Ogre, Ogre (Xanth 5) (23 page)

"Oh--Mundane slang," Chet said. "But I think she wasn't quite ready for it."

"It's really no business of ours what you call it," Grundy said, smirking.

"Oh, don't be cruel!" the Siren said. "This poor girl is terrified, and we know Smash wouldn't hurt her. Something is wrong in the gourd."

In due course they worked it out. Smash would have to return to the brass building first, then come back for Biythe, who, it seemed, was afraid of interplanetary heights.

But now dawn was coming, and other business was pressing. They had to inform the local village of the protected status of the tree and its environs, and then Chet and his party had to return to Castle Roogna. In addition, Biythe was no longer so eager to jump into the gourd, with or without the ogre. If she went alone, she might find herself crashing in the ship, and have no way to get back outside, since she was not an outside creature. It would be better to send her back later, once things were more settled.

"Oh," Chet said. "Almost forgot. I gave Tandy's message to Crombie, and he made a pointing--that's his talent, you know, pointing out things--and he concluded that if you went north, you'd face great danger and lose three things of value. But when he did a pointing back where you came from, there was something else you'd lose that was even more important. He couldn't figure out what any of the things were, but thought you'd better be advised. He says you're a spunky girl who will probably win through in the manner of your kind."

Tandy laughed. "That's my father, all right! He hates women, and he knows I'm growing up, so he's starting to hate me, too. But I'm glad to have his advice."

"What's back at your home that's worse than the jungle of Xanth?" Chet asked.

Tandy remembered the demon Fiant.
"Never mind.
I'm not going home until that danger is nullified. I'll just take my chances with the three things I'll lose in the jungle."

But she found the message disquieting. She had no things to lose--but she knew her father never made a mistake when he pointed something out.

Princess Irene's talent was growing plants. She grew a fine, big, mixed-fruit bush, and they dined on red, green, blue, yellow, and black berries, all juicy and luscious. Smash had always liked Irene, because no one remained hungry in her presence, and she did have excellent legs. Not that an ogre should notice, of course--yet it was hard not to imagine how delicious such firmly fleshed limbs would taste.

"Uh, before you go," the Siren said. "I understand you have a way with the inanimate, Prince Dor."

"Whatever gave you that idiotic notion, fish-tail?" a rock beside the Prince inquired. The Siren was sitting next to a bucket of water and was soaking her tail; she got uncomfortable when she spent too long out of the water.

"I picked up something, and I think it may be magical," the Siren continued. "But I'm not sure in what way, and don't want to experiment foolishly." She brought out a bedraggled, half-metallic thing.

"What are you?" Prince Dor asked the thing.

"I am the Gap Dragon's Ear," it answered. "The confounded ogre bashed me off the dragon's head."

Smash was surprised. "How did you get that?"

"I picked it up during the fight,
then
forgot about it, What with the pining tree and all," the Siren explained.

"The Gap Chasm does have a forgetful property," Irene said. "I understand that's Dor's fault."

"But the Gap's been forgotten for centuries, hasn't it?" the Siren asked. "We can only remember it now because we're still quite close to it; we'll forget it again when we go on north. How can Dor possibly be responsible?"

"Oh, he gets around," Irene said, giving the Prince a dark look. "He's been places none of us would believe. He even used to live with Millie, the sex-appeal maid."

"She was my governess when I was a child!" Dor protested. "Besides, she was eight hundred years old."

"And looked seventeen," Irene retorted. "You weren't conscious of that?"

Dor concentrated on the Ear. "What is your property?" he asked it.

"I hear anything relevant," it said. "I twitch when my possessor should listen. That's how the Gap Dragon always knew when prey was in the Gap. I heard it for him."

"Well, the Gap Dragon still has one ear to hear with," Dor said. "How can we hear what you hear?"

"Just listen to me, dummy!" the Ear said. "What else do you do with an ear?"

"That's a mighty impolite item," Tandy said, bothered.

"Can we test it?" the Siren asked. "Before you go, Prince Dor?"

"Oh, let me try," John said. She seemed much recovered, though her wings remained nubs. It would be long before she flew again, if ever.

The Siren gave her the Ear. John held it to
her own
tiny ear. She listened intently, her face showing puzzlement. "It's a rushing sound, maybe like water flowing," she reported. "Is that relevant?"

"Well, I didn't twitch," the Ear grumped. "You take your chances when there's nothing much on."

"How is that rushing noise relevant?" Dor asked the Ear.

"Obvious, stupid," the Ear said. "That's the sound of the waterfall where the fairy she wants is staying."

"It is?" John demanded, so excited that her wing-stubs fluttered.
"The one with my name?"

"That's what I said, twerp."

"Do you tolerate insults from the inanimate?" the Siren asked the Prince.

"Only stupid things insult others gratuitously," Dor said.

"That's for sure, you moron," the rock agreed. Then it reconsidered. "Hey--"

The Siren laughed. "Now I understand. You have to consider the source."

Prince Dor smiled. "You resemble your sister. Of course, I've never seen her face."

"The rest will do," the Siren said, flattered. "Do only smart people compliment others gratuitously?"

"Perhaps," he agreed.
"Or observant ones.
But I do obtain much useful information from the inanimate. Now we must go talk with the villagers and head back to Castle Roogna. It has been nice to meet all of you, and I hope you all find what you wish."

There was a chorus of thank-you's. Prince Dor and Princess Irene remounted the holey cow. Chet kissed Chem good-bye, and Grundy the Golem scrambled onto his back. "Get moving, horsetail!" Then Grundy paused thoughtfully, exactly as the rock had. They moved off toward the village.

"Dor will make a fine King one day," the Siren remarked.

"But Irene will run the show," Chem said. "I know them well."

"No harm in that," the Siren said, and the other girls laughed, agreeing.

"We'd better get started north," Tandy said.
"Now that the tree is safe."

"How can I ever thank you?" Fireoak exclaimed. "You saved my life, my tree's life.
Same thing."

"Some things are simply worth doing for themselves, dear," the Siren said. "I learned that when Chem's father
Chester destroyed my dulcimer, so I couldn't lure men any more." Her sunshine hair clouded momentarily.

"My father did that?" Chem asked, surprised. "I didn't know!"

"It stopped me from being a menace to navigation," the Siren said. "I was doing a lot of damage, uncaringly. It was a necessary thing. Likewise it was necessary to save the fireoak tree."

"Yes," Chem agreed. But she seemed shaken.

They bade farewell to the hamadryad, promising to visit her any time any of them happened to be in the vicinity, and started north.

At first they passed through normal Xanth countryside--carnivorous grasses, teakettle serpents whose hisses were worse than their fires, poisonous springs, tangle trees, sundry spells, and the usual ravines, mountains, river rapids, slow and quicksand bogs, illusions, and a few normally foul-mouthed harpies, but nothing serious occurred. They foraged along the way for edible things and took turns listening to the Gap Dragon's Ear, though it was not twitching; this became more helpful as they gradually learned to interpret it. The Siren heard a kind of splashing, as of someone swimming. She took this to be the merman she wanted to find. Goldy heard the sounds of a goblin settlement in operation: where she was going. Smash heard the rhyming grunts of ogres. Biythe, persuaded to try it, jumped as the Ear twitched in her hands, and she actually heard herself mentioned. The brassies missed her and feared the ogre had betrayed their trust. "I must go back!" she cried.
"As soon as I recover enough of my courage.
My nerves aren't iron, you know."

But when Chem tried it, her face sobered. "It must be out of order. All I get is a faint buzzing."

The Siren took back the Ear. "That's funny. I get the buzzing, too, now."

They passed the Ear around. Everyone heard the same thing, and it twitched for none of them.

Smash applied his Eye Queue curse to the Ear. "Either it is malfunctioning," he decided, "or the buzzing is somehow relevant to all of us, without being specific to any of us. No one is talking about us, no one is lurking for us, so it is just something we should know about."

"Let's assume it's not malfunctioning," Tandy said. "The last thing we need is a glitching Ear, especially when my father says there is danger ahead. So we'd better watch out for something that buzzes. It seems to be getting louder as we go."

Indeed it was. Now there were variations in it, louder buzzes in front of background ones, an elevating and lowering of pitch. It was, in fact, a whole collection of buzzes, sounding three-dimensional, as some pitches became louder and clearer, while others faded back and some faded out entirely. What did it mean?

They came across a wall made from paper. It traveled roughly east/west and reached up to the top level of the trees, too high for Smash to surmount. It was opaque; he could not see through it at all.

However, a wall of paper could hardly impede an ogre. He readied a good punch.

"Careful!" John cried. "That looks like--"

Smash's fist punched through the wall. The paper separated readily, but glued itself to his arm.

"Flypaper," the fairy concluded.

Smash tried to pull the sticky stuff off, but it stuck to his other hand when he touched it. The more he worked at it, the more places it adhered to. Soon he was covered with the stuff.

"Slow down. Smash," Chem said. "I'm sure hot water will clean that off. I saw a hotspring a short distance back."

She took him to the hotspring and washed him off, and it did clean him up. Her hands were efficient yet gentle; Smash discovered he liked having a female attend to him this way. But of course he couldn't admit it; he was an ogre. "Next time use a stick to poke through that paper," the centaur advised.

But when they returned to the wall, they found the others had already thought of that. They had poked and peeled a hole big enough for anyone to pass through. "But there's one thing," Tandy warned. "There are swarms of flies over there."

So that was what the Ear had warned them of. They were going to pass through a region of flies.

That didn't bother Smash; he normally ignored flies. Biythe was also unworried; no fly could sting brass. But Tandy, Chem, Goldy, John, and the Siren were concerned. They didn't want stinging flies raising welts on their pretty skins. "If only we had some repellent," Tandy said. "In the caves there are some substances that drive them off--"

"Some repellent bushes do grow in these parts," Goldy said. "Let me look." She scouted about and soon located one. "The only problem is
,
they smell awful." She held out the leaves she had plucked.

She had not overstated the case. The stench was appalling. No wonder the flies stayed clear of it!

They discussed the matter and decided it was better to stink than to suffer too great a detour in their route north. They held their breath and rubbed the foul leaves over their bodies. Then, reeking of repellent, they stepped through the rent in the flypaper and proceeded north.

There was a sound behind them. Marching along the paper wall was a monstrous fly in coveralls, toting a cart. It stopped at the rent, unrolled a big patch of paper, and set it in place, sealing it over with stickum. Then the flypaper hanger moved on to the east, following the wall.

"We're sealed in," Tandy muttered.

A dense swarm of sting-flies spotted them and zoomed in--only to bank off in dismay as the awful odor smote it. Good enough; Smash's nose was already acclimating or getting deadened to the smell, which wasn't much worse than that of another ogre, after all.

They walked on, watching the flies. There were many varieties, and some were beautiful with brightly colored, patterned wings and furry bodies. John became very quiet; obviously she missed her own patterned wings. There were deerflies and horseflies and dragonflies, looking like winged miniatures of their species; the deerflies nibbled blades of grass, the horseflies kicked up their heels as they galloped, and the dragonflies even jetted small lances of fire. At one spot there was music; fiddler flies were playing for damselflies to dance. It seemed to be a real fly ball.

This became a pleasant trip, since there seemed to be no dangerous creatures here; the flies had driven them all away. But then the sky clouded and rain fell. It was a light fall--but it washed away their repellent. Suddenly they were in trouble, having failed to take immediate shelter.

The first flies to discover this were sweat-gnats. Soon a cloud of them hovered about each person except Biythe, causing everyone to sweat uncomfortably. Smash inhaled deeply and blew the gnats away, but as soon as the turbulence ebbed, they were back worse than ever. Other flies saw the clouds and, in turn, converged. Some of these were itchers, causing intolerable itches; others were bleeders, causing blood to flow from painless bites. But the worst, as it turned out, were the fly-bys, because they flew by, observed, and carried the news of new prey to all corners of the Kingdom of the Flies. After that, the very sky was darkened by the mass of the converging swarms. There seemed to be no effective way to fight them, for there were far too many to swat or shoo away.

Then the swarms drew off a little, and a pair of shoeflies marched up. A formation of bowflies sent a fly arrow shooting in the direction Smash's party was supposed to go. It seemed better to obey, rather than fight, for there were sawflies and hammerflies and screwdriverflies that could be most awkward to fend off.