“Playing hooky,” said Tod. “I used to be an expert at it. Life in this citadel takes me right back to school.”
They went slowly. The blue ribbed surface of the lower ramps was steep for Josh’s hooves, and the light, away from living quarters, was kept dimmer. When they reached the first of the huge grain cellars, there was hardly light enough to see the mountain of passet, heaped up into the distance.
“It looks almost like wheat,” Zillah remarked.
“Bed,” Marcus announced.
“Quite right, infant,” Tod agreed. “It smells vile. Just look at it all! Enough to feed a thousand Brothers for at least a year, even if they ate nothing else — which they almost didn’t until that life-saving Helen person got into Kitchen.”
“They grow mushrooms in it when it goes bad,” Josh said.
“And then it smells even worse,” Tod said, starting to move on.
Philo, however, hung back at the grainy foot of the mountain, sniffing wistfully. “It reminds me of home,” he said.
“I was forgetting you came from the Trenjen Orthe,” Tod said. “Rather you than me!”
“I wish I was back there,” said Philo.
He sounded so yearningly homesick that Zillah asked sympathetically, “What is the Trenjen Orthe?”
“My bit of the Pentarchy,” said Philo. “The Fiveir of Orthe is all over the place.”
“In order to understand our friend,” Tod prattled, leading the way on down the next ramp, “you must realize that the Pentarchy consists of five onetime kingdoms, or Fiveirs, now united into one. These are Frinjen, Trenjen, Corriarden, the Orthe, and Leathe. Apart from Leathe, each Fiveir is governed by its own Pentarch — one of these is the old buffer who happens to be my father. The king governs the whole country, but he is also Pentarch of the Orthe — which is quite a job, because, apart from a lump in the middle of the continent, the Orthe is scattered over everywhere else but Leathe, in lots of little enclaves. I think it’s where the Other Peoples happened to live. Philo’s lot of gualdians — who no doubt had their reasons — chose to take up their abode in the north and put up with the weather and the passet, so that became part of the Orthe, instead of being part of Trenjen.”
“But I’m from central Orthe,” Josh said, following Tod downward with braced hooves and little mincing steps, “which is much more sensible. Most of my people are.”
“Sensible? Or just from the Center?” Tod called back.
“What exactly makes you a gualdian?” Zillah asked as she and Philo followed Josh.
“It’s hard to explain. I’m not typical,” Philo replied. “Most of us have a great deal of body hair — in fact, the usual way to tell a gualdian-human cross is that they look rather furry.”
“Not our beloved High Head, though,” Tod shouted up irrepressibly. “Unless he shaves all over daily, that is. He’s vain enough. He might.”
“No, but you can tell he’s a cross from the eyes,” Philo said. “That’s the main sign usually.” He turned his great wide eyes toward Zillah. She looked at them closely. In the dimness they seemed very penetrating and luminous, as well as large, but they looked like human eyes to her. So, come to think of it, did High Horn’s eyes. “But most of the time,” Philo went on, nuzzling closer to Zillah as his way was, “it’s quite hard to tell, particularly with gualdian women. And look at me. The only hair I have is on my head, and I was born with these enormous hands and feet. My parents took one look at me and consulted the Gualdian. And he said, a bit helplessly, that it was to be hoped that I’d grow into something special — which I didn’t. But I think they kept on hoping. It was the Gualdian who sent me over to Arth. Maybe he thought they could bring something out in me.”
“Did they?” Zillah asked.
“No,” said Philo as they rounded the ramp into the next level.
“As if Arth could bring anything out in anyone!” Tod said. “The Gualdian must be senile to think it could. Here, Zillah, we have the first of Arth’s main reservoirs. Enough water to last the citadel for years. And, since the Brotherhood sometimes amazes the rest of the Pentarchy by being practical from time to time, they use their reservoirs to breed fish in.”
Zillah was already staring at a high glass wall behind which, in nightlike gloom, swam a shoal of small silver fish. Other bigger fish stirred in the dimmer distance. The lighting down here was just bright enough for her to see their five twilit reflections murkily mirrored in front of the fish, Philo all hands and feet and clinging, limber movements; herself and Tod both neat and quick; and Josh’s great silver body, which seemed to draw all the light to itself and focus that light on the small, vigorous figure of Marcus on his back. Marcus liked the glass surface and the fish. He made Josh go close so that he could push the boat from his Charity Bag across it.
“Voom-voom,” he murmured, happily ignoring the fact that his boat had sails.
At intervals along the glass wall were curious faucets, which Tod explained were fish traps. You drew the fish into them by magework. “I’d show you, if I only knew what we’d do with the fish once we got it,” he said. “But no one’s going to notice if we pinch some mushrooms for Josh on the next level.”
“I’d kill for fresh mushrooms!” Josh told Zillah. He moved slowly along beside the glass for Marcus to push his boat. It was warm and secret there, with only the half-seen fish and their own reflections, and it made Josh as confidential as Philo. “It was the same for me,” he said, “as it was for Philo, really. They said a weedy centaur with knock knees has no excuse for existing unless his natural magecraft is something unusual. Mine isn’t — but I’m sure that’s why the king ordered me to Arth. I was lined up with rows of really good specimens, and he chose me. He said he expected great things.”
“Only after your year’s up,” said Tod. “This place is inimical. I wish I was anywhere else most of the time. The only good thing to happen here is Zillah.”
Zillah laughed, but she had never been able to handle compliments, and she had to change the subject. “Is the king the same as the Gualdian?”
“Good gods, no!” the three native Pentarchans cried out together. Philo explained, “The Gualdian is only for gualdians.”
And Tod added, “Clan chief, sort of. The king is for everyone. He’s an odd fellow, our monarch, very modern type. Wears thick glasses and likes to trot out shopping with a string bag. To look at him, you wouldn’t think he had an ounce of birthright.”
“But he must have,” said Josh, “or he wouldn’t be king.”
“At least,” Philo said, with his chin resting on Zillah’s shoulder, “our Gualdian looks the part.”
“And renowned for his silver tongue,” said Tod. “They say he once sweet-talked an archangel — or was it Asphorael? — into fetching his newspaper every day!”
Philo shot straight beside Zillah. “That’s a lie!” She could feel his body almost twanging with anger. And though there was no apparent change to that body, in the glass of the reservoir, Philo’s reflection blurred. It seemed to be flaring and shimmering around the edge. Was this what made him gualdian and different?
“You still haven’t said,” she interrupted hurriedly, “what makes a gualdian a gualdian. How would I tell a gualdian woman, for instance?”
“She’d be stunningly beautiful for a start,” Tod said, and Zillah had no idea if he knew how offended Philo was. “One of my uncles married a gualdian lady, and she’s still stunning, even though my cousin Michael’s the same age as me. Otherwise you’d think she was human. She’s not the kind to go round telling everyone she was born with second sight. She—”