Luck of the Draw

by Piers Anthony

  Then he got it. This was a pair of lies. “Paralyze,” he said. “Abysmal pun.” Rose had touched them, and been paralyzed.

  Bryce put his bag down over the balls and picked them up through the cloth so that he did not touch them directly. He had collected his first pun of the day.

  Rose recovered. “What happened?” she asked, straightening up.

  “You went after a pun, but it got you first.” He explained about the golf balls.

  “Oh, what a groaner!” she said. “I should have known better. I was just trying to—”

  “To flash me with your panties, and forgot to be on guard,” he said.

  She nodded. “You’re savvy about my motive.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’ll cut to the chase. Let’s make out.” She put a hand to her blouse as if to remove it. “I can show you how happy I can make you.”

  Actually it was tempting. But he did not trust this. “I hardly know you. But thanks for the offer.”

  “Oh, pooh.”

  They spent the day punning, and collected a number. Rose tried to flash him at every opportunity, but did not succeed. She was marvelously endowed, but not really his kind of girl. For one thing, they never had any conversation that hinted at any depth. He didn’t know whether she was shallow or merely too focused on seducing him to bother with intellect.

  The following day his guide was Clementine. She was lovely, wearing herring boxes without topses for sandals. She was also demure, not trying to flash him or make suggestive remarks. He learned in the course of the day that she had been driving ducklings to the water, caught her foot upon a splinter and fallen into the sea and drowned. Her little sister Tangelo had gotten her man after that. He liked her, but realized that she was no more than another emulation of a Mundane song. He preferred more realism.

  The third day it was Jezebel, with flowing dark hair and a dynamic manner. She stepped in to him and kissed him, and she was devilishly compelling, but she too was really no more than a song.

  It was similar with Irene, who bid him a truly alluring goodnight. He was tempted, as before, but declined.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Someone closer to my own age.”

  Next day it was Helen, from Troy, she whose face had supposedly launched a thousand ships. That was their idea of a woman closer to his age? “Enough!” he exclaimed. “I don’t want any of you!”

  “Why not?” Helen asked cannily.

  “You’re not Harmony!” Then he bit his tongue, too late. He had blurted out the truth before he realized it himself. He had been freed of his spelled love for her, but he still recognized her as a lot more woman than any of these emulations. Harmony was young, but at least she was real.

  “Oh, but we are,” she said. Helen’s classic visage faded, to be replaced by Harmony’s.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake!” he said. “It’s been you all along! Just as was the case when you were Mindy.”

  “I’m trying to be what you want me to be,” she said. “Older.”

  “No wonder they all seemed shallow. You were working from brief descriptions in songs or history. You didn’t know enough of those women to animate them persuasively.”

  “Yes. I asked Mindy for advice on attractive Mundane older women. As you say, I’m young. I don’t have the experience to emulate experience.”

  “Please, Harmony, stop trying! I’d prefer to be fending you off personally, instead of fakes.”

  “You’ve got it,” she agreed. “It didn’t work the first time, when I emulated Mindy. I tried to get you to show me the last detail of the Adult Conspiracy, but you wouldn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he agreed.

  “I just can’t get it by watching through my little gifts. People hug and kiss, but it’s somewhere else.”

  “In Mundania they have videos that show everything. But they are forbidden for anyone under eighteen.”

  “Mundania’s as bad as Xanth! But that’s only part of it. I want you to love me, however you do it. The physical details don’t matter.” She paused, reconsidering. “Well, actually they do, because I’m curious as bleep about them. But you know what I mean.”

  “I suppose it’s wasted breath to suggest that you look for a man closer to your own age.”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed. “If you were only older.”

  “We have aging spells. I could invoke one. My sister Rhythm used one. But they last only for an hour. Would that do?”

  “No.”

  “Oh Bryce, I love you and want you so bad! Please take me. You don’t have to marry me. Just take me!”

  “You’re offering to be my mistress?”

  “Yes! At least then I could have you with me, and maybe someday win your love. Please!” Now her tears were flowing, and he was sure this was not artifice. She was truly desperate.

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Harmony. I respect you too much.”

  “Your respect is killing me!”

  She had a point. He was being unfair. “Please, Harmony, can’t we just be friends?”

  “No!” There was the passion that had been missing from the others.

  He had to give her something. “Maybe when you’re older, naturally. So you have more life experience.”

  She pounced on it. “What’s the minimum age you’d accept?”

  He cast about for a figure. “Oh, maybe forty.”

  She sighed. “It’s going to be a long twenty-four years.”

  She was serious! She was going to hang on until he agreed to marry her. He doubted he could hold out that many years. She was already touching his heart.

  He tried again. “Give me a reason to associate with you that isn’t to let you try to seduce me into marriage.”

  “I’ll think about it.” She walked away.

  Surprised, he just stood there watching her. Was he in for more mischief?

  Mindy came to take her place. “I think you should give up and marry her. It will be easier for us all.”

  “I refuse to be overwhelmed by an imperious teen.”

  “You’re remarkably stubborn.” Her tone was more of admiration than censure. She was from Mundania too; she understood.

  Stubborn. That was the way she saw it, and probably the others did too. Yet he reserved his right to make his own choice. “I proffered her a compromise.”

  “She’ll come up with something,” Mindy said. “She really loves you. You can’t be cruel to her forever.”

  What kind of an emotional hole had he dug himself into? “I don’t want to be cruel at all. I just don’t think it’s right to stick her with an eighty-year-old man from Mundania. She can do so much better. She’s a smart and lovely princess.” Yet Electra’s words haunted him. This was Xanth, where things were different. Details like age could be changed at will.

  Next day Harmony was there to escort him. She was in heavy shirt and jeans, her hair tied back in businesslike fashion. But she remained infernally pretty. “I think I have it.”

  “What is it?” he asked guardedly.

  “Let’s get out in the field with the puns. I can tell you better there.”

  “Harmony, I’m not going to—”

  “I’m not asking you to!” she flared. “It just will require some discussion.”

  They rode out to the pun field. No puns were immediately evident. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Right now we can go to an area and puns are just bursting out all over,” she said.

  “Not this morning.”

  “Silly. I took us to a section where they are rare; Dawn cleaned out this area some time ago. That’s the point.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What do we do when puns are widely spaced and hidden? How can we finish the job?”

  “We’ll have to devise a way to locate them.”

  “Exactly. When the puppies grow up they’ll help sniff out puns as Rachel did. Meanwhile you can draw a pun sniffer or something.”

&
nbsp; “Maybe a compass,” he said. “In Mundania it always points north. Or a metal detector, though that would work only at close range.”

  “The compass,” she said. “And I could fix it so it points instead to the nearest pun, or concentration of puns. My magic won’t last more than a day, because such things tend to get out of adjustment, like that path to Mundania, but for that day it should work well enough. Then next day we could make another.”

  “That might work,” he agreed.

  “Let’s try it now.”

  He got out his pad and sketched a compass. He invoked it, and it slid off into his hand. There was the needle, pointing north, or whatever the Xanth equivalent was.

  “Now I’ll reorient it,” she said. She brought out her little harmonica and played a few notes. He had forgotten how prettily she played. “There.”

  The needle was pointing in a new direction. “I don’t see anything,” Bryce said.

  “It’s there.”

  They went in the direction the needle indicated. Soon they came to a path. They crossed it, but the needle spun about to point back to it.

  “It seems it’s the path itself,” Bryce said. “But I don’t see a path as a pun.”

  “Let’s follow it.”

  They followed the path, and soon came to a little sign identifying it: BRIDAL PATH. THIS WAY TO MARRY-GO-ROUND.

  “Oh, my!” Harmony said. “I like this path!”

  “You said you weren’t going to—”

  “I’m not! This is a surprise to me. I was just testing the compass.”

  “Should we put the path in the bag?”

  She hesitated. “Do we have to?”

  He relented. “Leave it. Let’s try again.”

  They stepped off the path, and this time the needle didn’t spin. It was pointing in a new direction. It led them to a pie tree with several ripe pies.

  “What’s punnish about a pie tree?” Harmony asked. “These look like pumpkin pies.”

  Bryce picked a pie and tasted it. Immediately he felt his belt tighten. His waist was expanding.

  Then he got it. “Not pumpkin—plumpkin. These are immediately fattening.”

  “Into the bag!” she said immediately, horrified.

  “So it does work,” Bryce said.

  She faced him squarely. “You may have lacked meaning in your life, here in Xanth,” she said. “As I did in mine, before I met you. But if we work together, we can zero in on the hard-to-find puns, like these two we didn’t recognize at first. We can do a job others can’t readily accomplish. Long-distance detection the dogs can’t do. For the good of Xanth. This is meaningful, isn’t it? A legitimate reason for us to associate? I promise not to flash you or anything; I just want to be with you on any basis you will tolerate.” She shook her head with fleeting bemusement. “I never thought to court a crotchety old man from Mundania, any more than you thought to take up with a teen princess. But we can do this together, as friends, and we should.”

  Astonished, Bryce realized she was right. He had been searching for meaning without realizing it, and frustrated because he hadn’t found it. Here was a good and useful job he could do to improve Xanth, exploiting his drawing talent with the magic pen she had given him. They could indeed work together legitimately.

  What about the other things he lacked here in Xanth? Now he remembered that he had no companionship of his own type in Mundania, either; the others had all died. But in time he could surely form a new circle here, maybe including men his own age like Bink and Trent. What about the loneliness? He had not felt it while he loved Harmony; now it seemed to be fading as he considered working with her. He doubted that his life would ever be dull with her nearby, regardless of the nature of their relationship. She was young but smart and motivated, and she had fathomed his need and acted forthrightly to fill it.

  He gazed at her as she stood there waiting for his answer. Her eyes were bright as diamonds, her hair twined in lustrous coils, her feet were in herring-box sandals, and her face would launch a fair number of ships. She was unconsciously echoing the women she had emulated.

  Harmony would be quite a woman, when she achieved her fully adult status. In fact she was already more than most others he had encountered here in Xanth. Or in Mundania.

  “Luck of the draw,” he said.

  Harmony looked at him, perplexed.

  “I always thought I should do more with my ability to draw,” he explained. “You made it possible, with your gift.” He held up the pen.

  “You’re welcome,” she said a bit uncertainly. “I have another confession about that.”

  “You told me how you tracked us via the gifts. I think that was a smart move.”

  “It’s that the use all of you made of them was really important in my assessment of you.”

  “You mentioned that too.”

  “Don’t forgive me before you know where I’m going!” she flared.

  So there was something else. “I apologize for presuming.”

  “Those gifts were suggested by my grandparents. They have enormous potential, but only when properly exploited. They’re like talents in that talent contest. They reveal things about their owners. Only two of you really rose to that potential. One was Piper, who played the piccolo in a way no one else could have, being one of Xanth’s top musicians. The grandfathers thought I would marry him, and I might have, but for two things: his love for Anna, and you.”

  “Me?”

  “You made superlative use of the pen. Others have tried it, but none came close to the things you evoked. Stink bomb, flying carpet, map of the gourd’s horror house, dragon repeller—that demonstrated phenomenal imagination and latent magical power. You became a virtual general-purpose Magician, just as I am a general-purpose Sorceress. My perfect match. I had to choose you, and not just because I love you.”

  “All I did was draw,” Bryce protested. “I love drawing, and I was lucky to get it right.”

  “Luck of the draw,” she repeated.

  More was required. “Now don’t misunderstand,” he said. “Or take this for more than it is. I have not changed my mind about marriage.”

  “Take what?” she asked, perplexed.

  “I’m going to kiss you.”

  “Don’t tease me!”

  “I am not trying to. You have found something I need, and shown me a way to achieve it, and I am grateful. That is all.”

  “That is all,” she agreed faintly.

  Then he embraced her and kissed her. She met him so eagerly that hearts flew out like soft bullets and smacked into the surrounding foliage. It was clear that despite his caution he was beginning to fall for her. The old-fashioned way. She was young, but more than worthy.

  Her wish probably would not take twenty-four years to accomplish. But he no longer cared. He had a future in Xanth.

  Author’s Note

  The prior Xanth novel, #35 Well-Tempered Clavicle, was written in the shadow of my daughter Penelope’s death, which occurred the day I was ready to start writing. This novel, #36, was written in the lesser shadow of the one-year anniversary of Penny’s death. We listened to the recording of the Memorial Service for her, which included our own voices sent for the occasion, as we were unable to travel to Oregon. I try not to let the vicissitudes of my private life interfere with my writing, but this has not been easy. Penny is a part of Xanth, as I modeled Princess Ivy on her as she grew up, and her horse became the Night Mare Imbrium. Now Ivy continues on her own, having retreated mostly into the background as King of Xanth. Little things keep reminding me of Penny, such as wearing a shirt she gave me, or Sunday mornings when she doesn’t call. She remains in my life.

  It is I think coincidence, but death does feature in this novel. A reader, Nicole Good, sent a batch of truly groanable puns that she had literally dreamed up, guided on a tour of Xanth by her daughter Melinda, who had died. Later when I set up to write the novel, I wanted a tour guide for those puns, so I wrote back and asked permission to use Melind
a, who became Mindy in this novel. She served well. Then Princess Harmony got her notion, and Mindy became a major character in the rest of the novel, for all that it wasn’t really her. Thus we have the anomaly of a person becoming a significant character without ever expecting it, without being requested. Mindy was simply there at the right time. I hope that if there is any Afterlife, Mindy sees and approves my theft of her identity. Wouldn’t it be nice if she encountered Penny, and they groaned together over their roles here.

  Meanwhile my own life proceeds in its petty pace from day to day (yes, a paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Macbeth). I still exercise seriously and watch my weight, because that helps keep my brain healthy. I got partial dentures, an expensive and sometimes painful process that took just about a year all told, but now I have a reasonably full set of teeth even if some of them do come out at night. I discovered that I was starting to gain weight, because now I can properly chew my food and I am getting more from the same amount. I have had to cut back on what I eat, as I mean to maintain my weight at my college level. One of the things about me that relates to both my weight and my writing is discipline.

  My writing is slower than it once was, because my wife tripped and fell and fractured her left elbow and right knee. They were hairline fractures that didn’t show at all externally, but she was incapacitated for about three months and I took over the household chores again. She’s better now, but not completely. I still do most of the meals and dishes, mainly because I can stand on my feet longer than she can, though sometimes I get the impression that she doesn’t really like eating scrambled cheese omelet on burned toast. I insist on going shopping and to doctors’ appointments with her, concerned about her state. I don’t want something to happen, and not be there to help. We are old, in our seventies, septuagenarians, and our future is no sure thing. We depend on each other. We’ve been married fifty-four years and want to try for a few more.

  I am of course well into retirement age, but I will never retire. I have not seen the spare time that supposedly comes at this age. I am a workaholic, constantly engaged in new projects, and there is always the flow of letters from my fans, which I still try to answer responsively. That is, I actually read and answer them myself; I have no paid service for such things, just my wife to print them out for me. Should that volume increase, or my health decrease, that may change. I am conscious that the note I hurriedly dash out and forget may be far more important to the person at the other end. Sometimes a routine letter of mine gets framed. Oh, I hope I didn’t say anything stupid therein!