Ogre, Ogre

by Piers Anthony

  This took several days. She practiced mostly when her mother was out setting jewels, so that there would be no awkward questions. The demon did not bother her by day, fortunately, so she was able to snatch some sleep then, too.

  When she was satisfied, and also when she dared delay no longer, because of Fiant's boldness and her mother's upcoming overnight journey to set diamonds in a big kimberlite pipe--a complex job--she acted.

  She wrote a note to her mother, explaining that she had gone to visit her father and not to worry. Nymphs tended not to worry much anyway, so it should be all right. She gathered some sleeping pills from the recesses where they slept, put them in her pockets, and lay down. One pill was normally good for several hours before it woke, and she had several; they should keep her in their joint sleep all night.

  But as the power of the pills took their magic effect on her body, drawing her into their slumber, Tandy had an alarming thought: suppose no nightmares came tonight?

  Suppose Fiant came instead--and she was locked in slumber, unable to resist him? That thought disturbed her so much that the first nightmare rushed to attend to her the moment she slept.

  Tandy saw the creature clearly in her dream: a midnight-colored equine with faintly glowing eyes--there was the demon stigma!--set amidst a flaring forelock. The mane was glossy black, and the tail dark ebony; even the hooves were dusky. Yet she was a handsome animal, with fine features and good musculature. The black ears perked forward, the black nostrils flared, and the dark neck arched splendidly. Tandy knew this was an excellent representative of the species.

  "I'm asleep," she reminded herself. "This is a dream." Indeed it was. A bad dream, full of deep undertow currents and grotesque surgings and fear and shame and horror, making her miserable. But she fought it back, nerved herself, and leaped for the dark horse.

  She made it. Her tedious rehearsals had served her well. She landed on the nightmare's back, clutched the sleek mane, and clasped its powerful body with her legs.

  For an instant the mare stood still, too surprised to move. Tandy knew that feeling. Then the creature took off. She galloped through the wall as if it were nothing--and indeed it felt like nothing, for they had dematerialized. The power of the nightmare extended to her rider, just as the sleeping power of the pills extended to their wearer. Tandy remained asleep, in the dream-state, fastened to her steed.

  The ride was a terror. Walls shot by like shadows, and open spaces like daylight, as the mare galloped headlong and tailshort. Tandy hung on to the mane, though the strands of it cut cruelly into her hands, because she was afraid to let go. How hard would she fall, where would she be, if she lost purchase now? This was a worse dream than any before--and the sleeping pills prevented her from waking.

  They were already far away from her mother's neat apartment. They cruised through rock and caverns, water and fire, and the lairs of large and small monsters. They galloped across the table where six demons were playing poker, and the demons paused a moment as if experiencing some chill doubt without quite seeing the nightmare. They zoomed by a secret conclave of goblins planning foul play, and these, too, hesitated momentarily as the ambience of bad visions touched them. The nightmare plowed through the deepest recess, where the Brain Coral stored the living artifacts of Xanth, and the artifacts stirred restlessly, too, not knowing what moved them. Tandy realized that when a nightmare passed a waking creature, she caused a brief bad thought. Only in sleep did those thoughts have full potency.

  Now Tandy had another problem. She had to guide this steed--and she didn't know how. If she had known how, she still wouldn't have known the way to Castle Roogna. Why hadn't she thought of this before?

  Well, this was a dream, and it didn't have to make sense. "Take me to Castle Roogna!" she cried. "Then I'll let you go!"

  The nightmare neighed and changed course. Was that all there was to it? It occurred to Tandy that the steed was as frightened as Tandy herself was. Such horses weren't meant for riding! So maybe the mare would cooperate, just to be rid of her rider.

  They burst out of the caverns and onto the upper surface of Xanth. Tandy was used to strange things in dreams, but was nevertheless awed. Her eyes were open--at least they seemed to be, though this could be merely part of the dream--and she saw the vastness of the surface night. There were spreading trees and huge empty spaces and rivers without cave-canyons, and above was a monstrous ceiling full of pinpoints of light in great patches. She realized that these were stars, which her father had told her about--and she had thought he was making it up, just as he made up tales of the heroic deeds of the men of legendary Xanth's past--and that where there were none was because of clouds. Clouds were like the vapor surrounding waterfalls, loosed to ascend to the heavens. Turn a cloud loose, and naturally it did whatever it wanted.

  Then from behind, a cloud came a much larger light, surely the fabled sun, the golden ball that tracked across the sky, always in one direction. No, not the sun, for that chose to travel, for reasons of its own, only during the day.

  Jewel had told her that, though Tandy wasn't sure Jewel herself had ever seen the sun. When Tandy had asked her father whether it was true, Crombie had just laughed, which she took to be affirmation of the orb's diurnal disposition. Of course things didn't need sensible reasons for what they did. Maybe the sun was merely afraid of the dark, so stayed clear of night

  No, this must be the moon, which was an object of similar size but dimmer because it was made of green cheese that didn't glow so well. Evidently, high-flying dragons had eaten most of it, for only a crescent remained, the merest rind. Still, it was impressive.

  The mare pounded on. Tandy's hands grew numb, but her hold was firm. Her body was bruised and chafed by the bouncing; she would be sore for days! But at least she was getting there. Her bad dream slipped into oblivion for a while, as dreams tended to, fading in and out as the run continued.

  Abruptly she woke. A dark castle loomed in the fading moonlight. They had arrived!

  Barely in time, too, for now dawn was looming behind them. The nightmare could not enter the light of day. In fact, the mare was already fading out, for regardless of dawn, it was no longer bound when Tandy left the dreamstate. The sleeping pills must have finished their nap, and Tandy had finished hers with them. No--the stones were mostly gone; they must have bounced out one at a time in the course of the rough ride, and now only one was left, not enough to do the job.

  In a moment the mare vanished entirely, freed by circumstance, and Tandy found herself sprawled on the ground, battered and wide-eyed.

  She was stiff and sore and tired. It had not been a restful sleep at all. Her legs felt swollen and numb from thigh to ankle. Her hair was plastered to her scalp with the cold sweat of nocturnal fear. It had been a horrendous ordeal. But at least she was in sight of her destination.

  She got painfully to her feet and staggered toward the edifice as the blinding sun hefted itself ambitiously above the trees. The land of Xanth brightened about her, and the creatures of day began to stir. Dew sparkled. It was all strangely pretty.

  But as she came to the moat and saw that there was the stirring of some awful creature within it, orienting on her, she had a horrible revelation. She knew what Castle Roogna looked like, from descriptions her father had made. He had told her wonderful stories about it, from the time she was a baby onward, about the orchard with its cherrybomb trees, bearing cherries a person dared not eat, and shoes of all types growing on shoe trees, and all manner of other wonders too exaggerated to be believed. Only an idiot or a hopeless visionary would believe in the land of Xanth, anyway! Yet she almost knew the individual monsters of the moat by name, and the same for the guardian zombies who rested in the graveyard, awaiting the day when Xanth needed defense. She knew the spires and turrets and all, and the ghosts who dwelt within them. She had a marvelously detailed mental map of Castle Roogna--and this present castle did not conform. This was the wrong castle.

  Oh, woe! Tandy stood in dull, defeated
amazement. All her effort, her last vestige of strength and hope, and her deviously laid plans to reach her father lay in ruins. What was she to do now? She was lost in Xanth, without food or water, so tired she could hardly move, with no way to return home. What would her mother think?

  Something stirred within the castle. The drawbridge lowered, coming to rest across the small moat. A lovely woman walked out of the castle, subduing the reaching monster with a trifling gesture of her hand, her voluminous robe blowing in the morning breeze. She saw Tandy and came toward her--and Tandy ,saw with a new shock of horror that the woman had no face. Her hood contained a writhing mass of snakes, and emptiness where human features should have been. Surely the nightmare had saved the worst dream for last!

  "Dear child," the faceless woman said. "Come with me. We have been expecting you."

  Tandy stood frozen, unable even to muster the energy for a tantrum. What horrors lay within this dread castle? "It is all right," the snake-headed woman said reassuringly. "We consider that your phenomenal effort in catching and riding the nightmare constitutes sufficient challenge to reach this castle. You will not be subject to the usual riddles of admission."

  They were going to take her inside! Tandy tried to run, but her strength was gone. She was a spunky girl, but she had been through too much this night. She fainted.

  Chapter 2

  Smash Ogre

  Smash tromped through the blackboard jungle of Xanth, looking at the pictures on the blackboards because, like all his kind, he couldn't read the words. He was in a hurry because the foul weather he was enjoying showed signs of abating, and he wanted to get where be was going before it did. When he encountered a fallen beech tree across the path, he simply hurled it out of the way, letting the beech-sand fall in a minor sandstorm. When he discovered that an errant river had jumped its channel and was washing out the path and threatening to clean the grunge off his feet and make his toenails visible for the first time in weeks, he grabbed that stream by its tail and flexed it so hard that it splatted right back into its proper channel and lay there quivering and bubbling in fear. When an ornery bullhorn blocked the way, threatening to ram its horn most awkwardly into the posterior of anyone who distracted it. Smash did more than that. He picked it up by the horn and blew a horrendous blast that nearly turned the creature inside out. Never again would that bullhorn bother travelers on that path; it had been cowed.

  This sort of thing was routine for Smash, for he was the most powerful and stupid of all Xanth's vaguely manlike creatures. The ground trembled nervously when he tromped, and the most ferocious monsters thought it prudent to catch errands elsewhere until he was gone. Naturally the errands fled with indecent haste, wanting no part of this. In fact, no creature with any wit at all wanted any part of this. For Smash was an ogre.

  He was twice the height of an ordinary man, was broad in proportion, and his knots of hairy muscles stood out like the boles of tormented old trees. Some creatures might have considered him ugly, but these were the less imaginative individuals. Smash was not ugly; he was horrendous. By no stretch of imagination could any ogre be considered less than grotesque, and Smash was an appalling specimen of the breed. There had not been a more revolting creature on this path since a basilisk had crossed it

  Yet Smash, like most powerfully ugly creatures, had a rather sweet interior, hidden deep inside where it would not embarrass him. He had been raised among human beings, had gone on an adventure with Prince Dor and Princess Irene, and had made friends with centaurs. He had, in short, been somewhat civilized by his environment, incredible as this might seem. Most people believed that no ogre was civilizable, and that was certainly the safest belief to hold.

  Yet Smash was no ordinary ogre. This meant that he usually did not strike without some faint reason and that his natural passion for violence had been somewhat stifled. This was a sad condition for an ogre, yet he had borne up moderately well. Now he had a mission.

  The bad weather cleared. The clouds drew their curtains aside to let lovely shafts of sunlight slant down, making the air sparkle prettily. Birds shook out their feathers and trilled joyfully. Everything was turning clean and pleasant.

  Smash snorted with disgust. How could he travel in this? He would have to camp for the afternoon and night and hope the morrow was a worse day.

  He was hungry, for it took huge and wasteful quantities of energy to sustain an ogre in proper arrogance. He cast about for something edible and massive enough to sustain him, such as a dead dragon or a vat of spoiling applesauce or a mossy rock-candy boulder, but found nothing. This region had already been scavenged out.

  Then he heard the squawk of a contented griffin and he sniffed the aroma of delicious pie. The perceptions of ogres were a-cute rather than a-ugly, oddly; though the griffin was some distance away, Smash located it precisely by sound and odor. He tromped toward it. This must be the creature that had cleaned out all the edibles of this region.

  The griffin had captured a monstrous shoefly pie. The winged shoes had been cooked to a turn, the juices of their fine leather suffusing the pie, which massed about as much as the griffin. This was an ideal meal for an ogre.

  Smash marched up, not bothering to employ any stealth. The griffin whirled, half spreading its wings, issuing a warning squawk. Nobody in his right mind interfered with a feeding griffin, except a sufficiently large and hungry dragon.

  But Smash was not in his right mind. No ogre ever was. There was simply not enough mind there to be right. "Me give he three, leave sight of me," he said. All ogres spoke only in inane rhyme and lacked facility with pronouns, which they took to be edible roots. But ogres generally made themselves plain enough, in their brutish fashion.

  The griffin had not had prior experience with an ogre. That was its fortune. There were very few ogres in these parts. The griffin opened its eagle beak wide and screeched a warning challenge.

  Smash's bluff had been called. That was unfortunate, because no ogre was smart enough to bluff. With dimwitted joy, he rose to the prospect of mayhem. "One," he said, counting off on his smallest hamfinger. The griffin didn't move.

  "Two." After a brief search, he found another finger. The griffin had had enough of this. It gave a raucous battle cry and charged, which was just as well, for Smash had lost count. This sort of intellectual exercise was horrendously difficult for his kind; his head hurt and his fingers felt numb. But now he was released from the necessity of counting all the way to three, and that was a great relief.

  He grabbed the griffin by its bird beak and lion's tail, whirled it around, and hurled it out over the forest in a cloud of small feathers and fur. The griffin, startled by this reception, spread its wings, oriented, circled, decided the event must have been a fluke, and started to come in for another engagement. Ogres did not have a monopoly on stupidity!

  Smash faced the lion-bodied bird. "Scram, ham!" he bellowed.

  The blast of the bellow tore out half a dozen pinfeathers and two flight feathers, and sent the griffin spinning out of control. The creature righted itself again, but this time decided to seek its fortune elsewhere. Thus did it finally do something halfway smart, yielding the stupidity title to the ogre.

  Smash took a flying leap into the center of the shoefly pie. Leatherlike pastry crust flew up. The ogre grabbed a big handful of the delicious mess and stuffed it into his maw. He slurped noisily on a boot, chewed the tongue in half, and masticated on a pleasantly tough heel. Oh, it was good! He grabbed two more handfuls, crunching soles and sucking on laces and spitting the metal eyelets out like seeds. Soon all the pie was gone. He burped up a few metal nails, well satisfied.

  After gorging, he went to a stream and slurped a few gallons of shivering cool water. As he lifted his head, he heard a faint call. "Help! Help!"

  Smash looked about, his ears rotating like those of the animal he was, to orient on the sound. It came from a nearby brambleberry bush. He parted the foliage with one gross finger and peered in. There was a tiny manlike crea
ture. "Help, please!" it cried.

  Ogres had excellent eyesight, but this person was so small that Smash had to focus carefully to see him. Her. It was naked and had--well, it was a tiny female imp. "Who you?" he inquired politely, his breath almost knocking her down.

  "I'm Quieta the Imp," she cried, rearranging her hair, which his breath had violently disarrayed. "Oh, ogre, ogre--my father's trapped and will surely perish if not rescued soon. Please, I beseech you most prettily, help him escape, and I will reward you in my fashion."

  Smash did not care one way or another about imps; they were too small to eat; anyway, be was for the moment full. This one was hardly more massive than one of his fingers. He did, however, like rewards. "Okay, dokay," he agreed.

  "My name's Quieta, not Dokay," she said primly. She led him to a spot under a soapstone boulder. It was, of course, a very clean place, and the soap had been carved into interesting formations. There was her father-imp, caught in an alligator clamp. The alligator's jaws were slowly chewing off his little leg.

  "This is my father Ortant," Quieta said, introducing them. "This is big ugly ogre."

  "Pleased to meet you, Big ugly Ogre," Imp Ortant said as politely as the pain in his leg permitted.

  Smash reached down, but his hamfingers were far too big and clumsy to pry open the tiny clamp. "Queer ear," he told the imps, and obediently both covered their minuscule ears with miniature hands.

  Smash let out a small roar. The alligator clamp yiped and let go, scrambling back to the farthest reach of its anchor-chain, where it cowered. The imp was free.

  "Oh, thank you, thank you so much, ogre!" Quieta exclaimed. "Here is your reward." She held out a tiny disk.

  Smash accepted it, balancing it on the tip of one finger, his gross brow furrowing like a newly plowed field.