Dragon on a Pedestal (19 page)

The three drew together in a huddle, conferring in unintelligible shrieks and woofs. Then, deciding on a new strategy, the Furies turned, faced the victims, and lifted their left arms in unison, as if to hurl something. But those three left hands were empty.

“Look out!” Grundy yelled. “It’s a curse! The hideous hags are going to throw a—”

The three arms descended, each making a throwing arc. Irene and Xavier hunched down, their shoulders colliding. Zora flung herself back, again interposing her body between the Furies and their victims.

Something like a wind stirred in the grass around them. Irene found herself on the ground, half embracing Xavier, with the body of the zombie against them both.

The vicious Furies had been partially foiled again. Their curse had struck Zora instead of its intended objects. But evidently one curse was all each hag could throw. In moments the three turned and departed, huddling within their wing-cloaks. This horrible siege was over.

Irene got up and dusted herself off. That had been a remarkable escape! She saw Xavier staring up at Zora as if he had never seen her before. “It—the zom—she took the strike meant for me!” he exclaimed incredulously.

“Twice,” Irene agreed. “For me too. Zombies are immune to physical pain and very hard to hurt. They are undead—the revived corpses of once-living people. They’re not bad folk at all, if you can bring yourself to get to know them.” She was speaking for herself as much as for him. This was the second time Zora had saved her, perhaps the second and third times, if she counted the scourge and the curse as separate items.

Zora seemed not to hear them as she unhunched herself and stood more or less erect. The impact of the curse was not visible, but it had to be considerable.

“She must have been some woman when she lived!” Xavier said. “A better person than any of us!”

“Probably so. I never knew her alive. But I gather from what the Furies said that she led a blameless life and was cruelly wronged by one not worthy of her.”

“A man,” Xavier said grimly. “A worm of a man!”

“Yes.” Zora wobbled on her feet, and Irene moved over to take the zombie’s flaccid arm to steady her. “Are you all right, Zora?” she asked solicitously.

“Ccurrsh …” the zombie said.

“You took our curse,” Irene agreed. “What was it? What is supposed to happen to us—to you?”

“I can tell you that,” Grundy said, climbing to his own feet. “I got caught by it.”

Irene realized that was true. The zombie had blocked off the punishment from two of them, but Grundy had been behind her. He had had no protection this time. Yet he seemed functional, so the curse couldn’t be something like instant, total collapse. “Is it—maybe we can nullify it—?”

“It’s a curse of misfortune,” the golem said. “One bad thing is going to happen which will make the victim wish he were dead. I interpreted their screeching; that’s how I knew what they were up to.”

“We’ll protect you from it!” Irene said.

Grundy shook his little head. “I doubt that’s possible, now that the curse has tagged me. The best I can hope for is that you’ll find a way to abate it, once it strikes. And it will be twice for the zombie, because she took your two curses.”

Irene hadn’t thought of that aspect. Of course a curse was not a thing to be sloughed off like a tatter of flesh! “What would make a zombie wish she were dead?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Grundy said. “But I guess we’ll find out when the misfortunes strike.”

All too likely true. Irene looked at Zora with mixed regret and puzzlement. The zombie had been—was
still
a truly nice person, completely self-sacrificing. But what possible penalty could she pay for her kindness?

Irene put the matter out of her mind for now, as there was nothing she could do about it. She checked the tree house. “Let’s sleep; Xap and Chem may be late returning.”

Xavier agreed wordlessly. Evidently he was not certain how he felt about what his steed might be doing. Possibly he wasn’t entirely pleased to see someone else tame the hippogryph.

“There’s room for you in the house, Zora,” Irene said. “Can you climb the ladder?”

The zombie hesitated. She was in bad condition, even for her kind, because of the savagery of the Furies. Decayed bone showed where her
flesh had been scourged away, and her dress was so tattered it would have been indecent on any other female. “Nnosh nneedth—” she began.

“Not need shelter?” Irene asked. “Do you stay outside because you want to—or because your kind usually isn’t welcome inside?”

Zora stood there, not attempting an answer.

“You have helped me and my friends twice,” Irene said firmly. “Maybe you saved my life—from the bonnacon and the Furies. It would be wrong for me to treat you like—” She broke off, unwilling to say
like a zombie
.

“You know, it’s just about dark now,” Xavier commented. “I can hardly see her. She looks sort of slender and shadowed. She don’t seem half bad, this way. And the smell’s not bad, neither. More like soil.”

As compliments went, that wasn’t much, but Irene realized the youth meant well; he had not had much experience with this sort of thing. Considering his background, that was not surprising.

“The scourge would have torn me apart,” Grundy remarked. “Literally. There’s worse things to be next to than a zombie.”

Irene addressed Zora again. “So come join us inside the tree house. You’ll heal better under cover. You need sleep, don’t you?” That was a guess, but it had become important to Irene to make this gesture. It might be some transference from her guilt about neglecting her mother Iris—oh, the Furies had scored there!—but it was also simple gratitude. Zora had saved her from the bonnacon, and Irene had allowed herself almost to forget about that; now Zora had saved her again, and this time there would be no forgetting. This zombie was no longer an unpleasant thing to be tolerated, and no necessary evil; this was a friend. Zora must indeed have been, as Xavier surmised, some woman when she lived; she was some woman
now
.

Zora accepted the invitation and shambled to the ladder leading up to the tree house. She tried to climb, but her body was less functional than usual because of the scourging, and her clumsy, skeletal hands slipped off the rungs. Irene winced to see the scourge wounds, knowing that her own flesh had very nearly suffered similarly. Obviously the poison of the whips was interfering with even zombie regeneration. Maybe in her healthiest state, Zora could have made it; not now.

Xavier stepped behind her, put his two large hands at Zora’s somewhat sloppy waist, and lifted. Once again Irene noted how strong a man he was; though he hardly seemed to put forth any effort, the zombie rose like a feather. Xavier resembled his steed in this respect, being the finest of physical specimens. With this considerable assistance, Zora was able to scramble to the top of the ladder, fortunately within the young man’s reach, and get her balance on hands and knees at the house portal. She disappeared inside, dropping some slivers of skin behind.

“I never touched one of them things before,” Xavier murmured, half to himself. “Not with my hands. ‘Course, she was hanging on to me, riding Xap, but I just sorta tuned her out. As if she were a bag of garbage going to the dump. But now, after she took that scourge for me—if I had been hit, I guess
my
flesh would be dropping off and showing my bones.” He shook his head. “I never had no one do me a favor I didn’t do back. But how do you give back the favor of a life when—I mean, she lost her life long before I ever knew her.” He clenched his fists in a frustration Irene shared. He was a decent man, facing an insoluble ethical problem. “It’s not so bad, touching her. No worse than entrails from some monster I killed. Touching stuff—it really don’t mean nothing. It’s how you feel about it. She sure don’t weigh much.”

Xavier was, in his crude but honest fashion, voicing sentiments similar to those Irene had privately entertained, to her half shame. His reassessment parallelled hers. There was no prejudice in Xanth greater than that relating to zombies, and she had shared it, though she knew better. Even Millie the Ghost, who had loved a zombie for eight hundred years, until he was at last restored to his living self as the Zombie Master—even she did not permit many zombies in their castle, although zombies had built that castle and now defended it. Castle Roogna had always been defended by zombies, yet they were not permitted inside it. Nobody wanted to be close to a zombie.

But if zombies were not properly alive, neither were they properly dead. They did have feelings, loyalty, and courage, as Zora had so dramatically shown. Zora had done more, and had asked less in return, than anyone else on this odd excursion.

“She’s a decent person,” Irene said, knowing this to be an understatement so gross as to be obscene.

“Yeah. Too bad she’s dead.”

And there was the ultimate tragedy of it. How could anyone repay a person who was not alive? That was the wall against which each notion smashed.

Irene climbed on up and into her monkey-puzzle chamber. Xavier and Grundy got settled.

Irene lay there in the dark. There was certainly a smell from the zombie like rotted leaves or a small, dead animal left in the sun. But Xavier was right; it wasn’t too bad, especially when one remembered what Zora had done.

X
ap and Chem were back by morning. Irene heard them arrive and decided not to inquire; it really wasn’t her business. That was why she was so infernally curious!

Maybe it was her imagination, Irene thought, but in the light of dawn, Zora looked improved. The scourge gouges had filled in so that bone no longer showed, her flesh no longer hung in tatters, and her eyes seemed restored to the point where they were capable of normal vision. Even her dress was whole now, apparently renovating itself as part of the zombie process. Her hair was longer and fuller and less straggly, with some of its original fair color showing. It seemed that rest and shelter did mend a zombie somewhat.

This was the first case Irene knew of in which a zombie had become less, rather than more, rotten with the passage of time. But of course she had never before interacted this closely with a zombie for several days. What had she ever really known about them? Little more than jokes: How many zombies does it take to plant a light bulb? She could no longer remember the punch line and didn’t care to; she was sure she would not find it very funny now.

There was one other factor, she recalled: human consideration and caring. That was one thing that was supposed to help a zombie—and the one thing few if any zombies received. But all of them had welcomed Zora into their group after the episode of the Furies. Perhaps they had, after all, returned part of the debt they owed her.

Irene’s original clothes were quite dry now, so she no longer had to wear the towels or other substitutes. That improved her outlook. She grew milkweed and eggplant for breakfast, for those who wanted it. Xap and Chem were not hungry; presumably they had eaten on the run during the night.

Chem projected her map. The scenery ahead spread out in miniature. “Here is the mountain of Parnassus,” she explained, indicating a large, irregular area. It was as if they were looking down on it from above; she must have questioned Xap closely about the details he perceived from the air, in order to fill out what she saw from the knoll. “It has two peaks. The
one we want is here, to the south. The nine Muses live on it; the cave of the Oracle is over there, but we’ll skirt around that to reach the peak where the Tree of Seeds grows. It’s quite a climb, but we can handle it, if—”

Irene didn’t like the smell of that hesitation. “If what?”

“If nothing interferes,” Chem said reluctantly.

“What might interfere?”

“Well, Xap says there are things on the other peak of Parnassus that—of course, we won’t be traveling on that side of the mountain—”

“But we’d better be prepared,” Irene finished. “Especially with that curse.” She had told Chem about the visitation of the evening, of course, and the part Zora had played. “What affects Grundy and Zora is likely to affect the rest of us, since we’re traveling as a group. So let’s have the worst. What’s on that other peak?”

“I’ll have to give a little background,” Chem said apologetically. Unlike some centaurs, she hesitated to show off her extensive classical education.

“Spit it out, horsefoot,” Grundy said. “Anything bad will probably hit me first.”

“The shrine of the Oracle was originally guarded by the Python, who had a keen insight into the fallibilities of man. But the huge reptile was attacked and severely injured and driven out; it survived only because it fled to the other peak of Parnassus, where the Tree of Immortality was, and ate one of its leaves. Now the Python is barred from the Oracle’s cave, but it is a most sagacious reptile and would do anything to return. So it slithers about, seeking some avenue. If we were to stray into its present territory—”

“We won’t,” Irene said firmly. “Not with your map to guide us. What else?”

“The maenads. They are the wild women of wine. They dance ritually on the north slope, tearing apart and consuming any creature they catch. Once they served the god of fertile crops, but the old gods are gone now and the maenads serve no one except the Tree of Immortality, which keeps them alive and youthful.”

“They sound like nymphs,” Xavier remarked.

“They may be related, but their personalities are more like those of harpies or ogresses. They are predators, not prey, though they are naked and beautiful.”

“I see,” Irene said, frowning. She tended to be foolishly jealous of eternally young, beautiful, naked wild women. Once she herself had been—but she stifled that thought. “So wild women roam the slopes of Parnassus. We’ll stay clear of them, too.” For sure!

“So here is the appropriate path,” Chem concluded, pointing out a dotted line on the map. “We’ll have to stay right on it to be safe. It is too bad you can’t use Xap to fly directly to the Tree of Seeds. But the Simurgh
allows no one to enter Parnassus by air, because every so often dragons and griffins try to raid. A hippogryph vaguely resembles a griffin in flight, so Xap knows it isn’t safe for him to fly there. Nothing larger than a small bird can risk it. Xap can handle just about any airborne creature he might meet, but the Simurgh is something else.”