Crewel Lye (18 page)

Finally he shrugged and resumed dragging the bundle. He intended to get it to a suitable burial place, no matter how much effort it took.

He hauled and he hauled, finding paths up the steep slope to the higher ground. He was panting and sweating, but would not desist till nightfall made it too dark to continue without risking a misstep and a tumble back to the beach. Pook was used to night, but this was treacherous terrain, and the bundle was awkward to manage. So he parked it in a niche, then braced himself below it and slept on his feet. He was tired and hungry, but he refused to quit until he had done the burial properly. Pook was one faithful friend in death, as he was in life.

But in the night, the creatures of the nocturn emerged to forage. Unseen things slithered along the slope, and there were sounds of scuttling and scratching. Insects set up a persistent chirruping. Pook stirred himself to stomp anything that approached the bundle. A hatch opened a short distance below, and a goblin's head poked out. Pook nudged a stone to roll down and scare the goblin back into his hole. As he knew, goblins could be very bad in quantity, but this place was evidently out of the main goblin country. A solitary goblin could be dealt with more readily than a mob.

Then a smell developed. Pook sniffed and snorted, disliking it. For a moment he might have been afraid the stuff in the bag was decomposing. Then he heard crass flapping and realized it was a harpy. The ugly-faced avian crone loomed near, sensing her type of prey: namely, something helpless. But Pook squealed warning and reared up, milling his forehooves and clanking his chains, and she reconsidered. “I didn't know that carrion was yours, pooka!” she screeched. “Most nags don't eat meat. Next time, let a girl know, you blippety blip!” I doubt I am repeating the exact words she used, as they weren't nice words; they flattened Pook's ears against his head and caused the scuttlings in the vicinity to curl up and die.

In this manner the ghost horse guarded the bag during the night, and never was there a more loyal and forlorn service rendered. Pook thought he was protecting the remains for decent burial; actually, he was giving me time to heal. My talent had both poison and the fatal fall to nullify, and that was a considerable task. I doubt that I had ever before been killed quite so dead. But all my pieces were there, plus some dirt for good measure; I had been granted a day and a night without disturbance and I was indeed on the mend. As the light of morning peeped hesitantly over the brink and crept into the chasm,

I stirred.

Pook had been horse-napping. The motion in the bag brought his ears straight up in shock. Had a predator sneaked inside to guzzle out the goodies? He investigated immediately, pulling the bag open.

I looked out at him. “Hi, Pook,” I said. “Was it bad this time?”

He almost fell off the slope.

I stretched and climbed out of the leaf. I was weak but whole. It's rough, recovering from two deaths simultaneously! I would need to eat and rest to replenish the formidable energies expended in the reconstruction.

“Say, didn't I hear a harpy in the night?” I inquired. “You shouldn't have driven her off; you should have used her for stork fodder.”

Then I paused, appalled, while Pook looked at me as if I had sprouted demon's horns. What was I saying? Nobody got that close to a harpy! How could I have spawned such a dirty thought?

Actually, it's clear now, though it was muddy then. Some of that dirt had gotten scooped up with my remains and tied in the bag--that dirt had gotten caught in my cracked head as it healed, and now I had a dirty mind. Too bad--but, of course, it had been a very difficult feat of healing.

After a moment, Pook recovered from his amazement and disgust, decided it was really me back alive, and came to nuzzle my hand. “Oh, didn't you understand about me?” I asked him, realizing that he hadn't actually seen me heal before, not all the way from death. He had always been away, avoiding dragons or searching for an exit from Callicantzari caves or battling a tarasque. “My magic talent is to heal rapidly from wounds or whatever. If I lose part of my body, I regrow it; if I am killed, I recover. You must have collected everything together for me, so I could recover most rapidly. Thank you, Pook; that was very nice of you.”

He just stood there, embarrassed. I petted him on the neck. Horses have excellent necks for petting; chickens don't. “I see you brought the bag of spells along also. And my sword. That's good; those spells may be jumbled, but I'll probably need them. I still have my mission to complete.” I looked around. “But how did we get here on the slope? Last I remember. Threnody had given me poison--but it shouldn't have taken me a day and a night to recover from that.” I glanced at my body. “And that wouldn't account for the destruction of my clothing and all the new flesh I have grown. I've just been through a major healing.”

Pook gestured with his head, indicating the chasm. “You mean she dumped me down there?” I asked. “I must have splattered like a broken egg!” He nodded agreement. Now I understood just how much he had done for me, and what it had meant when he gave me his friendship. I knew I owed him a big one.

We climbed on up the slope, slowly, for I was weak and he was tired. As I moved, I remembered what Threnody had said just before I died. She was King Gromden's daughter, cursed to stay away from Castle Roogna lest it fail, and afraid that Magician Yin would marry her and make her return if he became King. I could see her concern--but it seemed somewhat extreme for her to murder me so abruptly just for that. I had nothing to do with it, really. Well, not quite true; if I succeeded in my mission, then Yin would become King, and the heat would be on Threnody. But why couldn't she simply refuse to marry him, or refuse to return to Castle Roogna? She had said no to her father the King; she could say no to Magician Yin. She didn't have to kill me to prevent Yin from winning; she could have asked me not to mention her whereabouts, or she could have moved to some other, hidden place before I returned to the castle. Thus her action didn't seem to make sense, and that bothered me, for she was a most attractive woman. A woman I would have been happy to--

Then I wondered just how much sense my own thoughts were making. But I had an excuse--the dirt mixed up with the other gunk in my head. For all I knew, some rich, brown dirt was a good substitute for the useless gray stuff that had spilled; still, my head wasn't quite the way it had been. Of course, as I said, I didn't realize this at the time, for I hadn't seen myself splat in the Gap Chasm. Nevertheless, my mind did feel somewhat like an egg scrambled in sand. For one thing, I seemed to have lost most of the advantage of the intelligence spell, since no more complex philosophic thoughts churned about inside my skull. Maybe the eye-queue spell had compensated for the mixing my skull-innards had received, resulting in approximately normal intellect. Had I been really smart, I could have figured out exactly what made sense about Threnody and maybe saved myself an extraordinary amount of grief. But the eyeballs of the eye-queue must have been pointed every which way, so they couldn't quite focus on the obvious. I can't say, even now, how my thoughts ran then; I guess I hadn't properly appreciated the extent of my injuries, since I had been dead at the time. I really didn't want to believe that a woman as lovely as Threnody could have done as much damage to me as she had. I wasn't nearly as sensible as a barbarian should have been.

One thing was muddily clear, though. I should stay away from Threnody, because she was either crazy or dangerous, possibly both. If Yin was going to marry her, that was his problem, not mine. He was a Magician; maybe he could handle her. I couldn't see why he would even want to marry a woman like that. Um, no; I could see. To gain King Gromden's sanction for the succession, and--The dirt in my mind smudged a picture for me of what she might look like without clothes and of what a man might do--well, never mind. I would just go about my business, fetch the object, bring it to Castle Roogna, and then get out of this region before the ship hit the fanny, so to speak. (I think that saying derives from the time someone accidentally sailed his ship into the posterior of a snoozing giant sea monster. That was not a smart thing to do.)

We made it to the top of the slope by midday, to our immense relief. There was a nice green plain loaded with tall grass and dotted with fruit and nut trees. Here we could relax and fill up, as we so desperately needed to.

I took three good steps toward the nearest tree--and tripped over another black spell. This one was in the shape of a stone. It flared up darkly.

I knew what that meant--and if I hadn't known, I could have guessed, for my foot was turning to black stone. Quickly I kicked the spell so hard it flew out over the edge of the plain and rolled down the embankment toward the sea. There wasn't much damage it could do there; most of the slope was already stone. It might be awkward for the goblin and harpy in the vicinity, and perhaps the sea monster, but that was all. It wouldn't catch Pook.

Then I grabbed for a counterspell, for now my other foot was calcifying, too. Evidently that moment of contact had been enough for the spell to get the measure of me;

I hadn't stopped its progress merely by kicking it away. The stone-to-flesh spell had already been expended, but maybe I wasn't thinking clearly; the dirt fuzzing my brain could account for that, too. Mostly, I think, I was just too rushed to make any really smart decision. When one feels one's legs getting stoned, one doesn't pause too long for reflection.

I came up with the white doll. That was the bodies-exchange spell, to reverse the black spell of that type; I didn't need that now. But since the spells were all mixed up, I knew it would be something else. Maybe some other spell would help, crazy as that notion seems, now that I can consider it more objectively. “Invoke!” I cried.

The doll flashed--and suddenly I had a vision of an arrow pointing east.

An arrow? What could that be? Oh--this was the needle of the compass of the finder-spell for the object I was to fetch! Now I could find it, since this positive spell was fresher than the negative one I had encountered atop the mountain.

But that didn't do me a phenomenal lot of good at the moment, for my legs were still changing to stone, and my thighs too. Maybe getting rid of the black spell had weakened the effect, but I had gotten a good dose, and it looked as if I were going to become a statue. Now what should I do?

As I hesitated, my hands stiffened, and the hair on my head became brittle and heavy. My face glazed over. My breathing got labored, for stone is not very flexible. I felt myself falling, and felt the thunk as I struck the ground, hard. I hoped my stone body did not hurt the ground too much. Then I faded out, as my brains were stoned, too. This was my third death in the space of a day or two--not what I would call a very positive record.

Pook watched all this with alarm. He had hardly gotten me to safety when this happened! But he was smart enough to realize that if I could recover from getting smashed at the bottom of the chasm, I might recover from getting stoned, too. Pook's brains, after all, had not been scrambled. So he nosed me over, hooked a chain under my rigid arms, and dragged me to the shade of the tree I had been headed for. There he let me lie, while he grazed about the tree in a widening circle, keeping one eye on me and the other out for any stray monsters that might pass by.

Creatures did appear. One was a small feline on the prowl for prey, but Pook stomped a forefoot and it fled, for it was a scaredy cat. A swarm of frisbees flew over, but they were only interested in flowers. They were shaped like little disks and they sort of glided down to a flower, then spun away to the next. A long, dark shape flapped in, its wings leathery, its body like a thin club; it was a baseball bat looking for a baseball. There was none here, as the bases generally held their balls in the evenings, so it flapped on past. Some June-bugs buzzed me; no, they were je-june bugs, comparatively dull and uninteresting. A bird flitted about the tree under which I lay, a brown thrasher, but there was nothing brown here to thrash, so it dropped a dropping on my nose, taking me for a statue, and flew off. Now I understood why sculptures objected to birds!

Dusk came, creeping guiltily across the plain. Pook stood near me, making sure nothing bothered me. The truth is, very little bothers stone figures, apart from hammers and earthquakes and the aforementioned attentions of birds. But the ghost horse remained as faithful as ever, trusting me to recover in due course.

His trust was rewarded, for gradually my talent fought the curse of stone and prevailed. My head returned to flesh in the night, and my torso, and I began to breathe again. It was a good thing that Evil Magician Yang hadn't known about my talent. He thought the stone-spell would finish me, and he was wrong. Had he suspected, he might have arranged to have my statue smashed into little pieces and scattered; I'm not at all sure I could have recovered from that. Certainly it would have taken a long time, and probably by then Yang would have been deemed the winner and crowned King.

As dawn dawned, I was able to sit up. Pook gave a neigh of pleasure; his faith had been justified! But I was far from well, for my legs and my left arm remained stone, and my skull felt sort of rocky. Usually my healing accelerated as it neared completion; this time it was stalling.

I realized that my talent had been severely strained. I had been savaged twice in the tarasque's maze, and killed twice by Threnody's poison and the fall into the chasm, and this was the fifth bad accident in two days or so. I had never been killed before faster than once a day, and usually not that frequently. Also, these had been pretty thorough killings, not simple to heal. So my talent had at last exhausted itself and was unable to complete the job on my body.

Well, I couldn't blame it. In a few hours or days, I was sure my magic would recover its strength and polish off the remaining stone; meanwhile, I would have to function on an as-was basis. In retrospect I conclude that my talent, having expended its last gasp getting me mostly restored, lost track of the job and assumed that I was supposed to be partly stone, for it did not rush to complete the job when it could have. Just as a man coming into a strange house does not realize if a chair is out of place, my reviving talent did not realize that the stone foot and hand were wrong. But this is only conjecture, long after the fact; I don't really understand magic.