A Sudden Wild Magic

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.”