Five Portraits (36 page)

And there were the two others at the entrance. “Zosi!” Astrid exclaimed. “And Plato!”

“We just had to attend,” the zombie woman said. “Princess Eve understands.”

Indeed, there now appeared two lovely young women, one with hair as bright as day, the other with hair as dark as night: the twin princesses Dawn and Eve. They stepped forward to greet Wulfha and Golden as equals, then took their seats.

A huge wolf arrived, carrying an elf woman. “Jenny!” Astrid exclaimed, surprised. It was the one she had met at the grave of her lost daughter.

Jenny dismounted as the werewolf changed to manform. She came to talk with her. “Astrid. I finally realized why you were familiar that time we met. It's your soul.”

“My soul? It joined me when I was sleeping.”

“Yes, out near Jone's grave. That was her soul.”

Astrid was chagrined. “Your daughter's soul? I did not know. I never meant to cause you that grief.”

“No, no! It found a person worthy of it. One who could complete Jone's mission. I'm glad you were the one.” Jenny walked back to rejoin her husband, who was talking with the Princesses Dawn and Eve as if they were old friends.

“I think you do not properly know Jenny Elf,” Fornax said.

“I met her once. I'm not clear why she came here.”

“She is Princess Jenny, wife of the king of the werewolves, whom she rides.”

“Princess?” Astrid repeated blankly. “She never said.”

“She is modest,” Art said. “She is of course here for the Unveiling. Now we know why your soul was so set on saving Xanth.”

Another person arrived, hauling along a grumpy old husband. Astrid jumped up to greet her. “MareAnn! My first friend!”

“We had to come,” MareAnn said, glancing back at the Good Magician Humfrey. Then she went back to find seats.

Yet more folk were arriving, filling the seats. Even the donkey-headed dragon Astrid recognized as the Demon Xanth, with his wife, Chlorine.

Well, as long as they were here, Astrid had a question for them. She got up and went to them. “One thing I'd like to know,” she said. “The Demoness Fornax and I were struggling to save the children and Xanth. Why did you oppose us?”

It was Chlorine who answered. “My husband can be a bit mule-headed at times.” She glanced fondly at the donkey head. “Even asinine. He just didn't want to admit that outside help was needed to save Xanth. Especially not help from a chronic troublemaker like Fornax. Now he knows he was mistaken, and he is sorry.” She glanced again. “Say you're sorry, dear.”

The donkey head wiggled one ear.

“Thank you,” Astrid said gratefully, and returned to her place, carefully suppressing any smile that might have lurked.

She gazed out across the expanding audience. There was Ginger Goblin, whom Astrid had helped save from Truculent Troll's cave. She was sitting beside Truman Troll, the halfway decent one they had made a truce with. Astrid remembered how Ginger had naughtily kissed Truman before the truce ended. Maybe that had led to something more. Kisses could have remarkable effects.

And there was Wenda Woodwife, with her friend Dwarf Demoness Eris and her husband, Jumper Spider. They had recommended that Fornax and Astrid try adopting children, which had resulted in a novel's worth of adventures. It seemed that everyone was here.

Astrid shook her head. This couldn't be for a stupid statue. But in that case, what was it for? It was hard to imagine why so many illustrious people would come to a simple children's presentation. How did they even know about it?

A corpulent Demon Neptune appeared before her. “I notified them. That was part of my assignment.” He vanished.

Apparently Fornax had known that something was coming up, and made him handle the details. Maybe the children had asked her to spread the word. But that hardly explained why so many others had chosen to attend. The mystery remained.

It was time for the Play. The children took their places onstage.

What it turned out to be was a summary of the adventures the children had had since coming to Xanth from the future. They showed how Fornax and Astrid had rescued them, and how the other adults had taken them in and made them welcome and done their best to find good adoptive homes for them. But there were none, and in the end those same adults had done it themselves, adopting the children. Even though the last ones had gotten in trouble for it. But working together, they had saved Xanth from later destruction.

That was it. Astrid was sure the children had worked hard to arrange it as a presentation, but it really wasn't much of a play. Yet the audience seemed rapt. What were they picking up on that Astrid couldn't get?

There was polite applause as the play concluded. Then the children lined up onstage, facing the audience.

“And now we approach the Unveiling of the Final Portrait,” Firenze said.

“The Statue the artisans in Storage helped us craft,” Santo said.

“Of the two we owe the most to,” Squid said.

“And love the most,” Win said.

“We call it Friendship,” Myst said.

A statue honoring the abstract concept of Friendship? That belonged as a relic in the back of some obscure gallery, not as the finale to a children's play, let alone a public presentation for royal guests. But of course Astrid would not say anything like that aloud, lest she hurt a child's feelings. She only hoped that the assembled audience would be kind about their disappointment. To have so many come for so little reason—it was mind-boggling.

“Something about this statue we need to say,” Firenze said.

“It is a copy of one we saw in our own realm,” Santo said.

“Which helped us recognize the people we were dealing with,” Squid said.

“So that we knew we could trust them,” Win said.

“And honor them,” Myst concluded.

Astrid could not make head or tail of this. She glanced at Fornax beside her. The Demoness shrugged. “It is masked, from me as well as the audience,” she murmured. “But evidently important to the children.”

“And here they are,” Firenze said, and swept off the shroud.

Astrid stared. So did Fornax.

It was a statue of the two of them, Astrid standing in her Sequins of Events dress, Fornax beside and just behind her like a protective figure. Both of them seemed to glow as if angelic.

“It's us,” Astrid breathed, amazed.

“It is,” Fornax agreed, similarly surprised.

“Thank you, Mothers Astrid and Fornax,” the children said together. “Thank you for saving us—and Xanth.”

Then the applause began. All the rest of the audience joined in, including their husbands and friends, turning to face the two of them. Then they all stood, forming a massive circle, still applauding.

“I don't understand,” Astrid said. “What I did was for the children. I never sought any applause.”

Fornax's mouth quirked. “And I did it for friendship. Evidently the others also value Xanth's future.”

The children ran down from the stage and came to cluster adoringly around them both as the applause continued.

Children. Friendship. Leading to an adventure like no other.

Overwhelmed, Astrid felt tears on her face, and saw them on Fornax's face too. They were finally beginning to understand.

Author's Note

I wrote this novel in the ogre's months Marsh and Apull, 2013, and edited it in Mayhem. I usually write Xanth novels in the months of SapTimber, OctOgre, and NoRemember, but pressures of originally self-publishing caused me to move up the schedule. There are fewer puns this time because there were six months less for them to accumulate from readers with pundigestion. Apart from the anti-pun virus, of course, which I suspect did not extend to Mundania to stifle pun suggestions. Just so readers can get a notion of the times, this was when the Boston Marathon was bombed. Bad things happen in Mundania just as they do in Xanth.

A decade before, a reader had suggested that I include a gay man as a major character in a Xanth novel. I wasn't sure, so I queried my readers in my www.hipiers.com blog-type column. Their verdict was overwhelmingly negative: no gay protagonist. It wasn't that they were bigoted, but that they felt that Xanth, where funny incidents and silly puns abound, as you may have noticed, was not the proper venue for such a serious matter. Xanth parodies things, such as mundane attitudes toward sex, in the Adult Conspiracy, but a parody of homosexuality would not be funny. Also, I am unalterably hetero myself, loving the look and feel of women, and might well bungle any attempt to sympathetically portray a gay man. So I kept the subject out.

In the intervening decade there has been a sea change in the public attitude toward things like gay marriage, which a majority now favor. A gay reader asked me to check again, so I requeried my Column readers during the writing of this novel. The vote was small, partly because a virus infected the HiPiers site and kept many readers away, but there was a significant change. Now a majority favored it.

But was that enough? The readers I sampled at my website were only a tiny fraction of my full readership, and perhaps not typical of that full readership. The majority vote was far from a landslide. Doing it would be a gamble. I'm a commercial writer, which means I cater to readers rather than critics. I don't much like to gamble with my career. Yet neither do I like to exclude any part of my readership, regardless of its size.

So I compromised. There is a gay character in this novel, but he's only a child, and not the protagonist. It will take him a decade or so to mature. By then maybe the will of the readers will have clarified, and he will be able to be a main character. I suspect this will disappoint both the pro- and the anti-gay readers, and I will lose some, which is sort of the nature of compromises. Sigh.

What about the genesis of the larger novel? I had built up a cast of characters in the prior one,
Board Stiff
, and not all of them were safely situated. The pun virus still needed to be cleaned out, and Merge had not yet found a man. I thought she might be the protagonist (main character). But let's face it, searches for romance are a dime a dozen in literature. Was there anything more original? Well, a reader suggested that there be a wave of orphaned children from the future. I pondered that and concluded it was viable, though I reduced the number to be more manageable. Then I realized that there was one character who really was different: the beautiful but deadly basilisk. Suppose she had to deal with the children, when it was difficult for her even to touch them without hurting them? I also thought about friendship: suppose someone even worse about touching were also involved? Such as the Demoness of Antimatter. From this muddle of notions this novel coalesced.

Once I had the main characters, and their mission, they more or less took over and did the job. The more I saw of Astrid, the better I liked her. She means so well and tries so hard. But why would the most vicious and deadly of creatures ever care for people and children the way she does? Hence I had to give her a soul. There are readers who feel that a novel should spring full-blown from the head of the writer, without any creative effort, as with Athene from the left ear of the Greek god Zeus, but the truth is it takes work and sometimes missteps to craft it. Authors are not necessarily the geniuses they try to appear to be. (I hope this doesn't get me hanged in effigy by other writers for blabbing the secret.)

Here are the reader credits for this novel, roughly in the order of the appearance of their ideas, with duplicate ideas grouped together. I had a computer mixup and lost some of the credits; I hope I found them all again.

Quilting Bees—Karen. N-Trail, Heaven Nickel, Quarter, Dollar, Hell Cent, etc., Blue Music, Pun Dancing, the Gates, Ann Droid, Sun Dial and Pun Dial Soap, Belts: Asteroid, Bible, Rust, Sun, Eye-V, Ear-E, Brain-E, Cheek-E, Hair-E, Vein-E, Sas-C, Sis-C, Tea V drink, Talent of changing homonyms, Beds: Flower, River, Sea. Talent of shooting laser beams from one's fingers. Sand D, Sand Witch.—Tim Bruening. Smarty Pants, Rose Colored Glasses, Troubleshooter, Snow Shoes, Billi Ant, Firenze, Myst, —Mary Rashford. Skepticals—Chris Weaver. Yell-O Jacket—Geri Maisano. Pine Needle that sews curses—Kerry Garrigan. Santo—David Freedman. Orphaned children from the future—Naomi Blose. Talent of always having the wind at one's back—Owen Marrow. Playground—Alex Guelke. Weird birds—Avi Ornstein. Neigh Kid—Joseph McRyan. Boon Docks—Mark Caselman. Medium Coffee—John Hewison. Cecil and Tea Cup story—Rick Lippincott. Cat-atonic—Steve and Tom Pharrer. Exploring Daymares further—Laurie. Talent of summoning things from the dream realm—Brant Tucker. A mortal made love to by an angel no longer freaks at less—Andrew Jonathan Fine. Chris “Kribbitz” Kehler—Kristyn Cain.

This novel was proofread by Scott M. Ryan, who stepped in when I lost my prior proofer, Rudy Reyes. Yes, I proof them myself, but I seem to miss half a slew of errors.

At this writing I am not sure what the next novel, Xanth #40, will be, but I do have a suggestion from a young reader. Probably it will not involve the characters developed in these past two novels, but we'll see.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 Piers Anthony

ISBN 978-1-4976-6290-2

Published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com