Ogre, Ogre (Xanth 5) (3 page)

Oh, woe! Tandy stood in dull, defeated amazement. All her effort, her last vestige of strength and hope, and her deviously laid plans to reach her father lay in ruins. What was she to do now? She was lost in Xanth, without food or water, so tired she
could hardly move, with no
way to return home. What would her mother think?

Something stirred within the castle. The drawbridge lowered, coming to rest across the small moat. A lovely woman walked out of the castle, subduing the reaching monster with a trifling gesture of her hand, her voluminous robe blowing in the morning breeze. She saw Tandy and came toward her--and
Tandy ,saw
with a new shock of horror that the woman had no face. Her hood contained a writhing mass of snakes, and emptiness where human features should have been. Surely the nightmare had saved the worst dream for last!

"Dear child," the faceless woman said. "Come with me. We have been expecting you."

Tandy stood frozen, unable even to muster the energy for a tantrum. What horrors lay within this dread castle? "It is all right," the snake-headed woman said reassuringly. "We consider that your phenomenal effort in catching and riding the nightmare constitutes sufficient challenge to reach this castle. You will not be subject to the usual riddles of admission."

They were going to take her inside! Tandy tried to run, but her strength was gone. She was a spunky girl, but she had been through too much this night. She fainted.

Smash tromped through the blackboard jungle of Xanth, looking at the pictures on the blackboards because, like all his kind, he couldn't read the words. He was in a hurry because the foul weather he was enjoying showed signs of abating, and he wanted to get where be was going before it did. When he encountered a fallen beech tree across the path, he simply hurled it out of the way, letting the beech-sand fall in a minor sandstorm. When he discovered that an errant river had jumped its channel and was washing out the path and threatening to clean the grunge off his feet and make his toenails visible for the first time in weeks, he grabbed that stream by its tail and flexed it so hard that it splatted right back into its proper channel and lay there quivering and bubbling in fear.
When an ornery bullhorn blocked the way, threatening to ram its horn most awkwardly into the posterior of anyone who distracted it.
Smash did more than that. He picked it up by the horn and blew a horrendous blast that nearly turned the creature inside out. Never again would that
bullhorn bother
travelers on that path; it had been cowed.

This sort of thing was routine for Smash, for he was the most powerful and stupid of all Xanth's vaguely manlike creatures. The ground trembled nervously when he tromped, and the most ferocious monsters thought it prudent to catch errands elsewhere until he was gone. Naturally the errands fled with indecent haste, wanting no part of this. In fact, no creature with any wit at all wanted any part of this. For Smash was an ogre.

He was twice the height of an ordinary man, was broad in proportion, and his knots of hairy muscles stood out like the boles of tormented old trees. Some creatures might have considered him ugly, but these were the less imaginative individuals. Smash was not ugly; he was horrendous. By no stretch of imagination could any ogre be considered less than grotesque, and
Smash
was an appalling specimen of the breed. There had not been a more revolting creature on this path since a basilisk had crossed it

Yet
Smash
, like most powerfully ugly creatures, had a rather sweet interior, hidden deep inside where it would not embarrass him. He had been raised among human beings, had gone on an adventure with Prince Dor and Princess Irene, and had made friends with centaurs. He had, in short, been somewhat civilized by his environment, incredible as this might seem. Most people believed that no ogre was civilizable, and that was certainly the safest belief to hold.

Yet
Smash
was no ordinary ogre. This meant that he usually did not strike without some faint reason and that his natural passion for violence had been somewhat stifled. This was a sad condition for an ogre, yet he had borne up moderately well. Now he had a mission.

The bad weather cleared. The clouds drew their curtains aside to let lovely shafts of sunlight slant down, making the air sparkle prettily. Birds shook out their feathers and trilled joyfully. Everything was turning clean and pleasant.

Smash snorted with disgust. How could he travel in this? He would have to camp for the afternoon and night and hope the morrow was a worse day.

He was hungry, for it took huge and wasteful quantities of energy to sustain an ogre in proper arrogance. He cast about for something edible and massive enough to sustain him, such as a dead dragon or a vat of spoiling applesauce or a mossy rock-candy boulder, but found nothing. This region had already been scavenged out.

Then he heard the squawk of a contented griffin and he sniffed the aroma of delicious pie. The perceptions of ogres were a-cute rather than a-ugly, oddly; though the griffin was some distance away,
Smash
located it precisely by sound and odor. He tromped toward it. This must be the creature that had cleaned out all the edibles of this region.

The griffin had captured a monstrous shoefly pie. The winged shoes had been cooked to a turn, the juices of their fine leather suffusing the pie, which massed about as much as the griffin. This was an ideal meal for an ogre.

Smash marched up, not bothering to employ any stealth. The griffin whirled, half spreading its wings, issuing a warning squawk. Nobody in his right mind interfered with a feeding griffin, except a sufficiently large and hungry dragon.

But Smash was not in his right mind. No ogre ever was. There was simply not enough
mind
there to be right. "Me give he three, leave sight of me," he said. All ogres spoke only in inane rhyme and lacked facility with pronouns, which they took to be edible roots. But ogres generally made themselves plain enough, in their brutish fashion.

The griffin had not had prior experience with an ogre. That was its fortune. There were very few ogres in these parts. The griffin opened its eagle beak wide and screeched a warning challenge.

Smash's bluff had been called. That was unfortunate, because no ogre was smart enough to bluff. With dimwitted joy, he rose to the prospect of mayhem. "One," he said, counting off on his smallest hamfinger. The griffin didn't move.

"Two." After a brief search, he found another finger. The griffin had had enough of this. It gave a raucous battle cry and charged, which was just as well, for Smash had lost count. This sort of intellectual exercise was horrendously difficult for his kind; his head hurt and his fingers felt numb. But now he was released from the necessity of counting all the way to three, and that was a great relief.

He grabbed the griffin by its bird beak and lion's tail, whirled it around, and hurled it out over the forest in a cloud of small feathers and fur. The griffin, startled by this reception, spread its wings, oriented, circled, decided the event must have been a fluke, and started to come in for another engagement. Ogres did not have a monopoly on stupidity!

Smash faced the lion-bodied bird. "Scram, ham!" he bellowed.

The blast of the bellow tore out half a dozen pinfeathers and two flight feathers, and sent the griffin spinning out of control. The creature righted itself again, but this time decided to seek its fortune elsewhere. Thus did it finally do something halfway smart, yielding the stupidity title to the ogre.

Smash took a flying leap into the center of the shoefly pie. Leatherlike pastry crust flew up. The ogre grabbed a big handful of the delicious mess and stuffed it into his maw. He slurped noisily on a boot, chewed the tongue in half, and masticated on a pleasantly tough heel. Oh, it was good! He grabbed two more handfuls, crunching soles and sucking on laces and spitting the metal eyelets out like seeds. Soon all the pie was gone. He burped up a few metal nails, well satisfied.

After gorging, he went to a stream and slurped a few gallons of shivering cool water. As he lifted his head, he heard a faint call.
"Help!
Help!"

Smash looked about, his ears rotating like those of the animal he was, to orient on the sound. It came from a nearby brambleberry bush. He parted the foliage with one gross finger and peered in. There was a tiny manlike creature. "Help, please!" it cried.

Ogres had excellent eyesight, but this person was so small that
Smash
had to focus carefully to see him.
Her.
It was naked and had--well, it was a tiny female imp. "Who you?" he inquired politely, his breath almost knocking her down.

"I'm Quieta the Imp," she cried, rearranging her hair, which his breath had violently disarrayed. "Oh, ogre, ogre--my father's trapped and will surely perish if not rescued soon. Please, I beseech you most prettily, help him escape, and I will reward you in my fashion."

Smash did not care one way or another about imps; they were too small to eat; anyway, be was for the moment full. This one was hardly more massive than one of his fingers. He did, however, like rewards. "Okay, dokay," he agreed.

"My name's Quieta, not Dokay," she said primly. She led him to a spot under a soapstone boulder. It was, of course, a very clean place, and the soap had been carved into interesting formations. There was her father-imp, caught in an alligator clamp. The alligator's jaws were slowly chewing off his little leg.

"This is my father Ortant," Quieta said, introducing them. "This is big ugly ogre."

"Pleased to meet you,
Big
ugly Ogre," Imp Ortant said as politely as the pain in his leg permitted.

Smash reached down, but his hamfingers were far too big and clumsy to pry
open
the tiny clamp. "Queer ear," he told the imps, and obediently both covered their minuscule ears with miniature hands.

Smash let out a small roar. The alligator clamp yiped and let go, scrambling back to the farthest reach of its anchor-chain, where it cowered. The imp was free.

"Oh, thank you, thank you so much, ogre!" Quieta exclaimed. "Here is your reward." She held out a tiny disk.

Smash accepted it, balancing it on the tip of one finger, his gross brow furrowing like a newly plowed field.

"It's a disposable reflector," Quieta explained proudly. Then, seeing that he did not comprehend: "A mirror, made from a film of soap-bubble. That's what we imps do. We make pretty, iridescent bubbles for the fairies, and lenses for sunbeams, and sparkles for the morning dew. Each item works only once, so we are constantly busy, I can tell you. We call it planned obsolescence. So now you have a nice little mirror. But remember--you can use it only one time."

Smash tucked the mirror into his bag, vaguely disappointed. Somehow, for no good reason, he had expected more.

"Well, you saved my father only once," Quieta said defensively. "He's not very big, either. It's a perfect mirror, you know."

Smash nodded, realizing that small creatures gave small rewards. He wasn't quite sure what use the mirror would be to him, since ogres did not look at their own ugly faces very much, because their reflections tended to break mirrors and curdle the surfaces of calm lakes; in any event, this mirror was far too small and frail to sustain his image. Since it could be used only once, he would save it for an important occasion. Then he tromped to a pillow bush, pounded it almost flat and lumpy, and snored himself to sleep while the jungle trembled.

The weather was unconscionably fair the next day, but
Smash
tromped on regardless until he reached the castle of the Good Magician Humfrey. It was not particularly imposing. There was a small moat he could wade through, and an outer wall he could bash through--practically an open invitation.

But Smash had learned at Castle Roogna that it was best to be polite around Magicians, and not to bash too carelessly into someone's castle. So he opened his bag of belongings and donned his finest apparel: an orange jacket and steely gauntlets, given to him four years ago by the centaurs of Centaur Isle. The jacket was invulnerable to penetration by a weapon, and the gauntlets protected his hamfists from the consequence of their own power. He had not worn these things before because he didn't want them to get dirty. They were special.

Now, properly dressed, he cupped his mug and bellowed politely: "Some creep asleep?" Just in case the Good Magician wasn't up yet.

There was no response. Smash tried again. "
Me
Smash.
Me
bash." That was letting the Magician know, delicately, that he was coming in.

Still no answer.
It seemed Humfrey was not paying attention.
Having exhausted his knowledge of the requirements of human etiquette as he understood them.
Smash proceeded to act. He waded into the water of the moat with a great and satisfying splash. Washing was un-ogrish, but splashing wasn't. In a moment the spume dimmed the sunlight and caused the entire castle to shine with moisture.

A sea monster swam to intercept him. Mostly that kind did not frequent rivers or moats, but the Good Magician had an affinity for the unusual. "Hi, fly," Smash said affably, removing a gauntlet and raising a hairy hamfist in greeting. He generally got along all right with monsters, if they were ugly enough.

The monster stared cross-eyed for a moment at the huge fist under its snout, noting the calluses, scars, and barnaclelike encrustations of gristle. Then the creature turned tail and swam hastily away. Smash's greetings sometimes affected other creatures like that; he wasn't sure why.

He redonned the gauntlet and forged on out of the moat, reaching a brief embankment from which the wall rose. He lifted one gauntleted hamfist to bash a convenient hole-- and spied something on the stone. It was a small lizard, dingy blah in color, with medium sandpaper skin, inefficient legs, a truncated tail, and a pungent smell. Its mean little head swiveled around to fix on the ogre.