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.