Philo stared at these in some perplexity. “Do those only come up in spring? It was spring when I left for Arth. It ought to be summer if—”
“Or we’ve been away a whole year,” Josh suggested. “I think we’d better go and ask someone—in a roundabout way, of course, or they’ll realize we’ve broken the law.”
With Zillah and Philo each hauling on an arm, Josh struggled to his legs and they went cautiously out of the grove. At the far end of the pool, the water ran out in a stream over a carefully built small wooden lock, and a path led beside the stream, out of the grove and into sunlight strong enough to dazzle them all again. They halted nervously, shading their eyes.
There was a woman a few yards downstream. She was coming toward them on the path, halting from time to time to test the carefully turfed banks of the stream with a long tool. She was an idyllic sight. Long coal black hair blew in the breeze around her shoulders, and her faded blue-gray gown was blown to outline her figure. She was a beautiful woman, disturbingly familiar and strange at the same time. She looked around, seeing them, and Zillah could have sworn for a moment that it was Amanda staring at them.
Marcus had no doubt. With a loud shout of “Badder!” he set off down the path toward her as fast as his legs could take him. “Badder! Badder! Badder!”
Zillah set off after him, and Philo with her. Analogue of Amanda or not, the woman was a total stranger and might not care for a small boy hurling himself upon her. A dirty small boy. The pyjama suit Marcus had been wearing all their time in Arth was gray at the knees and rear and splotched down the front. The real Amanda would have found it bad enough, let alone this unknown image of her.
The woman, however, darted to meet Marcus even faster than Zillah ran after him. She reached him fractionally first and swept him gladly up in one arm. The bag of toys thumped to the ground and came open, spilling everything over the path. Zillah and Philo stopped, for fear of treading on Marcus’s treasures.
“Doy! Doy!” Marcus draped himself desperately over the woman’s arm.
“I’m so sorry,” Zillah said as she stooped to gather the toys up.
“Leave those,” said the woman. It was an absolute command. Her voice was high and chilly, and nothing like Amanda’s.
Zillah slowly stood up, staring at her, wondering how she could ever have taken her for Amanda. Her hair was not even very dark, and arranged in careful gleaming tresses which the wind had scarcely power to move. Her dress was indeed blue-gray, but it was of satin as stiff as her tresses, in a high-fashion mode that Zillah thought as displeasing as it was strange—a matter of two huge puffed panniers descending from the woman’s armpits around a tight whaleboned bodice that spread into a hooped divided skirt. Against it, Marcus looked even filthier. The kicking cloth feet of his pyjama suit were black and shiny as leather, except where one toe was coming through.
With a fleeting wonder as to however this woman managed to pee in such a dress, Zillah looked into her face. It was nothing like Amanda’s, being pretty and heart-shaped, with faint, hard lines of age to it. It dismayed Zillah utterly. It was the woman’s eyes, which were dark. They were eyes that greedily, urgently, and softly sought out what was valuable and vulnerable in Zillah and drank it in, without giving anything back. Mother’s eyes, Zillah thought. You could easily mistake such eyes for those of a kindly student of humanity, unless you knew Mother.
“Perhaps you’d better give me my son,” Zillah said. Marcus was still reaching and crying after his toys, and Philo, after one startled look at the woman, was doggedly picking them up.
“I will not,” said the woman. “Gualdian, I said to leave those.” The thing in her right hand, which Zillah had taken for a tool, was actually a long rod rather like a scepter, with a strange, ugly little head grinning from the end she held. When Philo took no notice of what she said, she reached out and tapped him with the rod. Philo cried out and dropped the toys. For a moment he seemed unable to move. When he did move, it was to clap one hand to the shoulder she had tapped and turn his face up to the woman in horror. He was whiter than Zillah had ever seen him. His eyes had gone enormous.
Marcus saw it and was shocked into silence. Great tears rolled down his face. Seeing them and seeing Philo, Zillah stepped forward in an access of anger and wrenched Marcus away. “You’ve no right to do that!”
Marcus’s tears had splotched the woman’s gown. She let him go with a shudder. “I have every right,” she said. “I am Marceny Listanian, and you are trespassing on my estate. You used unwarranted power to come here, too. I warn you that we do not treat such things lightly in Leathe. You are all under arrest. Tell that centaur to come out of the grove at once.”
Zillah whirled around to find a number of men and several women, who all wore versions of the hooped and panniered costume, hurrying toward them. They must have been concealed behind the trees of the grove. Now they were jumping the irrigation ditches that crisscrossed the flat field in order to spread out and surround Zillah and Philo. Josh was between the last two trees on the path. All his hooves were braced and he was holding on to the trees as if some compulsion were forcing him forward.
“Stay where you are, Josh!” Zillah shouted.
Josh did not reply, but he slowly retreated backward, handing himself from tree to tree, until he was out of sight in the grove. Somehow, Zillah had no doubt that he was safe there. She turned back to find that the rest of the people had arrived around them on both sides of the stream. The women were of all ages, and all, without exception, finely dressed and coiffured. Their perfume blew on the warm wind in muggy waves. The men mostly wore old-looking, rustic breeches and shirts, but there were one or two among them dressed in bright garments almost as fine as the women’s. One in particolored red and yellow, like a jester, caught Zillah’s eye as he leaped easily across a little ditch and came to stand on the other side of the stream.
She knew him at once. It was like a shock—whether of horror or joy, she did not know—to see him real and warm and moving, and in that silly jester’s suit, so like Mark and so utterly unlike. He knew her too. He stopped dead and they stared at each other over the stream. His shock and concern, his unbelieving glance at Marcus, made him for an instant look almost like Mark. Then his jauntily bearded face moved back into the cynical laughing shape which, she saw sadly, was habitual to it.
“Well now, Mother,” he said. “What do you want done with these people?”
“Bring them to me in the small audience hall,” the woman in blue-gray replied. “And the centaur too, if you can get him out.” Saying which, she turned and walked away along the stream. After she had gone a few yards, her figure appeared to ripple. She became transparent and, quite quickly, melted out of sight entirely.
The rest seemed to relax a little as soon as she was gone. Two of the men got Philo to his feet, and—Zillah could not help noticing—they handled him carefully and tenderly, as if they had more than a notion of how he was feeling. Philo was still very pale, and he did not seem to be able to use his right arm.
“You may as well pick those up,” Herrel said to one of the girls, pointing to the toys strewn in the path.
“Why?” she said irritably, glancing at Marcus. “It’s only a boy child.” But she and another woman got down among their billowing satins and started collecting toys.
Two other women, both older, took Zillah’s elbows and urged her along the path. Zillah resisted. Marcus was leaning over her shoulder reaching for his toys. “Doy!” he said urgently.
“And someone had better go and see if they can tempt that centaur out from under the Goddess’s skirts,” Herrel said. “You—Ladny and Sigry—you’d be best at it.”
Zillah felt both the women holding her stiffen. One said acidly, “Don’t you speak to me like that. I don’t take my orders from you.”
“Don’t you indeed?” said Herrel. “How shocking of me to suggest you might! All right. Sigry, take Andred and our sweet Aliky and see what you can do about my mother’
s orders.”
One of the girls who had been collecting toys nodded and handed the bag into Marcus’s eager fists. She even gave him a pleasant smile as she did so. She and the other older woman, together with one of the better-dressed men, set off toward the grove, calling out, “What if he won’t come out?”
“Besiege him,” said Herrel and leaped across the stream.
The woman called Ligny immediately flounced around and marched away along the path. From the way Herrel leered derisively at her stiff satin back, Zillah suspected that Herrel had got rid of her on purpose.
She became sure if it when they all moved off downstream and Herrel contrived to walk beside her, so near that she could catch the faint characteristic smell of him—Mark’s smell. It made her shake all over. She could scarcely carry Marcus, who was anyway writhing violently about in her arms to embrace his rescued toys.
“I’ll carry him if you like,” Herrel said. “Will he come to me?”
Feeling as if she could barely move, so conscious was she of Herrel beside her, Zillah twisted her head to look at Marcus. Some of his writhings, she found, had been in order to get himself into a position from which he could perform a grave inspection of Herrel. “Ike bad,” he remarked to her. “Airy bay.”
“Yes, I think so,” she said, and was surprised that her voice came out cool and normal.
“Here, then, fellow.” Herrel took Marcus out of her arms, making a somewhat clumsy job of the transfer. She could feel him shaking too. Under cover of their maneuverings, he whispered, “What in hellspoke’s name made you come here? You were safe. You’d left me—him.”
It was in a way incredible, that this man she had never met should whisper to her in Mark’s voice of things that had happened in another world. But even while she was feeling this amazement, Zillah was whispering back, “Because I couldn’t help it, as soon as I knew. I had to. Fetch Mark back. You need him.”
Herrel all but lost the bag of toys, but rescued it with a raised yellow satin knee, while he whispered, “I don’t know how to! For the gods’ sake, don’t say a word to my mother! She’d kill!” After which he contrived to gather up both Marcus and the bag and hoist them to his shoulder, remarking in a normal speaking voice, “So you think I’m a nice man, do you fellow, hairy face and all?”
“He must be the only person in the Pentarchy who thinks that then,” observed one of the women coming behind.
It showed Zillah that they could easily have been overheard. Herrel had taken a great risk. She blazed with joy that it was this important to him—still, after she had walked out on Mark that way, without even a word—and this joy mixed and warred confusingly with fear and dismay, and her guilt at bringing Josh and Philo into this. It was her fault. She was sure of that. In some way, getting them all out of Arth, she had been homing on Herrel, instinctively. She had only to think of the woman Marceny to see that this had been a disastrous thing to do. Yet for a short while this was less to her than the mere fact of being here, walking beside Herrel under the blue sky on the path beside the stream.
Nobody said anything much as they walked. From time to time the path crossed irrigation—or drainage—ditches leading from locks in the stream. Then they walked over carefully made plank bridges where everyone’s feet thundered, and, it seemed to Zillah, any amount of whispering could have been hidden in the noise. But Herrel did not say another word to her. The confusion of Zillah’s feelings began to sort itself out—as she told herself wryly, the confusion at least was familiar, since it was the way her mother worked, both on her and on Amanda—and she began to have suspicions.
She looked at Herrel frequently, pretending to be anxious about Marcus, who was placidly fingering Herrel’s beard as he rode in Herrel’s arms. The few words Herrel said were all to Marcus. “Don’t pull it out, fellow—it’s not grass, it’s hair.” He smiled as he said it with a sort of inane, contemptuous hilarity, as if life were to him nothing but a continuing silly joke. It was not a reassuring smile. It was possibly not quite sane. Zillah saw that Herrel’s face around the smile was even paler than Mark’s, and full of habitual creases of strain that had nothing to do with the smile. He looked deeply diseased. It began to be borne in upon Zillah that this fag-end left of Mark was not a man you could trust. Perhaps he had even intended someone to overhear him whispering to her—or at any rate, he had not cared.
But Marcus liked him. Zillah clung to that. Just as Marcus had taken to Tam Fairbrother and then Tod, he had taken one of his calm fancies to Herrel. Perhaps all was not lost.
They approached a stand of tall evergreen oaks. The path led around the trees to a shallow flight of steps, really a set of terraces climbing to a lawn. At the back of the lawn, bowered in the trees, was a mansion. It was built in a style so foreign to Zillah that the most she could have said of it was that it was gracious, and probably a good deal bigger than it looked. Palladian was the word that came to her, but she knew that was quite wrong. It was elegant, reposeful, and breathed out a menace so total that she gasped. Something crouched inside there that was implacably hungry and full of hatred. Marcus felt it too. He turned and looked at the building with his lower lip stuck out. But to everybody else it was obviously just the house. Their pace quickened and they crossed the lawn in a businesslike huddle, sweeping Zillah, Marcus, and Philo with them. Philo was carrying his arm and looking as scared as Zillah felt.
Up more shallow steps, among pillars and along a cloisterlike passage, they were swept, and finally into a small, lofty room paneled in some strange greenish wood. There was a dais at one end where Marceny was sitting, strumming at a small, painted harpsichord. As the double doors opened to let the party through, she smiled, nodded, and swung around on her stool to face them.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I’ll talk to the gualdian first.”
While Philo was being pushed toward her, Herrel quietly dumped Marcus on the floor beside Zillah and moved away to sit on the edge of the dais at his mother’s feet. Just the position, Zillah thought, that went with his jester’s clothing. Marcus leant against Zillah’s legs, thoroughly and unusually subdued.
“What’s your name, my boy?” Marceny asked Philo in a clear, kindly voice.
“Amphetron,” Philo said. Zillah tried not to let her surprise show. Philo knew this world and its dangers, and she did not. She realized she had better watch Philo’s responses closely and take her lead from him.
“And how did you come to be trespassing in my Goddess grove, Amphetron?” Marceny asked.
“I’ve no idea,” Philo answered. “We simply all found ourselves there.”
“You should call me ‘my lady’ or ‘Lady Marceny’ when you speak to me, you know,” Marceny pointed out, still in the kind and reasonable manner one might use to a small child. “And I really don’t think you should tell me naughty stories either, Amphetron. We all felt you coming for hours and hours before you arrived. One of you was using quite terrific power in order to get here.”
“And I suppose that gave you time to set up magework to disguise yourself—that, if you don’t mind my saying so, was a low trick,” Philo said. Zillah had not realized he could be so bold.
Marceny smiled. “Oh, I don’t mind your saying so if you feel the need. It was thoroughly simple mental magecraft, purely designed to fetch you all out of the grove, and it took me no time at all—nothing like the power you people were squandering. I notice you haven’t somehow confessed about that yet.”
“There’s nothing to confess. I don’t know what the power was,” Philo said. He seemed totally frank about it. “It must have come from outside us. We were in one grove and we suddenly found ourselves in yours. I apologize for alarming you.”
“One grove where, Amphetron?” Marceny asked.
“The king’s grove in the Orthe,” Philo said.
Zillah thought, from Marceny’s reaction, and Herrel’s, and the slight murmur from those around her, that Philo had played a bold stroke here and named a very important place. M
arceny said, with distinct caution—though her eyebrows were raised ready to disbelieve—“The king is a friend of yours, is he?”
“No, of my father’s,” Philo said, and his voice rang with truth. Philo, be careful! Zillah thought. She’s bound to check!
“Dear me,” Lady Marceny responded, with delicate incredulity. “Then the king and your no doubt eminent papa are going to want you back, aren’t they? Which of them would you prefer me to get in touch with?”
“The king,” Philo said. “If you would be so good.”
“Very well,” the lady said sweetly. “Meanwhile we shall, of course, keep you safely here. The king wouldn’t want to lose you. And of course, we’re always terribly glad to see gualdians here in Leathe. We suffer from such a dearth of gualdian blood. It’s such a hardship for us. Gualdians are so much better at magework than mere humans. But luckily, half-gualdians are quite as good. It’s a pity you’re such a funny little specimen. We’ll just have to hope that your offspring turn out a little more normal.”
Philo, for all his bold talk, must have known she was playing with him. As he realized the extent of it, his face flushed deep red. Herrel looked up and leered at him. Lady Marceny laughed outright.
“Or with such big feet,” she said. “It’s going to be quite hard to tempt any of my girls with you. But we can always use artificial insemination. It won’t hurt you a bit as long as you’re good and do what you’re told.”
Philo, with his face so dark with blood that he looked ill, started to say, “I—won’t—”
Lady Marceny held her hand up gracefully and stopped him. “Won’t? Is your arm still worrying you? You got off very lightly, you know. It could be a lot, lot worse. Please remember that you are a trespasser on my estate. Now I’m going to let you go away to a nice quiet room where you can think about this. I’m sure that by this evening you’ll have decided to be sensible, and if you are, I might get in touch with the king about you.”
Philo’s face drained to white as he was led away through another door. There was a decorous little spurt of murmuring and laughter from all the women present.
A Sudden Wild Magic Page 25
