Question Quest (28 page)

Dor used his talent to make the water of the moat talk in his voice, leading the triton astray while he swam under the surface. By the time the triton caught on, Dor was safely inside. That had been an elementary challenge, and an elementary response.

The next challenge was a needle cactus, ready to shoot its needles into anyone who passed by. But Dor pretended he was a fireman, who would burn anything that touched him, and cowed the cactus into letting him pass unneedled. That demonstrated the lad's cleverness.

The third challenge was one of courage. The Gorgon stood where he had to pass. Dor was terrified, but barged ahead blindly, literally: he kept his eyes closed, so that he could not meet her gaze and be stoned. And that was his victory: he had gone forward instead of back. Courage, as I understand it, relates not to fear but to how a person handles the fear he has, and Dor handled it as well as could be expected for a boy his age.

So I helped Dor make a deal with the Brain Coral, who was no longer our enemy. The Coral used Dor's body during Dor's absence, and Dor went back to occupy the body of a grown barbarian hero, or so it seemed. This is an aspect that few understand: Dor was visiting the image in the Tapestry, rather than the original setting, so the setting was much smaller than it seemed. He was not man-sized, and neither were the other folk; he was tiny. But this had no affect on his activity, which was independent of size, with one exception.

Dor had quite an adventure; the Gorgon and I kept track of it all. He encountered what he took to be a giant spider, Jumper, who in our realm is a tiny arachnid, and they were great companions. That was the exception: Dor's interaction with the spider on an even basis. Jumper had gotten snagged by the adaptation spell and been brought into the adventure life-size. To Jumper it had seemed as if he had entered a realm where human folk were his size.

Dor encountered Millie the Maid in her seventeen-year-old youth, and of course was somewhat smitten by her. Her talent, remember, is sex appeal, and even at the age of twelve he felt its potency. He helped King Roogna save his castle from encroachment by the goblins and harpies, who were at war with each other. He met Evil Magician Murphy and Neo-Sorceress Vadne, who in a fit of jealousy rendered Millie into a book. That was why Millie became a ghost; when the book was found and restored in contemporary times, Millie became a maid again. In the end Dor learned something about manhood, and brought back the elixir of restoration, and used it to restore Jonathan the Zombie, who turned out to be the Zombie Master who had first occupied this very castle.

Thus Dor had an effect on my life too, for Jonathan and Millie married and moved in with us. There was nothing to do but share the castle, as the Zombie Master did have a prior claim on it. Later he built a new Castle Zombie and moved there with his family, so we were no longer so crowded.

You may wonder how all this came to pass, when Dor had entered only the Magic Tapestry of History, rather than the real period of Xanth's history. The answer is that there are intricate connections between the two, and the magic worked to make what Dor did have real effect. He might not have been there physically in the way he thought, but what he did was real. A fuller understanding is impossible for anyone not well versed in esoteric magic.

Millie's talent was sex appeal, remember, and she was certainly the sexiest creature I encountered. Naturally it took almost no time for her and Jonathan to summon the stork, and the effort was so effective that the stork brought two babies. Those were Hiatus and Lacuna, with the talents of growing eyes, ears, and noses on things, and of changing print. They were cute tykes, but capable of enormous mischief. In fact they performed remarkably when the Gorgon and I got married four years later, in 1059. Prince Dor was then sixteen and serving as temporary king while King Trent was visiting Mundania, so it fell on him to perform the ceremony of marriage for us. The Zombie Master and Millie handled the details. For all that, it was accomplished, and thereafter the Gorgon and I settled down to married life. She was my fifth wife, though at that time I suspected she was the fourth, because of the period blanked from my memory by the Lethe elixir.

In 1064 the stork brought our son Hugo, named after the combination of the first syllables of our names. We waited until we determined Hugo's talent before announcing his arrival, and that took a while, and then it was an imperfect talent, so word was slow to get around. Hugo could conjure fruit—but because his magic was flawed, the fruit was often of poor quality, or even rotting. That was an embarrassment. Nevertheless, the Gorgon lavished her love on him, and he had a gentle character. I made it a point to pay some attention to him, because of what had happened to my son, Crombie, and tried to involve him in my activities when possible. Later the Princess Sorceress Ivy was to associate with him, and in her presence he became all that any family could wish for. Unfortunately, he relapsed to normal in her absence.

Meanwhile, things were proceeding elsewhere. Crombie and Jewel the Nymph's daughter, Tandy, grew up to the age of nineteen, suffered the attentions of the Demon Fiant, and managed to flee on a nightmare. She came to this castle in the year 1062, asking how she could be free of the demon, and served as a house maid for a year awaiting my Answer. I did not mention the fact that she was my granddaughter to her; that was not relevant to the issue. Presumably Crombie would inform her when he deemed it appropriate. But I must admit that I rather liked her spunk. She was a pretty girl, with brown hair and blue-green eyes, and her personality was pleasant. I wanted to do right by her, so that she would not think ill of me, at such time as she learned. I must admit it: I was proud of her.

Now some Answers are more complicated than others. Those involving demons can be troublesome, because demons are more or less immortal and are difficult to bar from any place. My castle was specifically spelled to exclude them, but when Tandy departed it she would be subject to the attentions of her demon lover again. I did not have any spell which would adapt to a particular person to discourage demons. What could I tell her?

Then the following year, just as Tandy's term of service finished, Crunch Ogre's son, Smash, arrived with a Question he had forgotten. Ogres are not the brightest creatures. Fortunately I knew what was bothering him: he was dissatisfied with his life.

You see, Smash was not an ordinary ogre. His mother was a curse fiend, which is a euphemism for human stock. So he was half human. Regular ogres, remember, were justly proud of three things: their outrageous strength, their grotesque ugliness, and their horrendous stupidity. Deep down inside, where it was so well hidden that even Smash was not aware of it, he had a certain human weakness, human handsomeness, and human intelligence. He would have been so embarrassed to learn of these qualities that his blush would have fried all the fleas on his hairy body. But these subterranean qualities nevertheless were having their muted effect, polluting his pristine ogre nature and making him vaguely dissatisfied. He wanted to know how to restore his satisfaction as an ogre, and I had no good Answer, because I knew that this half ogre could never be satisfied unless he recognized his true heritage and came to terms with it.

Smash had grown up near Castle Roogna, and was a friend of Prince Dor and Princess Irene. (Dor was considered a prince because he had Magician-caliber magic which qualified him to be king in due course; Irene was a princess because she was the daughter of the King and Queen. Definitions are somewhat loose in Xanth.) Thus he had picked up certain human sensibilities which further compromised his ogrehood. No ordinary ogre would have thought to come to me for an Answer.

So there I was, stuck for two Answers simultaneously. How could I free Tandy of the attentions of a demon, and how could I make Smash satisfied to be what he was?

And the solution came to me with such a flash that the edges of my assorted tomes turned brown and the magic mirror winced. I had to blink for several moments before my sight was fully restored. These two problems canceled each other out! If Tandy kept company with an ogre, even a demon would think two and a half times before molesting her, and if Smash got to know a human/nymph girl well, he would discover the rewards of being partly human. She would be protected and he would be satisfied.

So I gave them both my Answer, which of course neither understood: they were to travel together. In Smash's case it was both Answer and service; he was to protect Tandy.

Smash was too stupid to formulate his protest well, but it was obvious that keeping company with a human girl was somewhere near the top of his limited list of things not to do. Tandy was more specific: “If he gobbles me up, I'll never speak to you again!” she told the Gorgon.

They had what I found to be an instructive adventure, because Smash did something so stupid only an ogre could have managed it: he looked into the peephole of a hypnogourd. He got locked into the realm of the bad dreams, but remained too stupid to be afraid, and did significant damage to the dream settings. He terrorized the walking skeletons, who were not accustomed to having their tables turned in this manner. One of them, by the name of Marrow Bones, got lost at this time. Finally the Night Stallion himself had a showdown with him, and Smash lost half his soul. He also encountered a number of females of other species, and in his fumbling way managed to help them find husbands. Notable among these were Blythe Brassie, of the realm of the gourd, and Chem Centaur, Chester and Cherie's filly. Maybe that was later; no matter.

But in the end Smash did protect Tandy, and she did impress on him certain advantages of being a man. They married, and when Tandy was twenty-one the stork brought them their son Esk, my great grandson. They called him an ogre, but technically he was only a quarter ogre, and looked human except when he got really angry. He was to grow up to marry Blythe Brassie's daughter, Bria, who like most of her kind was as hard as brass but could be surprisingly soft when she wanted to be. I was sorry I never got to meet Esk in person, because there were aspects of him that might have favored me. But I was otherwise occupied at the time when a meeting would have been convenient.

However, the female who had more direct impact on my life was NightMare Imbrium. She was an ancient creature; a sea of the moon had been named after her. But she looked just like a small black horse. In the confusion surrounding Smash Ogre's dealing with the realm of the gourd, she got half of Chem Centaur's soul and did not turn it in. As a result she was corrupted by it, and became too softhearted to remain effective in delivering bad dreams. Finally she was allowed to go out into the regular world of Xanth to do two things: to bear a message to King Trent, “Beware the Horseman,” and to see the rainbow.

But things seldom go right when minor characters of this drama become major ones. The Horseman was a creature who could assume the aspects of both man and horse, not in the manner of a centaur, but as one or the other separately. His talent was the making of a line of sight that could not be broken between a person's eye and the peephole of a gourd. He used it to connect King Trent to the gourd, making him unable to function. This occurred just as the NextWave came, for the Shield no longer protected Xanth; the Horseman was working with the NextWavers. It was a bad time for Xanth.

When Dor assumed the crown of Xanth, the Horseman did the same to him. Then the Zombie Master assumed the role, and he too was taken. Then it was my turn. I had to do the thing I detested and be king again. All because Mare Imbri had not been able to deliver the warning message in time to avert disaster. I was properly disgusted.

It was Grundy Golem who rode the nightmare to bring me my bad dream. I was not exempt from this one, because it was real. My castle defenses were useless against Mare Imbri, of course; she galloped right through the walls and stepped out of my bookshelf.

I looked up from my tome. “So it has come at last to this,” I grumped. "For a century I have avoided the onerous aspect of politics, and now you folk have bungled me into a corner.” Technically it was only ninety-six years since I had quit the throne of Xanth, but I had not meddled in politics for the last decade of my kingship, leaving that to the Maiden Taiwan.

“Yes, sir,” Grundy said with seeming humility. “You have to bite the bullet and be king.”

“Xanth has no bullets. That's a Mundane anachronism.” But that wasn't quite accurate, because there before me on the shelf was a row of magic bullets. “I'm not the last Magician of Xanth, you know.”

But they would have none of it. They did not realize that Bink was a Magician, and Arnolde Centaur wasn't human, and Iris and Irene were female. So I was stuck with it. The worst of it was that I knew I would fail, because I was destined to do something calamitously stupid. That's what really bothered me: making that mistake.

For it was written in the Book of Answers: IT IS NOT FOR THE GOOD MAGICIAN TO BREAK THE CHAIN.  The chain of lost kings, obviously. I had prepared by removing the spell from the Gorgon's face; now she was heavily veiled, so that her aspect would not stone any creature who gazed upon it. But if she encountered the enemy, she would whip that veil aside.

Well she knew the danger. “Oh, my lord,” she said with unaccustomed meekness. “Must you go into this thing? Can't you rule from here?” She had packed my lunch and a change of socks, knowing my answer. I had already told her to fetch her sister the Siren for this encounter, and I had restored the Siren's broken dulcimer so that she could summon Mundanes to their doom. But I knew that I would not be the king for whom they served; it would be one of my successors.

I told Grundy to watch my castle while I was gone. The Gorgon would use my magic carpet to fetch her sister and reunite her with her dulcimer. Meanwhile, I mounted Mare Imbri, who was solid by daylight now, and we headed for Castle Roogna. How I hated all this! I was too old for such adventure, but it had been thrust upon me.

Mare Imbri, being female, was naturally curious about what was none of her business. She formed a dreamlet which showed her as a black-gowned and rather attractive human woman, her hair in a long ponytail. “Why didn't you let the Gorgon be with you?” this dream woman asked me. “She really seems to care for you.”