A Sudden Wild Magic

Marcus’s hand became a starfish, pointing. “Badder!” he shouted. Zillah, equally astounded, first looked around to see if Amanda was standing somewhere behind and above, and then, finding nothing but dark blue wall, had to struggle with tears. Oh Lord, I miss Amanda! Why did I leave? That really might be her.

Philo added to her shock by saying, “Oh, Amanda. She’s my second cousin. Is she really your aunt?”

“By marriage,” said Tod. The way he said it made it clear to Zillah’s shocked, heightened senses that this Amanda had somehow conferred an honor on Tod’s family — which surely, unless she had gravely misunderstood, was itself one of the highest in the land — simply by marrying into it.

“She’s been a widow for years,” Philo said, as if this excused the lady. This made Zillah struggle to replace Philo — and perhaps the whole gualdian race with him — in a social bracket above Tod’s.

“Yes, but she just remarried, did you know?” said Tod.

“I did. The second man was not gualdian either,” Philo answered, with unmistakable strong disapproval.

Marcus all this while continued to bawl, “Badder!” at the bright image. Josh swiveled his torso around in the way that was natural to a centaur but which made Zillah’s vertebrae ache every time she saw it, and silenced Marcus with a small shake. “What’s the matter with him?” he asked Zillah.

The tears in her eyes ran off down her cheeks. Her voice cracked as she answered. “That — that lady’s the absolute image of my elder sister. She — she’s called Amanda too, would you believe?”

Something belligerent vanished from Tod, and so did Philo’s stiffness. They both turned to Zillah. “Oh, great Goddess!” said Tod. “Analogues! What a pity my Amanda doesn’t have a sister, or you might get to meet yourself.” Philo, seeing Zillah’s tears, started to put his arms around her. Tod pushed his reaching hands aside. “No, you clinging vine! It’s my turn this time.” He wrapped his own arms around Zillah in a hearty embrace. “It’s quite all right,” he prattled. “You’re the sister of my favorite aunt— or you would be if she had one. Don’t cry. Please. I’ll take you to see her as soon as this horrible year’s over and we can get on a transport.”

Distress, homesickness, the relief of being comforted, caused Zillah to put her head on Tod’s shoulder and cling to him. Her tears leaked into the prickly blue cloth of his uniform. The warmth of him suffused her. She had not felt this warm since Marcus was born — as if she had been perpetually two degrees in arrears.

Tod found her frank leaning on him a decidedly sexual experience. Her body was the most satisfying shape to have his arms around and to have pressed against his. At the edge of his senses, he noticed Josh moving away with Marcus, probably so that Marcus should not be upset by his mother’s misery. Philo followed him, shrugging, rather annoyed. Tod waited until both his friends were out of sight on the next downward ramp and then fell to comforting Zillah like anything. Though he was quite aware that comforting was all Zillah would let him do, this did not stop him kissing her ear and her cheek, and then moving her around, gently but forcibly, so that he could at last kiss her mouth.

He had reached this stage, and the image of Amanda that had caused the kiss had faded away — Tod having forgotten entirely by then how he came to start — when Brother Wilfrid advanced down the ribbed passageway, accompanied by his own righteously triumphant reflection in the glass of the reservoir and, with a flick of sanctimonious fingers, froze Zillah and Tod in place while an image of them was transmitted to the mirrors in the office of the High Head.

“I knew this was what I would find!” said Brother Wilfrid, and his voice trembled with what Zillah and Tod both detected to be a variety of unhealthy emotions.

VII Arth

1

The High Head felt put upon. Breakfast had been too rich. Maybe it was the nagging of an overtaxed stomach, or maybe genuine anxiety, but he knew today that things were not right in the citadel.Those quickening vibrations bothered him. If they had been caused by the onset of the tides, they should have stopped when the tides began, late in the watches of the night. But the tides now ran full, message channels were open to all parts of the Pentarchy, and the rhythms still continued to quicken.

He was inclined to blame it all on their six unwanted guests. The sooner they could all be sent back wherever it was they came from, the better it would be for everyone. But Observer and Calculus Horns, though professing to be hard at work, were producing only increasingly obscure and contradictory results. As for the women, he began to suspect that Flan and Helen at least had unexpectedly expertly shielded minds. All they gave him was the same inane story. Zillah now seemed a dangerous mystery. Her child — well, he had long ago given up there.