Dragon on a Pedestal (27 page)

The zombie stiffened, her flesh congealing.

“Close your eyes!” Chem cried. “She’s not veiled!”

Irene’s eyes snapped closed before she raised her head. “Gorgon!” she cried. “It’s I, Irene! Put on your veil!”

“Why?” the Gorgon asked.

“Because otherwise you’ll turn us all to stone!”

“That’s right, I will!” The Gorgon agreed, sounding surprised.

“Of course you will!” Irene snapped, shaken by her near escape. She had assumed—but assuming could be treacherous, as the episode at the love spring had so recently shown. “Why weren’t you wearing your veil? You know you can’t go around barefaced!”

“I—forgot,” the Gorgon said, as if remembering something that might have been important a long time ago. “Very well; I’m veiled now.”

Irene pried open one eye, though uncertain whether this would protect her if she saw the Gorgon’s face. Maybe only half of her would turn to stone! But it was all right now; her friend was safely covered.

“How could you forget a thing like that?” Irene demanded, still shaken.

“Well, I was just walking along, looking for something—I don’t remember what—when—it’s all unclear. I didn’t remember you, until—”

“A forget-whorl!” Chem exclaimed. “We’re back in their region! She got tagged by—”

“And forgot her mission!” Irene agreed.

“My mission?” the Gorgon asked, perplexed.

“To find and rescue your son Hugo!”

The Gorgon’s mouth gaped under the veil. “Hugo!”

“And
we
forgot we were back among the rampaging whorls,” Chem said. “Between her forced forgetting and our carelessness, we almost came to considerable grief. But her forgetfulness doesn’t seem total, because her memory is coming back as we remind her.”

“A glancing blow,” Irene agreed. “She must have brushed the fringe of it, not getting a full dose. But the encounter was potentially deadly to us! I very nearly was turned to—” She broke off, remembering the zombie behind her. Zora had looked into the face of the Gorgon!

“Zora took your curse!” Chem said. “She has—”

Xavier and Grundy rode up. “Lucky you weren’t stoned,” the golem remarked. “I told Xav and Xap to stay clear when I saw what was up.”

“Zora looked,” Irene said dully. “She suffered the misfortune slated for me.”

Xavier jumped down and lifted the zombie away from Chem’s side, where she was half hanging. “She can’t be dead!” he cried. “She wasn’t alive!”

“The seeds of mischief sown by the Furies are deadly,” Chem murmured. “We sought to avoid their curses, but only transferred them to the most innocent one among us.”

The centaur was being kind. She had not been present, so she shared none of the blame. But the damage had been done.

“Wake, Zora!” Xavier exclaimed, holding the stiff zombie upright. “You don’t deserve none of this! You never harmed nobody!”

“Yet there is a philosophical alignment,” Chem continued. “Xavier’s curse and Irene’s curse—love and death—visited on the same person. The only cure for the one is the other. Zora isn’t suffering now.”

“The hell with that!” Xavier cried. “I won’t let her die, not after what she done for me! Zora, come back!” And he took the zombie statue in his arms and kissed her on the mouth.

The others watched, saddened yet fatalistic, knowing that the man meant well but that the woman was doomed—and had been doomed from the time she absorbed the curses. The terrible Furies had had their way.

Then something amazing happened. The statue began to sag.

Irene stared. Stone couldn’t sag! Even zombie stone crumbled or flaked away; it didn’t really soften.

Xavier was still kissing her, holding her against him. The vital warmth of his body was almost tangible. And Zora was returning to her half-life.

“Look at that!” Grundy said. “The Gorgon can’t stone zombies!”

Chem turned her human segment so her eyes could meet Irene’s gaze. “Perhaps it is true. Zora was immune to the stare of the Python. She can’t see very well, so perhaps it is like a veil between her and visual magic. She may have suffered only partial petrification—and she was not as solid as we to begin with. But—”

“There—there is a rationale?” Irene whispered numbly.

“If you were stone, or mostly stone, and the man you loved embraced you and kissed you and begged you to return—would you respond?”

Irene thought of herself becoming stone, and her husband Dor kissing her. “I suppose—if there were any way—any way at all—” Irene agreed faintly. “Love has power we hardly understand—”

Xavier broke the kiss. “I told you I wouldn’t let her die!” he said.

Zora was flesh again. She stood stiffly, blinking as if her eyelids were heavy. Her body had been too loose before; now it was too firm. But she was more flesh than stone.

They could not argue with Xavier’s claim, though Irene was uncertain which explanation had more to do with it. The Gorgon’s face turned living people to stone—but a zombie was undead, a different matter. Yet some things did affect zombies, as they had seen.

“But what have you restored her to?” Chem asked. “A hopeless love?”

Xavier released Zora, who stood without difficulty, looking about her. She seemed more solid now, as if the Gorgon’s magic had stiffened her decaying flesh to healthy flesh. She appeared more alive than she had ever been, ironically.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Xavier said. “About the good things she’s been doing for us all. I’m not awful smart about women, but it sure seems to me a good zombie is better than a bad woman. This one is awful good—and you’d hardly know she’s a zombie now.”

It was true. Zora was still firming. Love and/or the Gorgon’s magic had transformed her to something considerably more human than before. Her facial features had become both clear and animate, her body strong. She was indeed a woman, and not an unattractive one.

“But you—” Irene protested weakly. “You don’t love—”

“I know where the love spring is,” Xavier said. “I know what’s right. Nothing to stop me from taking a drink—I was going to do that before. It’s supposed to be my curse anyway. I never was one to let someone else pay my debts.”

Irene’s respect for him increased again. Xavier had a conscience and a rather clear notion of what was required. He had decided to honor his mother’s wish that he settle down, and he had chosen the one to settle with. This was a strange and unexpected union—but it did make a certain sense. And it nicely reversed the double curse Zora had absorbed. “Good luck,” she whispered.

Xavier turned to Zora. “Do you like to fly?” he asked.

“I do,” she said clearly. Her teeth showed as hard and clear as polished stone when she smiled.

“That’s a most artistic proposal,” Chem murmured.

Xavier lifted Zora to Xav’s back. It was evident she weighed more than she had, but his strength more than sufficed. Then he mounted the hippogryph behind her, putting his arms about her. “We’ll take the seeds to Maw,” he told Irene. “Zora’s carrying ’em anyway, and I’ve got the feather. You folks can go on about your business.”

“Thank you,” Irene breathed, still dazed.

The hippogryph spread his beautiful wings.

“We shall meet again,” Chem told Xap.

Xap nodded his beak, then pumped. He rose into the air, facing back toward the love spring.

“Your mother won’t like this!” Grundy called after them.

“That’s for sure!” Xavier called back, grinning. “But she can’t stop me from being a dutiful son!”

They disappeared into the sky. Nothing more needed to be said. Irene felt tears in her eyes, and they were not those of grief.

“I
am the youngest and prettiest and sweetest daughter of Gorbage Goblin, chief of the Gapside Goblins,” Glory repeated as she delicately chewed on the blackberries, grayberries, brownberries, guavas, and sugarplums Hugo conjured for her appetite. “I am in love with a wonderful creature.”

“Love—that’s poin-ant or peek-ant?” Ivy asked.

“Wonderfully sad,” Glory said firmly.

“Love isn’t sad,” Ivy said, thinking of her family. She was glad for this chance to rest, since she wasn’t used to walking the long distances she had covered in the past two days. “My father says love is fun, and my mother says it depends on the time of day.”

Glory smiled. “They surely know. But you see, this is forbidden love. That makes it sad.”

“How can love be forbidden?” Hugo asked. “My father says anything is possible with magic, except maybe paradox, and he’s working on that.”

“What is possible is not necessarily permissible,” Glory said. “Love really shouldn’t be forbidden. But after all, he’s not a goblin.” She bit into some more fruit. It was evident that when the goblin girl said “famished” she meant very hungry indeed.

“Well, my father says goblins are related to elves, gnomes, and dwarves,” Hugo said. “They’re of modified humanoid stock, he says. So they can interbreed if they want to, and when they run afoul of a love spring—”

“That’s true,” Glory said.
“Any
two species can interbreed in Xanth, but this is generally not voluntary. Even if the individuals approve, others of their kinds do not. And some liaisons are expressly forbidden. I love a harpy.”

Both children gazed at her blankly.

Glory sighed. “I see I’ll have to explain. The goblins and harpies are enemies. The enmity goes back over a thousand years.”

“You must be older than you look,” Ivy said, perplexed.

Glory smiled again. She was extremely pretty to begin with, and when she smiled, the forest seemed to brighten. “No, I’m only sixteen. I mean the quarrel is ancient.”

Ivy’s brow wrinkled. “My father said something about a war a long time ago. He was there, when they were building Castle Roogna. A spell—”

Glory frowned delicately. “You really shouldn’t fib, Ivy. You know he couldn’t have been there.”

“Well, he was in the tapestry with this big spider—”

“Oh, you mean he watched it on the magic tapestry in Castle Roogna! I have heard about that and would love to see it someday.”

“I watch it all the time,” Ivy said. “But I fall asleep before it gets interesting.”

“I gather your father works at Castle Roogna.”

“Yes, most of the time.”

Glory shrugged, not really interested. “Well, once goblins and harpies existed in peace. They even shared caves. The goblins used the floors and the harpies used the ceiling perches. But in time, it got crowded, and the goblins complained about the droppings. You see, goblins sleep with their mouths open so they can snore properly, and—” She shrugged again; She did it very well. “The harpies got angry and put a curse on our males, making them ugly—well, really it was on the females, making them
prefer
ugly goblins. I understand it is much easier to apply a curse of perception than one of actual physical change—that’s why illusion is so popular. Anyway, the girls stayed pretty, but the goblin men, owing to sexual selection—ugh! So the goblins got even for that by luring away all the harpy males—who, it seems, were partial to fully fleshed legs, unlike the chicken legs of the harpy females—until there were no males left and the harpies were all female.”

Now Hugo’s brow wrinkled. “All female? But how—?”

“I don’t know exactly how they reproduced. Maybe they laid parthenogenetic eggs.”

“What?”

“Harpies hatch from eggs,” Glory explained patiently. “If there’s no male, the eggs may hatch anyway—but only female chicks. Something like that. I’m not much for parthenogenesis myself; it’s not a type of magic I understand. Anyway, they were all female, and mostly old and ugly and bitter, as perhaps they had a right to be. They were absolutely furious at us, though all the goblins had done was get even for what they had done to us. So there was war. All the goblins and our allies on the ground, against all the harpies and their allies in the air. In those days, the goblins and harpies were the most numerous creatures in Xanth and wielded the most power. But after the battle, there were not nearly so many of either, and true human folk became dominant.

“At least the curse was off, and the goblin girls liked handsome males again, and the harpies had a few males. But the damage took a long time to
clear, because there weren’t any handsome male goblins left, which made the girls understandably reluctant. There was only one harpy cock for every hundred or so hens, and all the hens were ugly and dirty, which made the cocks reluctant. So in eight hundred years, the numbers of goblins and harpies have hardly increased. Most goblin males are still ugly, and so are the old harpy hens. During that period they still fought one another, in honor of old grudges, but not so much, because there were so few—and the Gap Chasm interfered.”

Stanley perked up his ears. He remembered the Gap!

“How could the Gap do that?” Hugo asked. “No one even remembered it!”

“That’s the point,” Glory said. “It’s very hard to cross the Gap when you don’t remember it. Especially when there’s a dragon in it who gobbles anyone who tries to pass. So gradually, the goblins settled north of the Gap, the harpies settled south of it, and the warfare diminished. It was really the Gap that brought peace to Xanth.”

Stanley snorted steam that swirled dangerously near her petite feet.

“And the Gap Dragon,” Glory added quickly. Stanley relaxed. “Of course, the harpies could fly over the Gap, so there were some skirmishes—just enough to keep the blood feud alive—but mostly it was pretty quiet for several centuries.”

Stanley might be satisfied, having established the importance of his office to the welfare of Xanth, but Ivy wasn’t. “But you’re across the Gap now!”

“True. But you see, the forget-spell has been breaking up—and anyway, my tribe lives right at the brink of the Gap, so we’re partly immune to the spell. I used to sit on the ledge and look down into the Gap and watch the Dragon charge by, so big and awful. I could see the steam wafting up in frightening clouds.”

Stanley puffed more steam contentedly. He was getting to like this goblin maiden, who certainly looked good enough to eat.

“But recently I saw that the Dragon was gone, so I knew I could cross.” Glory peered at Stanley. “Is he really the Gap Dragon? He’s so small!”