That was almost three weeks, not counting the time spent on the island. Marge noted. And that was if everything was perfect.
The first two days and nights were slower than expected, as they tried to ease their way into their new tasks. Tiana, in particular, was critical to Bly in spotting ever-changing hazards, and while she took to the water as if born a mermaid, thanks to instinctual skills and reflexes that came with the body, she had a lot to learn about hazards, and particularly what was and was not important to the captain.
Bly, for his part, seemed more than mollified despite his body switch. Before, he was simply getting paid a big bonus to deliver his passengers; now he was told that, by the laws of Marquewood, the Master's former yacht, after it was tracked down and registry cleared, belonged to the victims of the man who had owned it. The others quickly agreed to give their shares to him in exchange for limited use. Bly stood, in a few weeks, to become a very wealthy, independent businessman.
Late in the morning of the third day, however, the wind picked up radically and began blowing almost due north, making progress nearly impossible; soon after the skies darkened and they were in the midst of a strong and terrible storm that forced Bly to put in along a sheltered part of the riverbank and wait it out. Marge suspected more foul play, but Bly dismissed it. "These storms are not uncommon this time of year," he told her. "The trouble is, they can last a long time as they sweep in from the ocean and across the flood plain and then strike these mountains."
Tiana, for her part, seemed to be relishing her new freedom after more than five years as a pampered symbol and believed a mermaid's tail was a very small price to pay for it. The rain and wind hardly bothered her. Marge had been both careful and curious in talking to each of them, looking for how things were or were not changing. Certainly, the first day or so, they had all gone crazy addressing each other by the wrong names, but that seemed to have quickly passed as the personalities inside the bodies tended to dominate.
"It is most interesting," Tiana told her. "My wizard's powers are way down from what they were, yet my new abilities, particularly the sonar, are amazing. I have also been looking at myself and the others, and have discovered some very strange things."
The storm tossed and battered the small boat in spite of the shelter. "Like what?" Marge asked, a bit nervous at this acceptance.
"Curses. The were curse remained with the body, as I suspected, as it is a physical curse, which means that I, Tura, and Audra now have it, but not Joe. On the other hand, some other curses, such as my own curse of death in childbirth, are also basically physical, although linked to the metaphysical. It seems to have remained with my old body as well."
For Tura's part, she was relishing the fact that she was human and that she had legs. "I was an outcast to my people," she told Marge, "and now I can walk, freely, on dry land!"
"You don't miss the water world?" Marge asked her.
"It's odd, but I don't. I keep dreaming of—mountains."
Macore now managed to get around without being clumsy, and had even begun to practice a bit with the prehensile tail, but he still clearly called his form his "rat suit" and had no use for it as a permanent thing.
The storm dragged on for three more days, and it seemed that, each time they slept and then awoke again, the victims of the Master seemed more and more at ease with what they were, although the two most extreme cases, Joe and Audra, were unmistakably mismatched.
Joe, however, found that, rain or not, he needed to lie out on deck at least a few hours a day. The nymph needed water and light and very little else to survive.
"How do you feel, Joe?" Marge asked him.
"I'm going nuts," he complained. "I've been turned from a king into a slave at one swipe of a spell. Everybody demands I do all the cooking for them on their different schedules, then they complain about what I cook and how I cook it—as if I wanted to eat it. Food just sort of, well, turns my stomach or whatever's in there. Then it's always change the beds, clean and polish the insides, dump the garbage. It's boring, demanding, and it never ends!"
"Welcome to the wonderful world of being a housewife," she commented. "I did it for years, you know. Maybe this will give you an appreciation of what the people who do the work have to go through."
"Yeah, I guess, but it's a pain anyway. Poor Irving's having an identity crisis as bad as ours, too. The sword can't decide if Audra or me is really me. If it comes to a fight, I hope it picks Audra, though. That sword has a life of its own in a swordfight so it won't be a slaughter, but I couldn't even lift it."
"You'd have more trouble than that. Irving is of an iron alloy. It would kill you. Still, more is troubling you than that. I can sense it."
"Yeah, well, it's the dreams and funny feelings."
"How's that?"
"A wood nymph's half plant, half teenager, it seems. Something inside keeps nibbling at my brain, keeps telling me not to fight, to let go. I can handle it okay, but every night it gets just a little bit stronger. I found myself daydreaming today, looking at Audra over there in my body and getting slightly turned on, for instance. I only really cried twice in my life before, but now I seem to bawl at every little thing that goes wrong. And when Macore told that crazy joke of his, I got the giggles and couldn't stop. The giggles. I've swapped with Tiana as a were, and even you, and never felt anything like this."
She sighed. "Poor Joe. The trouble is really that you've become a fairy and a nymph. The races of faerie are more primal, more elemental than humans or other thinking races. We don't have as much self-control, and we tend to experience everything larger than life. It's in our nature. I should know! And nymphs are seductresses not known for clear thinking or intellectual abilities. It's not like humans, who learn. It's more instinct, a way you have to be. We can only make do and hope that Ruddygore will bail you out in the end, as usual."
"Yeah. Why is he so insistent about our seeing this Oracle, anyway? And what's more important than us?"
She shrugged. "Maybe a lot. I have an idea that he spends a good deal of his time fighting evil on a plane we can't see or imagine, and in that kind of fight we're sort of secondary. You know what's not far over the cliff walls on the other side over there?"
"Huh?"
"The Valley of Decision, where we first turned back the Dark Baron."
"Huh. I'll be damned."
"When we're underway again, we'll be passing the Zhafqua which leads to Morikay, and then the Khafdis which begins in Lake Ktahr. It's our own recent history we're passing through. Keep that in mind."
"I'll try," he assured her. "But this storm better break soon, or by the time we get through this I may not be able to fight off going nymph anymore."
There were still light showers, but the wind had shifted and Bly decided to get underway. The resumption of the journey brightened all their spirits and, as they proceeded south, the weather brightened. Just before sunset, the sun briefly appeared, just to give them a beautiful sunset, and things looked up once more. The ship had weathered the storm far better than the inhabitants, and they were no more than two days from Marahbar.
"We'll have to stop at the port," Bly told them, "not only because we're low on provisions but also because I'll have to get the proper clearances and briefings for the ocean hop. There are a lot of nasty things out there in the ocean just waiting for small boats, and there's no sheltered harbor, if we run into another of these blows."
"How long will this take?" Marge asked him.
"Not long, I hope, if the news and weather are good. Macore and I have been working on some fundamentals, since, due to the description and portrait on my master's license, he will have to impersonate me."
"It shouldn't cause much of a problem," Macore assured her. "I've gotten pretty used to this body now, and I've always been good at conning people. Bly'll be right there, and I've got enough of what's required to get by."
"I hope that the rest of you will remain aboard," the captain said to the others as they gathere
d on the deck. "However, if it is necessary for any reason to get off, or interact with any workers or officials, play the part your looks demand. We wish no complications with officials over who's who and what's what. Be who others think you are, no matter what."
For Joe, every day since he'd reawakened in this strange fairy body had been something of a nightmare, and the days mostly boredom and frustration. As Marge had said, the situation wasn't as much being someone else, even a female wood nymph, as it was the compulsive nature of the faerie as a group. His mind and memory were still pretty sharp, but the fact was that a wood nymph didn't need and wasn't designed, as it were, for such a mind and memory. The fairies, as a rule, were born with all the attributes, basic skills and aptitudes, and everything else needed to become what they were supposed to be; behavior was preordained and could not be changed. Most fairy folk, then, learned what they needed or wanted to learn and that was that.
Now he was at war with that nature, and it was a war he couldn't possibly win. Just as a cat was a cat first, and, in fact, Marge was Kauri first and Marge second, so he had no choice about being a wood nymph. If the right stimuli were present he'd have to act and react as a wood nymph would, no matter what he thought or how much he detested it.
The worst part was that Audra didn't face his problem. She was human now, and humans didn't have instinctive and compulsive behavior patterns. She was the sum total of her experience—and that was as a wood nymph. The fact that she was now big and strong and male didn't make much difference to her; it simply meant a change in technique and the fact that she no longer had to be fearful of others or apprehensive about her safety. She was also now freed from her attachment to a specific place, although Marge, who knew the laws of such fairies, assured him that this was a protective device and not truly a compulsion. If he didn't consciously wish to do it, he could retain his independence, such as it was.
He had decided to remain strictly aboard while in the port, although he was dying to see one of the great City States. He was physically weak, and, unlike Marge, was totally defenseless in terms of powers, and yet he was a nymph and would behave like a nymph. He'd never been really scared of much of anything before, either on Earth or in Husaquahr, but he was scared now, almost frightened to death.
After Macore and Bly went ashore, the others grew restless, with the bright lights and noise of a massive and living cosmopolitan city crisscrossed with a network of canals and levees. Marge had already gone, almost at nightfall, assuring them she'd be back in a couple of hours at worst, and Audra and Tura really couldn't be talked out of it by Tiana. For the former nymph, it was her first and perhaps only, chance to see what a big city was like.
Tura wanted to walk around and find what it was like to be a human rather than a mermaid in such surroundings. That meant that Tiana was more or less forced to figure out the big wheelchair, since she didn't really trust those two on their own out there.
Joe normally slept at night, but he fought sleep much of the time now, and the sun of the past two days had given him a lot of reserve energy. He still kept below, and it wasn't until boredom, curiosity, and apprehension at hearing nothing topside caused him to emerge and look around nervously. When he found no one else aboard, he nearly went into a panic. He felt suddenly very alone and very vulnerable. There was activity all around this twenty-four-hour port, with dockworkers, stevedores, and all sorts of others doing their jobs.
A young man, dressed as a dockworker of some sort and apparently on a break, saw the small figure and walked over to the side of the Hippogryph. "Hello!" he called, sounding friendly. "What sort are you?"
Suddenly Joe felt a tremendous rush through his whole body, and from that instant he was no longer in any way in control. He found himself walking sexily over to the rail near the gangplank and smiling sweetly at the man. "I'm a nymph," the pale green girl said in a soft and sexy voice.
"Is that right? What's your name?" "My name is—call me Joey," the nymph said.
It was nearly morning and there was much consternation on the afterdeck of the Piebald Hippogryph.
"How could you be so stupid?" Marge demanded to know, sounding angry as hell.
"Look, what was I gonna do, huh?" Tiana responded, sounding angry herself. "I'm going to stop somebody intent on going who's six-six and two-sixty, all muscle? And I had my own problems, remember!"
Macore and Bly tried to make some peace between them and finally got the whole story. It was apparent now that Audra had no intention of returning to the ship; by midway through the first bar, she'd excused herself to go to the bathroom and that had been that. Once Tiana and Tura had determined that the former nymph was gone, and not apparently a victim of foul play, they decided to return to the ship and confer before notifying the authorities. It was, after all, a city of almost a million inhabitants and not familiar to either.
The bigger surprise was Tura. They'd gotten back to the docks, and Tura had lifted Tiana from the wheelchair and carried her aboard, but then she went back, supposedly for the chair. Instead she'd looked back and said, "I'm sorry—but I have the chance to climb mountains and no one is going to take that away from me," and walked away, taking the wheelchair with her.
"I doubt if Tura intended or even thought about it," Bly said defensively, "but when Audra did it and it was clear how nearly impossible it would be to find even somebody that imposing, the impulse was irresistible."
Marge had a sudden thought. "What about Joe? He was left here all alone!" She made for the cabins below and found the form of the small, light-green nymph lying face up on one of the beds, eyes open and staring.
When Joe had no reaction to her entry, she had a sudden fear that he had been attacked again somehow by the enemy, although the body was certainly still living flesh. When Joe moved a little, she relaxed, but needed no special powers to realize that something was radically wrong.
"Joe? You all right?"
The figure sighed, then seemed to come at least partially to life. "I'm not really sure, Marge. It took control of me tonight. For an hour, I became Joey the Nymph, with all that implies, and I enjoyed every minute of it and I want more of it, lots of it."
She was shocked. "Who?"
"Nobody special, except for the hour. Oh, don't go rushing off trying to find some cad. I discovered I do have some powers, but they're directed to only one end and I used them. I couldn't help it. I was worse than Audra ever was, at least to me. I wasn't a thinking person anymore—I was a primal force with an irrepressible need."
"Joe, you've got to keep fighting it. Okay, it happened and maybe it'll happen again, but you've got to hold on to what's really you in there. It will only be permanent if you let it."
"It's coming after my mind now, Marge. It wants to get rid of all that gets in the way, to push it back or wipe it out." He sighed. "What was the yelling about on deck?"
Marge felt suddenly very uncomfortable. This was not the time for such news, but there was no way to conceal it, either. She swallowed hard and told him.
He just nodded fatalistically. "Well, that's it, then. They've committed no crimes. They can't be hunted down legally or charged with anything or brought back against their will, and Audra, at least, is so naive she'll be in thrall to somebody with power by tomorrow if she isn't already. Face it—the Master's won."
"I won't give up, no matter what you say! And don't you dare give up on me, either! Ruddygore has tremendous powers and can traffic with whatever powers he needs to!"
"Ruddygore's got more problems than us now," Joe responded dejectedly. "With no demigod or goddess to trot out, he can't fake it for long without the Council finding out. Once they do, they'll oust him from the leadership and start running things their own way."
"Well I, for one, am not going to give up and I'm going to fight you for your own sake as well! Things have looked pretty dark for us before and we've always pulled it out!" She turned and walked out, actually feeling as confident as she spoke. Things just couldn't end this
way! They wouldn't dare!
She told the others about Joe, and Bly sighed. "Well, my charter is still to get you to the Oracle. There's a tide in just under two hours. We either take it or we face another stormfront moving in that might keep us bottled up for a couple of days. I'll do what you say, since you're the boss, but if what you say is true below I wouldn't like to have Joe stay around here."
"Sail, then. We'll leave messages. I just wish there was something we could use to get the cops looking for those two!" She had a thought. "Did Audra take Irving?"
Tiana sighed. "No. Weapons scare her. And forget about the wheelchair. Macore found it two blocks away."
"Hmmm... what about rape? That'll get 'em."
"One look at Audra, even in that body, and they'll laugh it away."
Marge suddenly grinned. "I know! And it will stand up to psychic examination, too! Warn them that they've got two werewolves loose in the city!"
Chapter 10
Obliquity Split
When chronicling great adventures, the chronicler should take pains to use words that even the most educated of readers must look up. This may make your chronicle very slow, if not impossible, to read, but it will be critically acclaimed throughout the land, for none will wish to admit that they didn't understand and relish every word. Instead, they will use the comfort with such phraseology as a litmus test for intellectual equality. No one may ever really read you, but all will be forced to purchase a copy of the chronicle to convince others that they did, and your brilliance and intellect will be permanently unquestioned.
—The Romantic Saga
Writer's Manual of Style
Marahbar
"I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHY THIS IS SUCH AN UNTRAVELED route if this Oracle is as hot as Ruddygore thinks he is," Macore said to Bly as they passed beyond sight of land and picked up a stiff breeze.
Vengeance of the Dancing Gods Page 14