“And that tower?”
“Some newfangled factory.”
All his comments were similarly depressing. Gladys knew he was upset, but he began to annoy her. It seemed to her that she had done all she could to show him that they had a common cause, and he first tried to lose her and now snubbed her every time she opened her mouth. The car hummed slowly through a crowded square where stalls were set out. Most were piled with fruit, but Gladys saw meat, cheese, and clothing, and one stall full of animals.
“Oh, I love markets! What were those animals?”
“I didn’t see,” said the High Head repressively.
As the car started to wind its way up the hill beyond the market, Gladys lost patience. “You’ve spent too many years in that Arth place of yours,” she told him. “It’s turned you into some kind of gloomy prig. Relax, can’t you! Len could laugh at least!”
“I am not Len!” the High Head snapped.
“Yes you are,” said Gladys. “You’re Len in this world, and I’m glad it was the other one I knew. I’d never have married him if he’d been like you.”
Though the High Head did not deign to make the obvious reply, anger suffused his face nearly purple. Three worlds were conspiring against him to wound him! Three worlds were trying to make him both insignificant and ridiculous! When the car gently stopped, hood pointing into a large archway leading to the white-gray palace that crowned Ludlin, and its way was barred by a line of young gentlemen centaurs refusing to let the car go further, he could have screamed. A glance at the driver — another gualdian — showed him that the man was simply going to sit looking smugly impassive and let this happen. The High Head tore open the car door and advanced on the centaurs.
“I’m the High Head of Arth. Let me in to see the king at once!”
They stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder, wearing the same livery as the Grove Guard, and looked at him down their straight, somewhat horselike noses. “Sorry, sir,” said the one in the middle. “We’ve had no orders about anyone of your description.”
Though these guardsmen resembled Hugon only as a knife resembles a lump of ore, the High Head felt that the whole centaur race was out to thwart him too. He raved at them. He threatened them. He swore. The driver of the car opened his window to hear. An interested crowd gathered. Gladys climbed out of the vehicle, with Jimbo scuttling after her, and went to speak to the driver.
“What do we do to make them let us in?”
He shrugged. “Not much. Not if they’ve had no orders.”
Instead of shaking him, as she was very tempted to do, Gladys looked around her. The archway, and the line of centaurs too, were imbued with power. She was not sure of the source of it, but she could feel it was too strong for both her and the High Head to break, even if she could persuade the man to work with her, which she doubted she could. He was in too much of a state. Such power was very surprising, but there must be a way to get in. Someone must know how. She turned and advanced on the crowd of spectators.
They had obviously never seen anything like her before. They all — centaurs, humans, and one or two oddities she couldn’t place — backed swiftly away from her, looking alarmed, except for one of their number. This one, a little clerklike man in spectacles, with a string bag full of oranges, had obviously stopped to stare on his way back to work from the market, and seemed too bemused to move. Since he looked harmless and bewildered and was nearest, Gladys took hold of his arm.
“Sorry to bother you, dear, but do you happen to know how a person gets in to see the king? I wouldn’t ask, only it’s really important, you see.”
The little man’s bewilderment increased. “I was,” he said, “under the impression I was invisible.”
A nutter, Gladys thought. Just my luck! “No dear, I’m afraid you’re not. Auntie Gladys can see you quite clearly. Sorry to have bothered you.” She let go his arm and was turning away when she realized that everything around her had become strangely quiet. The crowd and the line of centaurs were staring. The driver was leaning out of his window, frankly gaping. Beyond that, the High Head suddenly looked like a frantic statue. She turned slowly back to the insane little man and found him smiling apologetically.
“Truly,” he said. “I like to slip away to the market from time to time. I have a habit — stupid, you may say — of liking to choose my own fruit. And usually nobody knows, because it is a fact that, when I will it, only those who also have royal blood can see me.”
“Only those — then you’re — but I’m not—” Gladys managed to say.
“No. This puzzles me,” agreed the little man. “You saw me, and you are not, as far as I know, one of my relatives. I’m sure I would have known if you were. You are — if I may say so — rather memorable.”
“I’m from otherworld,” said Gladys. “Do I call you Your Majesty?”
“A problem,” he said. “If you are from otherworld, there is no conceivable way I can be your king — but since I take it you need to see me and I am beginning to gather that the person with you who seems so angry must be High Head of Arth, I conclude there is something urgent afoot. I think we should all three go to my office.”
Five minutes later, still decidedly stunned, Gladys found herself with the king and the High Head in a plain paneled room in the palace. There was a desk under the window as plain as the room. The only personal things in it were a multitude of potted plants — everything from a tropical fern to a small rosebush — but watching the king first empty his string bag of oranges into a bowl on the table and then put a finger to the earth of the nearest plants to see if they had enough water, Gladys had no doubt that this was the king’s own private place. Having done this, His Majesty Rudolph IX, King of Trenjen, Frinjen, and Corriarden, Protector of Leathe and Overlord of the Fiveir of the Orthe, took off his clerkly spectacles and cleaned them with a handkerchief.
The handkerchief, Gladys recollected, had been invented by Richard II of England. She was not sure about spectacles. “Were those glasses one of the ideas that came down from Arth, Majesty?”
He put them on again and gazed through them at her with round, magnified eyes. “I believe so — several centuries back. Why? Is that a bad thing?” She nodded gloomily. “Then sit down,” he said, waving to the group of plain, cloth-covered chairs by the fern in the hearth, “and tell me about it. Shall we start with you, Magus Lawrence?”
The High Head, now very pale and harrowed, held on to the back of a chair and stood there stiffly. “Your Majesty, what I have to say is very serious and for your ears only.”
“I’m sure,” said the king. “But my sense is that what the two of you wish to say is closely connected. And though I feel hostility from you toward this lady, I get no sense of danger from the lady herself. So please sit and proceed, Brother Lawrence.”
Irritably, the High Head obeyed. While he talked, Gladys sat with Jimbo crouched against her and could have cheered at what had happened in Arth. Bless those dear girls! She was delighted, even though she could guess, from the way her leg was quaking with Jimbo’s laughter, that harnessing the vibrations in that way had not been entirely intentional. But that young Flan always had her instincts in the right place. Maureen’s motives, she had always suspected, had not been quite pure in choosing Flan, but it had turned out to be ideal all the same. The king, she was interested to see, did not seem too worried by any of what the High Head was telling him. He looked grave, he nodded, but he was in no way alarmed or scandalized.
“Thank you, Magus,” he said when the High Head was done. “I sympathize with your indignation and shock, naturally, but I must tell you that I have felt for some years now that Arth was in need of reform. You must have realized the way I felt from the servicemen I sent you last spring.”