Gladys wondered worriedly. She just had to hope Tod had found her.
“I see all this has to be royal,” she remarked to the High Head.
He whirled around irately. She saw, with sadness, that he had meant to get rid of her. “There’s no need,” she told him. “I really could get quite fond of you if you’d let me. After all, I married you once.”
The dark blood of fury suffused the High Head’s face. He glared. Perhaps it was lucky that the Grove Guard arrived then. They advanced precisely from all sides, twenty or so men and one or two tall women in red and gold livery. Strong-eyed they all were, Gladys saw. A lot of power among them. The man—captain?—who came up to the High Head looked at least as much of an adept as he did.
“Your names, and your business in the Royal Grove,” this man said coldly.
“I am the High Head of Arth, and I need to see the king urgently,” the High Head told him. “There is a crisis in Arth.”
The captain did not seem precisely impressed. “And I’m Gladys, dear,” Gladys said. “And this is Jimbo. I’m from otherworld, and he’s from—well, let’s just say down below—but he’s been with me for years, almost ever since my poor husband died. We have to see the king too. Your gods want us to.”
As she had expected, they were a good deal more interested in her, and very impressed indeed by Jimbo. But it took nearly twenty minutes of explaining and some arguing, during which time Gladys was fairly sure a number of hidden tests were performed, before the captain consented to let them set foot outside the grove.
“It’s by no means certain the king will grant you an audience,” he said. “I’ll send you to the palace, but my responsibility stops there.”
* * *
3
« ^ »
Outside the grove was a driveway through more well-tended turf, leading down to a tree-bordered road where a large car was waiting for them. It was, Gladys thought, settling gladly into it, newer and far more comfortable than her faithful taxi, though its appearance was that of a car fifty years older. She thought she would enjoy the drive.
The High Head was by now seething for various new reasons. “These gualdians!” he said, flinging himself in beside her. “Think they own the entire Pentarchy! They look down their noses at me—the whole squad did—because I’m only a half-breed gualdian!”
“No, that thought came from you,” Gladys told him. “But from the way they went on, I got an idea that Arth may not be too popular here. Is that right?”
The High Head remembered that consignment of servicemen—all those delinquents, one peculiar gualdian, and that sickly centaur. “That could be so,” he admitted gloomily. “I fear the king indicated as much a little while back. How did you guess?”
“I keep my eyes open,” Gladys said.
The car sped upward into the town piled on a hill beside a river. The style of the houses was no style Gladys knew—narrow and fairy-tale or thick and low, with great doors—but, she thought, you did not have to know a style to like it. Steep-pitched roofs, blue or red, a chunky bridge and a spidery one, towers like mad Chinese Gothic shooting up among the houses, all of it rising to the grayish towered building at the top. “What a lovely city!”
“It’s not changed much,” said the High Head, “but they’ve put up far too many centaur dwellings since I was last here. It’s quite spoilt the East Quarter.”
“And that tower?”
“Some newfangled factory.”
All his comments were similarly depressing. Gladys knew he was upset, but he began to annoy her. It seemed to her that she had done all she could to show him that they had a common cause, and he first tried to lose her and now snubbed her every time she opened her mouth. The car hummed slowly through a crowded square where stalls were set out. Most were piled with fruit, but Gladys saw meat, cheese, and clothing, and one stall full of animals.
“Oh, I love markets! What were those animals?”
“I didn’t see,” said the High Head repressively.
As the car started to wind its way up the hill beyond the market, Gladys lost patience. “You’ve spent too many years in that Arth place of yours,” she told him. “It’s turned you into some kind of gloomy prig. Relax, can’t you! Len could laugh at least!”
“I am not Len!” the High Head snapped.
“Yes you are,” said Gladys. “You’re Len in this world, and I’m glad it was the other one I knew. I’d never have married him if he’d been like you.”
Though the High Head did not deign to make the obvious reply, anger suffused his face nearly purple. Three worlds were conspiring against him to wound him! Three worlds were trying to make him both insignificant and ridiculous! When the car gently stopped, hood pointing into a large archway leading to the white-gray palace that crowned Ludlin, and its way was barred by a line of young gentlemen centaurs refusing to let the car go further, he could have screamed. A glance at the driver—another gualdian—showed him that the man was simply going to sit looking smugly impassive and let this happen. The High Head tore open the car door and advanced on the centaurs.
“I’m the High Head of Arth. Let me in to see the king at once!”
They stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder, wearing the same livery as the Grove Guard, and looked at him down their straight, somewhat horselike noses. “Sorry, sir,” said the one in the middle. “We’ve had no orders about anyone of your description.”
Though these guardsmen resembled Hugon only as a knife resembles a lump of ore, the High Head felt that the whole centaur race was out to thwart him too. He raved at them. He threatened them. He swore. The driver of the car opened his window to hear. An interested crowd gathered. Gladys climbed out of the vehicle, with Jimbo scuttling after her, and went to speak to the driver.
“What do we do to make them let us in?”
He shrugged. “Not much. Not if they’ve had no orders.”
Instead of shaking him, as she was very tempted to do, Gladys looked around her. The archway, and the line of centaurs too, were imbued with power. She was not sure of the source of it, but she could feel it was too strong for both her and the High Head to break, even if she could persuade the man to work with her, which she doubted she could. He was in too much of a state. Such power was very surprising, but there must be a way to get in. Someone must know how. She turned and advanced on the crowd of spectators.
They had obviously never seen anything like her before. They all—centaurs, humans, and one or two oddities she couldn’t place—backed swiftly away from her, looking alarmed, except for one of their number. This one, a little clerklike man in spectacles, with a string bag full of oranges, had obviously stopped to stare on his way back to work from the market, and seemed too bemused to move. Since he looked harmless and bewildered and was nearest, Gladys took hold of his arm.
“Sorry to bother you, dear, but do you happen to know how a person gets in to see the king? I wouldn’t ask, only it’s really important, you see.”
The little man’s bewilderment increased. “I was,” he said, “under the impression I was invisible.”
A nutter, Gladys thought. Just my luck! “No dear, I’m afraid you’re not. Auntie Gladys can see you quite clearly. Sorry to have bothered you.” She let go his arm and was turning away when she realized that everything around her had become strangely quiet. The crowd and the line of centaurs were staring. The driver was leaning out of his window, frankly gaping. Beyond that, the High Head suddenly looked like a frantic statue. She turned slowly back to the insane little man and found him smiling apologetically.
“Truly,” he said. “I like to slip away to the market from time to time. I have a habit—stupid, you may say—of liking to choose my own fruit. And usually nobody knows, because it is a fact that, when I will it, only those who also have royal blood can see me.”
“Only those—then you’re—but I’m not—” Gladys managed to say.
“No. This puzzles me,” agreed the little man. “You saw me, an
d you are not, as far as I know, one of my relatives. I’m sure I would have known if you were. You are—if I may say so—rather memorable.”
“I’m from otherworld,” said Gladys. “Do I call you Your Majesty?”
“A problem,” he said. “If you are from otherworld, there is no conceivable way I can be your king—but since I take it you need to see me and I am beginning to gather that the person with you who seems so angry must be High Head of Arth, I conclude there is something urgent afoot. I think we should all three go to my office.”
Five minutes later, still decidedly stunned, Gladys found herself with the king and the High Head in a plain paneled room in the palace. There was a desk under the window as plain as the room. The only personal things in it were a multitude of potted plants—everything from a tropical fern to a small rosebush—but watching the king first empty his string bag of oranges into a bowl on the table and then put a finger to the earth of the nearest plants to see if they had enough water, Gladys had no doubt that this was the king’s own private place. Having done this, His Majesty Rudolph IX, King of Trenjen, Frinjen, and Corriarden, Protector of Leathe and Overlord of the Fiveir of the Orthe, took off his clerkly spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief.
The handkerchief, Gladys recollected, had been invented by Richard II of England. She was not sure about spectacles. “Were those glasses one of the ideas that came down from Arth, Majesty?”
He put them on again and gazed through them at her with round, magnified eyes. “I believe so—several centuries back. Why? Is that a bad thing?” She nodded gloomily. “Then sit down,” he said, waving to the group of plain, cloth-covered chairs by the fern in the hearth, “and tell me about it. Shall we start with you, Magus Lawrence?”
The High Head, now very pale and harrowed, held on to the back of a chair and stood there stiffly. “Your Majesty, what I have to say is very serious and for your ears only.”
“I’m sure,” said the king. “But my sense is that what the two of you wish to say is closely connected. And though I feel hostility from you toward this lady, I get no sense of danger from the lady herself. So please sit and proceed, Brother Lawrence.”
Irritably, the High Head obeyed. While he talked, Gladys sat with Jimbo crouched against her and could have cheered at what had happened in Arth. Bless those dear girls! She was delighted, even though she could guess, from the way her leg was quaking with Jimbo’s laughter, that harnessing the vibrations in that way had not been entirely intentional. But that young Flan always had her instincts in the right place. Maureen’s motives, she had always suspected, had not been quite pure in choosing Flan, but it had turned out to be ideal all the same. The king, she was interested to see, did not seem too worried by any of what the High Head was telling him. He looked grave, he nodded, but he was in no way alarmed or scandalized.
“Thank you, Magus,” he said when the High Head was done. “I sympathize with your indignation and shock, naturally, but I must tell you that I have felt for some years now that Arth was in need of reform. You must have realized the way I felt from the servicemen I sent you last spring.”
“The louts,” the High Head said somberly. “Your Majesty—”
“The majority were indeed louts,” the king agreed. “We had to make up the numbers in some way, and neither I nor my advisers wished to waste any more promising young magecrafters on Arth. But the centaur and the gualdian were hand-picked by me, personally. Both are throwbacks to earlier times and so possess a large degree of wild magic. My hope was that this type of power would act to disturb the vibrations of Arth—which I suspect that it did—but I took care to balance them, in case of disaster, with a Fiveir heir with a trained birthright. And had these three had no effect, my next step would have been to go to Arth myself and force reforms upon you. I wasn’t, of course, reckoning on direct action from otherworld. By the way—” the king put his hands to the sides of his glasses and focused an apparently anxious stare upon the High Head’s harrowed face “—didn’t young Roderick Gordano play any part in all this? I don’t recollect your mentioning him, Magus.”
“Your Majesty,” the High Head said, “I have done nothing to deserve this—this high-handed one-sided action. I had no idea!” His voice cracked.
The king took advantage of the cracking to persist, musingly, “Though you tell me that young Philo and the centaur unaccountably took to the deeps of the citadel with the otherworld young woman and her child, you have not clearly indicated any reason for this.”
The High Head rallied. “I inherited a tradition,” he said chokingly. “I have been doing my best to continue it, Your Majesty. I—I behaved throughout as kindly and humanely as that tradition laid down. Tradition told me it was my duty to take in a party of women in distress. I did nothing wrong. I welcomed them, I tried to find out how to get them home. Meanwhile I warned them of our Oath and its connection with the vibrations—and my reward is that Arth and its values are now in ruins. How was I to know they were from otherworld? Tradition told me that the inhabitants of otherworld were not human!”
His distress was real. Gladys pitied him, even though she knew he was using it to bluster over the facts. The king thought so too. His hands continued to focus his glasses on the High Head. “Magus, I do not doubt you are a good man, though I could wish you were not so much inclined to the traditional. A little more real research into otherworld, a little questioning of tradition, might have helped. Now, if you recall, I asked you about Roderick Gordano.”
The High Head appeared to pull himself together. “So you did, Your Majesty. My apologies. I am in a state of shock. I suppose the young man was one of the dancers roaring for my blood in Arth just now.”
Gladys did not need the nudge Jimbo gave her. “Lawrence!” she said. “That is a whopper! You know it is. You sent Tod off to be a spy in my world. I know, because I met him on his way back here. No real coincidence, Majesty,” she told the king. “There’s only one way through—looks as if someone keeps it open—and he missed it slightly. So he got stuck, and I happened on him and put him right. He told me all what had happened to him on the way.”
The king looked at the High Head. “Magus?”
“He was caught,” said the High Head, with dignity, since he was caught himself, “making love to the young woman, Zillah. He deserved punishment. My practice is to send all such offenders to otherworld.”
“Condemned,” said the king pleasantly, “out of your own mouth, Magus. Transposing a serviceman anywhere except back to the Pentarchy is illegal, as I am sure you know. I am afraid you have given me my official excuse to remove you from your office. But I’d have had to remove you anyway. You see, it was not only Arth’s extreme traditionalism which was disturbing me. Leathe seemed to have got its claws into you—”
“I swear that is not the case!” the High Head protested. “Last time the Ladies of Leathe were with us, I took every precaution—”
“Possibly,” the king cut in. “Possibly you were unknowing victims. But I cannot otherwise account for the fact that Leathe has, for the last decade, been receiving a constant stream of ideas and inventions which the rest of the Pentarchy has never been allowed to have. Nor could I rid myself of a suspicion that the activities of Arth were actually causing the rising of the sea here.”
“Oh, they were, Majesty,” Gladys said. “This is what I came about. Your Great Centaur—”
The king turned his focused spectacles on her. “Then I think you should tell me now, Mrs.—er—”
“Gladys. Well, Majesty—”
“But first tell me about the invasion of Arth,” said the king. “I can’t imagine a person of your powers having no hand in that.”
A shrewd man, she thought. She told him the whole story, aware as she spoke of the unfortunate High Head becoming alternately enraged and desolated in the chair opposite. Len would have managed his feelings better, she thought, though Len was always a bit inclined to be hidebound too. It must go with the man. Havin
g told the king about the capsule, she gave him the facts as she had had them from the Great Centaur. “He was sick,” she concluded. “It was the ideas that did it. He told me that ideas transpose matter—energy—in the most concentrated form there is. Your universe is bloated by this time, Majesty, and ours is getting drained. As I told Lawrence here, it does no good for Arth to trigger this global warming thing with us, because your world is getting filled with what you get from us, and to pull in just another idea from us is going to do more harm than good. It might help more for you to tell us what to do about our trouble.”
“It might,” the king agreed intently.
“But there’s more,” Gladys said. “I’m glad we’ve had this talk, all the four of us together, and you happened to mention Tod, because things are really falling together in my head now. It’s what you said, Majesty, about Leathe getting this whole stream of stuff. I saw that stream, back in the early days. It’s like a great mains sewer, and I’m afraid I know what it is. You see, Tod told me he was set to spy on the man in our Inner Ring—he’s called Mark Lister, and he came out of nowhere suddenly with powers you wouldn’t believe, which always did puzzle me, but I was only just widowed then and I’d other things on my mind, like a row with my daughter, and who was to replace Len in the Ring, and so I kind of let him pass, if you know what I mean. Anyway, Tod said our Mark was the image of a man called Herrel in Leathe—”
“Stop there,” said the king. “I see. Herrel Listanian’s been puzzling us for some time. So not only has the woman Marceny committed an abomination, but she’s poisoned our world doing it. Good. Then I can safely close down Marceny.”