“Ach,” said the lady warrior, “ye fixed der vagons of some narcs yesterday, but ve don’t see any boggies. Vhat ve find ist some little bones in der stewpot, und I don’t think they vas having spare ribs.”
The three companions observed ten seconds of silent farewell for their friends.
“Then how about a lift on your mutton-mushers?” said Gimlet.
“Hokay,” said Eorache, “but ve ist going to Isinglass to fix, too, der vagon of dot schkunken Serutan.”
“Then you fight with us against him,” said Stomper. “We had thought the sheep-lords to have thrown their lot with the evil Wizard.”
“Ve haf never vorked for dot creep,” said Eorache loudly, “und even if ve did help him a little at first, ve were only following orders und it probably vasn’t us dot you heard about because ve vas someplace else. Und anyvay, he vas vasting his time looking for some schtupider Ring vhat vasn’t vorth nothing. Me, I don’t believe in dot pixie-dust schtuff. Magic-schmagic, I saying.”
The rider clicked her heels together and made an about-face, calling over her shoulder. “So, you coming mit us or you staying here und maybe starving to death?”
Stomper fondled the last piece of magic zwieback in his pocket and weighed the alternatives, not overlooking the beefy charms of Eorache.
“Ve going mit you,” he said dreamily.
• • •
Pepsi was dreaming that he was a maraschino cherry atop a huge hot-fudge sundae. Shivering on a mountain of whipped cream he saw a monstrous mouth of sharpened fangs loom above him, drooling great gobbets of saliva. He tried to scream for help but his own mouth was full of hardened fudge sauce. The maw descended, breathing a hot, odorous wind . . . down, down it came. . . .
“Wake up, youse jerks!” snarled a harsh voice. “Th’ boss want t’ talk to ya! Har har har!” A heavy brogan kicked out at Pepsi’s already bruised ribs. He opened his eyes to the night gloom and met the evil stare of a brutish narc. This time he screamed, but the gagged boggie only gurgled with fear, and as he struggled he remembered that he was still hog-tied like a prime roast.
Now it all came back to him, how he and Moxie had been taken prisoner by the band of narcs and forced to march south toward a destination that they dreaded, the Land of Fordor. But a hundred blond riders on fighting sheep had cut them off and now the narcs feverishly prepared for the attack they knew would come with the first rays of the sun.
Pepsi received another kick and then heard a second narc-voice speak to the first.
“Mukluk pushkin, boggie-grag babushka lefrak!” rasped the deeper voice, which Pepsi recognized as that of Goulash, the leader of Serutan’s narcs, who accompanied the party of Sorhed’s larger, more well-equipped henchmen.
“Gorboduc khosla!” snapped the larger narc, who returned his attention to the frightened boggies. Smiling fiendishly, he drew his curved grass whip and laughed. “Bet youse guys would give an arm an’ a leg t’ get outta here.” He raised his weapon above his neckless head with mock savagery and reveled in the boggies’ cringing and protestation.
“I, Goulash, shall have th’ pleasure of takin’ youse groundhogs t’ th’ great Serutan hisself, master of the fighting Ohma-hah, Nastiest of the Nasty and Bearer of the Sacred White Rock, soon t’ be th’ boss of alla Lower Middle Earth!”
Suddenly a hamfisted blow from behind sent the narc spinning like a lathe.
“I’ll give you boss of alla Lower Middle Earth!” spat a louder, deeper voice.
Moxie and Pepsi looked up to see a gigantic bull narc, well over seven feet and four hundred pounds if a gram. Towering over the sprawled narc, the monster pointed arrogantly to the red nose emblazoned on his own chest. It was Karsh4 of the fighting Otto-wah, leader of Sorhed’s contingent, who had laid Goulash low.
“I’ll boss of alla Lower Middle Earth you!” he reiterated. Goulash sprang to heavily shod feet and made an obscene gesture at Karsh.
“Slushfund tietack kierkegaard!” he screamed, stamping in anger before the larger narc.
“Ersatz!” bellowed Karsh as he angrily drew his four-foot snickersnee and deftly trimmed Goulash’s fingernails to the elbow. The smaller narc scampered off to retrieve his arm, cursing a blue streak, which was already lapping at the ooze.
“Now,” said Karsh, turning back to the boggies, “them bleaters is gonna jump us at dawn, so’s I want the lowdown on this Magic Ring right now!” Reaching into a large leather bag, the narc withdrew an armful of shiny instruments and arrayed them on the ground in front of Pepsi and Moxie. There before them were a large bullwhip, a thumbscrew, a cat-o’-nine-tails, a rubber hose, two blackjacks, an assortment of surgical knives, and a portable hibachi with two red-glowing branding irons.
“I got ways t’ make ya sing like canaries,” he chuckled, stirring the hot coals with his long index finger. “Youse each can have one from column A and two from column B. Har har har!”
“Har har har,” said Pepsi.
“Mercy!” yipped Moxie.
“Aw, come on, youse guys,” said Karsh, selecting an iron with the triple-bar S of Sorhed, “let me have a little fun before y’ talk.”
“No, please!” said Moxie.
“Who wants it first?” laughed the cruel narc.
“Him!” chorused the boggies, indicating each other.
“Ho ho!” chortled the narc as he stood over Moxie like some housewife sizing up a kielbasa. He raised the flaming iron and Moxie screeched at the sound of a blow. But when he opened his eyes again, his torturer was still standing above him, looking oddly different in expression. It was then that the boggie noticed that his head was missing. The body collapsed like a punctured whoopee cushion, and over it, triumphant, was the leering figure of Goulash. He held a blade in his good hand of the type usually employed on troublesome ham hocks.
“Last taps! Gotcha last!” he cried, hopping from one foot to the other with glee. “And now,” he hissed in the boggies’ faces, “my master Serutan desires the whereabouts of th’ Ring!” He drop-kicked Karsh’s noggin a good twenty yards for emphasis.
“Ring, ring?” said Pepsi. “You know anything about a ring, Moxie?”
“Not unless you mean my vaccination scar,” said Moxie.
“Come on, come on!” Goulash urged, slightly singeing the hair on Pepsi’s right big toe.
“Okay, okay,” sobbed Pepsi. “Untie me and I’ll draw you a map.”
Goulash agreed to this in his greedy haste and loosened the bonds around Pepsi’s arms and legs.
“Now bring the torch nearer so we can see,” said the boggie.
“Gnash lubdub!” exclaimed the excited narc in his own foul tongue as he clumsily juggled the blade and the torch in his one remaining hand.
“Here, better let me hold the sword for you,” offered Pepsi.
“Knish snark!” gibbered the fiend, waving the torch in anticipation.
“Now these are the Mealey Mountains, and this is the Effluvium,” said Pepsi, scratching the ground with the sharp point of the shiny blade.
“Krishna rimsky-korsakov!”
“. . . and this is the Great Turnpath . . .”
“Grackle borgward!”
“. . . and this is your gallbladder, right above your chitlins!”
“Gork!” objected the narc as he fell to earth, opened from end to end like a pillowcase. As his internal organs noisily shut down, Pepsi freed Moxie and they began threading their way through the narc battle lines, hoping not to be seen as the warriors prepared for the battle that would surely come with the first rays of the sun. Tiptoeing around a party of narcs busily honing their cruel knives, the boggies heard the low, gurgling song that they half sung, half belched in time with a spastic rhythm provided by one who repeatedly bashed his head against his iron helmet. The words were strange and harsh to their ears as they passed by in the dark:
“From the Halls of Khezaduma
To the shores of Lithui
We will fight King Sorhed’s battles
With tooth and nail and knee . . .”
“Shhhh,” whispered Pepsi as they crawled over open ground, “don’t make any noise.”
“Okay,” whispered Moxie.
“What’s all that whisperin’?” growled a voice in the dark, and Pepsi felt a long-nailed hand grab at his lapel. Without thinking, Pepsi lashed out with his toenails and ran past, leaving the guard writhing on the ground holding the one area neither protected by his armor nor by his group insurance policy.
The boggies took off like a shot past the surprised narcs.
“The forest! The forest!” cried Pepsi, just ducking an arrow that neatly parted his hair to the bone. Shouts and confused alarums rang out on every side as they ran to the safety of the wood, for as luck would have it, the fierce blaat of the Roi-Tanners’ war horns sounded the beginning of their attack. Diving for cover, the boggies watched with frightened eyes as the bloodthirsty sheep-lords advanced on the narcs, a hundred war-bleats echoing as one in the dawn light. The escaped prisoners forgotten, the narcs stood their ground as wave upon wave of woolly death crashed down upon them, battlemops thudding with a dreadful report against foot-thick skulls. Distant screams and blows reached the boggies’ ears and they watched openmouthed the carnage that followed. The outnumbered narcs gave way, and the slavering merinos charged this way and that, butting and kicking, fighting as mean and as dirty as their berserk riders. A handful of narcs could be seen with their cleavers thrown down and waving a white flag. The victors smiled broadly, surrounded them, and began hacking and hewing, tossing heads about like soccer balls. Laughing like loons, the merry band mirthfully relieved the corpses of their wallets and fillings. Pepsi and Moxie averted their faces from the slaughter, fighting their nausea unsuccessfully.
“Ho ho ho! The sheepers do not play at their craft.”
Moxie and Pepsi looked up with a start toward the green trees. They knew that they had heard a low, rumbling voice, but they saw no one.
“Hulloo?” they said uncertainly.
“Not ‘hulloo,’ ho ho ho!” returned the voice.
The brothers searched the woods for the source of the laugh, but not until a huge, green eye winked did they see the huge giant standing against the tall forest right in front of them. Their jaws dropped at the sight of an immense figure, fully eleven feet tall, standing before them with his hands coyly at his sides. He was bright green from head to foot (size fifty-six, triple Z). A broad, pastel-green smile broke upon its face, and the monster laughed again. As the boggies retrieved their jaws, they noticed that the giant was naked save for a parsley G-string and a few cabbage leaves in his feather-cut locks. In each great hand was a package of frozen string beans, and across his chest a green banner proclaimed, TODAY’S SPECIAL, FIVE CENTS OFF ALL CREAMED CORN.
“No, no,” moaned Pepsi, “it . . . it couldn’t be!”
“Ho ho ho, but it is,” guffawed the immense figure, half man, half broccoli. “I am called Birdseye, Lord of the Vee-Ates, oft called the jol—”
“Don’t say it!” cried Moxie, holding his furry ears in horror.
“Be not afraid,” grinned the affable vegetable. “I want to make peas with you.”
“No, no!” moaned Pepsi, nibbling his tie clip in frenzy.
“Come come,” said the giant, “lettuce go and meet my subjects who live in the forest. They cannot be beet. Ho ho ho!” The green apparition doubled over at his own bon mot.
“Please, please,” pleaded Pepsi, “we can’t take it. Not after all we’ve been through.”
“I must insist, my friends,” said the giant, “the people of my realm are off to war on the evil Serutan, eater of cellulose and friend of the black weeds who every day strangle us more and more. We know you to be his enemy, too, and you must come with us, and help defeat the cabbage murderer.”
“Well, all right,” sighed Pepsi, “if we gotta—”
“—we gotta,” sighed Moxie.
“Sigh not,” reassured the giant as he slung the two boggies over his kelly green shoulder blades, “being Lord of the Vee-Ates is not easy either, particularly on my celery. Ho!”
The boggies kicked and screamed, attempting a final escape from the towering bore.
“Struggle not,” he said soothingly, “I know a couple of peaches that will be just right for you meat-things. You will love them, they are—”
“—quite a pear,” muttered Pepsi.
“Hey,” burbled the giant, “that is a good one. Wish I had said that!”
“You will,” sobbed Moxie, “you will.”
• • •
Arrowroot, Legolam, and Gimlet massaged their aching muscles under a shaded coppice as the Roi-Tanners watered their slobbering mounts and looked over the weaker of them for the evening meal. Three long days had they ridden hither and thither over rocky ground and smooth toward the dreaded fortress of Serutan the Gauche, and relations among the company had deteriorated somewhat. Legolam and Gimlet never tired of baiting each other, and when the elf laughed at the dwarf as he fell from his mount and was dragged raw the first day out, Gimlet retaliated by slipping Legolam’s steed a strong laxative on the sly. The second day thus found the elf being borne in panicky circles and zigzags by his ailing mount and that night he revenged himself by shortening the right rear leg of Gimlet’s merino, causing its rider many long hours of violent seasickness on the following day’s ride. It had not been a tranquil journey.
In addition, it appeared to both Gimlet and Legolam that something odd had come over Arrowroot since they had met the Roi-Tanners, for he sat listlessly in the saddle and crooned to himself, always glancing covertly toward the leader of the sheep-lords, who spurned his advances. The last night of the ride Legolam awoke to find the Ranger absent from his pup tent and a huge commotion in the bushes nearby. Before the elf could remove his hairnet and buckle on his weapon, Arrowroot returned more melancholy than ever, nursing a sprained wrist and two heavily purpled eyes.
“Ran into a tree,” was his only explanation.
But Isinglass and the fortress of Serutan were now near, and the hard riding could be put by for an evening of rest.
“Ook!” yelped Gimlet painfully as he hunkered down upon a mossy knoll, “that damned four-legged pot roast busted my coccyx for sure.”
“Then ride on your head,” said Legolam in a snide tone of voice, “it is much the softer and less valuable.”
“Fetch off, hairdresser.”
“Toad.”
“Poop.”
“Creep.”
Jingling spurs and the thwapping of a riding crop interrupted the discussion. The three companions watched as Eorache trundled her bulk up the knoll to meet them. She slapped the dust and lanolin from her metal-studded jackboots and shook her horns dubiously.
“You two schtill machen mit der nasty names?” She contemptuously avoided the round, ardent eyes of Arrowroot and laughed aloud. “In der vaterland ve haf no argumenters,” she reprimanded, drawing several dirks for emphasis.
“The lads are but weary after their long ride,” cloyed the smitten Ranger, nibbling her heels playfully, “but eager to do battle, as I am to prove my worthiness in your azure eyes.”
Eorache gagged audibly and spat a large, brown quid against the wind. She stomped away in disgust.
“Wrong number,” said Gimlet.
“Worry not,” sympathized Legolam, throwing a more-than-companionable arm around Arrowroot, “them dames are all alike, poison, every last one of them.”
Arrowroot broke free, sobbing inconsolably.
“Der goes vun sick booby,” said the dwarf, pointing to his head.
Darkness was falling and the campfires of the Roi-Tanners began flickering. Over the next hill lay the valley of Isinglass, now renamed Serutanland by the scheming Wizard. Dejected, the Ranger shuffled among the resting warriors, hardly hearing their proud song, roared above the clinking of foamy steins:
“Ve ist der merry, gay Roi-Tanners,
Who like der boots, sal
utes, und banners.
Ve ride der scheeps in vind and vheather
Mit vhips und spurs und drawers of leather.
Ve dance und sing und valse und two-step
Und never ever mach der goose-step.
Peace iss vhat ve vant und do have,
Und a piece of anything you have.”
Men frolicked about the fires, laughing and joking. Two blood-slathered contestants hacked at each other with sabers to the gloating cheers of flaxen-haired spectators, and farther on a gathering of warriors bellowed with mirth as they did something unattractive to a dog.
But the scene cheered him not. Heartsick, he walked on into the darkness, saying “Eorache, my Eorache” softly over and over to himself. Tomorrow he would display such acts of valor that she would have to pay attention to him. He leaned against the tree and sighed.
“Really got it, huh?”
Stomper jumped back with a cry, but it was the familiar pointed head of Gimlet that poked through the leaves.
“I did not see thee approach,” said Arrowroot, sheathing his sword.
“Just trying to lose that jerk,” said the dwarf.
“Who’s a jerk, sirrah?” snapped Legolam, who had been molesting a chipmunk behind the tree.
“Speak o’ the devil,” groaned Gimlet.
The three sat under the broad branches and thought upon the hard travels they had made, seemingly to no purpose. What good would the defeat of Serutan be if Sorhed claimed Frito’s Ring for his own? Who could resist his power then? For a long while they brooded.
“Isn’t it about time for a deus ex machina?” said Legolam wearily.
Suddenly there was a loud pop and a bright burst of light that momentarily blinded the shocked three. The acrid odor of cheap flash powder filled the air, and the companions heard a distinct thump followed by a louder oof! Then through the swirling confetti, they saw a shining figure dressed all in white, brushing the twigs and dirt from his spotless bell-bottoms and gleaming a-go-go boots. Above the white Nehru jacket and cheesy medallion was a neatly trimmed gray beard set off by oversized wraparound shades. The whole ensemble was topped off by a large white panama with a matching ostrich plume.
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