A Sudden Wild Magic

Zillah slowly stood up, staring at her, wondering how she could ever have taken her for Amanda. Her hair was not even very dark, and arranged in careful gleaming tresses which the wind had scarcely power to move. Her dress was indeed blue-gray, but it was of satin as stiff as her tresses, in a high-fashion mode that Zillah thought as displeasing as it was strange — a matter of two huge puffed panniers descending from the woman’s armpits around a tight whaleboned bodice that spread into a hooped divided skirt. Against it, Marcus looked even filthier. The kicking cloth feet of his pyjama suit were black and shiny as leather, except where one toe was coming through.

With a fleeting wonder as to however this woman managed to pee in such a dress, Zillah looked into her face. It was nothing like Amanda’s, being pretty and heart-shaped, with faint, hard lines of age to it. It dismayed Zillah utterly. It was the woman’s eyes, which were dark. They were eyes that greedily, urgently, and softly sought out what was valuable and vulnerable in Zillah and drank it in, without giving anything back. Mother’s eyes, Zillah thought. You could easily mistake such eyes for those of a kindly student of humanity, unless you knew Mother.

“Perhaps you’d better give me my son,” Zillah said. Marcus was still reaching and crying after his toys, and Philo, after one startled look at the woman, was doggedly picking them up.

“I will not,” said the woman. “Gualdian, I said to leave those.” The thing in her right hand, which Zillah had taken for a tool, was actually a long rod rather like a scepter, with a strange, ugly little head grinning from the end she held. When Philo took no notice of what she said, she reached out and tapped him with the rod. Philo cried out and dropped the toys. For a moment he seemed unable to move. When he did move, it was to clap one hand to the shoulder she had tapped and turn his face up to the woman in horror. He was whiter than Zillah had ever seen him. His eyes had gone enormous.

Marcus saw it and was shocked into silence. Great tears rolled down his face. Seeing them and seeing Philo, Zillah stepped forward in an access of anger and wrenched Marcus away. “You’ve no right to do that!”

Marcus’s tears had splotched the woman’s gown. She let him go with a shudder. “I have every right,” she said. “I am Marceny Listanian, and you are trespassing on my estate. You used unwarranted power to come here, too. I warn you that we do not treat such things lightly in Leathe. You are all under arrest. Tell that centaur to come out of the grove at once.”

Zillah whirled around to find a number of men and several women, who all wore versions of the hooped and panniered costume, hurrying toward them. They must have been concealed behind the trees of the grove. Now they were jumping the irrigation ditches that crisscrossed the flat field in order to spread out and surround Zillah and Philo. Josh was between the last two trees on the path. All his hooves were braced and he was holding on to the trees as if some compulsion were forcing him forward.

“Stay where you are, Josh!” Zillah shouted.

Josh did not reply, but he slowly retreated backward, handing himself from tree to tree, until he was out of sight in the grove. Somehow, Zillah had no doubt that he was safe there. She turned back to find that the rest of the people had arrived around them on both sides of the stream. The women were of all ages, and all, without exception, finely dressed and coiffured. Their perfume blew on the warm wind in muggy waves. The men mostly wore old-looking, rustic breeches and shirts, but there were one or two among them dressed in bright garments almost as fine as the women’s. One in particolored red and yellow, like a jester, caught Zillah’s eye as he leaped easily across a little ditch and came to stand on the other side of the stream.

She knew him at once. It was like a shock — whether of horror or joy, she did not know — to see him real and warm and moving, and in that silly jester’s suit, so like Mark and so utterly unlike. He knew her too. He stopped dead and they stared at each other over the stream. His shock and concern, his unbelieving glance at Marcus, made him for an instant look almost like Mark. Then his jauntily bearded face moved back into the cynical laughing shape which, she saw sadly, was habitual to it.

“Well now, Mother,” he said. “What do you want done with these people?”

“Bring them to me in the small audience hall,” the woman in blue-gray replied. “And the centaur too, if you can get him out.” Saying which, she turned and walked away along the stream. After she had gone a few yards, her figure appeared to ripple. She became transparent and, quite quickly, melted out of sight entirely.