The Color of Her Panties Page 4

  "Yes."

  "That must be what Che Centaur is fated to accomplish: getting you to be chief. That certainly would change the history of Xanth."

  "Yes. Now what do you have interesting to tell?"

  The demoness made an expansive gesture. Her arms seemed to jump from one position to another in a series of placements, instead of smoothly the way mortal arms did. "Only that there is another group of three traveling to see the Good Magician. They are Mela Merwoman, Okra Ogress, and Ida Human. Only the other two don't know yet that Ida is to be part of their party."

  "Mela Merwoman," Che said thoughtfully. "Isn't she the one who—?"

  "Yes, the color of whose panties represents the Question the Good Magician couldn't answer. It seems the time is coming for her to don them. She doesn't know this, of course; she's entirely innocent, which is a paradoxical appellation to apply to such a brute."

  "Such a what?"

  "Animal, beast, critter, freak, monster—"

  "Creature?"

  "Whatever," Metria agreed crossly. "How come you didn't stumble over 'paradoxical appellation'?"

  "I am a centaur. Such vocabulary is natural to me."

  "Well, I stumbled," Jenny said. "What does it mean?"

  Metria was pleased. "It means that this is the only way in which Mela is innocent. When it comes to males, she—oops, just how old are you?"

  "Fourteen," Jenny said, just as crossly as Metria had been before. "I haven't joined the Adult Conspiracy."

  Metria looked her over. "But you're about to. It isn't just a matter of age. After all, mice grow up and join in a matter of weeks."

  "But why should Mela Merwoman's excursion be of interest to us?" Che asked.

  "Well, she isn't, of course. Your kind has no interest in panties, and the girls already know about them. But Okra Ogress is of interest to Jenny Elf."

  Jenny was startled. "She is?"

  "Yes. Aren't you aware of the rationale behind your arrival in Xanth?"

  "It was an accident. I was trying to catch Sammy, and we wound up in Xanth."

  "It was no accident. You were chosen to come here. Someone had to be Jenny in Xanth, and you were the one."

  Jenny was flustered. "I don't understand."

  "There were two finalists: a foreign elf and a local ogress. The elf was chosen, so you were guided through the hole in Xanth, and the ogre girl was dumped."

  "Chosen?" Jenny asked, bewildered.

  "Someone wanted a Jenny here, so she was brought. That's why the Muses were so interested; they hadn't done it." "But then the ogress—"

  "Had to take whatever name and role were left over. So Okra Ogress is a minor character, and not too pleased about it. It should be interesting when you two meet."

  "When we meet!" Jenny exclaimed, appalled.

  "Maybe it will happen at the Good Magician's castle. Ida, of course, is even more remarkable, in a weirder way. So the future of that trio is a good deal more intriguing than your future. With that interesting news I leave you." Metria faded out.

  "You were right," Gwenny said. "We don't like her truth. Who wants to meet an ogress?"

  "Nevertheless, we learned something unexpected," Che said. "When I started to ask about Mela Merwoman, I was thinking of the way she kidnapped Prince Dolph, intending to marry him when he came of age. But Metria told me something of which I had no inkling; it must be known only to the demons. Now at last we know the Question the Good Magician could not answer."

  "But that's such a simple Question," Gwenny said. "Any magic mirror could answer it, just by looking ahead."

  "There must be more to it than we know," Che said.

  Then they both looked at Jenny, who was oddly silent. "You don't have to meet any ogress, Jenny," Che said reassuringly.

  "It isn't that. It's that I didn't know I was chosen. That someone else got excluded. I didn't mean to do that. I thought it was just an accident, my coming here."

  "You didn't exclude anyone," Che said. "You have no responsibility for that."

  "Still, I feel guilty. That poor ogre girl."

  Gwenny laughed. "Poor ogress! That's impossible. All ogres are brutes."

  "How do we know?" Jenny asked.

  Gwenny exchanged a glance with Che. It was evident that Jenny had not had much experience with ogres.

  Che changed the subject. "We must build our raft."

  "That's right!" Jenny agreed. "I forgot about Sammy. I hope I can find him." She hurried off again, in the direction the cat had gone.

  This time the other two followed her. The three spread out, so as to be able to cover more territory. The little orange cat could be anywhere. He was able to find anything except his way back from wherever he went. That was why Jenny was so careful about letting him go in strange territory. The demoness had appeared at just the wrong time, perhaps by no accident.

  But it was all right. Sammy was just a short distance away, playing in a pile of vines. There was a quiescent tangle tree nearby. They were able to recreate what had happened: an ogre had passed by, and the tangle tree had made a grab for it, and the ogre had twisted off a number of tentacles and thrown them away. Such incidents occurred all the time in Xanth, because neither ogres nor tangle trees were noted for their intelligence or caution.

  They hauled the drying vines to their assembled wood. They bound the wood together until they had a ragged but serviceable raft. It took only half the day, because it was no fancy job.

  They hauled the raft to the water, clambered onto it, and used deadwood poles to push off. When the water became deep, they used deadwood paddles to move the raft forward.

  "I hope Fracto doesn't spy us," Jenny said.

  There was a rumble of thunder. Horrified, they paddled madly, but the raft moved as slowly as it could. The inanimate tended to be perverse.

  The thunder turned out to be a false alarm. It wasn't Fracto, but a routine action of offshore clouds that did not come closer. They nudged on toward the shore to the south of the Gap.

  Then the current caught them. The raft was carried out to sea, and they were unable to stop it. They watched helplessly as they moved away from the land.

  But there was an island. The current carried them tantalizingly close to it. Yet they were afraid to try to swim to it, because there could be lurking water monsters waiting to gobble them.

  The raft passed the northern tip of the island and started out into the larger part of the sea. They watched despairingly. As adventures went, this was a bleak one.

  There was a breeze here, blowing from the sea toward the land. But it wasn't enough to reverse the effect of the current. It merely slowed their outward travel, prolonging the agony.

  Then Gwenny had an idea. "Che! You can make the raft light! Then we can use the wind to get to the island!"

  Che did it. He flicked every log of the raft with his tail, and the raft rose in the water, floating very high. Then they braced themselves and stood with their backs broadside to the wind. Now the current had less raft to work on, and the wind had more to work on. The raft slowed, jogged a bit, twisted around, and finally nudged back toward the island. It was working!

  Finally they reached the beach and jumped back onto firm land. They hauled the light raft after them, for they would need it to cross from the island to the mainland. But meanwhile it was getting dark, and they had to make camp for the night.

  "Find us a good place to sleep, Sammy," Jenny said, putting her cat down on the sand. Because this was an island, she didn't need to worry as much about his getting lost.

  Sammy bounded toward the center of the island. They followed. And there, suddenly, they spied a tent.

  "That looks familiar," Che said.

  "It certainly does," Gwenny agreed. "It's almost as if we have been here before."

  "Playing in the sand," Jenny agreed.

  Then it came to them. "This is the Isle of View!" Gwenny exclaimed. "Where Prince Dolph married Electra!"

  "And that tent is where they summoned t
he stork," Che agreed.

  "So well that the stork brought them two babies," Jenny added.

  "Dawn and Eve," Che said.

  They looked at each other. A naughty thought flitted between them. "Do you think—" Gwenny started.

  "That if we spent the night here—" Jenny continued.

  "That we might learn the secret of summoning the stork?" Che concluded.

  "Let's find out!" Gwenny said.

  So it was that they spent the night in comfort, using the same pillows that Dolph and Electra had left. They had a fine pillow fight, for there was no adult to tell them no.

  But they didn't learn the secret of summoning the stork. It seemed that Dolph and Electra had taken it with them. They had joined the dread Adult Conspiracy. What a pity.

  In the morning they lightened the raft again, hauled it to the east shore of the island, and paddled it across to the mainland. A sea monster poked its head out of the water and eyed them, but a huge roc bird just happened to fly by, and the sea monster ducked out of sight.

  Gwenny realized that the winged monsters were indeed keeping an eye on them. That left her with mixed feelings. She wanted to make it on her own, but still it was comforting to know that they would not be gobbled by a monster. So maybe this was a reasonable compromise: the three of them were being allowed to proceed without interference from either hostile or friendly creatures. Maybe they would have less need for protection as they gained experience.

  They found a magic path and followed it inland. It would lead to Castle Roogna, because all the paths of the region did. Gwenny had visited the castle once, with her companions after Dolph and Electra's wedding. It was an impressive edifice. Much nicer, if the truth be confessed, than Goblin Mountain.

  Suppose she just came to Castle Roogna, and didn't leave it? Then she would lose her chance to be lady chief, but she would be safe.

  She shoved away the temptation. It wasn't that she wanted to be chief, it was that she had to be, so as to change the course of goblin history, and therefore Xanth history. It was her duty and her destiny. She dreaded it, but she could not flee from it.

  Then she realized something. She had been making decisions. She had thought of a good idea that got them to shore. She was learning how to be a leader. She might not be very good at it, yet, but she was getting better. Maybe, just maybe, by the end of this journey, she would have learned it well enough. So there was a scintilla, or perhaps even two iotas, of hope for her.

  So, resolutely, she proceeded on toward Castle Roogna.

  CHAPTER 3.

  Okra

  Okra's mind tended to keep pace with her body. Since that was now rowing hard, she was thinking hard, but since there wasn't much to think about at the moment, she thought about her past, seeming almost to relive it.

  She had been delivered by the stork fourteen years before, to a small community of ogres still living beside Lake Ogre-Chobee. It seemed that they had gotten turned around during the migration to the Ogre-Fen-Ogre Fen and returned here without quite realizing. After a few decades they had caught on, but by then it was too late to catch up to the main party, so they had remained.

  Okra's ogress mother, disappointed by Okra's pipsqueak size, had tried to compensate by giving her a name to grow into: Okra Cordata Saxifraga Goatsbeard Ganas Ogress. Unfortunately she hadn't grown enough and was singularly small and plain for her kind. She didn't even have any warts or fangs; her stare would never curdle milk. She was also embarrassingly weak; she had to use both hands to crush juice from a rock. But her worst failure was in her mind: she was not nearly stupid enough. This defect had a minor compensation: she was smart enough to hide this fault and to pretend to be only a little less stupid than the other ogre whelps. But she could not hide it from herself, and it was her constant shame.

  Okra tended to stay close to home, so as not to be teased by her peers. Other ogres thought that peers were wooden structures that projected into the water of Lake Ogre-Chobee and had no concern about them, but Okra knew better. Peers were other ogres her age, and they were the very worst company for her. She was content to stir the pot and scrape the dirt off the floor, and to think her frustratingly smart thoughts. If she ever let slip how unstupid she was, they would throw her away.

  But some events she had been unable to escape. Her stylishly brutish parents had taken her to the monster marriage mash of Conan the Librarian and Tasmania Devil. Conan was said to have been able to squeeze a big dictionary into a single word, and to be able to use two heavy tomes to pound the civilization right out of any creature in short order. Tasmania was hailed as the meanest she-canine of an ogress of her generation. So it was a perfect match. Alas, the marriage did not work out well. Conan was too literate for Tasmania's taste, and she had a restless spirit. When the blood was on the moon she would feed him wild poison mushrooms that she ground up and mixed into his sea oat cakes. He loved the taste of those cakes, but the poison only gave him romantic notions. She wished he would lie down and die so that she could marry her first cousin Tasmaniac and gain status, but instead he was fired up for twice the usual amount of stork summoning, and their family grew at an ogreish rate.

  But that was irrelevant. It was at this wedding that Okra's mother, Fern Kudzu, had gotten Okra's horrorscope cast in iron. The ogre tribe's midwife, who helped point out the right families when the stork couldn't tell one from another, was also the diviner. She announced that the runes, ox entrails, and stars pointed to good news and bad news. The good news was that Okra would eventually become a significant figure in Xanth. The bad news was that she had been cursed by a stray random accidental curse that escaped from a curse fiend without finding its proper object, and so had a magic talent.

  Kudzu had reacted to this outrage as any ogress would: she had smashed the diviner into the lake, where she had disappeared without significant trace; only a few fragments of bones showed at the water's edge, and the chobees soon gulped those down. She jammed the iron cast down into the ground so deeply that molten lava filled in the hole it left. Then she hauled Okra back into the midst of the festivities—the mashing and bashing, the slam dancing, and the floor show with the drunken harpies harping—and pretended that the horrorscope had never been cast.

  But Okra knew better. Ashamed, she slipped away from the festivities and hid in the cold, slimy, rat-infested cellar. That was a pleasant place, but still someone might find her, so she went down the winding narrow stone steps, down, down to the main kitchen where the wedding feast had been prepared. Pieces of chopped monsters lay scattered around; they must have fallen off the platters. As Okra's reddened eyes grew accustomed to the smoky gloom she saw sea oat cakes, both plain and poison (tastes differed), strewn on the stone floor. Someone had spilled a keg of wine dregs all over the kitchen table, the floor, and a drunken rat who lay in a stupor under the table. It was a very pleasant retreat, and Okra was able to hide there until the commotion above ground down into a dull roar.

  That was one of Okra's early memories, and not unpleasant as ogre experiences went. But the knowledge that she was cursed with a magic talent haunted her thereafter. All ogres had magic, of course, and plenty of it; it was magic that gave them their vaunted strength, ugliness, and stupidity. But a separate talent? That was awful! No wonder she was small and plain and unstupid; her natural magic had been siphoned away to make this other talent. But maybe with luck she would never discover what it was.

  Her other big memory was when she was thirteen. It rained, as it did every afternoon in this season. Thick steamy clouds wet on those below with torrents of sheets of deluge that drenched the hot rocks and cooled the hot pools. Steam puffed up, but the freezing rain sliced on through, making a turmoil of vapor that suffused the caves and made it almost impossible to breathe. It was wonderful.

  The dining room smelled of spoiling cabbage and stewed carcasses. That, too, was wonderful. Okra mussed up her unogreishly blond hair so that it would better hide the IQ vine circlet she wore as a wreath, and went i
nside. IQ vines had little effect on most ogres, because twice nothing remained nothing, but it helped Okra be alert enough to conceal her other liabilities. One was asthma; a siege of it had somehow found her, and it refused to depart. So she had to pretend to be fashionably hoarse, though actually she was having trouble breathing.

  She remained naive enough to fancy that a birthday was important to anyone other than the owner of it. This was the day that cured her of that notion. It was just a pretext for another bash, and a new horror. She would later wish she had never had that birthday, but at the time she hadn't known how it would turn out. She had retained a tatter of innocence.

  In an effort to sweeten the air, Okra's grandmother, that great burgundy queen Opuntia, had arranged to intermix heaps of wilted flowers with the rushes strewn about the dining room. There was a riotous show of color: white magnolias, yellow, orange, and red hibiscus, deep purple jacaranda, bougainvillea, and the famous fragrant lavender blooms from which Grandmother Ogre's medicinal soap was made. All of this was quickly trampled under the humongous hairy feet of the ogre clan as they pounded in to eat. Soon the dining room looked like an elegant woman dressed in soiled and tattered rags, feeling somewhat the worse for wear.

  The door from the kitchen opened, and the old servant Troika Troll tromped in, bearing the largest soup tureen.

  Behind her other servants came, each bending under the oppressive weight of the food piled on their serving platters. The last person in was Magpie, Okra's tutor. She was in black leather and black feathers. Her outfit was dated by a century or two, but that was understandable, for Magpie was a demoness who had served similarly in many places and times. She had even been at the fabulous human Castle Roogna, with Princess Rose, serving at her wedding to Good Magician Humfrey. Later Rose had gone to Hell in a handbasket, but remained a good person; Hell needed more roses, and roses were her talent. Who knew what else Magpie had seen during her immortal existence! No wonder she liked being a servant.

  But someone tripped and dropped a platter, and its contents spewed across the table and floor. "Incompetent!" screamed the cook. Enraged, she threw crockery, handfuls of ground pepper, and finally Okra's birthday cake across the room. That caused the ogres to think that there was a food fight in progress, and they gleefully pitched in, filling the air with flying food. The original purpose of the party was forgotten. Now the dining room smelled not only of spoiled cabbage and wilted flowers, but also of every other type of bad food.