“Centaurs are a physical impossibility. I read it somewhere,” Sandra said. “Hey! Is that why they’re all so respectful of me? Do they think I’m a physical impossibility too?”
“Perhaps black women are, in this universe,” Roz agreed repressively. “But centaurs can’t exist anywhere.”
“I tell you I saw one,” said Flan.
“You saw someone riding a horse, maybe,” Helen suggested pacifically. “They must ride horses all over the fortress. Why else do they have ramps instead of stairs?”
“For centaurs, of course!” Flan said angrily. “Why would anyone ride a horse in the sanatorium, idiot?”
Zillah, who was sitting against the wall trying hopelessly to amuse Marcus in this bare blue hall, said, “Flan did see a centaur. I saw him too.”
No one gave her much heed. She was an outsider among them. Roz looked at Judy and at Flan, then expressively at the other two, and changed the subject. “Odd, wasn’t it, how that doctor fellow never really came near us? But he saw my bad tooth and spotted Sandra’s allergies.”
And cured Judy, Zillah thought, by tentatively touching her head. And there had been a centaur, but it had only appeared near the beginning when the doctor’s assistants were all down the other end of the room somehow causing warm water to gush out of the ceiling. The chief doctor — Edward, he’d said his name was — had been trying to shepherd them all down that way to have a shower behind chastely thick veiling. Zillah followed the others. But Marcus had rushed the other way, shouting, “Eeh awe!” and she turned and chased him. That was how she had seen the centaur tiptoeing — as far as knock-kneed horse legs could tiptoe — around the corner from another part of the health center. He looked pale, and he had a dressing over one eye. Tod had seemed delighted to see him. Tod had been in the act of removing his all-over invisible covering — Zillah had been glad; by then she had been wondering if the sort of squashed look to his face was some kind of deformity — and he had flung it aside in order to seize the centaur by both hands.
“Josh! Did they save that eye?”
“Oh yes — it’s really only a cut,” the centaur replied, in a wholly human, though rather resonant, whisper. “Tod, I heard you got all the blame. What’s going on?”
Here, however, Edward had approached, causing the centaur to back hastily out of sight and Tod to look nonchalant. Edward, it seemed, wished Marcus to have a shower on his own and not with Zillah and the others. As soon as Marcus grasped this, he clung to Zillah’s leg and protested lustily. Zillah pleaded. Edward replied that Marcus was male, and therefore it would be unseemly for him to stand in a shower with six naked females, and he tried to drag Marcus off her.
“Oh, look here!” Zillah shouted, flaring up. “He’s only two!”
She saw Tod shoot a sharp look at her and step forward. “Excuse me, Horn Brother,” he said with crisp politeness, “but the little fellow’s still only really a baby — far too young to be separated from his mother — and in a strange place and all.”
It had seemed reasonable, and yet Zillah had been sure something very strange was going on. While Tod spoke, she felt as if the whole angry tangle of her feelings were being deftly sorted into a strong and orderly chain, stretching down from somewhere far, far overhead, and that this chain was then being firmly bound around Edward. Edward’s look of bewildered hauteur bore out this feeling, particularly when it turned to alarm, possibly even fear. At any rate, his small, pale features reddened slightly, and his eyes were as wide and hurt as Marcus’s. “All right then,” he said. “If that’s the way it is, I’ve no option. The child shall stay with his mother.”
I like Tod, Zillah thought gratefully. Tod’s strange help stopped her feeling quite as lost as she might have done. She had made her complete break. She and Marcus truly were in quite another universe, she had no doubt of that. But, in her usual unforeseeing way, she had not bargained for being alive and having to live in this universe. Maybe she was in shock. It had been plain terrifying in that capsule. She felt she ought to have been dead from whatever it was killed all the others at her end of the capsule. Now she had a dreamy, raw, invalid feeling, like you do when you have passed the crisis in a bad illness but are still far from well. Frankly, she had no idea what to do next.
This citadel was causing some of her disorientation. It was queer the way it was all blue, inside as well as out. The floors throughout were of ribbed rubbery stuff which was not rubber — it had a smell more like stone. The walls were those huge blue blocks. They had been led through passages and under veiled archways of queer proportions but many different shapes. Veiling seemed to be used for doors everywhere. And it was all blue, blue, blue, and brightly lit, including the mad Escher-like ramps. On a ramp, bringing up the rear with Marcus, Zillah had looked up at the top of Tod’s head, or at Roz standing out at right angles into space at the front of their group. After that it had been ramp after ramp, with everyone at crazy angles, all blue, but without ornament, chaste and bare. Not a trace of decoration anywhere. It was, to look at, a serious, clinical place. The cells they were to sleep in were monastic. Yet — this was what was muddling Zillah — for no reason she could see, the fortress was not cold or joyless. If the place were a person, Zillah would have said it was itching to spring up and do a mad dance, because it was full of health and delighting in that health, but it seemed to have been too well trained or severely brought up to do anything so frivolous. Perhaps repressed was the best word for it.
There I go, fantasizing again. Trust me!
Her companions seemed to be fantasizing too. “All these men!” Flan was saying, stretched on her back on the ribbed floor, grinning like a hyena. “Some of them real good-lookers too! Did you see that little dark medical one? Yum-yum-oh-yum!”
“There were two in those short-horn things,” Sandra concurred. “You know — when we first got inside. I can’t wait to get to know either of them!”
To which Judy, looking much more her normal self, added, “You can’t have Edward. He’s mine. I love him. He’s so shy.”
“Pleasure with business!” chuckled Flan, kicking her legs up.
“Talking of business,” Zillah said, “will you fill me in on the Highland Games story a bit? I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
“Zillah, for goodness’ sake!” said Roz. “Walls have ears. Put a sock in it — huh? Now, I tell you who I’m going after,” she told the others, “because I always make straight for the top, and that’s the great panjandrum himself — the one with the big horns!”
“You mean the High Head,” said Helen.
It was at this moment the High Head chose to sweep through the veiling at the door. Zillah was hard put to it not to laugh. Roz, caught with her hands to her head to illustrate the horns she meant, pretended hastily to be stretching. Flan rolled into a ball and bounced to her feet. The rest just looked guilty.
“Good evening,” said the High Head. He spoke with the same pleasant firmness he used to the Ladies of Leathe. Judging by what he had overheard, what he had to say decidedly needed saying. “I hope you are settled in comfortably. These are only temporary quarters — I want you to understand that. We will do our best to get you home. I came to assure you of this. Or, failing that, we’ll send you over to the Pentarchy in a few months time when the tides are right, where you’ll be much more at home. But until then you will, of course, be guests of the citadel, and there are one or two things I have to make clear to you about Arth.”