She jerked away. “Don’t you touch me!” she screeched.
“Huh?”
“Not while there are storks in the neighborhood!”
I didn’t grasp her objection, but did grasp that she had changed her mind. Disappointed, I lay back. Women can be awfully hard to understand!
In the morning the horses were gone. Pook had left the bag with the remaining spells, so I knew he wasn’t coming back. Stupid as I was, I still understood why: because he knew I was going to ask him and Peek to take us north. I couldn’t figure out why it was so bad to go north, since Threnody had explained the reason so sensibly. But Pook wouldn’t go that way, so he had left. Therefore we couldn’t go north, either. He had been free to leave us anytime, but had chosen this time because of our irreconcilable difference of opinion about direction. I was really sorry to lose him, yet couldn’t blame him. Sometimes the best thing a friend can do is to refuse to help a friend-gone-wrong. Not that I had gone wrong, but—well, anyway, it was too bad.
Then I had a notion. “Spells!” I exclaimed.
“But they don’t work right,” Threnody said, evidently nervous about another foul-up like the exchange of identities.
“Maybe help anyway,” I said with foolish eagerness. I pawed through the mostly empty bag and fished out the little white skull. “Life!” I said.
“Life? You mean it—it restores someone who has died? You don’t need that.”
I wasn’t smart, but my memory remained good. “Mixed up. This not life.”
“Oh—you mean it has to be some other spell—one that may help us travel?”
“Yuh.” Then, before I could become confused, I said: “Invoke.”
The skull glowed—and expanded. A ridge appeared that circled around the staring face. This projected out until it formed a full-sized shield, while the face flattened into a picture of itself on the surface of that shield. The back of the skull became the apparatus by which the shield could be comfortably supported on the left arm.
“Say!” I exclaimed, pleased. “Nice shield!”
“If we had needed a shield,” Threnody said curtly, “we could have taken the Knight’s shield. How does this help us travel?”
But I remained delighted with this acquisition. I had never had a shield of my own before, because barbarians are too primitive to understand a shield’s proper use. However, my experiences with flame-shooting dragons and lance-bearing Knights had provided me with an inkling. Sometimes defense was a good thing, even for a barbarian. Or so I supposed, now that I was stupid.
I put the shield on my arm and postured with it, slicing the air with my sword. We now had two swords, since we had recovered my own from near the dead tree, as well as saving the Knight’s. “Take that!” I exclaimed, striking at an imaginary foe. “And that!” Then I lifted the shield, as if warding off an enemy blow. “Nyaa! Nyaa! You can’t get me!”
“Some toy!” Threnody muttered, disgusted. Women don’t understand about war games. But they sure are fun for the young-of-brain.
In due course I settled down, and we came to grips with the problem of traveling. “I suppose we’ll have to walk,” Threnody said, unthrilled. “But it will take us a couple of days, and I’ll be footsore. Damn those horses!”
“Yuh,” I agreed amicably.
She focused on me. “You won’t stay stupid forever,” she said. “These spells wear off after a few days, don’t they?”
“Yuh,” I said. “Some do.”
“A man does have his uses,” she said to herself. “As long as I’m single, I’m vulnerable on one level or another. The only way to finish this nuisance for good is to marry an amiable man, not too bright …” Then she looked up, as if becoming aware of me. “Very well—I’ll carry you. At least that will get us there.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll change into a dollarpede,” she decided. “That’s a hundred times the size of a centipede, but not vicious like the nickel or dimepedes, because it doesn’t have any metal pincers. A dollarpede has no metal backbone, so it has been losing strength for decades. It’s a helpless form, subject to the whims of whoever handles it; you’ll have to protect me with your sword and shield.”
“Helpless?”
“Dollarpedes just seem to keep getting devalued by everything else they encounter,” she said. “Until finally they look as big as ever, but they’re hardly worth anything at all. Maybe that’s because they’re made mostly of paper.”
“Paper?” I was stupid, but even to me that sounded funny.
“Some of them have silver support,” she said. “Those ones are stronger, but they’re very rare. I’ll become one of that kind.”
“Yuh,” I agreed, reassured.
Of course it took time. First she changed her form, after cautioning me to keep a sharp eye out for predators, as she was most vulnerable while changing. “Everybody grabs for dollarpedes!” Had I been smarter, I would have realized that that was the main reason she needed me right now, if she had been able to change safely when alone in the jungle, she could have deserted me and headed directly for home. So she had to take me along. My brain wasn’t worth much now, but my body and sword and shield were. But of course she didn’t tell me that; she told me she liked me and wanted my companionship. It’s an old ploy women use on men. And I, being stupid, believed her.
Though even now I wonder what she could have meant by that remark about marrying an amiable, not-too-bright man. Certainly she didn’t mean Magician Yin, and events were to prove that she didn’t mean me. But as I have said, even when I have been smart, I haven’t really understood women.
In an hour she was in the form of the dollarpede, with the mass of a person. Then she worked on her size, expanding up to a creature so large it could carry me—except that she was now too diffuse to support my weight, since her mass had not changed. In the third hour she increased her mass, until finally there she stood before me complete—a creature with fifty pairs of legs, dull green in hue on one side, gray on the other, with all sorts of print and numbers on it. The face was gray and looked a little like that of a sphinx, while the backside resembled a bird waxing amorous with a shield. Overall, the thing did seem sort of papery, with corrugations supporting each set of legs, but the silver backbone gave it strength to support me.
I mounted, and stacked the spell-bag and extra sword behind me. This was the strangest creature I had ridden—but of course, most of my prior experience had been with Pook. If this dollarpede could do the job, all right.
The creature started moving. This was interesting. First the number one set of legs stepped forward, quickly followed by the number two set, followed in turn by number three, and so on down the line in a ripple. There was a gentle sway as the ripple passed under me and proceeded to the tail. Then it bounced back and swayed me forward. It was a little like riding an ocean swell—which was an interesting thought, since I had never been to the ocean, swell or awful.
Threnody-dollarpede flowed over the irregularities in the landscape, picking up speed. Soon she was traveling as fast as a galloping ghost horse, and I was feeling seasick from all the swaying. But we were making excellent time!
Around noon a shadow descended. I looked up and saw a great bird circling. It was a roc and it looked hungry—and the dollarpede was about the right size for a snack. “Get under cover!” I cried, needing no special intelligence to recognize danger like this.
Threnody scooted for a nearby fallen tree, hoping to conceal herself under it. I dismounted, drew my sword, and held my shield firmly before me. I stood beside the fallen tree, facing out, while Threnody tried to get her length squeezed under it.
But it seemed that a dollarpede was very hard to hide from an alert predator. The roc quickly corrected course and descended. Phew! Those birds are huge! I keep forgetting how big they are, until I encounter another. The giant wings covered all the sky, and the monstrous talons came toward me like—like a roc’s talons. There isn’t anything else to compare them to!
I had fought a roc before and knew we were overmatched. But a barbarian warrior doesn’t question the odds, he just fights on. Especially when he’s stupid. So as that foot came at me, I held-up my shield and. swung with my sword.
My sword connected, cutting off the end of the claw. Blood gushed out, and a few seconds later, when the sensation reached the roc’s head, there was an ear-dazzling squawk that shook the clouds in their orbits.
Now I had the roc’s attention—and a baleful attention it was! The foot retreated, one claw snagging in a small palm-tree and ripping it out, fingers, toes, and all. The bird’s head came down, the eyes peering at me. The beak pecked at me, and it was the size of the snout of a good-sized dragon. I was finished now!
But my shield came up and blocked the beak. I thought the impact of the beak against the shield would break my arm and knock me over and maybe drive the shield deep into the ground, but there was no recoil at all.
Odd!
The roc squawked again, and such was the blast of air that the nearby saplings bent and their sap squirted out, and the fallen tree rolled a turn or two back, exposing the dollarpede. The roc peered at me again, straight down from above, and I knew I would be squished like a bug and perhaps spitted on bedrock below. There was fire in those little roc orbs!
My shield came up once more, and this time I knew I wasn’t doing it. The thing was shifting itself, hauling my arm along with it! It stopped over my head, horizontal, blocking that plummeting beak.
The beak struck with a colossal clang—and I felt no shock. But the bird bounced off as if rejected by a stone mountain, its beak dented.
I was slow-witted, but now at last the truth managed to wedge itself through my brain—this was the magic of the shield! It was intended to combat the magic sword, but it wasn’t smart enough to distinguish between types of attack, so it fended off whatever came at it. Self-powered, it absorbed the full thrust, transmitting no shock to me. As long as I held this shield, I could not be successfully attacked!
The big bird, its beak bashed, came to a similar conclusion. It backed off, spread its wings, and launched itself into the air. The downdraft flattened the nearby bushes and tore a branch from an acorn tree; the branch thudded into the ground and acorns peppered us like hailstones. But my shield protected me against those, too.
Threnody crawled out, somewhat bedraggled; her papery body did not stand up well to such high winds, and I dreaded to think what rain might do to it. She was unable to speak in this form, but I was sure she was pleased not to have been gobbled by the roc. I remounted, and we proceeded on north.
We stopped in midafternoon, back at the copse of artistrees. Perhaps it was fitting that I brought the magic shield back here to where the magic sword had attacked me. Still, as my stupidity gradually abated—maybe my talent was healing my brain of this malady, too—I became increasingly uneasy about the direction of our travel. Castle Roogna, after all, was the opposite way.
It took Threnody three hours to change back to her normal form. First she went diffuse, then she sank to human size, and finally she changed to human shape. “I’m famished!” she exclaimed.
“Why not eat in dollarpede form?” I asked, concentrating so as to formulate my question properly, as it was hard to handle full sentences in my present state of mind. “Why so much trouble to change back?”
“My, you are improving!” she remarked, not entirely pleased. “You’re not half as stupid as you were last night.”
“I know,” I agreed, dully satisfied. She certainly was pretty in this form. Had I been smarter, it might have occurred to me that, since she could control her form, she naturally made sure it was a good form. What woman, given the opportunity to make herself more attractive, would fail to exercise that power?
“I will answer your question,” she said. “If I remained in dollarpede form and mass, I would have to feed that mass—and that would require a lot more food than my natural body does. Also, dollarpedes feed on things like Principal and Interest and Assets and Liabilities and Budgets; since there aren’t any of those around here, this one would have to make do with bugs and moldy twigs and things, and I don’t happen to like such food much. So I change back to human form so I can eat human food, which I do prefer.”
I didn’t know what an Asset was, but I could see why she wouldn’t want to eat one. “But—”
“But how can a human meal feed the mass of a dollarpede? Because I only have to feed the form I’m in when eating. If I shrank to gnat size, I could feed myself on a gnat meal, then return to human size and not be hungry. But that would take three more hours, and I’d be vulnerable all the time. Any bird could come by and swallow me when I was in gnat form, and that would be the end of me. So I don’t like to go to the small sizes, and my own form seems to be the best compromise.”
All that was a bit more explanation than I could assimilate at my present level of intelligence; I merely smiled and nodded acquiescently. It was evident that Threnody did know what she was doing. Besides, why should I question such an excruciatingly beautiful woman? So what if she had used her talent to reshape herself? It was a lovely shaping.
She hardly had to work at fooling me; I was eager to fool myself!
So we foraged and ate, then removed ourselves from the immediate vicinity of the dead tree with the gnomes’ entrance and made camp for the night. Once again Threnody cuddled up to me, after glancing around to make sure there was no stork nearby.
“Uh,” I said, trying to organize my thought. “We should go south—”
“There is another reason to go north,” she said quickly. It was almost as if she had expected me to remember my mission, and have a second thought about our direction of travel, as my intelligence increased. “You said the enemy spells have been placed along your route, so that when you go where you’re going, you walk into them.”
“Yes,” I agreed. She had a good grasp of the situation. “And most of those evil spells are a whole lot of trouble,” she continued. “Like the black sword, and the personality exchange—I realize that was the good spell that hit us, but it was the same as the evil spell—and the idiocy.”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you don’t go where you’re going, you won’t encounter the spells laid out along your route, will you?”
“Huh?”
“If we go to Castle Roogna, straight south, the next spell is sitting there somewhere in our path, waiting for you to meet it. Probably in the middle of the bask territory, so we’ll really be in trouble. But if you don’t go there, you won’t walk into that spell. That makes this a better route, doesn’t it?”
“Say, yes,” I agreed, brightening. I was still too dull to figure out the predestination angle. “But how do we get to Castle Roogna, going north?”
She smiled in the dusk. “We go around the quicksand desert to the north, then turn south and proceed without further trouble.”
“That’s nice,” I said, reassured.
“Still,” she added, as if musingly, “it would be just as easy to turn west and return to my house. Then you and I could stay together forever.”
It seemed to me that she had said something like that the night before, but we had been interrupted by the stork. Tonight I was a trifle smarter. “But what about my mission?” I asked.
“Let me show you how it can be with us,” she said. “Then you can decide about the mission.”
“Well, uh—” I said uncertainly, torn between loyalty and her beauty.
She wriggled, and her bare body came up against mine. She put her lovely face to mine for a kiss. The consciousness of my mission faded. I enfolded her in my arms and— There was a noise.
Threnody stiffened. “Someone’s near!” she whispered, alarmed.
I felt for my sword and shield in the darkness. In a moment I located the direction; the sound was in the area of the gnome-tree. “The Gnobody Gnomes,” I whispered. “Out hunting.”
“I’ve seen enough of them to last
me a lifetime!” she said.
“I’ll go out and slay them. With my sword and shield, in my own body, it will be easy.”
“Don’t be stupid. That won’t—”
“But I am stupid!” I protested.
She chuckled. “So you are, at the moment. But trust me, Jordan; we don’t need to attack the gnomes. They’re only out foraging for food and supplies, not looking for us, and they’re not such bad folk. If we kill the men, the gnomides will suffer. All we have to do is lie quiet, and they’ll pass us by.”
We lay quiet, though I wondered how folk who put strangers in the smoking pot could be considered “not bad,” but I was not smart enough to figure that out. So I was still, and she was right; the gnomes moved on by and never knew we were there. But we had to bide some time, and in due course I fell asleep. Whatever it was that Threnody might have had in mind did not come to pass between us that night. The gnomes had saved me from—what?
In the morning we ate again, Threnody converted to the dollarpede form, and we moved north. In the afternoon we came to a huge chasm that neither of us remembered. That was odd, because it was far too big to be ignored. We stopped, and Threnody changed while I foraged and ate and made a hut from stray timbers. In the sky to the south, we saw huge shapes wheeling; we knew that the rocs were angry and were searching for us.
“We can’t stay here and we can’t go south again,” Threnody said. “You fought valiantly to save me from the big bird yesterday, and I am duly grateful, but if a whole flock of them comes upon us, we’ll be finished.”
“But where can we go?” I asked, bewildered.
“I will assume another form, one that can traverse that chasm,” she said. “I’ll start early, so I’ll be ready by dawn, and will carry you with me. Only—”
“Yuh?” I asked.
“I’m not certain which way to go.”
I was yet smarter than before. “To the east, so then we can go south to Castle Roogna.”
She sighed. “Yes, of course. But I don’t want to go to Castle Roogna; I want to go home—which means turning west.”
Crewel Lye Page 28