen, who memorized it with the same speed and dispatch with which she ate chocolate. “With blackest moss the flower-plots / Were thickly crusted, one and all,” she announced to the cold, swept fireplace. “The rusted nails fell from the knots / That held the pear to the garden-wall.”
And with the same thoughtless assurance, the same swift walk of habit, with which she used to make for the science fiction shelf in the library at home, Ruth walked to the shelves on the right of the fireplace, knelt down, and extracted from the middle of the bottom shelf three small volumes bound in red.
“Bingo!” said Ruth, unpoetically; and she sat down on the hearthrug, folded her legs up under the full white skirt, and began to read.
The books were written in a relatively plain English. The spelling was abominable. They were titled A Short History of the Dwarves; but the Dwarves, Ruth thought, might have found it a rather narrow and unrepresentative history. They were really the story of the impingement of the sorcerous methods of the Dwarves on the philosophy of the schools of sorcery in these central lands: the Hidden Land, Fence’s Country, the Dubious Hills, the Great Desert, the Kingdom of Dust, and the Forested Slopes. The Dwarves had chosen three animals, the raven, the marten, and the sunfish; and by some combination of magic and what sounded to Ruth like genetics, had bred them to be magical beasts, capable of acting as spies and messengers but having in them, like the dragon or the unicorn, an unchancy element that would play you false when you could least afford it.
The Dwarves, who had a fondness for green growing things but a dislike for living aboveground, had traded knowledge with the sorcerers of the middle lands. So now the Dwarves had botanical gardens under the earth, and the Green Caves had the services of snakes and fishes and the little burrowing mouse; while the Blue Sorcerers, like Fence and Randolph, could call upon the cat, the dog, the horse, or the eagle. The Yellow Sorcerers might tame the lesser hawks, the squirrel, or the black bear. And the Red Sorcerers had made intelligent, useful, and unchancy the red deer, certain finches, and the cardinal.
Ruth stuck her feet, which had gone to sleep some time ago, ungracefully out in front of her. “Oh, Lord,” she said. She had thought the cardinals were servants of the Green Caves. The Green Caves people, however mysterious and testy, were benevolent. The Red Sorcerers were another thing entirely. Several centuries ago, they had made themselves so unpopular that the quarreling, backbiting, bitterly independent members of the other three schools had ganged up on them and tossed them out of the middle lands. Red Sorcerers were said to infest the seacoast countries, and to be allowed grudgingly in the Outer Isles. But not in the Hidden Land.
But Claudia wore red. Ruth jumped up, scattering books; and then made herself sit down again. Fence and Randolph must know this already. And Benjamin; what had Benjamin said to Ted? “I would not come between the cardinal and its charges. If thou art one.” Those were not the words of someone who had discovered that the messengers of an outcast school of sorcery were abroad in his adopted country. And Randolph had said to Patrick, when a cardinal’s interruption saved him from having to practice fencing, “I knew ’twas folly to allow rival magics in this castle.” But the rival magics were the Green Caves and the Blue Sorcery. And these rooms were for Dwarves, who were not Red Sorcerers; and yet there was a cardinal on the hearthrug.
“You are about as dumb as they make them,” Ruth said aloud. There was no need to sneak around like this. All she had to do was ask Fence and Randolph.
Except that Fence and Randolph either had not known or had not wanted to tell her. To her suggestion that she prowl around a little, trying if she might discover more about the cardinals, they had returned only the bland silence that implies consent.
“Jerks,” said Ruth, bitterly. She shoved the three books back into their place, stood up, and, leaning on the marble mantelpiece with its useless candles in their silver holders, she said, “O’Driscoll drove with a song / The wild duck and the drake / From the tall and the tufted reeds / Of the drear Hart Lake. / And he saw how the reeds grew dark / At the coming of night tide, / And dreamed of the long dim hair / Of Bridget his bride.”
And walked, with the brisk thoughtless stride of habit, across the room, and stretched her arm up as far as she could, and tipped down a thin volume minus its binding, tied up with blue ribbon.
All of the books were copied by hand; the Secret Country had not yet discovered the glories of moveable type. The copyists, for the most part, had a tidy and invariable script; you often forgot, reading it, that somebody had painstakingly traced every letter with the sharpened quill of a goose feather. But this book was written in longhand, rather cramped and spiky. Ruth sat down in the nearest chair and began to read.
It began in the midst of a sentence. “. . . air is fulle of Voyces,” it said. The spelling was abominable here, too, but it was consistent. If the writer spelled “only” as “onlie,” he did so every time.
Ruth found neither enlightenment nor much entertainment in this work; but she plodded through all of it. “To banish such Voyces,” she read, “it is above all Else necessarie that thou banishest wordes from the threshold of thy mind and heart. These Voyces do gain their powre from chance wordes thy mind or mouth shall let fall.”
As she read on, it seemed likely that it was some lesson of the Blue Sorcerers; it spoke of the habits of cats and dogs and horses and eagles, and how to address them with one’s Inmost Voice. That subject exhausted, the writer began a dissertation on the nature of enchanted weapons, and ended suddenly in the middle of a paragraph.
“Bother!” said Ruth, and slammed the book back into its place. There was nothing in its vicinity that looked like what had come before or after it. “Well,” said Ruth, “let’s hope third time pays for all.” She scowled at the rug; she was running out of poetry. She cast around in her memory, and grinned. “Egypt’s might is tumbled down / Down a-down the deeps of thought; / Greece is fallen and Troy town, / Glorious Rome hath lost her crown, / Venice’ pride is naught. / But the dreams their children dreamed / Fleeting, insubstantial, vain, / Shadowy as the shadows seemed, / Airy nothing, as they deemed, / These remain.”
And thoughtlessly she took from the table before her, from under five or six tumbled volumes, a fat black book stamped with gold lettering: On the Mingling of Sorceries as They Had Been Paints on a Palette, its Benefits and Disasters.
“Well, hallelujah!” said Ruth. Having no hat, she flung her handkerchief into the air and, when it fell back down onto her head, burst out laughing.
Fence did not laugh. Fence, whom Ruth sought over all the first two levels of High Castle and finally found, resignedly, in his own room at the top of his two hundred and eight steps, was appalled. He knew the book, but he had not known that the sorcerers of the Green Caves possessed a copy. Nor had he known that the short history of the Dwarves existed, or that the origins of his own knowledge might be as those red volumes claimed. It was hard to say which discovery upset him more.
“I’d thought there was one copy only,” he said, holding the fat black book in one hand and absentl
y pouring wine for Ruth with the other.
Ruth pushed her glass under the effervescent pale stream and said, “Thank you, that’s enough. Why are you so surprised? Didn’t you tell us that those purple water-things were the result of combining Green and Blue sorcery?”
“No,” said Fence, putting the bottle down and looking up sharply, “you told us.”
“You didn’t deny it,” said Ruth.
“It’s true,” said Fence, paging through the book. “But look you, we had thought that was the only instance of such meddling, for that the results were so ill. Claudia’s knife wherewith she made to stab me below was also of that combination, wherefore we knew her to be renegade. But that the cardinal began as the Red Magicians’ servant is ill news, and fresh. More’s amiss than Claudia.” He shut the book. “Read you aught else?”
Ruth described the fragment bound in blue ribbons. Fence’s face darkened. “That,” he said, “is the journal of Shan. If they came by it honestly, they had given it into our keeping.” He stood up. “Rest here. I think I must speak with Meredith.”
“Fence, you can’t! She’ll kill me!”
“Well,” said Fence. “What keys and knowledge are needful, to find this library?”
“No keys,” said Ruth. “It’s in the old wine cellars.”
“I might wander there, as well as anyone,” said Fence. “Fear me not, I’ll contrive some tale.” He grinned. “And this also may serve as the reason whereby I shall remove you from their influence. You need not resign, lady; we’ll forbid you their company.”
Ruth, full of profound misgivings that she could barely articulate even to herself, got up quickly. “Fence, is this wise? Do you want to start a major fight between two schools of magicians on the eve of your departure?”