“We won’t still be here, surely?” Anthony said, his own apprehension coming through. He heard it and amended himself more calmly. “Will the mission last that long?”
His father shook his head. “We don’t know, Tony.”
“What kind of horses can these Hippae be?” Marjorie mused, turning to look into the shadowy corners of the vast, low space. “This looks like some great burrow Like the meeting hall of a badger’s set.”
“The meeting hall of a badger’s set?” her daughter mocked. “Mother, you amaze me.” She shook her hair over her shoulders, the depthless black silk of it flowing down over her back like lightless water. Her seventeen-year-old body was still slight, and the beauty which would be ravishing was only beginning to emerge. Now she smiled a siren’s smile and sulked at her parents out of deeply fringed eyes. “When were you last in a badger’s set?” It was not said lovingly. Stella had not wanted to come to Grass. They had insisted that she come, but they had been unable to tell her why. To Stella, the journey had been a violation of her person. With maximum drama, she likened it to rape and let them know it as often as possible. “In some other life?” she mocked now. “In some other time?”
“When I was a changeling,” her mother answered firmly. “Long and long ago, when I was unconscious of my dignity. As I am about to be again. I am going to change into some nice old robe and become sedentary. I need food, a lot of food, and then some familiar book and sleep. There is too much that is strange here. Even the colors of things aren’t right.”
And they weren’t. Her words brought it to all their attention as they left the caverns to walk through a bleached alley of imported trees toward the residence. The colors weren’t right. The sky should be blue and was not. The prairie should be the color of dried grass, but their eyes insisted upon making it pale mauve and paler sapphire, as though under a stage-light moon.
“It’s only that it’s foreign to us,” Tony said, trying to comfort her, wanting to be comforted himself. He had left things behind, too. A girl who mattered to him. Friends he cared about. Plans for education and life. He wanted the sacrifice to have been for something, for some reason, not merely to exist for a time in this chill discomfort amid strange colors. Tony had not been told why, either, but he trusted Marjorie when she told him it was important. It was Tony’s nature to trust, as it had been Marjorie’s at his age, when she married.
“We will ride to the Hunt,” Rigo said firmly. “The horses will be recovered by then.”
“No,” Marjorie said, shaking her head. “Apparently we mustn’t.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He said it, as he often did, without thinking, and was immediately annoyed as he saw the pain in her face.
“Rigo, my dear, surely you don’t think it’s my idea not to ride.” She laughed, a light little laugh which said in the only way she could that he was being obtuse and unpleasant. “Obermun bon Haunser almost came apart at his impeccable seams when I suggested we would merely join the field on horseback. Apparently arrangements have been made otherwise.”
“Damn it, Marjorie. Why was I sent here? Why were you? Except for the horses?”
She didn’t try to answer him. It was not a question which could be answered. He glared at her. Stella stared, giggling a little, enjoying this discord. Tony made uncomfortable littlehrnchingsounds in his throat as he did when caught in some seeming conflict between them. “Surely,” he said softly, “surely …”
“I thought it was something important we were here for?” sneered Stella, unwittingly derailing her father’s hostility toward Marjorie and bringing it upon herself.
“We would scarcely have come otherwise,” he snapped angrily. “Our lives have been disrupted, too, and we are no fonder of Grass than you are. We, like you, would prefer to be at home, getting on with our lives.” He lashed at an offending seed head with his whip. “What’s this about not riding?”