The High Head lifted his chin and expressed his irritation in a venemous look at all three. “Why are you here again, Brother?”
Brother Milo was harassed. “I do beg your pardon, sir. The little fellow is getting very upset. I’m afraid none of us can understand what he’s asking for. He keeps saying he wants damages.”
Zillah bit the inside of her cheek in order not to laugh.
“Damages?” the High Head said irately.
“Damages, sir,” said Brother Milo.
Both of them looked at Marcus. Marcus was exasperated at their stupidity. “Damn bitches,” he enunciated, his whole body shaking with the effort to communicate. “Damn damn bitches.”
The High Head’s astonished face turned first to Brother Milo, then to Zillah. She unclenched her teeth from her cheek. “He’s asking for jam sandwiches,” she said, rather impressed to find her voice was quite steady.
The two mages of Arth stared at her much as they had stared at Marcus. “Could you perhaps explain what a sandwich is, my lady?” Brother Milo asked helplessly.
“You take two slices of bread,” said Zillah. “You do have bread, do you?” Both nodded. “Then you spread butter on each slice and a lot of jam on one — Do you have jam?” They looked blank. “Marmalade? Preserves?” Zillah asked, beginning to see how Marcus had become so upset in the kitchens. They looked enlightened at “preserves.” They nodded. “Then you put the two slices together and give it him to eat,” she explained patiently.
“Oh!” said Brother Milo and looked at the High Head, who said almost simultaneously, “Oh! She means a buttie — or that’s what we used to say in Leathe. Didn’t you call them that in Trenjen?”
“No, sir. We used to call them slathers,” said Brother Milo. Jolly with relief, he looked down at Marcus. “Come on, my fine fellow. You shall have a red slather and a yellow one and see which you like best.”
“Dyke dead buds,” Marcus announced confidently as he was led away into nothingness.
The High Head took a second to recover from all this. Zillah looked up at the thick-framed window while she waited. He’s not so bad, she thought. Just not got a clue about toddlers. They all seem to mean well here — I don’t understand it. Amanda was sure everyone in this place was out to destroy the Earth. I’d expected to find a whiff of downright evil somewhere at least, and nothing’s even sinister. If you look at him without that costume, High Horns is more like the director of a big company, or perhaps a cardinal — one of the worldly ones. I’m sure he thinks of himself as a good man.
Through the window, apart from the corner of a blue tower, she could see only clear pale blue sky. No birds of course. Insects? How do they pollinate those gardens I saw? Come to think of it, what do they use for a sun? I must find out. And how funny that they didn’t know what a sandwich was. At this point she remembered that sandwiches were the invention of the Earl of Sandwich, who ate them rather than leave the gaming table for a meal — which surely had to be something entirely local to Earth.
So much had her confidence been restored by the incident with Marcus that she said, before the High Head could ask her further awkward questions, “Please could you tell me why it is we both speak so much the same language? We don’t even come from the same universe.”
He answered with surprising readiness, “It’s fairly simple. This cluster of worlds develops in parallel, with parallel influences — this applies to many other things beside languages. It is clear that you come from a world in this cluster, or we would not be able to understand one another.” He was happy enough to explain. It was a surprise — he could almost say a treat — to deal with a woman who was simply asking for information, as a cadet might do, instead of using questions to trip or manipulate like the Ladies of Leathe.
Zillah realized she had stumbled on a way to divert him whenever his questions became too difficult. Thereafter, whenever she needed time to think (what kind of place had she implied Logres was?), or when he pressed too hard (why did he keep asking what kind of work she did?), Zillah simply asked the High Head some of the things she genuinely wanted to know. She learned in this way that plants had to be pollinated by hand or by magecraft, depending on type; that Arth’s light source was a small star, maintained by mageworks and veiled by a special ritual each evening; that atmosphere was contained in a mage-net; that most research in Arth was directed toward otherworld, because it was a debased image of the Pentarchy; and that the starchy potato-rice was called passet.
Here the High Head confounded Zillah by projecting, with a gesture, a dazzle in the air like a Rorschach blot. She blinked at it.
“This is a map of otherworld,” he explained. He was perfectly aware that she kept trying to divert him, and it amused him. He simply answered her questions and went on. “I’m showing you otherworld first because it’s one of the three main types of land distribution in this cluster of universes. Look at it carefully and tell me whether it in any way resembles your own world.”
“It’s a map?” It resembled to Zillah more the lights and lungs of an animal hung in a butcher’s shop. “Sorry. It means nothing to me.”
Another gesture. The butcher’s shop dazzle was replaced by another, mostly a large pear shape with a crab wedged against it, trying to eat it. Zillah was already shaking her head when she recognized a sort of Africa in the pear shape. And could the crab be a version of Australia? Antarctica? High Horns was using some form of map-projection that was squashed and sideways and alien to her, and showing her a world not really anything like Earth, but — The moment she saw this, Zillah realized what the butcher’s shop had been. Earth! My world! The one he calls otherworld and a debased version and they all do research on! It had all been there, dangling and sideways, Europe, Asia, Greenland, the Americas, Africa, and Australia masquerading as the meat hook. Now she understood what Amanda had been talking about, and the reason all the other women were here. Guilt flooded her, along with shock and anger. How could she have been such a fool as to blunder in on what had to be a commando action? How could the mages of Arth so coolly tamper with Earth? How dared they?
To cover up her feelings, she kept shaking her head. The High Head dismissed his second projection with something of a showman’s gesture. He was unable to resist the flourish because, if her world was like neither of these, it had to be even closer to his own than he had realized. The pear and the crab vanished, and with panache, blue on white — like the United Nations! Zillah thought — two new shapes came to hang in the air. The larger, if you stripped away outjutting lands like Britain, Spain, Greece, India, Japan, and then tilted the whole lot downward, was not so unlike Europe and the bulk of Asia. The smaller was — somewhat — like North America, if you turned it sideways and south.
“That’s it,” said Zillah. This projection was almost saying Choose me! anyway.
“Then we must be very near neighbors,” said the High Head, rejoicing. It should be simple to get these castaways home before long. He used his sword-wand as a pointer. “This larger blue mass is the Pentarchy, where everyone on Arth was born, and this other is Azandi. If your home looks anything like this, it must be quite close.”
Zillah could see the idea pleased him. She could not think why. Her mind was still roaring with shock and anger, which she knew he would notice unless she was careful. She could feel her hands shaking. She tried to disguise her feelings as excitement. “Well, fancy that!” Lord, how artificial that sounded! She clasped her hands together and clamped them between her knees to stop them shaking. She leaned forward as if eagerly. And spoke almost at random. “I’d never have believed it — never for a moment! — because my world is so much more creative than yours.”