Night Mare (11 page)

“I learned long ago to obey without question,” the day horse replied. “He hasn’t used the spurs on me in some time; the scars are now so faint as to be invisible. But if he caught me now, after I escaped him, it would be terrible. There would be blood all over my hide.”

Imbri visualized bright red blood on the bright white hide and flinched. What horror!

“Surely so.” Ichabod nodded. “Man has a very poor record in his treatment of animal. In Xanth it is not as bad, for animals are much better able to defend themselves.”

“Dragons are!” Grundy agreed, laughing. “And ant lions and basilisks and harpies.”

They were mounting a steep, bald hill that barred their way north. Aggressive carnivorous vines and nettles to east and west made this the best route, laborious as it was. But soon they would be over it and might be able to relax a little going down the other side, where the sweet lake was supposed to be. Imbri and the day horse dug their hooves into the reddish turf, scuffling the sparse dry grass aside. The slope was spongy and warm from the sun.

Suddenly the bank exploded into a bunch of sticks. Chameleon screamed. Both horses reared and plunged to the sides, startled.

“Flying snakes!” Grundy cried. “Fend them off! I recognize this species; they’re mean and unreasonable and some of them are poisonous. No use to try to talk to them; they only respect a clout on the snoot.”

Chameleon and Ichabod had staffs they had harvested from a forest of general staffs. They had been using these to brush away clinging vines and such. Now they used them in earnest as the snakes darted through the air, jaws gaping. They were not big serpents, but they might be poisonous, as Grundy had warned. Imbri dodged away from them as well as she could, avoiding a green one and a red one, but a yellow one got through and bit her on her left front knee. She reached down with her own teeth and caught it behind the head and tore it loose, but the punctures hurt. She had never had to worry about this sort of thing as a full night mare!

A few moments of vigorous action got them away from the snakes, who could not fly very fast. Air simply was not as good to push against as ground. They resumed plodding up the hill.

“It is strange that both the Night Stallion and the Good Magician provided the same warning,” Ichabod reflected aloud. It was one of his annoying habits. He talked a great deal about obscure aspects of situations, boring people. “Since the Horseman is an obvious enemy and perhaps a leader of the invading Mundanes, naturally loyal Xanth citizens should avoid him. Why waste a prophecy belaboring the obvious?”

“I fell into his power anyway,” Imbri confessed. “I carried the warning, but I did not recognize the Horseman when I met him. If the day horse hadn’t helped me escape—”

“I couldn’t stand to see a mare as pretty as you in the power of a man as cruel as that,” the day horse said in the community dream Imbri was providing. “I was terribly afraid to come so close to his camp.”

“You didn’t seem at all afraid,” Imbri returned, complimenting him.

“Thank you,” the day horse said. “I look bolder than I am, I suppose.”

That seemed to be true. The day horse’s fear of the invading Mundanes amounted almost to a fetish. Imbri felt he was overreacting. But outside of that, he did look bold, with his brilliant white coat and flaring mane and tail and muscular body. All factors considered, it remained a pleasure being with him.

With a final effort, they crested the red knoll. Now the Land of Xanth spread out around them in a sufficient if not marvelous panoply, like the clothing of an ill-kempt giant. In the distance to the south was the barely visible crevice of the Gap Chasm; to the west was a faint tail of smoke rising from the cookfires of the North Village; to the north—

“A lake!” Ichabod exclaimed happily. “With rich green color around it, surely suitable grazing for the equines and fruits for the unequines. There’s our evening campsite!”

So it seemed. “But there’s an awful mess of corrugations between us and it,” Grundy said.

“I can travel a straight line to it,” Imbri sent. “I am used to holding a straight course, regardless of the view, once I know where I’m going.”

“Good enough,” Grundy said.

Imbri started down the slope, leading the way—and stumbled. She went down headfirst, and Grundy and Chameleon were thrown off. They all went rolling down the rough slope helplessly, until they fetched up in a gully on the side of the knoll.

Grundy picked himself up, shedding red dust and bits of grass. “What happened, horseface?” he demanded grumpily. “Put your foot in it?”

“My knee gave way,” Imbri projected, abashed. “That never happened before.”

Chameleon righted herself. Even dirty and disheveled, she looked lovely. It was not necessarily true that women grew ugly as they aged; she was the impressive exception. “Is it hurt?” she asked.

Imbri rolled over, got her forefeet placed, and heaved herself up front-first in the manner of her kind. But she immediately collapsed again. The knee would not support her weight under stress.

Chameleon looked at it as she might inspect the scrape on the leg of a child. She was not bright, but that sort of thing did not require intelligence, only motherly concern. “You were bitten!” she exclaimed. “It’s all swollen!”

The day horse arrived, picking his way carefully down the slope. “Bitten?” he neighed.

“So those snakes
were
poisonous!” Grundy said. “Why didn’t you tell us one got you? We could have held it for interrogation and maybe found the antidote.”

“Horses don’t complain,” Imbri sent. She had never been bitten before and had not properly appreciated the possible consequence. Her leg had hurt, but she had assumed the pain would ease. It had done so—but the extra strain of the downhill trek had aggravated what she now realized was not a healing but a numbness. Her knee had no staying power.

“I will carry all the people,” the day horse offered. “I can handle it.”

After a brief consultation, they acceded. The stallion was tired and sweaty, but still whole and strong; he could bear the burden. Chameleon and Grundy joined Ichabod on the day horse’s broad back. It was a good thing he was along; the whole party would have been in trouble had it been Imbri alone for transportation.

Now it was up to Imbri to get herself on her feet. She set her good right leg under her and heaved herself up. Now that she wasn’t depending on her left knee, it couldn’t betray her.

She tried her left leg, but the numbness remained. It was better to hold it clear and hop along on the other three. It was possible to walk, jerkily, slowly, this way.

“Perhaps we could fashion a splint,” Ichabod said. “To keep your knee straight so you can at least put weight on it.”

That was an apt notion. They scouted around and found a projecting ledge from which several fairly stout poles sprouted. Ichabod dismounted and took hold of one, but though it wiggled crazily under his effort, it did not come loose from the ground.

“Cut it,” Grundy said.

Chameleon had a good knife. Where she kept it Imbri wasn’t sure, for it had not been evident before, but this suggested the lovely woman was not entirely helpless. She stooped beside the pole, applied her blade, and sawed at the base.

The ground shook. There was a rumble. Chameleon paused, looking askance at the others. “No meaning in a rumble,” Grundy said. “Except to get out of here before an earthquake decides to visit.”

“Earthquakes don’t decide to visit,” Ichabod protested. “They are natural, inanimate phenomena—merely the release of stresses developing within or between layers of rock.”

There was another rumble, closer and stronger. “Not in Xanth,” the golem said. “Here the inanimate has an ornery personality, as is evident when King Dor converses with it. Everything has its own individuality, even a quake.”

The archivist had to step about to keep his feet during the second shaking. “There is that,” he agreed nervously.

Chameleon sawed again at the pole. Her blade was sharp, but the pole was tough; progress was slow. A gash appeared, from which thick red fluid welled.

“I wonder what kind of plant that is?” Grundy said. He made some noises at it, then shook his head. “It doesn’t answer.”

“Maybe we can break it off now,” Ichabod said, becoming increasingly uneasy. He wrenched the pole around more violently than before.

Suddenly the entire horizontal ridge of poles lifted up. A slit opened in the ground beneath them, revealing a moist, glassy surface crossed by bands of white, brown, and black. It was pretty enough for a polished rock formation.

“That’s an eye!” Grundy exclaimed.

Ichabod, hanging from the pole, looked into the monstrous orb, aghast. “What’s a hill doing with an eye?” he demanded. “And what am I suspended by?”

“An eyelash,” the golem said. “I should have realized. It’s alive, but it’s not a plant. I was trying to talk to the eyelash of an animal. Naturally it didn’t answer; eyelashes don’t.”

Ichabod dropped to the lower eyelid. One foot jammed accidentally into the eye. The eye blinked; the lid smashed down like a portcullis. The man wrenched out his foot and scrambled away.

“Get on the horse!” Grundy cried. “Get out of here!”

The three of them scrambled aboard the day horse, who moved out rapidly. Imbri hobbled after them.

Suddenly Imbri caught on. “The sphinx!” she broadcast. “This is the sphinx!”

“We were warned to beware of it,” Grundy agreed. “As usual, we walked right onto the danger without recognizing it.”

The ground shook again and buckled. The monstrous face of the sphinx was opening its mouth. A tremendous bellowing roar came forth in a hurricane blast of air.

“When it pains, it roars!” Grundy cried.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Ichabod grumbled. “This is no time for idiotic puns.”

“Xanth is mostly made of puns,” the golem told him. “You have to watch where you put your feet, or you end up stepping on puns.”

“Or something,” Chameleon said, noting where some horse clods had fallen.

Meanwhile, the day horse was galloping off over the flexing cheek of the monster toward the shoulder. The tremendous sphinx was reclining, its face tilted back, so that the slope was by no means vertical. The pink knoll they had climbed was its sunburned pate. Every hoofprint must have aggravated the monster, but it had not become truly aroused until its eyelash had been attacked.

“Imbri!” Chameleon called from far ahead, realizing that the mare was not maintaining the pace.

“Keep going!” Imbri projected. “I’ll follow!”

But she could not follow well on three legs, with the face of the sphinx shaking all over. She lost her footing and rolled toward the mouth, which was now sucking in a gale of breath. She scrambled desperately and managed to avoid it—but then rolled helplessly across the cheek in the wrong direction. Now the mouth was between her and her friends.

She fetched up against another projection. It was the huge, curving outcropping of the ear. Beyond it the face dropped unkindly far to the cracking and shuddering ground.

Imbri decided to stay where she was. At least the ear could not chomp her.

But what about her friends? They could be caught and tromped! They were on the dangerous part of the face.

Then she had a notion. She pumped her dream projection up to maximum strength and sent the sphinx a vision of absolute peace and contentment. Imbri wasn’t expert at this sort of dream; all her experience had been with the other kind. But she did have half a soul now, and it was a gentle soul, and it helped her fashion a gentle dream.

Slowly the irritated sphinx calmed. It submitted to the dream of soft, sunny pastures with little sphinxes gamboling on the green. Cool mists wafted across its burning pate. Its eyes closed, broken eyelash and all, and the rumbling diminished.

Carefully Imbri left the cavern of the ear and hobbled back along the huge cheek toward real ground. But her hooves irritated the sunburned skin, resuming the waking process. The monster was not nearly as deeply asleep as it had been before; any little thing could disturb it now. A creature of such mass had considerable inertia, whether heading into sleep or out of it, and at the moment it was almost in balance. She had to retreat to the safe ear.

Unable to depart during daylight, Imbri settled down for a nap herself. She kept the sphinx passive by projecting a nominal sweet dream, just enough to lull it back to sleep when it thought about waking. Fortunately, sphinxes liked to sleep; that was why they were very seldom seen wandering around Xanth. There was a myth about one who had retreated to Mundania to find a suitably quiet place, and who had found a nice warm desert and hunkered down for a nap of several thousand years. The ignorant locals thought it was a statue and knocked off its nose. There would be an awful row when it woke and discovered that . . .

Meanwhile, it was easy for this one to doze off when no one was trotting on its face or blasting off its nose. This was just as well, considering the situation of Imbri’s party.

When she woke, it was dark. Now she could move freely. Her bitten leg did not need to support any weight, now that she was able to dematerialize. She got up and galloped through the sphinx’s head, where sweet dreams still roamed; her hooves got coated with sugar and honey. She emerged from the other ear and moved on north toward the lake. Soon she found it, trotted across it, and found the camp of the others.

Chameleon was the first to spy her. “Mare Imbri!” she screamed joyfully. “You got away!” She hugged Imbri fiercely, and the mare remained solid for the occasion. It was easy to like Chameleon despite her intellectual handicap, especially at a time like this. No creature except a basilisk would object to being hugged by a person of Chameleon’s configuration.

“She wanted to return for you,” Grundy said, “but we told her no. All we could have done was get ourselves in trouble and maybe make things worse for you.”

“My son the King told me to listen to the golem,” Chameleon said apologetically, her lovely face showing her distaste.

“It was best,” Imbri agreed in a general dreamlet. “I hid in the sphinx’s ear until night, then shifted to immaterial form.”