The monster tried, though it seemed he had not done this before. He managed to overlap the voices, but his notes were ragged and it was not very melodic. However, after finishing he tried it again, and this time did it better. He had lost style points, perhaps, because he had required two tries, but he had done it. That was what counted.
Then Picka played it again, this time with three voices. He carried it through to the end, suddenly glad that he had tackled this supposedly irrelevant exercise.
The monster did well on the first voice and the first overlap, but the third one threw him. He had obviously never practiced a round done this way, and had trouble balancing the offset melodies. He got through again, but in an inferior manner.
Then Picka played all four voices. He covered them perfectly, making a lovely song with the “Oo’s” sounding above the other parts, providing a special flavor. He tapered off at the end, as each voice finished in turn.
When he finished, he looked at Piper—but there was not much to see. The monster had melted into the earth, and was now no more than a messy pool of goo-soaked dirt. He had not even attempted the four-voice variant, and had been defeated. He had paid for it with his substance.
Picka was, in his fashion, sorry. Piper had been a worthy opponent, and probably should have won. Picka had just happened to find the variants that gave him the edge. Maybe in time he would truly become a superior musician, but he owed his victory mostly to luck.
The animals, aware that the music was done, faded back into the forest.
Demon Pundit reappeared. “The verdict?”
“Picka,” Joy’nt said.
“Tweet!”
“And I agree,” the Demon said. It had been a formality, considering the fate of the monster. “Picka Bone, take possession of princess and castle and commence your duties collecting and storing puns. I will expect to see steady progress.” He frowned. “And no messing up.”
“No messing up,” Picka agreed. Then he surprised himself by trying something dangerously daring. “Demon Pundit, I beg a boon.”
The Demon was surprised. “You dare?”
Picka plowed ahead. “Piper is worthy. He did what he had to do. He made a mistake trusting a treacherous woman. He has been punished. He does not deserve extinction. I beg you: spare him.”
“I’ll be bleeped,” the Demon said in wonder. “You are a more generous being than I took you for. But if I spare him, he may interfere with the pun-collecting mission.”
“Not if you put a geis on him not to interfere. He might even help, making the job go faster.”
The Demon pondered a micro-moment. He cared not half a whit for any person, but did want efficient collection. Then the gooey dirt where the monster had melted heaved, and formed into the man, Piper.
“You are spared by Picka’s request,” the Demon told him. “You will retain existence as long as you labor diligently to assist in pun collection. If you enter Caprice Castle you will transform to monster form until you depart it. If you touch Princess Dawn you will dissipate in smoke.” He turned to Picka. “Is that satisfactory?” The sarcasm fairly dripped. “Will you now get to work?”
“First we will need to report to the Good Magician,” Picka said, still dazed by his sudden victory, “so he knows Dawn has completed her mission to tame Caprice Castle and fetch Pundora’s Box.”
“Caprice will take you there, and anywhere else,” Pundit said shortly. He vanished.
Piper spoke. “Thank you for a favor beyond anything I would have done for you. You are not only Xanth’s greatest musician, you bid fair to be Xanth’s best person. You and I have been enemies. That is over. I will support you in every respect to the best of my ability. I will go collect puns.” He turned and strode away.
Dawn jumped up and ran to him. “I knew you could do it, Picka!” she exclaimed, kissing his skull so hard that little heart-shaped skulls flew out.
The Demon reappeared. “One other minor thing: either of you will be able to assume either form at will for as long as you desire, while on the castle premises. The same is true for the two other skeletons, and the giantess if she chooses. You no longer need the transformation spells. Return them to the Good Magician.” He faded.
“Thank you, Demon,” Picka said belatedly.
“Enter the castle, all of you,” Dawn said, also beckoning the sky where Granola stood. “We have a trip to make, and a job to do.” She glanced around. “Plus a phenomenal victory celebration, a royal wedding inside Caprice Castle, and anything else I happen to think of.” She glanced at Picka. “You will assume fleshly form for the wedding, and for the wedding night, until I am quite satisfied.” She winked in a manner that would have unsettled a stork. “I may even tease you by becoming a skeleton while you are in amorous flesh form. Any objections?”
“No, dear,” he agreed dutifully. In fact, her notions threatened to be quite intriguing.
“I knew that,” she said, and kissed him again.
Author’s Note
I planned to start writing this novel SapTimber 1 (Ogre Calendar; their months are more descriptive than the mundane ones) 2009. I cleared all my projects and tag-end chores by the end of AwGhost, so as to have no distractions. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. Well, nature must have considered that clearance to have been a vacuum, because things came in from left field to take my time. Such as the copyedited manuscript for my historical novel Climate of Change, which I had to page through and check. Such as a necessary blood test for a doctor’s appointment. Such as material to review for the high school writer I was mentoreeing. I also answered four or five fan letters those two days. But on the second day of the month I did manage to squeeze in five-hundred-word notes organizing the novel.
The third day was busy. I use an adult scooter, the kind you push with one foot, to fetch in the morning newspapers, a round-trip of just over a mile and a half. On the way back the rear tire popped, and I walked the rest of the way. My wife’s front bicycle tire also went flat. So I dismounted both, and discovered neither could be patched; we would have to buy new tubes and a new tire. That took an hour to ascertain. We also had shopping to do, another generous hour. A novel manuscript arrived, for reading and comment. I planned to read the first ten pages, getting it started, then start writing my novel.
Then came The Call: our elder daughter, Penelope Carolyn Jacob, in treatment for cancer, who had recently had brain surgery to remove tumors that were paralyzing her right side, had suddenly died. Her forty-second birthday would have been the next month. That wiped out the rest of my day, and in fact it was four days before I could return to this novel. It wasn’t just the emotional turmoil. We were busy notifying family of the tragedy and setting up monetary and practical help for her widowed husband and eight-year-old daughter; their loss was greater than ours. Fortunately our younger daughter, Cheryl, had taken time off from work and flown there to assist for the month. Three days into that, Cheryl suddenly had a lot more responsibility.
So this novel was written under a cloud. Penny was constantly on my mind. I really wasn’t in the mood for funny fantasy. But neither was I in the mood to curl up and suffer. Writing is what I do, and it was time for this novel. My wife and I maintained our activity, consoling each other, and supporting the others. There is no need to belabor this further. It will be two years later by the time this novel is published. Anyone who wishes to get more of the story can check my blog-type column for OctOgre 2009, at www.hipiers.com, where I give a sort of memorial life history of my daughter.
But I will mention here that Penny had impact on Xanth. She was ten when the first Xanth novel was published. She contributed the pun about the dirty mind of Jordon Barbarian, after his skull got split open and his horse used his hooves to scrape his brains back in, along with some dirt. Every time thereafter when Jordon saw a pretty girl, that dirt got stirred up and colored his thoughts. That also happens, oddly, to many mundane men. Penny said after her own brain surgery that, yes, there was some air and
dirt from that, so now she was an air head with a dirty mind. When I made up the Xanth calendar, with the Ogre Months, I was stumped on February. She suggested FeBlueberry. I laughed, dismissing it, but soon realized that it was perfect: the month when the red berries got blue with cold. Penny’s horse, Sky Blue, became the model for the Night Mare Imbrium, with the hoof print on the moon named after her, and for Neysa unicorn in the Adept series.
In fact, I had Penny in mind when I crafted Princess Ivy and followed her as she grew up over the course of several Xanth novels. When Penny made a friend her exact same age, she demanded that Ivy find a twin sister; thus Princess Ida came to be. When Penny got engaged, so did Ivy. But then Penny didn’t marry for eight years, so neither could Ivy. I finally lost patience and divorced them, freeing Ivy. She immediately married Grey Murphy. Then Penny married. It seemed the character had started leading the way. Ivy went on to have triplet princesses, but Penny was satisfied with just one mundane daughter. Ah, well.
However, this novel is not about Penny. It just happened to be the one I was writing when Penny died. Because her death colored my world while I was writing it, Penny gets this recognition here. And no, Ivy will not die, any more than will my memory of my daughter.
* * *
The writing started slowly, but gained speed as I recovered my equilibrium. Life does go on, though the hole in my soul will never completely heal. Before the novel ended, I had dental surgery to remove five teeth, setting up for partial dentures. At this writing I’m seventy-five, and my teeth have never been great; I’m tired of pouring money into the aching cavity. I thought my recovery from the extractions would have me zonked out on pain pills, but it wasn’t that bad, and I continued to write, and completed the novel on schedule. But I remain in doubt whether it is as sharp as prior novels; that will be for the readers to judge. Meanwhile I had to wrestle with the dread Soft Diet while my mouth healed, and lost weight before bouncing back.
There are the usual half slew of puns. There may be fewer in future, as the puns are methodically collected and locked in the Caprice Castle dungeon. But I suspect that more will continue to leak in from Mundania, so there won’t be much difference for a while. We’ll see. The title itself is a pun on The Well-Tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach. The clavier is the keyboard of any musical instrument; think of it as a piano. Bach’s piece is about four hours of gentle piano music. My second daughter, Cheryl, gave me a four-disc CD set with the complete preludes and fugues, and I listened to it while working on this novel. To my untrained ear it’s just music, but I understand that knowledgeable musicians consider it to be a pinnacle of this form, the “Old Testament.” So we have even-tempered Picka Bone playing his ribs as a keyboard, and yes, his music sounds just like Bach.
Before I started writing the novel I had a problem: I did not remember how walking skeletons reproduced. That information was buried somewhere in a prior novel, and I was not about to reread several novels to locate it. So I went to the readers of my monthly column and asked, promising a credit in the Author’s Note. They came through. The most comprehensive early answer was by Erin Schram, who identified the novels and even quoted relevant passages. Others were by Russell Leverett, Heather Hatch, Sean Draven, Jan Perlmutter, Bridget “Bee” Allen, and Kerry Melissa Anne Garrigan. Thank you, one and all. Oh—how do they do it? He strikes her so hard she flies apart. This is known as knocking her up. He selects small bones from the collection and assembles them into a baby skeleton. I was not sure how Princess Dawn would go for that, nice as her bones may be—women can be fussy about the darnedest things—but in the course of the novel I learned that Dawn could handle it. How are the genders distinguished? Girl skeletons have one more rib.
That settled, I proceeded to the writing. I have a list of reader suggestions that keeps growing; I try to use them up, but some readers send in pages at a time, and so I never quite catch up. But I try to use one suggestion by each contributor before using more than one by some. That means that a number of available notions were not used here; I ran out of room. They should find homes in future novels. I don’t want to annoy readers unduly, but the truth is that I would find it easier to write the novels without reader suggestions. I know, because I do write non-Xanth novels, even if many readers seem not to know that. It can be a challenge to fit in so many reader notions without disrupting the flow of the story. At any rate, here are the credits:
Appundix: the list of contributors to the novel—suggested by Ken Sundvik. Bring back the Baldwin pets, Woofer, Tweeter, Midrange—Michael Putch. F & G gravestones, Flight of Stairs chained down—Taz Spivak. Cody deciphers codes or languages—Cody White. Think tank, Chopping Chop Sticks, Gorgon’s marble cake, Isle of Cats littering law—Robert. Astonish- and fig-Mints—Olivia Davis. Coco-nuts with cocoa inside—Nicole. Iron Maiden, Talent of changing the color of trees, boy with hot hands, Snowshoe Tree—Aaron Jackson. Psycho Path—Cassandra York. Rob, who robs—Robert Tobara. Talent of making balls of light—Aaron Amberg. Lending strength of body, substance, or character—Champion. Meaty Oar—Logan Addotta. Curse Sieve—Sophia Hanson. Glitch in the spell making Bink’s descendents magicians, makes most female too, Chameleon gets split into Fanchon and Wynne—Matt Yarnot. Riding a day mare—D.B. Bone-headed ideas—Kerry Melissa Anne Garrigan. Sound Barrier, Diplo-mats, woman makes dreams real—Nicolas Birchett. Key Limes that unlock doors—Adrian. Jack in the Box, Occu-pie, crack-hers, crack his—Jennifer Macleod. Frayed Knot—Dave Gomberg. Evil Devil Tree, Blood, Fog, River Banks, Salad Bar, Infini Tea, petroleum jellyfish, jellyfish bean, many pun demons—Tim Bruening.
Thought Projection, Worry Wart, absorbing talents, answering a question without confusion, pausing time for others—Brant Tucker. Box containing all puns (Pundora’s Box)—Belgarion Kheidar. Caprice Castle—Ron Leming. Attila the Pun, Hairdo/Hairdon’t, finding something in the second-to-last place looked, Greased Lightning—Jesse McBeth. Punisher—Jamie Conner. Tom Boy, SOGA (Sea of Gruesome Arms), Walking skeletons have desiccated souls, the woman Steel who becomes a weapon, Buddy who is best friend—Bithor. Aliena—name borrowed from Aliena Scarlet. Bass Fish—Chris Hamilton. Drift wood makes thoughts drift—Kyle Martin Paddock. Ci-Gar, Ci-Garette—Donald Dickerson. Water Shed—Anna Pool.
Khari Saia—Khari Saia. Cow peas, reci peas—Darrel W. Jones. Pop fly (soda)—Wes Didier. Finger Prince (finger prints)—Rusty Burkett. Matter Horn, Turn Coat—Thomas Pfarrer. Pastree for pastries and paste, razor tree—Webster Neely. Window Pain—Richard Dickerson. Pie in the Sky—Wes Didier. See an Enemy (anemone)—Ian deJoode. Aphid David, the legal bug—Misty J Zaebst. Poultrygeist, Doris who sees the truth—Deneen Jardstam. Rockchuck—Kelley Gililland. Car Pet—Cathy Priller. Have a female giant—Jareth. Granola = Granny Ola—Chris Dalton. Wear-Wolf, Where Wolf—Laura C. Punishment—cursed with a pun to live with—James Kollinger. Demon Litho fragmenting into asteroid belt—Kim Delaney IV. Furn, Airic, Peat, Wyck, Quantum—Wade Moriarty. Skully Knucklehead—Joe Birchett. Ports of Xanth: C, D, M, X, Car, Pass, Purr, Trans, Rap—Avi Ornstein. Smart Bombs—Richey Birchett. Crymea River—Adria Nyxx. Common Tater—Amber Hamm. Skyler making gray days bright, Sky Violet blending into scenery—Audrey Willoughby. The two Claire Voyants meeting—John D. Heinmiller.
Mim Barbarian, changing her wings—Maddragon. Eunice, who adds the silent E. Text Tiles, Text Us—Dragonlord. GoDemon making music from anything—Benjammmin St. Rebel. Talent of making any rolling object come up as wanted—Mike Kloss. Tracy Berry McLain—Tabby McLain. Anthony Liaw “Pirate”—Kara Ogushi. Talent of summoning cheese from the moon, summoning stink horns—Dan Clarke. Adora Bull, minotaur maiden, with door talent—Jamie O’Neill. D Sist, A Sist—Chris Bullard. Sara Nade—Kari Lambert. Emily Bee Keeper, Erin Kitty Litter—Lora Beuoy. Grease monkeys, fuel hogs—Russell Styles. Convey-Her-Belt, Transparents—Emma Schwarztans. Talent of becoming a shadow—Noah Goodman. Bubble of Silence—Justin Hernandez. Rain Bow—Alexander Jones. Centaur gets things wrong—Sparrow.
Thus conc
ludes Xanth #35. I have not yet decided on the next, but suspect it will be Luck of the Draw, wherein there is a Demon contest to determine the ideal man for Princess Harmony as she comes of age. Xanth has many princesses, as noted, and finding suitable men for them is a continuing project. They do not like to be denied. Meanwhile, readers are welcome to catch up on my current events at my website, www.hipiers.com, where I have a monthly blog-type column and maintain on ongoing survey of electronic publishers and related services. That’s because it seems that about half my readers are aspiring authors, and they need to find suitable publishers. That’s almost as difficult as finding situations for princesses.
TOR BOOKS by PIERS ANTHONY
THE XANTH SERIES
Vale of the Vole
Heaven Cent
Man from Mundania
Demons Don’t Dream
Harpy Thyme
Geis of the Gargoyle
Roc and a Hard Place
Yon Ill Wind
Faun & Games
Zombie Lover
Xone of Contention
The Dastard
Swell Foop
Up in a Heaval
Cube Route
Currant Events
Pet Peeve
Stork Naked
Air Apparent
Two to the Fifth
Jumper Cable
Knot Gneiss
Well-Tempered Clavicle
THE GEODYSSEY SERIES
Isle of Woman
Shame of Man
Hope of Earth
Muse of Art
Climate of Change
ANTHOLOGIES
Alien Plot
Anthonology
NONFICTION
How Precious Was That While
Well-Tempered Clavicle Page 32