Crewel Lye

by Piers Anthony

  Of course it wanted to be free! Here it was, abruptly waking as a huge mass of living tissue—with no eyes or ears or nose, no way to discover where it was or what it was doing there. So it was doing the only thing it could—bashing its way out. If I were blindfolded and deaf and tied down, I’d struggle too!

  Snow crashed down beyond the snow line, heading for us. The shaking flesh had started an avalanche! There wasn’t enough snow to do real harm, but I did not feel easy. Sure enough, pretty soon the rocks on the fringe of the flesh-zone were shaken loose and they started rolling down. Those could harm us!

  “I think maybe this is not our best place to camp,” I told Pook.

  He agreed. I mounted, and we started on down.

  But now it was getting dark, and the struggles of the mountain increased. The violence was such that the welkin was jarred, and an early-showing star was jostled out of its socket. It fell nearby, tracing a fiery path across the sky, and set the dry brush aflame. More trouble!

  The mountain heaved again and shook the firmament. Other stars fell, starting other fires; they really weren’t very well anchored when they first came out. Soon there were sizable conflagrations, and we smelled the smoke. But we couldn’t hurry, because the footing was treacherous in the gloom, and we had to be alert for more rolling stones.

  The mountain peak belched. A mass of gas burst out, soiling the sky. Several stars coughed, and a comet sneezed so hard its tail flew off. Bad business!

  We traveled as well as we could, but it was nervous business, with fires blazing on either side, boulders rolling down from above, and clouds of the mountain’s stomach gas hovering in the night sky. The scene was very like my private picture of hell, and I was not eager to remain there long.

  The conversion of stone to flesh had not melted the snow; apparently it was cold flesh. But the fires raging up the slope were now heating the upper reaches, and water was beginning to flow from the fringe of snow.

  We came to a cul-de-sac. Ahead was a section so steep as to be clifflike, while the fires closed off the escape to the sides. We did not want to retreat back up the mountain, but did not want to stay in place, either. The ground was still shuddering with the motions of the tortured flesh, threatening to dislodge us from our perch. Behind, we heard the increasing sibilance of rushing water. We could soon be washed on down the cliff, becoming part of the waterfall!

  There is something about personal hazard that sharpens my native cunning. “Diversion!” I exclaimed. Pook cocked an ear at me questioningly, perhaps fearing I was losing what little wit I possessed. “I’ll show you!”

  I dismounted and scrambled to the side, near the fire. I used my boot to scuff a channel in the ground, and my sword to cut through the brush in the way. Quickly I extended the channel upward at a slant, forming a bank on its lower side. I took advantage of whatever natural declivities there were, so that my channel curved but was reasonably deep. Pook was perplexed, but helped me excavate through a small ridge by bashing it with a hoof.

  Naturally we struck a buried boulder, too big either to circle or to pry out. Now was the time for my reserve equipment! There was very little time for excavating around the boulder, so I poked a hole with the point of my sword and dropped in a cherry bomb. The explosion blew out a much bigger hole. Then I tossed in a pineapple and dived clear.

  This explosion blew the top off the boulder. It crunched into a tree in the fire-zone; lucky for us it hadn’t gone the other way! Now my channel was complete; all I had to do was touch it up where the explosion had messed it up.

  Just in time! The trickle of water was becoming a river, and now this coursed down my sluice. I stood by to free any clogs that developed. Soon there was a torrent, and the water deepened the channel itself and sought to overflow it; hastily I shored up my embankment. I wasn’t perfectly successful, but most of the water did stay on course. This meant that only a little of it swirled around our feet and poured on over the cliff, and most flowed down into the rising blaze. We had saved ourselves from being washed away and had diverted the water to the more useful employment of fighting the nearest fire.

  There was a continuous angry hiss as the water intruded on the fire’s domain, and a cloud of steam puffed up. My new channel ended at the fire’s edge, so there the water spread out, coursing over a much broader area. Soon the fire was gone from there, and a swath of blackened but unburning terrain appeared, leading down the mountain.

  “And this is our route down!” I said, pleased with the success of my strategy. I mounted Pook, and he stepped into the channel, walking carefully to prevent the moving water from interfering with his footing.

  Thus we made it off the mountain. It wasn’t easy or comfortable, but the farther from the mountain of flesh we got, the less severe the effects were. Finally, near dawn, we felt secure enough to rest. We doubted any wild creatures would be bothering us; they were all terrified by the strange events of this night, and most had fled the scene.

  As I settled down to sleep beside a nice, solid boulder, I pondered the significance of what had happened. So Yang had switched the spells; he must have done that while handling them in my presence. Of course he had known what they were; he had pretended ignorance so as to have a pretext to touch each one. He had distracted me with talk of the futility of my mission so that I would not catch on to the real nature of his skulduggery. His attempt to bribe me had not been serious; why bribe me when he already had the situation in hand? He had indeed deceived me, obliquely. Not for nothing had he remarked on my bumpkinishness! He had proved it.

  He had, ironically, spoken the truth when he said he was convinced that I would fail. He had ensured that by cheating. Yin and the King thought this was a straightforward spell-vs.-spell contest set in the field; Yang knew it was an ignorant barbarian trotting blithely into disaster. Yin’s spells were now just about as dangerous to me as Yang’s!

  Maybe the King had caught on, and had been about to warn me not to let Magician Yang touch those spells. I had been too quick to dismiss his effort. Talk of blundering fools! I had just done the cause of Barbarian Public Relations a singular disservice, by being precisely as oafish as charged.

  How could I hope to complete this quest when I had no idea where the object was or what it was? I had climbed the mountain, back when I had some notion; was it because the object was up there? Should I go back to the fleshy peak? I could not be sure, but since I hadn’t seen anything up there except snow, I concluded that wasn’t it. Could the thing be on one of the other peaks of this range, and I had been about to check them all until I found it? Again I couldn’t be sure. The black compass had somehow nullified my brain in this respect, so that I could not even decide where to search. The only confidence I had was that whatever I decided to do would be wrong, because of that hostile magic.

  Somewhere among my remaining white spells was the true finder compass. But which one was it? If I invoked one and guessed wrong, not only would I be wasting another spell that I would certainly need later but I could be getting myself into immediate trouble, as I had done atop the mountain.

  I had supposed this adventure was going to be slightly tame for my taste. Abruptly it had become slightly too challenging. Elsie had tried to warn me that there could be days like this; naturally I hadn’t listened. A barbarian who thinks he can interact on an equal basis with Magicians is a fool, indeed!

  Well, Pook had been farther from the black compass than I had been, so wasn’t affected as much. Perhaps he, being equine, had not been touched at all. I would just have to trust his horse sense to get me where I was going. I suspected that Evil Magician Yang had not realized that I would have a sensible friend along.

  With that modestly renewed sense of comfort, I slept.

  Chapter 8. Tarasque

  In the middle of the day, the heat forced us awake. Pook had been grazing in his sleep; that’s a talent his kind has that I was coming to envy. I foraged for bread sticks, picking them off a stale bread tree; they were bett
er than nothing. Then we went on.

  We were in hilly country now, but there were no more mountains, for which I was duly grateful. I had climbed the mountain in part to avoid the predestined route and the evil spells on it; obviously this had been ineffective, so there was no point in bothering with such efforts henceforth. Pook proceeded northwest, which I was sure was the wrong direction, but I didn’t argue. I hoped he had some inkling where the object was, though I despaired of either finding it or bringing it back to Castle Roogna. How could I, with my own spells loaded against me? Magician Yang had really fixed me, but that ol’ barbarian oinkheadedness prevented me from quitting. If there’s one thing worse than blundering, it is admitting the blunder.

  As evening dawned—well, you know what I mean—we spied a region of caves and considered using one of them for the night. Barbarians, of course, are not far removed from cavemen. But in the shadows we heard myriad clicking sounds and saw little pincers lifted in eager anticipation of our flesh. Nickelpedes! No, these were smaller, but twice as fierce; they were dimepedes. They had ten little legs, and silvery pincers that could readily gouge out serrated disks of flesh. They couldn’t do much to Pook’s hooves, but all they had to do was scuttle to the flesh above and begin work. Certainly we were not about to lie down there!

  So we found a little lake with a littler island and leaped across to that. The dimepedes could not swim—in fact, they sank in water like so many bits of metal—so we knew they would not bother us in the night. And since they would be foraging in this region under cover of darkness—they could not tolerate the full light of day, because that showed up the dirt on them—no other creature would be in this vicinity. We had an ideal nocturnal retreat.

  But as darkness closed, the fish came to the surface of the lake, and they were strange ones. One had little gauzy wings, so that she could fly just above the surface, and a little halo of light formed above her head. “What are you?” I asked, not expecting an answer, for few fish talk.

  “She’s an angelfish, man-visitor,” a voice at the shore said. There was a fat-faced fish there, and it seemed that one could talk. “She will dance for you, if you wish. Angelfish are very nice creatures.”

  “Well, sure,” I agreed, seeing no harm in it. Some civilized folk think there is nothing good in the wilderness, but we uncivilized folk know that there are fewer threats to man among wild creatures than there are among our own violent kind.

  The angelfish stood on her tail just over the water, buzzed her wings, and did a pirouette. Then she leaped and circled and splashed lightly against the lake; the light from her halo was enough to make her reflection visible in the still water, so that there seemed to be two of her. One was upright, above the surface, and the other was inverted, below. It was a pretty effect.

  Then another fish appeared, his motions sending ripples that broke up the reflection of the first, spoiling the effect. He hoisted himself up; he lacked wings, but somehow was able to walk the surface. He was reddish and had little horns, and his tail curved back behind him as he stood, ending in a barb.

  “And there’s the devilfish,” the fat announcer said. “He always shows up to spoil things.”

  Indeed it was so, for the angelfish made a little bubbly scream and fled, the devilfish chasing her with an evil leer on his gills. But she could not leave the region of the water, and the lake was small, so they went round and round in circles.

  Suddenly I jumped. Something had cut my foot, which was near the water. I looked—and saw a cuttlefish, its tentacles like knives, brandishing those little blades at my tender toes. I had taken off my boots to air my stinking feet—barbarian feet can be pretty bad when confined, and when the stench gets so thick it squishes, it’s time to let it out—so now they were vulnerable. “Get away from me, you creep!” I snapped, grabbing a boot and flailing with it.

  The fish dived below the surface. My boot struck the fringe of water—and stuck. Now, I knew boots could get pretty gunky, but they had never stuck to water before! I yanked—and found that something had clamped onto the boot’s toe. It had giant dull pincers—and when I hauled harder, the whole thing came up, and I saw it was nothing but pincers, broad serrated things. “What’s this?” I demanded.

  “A shellfish, of course,” the other fish replied.

  “How do I get it off my boot?”

  “Well, it’s afraid of starfish—”

  I looked into the dark sky. There was a star in the shape of a fish, but it was out of reach. Some starfish shine brightly in the water, while others hover in the night sky; I suppose there is enough water up there for them. But my animal cunning was operating. “Let go, shellfish, or I’ll fetch down that starfish,” I threatened.

  Immediately the shellfish dropped off my boot and sank back in the water. I had bluffed it.

  “You should have eaten it instead,” the other fish said. “And the cuttlefish too.”

  “They wouldn’t have liked that,” I said.

  “Who cares what they like? They don’t count! Nobody counts but Number One!”

  My brow creased. “What kind of fish are you?”

  “I thought you’d never ask! I am a sel-fish, of course.”

  “Sell fish? What do you sell?”

  “Instant gratification—that’s the selfish way. Don’t worry about the welfare of others!”

  “Don’t listen to him!” the angelfish called, pausing in her flight. Then she screamed, for in that moment of her distraction the devilfish had caught up with her. He wrapped his fins about her quivering body and bore her down despite her struggles. The two disappeared under the surface, and only her little halo remained floating on the water.

  “He always wanted to catch an angel like her,” the selfish said smugly. “She won’t be needing that halo any more—not after he’s through compromising her.”

  I was angry about the fate of the pretty angelfish. “Something’s fishy about your attitude,” I said. I fished the halo out of the water, but it disintegrated in my hand. Halos were not for such as I.

  “You’re a fool,” the sel-fish said witheringly and swam away.

  “I surely am,” I said under my breath. People like me were always getting victimized by clever, unscrupulous people like Magician Yang, just as the angelfish was ravished by the devilfish. Yet somehow I didn’t care to trade places with the obvious winners. I couldn’t make much sense of my own attitude; it was simply the way I was. Just an ignorant barbarian.

  I slept, discontented.

  Next day we left the island and set off again. We came to a kind of gateway in the forest, formed by two large trees linking branches above. I didn’t like this; it reminded me of the trees guarding Castle Roogna, the ones that didn’t like me. But there was so much thorny bush around that the portal appeared to be the only practical way to go. Pook didn’t like it any better than I did, but also saw no better way; it seemed that was the direction we were supposed to be going in, by his reckoning.

  So we went. Pook nudged through the gate, and I kept my hand on my sword. Nothing happened. But Pook sniffed the air nervously, winding something unpleasant, and I experienced a feeling of claustrophobia. This was definitely ugly territory!

  Yet the sun shone pleasantly, there were playful little breezes, the footing was good, and there did not seem to be any bad animals in this region, so we moved along well. I did notice that the trees interlinked, forming veritable walls of foliage, but these were intermittent, so that we had no trouble passing through the spaces. Both of us remained nervous about the confinement, but all we needed to do was trot along until we got out of the region. Certainly it was better than climbing a snow-topped mountain.

  Then there was a buzzing. I didn’t like the sound of that, and Pook switched his tail nervously. Horses tend to dislike buzzing things generally, but some buzzes are worse than others, and this was bad buzzing. The sound loomed louder, and then the source manifested—a swarm of huge flies.

  I muttered a repeller-spell. Some peo
ple claimed spoken spells didn’t work in Xanth, but in my opinion those folk hadn’t given them a fair trial. I used spells to make fire, put myself to sleep, abolish warts, adjust my eyes to sudden changes of light, ease pain, and the like; that sort of magic generally worked for me. Of course, it helped to have two magic stones to strike together for the first spark for the fire and to relax properly before using the sleep-spell; the magic took weeks or months to work on the warts and several seconds on the eyes; and there was only so much that incidental magic could do for pain. But weak magic was better than none at all, I always said, knocking on wood. Sometimes, when I was very tired and really needed to sleep, the sleep-spell zonked me out instantly, and that was a blessing. One simply had to understand the natural limitations of magic; then it worked just fine. Once in a while one encountered a bum spell, one that simply did not perform as advertised; then it was simply a matter of reporting it to the Barbarian Better Business Bureau, so that no one else would be deceived into using that spell.

  Anyway, I used the fly-spook-spell, but that swarm came right on at us. Then I saw that these were not ordinary flies; they were dragonflies, resistive to such little magic. Normally dragonflies did not deign to bother people, but buzzed about their own business, preying on other bugs and keeping company with real dragons. On occasion, a dragonfly would adopt someone’s garden, keeping it clear of bugs. But these ones were different; they were wild, not tame, and they were out after us.

  Pook broke into a gallop, but the dragonflies were faster than we were and quickly overhauled us. I flailed my arms and Pook swished his tail violently, but to no avail. The flies came at us head-on, jetting fire, and veered away only at the last instant. Thus their fire continued on at its target. One of those little scorches scored on my bare forearm; it hurt!

  This seemed ludicrous, but I drew my sword and sliced the air with it, swiftly. I cut a fly in half and winged another; the first fell with smoke trailing from its fuselage, and the second plunged out of control because of the loss of its wing, crashed into the ground, and exploded. A mushroom cloud of smoke roiled up from the site of the impact.