With Zillah and Philo each hauling on an arm, Josh struggled to his legs and they went cautiously out of the grove. At the far end of the pool, the water ran out in a stream over a carefully built small wooden lock, and a path led beside the stream, out of the grove and into sunlight strong enough to dazzle them all again. They halted nervously, shading their eyes.
There was a woman a few yards downstream. She was coming toward them on the path, halting from time to time to test the carefully turfed banks of the stream with a long tool. She was an idyllic sight. Long coal black hair blew in the breeze around her shoulders, and her faded blue-gray gown was blown to outline her figure. She was a beautiful woman, disturbingly familiar and strange at the same time. She looked around, seeing them, and Zillah could have sworn for a moment that it was Amanda staring at them.
Marcus had no doubt. With a loud shout of “Badder!” he set off down the path toward her as fast as his legs could take him. “Badder! Badder! Badder!”
Zillah set off after him, and Philo with her. Analogue of Amanda or not, the woman was a total stranger and might not care for a small boy hurling himself upon her. A dirty small boy. The pyjama suit Marcus had been wearing all their time in Arth was gray at the knees and rear and splotched down the front. The real Amanda would have found it bad enough, let alone this unknown image of her.
The woman, however, darted to meet Marcus even faster than Zillah ran after him. She reached him fractionally first and swept him gladly up in one arm. The bag of toys thumped to the ground and came open, spilling everything over the path. Zillah and Philo stopped, for fear of treading on Marcus’s treasures.
“Doy! Doy!” Marcus draped himself desperately over the woman’s arm.
“I’m so sorry,” Zillah said as she stooped to gather the toys up.
“Leave those,” said the woman. It was an absolute command. Her voice was high and chilly, and nothing like Amanda’s.
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.
The rest seemed to relax a little as soon as she was gone. Two of the men got Philo to his feet, and — Zillah could not help noticing — they handled him carefully and tenderly, as if they had more than a notion of how he was feeling. Philo was still very pale, and he did not seem to be able to use his right arm.
“You may as well pick those up,” Herrel said to one of the girls, pointing to the toys strewn in the path.
“Why?” she said irritably, glancing at Marcus. “It’s only a boy child.” But she and another woman got down among their billowing satins and started collecting toys.
Two other women, both older, took Zillah’s elbows and urged her along the path. Zillah resisted. Marcus was leaning over her shoulder reaching for his toys. “Doy!” he said urgently.
“And someone had better go and see if they can tempt that centaur out from under the Goddess’s skirts,” Herrel said. “You — Ladny and Sigry — you’d be best at it.”
Zillah felt both the women holding her stiffen. One said acidly, “Don’t you speak to me like that. I don’t take my orders from you.”
“Don’t you indeed?” said Herrel. “How shocking of me to suggest you might! All right. Sigry, take Andred and our sweet Aliky and see what you can do about my mother’s orders.”