Ogre, Ogre

by Piers Anthony

  If nothing truly existed here, how could there be a wall to block escape? He kept skirting the dangerous thoughts!

  Soon Chem spied Tandy's footprints--bright red, she announced. The prints were headed north, deeper into the Void.

  They followed this new trail. Smash checked every so often and discovered that the invisible wall paced them. Any time he tried to step south, he could not. He could only go north, or slide east or west. This disturbed him more than it might have when he was ogrishly stupid. He did not like traveling a one-way channel; this was too much like the route into the lair of a hungry dragon. The moment he caught up to Tandy, he would find a way to go back out of the Void. Maybe he could break a hole in the wall with a few hard ogre blows of his fist.

  Yet again his Eye Queue, slanted across with an alternate thought. Suppose the Void were like a big funnel, allowing people to slide pleasantly toward its center and barring them from climbing out? Then the wall would not necessarily be a wall at all, merely the outer rim of that funnel. To smash it apart could be to break up the very ground that supported them, and send them plunging in a rockslide down into the deeper depth. No percentage there!

  How could he arrange to escape the trap and take his friends with him? If no one had escaped before to give warning, that was a bad auspice for their own chances! Well, he intended to be the first to emerge to tell the tale.

  Could he locate a big bird, a roc, and get carried out by air? Smash doubted it. He distrusted air travel, having had a number of uncomfortable experiences with it, and he certainly distrusted birds as big as rocs. What did rocs eat, anyway?

  What else was there? Then he came up with a notion he thought would work in the Void. This would use the properties of the Void against the Void itself, rather than fighting those properties. He would try it--when the time came.

  "There's something ahead," Chem said. "I don't know what it is yet."

  In a moment they caught up to it. It was an ogress--the beefiest, fiercest, hairiest, ugliest monster he had ever seen, with a face so mushy it was almost sickening. Lovely! "What's another centaur doing here?" Chem asked.

  Instantly the Eye Queue analyzed the significance of her observation. "That is another anonymous creature. We had better proceed cautiously."

  "Oh, I see what you mean! Do you think it could be a monster?" The centaur, delicately, did not voice the obvious fear--that the monster could have consumed Tandy. After all, it stood astride her tracks.

  "Perhaps we should approach it from opposite sides, each ready to help the other in case it should attack." He wasn't fully satisfied with this decision, but the thought of harm to Tandy made the matter urgent.

  "Yes," Chem agreed nervously. "As I become acclimated to this region, I like it less. Maybe one of us can draw near her and the other can hide, ready to act. We can't assume a sleek centaur filly like that is hostile."

  Nor could they afford to assume the ugly ogress was not hostile! They had to be ready for anything. "You hide; I will approach in friendly fashion."

  The centaur proceeded quietly to the west, and in a moment disappeared. Smash gave her time to get properly settled, then stomped gently toward the stranger. "Ho!" he called.

  The hideous, wonderful ogress snapped about, spying him. "Who you?" she grunted dulcetly, her voice like the scratching of harpies' talons on dirty slate.

  Smash, aware that she was not what she seemed, was cautious. Names had a certain power in Xanth, and he was already below strength; it was best to remain anonymous, at least until he was sure of the nature of this creature. "I am an inquiring stranger," he replied.

  She tromped right up to him and stood snout to snout, in the delightful way of an ogress. "Me gon' stir he monster," she husked in the fascinatingly unsubtle mode of her apparent kind, and she clinked him in the puss with one hairy paw.

  The blow lacked physical force, but Smash did a polite backflip as if knocked heels over head. What a romantic come-on! He remembered how his mother knocked his father about and stepped on his face, showing her intimidating love. How similar this ogre she was!

  Yet his Eye Queue cautioned caution, as was its wont. This was not a real ogress; she might just be roughing him up for a meal. She might not be nearly as friendly as she seemed. So he did not reciprocate by smashing her violently into a tree. Besides, there was no suitable tree handy.

  He used un-ogrish eloquence instead. "This is a remarkably friendly greeting for a stranger."

  "No much danger," she said. "He nice stranger." And she gave him a friendly kick.

  Smash was becoming much intrigued. He was sure this was no ogress, but she was one interesting person! Maybe he should hit her back. He raised his hamfist.

  Then a third party appeared. This was another ogress. "Don't hit her. Smash!" she cried. "I just realized--"

  "Smash?" the first ogress repeated questioningly. She seemed amazed.

  "We must all describe exactly what we see," the second ogress said. She, too, was no true ogress, for her speech did not conform--unless she bad blundered into some Eye Queue vines--but that hardly seemed likely. "You first, Smash."

  Confused by this development, he obliged. "I see two attractively brutal ogresses, each with a face mushier than the other, each hunched so that her handpaws reach almost down to her hindpaws. One is brown, the other red."

  "And I see two centaurs," the second ogress said. "A black stallion and a red mare."

  Oho! That would be Chem, seeing her own kind. Once she had separated from him, her own perceptions had taken over, so that she saw him falsely.

  "I see a handsome black human man and a pretty brown human girl," the first ogress said.

  "Then you are Tandy!" Chem exclaimed.

  "Tandy!" Smash repeated, amazed.

  "Of course I'm Tandy!" Tandy agreed. "I always was. But why are you two dressed up like human people?"

  "We each perceive our own kind," Chem explained. "Each person instinctively generates his or her own reality from the Void. Come--take hands and perhaps we can break through to reality."

  They took hands--and slowly the alternate images dissipated, and Smash saw Chem in her ruffled brown coat and Tandy in her tattered red dress.

  "You were awful handsome as a man," Tandy said sadly. "All garbed in black, like a dusky king, with silver gloves." Smash realized that his orange jacket had become so dirty it was now almost indistinguishable from his natural fur. "But why did you fall down when I tried to shake your hand?"

  The Eye Queue provided the insight to cause him embarrassment. "I misunderstood your intent," he confessed. "I thought you were being friendly."

  "I was being friendly!" she exclaimed indignantly. "You were the first human being I was able to get close to in this funny place. I thought you might know some way out. I can't seem to go back myself; I bang into an invisible hedge or something. So I wanted to be very positive, and not scare you away. After all you might have been lost too."

  "Yes, of course," Smash agreed weakly.

  "But you acted as if I'd hit you, or something!" she continued indignantly.

  "This is the way ogres show affection," Chem explained.

  Tandy laughed. "Affection! That's how human beings fight!"

  Smash was silent, horribly embarrassed.

  But Tandy would not let it go. "You big oaf! I'll show you how human beings express affection!" And she grabbed Smash's arm, pulling him toward her with small human violence. Bemused, he yielded, until his head was down near hers.

  Tandy threw her arms around his furry neck and planted a firm, long, hot-blooded kiss on his mouth, moving her lips against his.

  Smash was so surprised he sat down. Tandy followed him, still pressing close, locking his head to hers. He fell all the way back on the ground, but she stayed with him, her brown hair flopping forward to cover his wildly staring eyes as she drove home the rest of the kiss.

  At last she released him, as she needed a breath. "What do you think of that, ogre?"

  S
mash lay where she had thrown him, unable to make sense of the experience.

  "He's overwhelmed," Chem said. "You gave him an awfully stiff dose for his first such contact."

  "Well, I've wanted to do it for a long time," Tandy said. "He's been too stupid to catch on."

  "Tandy, he's an ogre! They don't understand human romance. You know that."

  "He's an ogre with Eye Queue. He can darned well learn."

  "I'm afraid you're being unrealistic," the centaur said, talking as if Smash were not present. Perhaps that was the case, mentally. "You're a spunky, pretty human girl. He's a hulking jungle brute. You can't afford to get emotionally involved with a creature like that. He just isn't your type."

  "And just what is my type?" Tandy flared defiantly. "A damned demon intent on rape? Smash is the nicest male creature I've met in Xanth!"

  "How many male creatures have you met in Xanth?" the centaur inquired.

  Tandy was silent. Of course her experience had been quite limited.

  Smash at last essayed a remark. "You could visit a human village--"

  "Shut up, ogre," Tandy snapped, "or I'll kiss you again!"

  Smash shut up. She was not bluffing; she could do it. She still had her arms looped around his neck, since she lay half astride him, holding him down, as it were.

  "You have to be realistic," Chem said. "The Good Magician sent you out with Smash so the ogre could protect you while you searched for a husband. What good will it do you to find the destined man, as John and the Siren and maybe Goldy did, if you foolishly waste your love on an inappropriate object? You would be undermining the very thing you seek."

  "Oh, phooey!" Tandy exclaimed. "You're right, centaur, I know you're right, centaurs are always right--but oh, it hurts!" A couple of hot raindrops fell on Smash's nose, burning him with an acid other than physical. She was crying, and he found that even more confusing than the kiss. "Ever since he rescued me from the gourd and got me back my soul--"

  "I'm not denying he's a good creature," Chem said. "I'm just saying, realistically--"

  Tandy turned ferociously on Smash. "You monster! Why couldn't you have been a man?"

  "Because I'm an ogre," he said.

  She wrenched one arm clear of him and made as if to strike his face. But her hand did not touch him.

  The Void spun about him, dimming. Smash realized she had hit him with another tantrum. That, ironically, was more like ogre love. Why couldn't she have been an ogress?

  An ogress. Now, his mind shaken by the double whammy of kiss and tantrum. Smash floated, half conscious, and realized what he had been missing. An ogress! He, like every member of his party, could not exist alone. He needed a mate. That was what had brought him to Good Magician Humfrey's castle. That had been his unasked Question. How could he find his ideal mate? Humfrey had known.

  And of course there would be ogresses at the Ogre-fen. That was why the Good Magician had sent him to seek the Ancestral Ogres. He would be able to select one who was right for him, knock her about in ogre fashion, and live in brutal happiness ever after, exactly as his parents had. It all did make sense.

  He drifted slowly to earth as the horrendous impact of the tantrum eased. "Now I understand--" he began.

  "I warned you, oaf," Tandy said. She leaned over and plastered another big kiss on him.

  Smash was so dazed that he almost grasped the nature of the kiss, this time. Perhaps it was the effect of the Void, making things seem other than they were. It was as if she were punching him in the snoot--and with that perception she became much more alluring.

  Then she broke, and the odd perspective ended. She became a girl again, all soft and pretty and nice and wholly inappropriate for romance. It was too bad.

  "Oh, what's the use," Tandy said. "I'm a fool and I know it. Come on, people; we have to get out of this place."

  "That may not be readily accomplished," Chem said. "We can travel in deeper, or edge sideways, but we can't back out. I'm sure it's like a whirlpool, drawing us ever inward. What we shall find in the center, I hesitate to conjecture."

  "Oblivion," Tandy said tightly. She, too, had caught on.

  "A maw," Smash said, climbing unsteadily to his feet.

  "This land is carnivorous. It gives us respite only because it doesn't need to consume us instantly. It has herds of grazing creatures to eat first. When it gets hungry, it will take us."

  "I fear that is so," the centaur agreed. "Yet there must be some way for smart or creative people to escape it. There is so much illusion here, maybe we could fool it."

  "So far, ifs been fooling us, not we it," Tandy said. "Unless we can wish away that wall--"

  But Smash's Eye Queue had been cogitating on this problem, and now it regurgitated a notion--the one he had flirted with before. "If we could escape into another world, one with different rules--"

  "Such as what?" Chem asked, interested. "Have you got something on your hairy mind?"

  "The hypnogourd."

  "I don't like the gourd!" Tandy said instantly.

  "And the fact is, even if we all entered the gourd, our bodies would remain right here," the centaur pointed out. "The gourd is a trap itself--but if we did get out of it, we'd still be in the Void. A trap within a trap."

  "But the nightmares can go anywhere," Smash said. "Even to Mundania--and back."

  "That's true," Tandy agreed. "They can go right through walls, and I think some can run on water. So I suppose they could run through the Void, and out again. They're not ordinary mares. But they're very hard to catch and hard to ride, and the cost--" She smiled ruefully. "I happen to know."

  "They would help us if the Night Stallion told them to," Smash said.

  "Oh, I forgot!" Tandy exclaimed. "You still have to fight the Night Stallion! You sacrificed your soul for me--" She clouded up. "Oh, Smash, I owe you so much!"

  The centaur nodded thoughtfully. "Smash placed his soul in jeopardy for you, Tandy. I can appreciate how that would affect you. But I'm not sure you interpret your debt correctly."

  "I was locked into that horror, deprived of my soul!" Tandy said. "I had no hope at all. The lights had gone out on my horizon. Then he came and fought the bones and smashed things about and brought out my soul, and I lived again. I owe my everything to him. I should give back my soul--"

  "No!" Smash cried, knowing that she could endure no worse horror than the loss of her soul again. "I promised to protect you, and I should have protected you from the gourd, instead of splashing in the lake. I'll fight this through myself."

  Chem shook her head. "I do see the problem--for each of you. I wish I perceived the answers as clearly."

  "I have to meet the Stallion anyway," Smash said. "So when I have conquered him, I'll ask him for some mares."

  "That's so crazy it just might work!" Chem said. "But there's one detail you may have overlooked. We have no hypnogourds here."

  "We'll use your map again," he said.

  The centaur considered. "I must admit it worked for your Eye Queue replacement vine, and our situation is desperate enough so that anything's worth trying. But--"

  "Replacement?" Tandy demanded.

  "Chem will explain it to you while I'm in the gourd," Smash said. "Right now, let's use the map to locate a gourd patch."

  The centaur projected her map and settled on a likely place for gourds while Tandy watched skeptically. Then the party went there, though the way took them deeper into the Void.

  And there they were--several nice fat hypnogourds with ripe peepholes. Smash settled himself by the largest. "You girls get some rest," he advised. "This may take a while. Remember, I have to locate the Stallion first, then fight him, then round up the mares."

  Tandy grabbed his hamhand in her two delicate little hands. "Oh, Smash--I wish I could help you, but I'm terrified to go into a gourd--"

  "Don't go in a gourd!" Smash exclaimed. "Just stay close so you don't get walled off from me and can't bring me out in an emergency," he said gruffly.

  "I
will! I will!" Tandy's eyes were tear-bright. "Oh, Smash, are you strong enough? I shouldn't have hit you with that tantrum--"

  "I like your tantrums. You just rest, and wait for the nightmares, by whatever route they come."

  "I know I'll see nightmares," she said wanly.

  Smash glanced at Chem. "Keep an eye on her," he said, disengaging his hand from Tandy's.

  "I will," the centaur agreed.

  Then Smash put his eye to the peephole.

  Chapter 13

  Souls Alive

  He found himself emerging from the cakewalk onto a vast empty stage. He landed gently. There was no vomit. There was a new scene.

  The floor was metal-hard and highly polished; his feet left smudge marks where they touched. The air was half lit by a glow that seemed inherent. There was nothing else.

  Smash peered about. It occurred to him that if the Night Stallion were here, he could spend a long time looking, as this place seemed infinitely extensive. He had to narrow its compass, somehow.

  Well, he knew how to do that. He started tromping, unreeling his string behind him. He would crisscross this region for as long and as far as it took him.

  Smash advanced. The string became a long line, disappearing in the distance behind. It divided the plain into two sections.

  This could take even more time than he had judged, he realized. Since the girls were waiting outside the gourd in the Void and would not be able to go in search of food or water, he wanted to get on with it quickly. So he needed some way to speed things up.

  He cudgeled his Eye Queue again. How could he most efficiently locate a creature that didn't want to be located?

  Answer: what about following its trail?

  He applied his eye to the floor. Now that he concentrated, he saw the hoofprints. They crossed his projected line, coming from the right rear and proceeding to the left front. There would be no problem following that!