Crewel Lye (20 page)

“Yes. And they always deliver to the woman, no matter how hard the man works for the baby. I don't think that's fair.”

She laughed. “Many things in life and magic aren't fair, barbarian! So this meant that if the King wanted a baby, he had to make arrangements through some woman other than the Queen. I think that was in his mind when the dusky demoness came to him. Maybe there were other things in his mind, too--men can be quite superficial about such things--but I must believe that he really did want me.”

“Of course he did!” I exclaimed. “And he wants you back home now! That must be why he agreed to this--”

“And I don't think he knew the nature of my mother. You see, a demon can assume any form. So she became the most beautiful woman anyone could imagine, midnight of hair and eye, perfect in every physical detail--”

“You favor her,” I said.

“Be quiet, imbecile!” she said angrily. “My mother was a terrible creature! She had absolutely no conscience. Demons are soulless; they have no human values, just human passions. She wanted to make mischief for the human folk, and she knew the most telling way to do that was to compromise and humiliate the human King. So she assumed a ravishing form and came to him with a story about being outcast from her distant village and needing help and protection, and when she got him alone--oh, you don't know what lying is until you've seen a demon do it! She--well, she got him to help summon the stork, and the stork took the order for me, and when my mother was assured of that, she laughed and changed into the semblance of a Mundane monster called a crock-o-dile so he would know what she was without any further illusion, and then she became a puff of laughing gas and faded out. The King was mortified when he realized he had been with a demoness, but it was too late.”

“Poor King Gromden,” I agreed. Now I remembered that there had been a passing mention of scandal at Castle Roogna; that reference was coming clear.

“And when the stork delivered me, she had the other part of her terrible fun--causing everyone in Castle Roogna to know what the King had done. She brought me openly to him in broad daylight, when the King and all the people of the castle were at dinner, and set me down before him, saying, 'Here is your bastard baby, 0 adulterous King! Dare you deny it?' And the King, being an honest man, whatever other weaknesses he may have had, did not deny it, perhaps in part because he knew I would fare ill indeed if he refused to accept me. In that sense I was the cause of his loss of respect in Xanth. Then my demon-mother vanished in another puff of smoke, only her cruel laugh remaining. She had deceived the King, ruined his reputation, and forever finished any decent relation he might have had with the Queen. After that, the people associated with the castle began drifting away, each one finding some important business elsewhere, and of course the King could not say nay. He had been rendered impotent by the crudest of lies. When the Queen cursed me, there were fewer than a dozen people remaining there.”

“There are only a couple now,” I said.

“Only the ultimately loyal,” she said wryly. “People resemble demons in some respects, but they react more slowly and make excuses for their dereliction, while the demons act swiftly and without apology. I wish I could be with my father now and provide the support he needs. But I can not; that curse prevents.” She shook her head as if clearing it of distress. “So now you see why I had to go. I don't blame my foster mother the Queen. My presence was demoralizing the whole region, simply because of my origin; I was a constant reminder of the King's peccadillo. The King never held this against me, but the others did--at the same time as they condemned him for that error. They magnified it grotesquely--” Threnody paused to choke back her rising emotion. “I don't think much of the average human being.”

“It's better among the barbarians,” I said. “We would never--”

“It was getting difficult for the King to govern Xanth effectively. The Queen had no love for the King, but she did see the need for Xanth to be unified. She knew that could not be while I remained at Castle Roogna, and she knew the King would never send me away himself, so she arranged for me to take myself away. Her curse made it plain to me that I was destroying Xanth. I had been unable to see it until she made it literal. If I was going to destroy Xanth as the seat of effective government, why not bring the castle down, too, and complete the job? So she was right; she did what had to be done, and I don't hate her for it. I had been a child; I grew up in a few hours and I left Castle Roogna forever.”

I felt the impact other story, but I remained suspicious. “You said she was jealous of you.”

“She was. I don't say she wasn't petty in some ways; that's part of what had alienated her from the King before my mother stepped in. I was beautiful, while she was not, and the King loved me and not her; that was grounds for resentment, though I had not intended any evil. She never made any attempt to relate to me, and so I had neither mother nor foster mother. She shares some of the blame. No one's hands are entirely clean in this. But she was right about me, and about the need to make me leave.”

“Then why did she curse the King to forget why you left?”

Threnody shrugged. “I exaggerated. My father never understood why I left. He was absolutely blind to any negative thing about me. I was his favorite and only child, and he wanted me to inherit the throne after him. Of course that was impossible for several reasons, and I always knew that, but it shows how he felt. No curse was needed to make him forget. He simply refused, and still refuses, to believe that my presence is bad for Castle Roogna in any literal or figurative manner. He thinks of me as his darling little girl.”

Some darling! But I knew how fathers could dote on their daughters; I would, if I had the chance. “Well, aren't you?”

“Damn it, I'm half demon!” she flared. “Have you any idea what that means?”

I shrugged. “That you're a crossbreed. That you have some human and some demon traits. Xanth has a lot of crossbreeds. I happen to know of an upcoming human-elven crossbreed--”

“You fool, it means I have no soul!” There was the anger of despair in her tone.

“I don't know much about souls,” I said. “But I thought they came with human ancestry. Since your father is human--”

“A human parent means a soul is possible, not that it is guaranteed. I suppose the chances were even for me--but since the delivery was to the demoness, not the human man, I lost. I didn't get one.” Her voice was flat and cold.

“How do you know?” I asked, genuinely curious. I had some concern for the son the stork would bring to Blue-bell; would he have no soul?

“Do people with souls kill passing strangers?” she demanded.

I pondered, taken aback by the point. “I'm human,” I said after a bit. “I'm ready to kill strangers if they attack me. I'm a barbarian warrior; I live by my sword. It depends on the circumstance. In war--”

“This isn't war! You came to me injured, and I poisoned you and dumped you into the Gap.”

There was that. “But you said you were sorry.”

“Big deal! I'm also sorry you returned to capture me.”

“But demons have no conscience,” I pointed out. “They're never sorry.”

“You're wrong, ignoramus. They can be sorry--when a plot turns out bad. Like my killing of you. It didn't work, so my effort was for nothing. I'm sorry you ever set foot on this misguided mission.”

“But you said you were sorry before you knew I would recover,” I persisted. “I remember hearing that, just before I died.”

“I say a lot of things,” she said irritably, but she seemed slightly mollified. “I also inherit the demon capacity for lying, the more cruelly the better. You can't afford to believe anything I say.”

I found this confusing, but there had to be some truth in it. If a person tells you he's a truth-teller, he may be lying; but if he tells you he's a liar, he has to be telling the truth, ironically. Because a truth-teller could never call himself a liar; he could become a liar by that statement. A liar, in contrast, can't lie all the time, because that makes it too obvious; people start interpreting what he says the opposite way, so he becomes a truth-teller in reverse. It's confusing, but Magician Yin had helped clarify this matter for me. So I had to believe that Threnody could lie, and that therefore she spoke the truth when she warned me to be wary of anything she said. “Maybe so,” I agreed. “But you could still have a soul. Some human beings are liars, like Magician Yang, and you're more human than demon.”

“No, I'm not! I can't love!”

“Now that's a lie right there! What about your father? You said you love him.”

“I lied!” she cried without conviction.

“I don't believe you. I think you're lying now. You do love him. Therefore you can love, and you do have a--”

“You're a fool to believe me!”

“Then why do you care what happens to the King, or to Castle Roogna? Why don't you just come along with me without protest, and watch the castle crumble, and laugh as it falls? What does any soulless one care about the welfare of Xanth?”

She looked at me with a peculiar mixture of relief and frustration, but did not answer my questions. I was satisfied; she might be a liar, but she was more human than demon. Her humanity, ironically, was proved by the manner in which she opposed me.

And what of my soul? If I believed her, I could not afford to deliver her to Castle Roogna. So I had to believe that she had lied about the curses and just didn't want to marry Yin. I couldn't blame her for wanting to make her own life instead of getting tied down to a family; I was that way myself. But that was no reason for me to abrogate my own mission.

I was, of course, a fool in several respects, but I didn't know that then.

We moved on, and gradually the terrain changed. The trees and brush thinned out, and the ground became sandy. “You'll never get through here,” Threnody said.

“Why not?”

“I know this region. This is slowsand.”

“Seems ordinary to me,” I said, undaunted. “You'll see, barbarian,” she said confidently. The patches of sand became larger, until finally they linked and we had to walk through them, rather than remain on rock and turf. But as Pook and I stepped on the sand, we slowed. Our steps became measured, then dragging; we seemed unable to move at normal speed. “What's this?” I asked, surprised.

“I told you,” Threnody said. “Slowsand.”

Now I understood. “It slows us down!”

“To a crawl. We'll starve before we get through here.” Fortunately, this was only a thin barrier, with more hard land beyond. After a tedious trek, Pook and I made it out of the sand and resumed normal velocity. Now we stayed off the sand, however circuitous the route had to be. But this became difficult and finally impossible. The level region between the mountains and the chasm turned into a desert of slowsand. We had to go around it--but there was no way through the chasm to the north, so it had to be the slopes to the south.

We meandered that way, our progress slowed almost as much by the deviousness of the necessary route as by the sand itself. The last section before the slope had a strand of sand cutting us off; Pook hurdled it--and slowed in midair so that he seemed to be floating. He wasn't; he was merely in mid-jump. But it took about fifteen seconds for him to make it to the opposite bank. I jumped, too, with the same effect, so we were both crawling through the air. The slowsand affected creatures above it as well as on it.

“Won't do you much good,” Threnody said smugly. “Farther along, there's quicksand.”

Quicksand. Obviously that would speed us up as much as the slowsand slowed us down. “I'll risk it,” I said gruffly.

“Suit yourself, idiot.”

“Anything that happens to Pook and me happens to you, too,” I pointed out.

“Since I'd rather die than betray my father by returning, that's all right.”

We got well clear of the sand by ascending the gentle slope of the foot of the mountain range. But now dusk was looming. We stopped under a spreading chest-nut tree whose chests were loaded with nuts; no problem about food here. I unbound Threnody's feet so she could dismount. She reacted without gratitude. “How do you expect me to eat or whatever with my hands tied?”

“Whatever?” I asked.

“I'll do it behind the tree.”

Oh. Embarrassed, I untied her hands. “But you must give me your word you won't try to escape.”

“Sure,” she said wryly, chafing her wrists. Then she went behind the tree, while I reached up to harvest a chest of nuts.

It turned out to be a fine selection: Q-nuts and P-nuts; green pistachios; blue, red, and hazel nuts; soft, yellow butter nuts; sandy beach nuts; even a small brown cocoanut; plus a few bolts for good measure; and even some washers. That was convenient; I used a washer to wash my grubby hands.

After a time, I realized that Threnody hadn't returned from her errand behind the tree. I hesitated to go and look, since I never really did understand how women managed these things and preferred not to inquire, so I called, phrasing it discreetly: “Hey--did everything come out all right?”

There was no answer. Suddenly nervous, I went and looked.

Sure enough. Threnody was gone.

I had been a fool again. Well, I would just have to track her down. I could follow the traces through the brush and weeds of the slope, and if she had gone down into the slowsand plain, I'd be able to see her, despite the encroaching darkness.

I found no traces. Perplexed, I hesitated. Could she be so adept at hiding that she left no trail? Then my lingering intelligence provided me a notion; use my lingering compass sense! I tuned it in--and the arrow pointed up into the tree.

I smiled. That was a neat ploy--hide, and when I dashed off in a fruitless search for her, she could come down and proceed without pursuit. Whatever her half-demon parentage might have cost her, it wasn't cleverness.

Well, two could play at that game. I finished my meal of nuts, then climbed the tree myself. I settled on a comfortable lower branch and slept.

After an hour or so, she climbed quietly down. She tried to pass me, but of course I woke and caught her leg. “Going somewhere, woman?” I inquired.