Fire Sail

by Piers Anthony

  Even if he had a sword, he was not at all sure he could use it, and not just because he was encumbered at the moment with a frightened girl. The thought of actually hurting a living creature, let alone killing it, appalled him, now that he was at the point.

  But did the trolls really mean evil? Maybe he was being prejudiced because they were ugly.

  “Grab the girl,” the lead troll said to his minions. “You can gang-rape her while I pulverize this lout. Then I’ll take my turn at her while you cut him up for soup. After that she’ll be properly broken in for the slave market and should fetch a good price, because she’s pretty.”

  No, it did not seem to be prejudice. Still, what could he do?

  Then he got a notion. Three trolls were grabbing for the girl in Dell’s arms. He reached out to intercept their hands and arms, stroking them quickly with his hands, shaping the quality of their skin. Not for color but for texture, using his enhanced talent. In the old days he could have changed the color and feel of their hide, but now he was trying for more. He hoped it worked.

  “Hey!” a troll said, holding up his hand. “I can’t move my fingers!”

  It was working! Dell continued to stroke whatever parts of the trolls he could reach. They stiffened and fell back, confused and dismayed.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the leader demanded.

  “Our arms and hands are stiff,” a minion said. “We can’t grab with them.”

  “I’ll show you nincompoops how to grab!” the leader said. “After I bop this chump.” He swung his club viciously at Dell’s face.

  Dell ducked, bringing Tess down with him. The club whistled just over their heads. Then he snapped his hand out to catch the troll’s elbow.

  “What the bleep?” the troll exclaimed. He could no longer bend the elbow.

  Dell had made the elbow, like the arms and hands of the minions, as stiff as coagulated grease. He hadn’t harmed it, just toughened it. Now it took a lot of strength to move it slowly a little way.

  “He’s got magic!” the leader said. “Kill him now, and it will fade.”

  Dell leaped for him, leaving Tess behind. He slapped his hand on the troll’s mouth. Now that orifice was too stiff to talk.

  So Dell talked instead. “I haven’t hurt you, any of you, yet,” he said. “You know I can. I could stroke your eyes and stop you from seeing. Or your chests and stop you from breathing. My power will wear off when I am gone, yes, but if you stop breathing too long now, you’ll be dead regardless. Get the bleep out of here before I lose my temper.”

  The trolls considered. Then they backed off.

  “And let my dog go.”

  The one holding Tata set him down. They hurried into another chamber, and another, evidently knowing their way out. In a moment and a half they were gone.

  “Okay, friends,” Dell called. “Let us aboard now.”

  The boat became visible. Tata came to sniff Tess, and wagged his tail. She was okay to board. Dell helped her over the gunnel. “These are my friends.” Then, to them, as they made their way down the hatch and into the yacht: “This is Tess. We will help her escape the trap.”

  “You saved me from a lot worse than that!” the girl said. “Did you hear what those brutes wanted to do with me? I never in my life thought I’d be faced with that horror. I thought it was impossible. But I reckoned without the magic of the tesseract. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She kissed him again.

  “You’re welcome,” Dell said when his head stopped floating.

  “But there’s something you should know about me before we go any farther.”

  “You don’t need to tell us anything you don’t want to,” Dell said. “We got your message and came to help, that’s all. It was the right thing to do.”

  She considered. “Maybe it can wait. Is there anything I can do in return for your kindness?”

  “There is something,” Dell said, remembering. “A villager fixed our boat, and we promised to ask you to move the mountain that blocks their harbor. I don’t see how a slip of a girl like you can do that, but they seem to think you can.”

  Tess nodded. “I can, and will. But I was thinking of something more personal. I see that you have a very fine boat here, complete with rooms and beds. If you would like to take me to a private place for a time, I would be glad to express my gratitude more passionately.” She paused, blushing. “I am not a virgin. I just didn’t want to get raped and enslaved by those brutes. But you saved me, and I can see that you are a fine young man. I would be more than glad to be with you.”

  This was tempting indeed. But he was aware that her offer had come after she saw the wonders of the boat. That meant it couldn’t quite be trusted. “Let’s—let’s talk first,” he temporized. “Get to know each other better.”

  “I will certainly be glad to do that. But I fear that you will not want to associate with me once you know my nature.”

  “You’re a criminal?” he asked disbelievingly. “Or a spook in disguise? I have trouble believing that.”

  Tess laughed. “No, nothing like that. I really am a nice girl. Just not exactly as I appear.”

  “I—I would like to have a girlfriend. But only if we know each other well and know it is right.”

  “I think I could be that for you, and would like to be, apart from the one thing.”

  Dell looked around at the others, who had remained silent. “What do you think?”

  “Kadence might be jealous,” Ula said. “But she would understand.”

  “This mission won’t last forever,” Nia said. “It would help if you knew whom you might want to be with after you leave the boat.”

  “Leave the boat?” Tess asked. “That could be a problem.”

  Bleep! It was the boat she wanted.

  “Maybe it is time for us to learn your caution,” Nia said. “Let’s sail out of the tesseract and anchor somewhere, and you can tell us.”

  “Yes,” Tess said nervously.

  They went topside, set the sail, and Win got the wind. Soon they were back in the sky.

  “I am impressed again,” Tess said. “This is a really wonderful boat! I truly appreciate its ambient magic, too.”

  “It is magical throughout,” Dell said. “But it is not ours to keep.”

  “Of course.” Tess visibly nerved herself, then spoke again. “Here is my situation: I am a giant. A female giant. A giantess. That may be where you assigned my name: giant Tess. A lot of us answer to that name, for convenience when with strangers, just as ogre females may answer to Gress and dragons to Ness.”

  Dell realized that that explained the ambiguity about her name. She wasn’t exactly Tess, but answered to it.

  The others stared at her. “You don’t look like a giant,” Win said.

  “When I entered the tesseract, my size became irrelevant; nothing is fixed there. Then when I came aboard your magic boat, it fixed my size to match yours. That’s why I like it so much: I can interact with you on an even basis.” She glanced at Dell. “As I would so much like to do.”

  “Giants come in different sizes,” Nia said. “What size are you?”

  “I’m small for a giant. I’m about ten times normal human height, and about a thousand times the mass. My proportions are the same, just larger. I can also turn invisible, as I often do, so as not to alarm stray villagers or freak them out.”

  Dell was delving into a slow stun. “So if I wanted to—to kiss you—your head would be as tall as my whole body.”

  “Yes,” she agreed sadly. “I would have to keep my mouth closed, lest you fall in. But here on the boat there’s no such difficulty.”

  He had said kiss, but what he was thinking of was more than that. “But outside—”

  “We would have to use an accommodation spell.” She understood what he was thinking, as it seemed women usually did when
dealing with men.

  “A what?” Win asked.

  “It is a spell that makes different folk able to relate intimately to each other,” Nia said. “It is said to be largely illusion, but it works. So if Dell and Tess wanted to hug each other, they would seem to be the same size.” She was speaking carefully, because of the children; any direct reference to stork summoning would be bleeped out. “Much as they seem to be the same size here on the boat.”

  “And if a vole and a dragon wanted to be together,” Dell said, “the accommodation spell would make that feasible too. That’s what accounts for many of the crossbreed species, like winged centaurs or mermaids.”

  “Wow!” Win said. “I’d like to see that.”

  “Not at your age,” Tess said.

  “Blip.” Her effort to swear made a cute little puff of smoke. The others smiled sympathetically. No child liked the Conspiracy.

  “So there are ways to get around some of the limits,” Dell said.

  “Which could be done,” Nia said. “A relationship is possible.”

  She was supporting it? Or merely reminding him not be be too demanding that everything be exactly his way? As with the mermaid. His ideal woman might be unpretty, or unintelligible, or significantly different in some other way. He needed to give Tess a proper chance.

  Well, why not? Suppose she were the perfect girl for him, apart from her size? They would have to operate apart, and meet on the boat or in a tesseract (with protection against getting lost) or keep a supply of accommodation spells.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s keep company for a while, and see how it works out.”

  “Oh, thanks!” she exclaimed, and kissed him again. It seemed she was an affectionate person. He hardly objected.

  “Tess can have her own cabin on board,” Nia said briskly. “Now we need to move that mountain.”

  Oh yes. That neatly dodged the problem of where Dell would spend his next night. He wanted to be with Tess, but was not at all sure that was wise. It was her personality he needed to get to know better, not her body.

  “What about the tesseract?” Ula asked.

  There was another unexpectedly useful point. “We don’t want to leave it there to trap other folk,” Dell said. “We need to stop that racket.”

  “Yes!” Tess agreed fervently. “I hadn’t realized that my size would match the trolls, inside the cube. Suddenly awful things were possible. Of course I would have reverted to my real size when they took me out, but I would already have been severely despoiled.”

  “So what do we do with it?” Dell asked. “Take it with us?”

  “Or maybe leave it,” Ula said.

  “Leave it!”

  “With a small modification. Could Tata change its setting so that it trapped only trolls?”

  Nia whistled. “So that if the trolls re-formed and stayed clear, they would not get in trouble. But if they tried to return to their old ways, they’d be forever locked in.”

  “Poetic justice,” Dell said.

  “Vote?” Nia asked.

  They quickly voted to do it, Tess included.

  Dell and Tata went out to visit the pavilion and pedestal. Tata checked the cube, then fed some kind of clicking code into it. It was done. Now the cube might continue to attract big ladies called Tess, but they would be able to escape it, while the trolls would not.

  They sailed for the village of C Side. Soon they landed near it, and Dell got out. Then Tess—and suddenly she was ten times his height. He looked up in awe, and saw her nice legs under her short skirt. That wasn’t all.

  “Snap out of it,” Nia said, snapping her fingers by his ear. “Watch where you look.”

  Yes. He had not been thinking. Tess had even mentioned turning invisible so as not to freak out folk; he had thought that meant amazement at seeing a giant. Now he realized that it also meant peeks under her skirt as she walked close by.

  The villagers came out as they approached the man and the giantess. The odor of peanut butter became strong. “We’re going to move the mountain,” Dell called. “Where do you want it?”

  Several villagers pointed to a nearby pit. The mountain would fill it nicely. Fortunately it was a small mountain, really more of a hill, hardly taller than the giantess was.

  Tess squatted down beside it. Her skirt pulled up past her thighs. Several village louts keeled over. “Maybe women and children should be the spectators,” Dell said as others dragged the men clear of the zone. “She can’t keep everything covered while she’s working on the mountain.” As if he himself had not looked just as foolishly, before learning caution. This time he had looked away before the skirt slid too far. She had a right to wear what she wanted, normally being around other giants and not squatting. That included using brief clothing, showing off her attractive figure.

  That triggered a thought. Bleep! The idea of getting her in bed, his size, thighs and all, was increasingly tempting. But that was a matter for another time.

  Could she actually move it? The thing had to weigh several times what she did. Even a small mountain had considerable mass.

  The giantess leaned forward, extending her arms around the narrowing central part of the mountain. Her low-cut blouse fell open. Two more louts hit the dust. They hadn’t had the wit to get out of the way or close their eyes. Or maybe they had wanted to get that devastating glimpse. Men were like that, Dell thought with wry amusement. He ought to know.

  Then she wrapped her arms around the midsection of the blob, her fingers digging into its caked peanuts. She heaved it up, and it rose, its base flat. She had more strength than her petite (for a giantess) figure suggested, and this mountain had not been anchored to the underlying rock in the way a real mountain was. Probably the villagers could have moved it themselves, if they had had the gumption to tackle it seriously. Spades and wagons could have done it in hours or days. Except that they had found an easier way: Tess.

  But the mass of it was in her face. She couldn’t see where to go. “This way, Tess!” Dell called, walking toward the pit. He had guided Nia in the dream scene; he could do the same here.

  She followed him, trusting his guidance. He led her to the pit. “Dump it here,” he called.

  She heaved it forward. The mountain rotated grandly in the air, then landed in the pit upside down with a giant un-sucking sound. Goook!

  The villagers applauded. Then Dell and Tess walked back to the hidden boat. Tess squatted again, and he took her huge hand, then stepped into the craft. That contact made her return to his size, and she stepped in after him.

  Pleased, she hugged him and kissed him.

  Then they realized what they had not noticed before: the whole front side of her, including her face, was plastered with peanut butter. Now it was on him too, and they were stuck together. It hardly seemed to matter.

  They pried themselves apart, laughing, and went down the hatch and into the shower Nia had turned on for them. They pulled off their clothing and scrubbed each other off. And kissed again, laughing.

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed myself this much in years,” Tess said as she washed peanut butter out of her hair and his. “Thank you for making this naughtiness possible.”

  “Thank you,” he said. So she was a creature of a different scale; right now she was definitely a person. A nice one.

  Clean, they stepped out and dried off with the towels, and got into the fresh clothing Nia had provided. The new skirt was longer and the blouse higher, for whatever that meant. Maybe a hint?

  “It’s a good thing my panties were all gunked up too,” she said. “So they lost their power.”

  Only then did Dell realize that he had handled Tess all over, and hugged and kissed her naked, and never once thought of the stork. Surely that was just as well.

  Meanwhile, he suspected that he was falling in love.

  Tess join
ed them for dinner. It was clear that everyone liked her. Yes, she was a giant; but she was also a girl. The boat made it feasible.

  When evening came, Dell joined Tess in her room. “Do you still want to—?”

  “Yes!” She unbuttoned her blouse. “Turn around so my bra won’t freak you. Once I get it off, you can safely kiss the contents.”

  He laughed and turned, unbuttoning his shirt. Then he felt something. There was a note in the pocket. He brought it out and looked at it. SEA KINGDOM.

  “Oops,” he said. “I just found a note saying SEA KINGDOM. Nia wouldn’t have put it there; it just appeared. That must be a clue.”

  “A clue? To what?”

  “We have been getting cryptic clues to our next destinations. I think this means that we have a date with something in the sea. We’ll have to go there tomorrow.”

  “This is the way of your mission? You don’t know where you’re going next?”

  “That’s right. Until we finally find the new proprietors and turn the boat over to them. Then we’ll be on our own.”

  “Then if you and I are together, you’ll be a man and I’ll be a giantess.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bleep.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that. “But if we love each other—”

  “That love would be highly stressed. Dell, I don’t think we could make it without the boat. It’s not that I want it for itself; I can get around well enough on my own. I want you, and I don’t think I can really have you if we can’t share a bedroom. You need a girl you can hold in your arms and I need a man who can hold me.”

  “There’s the accommodation spell.”

  “Which would be delightful. And what about the other twenty-three hours of the day and night? Do I carry you around in my purse?”

  She was making sense. He hated that. “Bleep.”

  “I think we’ll have to break it off before it really starts. I’m so sorry. The longer we delay, the worse it will be.”

  “Yes.” He hated it, but it was true.

  “But we can still have this night, then separate in the morning with no hard feelings, just soft ones. I never meant to tease you or me. Consider it my thanks for the way you rescued me.”