On the whole, the High Head favored pitching the women back to wherever they had come from as soon as possible. There were, however, two difficulties about this. First, as in the case of otherworld, was the Law of Altered Reality. This stated that the changes brought about in a person in order to permit him to pass from one universe to another were—particularly in the case of worlds of high reality like Arth and its parent the Pentarchy—so great as to allow a person only one such transition. In other words, these women might be stuck here. Going back might kill them in the same way that sending them to otherworld might. But, since the hasty scan the High Head had made while the women were in front of him suggested they were as human as he was, he had hopes that he might find a way around the Law. It was just possible they came from a universe of equivalent reality to Arth. This was his main reason for shunting them straight off to Healing Horn. Edward was presumably checking on the women’s humanity at this moment. If it tallied enough with Arth’s standard, they could be returned whence they came.
This brought him to the second difficulty. Where exactly were they from? The High Head was not sure he followed or quite trusted the explanation given by the one who called herself Roz Collasso—standing very straight and speaking with brave schoolgirl openness—that they were a sport team from somewhere called Middle-Earth who had been on their way to compete in the Highland Games by strato-cruiser. They had, claimed this Collasso, hit sunspot turbulence and found themselves in Arth in free-fall. The High Head doubted this. Even allowing for the fact that the woman was in shock, his study of suns had never come up with a similar accident, and her manner had too much in common with that of one of his cadets trying to conceal the truth from a Duty Mage. He intended to question them separately until he got at the truth.
But what was he to do with them meanwhile, until he found out?
The measure of the difficulty was Brother Dewi, Horn Head of Housekeeping, and his assistant Brother Milo, standing in his outer office waiting for a decision. It was unprecedented. Housekeeping prided itself on knowing the precise social status of every visitor to Arth and providing accommodation for that visitor’s exact rank and degree without ever consulting anyone. But Brother Dewi had no idea what these women were. Nor had the High Head. All he could tell Brother Dewi after his brief survey was that, although one woman had the black skin of a highborn Azandi, neither she nor any of the others merited being housed in the Rooms of State where the Ladies of Leathe had spent the night.
He had no wish anyway to treat these women as important. Even though the Goddess had allowed them to reach Arth, strong twinges of foreknowledge suggested to him that they meant trouble, and his impulse was to lock them up, away from everyone else in the citadel. But Arth had only three solitary-confinement cells. It would mean draining a fish-cellar for them. Besides, this was the sort of solution one would expect of otherworld—all Arth knew that otherworld locked refugees up as a matter of course. Arth could not do that. Arth was civilized.
Edward’s sigil appeared in his glass at last. Thank the Goddess!
“Just my first impressions, you know,” Edward said in his most apologetic way, “but I’d say these—er—people are every bit as human as we are. The black one has nearly all the Azandi traits, and some of the others test out as quite markedly gualdian—specially that very pretty one and her little boy.”
“Fine,” said the High Head. “Then we can send them back where they belong before long.”
“What do you want me to do with them when I’m through?” Edward wanted to know.
Gualdian traits did not mean gualdian status. The decision was not all that difficult after all. “Put them in the servants’ hall attached to the Rooms of State. They can sleep and eat there. It’s convenient for Kitchen.”
Feeling considerable relief, he gave the same order to Brother Dewi.
* * *
2
« ^ »
I saw a centaur,” said Flan. “I know I did. Just after that Tod boy took his skin off.”
“Don’t be silly.” Roz glanced at Judy. Judy was sitting quietly in one of the few hard, upright chairs, which were all the furniture the room had, and she seemed calm enough. That doctor fellow, even though he seemed to be scared stiff of all six of them, had worked wonders there. Now it looked as if Flan was going bonkers too, and that could set Judy off again. “You can’t have seen any such thing.”
“Centaurs are a physical impossibility. I read it somewhere,” Sandra said. “Hey! Is that why they’re all so respectful of me? Do they think I’m a physical impossibility too?”
“Perhaps black women are, in this universe,” Roz agreed repressively. “But centaurs can’t exist anywhere.”
“I tell you I saw one,” said Flan.
“You saw someone riding a horse, maybe,” Helen suggested pacifically. “They must ride horses all over the fortress. Why else do they have ramps instead of stairs?”
“For centaurs, of course!” Flan said angrily. “Why would anyone ride a horse in the sanatorium, idiot?”
Zillah, who was sitting against the wall trying hopelessly to amuse Marcus in this bare blue hall, said, “Flan did see a centaur. I saw him too.”
No one gave her much heed. She was an outsider among them. Roz looked at Judy and at Flan, then expressively at the other two, and changed the subject. “Odd, wasn’t it, how that doctor fellow never really came near us? But he saw my bad tooth and spotted Sandra’s allergies.”
And cured Judy, Zillah thought, by tentatively touching her head. And there had been a centaur, but it had only appeared near the beginning when the doctor’s assistants were all down the other end of the room somehow causing warm water to gush out of the ceiling. The chief doctor—Edward, he’d said his name was—had been trying to shepherd them all down that way to have a shower behind chastely thick veiling. Zillah followed the others. But Marcus had rushed the other way, shouting, “Eeh awe!” and she turned and chased him. That was how she had seen the centaur tiptoeing—as far as knock-kneed horse legs could tiptoe—around the corner from another part of the health center. He looked pale, and he had a dressing over one eye. Tod had seemed delighted to see him. Tod had been in the act of removing his all-over invisible covering—Zillah had been glad; by then she had been wondering if the sort of squashed look to his face was some kind of deformity—and he had flung it aside in order to seize the centaur by both hands.
“Josh! Did they save that eye?”
“Oh yes—it’s really only a cut,” the centaur replied, in a wholly human, though rather resonant, whisper. “Tod, I heard you got all the blame. What’s going on?”
Here, however, Edward had approached, causing the centaur to back hastily out of sight and Tod to look nonchalant. Edward, it seemed, wished Marcus to have a shower on his own and not with Zillah and the others. As soon as Marcus grasped this, he clung to Zillah’s leg and protested lustily. Zillah pleaded. Edward replied that Marcus was male, and therefore it would be unseemly for him to stand in a shower with six naked females, and he tried to drag Marcus off her.
“Oh, look here!” Zillah shouted, flaring up. “He’s only two!”
She saw Tod shoot a sharp look at her and step forward. “Excuse me, Horn Brother,” he said with crisp politeness, “but the little fellow’s still only really a baby—far too young to be separated from his mother—and in a strange place and all.”
It had seemed reasonable, and yet Zillah had been sure something very strange was going on. While Tod spoke, she felt as if the whole angry tangle of her feelings were being deftly sorted into a strong and orderly chain, stretching down from somewhere far, far overhead, and that this chain was then being firmly bound around Edward. Edward’s look of bewildered hauteur bore out this feeling, particularly when it turned to alarm, possibly even fear. At any rate, his small, pale features reddened slightly, and his eyes were as wide and hurt as Marcus’s. “All right then,” he said. “If that’s the way it is, I’ve no option. The child shal
l stay with his mother.”
I like Tod, Zillah thought gratefully. Tod’s strange help stopped her feeling quite as lost as she might have done. She had made her complete break. She and Marcus truly were in quite another universe, she had no doubt of that. But, in her usual unforeseeing way, she had not bargained for being alive and having to live in this universe. Maybe she was in shock. It had been plain terrifying in that capsule. She felt she ought to have been dead from whatever it was killed all the others at her end of the capsule. Now she had a dreamy, raw, invalid feeling, like you do when you have passed the crisis in a bad illness but are still far from well. Frankly, she had no idea what to do next.
This citadel was causing some of her disorientation. It was queer the way it was all blue, inside as well as out. The floors throughout were of ribbed rubbery stuff which was not rubber—it had a smell more like stone. The walls were those huge blue blocks. They had been led through passages and under veiled archways of queer proportions but many different shapes. Veiling seemed to be used for doors everywhere. And it was all blue, blue, blue, and brightly lit, including the mad Escher-like ramps. On a ramp, bringing up the rear with Marcus, Zillah had looked up at the top of Tod’s head, or at Roz standing out at right angles into space at the front of their group. After that it had been ramp after ramp, with everyone at crazy angles, all blue, but without ornament, chaste and bare. Not a trace of decoration anywhere. It was, to look at, a serious, clinical place. The cells they were to sleep in were monastic. Yet—this was what was muddling Zillah—for no reason she could see, the fortress was not cold or joyless. If the place were a person, Zillah would have said it was itching to spring up and do a mad dance, because it was full of health and delighting in that health, but it seemed to have been too well trained or severely brought up to do anything so frivolous. Perhaps repressed was the best word for it.
There I go, fantasizing again. Trust me!
Her companions seemed to be fantasizing too. “All these men!” Flan was saying, stretched on her back on the ribbed floor, grinning like a hyena. “Some of them real good-lookers too! Did you see that little dark medical one? Yum-yum-oh-yum!”
“There were two in those short-horn things,” Sandra concurred. “You know—when we first got inside. I can’t wait to get to know either of them!”
To which Judy, looking much more her normal self, added, “You can’t have Edward. He’s mine. I love him. He’s so shy.”
“Pleasure with business!” chuckled Flan, kicking her legs up.
“Talking of business,” Zillah said, “will you fill me in on the Highland Games story a bit? I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
“Zillah, for goodness’ sake!” said Roz. “Walls have ears. Put a sock in it—huh? Now, I tell you who I’m going after,” she told the others, “because I always make straight for the top, and that’s the great panjandrum himself—the one with the big horns!”
“You mean the High Head,” said Helen.
It was at this moment the High Head chose to sweep through the veiling at the door. Zillah was hard put to it not to laugh. Roz, caught with her hands to her head to illustrate the horns she meant, pretended hastily to be stretching. Flan rolled into a ball and bounced to her feet. The rest just looked guilty.
“Good evening,” said the High Head. He spoke with the same pleasant firmness he used to the Ladies of Leathe. Judging by what he had overheard, what he had to say decidedly needed saying. “I hope you are settled in comfortably. These are only temporary quarters—I want you to understand that. We will do our best to get you home. I came to assure you of this. Or, failing that, we’ll send you over to the Pentarchy in a few months time when the tides are right, where you’ll be much more at home. But until then you will, of course, be guests of the citadel, and there are one or two things I have to make clear to you about Arth.”
Looking along their faces, he had a sense of déjà vu. This felt just like his speech to the servicemen, except none of these women struck him as second-rate. They all gave him a sense of quality. But what was the same was that they were all—he knew it—potential troublemakers—including the child, who was raising his voice in some kind of complaint.
“Please silence your infant,” he said politely.
Zillah’s face flushed all over. There was a sense of anger. Of powers. But the child stopped his noise.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now, Arth and its Brotherhood were founded a thousand years ago on the king’s orders, for a double purpose: first, so our charter states, to protect the Pentarchy and, by our researches, to strengthen the realm; and second, to provide the young men of the five provinces with proper teaching in magework. This citadel was made so that the Brotherhood could employ its arts in peace and seclusion, and a very holy ceremony was performed to create it. A piece of the Sanctuary of the Goddess was raised and moved to this place, which afterwards became Arth. Now, you will understand from this that Arth is in a special position: not only is it in existence solely by favor of the Goddess, but it is also at once very potent and very fragile. We in Arth have to be very careful that, while we take advantage in our mageworks of the special vibrations of this citadel, we do not in any way unbalance them. If we did, Arth would be destroyed. For this reason, all of us in Arth—” He paused impressively. They were listening patiently, waiting for him to stop. “All of us in Arth,” he repeated, “take solemn vows of total celibacy. The Goddess exacts extreme penalties from those who break those vows. Now, you are all women. I must therefore ask you to understand, and to respect the oath we take.” Ah, that got to them! They were looking alarmed—shocked, in fact—and impressed. “I believe you take my point,” he said. “Thank you. Someone will be along with food for you shortly.”
He swept out. He did not hear Flan say, “Obvious, isn’t it? Work on these vibrations with a bit of kamikase sex, and who needs virus-magic?”
“Tantric,” agreed Roz, and cackled hilariously.
* * *
3
« ^ »
The food was appalling. What was not tasteless and tough, swimming in some weak liquid, appeared to be some kind of cereal—large, off-white mounds of it—that looked like rice but, as Flan said, tasted like overcooked potato. They were none of them hungry after their experiences. Most of them could not eat it. Marcus deliberately overturned his bowl on the floor and smacked the resulting sloppy heap severely and often.
“Ardy poo,” he stated. “Dummy ay.” No one asked Zillah to translate.
But after a night under one thin blanket on a hard wooden bed, every one of them was ravenous. They were given a jug of brown liquid that—possibly—partook of the nature of both tea and coffee, and, to their dismay, the cereal again, this time cold but fried.
“Oh, looky, looky!” said Flan. “Potato Krispies!”
“Snap, crackle, sug,” Zillah agreed.
“And I like my popcorn hot,” Roz said morbidly. “Is this drink toffee or kea, or neither?”
“Cooking’s not really my scene,” Sandra observed, “but it wouldn’t take much to make me go in that kitchen and try. Even I could do better than this.”
“You wouldn’t be allowed,” said Roz. “This is the way they mortify their flesh for the Goddess. This is not food, it’s religion, friends.”
“Not religion—magic,” Helen said in her quiet way.
“Oh, you mean we’re supposed to transmogrify it into bacon and eggs like they all do?” said Flan. “Abracadabra—kippers! No, still the same old ardy poo.”
Zillah was not surprised that Marcus spat the stuff out. She was scooping it off the floor when they were summoned by two solemn young mages. “They go in pairs, to chaperone one another,” Flan said in a stage whisper. Both young men went scarlet, but pretended not to hear. They guided the party decorously along corridors and dizzy blue ramps to the outer office of the High Head. There an elderly mage told them to wait. The High One wished to ask each of them some questions.
The High Head m
eanwhile was looking at the full report Edward had handed him over breakfast. All the survivors were in good physical condition, it seemed, but none, except for Flan Burke, appeared to be athletes. The child was healthy too, but Edward was at a loss to think what sport a child so young might compete in. So was the High Head. He intended to find out.
He had them in one by one, starting with Judy. Edward had stated that she was the least stable and most likely to give the real truth if pressed. But Judy simply and doggedly repeated the story Roz had given, and then burst into tears. “All my friends are dead!” she sobbed. “And I don’t know why. Lynne just died. She was talking to me, and then she was dead—just like that!”
The High Head was not used to people crying. He got the woman out of his room as fast as he could and called in Roz.
It was a trying half hour. Why don’t I like this woman? the High Head kept thinking. She stuck long legs in high boots out across the floor of his office with a confidence that would have reminded him of Leathe had it not also seemed so masculine. If he had let her, she would have got up and strode about. He judged it prudent to keep her seated, but her aggression still came out—Leathe-like—in strident little phrases tacked on to the end of everything she said.
“Tossing the caber is immensely satisfying to a woman—but female satisfaction will be outside your experience, I imagine,” she remarked; and later, “female athleticism is largely a matter of mind and emotions, you know. Muscle tone isn’t hugely important to us. But I don’t expect an all-male community to grasp this sort of fact.”