Harpy Thyme (18 page)

In fact, she realized now, that poison was from Pin-A-Tuba! That was the volcano's other slope. They had circled around it without catching on that it could have nasty vents on both sides, or that these could issue either noxious gas or nasty fluid. So they hadn't finished with this evil mountain.

Meanwhile Marrow was walking up the ruined slope toward the vent. But Gloha saw that he wasn't going to be able to reach it, because there was a small cliff in the way. The black poison goo had no trouble dribbling slowly down it, but there was no way for a person to climb up it. However, there was an indirect route, clear only from above.

She flew down to tell Marrow. But he was walking right beside the poison flow, supremely unaffected. The moment she started to think of getting faintly close, her breath began to choke and her vision blurred and her wings got shaky and weak. She plunged away to the side, so she wasn't directly above the flow, and recovered her equilibrium. No, she couldn't go and tell him directly.

But maybe she could signal him from afar. She flew back and forth before him, waving her arms. “Marrow!” she called, sure he couldn't hear her from this distance.

But in a moment he noticed her. He waved a bony arm.

“Go that way!” she cried, zooming to the mountain's right side. “There's a path!”

But he couldn't understand. He moved on beside the flow.

Was there any other way to get through to him? She racked her blank little brain but dredged up nothing. So she just followed along, hoping to be able to help when there was a chance.

He finally trekked to the cliff and stood looking up. It was obvious that he couldn't climb it. He looked around.

Now was the time. She flew to the right again and hovered there, beckoning him. This time he caught on. He walked that way, away from the flow. She led him to the place where a ledge angled erratically up the steep slope. From there it moved back across to the top of the cliff, and the way was followable.

Marrow found it, and made his way up. He was carrying something, and she realized that it was a piece of stone he hoped to use as a plug. It seemed to be an old stalactite that some cave had discarded.

She watched from afar as he went all the way to the vent. He studied the situation, then lifted his stalactite and rammed it straight down into the center of the vent, where the poison started flowing. It went partway in. Then he lifted off his skull-Gloha did a double take at about that point-and used it to pound in the spike.

That was it. He replaced his skull and walked away. Gloha saw that the flow was clearing near the top. It remained below, but there was no more coming out of the vent. He had plugged it.

Gloha thought of something else. Marrow had been too close to the poison. He probably reeked of it now, so that it wouldn't be safe for anybody else to get near him. He would have to get clean before he returned to the village.

She flew back and forth, signaling him as she had before. Then she headed for the nearest stream that didn't originate on Mount Pin-A-Tuba. He followed. The foliage on either side of his route wilted as he passed. The stream was far enough away so that she was able to land beside it. But when Marrow approached, sure enough, he reeked of poison, and she had to fly away before she fainted. “Wash! Wash!” she cried, pointing at the water. Then, afraid he couldn't hear her, she made vigorous scrubbing motions along her body.

He caught on, and waded into the water. He disappeared in it. The plants downstream began to wilt. Gloha was sorry for them, but at least it showed that the water was carrying the poison away from his body. Before too long it should get so diluted that it wouldn't hurt anyone anymore.

She hovered at a safe distance until he emerged. He walked downstream, and when he got beyond the wilted region, there seemed to be no further wilting in his vicinity. So she risked a closer approach. There were no deadly fumes. Finally she landed before him. “You're clean,” she announced.

“Thank you for advising me,” he said. “It had not occurred to me that I might have become unsanitary, but when you signaled I realized that life in my vicinity was perishing.”

“Yes. That poison is very strong.”

They returned to the village. Trent had evidently been at work there, because there was now a large pile of fresh food from plants and creatures he must have transformed. The villagers were aware that the poison was no longer flowing. That meant that the existing stream should slowly dry up or sink into the ground, leaving the village clear. They would be able to continue their business.

“I have talked with the villagers, and ascertained that there are no winged goblins here, nor have they even seen any before you,” Trent advised her. “As far as they know, you are unique.”

“I'm afraid I am,” she agreed. “But Crombie wouldn't have pointed a direction if there weren't an answer. It just means it isn't here.”

“True. We can rest here the night, and continue southeast in the morning.“ He hesitated. ”I wouldn't judge the villagers too harshly with respect to their unwillingness to yield half a soul. Many are female, making them imperfect for this purpose, or old. Others are simply frightened. There are a number of misconceptions about souls that are hard to eradicate."

“I know,” Gloha agreed, remembering her own concern about losing half of hers.

“I would not care to take half a soul from someone who did not freely wish to give it,” Marrow said.

“We'll keep looking,” Gloha said.

They had a good meal, really a feast, and the villagers were very appreciative of the service Marrow had done for them. “You have benefited all Xanth,” Pa Troll said, with an emphasis that hinted that maybe it was all Xanth who owed Marrow the half soul, not the local village.

There was a nice house for them to use for the night, left by a family that had moved out recently in anticipation of a complete evacuation. Gloha had the pleasure of a private room with a nice soft bed. She slept well, despite still wishing that she had a perfect man with warm feet to share it with. She realized that the Good Magician had been right about a harpy (or part harpy) helping to save the village at the last moment. Maybe his son was right about the direction of the solution to her own quest Meanwhile, she did feel slightly useful.

In the morning they resumed their travel to the southeast. However, Pa Troll had a warning for them: “The wind currents carry the magic dust everywhere, but they are thickest immediately downwind from the village. Usually this is to our southwest, but at the moment it is to our southeast. Your route may take you through the fringe of it. You would be well advised to avoid that direction, at least until the wind changes and some of the dust can clear.”

Trent looked at Gloha. “This is good advice.”

She knew it was. She had heard stories about the effects of magic madness. “But is it possible that my perfect man and Marrow's half-soul donor will be found within the Region of Madness?”

“It is possible,” he agreed. “I suppose if such quests seem unlikely to succeed in normal Xanth, the abnormal should be tried. But I'm not sure you appreciate just how weird the Region of Madness is likely to be.”

“Oh, pooh! It can't be worse than Mount Pun-A-Tub was.”

“Which threat you also doubted, at first,” he reminded her evenly.

She knew he was making sense, and that she was being an unreasonable teen crossbreed female. Somehow that didn't cause her to become more reasonable. It didn't help that she wished she could make an impression on him as an intriguing adult female, for no legitimate reason, and didn't know how. So her fouled-up little feelings just made things difficult. “Anyway, I'm curious to see just what's so weird about it.”

His gaze remained straight, yet somehow she had the impression he was rolling his eyes. “As you wish.”

Marrow Bones tilted his skull. His nonexistent eyes were rolling too.

They proceeded southeast. Downwind. There was no problem. The country consisted of rolling hills covered by forest and fields, with an occasional river wandering through. Trent was about to wade through the first river, but the skeleton stopped him. “Kick me,” he said.

“Thank you,” Trent said.

Gloha thought they were joking, though neither creature had been much for humor before. But Marrow bent over, and Trent delivered a fine kick to the skeleton's hipbone. Marrow flew apart. The bones landed in a pile-in the shape of a small boat. Trent pushed the boat into the water, where it floated despite not seeming to be watertight, then stepped into it and sat down. The craft then moved across the water under its own power. Trent got out on the far bank, then kicked the boat, and the bones flew apart and landed back in Marrow's natural form.

Gloha finally got her gape hinged. She had known that the walking skeletons could change the arrangement of their bones, but hadn't realize how neat and useful this could be. After all, Marrow had changed to clamp the dragon's nose. Trent's kicks had merely facilitated the effort. She flew across the river herself. They resumed walking.

“We seem to be skirting the Region of Madness,” Trent remarked. “Perhaps the folk of the Magic Dust Village were operating at reduced efficiency the past few days as the poison flow approached, so the dust level is not high. But now they are likely to be back at full efficiency, and we are apt to encounter more of the effect.”

“I believe you are correct,” Marrow agreed, his skull turning. “There may be a waft of it approaching now.”

“Well, I don't see any madness yet,” Gloha remarked impertinently. She shouldn't have.

Gloha sucked and licked at the sticky ends of her fingers. She was too old for Aunt Grobigatail's honey flummery, but a taste of honey always whetted her appetite for more. She sighed, her joy mixed with a little bit of sadness. She was, at the age of eighteen, getting more than a bit long in the tooth, too old for sweet treats. But she was still too young for goblin garbage rituals. Now she was too bored doing her usual good job of baby-sitting her obnoxious little brother Harglo. He might be her sibling, but he wasn't her kind; he had the head and legs of a goblin, but the full-feathered body of a harpy complete with tail, and no hands. He was a stronger flyer than she was, and a stronger runner too, but couldn't do much delicate handling of things with just his wings. He made up for that by having an excellent command of harpy vocabulary; already at age nine he could make some foliage wilt when he swore, and he was still confined to non-Adult Conspiracy words.

But today she was free of him, having a day off while he took flying lessons (and probably illicit cussing lessons) from Aunt Fowlmouth. So she could relax and enjoy herself. So why wasn't she happy? She tasted her fingers again, but this time her scalding-hot salty tears caused her fingers to hurt like the singing stinging threads of sea wasps. The problem was that today she had time to appreciate just how much it hurt being a half-and-half crossbreed, never quite fitting in with either the goblins or the harpies. So now she was caught up in her self-pity party. She had stopped grooming herself; her wing feathers were droopy and creased, her hooded blue bio-luminescent eyes were dull, and her glorious blue-black glossy hair hung in salty honey-sticky twisted loops.

Harpies flew overhead, hooting and hurling a golden coprolite about. This was a gold-plated fossilized ball of dragon dung that they caught in their claws and tossed up again. Whoever could get out the longest and foulest string of cussing before the next harpy touched the flying ball was winner for the moment. Harglo loved that game, and longed for the day he could play it; Gloha had never even tried, as she could not even begin to understand the implications of its most basic terms without going into a terminal blush.

These were good days in Xanth, in the harpy caves and goblin dens, when things went medium to bad instead of bad to worse. But from time to thyme a demonic, shot-fowl (or maybe foul-shot) rogue-awful day sneaked in, and this seemed to be one of them. So instead of enjoying her rest from spite, her respite, she was having Xanth's most miserable little mood.

It had started with dawn, which had lifted its brooding mists to reveal a bleary red-eyed sun surrounded by bruised purple clouds whose only desire was to make an acid rain and wet on someone's head. Then had come the snarling, whining, grunting, screaming rush to the breakfast cave, aptly termed the mess hall, where her dozens of aunts fought for the juiciest dripping raw bleeding morsels. Gloha had found herself wedged between Aunt Hoary Harributtes and the Grand Harridan Queen-Chief of this branch of the family clan, each of whom could screech more piercingly than the other. Gloha managed to plead difficulty clinging to the perch, so she took her quivering chunk of whatever to a separate bench where she could sit in what was disparagingly termed human style. Then someone had accidentally dropped a splash of hot coffee down her back, never mind that harpies never dropped anything they had ever snatched up unless they meant to. Gloha had had to flee to her personal nest to change clothes and put salve on her burn.

She had tried to cheer herself by dressing up. She donned her festival outfit: mock-leather jerkin, thongs of molten golden color trimmed in a Musical pattern with mellow golden bells, brazen Hell's Bells, and icy crystal stars. A really nice outfit always made her feel so good. But then her tutor, Magpie, had told her not to wear it, because harpies didn't wear clothing and she would be a laughingstock.

“But I'm a laughingstock anyway!” she protested.

“Nonsense. You just haven't found your place yet.”

“What do you know about it?” Gloha flared rebelliously. “You aren't really a harpy at all! You're just an unlikely kindly demoness.”

“But I have worked with quite a number of mortals,” Magpie said with an evenness impossible to mortals. “Okra Ogress thought her life was hopeless, and now she's a Major Character. Rose of Roogna thought she'd never find a good husband, and then she married the Good Magician and had a lovely daughter. I could list others.”

Gloha knew she could. At length. So she didn't ask. Instead she went into Routine #2: a terrible little tantrum. “Don't tell me what to do!” she screamed with a great deal of hair tossing and foot stomping. Her show frightened several nearby birds, who flew under the bed to hide, disturbing the snoozing monster there.

But Magpie had seen it all before, and was unmoved. In the end Gloha had to remove her finery and return to her dull ordinary state. Her dreary life continued unabated.

Gloha shook her heavy little head. She was back in the forest with Magician Trent and Marrow Bones. What had happened?

“I had supposed your life was happy,” Trent said, surprised. “But I realize now that no one living among harpies could be satisfied.”

“You saw my flashback?” Gloha asked, amazed.

“It appeared before us,” Trent said.

“I am not expert in the ways of living folk,” Marrow said. “But it seems to me that it was not nice of that harpy to spill hot black liquid down your back.”

“You really did see it? In wild living color? Even when I threw my-”

“I averted my gaze when you changed clothing,” the Magician said. “I thought you might consider that private.”

She had been going to say “tantrum,” but now she realized that she had more to be concerned about. She had relived an episode of her past life, and they had seen it unfold exactly as she had. Including her temporarily bared body. What madness was this?

Then she realized the rest of it. This was the Region of Madness, with the intense magic of the concentrated magic dust making even memories become visible. She hadn't realized that it would be like this. She wasn't at all sure she liked it. “Let's get quickly out of here,” she suggested.

“What, when the fun is just beginning?” a voice demanded.

“Who is that?” Gloha asked, alarmed.

Smoke swirled. “Nothing to concern you, antiseptic goblin girl.”

“What kind of goblin girl?”

“Unpolluted, sanitary, unadulterated, immaculate, faultless-”

“Innocent?” Trent suggested.

“Whatever,” the smoke said crossly.

“What are you doing here, Metria?” Gloha asked a brief little bit crossly herself.

“I poke around wherever anything interesting is happening. Anyone fool enough to blunder into the Region of Madness is bound to be interesting.”

“Well, my past life is about as uninteresting as anything can get, so you might as well go away.”

“Oh, I don't know about that. Magpie always takes the interesting characters to work with.”

“You know Magpie?”

“She's a demoness, isn't she? She knows when something's going to happen, and she's always there to nursemaid it through.”

“Well, nothing's going to happen right now, so-”

“That's what, you think. Here comes another waft of madness.”

“I don't believe it,” Gloha said. “You're just saying it to tease-”

... and long lonely hours had been spent conducting endless imagined conversations with her adversary, that harpy flying tiger, her Aunt Hoary.

“Chaos and coffee!” Hoary Harpy screeched as she used one soiled wing to sweep strands of slop, glop, and flop out of the mess hall and into the fire pits. She clutched a teaming mug of brew in one claw while standing on the other scrawny leg. She vaguely resembled a black-feathered desultory stork, her red eyes glowing like soiled coals in the dusky purple shadows of the messy hall. She swept long dirty strands of feathery black hair back from her stony alabaster brow and glowered at her niece.

Gloha's sensitive little stomach knotted and burned, her heart cramped, and her hair wanted to wriggle out of sight. How had she gotten into this dill picklement?

“I said, what game are you playing?” a low whispery voice repeated, which was somehow worse than the usual screech.

With an icy start Gloha realized that the subject of her worries was now focusing her formidable annoyance at her. She blushed, which of course only made things worse, making her seem even more guilty that she probably was. “Auntie?”

“You politely requested this early morning interview, which showed how unharpyish you are,” the harpy said. “You should have demanded it in the foulest vernacular. Now what in the name of idiocy do you want?”

Gloha somehow nerved herself enough to speak her muted little mind. “Auntie Hoary, I've been made sick and tired by living a dull and middle-of-the-road life amidst creatures who aren't exactly like me. We all know what happens when you stay in the middle of anything: you get run over. Auntie, I want to be an alchemist, a geo-alchemist on a wizard's team. I think a person without a dream becomes mired in our st-st-” She faltered, unable to get the ugly word out.

“Stinking!” Hoary screeched. “S-T-I-N-K-I-N-G! Where's your harpy vocabulary? Girl, you need to learn to swear, if you're going to get along. Now try it again.”

Gloha made an effete little effort. “M-mired in our st-stinking pig pit,” she managed to eke out. “Over and over I dream a bad dream brought by a night mare, that I can no longer fly-that I am a crippled broken-winged bird. Let me leave the nest-”

“What kind of nest?” Hoary screeched.

“The st-stinking nest, and go to seek-”

“What in the hell is the hurry?” Hoary demanded. “Leave the safety of the flock when you still don't know how to swear? You'd really break your wings then! The nest is best for chicks.”

“But I'm eighteen, Auntie,” Gloha reminded her.

“And have the vocabulary of a dirty bird half your age,” Hoary pointed out, cleaning gore from her teeth with a dagger like claw. “If a monster came to eat you, you wouldn't even be able to give it a toothache with either your voice or your hygiene. You'd be one mouthwatering little morsel.”

All too true. But Gloha, knowing that she'd never get up the courage to broach this subject again, tried to see it through. “Couldn't you let me fly with a proper escort to pay a professional visit to the castle of the Good Magician Humfrey, there to ask my one Question and give my year's Service for his Answer? Oh, please, Auntie Hoary! I would do anything if only I could-”

“Harpies never plead!” Hoary snapped, disgusted by this weakness. “Show me that you can let out one incendiary oath, and I'll let you go.”

Gloha tried. “Darn!” she cried. “Help! Ship!”

Hoary sighed. “You're improving; at least you are taking aim at the words. But you're off by one letter in each case. That nullifies it. There's not even a stir of fire in the air. Now pay attention: this is the proper mode of harpy expression.” She took a breath. “*%#(c)/$!!”