“Get used to this?” said Colin. “I’d sooner pluck out my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at myself.”
“Yes, it’s easy for you to stand there calmly and mouth platitudes,” said a whimpering Sorbl. “You aren’t suffering as we are suffering.”
That much was true, Jon-Tom had to admit. Demonstrating an extraordinary and unprecedented selectivity, the perturbation had left him untouched, whereas his friends had been radically altered. Clothahump could now grit his teeth because for the first time in his life he had some. Sorbl was having to adjust to a body without wings. As for poor Dormas, she had to feel as if her whole skeleton had been wrenched sideways. It was a change they had been threatened with as children, and now they were experiencing it for real. Their worst nightmares had come true.
Each and every one of them had been turned into (it was almost too awful to say aloud) a human being.
There was Clothahump, holding his ground while furiously trying to recall some spell, any spell, that might restore them to their real selves. He had been transformed into a short old man with a long white beard, long hair, and a slightly smaller set of six-sided spectacles. He wore canvas pants and a tan safari jacket full of pockets. Only the eyes were the same, staring out from beneath a brow of hair instead of shell.
Next to him a strapping lady of fifty-five swayed awkwardly on her feet. She was six feet tall. Dormas hadn’t been broken by her pack load because it, too, had been changed, shrunk down to a single backpack, which hung from shoulder straps. Her hair was short and black, and her handsome, if terrified, face was lined and deeply tanned.
Then there was a short, slim teenager whose eyes darted wildly in all directions. Once he turned and ran toward a nearby tree while flapping his arms, until he realized anew that he was incapable of flight. The look in his yellow eyes was piteous to behold. Colin tried to comfort the distraught Sorbl. The koala’s attire was little changed from what he’d been wearing before the perturbation had struck. Black leather and metal studs, though altered to fit the body of a fullback. He stood five-nine and must have weighed a good two hundred and twenty pounds, Jon-Tom guessed, and all of it muscle. A perfect human analog of the little koala. He also had the face of a movie villain and eyes that glittered. It would have been an entirely intimidating personage if not for the retention, albeit furless, Of grossly oversize ears.
And then there was Mudge. A man in his mid-thirties, thin and wiry. He wore his green cap and carried sword and longbow, both lengthened to fit his human form. Very impressive in his transformation, except for the fear in his face and the disgust in his voice.
“This is bloody awful, just bloody awful.” He held out both arms and had to fight to keep from shaking uncontrollably. “Look at this sickening, naked flesh. Not a ’int o’ fur anywheres.” He twisted around to look behind him. “A’ no proper tail, either. Nothin’. A void where an expression ought to be.” He gazed pleadingly at Clothahump. “Tell us this ain’t goi’ to last much longer, sir.”
“You are no more anxious for a return to normalcy than I, water rat. If you feel naked and unprotected, consider for a moment the emotions I am experiencing.”
“It’s indecent,” Colin insisted. “Damn indecent. Enough to make a strong koala cry.”
“We’ve got to do something,” Dormas insisted. Her voice was clear, the phrasing elegant and little changed from her normal tone. “If I have to stay like this much longer, I’ll go crackers. I keep wanting to sit down on all fours as is right and proper, and this body doesn’t work like that. Look at these useless little things.” She displayed first her right arm, then the left. “Put the slightest upper body pressure on them and they’ll break, I know they will. The rest of you can go on about losing a little fur, but what about me? I can’t even walk properly.”
“What about me, what about these?” The teenager shook his arms at her. “Bats are naked, too, but at least they can fly. I’m grounded.” He started to sob.
“Take it easy,” Jon-Tom urged them. “We’ll be changing back soon.”
“Aye, a’ wot if we don’t?” Jon-Tom had to admit it was unsettling to find himself standing eye to eye with a swarthy older man and hear Mudge’s familiar voice issuing from his throat. It was nothing but a man standing before him. There wasn’t a hint of whisker or fur about the man’s face, and yet he knew it was Mudge. In addition to that unmistakable voice, there were the eyes, blue and challenging. It was fascinating to watch him move. There were all of Mudge’s little gestures and affectations, being played back at three-quarter speed.
“We can’t stay like this much longer, mate. An intelligent mind can take only so much.”
“I am trying,” Clothahump said earnestly. “I have been trying for the past several minutes, but it is difficult to design the parameters of a spell with all of you moaning and blabbering at once.”
“It doesn’t bother me.” Jon-Tom plucked idly, thoughtfully, at his duar.
Mudge hastened to put a restraining hand on his friend’s wrist. “Be careful, lad. Don’t screw this one up. Make this perturbation’s effects permanent and you’ll ’ave at least one death on your ’ands, because I’ll surely kill meself if I’m forced to occupy this obscene guise forever.”
“Don’t worry, Mudge. Hey, I’m hot. Remember how I handled the fire?”
“Aye, and almost got yourself cooked in the bargain. Mess this spellsong up and I’ll barbecue you meself.” He removed his hand. “Bugger me though if I ain’t curious to see wot sort o’ song you can come up with to counter a catastrophe like this.”
“Go ahead, my boy,” Clothahump urged him. “You might as well make the attempt. I am as uncomfortable with the present circumstances as anyone else. With my thoughts as unsettled as they are, it is difficult to think clearly.”
“I’ll take care with the lyrics,” he assured the wizard. So he would—if he could think of some. Mudge had a point. Their present situation was not one your average performer would think about when sitting down to compose a song.
Something he’d picked up while poking around the Department of Ethnic Music might work, but he’d taken that course years ago and didn’t exactly practice African chants or Indonesian gamelan tunes daily. That wasn’t the kind of music likely to put him on Billboard’s Top 100. His rock repertoire was considerably more extensive and up-to-date, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall anything that related even vaguely to changing humans into animals. Not that the lyrics had to be that precise. As he’d learned, it was the feel of the song, the driving emotion behind it that mattered most of all when one was spellsinging.
There was one song that might accomplish what the perambulator had already done. Suppose he sung the lyrics backward? Crazy—but no crazier than their present predicament. He knew the song well enough, cleared his throat, and began to play.
It didn’t sound right, but neither was his friends’ situation. Perhaps that was appropriate. Certainly something was, for as he passed the halfway point, there was a shudder in the air, that familiar queasiness in his belly, and a sudden haziness before his eyes, like waking up slowly on a Sunday morning. He kept singing, wanting to finish the song, and when he concluded with the opening stanza and emerged from that wonderful performer’s trance, he saw with relief that it had worked exactly as he’d hoped. The perturbation had been reversed and everything had snapped back to normal. His friends were his friends once more.
“Me! I’m me again!” Mudge yelped as he jumped two feet into the air. He ran his fingers through his thick brown fur. “I’ll never knock bei’ meself ever again.” He was prancing around like the kid who’d just discovered he’d won the special dessert at the school picnic.
Dormas had been restored to her powerful, four-legged form.. “Disgusting experience. What did you sing, young one?”
“Rick Springfield song—‘We All Need the Human Touch’ —only I sang it backward. Worked as well as I could’ve hoped.” He beamed at his restored companions.
Clothahump had his shell back. Sorbl was already in the air, driving through dives and barrel rolls. Colin flexed his short, muscular arms, wiggled his oversize ears, and rubbed his damp black nose.
“Much better, Spellsinger.” He frowned at Jon-Tom. “Uh-oh. My friends, we’ve got ourselves another problem. I guess we ought to have expected it.”
“Damn,” said Mudge, staring in the same direction as the koala, “do you think we’ll ever be free o’ this thing’s insidious effects, Your Wizardness?”
Clothahump, too, was gazing with interest at the center of attention. “Not until we find it and free it from its prison.”
Jon-Tom tried to turn and look in the same direction as his friends, until it occurred to him that they were not staring past him but at him. At the same time he became aware that something was still not quite right He swallowed. His spellsong had done everything he’d asked of it—and more.
Mudge studied him critically, lips pursed, hands on furry hips. “Well, Your Lordship, wot are we goi’ to do about this?”
Standing there before them and looking very forlorn indeed was a tall, very slim howler monkey. It wore Jon-Tom’s indigo shirt and lizardskin cape and boots, and it held tightly to the duar. Looking down at himself, Jon-Tom took note of his long arms and curving, prehensile tail. He flexed his mouth, feeling the thick curving lips and the sharp canines inside.
“That were some spellsong, mate,” the otter told him sympathetically.
“Personally I think he looks better this way,” said Colin. He stepped forward and drew his sword.
Jon-Tom retreated a step. “Hey, I can’t look that bad, can I?”
“You deserve to see yourself as your friends see you.” The koala held the highly polished blade upright.
Jon-Tom gazed into the narrow mirror thus presented for his use. His jaw dropped when he got a glimpse of himself. It dropped quite a ways, in fact, much farther than any human jaw could have fallen.
“Oh, my God. What have I done?”
“Right by us,” Mudge said, “but maybe not so good by yourself.”
Jon-Tom continued to stare at the reflection in the flat of Colin’s sword. He’d gone and done it for sure this time. Until now the only one who’d ever been able to make a monkey out of him had been an attractive senior in his morning class on torts. She’d stood him up twice on successive weekends. Now he’d managed to better her efforts, physically as well as mentally.
“I’ve got to try to sing myself back.”
“Wait a minim, mate. You can’t use that same song again or you’re liable to put the rest of us right back to where we were before.”
“But that’s the only appropriate song I know.”
“Then you will have to try something else, my boy,” Clothahump told him. “My powers are useless in this matter. I cannot help you. Only you can help you. But you must figure out a way to help yourself without harming us. That is only right.”
“I know, but I’ve used so many songs. I’m tired, and I’m sick of these damn changes. I don’t know what else to sing.”
“You’ll find somethin’, mate.” Mudge tried to encourage his friend. “You always do. Just try singin’, maybe, and you’ll likely ’it on the right tune.”
“I don’t know. It seems awfully haphazard.”
But he didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want to change his friends back into their unbearable human shapes any more than he wanted to remain a skinny simian with his knuckles dragging on the ground. There seemed no way out. Maybe Mudge was right. Maybe he should just sing whatever came to mind, whatever pleased him the most. He never felt more whole, more complete, than when he was singing. Maybe that was all it would take.
It was so damned unfair, though. Really, he was nothing but an ordinary and not too bright law student and would-be rock musician misplaced in time and space, and here these people kept expecting him to perform miracles. Which he’d done, time and time again, to help out this one or the other.
Now, when he was the one in need of assistance, what did they suggest? That he help himself. They couldn’t do a damn thing for him. All right, then, he could damn well help himself, and to blazes with this whole unsettled, unnatural world!
He swung the duar around across his chest, clutching it to him with those impossibly long arms. His attenuated fingers easily spanned both sets of strings as he began to sing. So involved was he in his own pique, so mesmerized by his honest fury that he forgot just what he’d turned into.
There is nothing in the animal kingdom that has the proportionate lung power of a howler monkey. It has a voice that carries for miles, over mountains and across dense forest. Backed by the duar and combined with the anger Jon-Tom was feeling, the resultant explosion of sound was magnified and sharpened by the magic of his spellsinging.
So what emerged from his throat was not a passionate plea for restoration so much as it was a primal concussion, a sound so raw and powerful that Mudge and Clothahump, who happened to be standing in the line of lyrical fire, were blown off their feet. The wizard retreated into his shell. Dormas was knocked to her knees. Sorbl instinctively took to the air, only to find himself fighting for balance in the grasp of the small hurricane Jon-Tom was producing. It blew him up over the trees and out of sight down the far side of the hill.
None of this made any impression on Jon-Tom. As far as he was concerned, he was singing normally, generating the same volume as usual, because that was how his howler voice sounded to his howler ears. And as always, when concentrating on his spellsinging with particular intensity, he sang with his eyes closed. Mudge tried to let him know what was going on by shouting at him, but the otter couldn’t make himself heard over the storm.
Dormas turned her back on the raging music while Colin and Mudge dug their claws into the ground and hung on for dear life. Sorbl sensibly stayed out of sight behind the hill while Clothahump remained bottle-up like a barrel. At least two landslides roared down the slope ahead of them, and one especially heartfelt refrain flattened a stand of trees for four hundred yards in a straight line in front of Jon-Tom’s lips.
Finally there was nothing more to sing, no more musical pleading to do. Jon-Tom’s throat was sore from the effort he’d put into his performance. Wiping dirt and leaves from their faces and clothes, Colin and Mudge slowly got to their feet. Sorbl peeped hesitantly through the trees while Clothahump stuck his head out of his shell.
Jon-Tom was himself again, and so were they. He looked a bit bewildered as he peered past his friends. “When did the wind come up?”
“When you opened your mouth, lad.” Mudge clapped him on the shoulder, having to stand on tiptoes to do so. “The particular kind o’ ape you were for a while there ’ad a voice that would’ve put a small volcano to shame. I should o’ thought o’ wot that might do when matched with your spellsingi’ ability. When I did, it were too late. All the rest o’ us could do was ’ang on a’ ’ope you wouldn’t sing us ’alfway back to Ospenspri. I think ’tis a mite safer ’avi’ you just as you are, defurred a’ ’uman ’an all.”
Clothahump was trying to shake the dust out of his shell. “There can be such a thing as too much useful magic.” He gazed past his companions, toward the pass that was their immediate destination. “One thing more we can be certain of. There can no longer be any doubt that our quarry is aware we are coming. All of the north woods must have heard that noise.” The dust from the landslides was still settling on the flanks of the pass up ahead.
Jon-Tom was enjoying being himself once again. He looked down at his tanned bare arms and naked fingers, at the short, unfunctional nails. Turning them over, he inspected the pale, furless palms that had been callused by the time he’d spent in this world. Yes, he was glad to be human again.
And yet he couldn’t help but wonder at the musical worlds he might have conquered had he been able to change back while still retaining that incredible simian voice. He could have outsung an amplified choir. Then again, a voice that sti
mulated landslides instead of an audience might not be such a good idea. With such a voice, the old show business adage about bringing the house down might acquire a new and lethal meaning.
XI
COLIN HAD TO FORCE himself to slow down. Excitement kept pushing him out ahead of the others. It was just that after more than a year of wandering, he was now close to his goal.
The character of the forest was changing, for which he was grateful. He was sick of evergreens and longed for the sweet, deciduous woods of home. The trees looming up just ahead were almost familiar. Instead of being thick and deeply scarred, their bark was thin and pale gray in color. Long strips of it peeled off the trunk and collected around the base of the tree. They had leaves, too, instead of the ubiquitous needles. Long, thin leaves shaded a pale green. The grove ahead even smelled different.
Then his eyes grew very wide. It couldn’t be. It was impossible for such trees to live this far north. Yet there they stood, straight and beckoning. Their delicious, distinctive aroma could not be faked.
Aware that he’d moved out in front again, he shrugged off his knapsack and let it tumble indifferently to the ground. His companions would catch up to him soon enough, he knew. He added his saber and scabbard to the pile. Then he rushed forward as fast as his bandy legs would carry him.
Soon he was standing next to the nearest of the trees, caressing the trunk, the long strips of peeled bark splintering beneath his feet. Using his claws, he shimmied rapidly up the trunk, then walked out onto the lowest branch capable of supporting his weight. His hand was shaking as he pulled free a handful of the distinctive, narrow leaves and shoved them raw into his mouth.
As he chewed, a subtle sensation of heavenly peace and well-being began to spread through his body. His eyes shut halfway as he devoured the superlative mouthful, but he could still see the ranks of trees climbing the southern hillside, ranging far up toward the peaks themselves.
The Paths of the Perambulator: A Spellsinger Adventure (Book Five) Page 19
