Man From Mundania

by Piers Anthony

  “That just might be!” she agreed. “This is certainly turning out to be more than just a castle cleaning!”

  There was a shadow in the sky. “There's another one already!” he said, his heart sinking. “A roc. Neither moat nor walls will slow that down!”

  “No, it's my brother, silly!” Ivy said. “We'll tell him to fetch us the Book of Answers, so you can answer Mae and send her back immediately.” It was evident that Ivy remained uneager to have the shapely Wild Woman remain close to Grey for any longer than was strictly necessary.

  He liked that.

  “You tell Dolph,” he decided. “I'll figure out the next challenge. I think we can use Goody Goblin after all.”

  “See that you do,” Ivy said darkly, and hurried off in the direction of a roof terrace.

  Grey went in search of the goblin, whose chamber might not be where it had been. All the labyrinthine passages of the castle were different, but there were not a great number, and soon he did find the goblin.

  “Do you know, Magician, I must have been unobservant yesterday,” Goody remarked. “I could have sworn the passage was of another nature.”

  “It was,” Grey explained shortly. “We changed the layout. Now I would like you to do me one service before you go.”

  “Gladly, Magician!”

  “There is a Wild Woman coming into the castle. You must go down and try to scare her off. Don't hurt her, just frighten her.”

  “A Wild Woman? But they don't affright readily, and I am hardly the type to—” The goblin paused, realizing something. “I believe I saw a mirror chamber downstairs.

  In that I could assume the aspect of twenty goblins. If I made faces and moved around, I might put on a good show. But if she catches on—”

  “Then she wins the challenge, and your service is done,” Grey said. “You will then be able to go your way with a clear conscience.”

  “Excellent! I shall intercept her as she passes through that chamber.” Goody hurried down the hall.

  But he still needed a third challenge. What would really faze a Wild Woman?

  Grey snapped his fingers. He searched out the maiden.

  “Maiden, there is a service you may be able to perform to acquit your debt to me.”

  “What would that be. Magician?” she asked, just a trifle warily.

  “There is a Wild Woman coming into the castle soon. I want you to intercept her after she passes the goblin, and give her a manicure and hair styling and female outfitting—a frilly dress, slippers, and uh—” He faltered.

  “Panties?” she prompted.

  “Uh, yes. That sort of thing.”

  “Oh, yes, I am excellent at that sort of thing!” she agreed. “But a Wild Woman—”

  “You will stand athwart a locked door which bars her passage to me. She must suffer the treatment or be forever barred. If she departs without the treatment, your debt is paid. If she agrees to it, you will—how long would it take?”

  “To do it right? Hours!”

  “Perfect! When it is done, knock on the door, and I will open it, and you may go home.”

  And if that didn't stop the Wild Woman, nothing would, he thought as he went looking for Ivy. But by that time, he should have the Book of Answers, and be able to handle her Question. He really appreciated Humfrey's system, now!

  Mae encountered the goblin in the mirror chamber. She screamed: not in fear, but in outrage. It seemed that Maenads didn't like goblins. She chased the first figure she saw, and smacked into the mirror. After several such smacks she began to catch on to the nature of the challenge. She noted her own reflections in the mirrors, and avoided these. Finally she found a panel in which there was neither a goblin nor Wild Woman and leaped through it, for that was the exit. She had won the second challenge, and it had only taken her an hour to do it.

  Meanwhile Dolph had taken off for Castle Roogna. As a roc he could cover the distance rapidly—but once there he would have to convince King Dor to give him the volume, which was kept locked up for safety until the Good Magician's return. Ivy would have sent a note, but even so, it could take hours. Would the book arrive in time?

  The maiden intercepted the Maenad. There was another screech of outrage. Almost the wild woman turned back… but the same flaw of character that caused her to avoid blood made her decide to submit to this transcendent indignity. The maiden started to beautify and civilize her appearance.

  Two hours passed. Grey knew that the beautification could not last much longer. Where was Dolph?

  Then the roc showed on the horizon. The big bird was carrying a book!

  It turned out to be a monstrous volume. Grey clutched it in his arms and set it on a table evidently sized for it.

  He opened it—and was bewildered by such a maze of entries that he could not make any sense of them. It would take him an hour just to find his place!

  The door opened. A stunning Mundane woman entered.

  Grey blinked. This had to be the Maenad—but what a change! Grace’l must have found a cache of supplies for this job. She was in a lovely pink dress with bows, and wore pink slippers with flowers on top, and her hair was bound in another bow with another flower. Her finger and toenails were delicately tinted, and so were her lips. Her legs were so smooth that they were surely exhibited in hose, and there was a definite suggestion of panty out of sight. She looked as if she were going to a debutante party.

  She had come for her Answer, surmounting all the challenges—and he was unable to use the Book of Answers!

  Now what was he to do?

  Her petite mouth opened, the Question incipient.

  “You're beautiful,” he said, partly to stave off her Question, and partly because it was true.

  “You have humiliated me!” she cried. “You have made me cry, and chase a goblin, and—what?”

  “You're beautiful,” he repeated. “If you wish, I will null out all that magic as you stand before a mirror, and you will see that your beauty owes nothing to enchantment or nymphly arts. Any time you wish to retire from the oracle, I'm sure you could readily nab a village lout.”

  She considered. “Maybe I will. It has occurred to me since meeting you that-there may after all be uses for men other than as food. But right now I have a Question.”

  He had hoped he had diverted her. Now he was in for it. “Ask.”

  “I am running out of gibberish to spout when I sit over the cleft. The priest says I can't be a priestess unless I have plenty of vile-sounding gibberish. How can I get it?”

  His worst fear had come true: here was a Question he couldn't answer! How could a person “find” gibberish to spout when it no longer came naturally?

  Then he remembered how Goody Goblin's nice language had deteriorated when he had sat on a curse burr.

  Suppose Mae did the same thing?

  He looked at her form, and knew he couldn't recommend that remedy; it would be a defilement of beauty.

  But another memory came to him: of his father, in past years, laboring over a Mundane torture known as income tax. Much of the problem had been the maddeningly incomprehensible tax manual.

  “Grace’l,” he said.

  The lady skeleton appeared.

  “Fetch the volume labeled Revised Simplified Tax Manual. “

  Soon Grace’l was back with the volume, one of the pile of dusty tomes Grey and Ivy had sorted through. He had thought that particular one useless, but had been too busy to throw it out yet.

  He opened the tome. “Now I want you to look at this and try your best to make sense of it.”

  “A book?” Mae asked, frowning skeptically. She looked at the page. “It shouldn't be hard to blip toggle subtract twenty-eight percent of Line 114 from the total of Lines 31 and 89, whichever is less coherent, and zap fraggle Form 666 under Line 338A unless outgo is more than indicated in Supplementary Brochure 15Q, in which case fromp beezle—” She looked up. “This is sheer gibberish!”

  “Precisely,” Grey said. “This is the volume
of gibberish. No one has made sense of it in centuries. Take it with you, and you will never run out of inspiration.”

  “Oh thank you, Magician!” she exclaimed, clutching the tome to her bosom. “And what service—”

  Grey started to say that she needed to perform no service, then realized that he just might need a Wild Woman to challenge some other visitor. The Good Magician's policy of requiring a term of service was not merely to discourage applicants, but to make the system feasible. It all fitted together—now that he had spent a day, as it were, in the Good Magician's shoes. “Remain for a while,” he said gruffly. “The skeleton will show you to a room. I shall notify you of your service in due course.”

  Then, seemingly abruptly, his time was up. They had spent most of a week putting Humfrey's castle in order and in handling the constant pleas for Answers. The Good Magician had not returned, and now it was evident that he was not going to. Their wild hope had proved vain.

  Dolph was ready to change form and carry Grey and Ivy away. Marrow and Grace’l had agreed to supervise the shutting down of the castle, with the help of those who owed service. The brief restoration of Answers was about to end.

  Ivy's determination to come with him remained firm.

  She bid a tearful farewell to the castle and the creatures of it, and would do the same as they stopped by Castle Roogna on the way to the isthmus. Forced to choose between him and her homeland, she had done him the immense kindness of choosing him, and he would always remember and treasure that, no matter how dreary his life in Mundania became. With her it would have been bearable; without her it would be unbearable. But he had to do what he had to do. He would fly with her back to Castle Roogna, then say what he had to say, in the presence of her family. He knew that King Dor and Queen Irene would understand, and would support his position. Ivy might hate him, for a time, but she did have magic alternatives.

  “It's time,” he said through the lump in his throat. “I wish I could stay here forever, hectic as it may be; I really like feeling useful! But I can't.” That was only the half of it! This coming flight would be his last with her, and with her love.

  Ivy was blinking back her tears. She took his hand, proffering silent comfort. How little she knew!

  Dolph changed form. He became the roc, precariously perched on the roof. One of his huge claws happened to slip on a dead leaf on a tile; he lost his balance, and had to spread his wings to recover. The tip of one wing clipped a turret—and a flying feather was broken.

  Dolph changed back. He jammed a crushed finger into his mouth. “I can't—mmph—fly with that—mmph—broken feather!” he said around it.

  “You poor thing!” Ivy said with instant sympathy. “I'll bandage it.”

  “But how will we get to the isthmus in time?” Grey asked. He knew that no other mode of transport would be fast enough; they had depended on Dolph and had stayed just as late as they could risk it. He felt guilty for that, knowing he was playing it too close, but savoring his last moments in Xanth and with Ivy.

  “Look in the Book of Answers!” Ivy said over her shoulder as she took her brother off for bandaging.

  He shrugged and decided to do just that. He went to the book and opened it. Maybe there was a magic way to fix a feather instantly. He had begun to get a glimmer of the way the book was organized; it was alphabetical, but so detailed, with so many subentries and cross-references, that it was easy to get lost on the way. He looked for “Feather” and discovered such an enormous listing of types and classes and qualities of feathers that he decided it would be faster to look up “Roc” instead. He flipped over the pages, and naturally turned too many, finding himself in the S's. He started to flip the pages back, and his eye happened to light on the entry immediately by his left thumb: “Service.” Curious, he read it. This, too, had many subtypes and qualifications. One he saw at the bottom of the page was “Good Magician's.”

  Grey paused, his hand still about to turn the page. He read that portion. “… that by ancient custom and practice having the force of law, service to the Good Magician, such as in payment for Answers, takes precedence over all other services of any type, regardless of their dates of inception, notwithstanding commitments that may have been made or inferred or otherwise designated, for the reason that …”

  This was almost as obscure as the tax manual! It must have taken the Good Magician most of his century or so of life to decipher this opacity! It would have been fascinating to unravel the actual meaning of such entries, maybe sitting by a warm fireplace with Ivy in the evenings …

  Grey had to thumb tears out of his eyes. The truth was that, despite all its confusion and frustration, this scant week in the Good Magician's castle had been wonderful.

  He had somehow stumbled through and managed to do some favors for the good folk and creatures of Xanth, and each case had been a separate item of education, opening his eyes to another intriguing aspect of the magic realm.

  But mainly he had felt so very useful! It had seemed as if what he did mattered to others. Never before he met Ivy had he had that feeling, and never before this castle had he had it in relation to strangers. He had felt, however foolishly, important. For these few days. He hated to give that up just about as much as he hated to leave Xanth. It wasn't just for him; it was for those he had helped, and might have helped in times to come. Had it been possible to stay—

  … takes precedence over all other services … Grey stopped still. Could that be true? Could it apply even to the service he owed to Com-Pewter?

  He reread the passage, carefully, making sure he understood each part of it. It did seem to be true! And that just might mean—

  “Oh, here you are,” Ivy said. “Did you find a way for us to make it in time?”

  “I found something else, by pure coincidence,” Grey replied, excited. “I—we may not have to go!”

  “Not have to go? But in another day Com-Pewter—”

  “Is this book the ultimate authority?” he asked. “I mean, is there anything else that overrules its Answers?”

  “No, nothing, of course. The Good Magician was always the ultimate authority on anything. He was the Magician of Information, after all. So his Book of Answers—why do you ask?”

  “This says that service to the Good Magician takes precedence over any other service, no matter when that other service was undertaken. By the Custom and Law of Xanth. Which seems to mean that until I complete my service to Humfrey, I can't serve Com-Pewter. If that's true—”

  “But he said he might never return!” she protested.

  “You'd be stuck with serving him all your life, and maybe never even get an Answer!”

  “No,” he said, understanding dawning like sunrise on the millennium. “I've already had my Answer. I just didn't understand it, before. Now I must serve, if need be, for the rest of my life—right here. Doing this. And do you know—”

  “It's no bad thing,” she finished, her confusion brightening into awe.

  “No bad thing at all,” he agreed.

  Then they were in each other's arms, hugging and kissing and crying with relief.

  Grey's eye caught sight of a magic mirror on the wall.

  He hadn't noticed it before, but now he saw that it was tuned to the evil machine's cave. Pewter had been watching all the time! But on the machine's screen were the words CURSES—FOILED AGAIN!

  What an amazing coincidence, that he should happen on this very passage in the Book of Answers, after Dolph had by sheerest mischance broken a feather, so that—

  Coincidence? Mischance? No, it was more like magic!

  The one thing, or series of things, that could have gone wrong with the evil machine's long-range plot to conquer Xanth—that thing had occurred, because of the nature of Murphy's curse on Com-Pewter's ploy. It was perhaps incidental that this also accounted for Grey's lifelong happiness with Ivy. Perhaps.

  Grey knew better, now.

  “Thanks, Dad,” he murmured.

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  Piers Anthony, Man From Mundania