Vale of the Vole

by Piers Anthony

  “I see your point. Yet in that case—”

  “We knock skulls.”

  “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “Hurt?”

  She realized that pain would be a foreign concept to creatures who had no soft flesh. “I think I understand that it does not. But suppose a skeleton embarrassed a brassie? Would they kiss or knock heads?”

  “How could a skeleton embarrass a brassie?” he asked.

  That stumped her, so she moved on to another subject. “You said there were small skeletons. How do skeletons reproduce?”

  “Very simple. He strikes her so hard she flies apart. That is known as knocking her up. Then he selects some of the smaller bones and assembles them into a baby skeleton.”

  “But doesn’t she need those bones for herself?”

  “Well, how does a living creature reproduce?”

  “He inserts his seed in her, and she grows a foal from her flesh.”

  “Doesn’t she need that flesh for herself?”

  Chex considered. She concluded that Marrow had made his point.

  In due course they reached Xap’s stamping ground. The hippogryph was there, snoozing. He had the body of a centaur and the forepart of a griffin, with great golden wings and a golden bird-of-prey head. He was evidently past his prime, but still a powerful figure of a winged monster.

  “Hello, sire,” Chex called.

  Xap snapped his head out from under his wing and squawked.

  “He doesn’t talk much,” Chex explained to Marrow. “But I understand him well enough.” Then, to the hippogryph: “Sire, this is Marrow Bones from the gourd. He would like to return if he can find a normal person oriented on his region.”

  Xap squawked again. Chex turned to Marrow, who remained on her back, swathed in his herringbone. “Sorry; my sire says the last time he looked in a gourd, all he saw was a lake of purple manure. I don’t think you’d care to go there.” The skeleton nodded agreement; manure made bones smell bad.

  “Sire,” she continued, “I am looking for help for a friend. I would like to ask the winged monsters for that help. Do you suppose I could meet with them?”

  Xap squawked. “Who? Cheiron?” she asked. “No, I don’t know him or of him, but I doubt that I need to. Sire, I wish you’d stop matchmaking! I’ve told you before that no ordinary centaur wants to mate with a winged one; most won’t even speak to me. My centaur granddam won’t, and she’s typical. I feel more comfortable with the winged monsters. At least they don’t treat me like a freak. That’s why I’m hoping they might help, when the centaurs refused.”

  Xap squawked again. “But I can’t go up there!” Chex protested. “It’s inaccessible to landbound creatures!”

  But it turned out that the winged monsters had a firm policy: they would not deal with any creature who would not meet them on their turf. Xap could help by notifying them of her coming appearance, but she would have to get herself to the turf.

  Chex nerved herself. She dreaded the effort, but knew it was the only way. She knew the route, but doubted she could travel it. About the best she could do was to die trying.

  She explained this to Marrow as she started for the mountain trail. “But isn’t dying awkward for fleshly creatures?” he inquired.

  “Very.”

  “Does it require courage for a fleshly creature to risk it, then?”

  “I suppose so,” she agreed. “Fortunately, centaurs are noted for their courage.” But her tongue was drying up in her mouth. How she wished she had been able to find the Good Magician and had learned how to fly!

  At the foot of the mountain she paused to defecate and urinate; there was no sense carrying any inessentials up! Marrow found this process quite interesting; his kind had no experience with it. “Life seems like such an inconvenient business,” he remarked.

  The trail proceeded steeply. Soon it came to a rushing torrent of water: the mountain’s own process of urination. “Hold on,” she warned Marrow. “There is no bridge; I’ll have to ford this.”

  Marrow hung on, and she waded into the stream. The water was frigid; in a moment her legs were getting numb. Then the current intensified, doing its best to dislodge her footing, but she maintained it.

  Then, in the center, the channel abruptly deepened. She was unable to find proper footing, and the rush of water was too fierce to permit her to swim.

  Frustrated, shivering, she backed out. “I can’t pass!” she said, uncertain whether the droplets on her face were from river spray or her eyes.

  “Allow me to inspect the situation,” Marrow said. He climbed off her back, doffed his clothing, and walked along the bank, swinging his skull from side to side. “Yes, as I thought, there is a cave.”

  “A cave? Here?” she asked. “How do you know?”

  “Skeletons have a sense about things underground,” he explained. “There is water in this cave, not as cold as the river, with very little current, and it is large enough for your body. I can guide you through it, if you wish.”

  “Yes!” she exclaimed, gratified. Then, realizing that there was a detail he might have overlooked: “But I have to breathe, you know. Is there any air?”

  Marrow angled his skull, orienting on the hidden cave. “Some. In bubbles. Several paces apart. I can guide you.”

  Chex decided to take the plunge. “Then guide me! Just remember, I need to breathe every minute or so; if I don’t, I’ll drown.”

  “What is drown?”

  “Dying because of insufficient air.”

  “Oh, yes; you don’t find that comfortable. I will try to remember that: air every minute.”

  “Exactly where is this cave?” she inquired, not completely at ease about this, but seeing no better alternative.

  “Just a few paces upstream. It is quite convoluted.” Another problem occurred to her. “That means you will have to direct me constantly—but if it is underwater, you won’t be able to speak.”

  “Oh, I can speak; you merely may have difficulty hearing.”

  “I appreciate the distinction. Let me explain to you how to direct me without words.” She proceeded to drill him as she had Esk, so that he could guide her accurately with his knee bones and feet bones. Now the interference of his speech (or her hearing) would not put her at risk of drowning. Perhaps Marrow did not properly appreciate her concern about this detail, but she was greatly relieved anyway.

  Whoa, his leg bones said.

  Chex halted. “Here? But I don’t see it.”

  Turn, the left knee said. Marrow was already good at this!

  She turned to the stream. Caution, his knees said.

  He was getting very good! She hadn’t known that that directive existed! She stepped into the river, experiencing the deadly chill of it.

  The bed fell sharply away; it was surprisingly deep here. Guided by his leg bones, she made her way around and down, discovering a big hole below the water’s surface, slanting back under the bank and curving to be parallel to the river. Here was the cave!

  She had to duck her head to get completely into it, but it was big enough to accommodate her. Before she did that, she turned one last time to face the skeleton. “Remember, you must direct me to air within a minute. How good is your time sense?”

  “It is excellent,” he assured her. “We must have precise timing when we dance, just as we need thorough coordination when we gamble.”

  “You gamble? How do you do that?”

  “We roll the bones, of course. It’s a great way to pass the time between gigs.”

  “Gigs?”

  “Assignments. When an order for a bad dream comes in, and we have to perform. They never give us enough advance notice, so it can be a real scramble. So our existence consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by brief flurries of terror. It’s just like war.”

  “Terror? What are you afraid of?”

  “Not us; the recipients of the bad dreams.”

  “Well, just don’t gamble with your timing! I’m about to unde
rgo a brief period of terror myself, and I don’t need any help in that!”

  “The first air bubble is just fifty-two seconds distant,” he said.

  Chex realized that she would just have to trust that. She inhaled deeply, causing a local fish to goggle at her chest, and held her breath, and ducked under the surface and into the cave.

  Now she remembered her claustrophobia. She was heading into a confined region!

  But it was filled with water, she told herself. That was different. The cave would not collapse, because it wasn’t under pressure; the water sustained it. She had to believe that!

  She tended to float, so that walking was difficult; she had to reach up with her hands and more or less pull herself along the roof of the cave. Marrow’s firm knee pressure guided her, so that she encountered no dead ends or tight squeezes. He was correct about its temperature not being as cold as the river, though it was still uncomfortable. Her wings also helped; their feathers were insulative and protected that part of her torso. But she worried: had he assumed that she would be walking at her land-bound pace when he judged the time to the air bubble? If so, it would take her several times as long, and that would be a disaster! Should she turn back while there was still time?

  She decided to gamble. After all, if the air turned out to be too far away, she would have no way to cross the river. Besides, if she turned back now, her claustrophobia would think it had the victory and would never let her try it again. So it was this or nothing. The bubble had to be within range!

  Precisely fifty-two seconds after her start, her head poked into a bubble of air. She took an eager breath, her emotional relief greater even than her bodily relief. Marrow had been right about his excellent sense of timing!

  The air was quickly turning bad; this was not a big bubble. She held her breath again and moved on, this time remembering to expel the spent air slowly from her mouth; that would save time when she hit the next bubble, and also give her a gradually increasing density so that her hooves would have slightly more traction.

  The chill of the water was now numbing her eyeballs, causing blurring vision. It was so dark here that she really wasn’t seeing anything, so she got smart and closed her eyes, protecting them. Now she was completely dependent on the skeleton’s guidance. This, oddly, decreased her fear of enclosure; it was as if she were no longer herself, but a mere vehicle answering to directives.

  In forty-one seconds she came to another bubble of air. This one was larger, so that she was able to breathe more thoroughly before moving on.

  Now Marrow guided her in a sharp turn to the right. The cave descended, then hooked up just in time to give her another bubble. She realized that they were not necessarily following the most direct route, but rather the one that guaranteed an air bubble within every minute. The skeleton was doing an excellent job!

  Just about the time she feared she would lose control of her limbs because of the deepening cold, the cave angled up, and her head broke the surface of the river near the other bank. They had made it across!

  Chex stumbled out and stood shivering. Her body was in an awful state, but there was a warm core of gratitude to Marrow for getting her through. She had just navigated an otherwise impassible barrier! She had mastered not only the challenge of the river, but of the cold and her own claustrophobia. That was in its fashion a triple victory.

  “You know,” she gasped as her neck thawed, “if we find someone up on the mountain who orients on the haunted garden, we may have to wait to return you to the gourd, so that you can guide me back through this cave.”

  Marrow shrugged. “Why not? It is a very pleasant cave.”

  A pleasant cave! But of course the skeleton was immune to cold and accustomed to operating in darkness.

  They resumed their trek up the mountain. Very little time had passed; it had merely seemed like an eon to her, as she had progressed bubble by bubble through the cave. Already she was warming with the exertion. Maybe she really could make it to the top!

  Time: just how much did she have? It had taken one day’s travel to reach her sire, and another to reach the base of the mountain. If she made it to the top in one day, that would leave her one day there to convince the winged monsters to help. Then the three-day trek back to the rendezvous with Esk and Volney. She was on schedule, so far.

  The thought of Esk reminded her of the manner he had missed their prior rendezvous. That had been an ugly occasion! Had the curse fiend Latia not had the wit to seek them herself, it could have been the end of Esk! All because he had foolishly asked her to curse him, thinking that it would be a blessing. Human beings did have an erratic streak that caused them to act in irrational ways. Some blessing!

  Yet he had survived it, and even brought out a denizen of the gourd who was proving to be of considerable assistance to her now. What might have been a curse to Esk was, ironically, a blessing for Chex!

  But the other party he had brought out was the brass girl. Her kind, it had turned out, atoned for incidental offenses by kissing, and evidently she had performed such an atonement for Esk. Human beings tended to be unduly influenced by appearance and action, rather than being guided by practical and intellectual considerations as centaurs were; that was another of the human liabilities. Sometimes she wondered just how the human species had survived so well in Xanth. On the other hoof, they did have some endearing qualities. Esk had accepted her immediately and used his magic talent to help safeguard her from mischief; in fact, he had been more generous to her than the centaurs had been. So she was not about to condemn the human folk; probably their assets did balance out their liabilities in the long run.

  So Bria Brassie had kissed him, and the boy was obviously smitten. That was a curse indeed! Yet, with a further and exquisite irony, Esk evidently did not perceive this as an aspect of the curse. Could it be that his entry into the gourd really had been a blessing? If so, it had to be a powerful one, because Latia had explained the manner in which her curses strengthened when allowed to accumulate.

  This intellectual riddle was intriguing, so she continued to divert herself with it as she progressed up the steep trail. Assume that Esk had been struck by a very potent blessing. Then her advantage of Marrow’s help was only peripheral, part of that blessing, facilitating her mission, and therefore Esk’s mission. And Bria—she could be a good deal more important to that mission than they had supposed.

  But she was a creature of the gourd. That meant that she had to return to it, for her existence in this world was no more substantial than Esk’s had been in the gourd. She had to rejoin her world, or she would eventually perish. What, then, of her interaction with Esk?

  Assume that such an interaction was feasible. After all, Bria did look human, when allowance was made for her metal. Suppose Esk did not want to give her up? That was where the zombie’s huge gourd came in: Esk could enter that physically and go after her, and perhaps bring Bria out physically.

  No—if Marrow and Bria remained physically in the gourd, then it should not be feasible to return them to their home regions within it merely by having some person or creature of the outside realm look in through a peephole and take them along. So they must be physically outside. But Chex was sure that no denizens of the gourd had settled outside it, historically; her dam would have informed her of anything like that. So there had to be a reason that they could not survive indefinitely outside. What could that be?

  Well, she had a source of information. “Marrow, what would be the consequence if you did not manage to return to your realm in the gourd?”

  “I would slowly fade away,” he said promptly. “I am after all, merely the stuff of bad dreams.”

  “Then if Bria, to take a random example, wished to remain here, she could not?”

  “She could not—unless she got access to a soul.”

  “Access to a soul?”

  “We creatures of the dream realm have no souls, of course. That is our primary distinction from you living folk. If we had souls, we wo
uld come alive, and be able to survive normal terms here.”

  Now Chex remembered: there was a great demand for souls in the gourd! The reason was suddenly clear. “My dam gave up half her soul to the night mare Imbri.”

  “Yes, half a soul becomes a whole soul, as it fills out. This takes time, but is done on occasion.”

  “So if someone were to give you half a soul, you would be able to live here indefinitely?”

  “True. But of course I have no wish to live. I am surprised that you folk put up with the awkwardnesses and occasional messiness of it.”

  Chex nodded. She believed she had worked out a solution to Esk’s problem, if it developed. If she survived this mountain hike. She was sure that Esk would not be able to devise a solution on his own; he lacked centaur rationality.

  She came out of her reverie to discover the trail narrowing. They were well up the mountain now, and the slope was becoming sheer; there was barely room for her hooves on the slightly diminished slant that was the path.

  Then it became too slight for her; the girth of her body caused her center of gravity to be too far out from the face of the mountain to remain stable. If she tried to go any farther, she would inevitably fall.

  She stopped; she had to. The suggestion of the trail continued on around the curve of the mountain, with an awesome height of wall above, and a mind-blanking depth of drop below. She could not climb that cliff, and would certainly die if she fell. What could she do?

  “I don’t suppose you know of a nearby cave?” she asked Marrow.

  “No cave,” the skeleton replied.

  “Then I fear we cannot continue. This is, as far as I know, the only trail, and it is too narrow for my body.”

  The skeleton considered. “It does not appear to be too narrow for my body.”

  “That may be true. But I am the one who must reach the meeting plateau and address the winged monsters; they would not listen to you, as you are not winged.”

  “Still, I think I might assist you. Could you manage that path if you had a line to cling to?”

  “Yes, I suppose I could. But I don’t carry a line; I’m a bow and arrow centaur. My arms aren’t strong enough to sustain my full weight on a line, you see. My grandsire Chester has very strong arms; he could do it, but not me.” She clenched her teeth with frustration. “Oh, how I wish I could fly!”