Dragon on a Pedestal (23 page)

In a moment, the hail of particles was over. Dazed, Irene looked around. No seeds remained anywhere on the top of the mountain; all had rolled or slid over the edge, and somehow she knew they were forever beyond recovery. But her skirt was full. Seeds of every description rested within it. Many were tiny motes; some were like snowflakes; others were like grains of sand; others like puffs of cotton; and others like little pods. They were all colors and sizes and shapes and textures and densities. She recognized some, like chinaberry (miniature teacups), airplant (with tiny wings and propellers), sundrop (shining brightly), gum (blowing bubbles), peacock plant (with pretty spread tails), and blue fern (unhappy expressions); but many others were unfamiliar. What was this one that looked like a pair of
crossed bones, or the ones like hairpins? She would have to get them home and look them up in the Castle Roogna classification manuals before she dared grow them. What a fabulous treasure!

“You should look at you!” Grundy exclaimed. “Seeds in your green hair, seeds in your slippers, seeds in your boo—” He caught her fierce glare and modified his term. “Bosom,” he concluded.

Now a problem manifested. “How can I carry all these seeds?” Irene asked. “I can’t let go of my skirt!” If she tried to use her hands, the skirt would fall, and the seeds would slide out. She knew she would lose any that touched the ground here; the disappearance of all the other seeds made that clear. The Simurgh had given her a gift, but had not made it easy. She could keep only those seeds she could catch—and hold.

“I’ll help you,” Xavier said gallantly. He started picking seeds out of her hair and dropping them into her spread skirt. When he reached for the ones caught lower, she had to demur. “Thank you Xav, I’ll get the others myself, in due course.” She had enough problems without his fishing for seeds in her bosom while she stood with skirt raised, unable to free her hands. He had agreed to find another woman, but there was no sense tempting him.

Grundy was meanwhile picking the seeds off her shoes and depositing them in the dress. “Girl, you sure still got ’em!” he remarked, glancing up under her skirt. Irene glared again—and again he amended himself. “Seeds, I mean. I didn’t drop a one.”

Now she had most of the seeds in one place—but still couldn’t use her hands. What was she to do? She couldn’t abide the thought of losing any of them, not even a single seed; it might be the most valuable one of all, whatever it was. Seeds were the most important thing she knew, next to her husband and daughter; she
had
to save them all!

“How you going to climb back down?” Xavier inquired.

Oh, bother! That was exactly the problem. Irene had an embarrassment of riches, and it seemed to have trapped her.

She sighed. The seeds came first. She took several not-too-deep breaths, then faced Xavier. “Xav, would you please undo my skirt? It’s a wraparound; it unsnaps at the waist.”

The young man gawked. “Oh, no miss! I wouldn’t do that! The big bird told me not to—”

“Not to take up with a woman already spoken for,” Irene finished. “That is excellent advice, and certainly I am spoken for, so you don’t need to worry about that. Now I ask you this favor, as a friend who is going to find some other woman and therefore has no interest in me, to help me get these seeds home. To do that I must wrap them up in my skirt, and to do
that
I must take it off. Since my hands are not free, you and Grundy will have to help me. You must remove my skirt, and Grundy will tie it together. It is all
perfectly in order.” She hoped she had phrased it properly and that she was not blushing. This was not a situation she would have cared to explain to her husband.

Xavier pondered. “Uh, yeah, I guess so. But still, it don’t seem right.”

“The snap is to the side. Undo it carefully and unwrap the skirt slowly, so no seeds get dumped.” She spoke firmly, determined to do what she had to do.

“Oh, sure, ma’am.” The young man fumbled at her waist. He was not at all good at this; men generally weren’t. “You sure got a tight—” “Watch it,” Grundy cut in, grinning.

“—snap here,” Xavier finished. Unlike the golem, he had not changed his original thought. Then he got it loose and unwrapped the skirt.

Grundy whistled. “Look at that—” Again he was interrupted by Irene’s warning glare. Glares could be exceedingly useful at a time like this! “Pair of ankles,” he finished, somewhat lamely.

“You got a seed in your—” Xavier said. “I mean, in the band to your—the green—”

“They’re called panties, yokel,” Grundy said before Irene could catch him with her eye. “They’ve never before been seen by human eye.”

“Leave the seed,” Irene said evenly. “Grundy, you tie the knot.” Xavier brought the free side of the skirt around to the front. She continued to hold up the sides of her basin while Xavier held the rest of her skirt, which was now a more or less oblong swatch of cloth.

Grundy climbed up on the bag formed as they folded the skirt up and over the seeds, and tied it in a good topknot. The golem had originally been made of wood and cloth knotted together, so he understood the process. His knot would hold. The bag was complete, and not a seed had been lost.

Now Irene picked the seed out of her panty band. “Still wearing that same pair, I see,” Grundy remarked innocently. “Aren’t they getting a little old by now?”

“My panties match my complexion,” Irene said with what she hoped was humor. She was not about to explain the niceties of maintaining changes of clothing. It had been bad enough when her present clothes had gotten soaked during the night, forcing her to grow substitutes while these dried. She did not normally wear her underclothing several days in a row. The golem knew that; he just wanted to force her to talk about titillating things in the presence of Xavier. There were levels and levels of Grundy’s mischief. “Now let’s get on down the mountain.” She turned to face the trunk of the main ivy plant, clinging to the side of the knoll.

This was another problem. She had a good-sized bag to carry, and it weighed a fair amount. She could heft it with one hand—but she needed two hands to climb down the vine. She didn’t dare drop the bag down first;
it would burst apart when it struck below, and the seeds would be lost when they scattered. What was she to do now?

Xavier saw the problem. “I can carry the bag for you, miss. It don’t weigh much, for me.”

Irene looked at him, considering. He remained a fine, muscular man. But he, too, would need two hands for climbing, so couldn’t safely carry the bag down. He might have held on to something less bulky with his teeth, but not this.

Fortunately, Grundy came up with the answer. “One of you go down a bit, and the other hand down the bag. Then the other can climb below and take the bag again. Stair-step it down. It’ll take time, but the bag will get there.”

“Yeah, sure, that’ll work!” Xavier agreed, removing his gaze from Irene’s torso. He clambered over the brink and grasped the vines, readily lowering himself. When his head was just below the brink, he hooked his left hand firmly in the ivy and reached up with his right. “Hand it down!” he called.

“He means the bag,” Grundy informed Irene. She didn’t bother to glare at him this time; she handed it down. Xavier had no trouble holding the bag, as long as he didn’t have to move.

Now it was time for her. She didn’t relish descending a vertical vine in her panties, but really, it was not worse than wearing a bathing suit. When she had been a teenager, she had believed that the mere sight of those celebrated green panties would drive men mad, so naturally she had taken every opportunity to proffer fleeting glimpses of them. Now she was in her—alas—late twenties, and long past such illusions. If only she had known what was coming, she would have come prepared!

Prepared—how? If she had not worn a skirt, she could not have caught these seeds. It would have seemed silly to bring a big bag. So maybe it was just as well, the way it had happened.

No sense dawdling. She swung her legs over the edge and found footholds in the vine. She knew Xavier was looking up at her legs, but that could not be helped; besides, he was worried that she might fall. In moments she would be below him, anyway.

She paused, glancing back up at the Tree of Seeds and the monstrous sapient bird perched on it. “Farewell, Simurgh, and thank you!” she called.

FAREWELL, GOOD WOMAN
, the bird responded.
REMEMBER THE NATURE OF THE SEEDS YOU CARRY
.

Scant chance she would forget! These seeds represented wealth beyond her fondest prior imaginings!

Irene resumed her descent, knowing that she would probably never again meet the like of the Simurgh.

I
n the morning, Ivy and Hugo and Stanley peeked over the edge of their ledge to spy out the worst. It was confirmed. A monster slept across the cave entrance.

They looked about the rest of the cave, seeking some other exit. There was none. This was a one-entrance domicile, and the monster blocked that one.

“Can we sneak out past him?” Ivy asked. “Before he wakes?”

Hugo inspected the monster. It was humanoid, hairy and huge. There was no gap between it and the walls of the mouth of the cave. “We’d have to climb over its legs,” he said. “I don’t think it would sleep long, then.”

“Maybe he’ll go away soon,” Ivy said.

But as she spoke, the giant rolled over, so that his horrendously ugly face was toward them, and opened his eye.

“Uh-oh,” Hugo said.

It was a fair comment, for the giant saw them. “Ho!” he roared with a voice like mottled thunder and scrambled to his feet. The cave entrance was high enough to admit two and a half ordinary people standing on each other’s heads, but the hairy pate of the giant barely cleared it. “Midgets in cave!” the gaping mouth roared.

“Run for it!” Hugo cried in a fit of inspiration.

They tried. They slid-scrambled down to the floor—but the only place to run was toward the monster, and his huge, hairy, knobbly legs barred the way. His enormous eye seemed to flash as it watched them, and his gigantic wooden club, formed from the trunk of a medium ironwood tree, hovered menacingly. The three of them lost what little nerve they had remaining and backed away.

But the giant followed them, poking forward with the club. “What you do in cave?” he roared, causing sand to rattle loose and sift down from the ceiling.

Ivy was terrified, but she knew her friends were brave. “We must fight him!” she declared. “We’ll make him let us go!”

Hugo exchanged an incredulous glance with Stanley. The logic of women was indecipherable! Then he turned a blank face to Ivy. “Fight him?”

“Throw fruit at him!” she said encouragingly.

“But my fruit is rotten!”

“No it isn’t!”

He remembered. “That’s right; it isn’t any more! But rotten fruit is okay for this!” He conjured a huge superripe tomato and hurled it at the giant. It struck about halfway up, splattering the crude animal-skin clothing with drippy red tomato-brains.

“And you, Stanley, with your superhot steam—you can toast his toes!” she said encouragingly.

The little dragon pumped up his steam. It was indeed superhot now, and he found his courage returning. If Ivy thought he could fight the giant effectively, maybe he could. He braced himself, aimed his snout precisely, and issued a searing jet of white-hot steam that heated the giant’s callused, warty, big left toe.

The giant paused, taking a moment to realize that something was wrong. It was, after all, a long way from his toe to his head, and the pain took time to travel through the poorly maintained nerve channels. The aroma of cooking meat wafted up from the affected digit.

The giant sniffed. He licked his lips with a long sloppy tongue. That smelled good!

Then the pain plowed through the sludge clogging the last nerve channel and reached the pain center.

He roared again. Stalactites picked up the impulse, vibrating like tuning forks, and a pile of old fish scales jumped, registering two notches on the earthquake scale. The wind from the roar blew the little dragon head over tail, interfering with his aim; his remaining breath of steam shot up in a vertical geyser and petered out.

Hugo threw another fruit—this time an overripe watermelon. It was too heavy for him to heave high, so it splatted on the giant’s hot toe, cooling it.

Ivy realized that they weren’t making much progress. “Think of something, Hugo!” she cried. “You’re smart!”

“I am?” Hugo still found this hard to believe, especially in the morning. But he discovered he was smarter than he had supposed, and he did think of something. “Cherries!” he cried. After all, they had worked pretty well to disrupt Fracto, the bad cloud, when the three children were fleeing it.

He started heaving cherries, and they exploded all around the giant with fancy red booms. But they were too small to have much effect on a target of this size.

“A pineapple!” Hugo said. It, too, had proved to be an effective fruit in the past, with some sweet results. He heaved one. This was considerably more powerful, and the explosion set the giant’s animal skin on fire. The conflagration was closer to the pain center, and the nerve channels had
already been reamed out, so the smell of roasting meat hardly got started before the new roar shook the cave. The giant danced about, smashing out the flames with fist and club.

In the course of this activity, the monster bent down. For a moment his eye hovered near the dragon.

Stanley shot out a blast of steam that bathed the eye.

“Owwwgh!” the giant cried, clapping his hands to his face as the club dropped to the floor. “Ungh, smarts!”

“Now we can go!” Hugo cried happily. “Stanley blinded him!”

“Oh!” Ivy exclaimed. She paused to peer up at the tears squeezing out between the monster’s fingers. “Poor thing!”

“Hey, we gotta go!” Hugo said. “Before he starts blocking off the door again!”

“But his eye!” she said. She had sympathy for anyone who cried for any reason. Once she had gotten dust in her eye, and it had teared something awful. “Suppose it doesn’t get better?”