And where the Pug-Boos sat their fat mounts, there appeared to either side of them more dottles. And more and more and more, until the entire ridge was covered with them, so that they were boiling over and coming down the slopes of the ridge. And that’s when the second thing began.
There are those who fought on the field of Dunguring who say that the north would have won, anyway. I am not one of them. Some say this so strongly that I think they feel a need to hide the fact that for all their courage and their slaughtering and their heroism—and mind you, I’m not putting this down—it was really gentle dottles that won the battle of Dunguring.
That’s right! It was dottles—dottles who loved Pug-Boos to distraction; sweet-smelling, fat-bellied, blue-eyed dottles— who would do anything for Pug-Boos!
Murie and I and our wounded and our three sorcerers, who still chanted their words, had a front-row seat to the strangest happening that Fregis-Camelot had ever witnessed. Earth had its fabled Pied Piper. Camelot did better than that. Camelot had Pug-Boos!
Streaming in a gray, black, and ocher wave from over the ridge, and from the twenty square miles of forest and meadow beyond, there came perhaps a quarter of a million dottles. They literally boiled down upon those armies and through them and around them, and between them, and over them; so that no warrior could swing a sword without hitting a dottle, which most simply would not do. And there was a wheeeing and a wooohing (amplified, you can bet, just as our sorcerers words had been amplified) that echoed throughout the very heavens, so that every warrior deemed it afterward a most religious experience. And more than one of them was kissed by a dottle to help substantiate this reasoning.
Of the warriors of Seligal and Kerch and Kelb, most just surrendered. They weren’t stupid. They could see that it was all over and that they had lost. This was doubly understood when certain great lords of Marack, Gheese, and Ferlach forced their way through that dottle horde waving the emptied cowls of the remaining four dark wizards of Om from their lance tips (I had been right there, too).
The warriors of Hish simply grabbed dottles and fled in the direction of Corchoon and the fleet; only to find themselves bottled up by the arrival of our ships, come down from Reen and Saks.
And I am convinced that the thing in Hish just gave up; sulked; retreated for the moment to whatever options it had prepared for itself; overwhelmed by what I am sure it thought was complete and utter alien nonsense. It had been nonsense, all right Pug-Boo nonsense; the kind that works like magic… .
And it was all over. And it was that simple. Even while we were all congratulating each other in paroxysms of jubilation, bewhiskered kisses, back-slaps, and what-have-you when you have just won the greatest battle of all time, rain swept the field. When I look back on it, the cloudburst that hit Dunguring—and it was literally that—was the final Pug-Boo manifestation of what could be done, psychologically, with the proper gimmicks, and at the proper time.
True, the Foundation and I had helped. But in a sense a part of my efforts had simply been used to help set their stage… . Anyhow, if there had been any fight left in anyone, those torrents of rain wiped it out. Better yet, while we sat snug in our tents, we held parley on the terms of surrender of our erstwhile enemies. Most, led by the lords Roume-Fir and Fousten, of Seligal and Kerch respectively, were actually glad of Om’s defeat. The Kaleen’s work of a century had been undone.
I didn’t attend—or rather I did, but only for a little while. I begged off and went to bed, my princess sharing a pillow with me, plus a jug of sviss that, until Rawl’s ministrations, had been simple gog-milk. Hooli had come down off his high horse and joined us. He had returned to the princess, that is. He dared to curl up on a camp rug beside our bed. I winked at him. He looked stupidly back at me. That was my cue to kick him out, with some polite excuse to Murie for my action.
Then I turned to my own sweet-smelling, warm-tummied, purple-eyed vixen… . Beyond the walls and through the thin canvas of the tent next to ours we could hear the laughter of Rawl and Cari. And I thought then that I really liked him. For he, too, was not at council. Like myself, he had fled the field to fight another day.
Later in the night I removed Murie’s head from my shoulder and reached for my belt. I tried for Greenwich just to see. … I tried and tried, and tried, and there they were!
“In! In! In!” I said. “Well, well! You’re back, and without my permission.”
“In!” Kriloy said. “And look who’s talking!”
“You saw?”
“Everything! From the other side of Fomalhaut. We didn’t make waves, Buby. So you’re safe. By the way, all is forgiven.”
“Is that a question or a statement?”
“Sheeeee!”
“So what did you think of the Third Act?”
“Better. What did you think of it?”
“The dottle finale was great,” I said. “Anyway, it’s all over, though there’s still a big job ahead. The thing is Hish only lost the first skirmish, you know. For the moment, however, and on Camelot that may mean two hundred years, everything’s cool! The war is over. The Vuuns are our friends. The north is safe. And everything is as it was—well, almost.”
“We’ve got it on film, with a close-up of you popping Gol-Bades’s rivets. They’ll love it at the library. So what now? When do you want to return?”
“There are a few loose ends.” I grunted cryptically. “A couple of problems.”
“Yeah.” Kriloy smirked. I know he did. “How’s about the sixth hour after you’re back at the castle?”
“No reason not to.”
“You’ll give us a tape, a good one this time?”
“No reason not to.”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“Well, yes. I’ve got this friend with me, you see… .Friend, hell! I’m going to marry her—with pomp and circumstance. And right now she’s waking up.”
“Well, out then.”
“Bless you.”
And they were gone and I turned to Murie.
Among a lot of things there was one tidbit of knowledge that I really wanted out of all this conglomerate of complications. The next day, as Rawl and Can, Murie and I, and an escort of fifty young warriors were resting during our dottle browsing period (we were on our way back to Glagmaron), I tried to get it I lay back with my head in Murie’s lap, and I closed my eyes and shot a thought to that miserable Hooli who sat on a large toadstool grinning and spreading goodness.
“Hooli,” I said, “you once—or rather, you in the plural sense—suggested that you would tell me who and what you are. How about now?”
He came in on my wavelength. He actually came in!
“No big deal,” he said with my voice. “What do you want to know?”
“I just asked, stupid.”
“Well, what are you?”
“I’m an Adjuster. I’ve told you that”
“Well, that’s what I am.”
“What?”
“An Adjuster.”
“Great Gods!”
“There is a difference.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, you’re Galactic. I’m Universal. I adjust you!”
“Great Gods-“
“How about that?”
“Oh, no,” I said. Then wearily, “All right. Again. Are you just one entity, or an entity for each Pug-Boo?”
“One for each,” Hooli said. “But we come and go. Most of the time we don’t occupy the host at all.”
“I see,” I said.
“Bye,” Hooli said. …
Later, as we rode back through the thick forest toward far Glagmaron and I tried to contact him again, I just got that idiot smile. But after that, at dinnertime, I happened to glance over Murie’s delectable shoulder, and there was Hooli. And Hooli winked at me.…
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