A Sudden Wild Magic

“You’re not the only one,” Tod said. “I do dislike that man.” And he went off to collect toys for Marcus in a sack that Josh had filched from Healing Horn. Tod called it the Charity Bag. He took it around with them and watched with pleasure as it filled with mascot dolls, cubes and prisms and other hardware from Observer and Research, a wonderful model train made by a lonely Brother, a boat, and wax images from everywhere. It gave him enormous pleasure to watch Marcus tip them all out, crying, “Ooh! Doy!”

Tod turned to Zillah. “There. You see? I’m a truly expert uncle.”

By the third day, all of them except perhaps Marcus were sick of the blaze of attention. Instead of attending a parade in the square where Zillah got so giddy, Tod planted Marcus and his Charity Bag on Josh’s back, Philo took Zillah by the hand, and they all descended the ramps into the lower parts of the citadel to show Zillah the stores. Tod saw afterward that he should have persuaded Josh at least to stay for the parade. A solitary centaur is noticeable, present or absent. But at the time they thought no more about it than to laugh with guilty pleasure.

“Playing hooky,” said Tod. “I used to be an expert at it. Life in this citadel takes me right back to school.”

They went slowly. The blue ribbed surface of the lower ramps was steep for Josh’s hooves, and the light, away from living quarters, was kept dimmer. When they reached the first of the huge grain cellars, there was hardly light enough to see the mountain of passet, heaped up into the distance.

“It looks almost like wheat,” Zillah remarked.

“Bed,” Marcus announced.

“Quite right, infant,” Tod agreed. “It smells vile. Just look at it all! Enough to feed a thousand Brothers for at least a year, even if they ate nothing else — which they almost didn’t until that life-saving Helen person got into Kitchen.”

“They grow mushrooms in it when it goes bad,” Josh said.

“And then it smells even worse,” Tod said, starting to move on.

Philo, however, hung back at the grainy foot of the mountain, sniffing wistfully. “It reminds me of home,” he said.

“I was forgetting you came from the Trenjen Orthe,” Tod said. “Rather you than me!”

“I wish I was back there,” said Philo.

He sounded so yearningly homesick that Zillah asked sympathetically, “What is the Trenjen Orthe?”

“My bit of the Pentarchy,” said Philo. “The Fiveir of Orthe is all over the place.”

“In order to understand our friend,” Tod prattled, leading the way on down the next ramp, “you must realize that the Pentarchy consists of five onetime kingdoms, or Fiveirs, now united into one. These are Frinjen, Trenjen, Corriarden, the Orthe, and Leathe. Apart from Leathe, each Fiveir is governed by its own Pentarch — one of these is the old buffer who happens to be my father. The king governs the whole country, but he is also Pentarch of the Orthe — which is quite a job, because, apart from a lump in the middle of the continent, the Orthe is scattered over everywhere else but Leathe, in lots of little enclaves. I think it’s where the Other Peoples happened to live. Philo’s lot of gualdians — who no doubt had their reasons — chose to take up their abode in the north and put up with the weather and the passet, so that became part of the Orthe, instead of being part of Trenjen.”

“But I’m from central Orthe,” Josh said, following Tod downward with braced hooves and little mincing steps, “which is much more sensible. Most of my people are.”

“Sensible? Or just from the Center?” Tod called back.

“What exactly makes you a gualdian?”,Zillah asked as she and Philo followed Josh.

“It’s hard to explain. I’m not typical,” Philo replied. “Most of us have a great deal of body hair — in fact, the usual way to tell a gualdian-human cross is that they look rather furry.”

“Not our beloved High Head, though,” Tod shouted up irrepressibly. “Unless he shaves all over daily, that is. He’s vain enough. He might.”

“No, but you can tell he’s a cross from the eyes,” Philo said. “That’s the main sign usually.” He turned his great wide eyes toward Zillah. She looked at them closely. In the dimness they seemed very penetrating and luminous, as well as large, but they looked like human eyes to her. So, come to think of it, did High Horn’s eyes. “But most of the time,” Philo went on, nuzzling closer to Zillah as his way was, “it’s quite hard to tell, particularly with gualdian women. And look at me. The only hair I have is on my head, and I was born with these enormous hands and feet. My parents took one look at me and consulted the Gualdian. And he said, a bit helplessly, that it was to be hoped that I’d grow into something special — which I didn’t. But I think they kept on hoping. It was the Gualdian who sent me over to Arth. Maybe he thought they could bring something out in me.”

“Did they?” Zillah asked.

“No,” said Philo as they rounded the ramp into the next level.