Vale of the Vole

by Piers Anthony

  The path they were following was easy to discern. Chex wondered why Millie had considered it to be so difficult as to require a guide. Then Horace drew to a halt.

  “Zragon nesht ahead,” he announced, losing a discolored tooth.

  That would make it difficult! Chex unslung her bow. “A big one?”

  “Many bigh onze,” he said. “Vwe go around.”

  “I thought we were already going around.”

  But he was leading the way into a thick tangle of vegetation. It seemed to consist of truly monstrous vines.

  “They’re growing in dragon dung,” Ivy remarked. “That must be why they’re so big! But you know, these look like—”

  Abruptly they came up to the biggest gourd Chex had ever imagined. “But that’s a—” she started, shocked.

  “Hypnogourd,” Ivy finished, as Horace leaped into the giant peephole.

  “We can’t—” Chex protested, appalled. “No one escapes on his own from a gourd! There isn’t even supposed to be any physical entry—it’s all in the spirit! But he just—”

  “I guess that’s why we need a guide,” Ivy said.

  Chex nodded. Maybe it did make sense. If she wanted to keep their guide in range, she had to act promptly.

  She nerved herself and leaped into the peephole.

  She landed in thick vegetation much like that she had just left. But this had one important difference: it was zombie vegetation. The leaves of the plants were rotting, and the stems were mottled. Nevertheless, vines were extending toward the depressions of what appeared to be sunken grave sites. The vines were trying to tunnel into the ground here, rather than springing from it in the normal fashion.

  But she couldn’t pause to figure out this anomaly; Horace was disappearing on the winding trail ahead. She galloped after him.

  “Funny—they’re growing the wrong way,” Ivy said. “But you know, that’s not scary, the way it was when I was in here before.”

  “You were in the gourd before?” Chex asked, amazed.

  “Yes. There was a whole big lake of castor oil! Triple ugh! And a bug room! I hated it. But here it’s only plants growing into zombie graves.”

  “It’s a zombie horror!” Chex exclaimed, catching on. “Things that frighten zombies—like plants boring into their graves and sapping their vitality, or whatever it is they have.”

  “That must be it!” Ivy agreed happily. “Zombie haunts!”

  There was a sharp hiss ahead. It was a venomous snake, striking at Horace’s leg. But the centaur leaped clear, and the fangs closed instead on a sickly rose plant.

  Immediately the plant changed color, becoming healthy and vigorous. Beautiful red roses formed.

  “But what’s so bad about that?” Ivy asked. “If it had bitten Horace, he would’ve been healthy again, wouldn’t he?”

  “Which might be the ultimate horror, for a zombie,” Chex said. “Just as getting bitten and turning zombie would be a horror for us.” But it certainly was strange!

  Horace drew up at a new threat: a region of slashing knives. There seemed to be no creature wielding them; the knives merely cut of their own volition. This was as awkward for living creatures as for zombies; how were they to pass?

  Horace drew a rusty knife from his backpack. He hurled it into the melee.

  Immediately the other knives attacked it. Sparks flew as metal rasped against metal. Soon the magic knives, their blood frenzy aroused, were slashing each other. Not long thereafter, all the knives were broken, having destroyed each other. It seemed safe to proceed through this region now.

  Whereupon Horace turned and proceeded back the way they had come. Startled, Chex followed. What kind of a maze was this?

  The path behind had changed. Now the zombie vegetation was zombie mineral; decaying stones, rusting metal, and dissolving plastic. Horace threaded his way through it, touching nothing except the ground—until, abruptly, he brought a front hoof down on a sodden green rock.

  The rock fragmented. The chips fell to the ground and burned their way into it, sinking from sight. The ground itself caught fire, burning with a sickly greenish flame. Zombie fire.

  Gradually a wooden underpinning was revealed, as the earth above it burned away. The wood, oddly, was untouched by the flame, which flickered out.

  Horace set his front hoof against the near end of the wood, and it descended. The far side lifted; the panel was hinged in the center. Beneath was revealed a flight of wooden steps, leading to a lighted cellar.

  “Gee,” Ivy whispered, intrigued.

  Horace turned and walked back the way he had come, ignoring the steps. Chex, bemused, followed.

  Again the setting had changed. Now it consisted of zombie animals: ratlike things that scurried haphazardly around, shedding fragments of themselves.

  Horace stepped among them, taking care that his hooves crushed none. Chex followed, taking equal care. She could guess what would happen next: the centaur would select one creature to crush, and then a new way would open, and he would ignore it. This was a strange place even in its predictability!

  Horace kicked a rat. The creature squealed. Immediately the others rose up and squealed too. Then they changed into numbers and rose into the air. The ground became a grid on whose squares the shadows of the numbers danced.

  Horace lay down, his body covering a number of the squares. The numbers above those squares keened angrily and attacked. They spun so that their ends formed cutting surfaces and plunged at his body.

  Chex, doubtful and not a little worried, lay down too. “I hope that zombie knows what he is doing,” she murmured.

  “I hope so too,” Ivy whispered. “I don’t like those numbers!”

  Indeed, the numbers were attacking the two of them now, as well. They buzzed down like aroused bees—and passed right through their flesh without impact.

  Chex laughed. “They must be imaginary numbers!”

  “What?” Ivy asked.

  “Numbers used in mathematics that aren’t real,” Chex explained. “But sometimes it is necessary to use them anyway.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense to me,” Ivy grumbled.

  “I’m sure it doesn’t! But this must be the home of those numbers. They are probably the bad dreams of mathematicians.”

  Horace leaned his humanoid torso back and went to sleep.

  Chex hesitated. Did the zombie really know what he was doing or had he given up? If so, could she afford to follow his example? There were certainly dangers here, and this was the gourd; they could be in real trouble, if—

  “I guess we don’t have much choice,” Ivy said, for once not enthusiastic.

  “So it seems, dear,” Chex agreed. They both settled back and closed their eyes. To their surprise, they slept immediately.

  Chex opened her eyes. It was day, and she lay on a beach. Across the open water she saw the distant outline of a large island.

  She blinked. “Could that be Centaur Isle?” she asked aloud.

  “Yesh,” Horace said from behind her.

  Ivy woke. “We’re here!” she exclaimed. “But how did we get here?”

  “We went to sleep in the gourd,” Chex said, hardly believing it herself. “I can only surmise that to sleep in the realm of dreams is to wake in the realm of ordinary consciousness.”

  “I guess maybe we did need a guide,” the little girl said.

  “I guess maybe we did,” Chex agreed.

  “Gotcha!” Ivy exclaimed. “You spoke my language!”

  “After what we just experienced, your language seems easier.” Chex hefted herself up. “Is this really Centaur Isle,” she asked Horace, “or merely a dream of it?”

  “It really ish,” he assured her. “Shortch cut.”

  So it seemed. Chex decided to accept things as they seemed, and get on with her mission.

  Ivy slid off her back. “I gotta feel solid sand under my feet,” she said. Chex understood; the experience in the gourd had been unsettling, even for a little Sorceress.<
br />
  Now she had to cross the water to the Isle. There should be a ferry where the trail arrived. “I’ll scout around for the crossing,” Chex announced.

  “I’ll rest here,” Ivy said. “It’ll be safe enough, with Horace. Anyway, Mom gave me a protective charm.”

  Chex made sure. “You will wait here for me?” she asked Horace.

  “Yesh,” he said.

  She set off along the beach, trotting east, because the closest approach to the Isle seemed to be in that direction. Soon enough her judgment was confirmed; there was a raft with a sail at a landing.

  She trotted up. “Halloo!” she called.

  A centaur of middle age emerged from a shelter. “Someone for crossing?” he asked.

  “Yes. I need to go to Centaur Isle, and then to return—” She broke off, because the other was staring at her wings.

  “Oh, a crossbreed,” he said, with deep disgust. “Forget it.”

  “But I have to talk to the centaur Elders about—”

  “We don’t talk to crossbreeds,” he said curtly. “Now get away from here before someone sees you.”

  “But—”

  He reached for his bow.

  “Now look!” she protested. “I have a right to be heard!”

  The bow was in his hands. “Crossbreeds have no right to exist, let along be heard,” he said. “No one will talk to you. You’d be executed without trial if you set foot on the Isle. Now fly away before I’m put to the trouble of burying your body.”

  Appalled, Chex realized that he was serious. Her granddam’s attitude was merely the echo of the prejudice of the larger community of centaurs. They were unable to tolerate any deviance from their norm.

  For a moment she was tempted to stand her ground and put him to that trouble of burying her. But she knew it would not accomplish anything; the position of the centaurs was sealed. As Ivy had said: centaurs were stubborn.

  She turned and trotted away, frustrated and disgusted. Now she appreciated why her dam had raised her largely isolated from her own kind. Uncle Chet had been around often, showing her his magic with boulders and pebbles, and some of the hermitlike forest centaurs had visited on occasion, but never any centaurs from either the village north of the Gap or from Centaur Isle. Her education was coming hard. Centaurs were supposed to be the most brilliant and consistent creatures of Xanth, but her belief in this had been shaken. How could a species that was an obvious crossbreed between humanoids and equinoids be so restrictive about further crossbreeding?

  Yet, as she considered the matter, she knew. If centaurs accepted unrestricted crossbreeding, as the equines did, they would eventually be fragmented as a species, as the equines were. There were no longer any true horses in Xanth, only in Mundania, where they couldn’t interbreed with other species. In Xanth there were night mares and pookas and were-horses and sea-horses and hippogryphs and centaurs and unicorns and flying horses, and the original stock had been crossbred out of existence. Now the centaurs were preserving their variant as a viable species, and were doing what they had to do in that effort.

  Still, there were even more crossbreeds involving the human stock than there were of the equine stock, ranging from elves to ogres to multi-mergings like the sphinxes, yet the original stock remained viable. Humans did tend to discourage crossbreeding, but were reasonably tolerant of what did occur. Thus centaurs were welcome at Castle Roogna, and other variants such as the golem and an ogre or two. So the restriction did not have to be absolute.

  But, she reminded herself in an effort to retain centaur objectivity, the human stock had a major source of replenishment: Mundania. There had been many Waves of colonization from Mundania, each one adding to the straight human population of Xanth. Centaurs could not be reinforced similarly, for they existed only in Xanth. So the situations were not precisely analogous.

  All of which did not make her feel much better. She could understand the position of the centaurs, without appreciating it. What she really needed was a species of her own.

  She laughed to herself, somewhat bitterly. She was, as far as she knew, the only one of her kind in Xanth. Some species!

  She arrived back at the spot where Ivy and Horace waited. “Any luck?” the little girl asked brightly.

  “No luck,” Chex said heavily. “They will not even talk to me, because I am a crossbreed.”

  Ivy pursed her lips. “The way Cherie won’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I could do it—”

  Chex considered. Ivy was a child, but she was also the King’s daughter, and a Sorceress. The centaurs might give her an audience. But she would have to go to the Isle alone, and that would violate Chex’s commitment to guard her. Also, if the centaurs would not even talk to a variant of their own kind, would they help a completely different species, the voles? This was highly doubtful.

  “I think we should write this off as a bad job, dear,” she said. “I underestimated the resistance of the centaurs to our effort.”

  Ivy shrugged. “Okay. Maybe we can get help from your sire’s folks, instead.”

  “The winged monsters?” Chex considered, finding this alternative more interesting now that her major hope had been dashed. “Well, certainly I could go to my sire and ask. But he lives closer to central Xanth; we shall have to return to Castle Roogna first, and I can compare notes with Esk and Volney. Perhaps one of them has already found help.”

  “Um,” Ivy agreed, glancing at her expectantly.

  Chex waited, and Ivy waited. Finally Chex surrendered and said “Yes,” in correction, and Ivy said it with her, then laughed. The odd thing was that this made Chex feel better.

  Horace led them into the jungle, following another trail that showed signs of disuse. Chex realized that other creatures tended to avoid the paths used by zombies. Prior to this experience, she would have avoided it too. But after her rebuff by the living centaurs, she found the zombie centaur better company. The zombies were providing what help they could, and indeed, had enabled her to cut many hours off her trip south.

  When the trail passed through looser forest, she drew up abreast of him. “May I ask you a question, Horace?”

  “Yesh.”

  “How did you come to be a zombie?”

  “I zdied.”

  Evidently he wasn’t much for detail! “How did you die?”

  “Peopleschooz.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Parzon?”

  Not much for social niceties, either. But these could hardly be expected of those whose brains were rotten. “How did you die?” she repeated.

  “Zome call it horschschooz.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think he said horse—” Ivy started.

  “Don’t say that word!”

  “Manure,” Ivy finished contritely. “A princess doesn’t even know the other word.”

  “Let’s hope not! But how could anything like that account for his death.”

  “I’m sure he can explain it, if I ask him,” Ivy said confidently. “Here, let me ride him.”

  “I really don’t think—”

  “Oh, he can hold my weight all right. I talked to him while we were waiting for you. He’s nice enough, for a zombie.” She leaned across, and Chex had to move close to facilitate the transfer, lest the girl fall between them.

  Ivy scrambled across and settled on Horace’s back. “Horace, you’re pretty strong,” she said, and indeed, the zombie seemed to be in better physical condition than before. “You can talk well, too, I just know it.”

  “Zthank you,” Horace said, and his voice did sound better. It was the child’s magic, enhancing him.

  “How did you die?” Ivy asked.

  “People zhooz.”

  “People shoes!” Ivy exclaimed. “What they call horseshoes in Mundania! Where you throw these metal shoes.”

  “Yez.” The pronunciation was less slushy, but still not perfect. There was only so much Enhancement could do, when lips
were decayed and teeth missing.

  “But how did a game kill you, Horace?” Ivy asked.

  “Hit by a boot.”

  “Oh, an accident!” Chex exclaimed. “One of those hard metal shoes hit you on the head!”

  “Yez. A heavy people zboot, with hob nailz.”

  “And then the Zombie Master revived you as a zombie.”

  “Yez.”

  “How do you feel, being a zombie?”

  “It’z not zbad. But my oldz friendz won’t play with me.”

  “I’m afraid the living aren’t too fond of the undead,” Chex said. “They’re prejudiced.” She had just had a good lesson in prejudice.

  “Yez.”

  “But Zora Zombie’s nice,” Ivy said, transferring back to Chex. “She’s almost alive.”

  “Zora is a friend of yours?”

  “Yes. She helped Mom learn about zombies: Then she married Xavier.”

  “Xavier!” Chex exclaimed. “I know him! He rides Xap!”

  “Yes. Xap’s great. He’s a hippogryph.”

  “I know. He’s my sire.”

  “Oh!” Ivy squealed with delight. “I didn’t realize! That’s how you got your wings!”

  “That’s how,” Chex agreed. “I know Xavier because he’s been with Xap, but I didn’t know he was married. He never mentioned it.”

  “I guess that’s less important to males than to females,” Ivy said.

  “Unless he was ashamed of having a zombie wife.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ivy said. “He always seemed real—really proud of her, when he was with her.”

  “Then perhaps he was afraid that others would have the wrong picture of her, if they learned she was a zombie without meeting her.”

  “Maybe. You’d hardly know she’s a zombie. That’s how I know zombies aren’t bad, ’cause she’s baby-sitted me and she’s great.”

  Horace veered to the side. “Gourd,” he announced. There was another of the huge variety that grew in dragon dung. Horace plunged into its peephole, and Chex followed.

  Inside it seemed exactly the same as it had been on their prior entry. Chex had thought they would be in the region of imaginary numbers that they had left, but they were in the first stage, with the zombie vegetation.