"Never? That's hard to believe."
"Not if you saw the ones that lived around our estates. Besides, my father believed that if my true nature were generally known among them, they'd be out to get me or something. Inside the walls was strictly human staff. Many of them knew of me, of course, but like most such staff, they had worked for my father's family for generations. Except for two handmaids, no one ever saw me except fully dressed, properly concealed. Then no one could tell. I don't give off a faerie aura or have much in the way of magical skills. I do have serious problems with iron, but I can sense its presence and be a bit careful around it."
"So you've been raised as, and passed as, a normal human girl," Joe said, nodding. "But surely your father and you knew you couldn't keep this up forever. There would be young men, family influences, pressures to many, and so on."
She nodded. "True, but in another two years I would have come into proper inheritance on my own, and my father intended then to sign full rights, title, and birthright to me. After that, well—I should not like to be married to a man who found me repulsive or monstrous. If anyone stopped his pursuit of me because of this, it would be good riddance."
"Maybe." Joe personally had her doubts about this. Born a full-blooded Native American, she knew that the value of papers and legal documents when race was an issue wasn't anything sacred and inviolate. And she had seen more than one of the type of man who'd swallow hard, marry, get the money and the estates, then denounce his wife as a monster. In this world her testimony as a halfling against his as a full human wouldn't even bring a contest. Still, it was kind of a moot point now.
"So with all those plans, why were you over here in the middle of nowhere being hunted by these men?"
"I—I'm not sure. One night, months ago now—seems like years—my father woke me up, told me to pack everything I could, particularly clothes, and be ready to leave immediately. He said that some very evil forces were coming that he couldn't fight off or stand against in any way and that we had no choice but to flee. He hoped that we could find safety with old friends, powerful wizards apparently, until things blew over. When I asked him who could hate us this much, he only said that once he'd had to make a bargain with somebody who otherwise he would never even have acknowledged and that he had hoped to be able to fulfill the bargain without involving me or risking everything but that it had proved impossible. He never would say more. We have been on the run ever since, often only minutes ahead of them. When we left home, I saw them ride in."
"Who? Those guys?"
"No. Ugly, nasty things on shining demonic horses with blazing red eyes and nostrils spouting fire. Tall, scary homed riders in shiny black armor and great bat's wings folded against their backs. Since then I've seen them again, but only in ones and twos and in the dark. Most of the time it's been ones like those last night. Mercenaries and robbers hoping for some sort of reward. Well, perhaps my father's body is enough for them now!"
Joe doubted it. They hadn't shown any care in taking the old boy out, yet they had bound her and had been making ready to take her someplace. No matter what, it was Alvi who was the prize here.
This was getting interesting, and it had been a very long time since anything or anybody had interested Joe.
A small creature, perhaps no more than a foot high, emerged from under one of the big roots. At first glance it seemed like some gigantic bug, but two four-fingered white-gloved hands, big round eyes, a round bright red glowing nose, and a purple mustache over two enormous protruding buck teeth said otherwise.
"Hey, girl! Still want me to look at the halfling's bond spell?' the creature piped, whistling through its teeth. "Yes! Over here, old-timer!" Joe called.
The Mossuk scurried over and looked at Alvi with a distasteful expression. "Well, don't just stand there! I can't climb up, y' know! Just set here and look the other way and I'll see what I can do about them cussed cuffs."
Alvi was startled. "Um—I'm sorry!" She sat and put out her wrists as much as she could for the little creature. She realized that she was the stranger and the freak there, but all these creatures were so new and so very odd ...
There was a sudden click, and she felt the cuffs give way. The sudden pain in her shoulders as she brought her arms forward was more than compensated for by the relief of moving freely again and feeling blood course through her arms.
There was a motion deep within the baggy dress. Joe could almost swear ... No, never mind.
"Thanks! Maybe I can do something for you sometime!" Joe told the little creature.
"Could be. Doubt it, though. No big problem here. Simple stuff. Cheap bonds, really. If you could see it clear, you could get it loose. Just a bunch of standard knots, that's all."
Joe went over to Alvi as the little creature vanished back underground, stood in back of her, and began massaging Alvi's neck and shoulders as she sat, trying to get her fully back to normal.
Alvi breathed an excited and heavenly sigh. "Oh, don't stop! That feels so very good!"
Eventually it was time to stop, though. "Where are the rest of your things?" Joe asked her. "I'm sure you had a lot more than what I saw."
"We did, but we had to leave it in a hurry. We had two pack mules, but when it was clear we were being followed, we had no choice but to leave them and hurry on."
"You had no horses?"
"We should have, but a wagon or surrey would have been too large and hard to manage on these kinds of roads, and I can't really handle much of a regular mount, I'm afraid."
They reached the pool of fresh water. "Well, you're going to have to take off what you have in any case," Joe noted. "For one thing, you'd sink with all that on. For another, it's not practical out here. Third, they're pretty filthy and we're a long way from a laundry."
"I—I'm sorry. I'm just not used to this! I mean—my whole life has been one of concealment! Now, suddenly, I'm here, with nobody I have known, and I'm—well, it is difficult. I never knew how much the monster I was until we were on this trip. There have been times—it could not be helped—when others have ... seen. And I have endured their looks, their pity, their revulsion, and whatever. You are so perfect. You cannot know what it is to be like this! You can never know how I envy you!"
Joe was taken aback. Perfect? Envy me? If only she knew!
But the fact was, putting aside the couple of extra inches of perfectly proportioned height and dimensions, Joe was physically about as perfect as one could be—for a wood nymph. It was just that, well, Joe had been neither born nor raised a wood nymph, or a member of the faerie race, or even female and culturally was even more cut off from this existence. Somehow she'd been feeling so damned sorry for herself that it had never once occurred to her that to any stranger she really was perfection of her race and for this world, anyway, normal and acceptable.
And of course there were far worse things to be than a wood nymph, particularly in this world. Somehow, though, the idea that one who considered herself such would actually feel envy for Joe was unreal, unheard of, and hard to deal with.
'Well, I might as well see it," Joe told her. "I promise I won't turn away or treat you any differently. I wasn't born like this. I was born so different that this form and existence are to me so unhappy that I've been wandering the world trying to discover how to change it, to go back. I'm hardly the one to be turned off by the way anybody looks."
"But it is just a disguise and a pleasant one to look upon, at that," Alvi noted. "You don't have to hide half your body from the world, always fearful that someone will see, will start yelling and pointing out your shame."
By that point Joe's imagination had already conjured up more horrible things than were likely to be hidden under that baggy dress of Alvi's. Still, she could understand the problem and sympathize. "Anyone who sees me sees only a simpleton, an oversexed, ignorant, dumb little faerie girl with only one reason to be looked at and one thing on her tiny little mind," Joe noted. "At least, with your dresses and cloaks, you could be tre
ated more as a person."
"It was not the same," Alvi responded. "Not only was the fear too great, but the limits were much too restrictive and even dangerous. It wasn't equality from my point of view. It was play equality, that's all."
Play equality . . . Hey, chief! You ain't no Injun, are you? We don't serve no Injuns in this here place ... Who'd ya kill to get a job drivin' that truck, Geronimo? Yours? Get dutta here! Aita no Injun afford a truck like that . . . How many times, after all those fights and the hospital time that almost caused him to lose his truck, had Joe tried to "pass," to deny his own self-evident heritage? That was why he'd resettled in the East once he could. In the East "Indians" were exotic, fascinating creatures, like people from Mars; the Easterners had other targets.
"You don't have to playact with me," Joe said gently, and helped Alvi remove the rather elaborately fastened clothing.
The real problem with halflings was that they made up survivable combinations of creatures with no reason at all for being other than that the mixture, for some reason, worked. Mostly things that would be okay on the proper creature just didn't turn out right or weren't in the right proportions or places on the body or things like that. They were deformed—mutations, sort of—and nobody ever felt comfortable around that sort of unfortunate. Still, in a land where Joe had battled zombie armies, monster carnivorous rabbits, real fire-breathing dragons, and even nastier types and one that had countless thousands of faerie races, demons, and monsters all its own that were "normal," how bad could it be?
The answer was not so much bad as very, very bizarre.
Alvi didn't have to go far to lose all illusions of humanity. In fact, she looked decidedly less human and more alien than Joe had ever been as a creature of this land. And it was easy to see why she'd not been terribly put off by being handcuffed. In fact, had that fellow managed to take her prisoner, he might have been in for a very nasty shock.
The head of course was normal: the face of a pretty girl with a nice short hairstyle, thin brows, big brown eyes, the usual, set atop a fairly long neck, nice shoulders, and a pair of medium-sized and fairly firm breasts. Then the fun began.
Just below this was a second set of shoulders, mounted under the first but tapered in just a bit from the top, from which extended two additional arms ending in hands as well and between which were two slightly smaller but otherwise perfect medium-sized and fairly firm breasts.
Just below this was yet a third set of shoulders, again mounted under the first and in just a bit from the second set, with a third set of arms, hands, even breasts, in a threesome that cascaded down in such a way that each succeeding set was perhaps ten percent or so smaller than the set on top and, interestingly, was proportioned so that all three pairs of hands ended at the exact same point on the body. This, however, left room for only a small flat stomach area with no visible navel, and then the whole thing tapered into the hips so narrowly that it all appeared to be on a giant ball joint. The only girl with top measurements thirty-six-thirty-three–thirty and a waist of maybe twenty-two, Joe thought. But the hips really blew it.
Those hips were very wide, supporting two thickly thighed and very nonhuman legs that might have more properly been on a bipedal lizard or perhaps a small dinosaur. That is, the legs were attached to the hips slightly splayed rather than straight down, which was why the hip area looked so wide in the first place, and it was this that had given her clothed figure the appearance of being fat. Extending out from the tailbone and crotch area rearward was a thick, tapered tail in keeping with the lower body but rather stiff-looking for all that and relatively short. In fact, it appeared to be somewhat rigid, although her movement showed that the tail could be brought in against the legs, forming a sort of third appendage between and in the back that wasn't quite long enough to reach the ankles, let alone the ground. This tail was designed as a counterweight, for balance, not support, and to some extent its operation was automatic.
As startling was the patterning of the whole lower area starting just below the small third breast pair. It was as if a gang of mad tattoo artists had beset her, producing a riot of attractive but totally abstract designs and colors over her whole lower body. The skin was quite smooth and had a texture similar to that of her human part; the colors were not dull, either, but bright and vibrant, the design about as complex as could be imagined. Only the underside of the tail, revealed through the opening between the legs, was left au naturel, a somewhat segmented-looking off-white.
There was no hair anywhere except on the head or any obvious sign of female genitalia. If it was there, then it was lost in disguise in that riot of color and shape and form, although Joe reflected that anything fairly small might well be anything but obvious in that riotous yet attractive mass.
"You kept—this—a secret even from part of a household? And from anybody around?"
She nodded. "It's not as hard as you think, and I was used to it, raised to control it. Growing up, they used to tie my lower arms to my sides all the time so I wouldn't reflexively move them, and my tail got lashed to my leg for the same reason. That was tougher. I always had to walk really slowly and deliberately because I couldn't use it for balance. The hands, too, were a problem, mostly if I lost my balance or something. Your instinct is to use everything you have to break a fall. I spent a lot of time in my quarters, alone or with the two serving maids whose folks had been with the family for generations, just to be free of those despicable straps and my tent dresses. I yearned to be outside like this, free, able to run and stretch and not pretend. But it never happened."
The tremendous difference in Alvi would have made any sort of medical solution more grotesque than the social one her father had adopted. Still, if a big, ugly Injun truck driver could wind up a nymph, surely there was something that a rich guy like her father could summon up from the magical arts. Joe didn't really know all that those Books of Rules contained—except that it was far too much—but surely in them was one of those universal laws: the rich could buy themselves out of almost anything. She raised the point in more delicate terms.
"It was not even an issue," Alvi replied. "There were occasional sorcerers as guests, of course—I told you that my father was friends with many powerful ones. They knew of my condition; it could hardly be hidden from them. I am certain that I was examined, perhaps without my knowledge, on magical levels many times, but nothing was ever done. The few who so much as alluded to it—none of them ever came right out, at least in front of me—suggested that there was some kind of curse, that whatever might be done by magic for me would only make things much, much worse. I never understood it. Many times my father started to tell me—I knew he truly wanted to—but each time something held him back. I was never sure if it was part of the curse or some promise he made, like to my mother, or what, but he couldn't, not even in these last few months on the run."
"This is beginning to sound very much like a curse," Joe agreed, considering her story so far. "Come, though. Get into the pool and wash off the grime. You'll find the water's warm and clean, and the bottom's basically stones."
In the water Alvi leaned back and enjoyed the warmth and clean feel—and only her neck showed. Joe wasn't very worried; of all the people she'd ever met anywhere, Alvi seemed absolutely drown proof.
"You're not coming in?" Alvi called to her.
"Sorry. My race is very good for showers, even better for being out in the rain, but baths are risky. If I absorb too much water without any sort of drain, I can become heavier than gold. Take your time, though, and enjoy. I've got absolutely nothing else to do and nowhere else to go."
"That's all right. I just feel bad because this is so nice. I finally have a tub that fits me!"
Joe let her enjoy herself for a while, then asked casually, "Just out of curiosity, what race was your mother? Do you know?"
"A mortal human and very pretty," Alvi responded. "What? Now, wait a minute! I saw your dad, and if your mother was human ..."
"That's not ex
actly the way it seems," the girl told her. "I always knew that he wasn't my real father, but he was the only one I ever knew, and he was very good to me and to my mother. They had been betrothed, lovers since they were very young, but before they could many, something happened. I don't know what. Neither would really talk about it, but my mother went away for a while. After she came back, my father insisted that they marry anyway, and she agreed. He really did love her, and he was her whole life. They tried to have another child, one for both of them, but it didn't work out. The child was born dead, and the result ..." It was the first time Joe had really heard any sincere emotion from Alvi about her parents and background. "It—it killed her. Not right off, but she was sick and never really got better. I was four or five years old, but I remember it. I remember all of it."
An interesting picture was emerging in Joe's mind. It might be completely off, but it fit the facts. Young, handsome nobleman is betrothed to the daughter of some wealthy local monarch or one of the landed gentry, the dowry most likely the estate itself. That was how things worked there. Everything set, going normal, when suddenly something happened, something that threatened the marriage, caused her to go away for a bit, and forced everything to be put on hold. What?
Alvi was what. Was it actually an illicit human-faerie affair? Some adolescent caprice that caused her extreme guilt ever after? Or was it perhaps some sort of a rape? Not all the faerie were nymphs and fairies and elves and other cute characters. Those bat-winged creatures who'd come for Alvi and her father, for example. Forces of the real father come to claim his child? The fact that she had no characteristics of such creatures meant little: in perhaps the majority of cases among the faerie, the male and female were so different, they might well be mistaken for different races or species entirely. Nymphs were a good example and by no means unique—satyrs for wood nymphs, those Boyfriends from the Black Lagoon for the water nymphs, you name it. The colorful lower body patterns would be the key; it seemed too complex and too natural to be a one-shot affair and was almost certainly some sort of racial characteristic. But which race?
Horrors of the Dancing Gods Page 3
