Dragon on a Pedestal (43 page)

The nest loomed close. Stanley saw it and gathered his last remaining strength for a final effort. All six legs heaved together, and he leaped, and sailed into the air—and landed on top of the nest.

The whorl was dragged along with him, settling around and into the nest.

The zapping of the wiggles faded at the center. They still moved outward outside the nest, but no new ones emerged. The whorl had made them forget, and so they had become harmless. The nest had been nullified, thanks to Stanley’s heroic concluding jump.

The three of them were safe from the wiggles—and so was Xanth, once the ring of people got rid of the remaining wiggles. That was no easy task, but it was at least possible to do.

Stanley lay astride the huge nest, as if he were mounted on a pedestal, his blood dripping down around it to the ground.

“Oh, Stanley!” Ivy cried, rushing up to him.

Hugo grabbed her arm, whirling her around and holding her back. “No!” he cried. “Don’t go into the forget-whorl!”

“Oh—the forget!” She nodded. “I don’t want to be forgetted. Poor Stanley!”

One of the dragon’s ears twitched. Stanley had always had excellent hearing, especially when he was mentioned; that was the nature of his ears. One eye opened.

Ivy clapped her hands. “Ooo, he lives! He remembers!”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow—” Hugo said cautiously, his intelligence interfering with his emotion.

“Yes, it does!” she insisted. “It has to! Make it reasonable, Hugo!”

Hugo put his mind to work again. He could do some pretty impossible things when Ivy told him to. “Well, since he is the Gap Dragon and he has lived for centuries in the middle of the forget-spell that’s on the Gap, we conjectured that he could be partially immune. But he could be completely immune, in which case—”

“Oh, yes! That must be it! He can’t be forgetted!” She stood and looked at the dragon. “But he’s hurt awful bad, Hugo. He’s bleeding and everything! We’ve got to help him!”

Hugo knew there was nothing they could do at the moment. He looked about—and spied the Gap Dragon.

The what? Hugo blinked.

Then he saw, beside the full-sized dragon, the Gorgon. “Mother!” he cried, waving violently.

From the distance, the Gorgon made a familiar signal. “Cover your eyes,” Hugo told Ivy. “You too, Stanley. Do not look. Mother is on the way. She will make everything right.”

Obediently Ivy faced away and closed her eyes, and Stanley relaxed into unconsciousness. He was a tough little dragon, but he was badly hurt.

They waited for some time. Then they heard something like pebbles dropping to the ground. “Mother’s glaring at wiggles,” Hugo said, figuring it out. “They’re turning to stone!”

There was also a whomp-whomp approaching. “How can the Gap Dragon be big—and small?” Hugo asked, then answered his own question. “There must be another of the same species.”

“A lady dragon,” Ivy said with female intuition.

The dropping-pebbles sound stopped. “You may look now,” the Gorgon said. “I am veiled.”

Ivy opened her eyes and looked. The Gorgon and the dragoness were crossing the greatfruit ramp.

The Gorgon paused to turn and wave to the outer circle. “I have cleared a channel!” she called.

Another figure detached itself from the circle. It was a centaur, bearing a rider. Ivy knew who that would be.

The Gorgon completed the distance and picked Hugo up. “You get lost like this again,” she said severely, “and I’ll show you my face!” Then she kissed him through the veil. “My, aren’t you handsome! Whatever happened to you?”

“Aw, Mom, it was fun!” Hugo protested. “But we’ve got to help Stanley!”

“Who?”

“Stanley Steamer,” Ivy explained, indicating the little dragon. “He saved Xanth—but he’s hurt!”

“Oh, yes, of course.” But the Gorgon stood aside while the big dragon whomped up, sniffed Stanley, then opened her huge jaws and took him in her mouth. She lifted him down off the nest and set him on the ground.

“But the forget—” Ivy protested.

“She’s immune too,” the Gorgon reassured her.

A monstrous shape glided down from above: the biggest bird Ivy had ever imagined. It banked and flew away. A single feather drifted down.

“Thank you, Simurgh!” the Gorgon called. She picked up the feather, paused, and looked at Ivy through her veil. “I think it is better if you do this, Ivy,” she said. “He’s your friend, and it will work most effectively for you.” She handed her the feather.

Ivy looked at the feather. It had seemed small in the sky, but it was as long as she was, now that she held it, but not heavy. “Do what?”

“Touch Stanley.”

“Oh.” Ivy took the feather and touched the tip to the little dragon’s nose. “Like this?” she asked, perplexed.

“Wherever he hurts, dear.”

“Oh.” Ivy stroked the feather across the wound in Stanley’s neck—and it healed immediately. “Oh!” she exclaimed, thrilled. She proceeded to touch the feather to every place Stanley had been holed, and soon the little dragon had mended completely. Once more he was able to hold his head up. “Oh!” she cried a third time and hugged him joyously.

“Hugo, how were you able to conjure good fruit?” the Gorgon asked her son, though her manner indicated she had an idea of the answer. This was the way of mothers.

“It’s Ivy’s fault,” Hugo replied. “When I’m near her, I can do almost anything. I can even think straight. She’s a Sorceress.”

The Gorgon studied Ivy through her veil. “Yes, I believe she is.”

“Just the way my father is a Magician,” Hugo continued happily. Then he sobered. “Except—”

“He will be a Magician again,” the Gorgon said. “It will take some time, of course, for him to grow—”

Another figure approached, seemingly careless of the remaining wiggles. It was a fairly pretty young woman Ivy didn’t recognize. “May I help?” the woman inquired.

“Thank you, no,” the Gorgon said, glancing at her in perplexity. “We seem to be in order here.”

“Who is she?” Ivy asked. “Why don’t the zap holes hurt her?” For the woman had several perforations.

“I am Zora Zombie,” the woman said. “Holes don’t hurt zombies, so I walked across in case there was anything I could do.” She spoke with a slight slurring, as if her lips weren’t quite tight.

“You don’t look like a zombie,” Hugo remarked.

“True love has almost restored me to life,” Zora said. “And perhaps my spine was stiffened when I looked at your mother’s face.”

“That’s why I didn’t recognize you!” The Gorgon exclaimed. “You have changed so much—”

“I am what every zombie could be, if conditions were right, Zora said. “Now I can even do my magic again.”

“What’s that?” Ivy asked.

Zora smiled depreciatingly. “It’s not very useful, I’m afraid. I can make creatures age faster.”

“Age faster?”

“When I turn on my talent, any animal will mature two years in only one year,” Zora explained. “But since no one in his right mind cares to speed up his life—certainly the man I loved when I was alive didn’t—” She frowned, then set that aside as dead history. “So I never had use for it.”

But the Gorgon perked up. “Could you make a baby grow twice as fast as normal, without harming him?”

“Oh, certainly,” Zora agreed. “My talent never hurt anyone, except that most people feel that aging is the same as hurting.”

“If you did it near Ivy, you could age a baby ten times as fast,” Hugo said confidently.

“Ten times as fast!” the Gorgon exclaimed. “Zora, you must come to baby-sit my husband!”

“Certainly, if you wish,” Zora said. “I always like to help people, especially older folk like my parents. But isn’t your husband already over a century old?”

“He is and he isn’t,” the Gorgon said. “Believe me, you will be welcome at our castle! You and Ivy together!”

The centaur arrived. Ivy heard the beat of hooves and looked up, her arms still around Stanley’s healed neck. It was Chem, and on her was—

“Mother!” Ivy cried, with tears of joy and relief. Now she
knew
everything would be all right. “You must meet my friend Stanley! He saved Xanth!”

“Yes, he did,” Irene agreed, dismounting. “And in the process, he helped show us how to move the forget-whorls out of our way so no one else will be forgetted. We shall make a statue of him.”

“No!” Ivy cried, gazing wildly at the Gorgon.

Irene laughed, patting Stanley on the head. “Not that way,” she reassured her daughter. “We shall carve it from genuine stone, and set it beside
the statue of Night Mare Imbri, exactly as I envisioned. It will be on a pedestal, with the words HERO DRAGON in the base. He will be famous.” She glanced across at the full-sized dragon. “His place in the Gap will have to be filled by a substitute for a while, until Stanley is able to resume his duties there.”

“Oh, goody!” Ivy said, clapping her hands. “He’ll stay with me! Stanley is my friend!”

“That too,” Irene agreed, getting down to hug child and dragon together.

The author wishes to thank a number of Xanth fans for their contributions of punnish notions for this novel. Roughly in chronological order: Paul Priu of the Isle of Illusion—the Football and the Baseball Diamond; Richard Hoffman—the Torment Pine; Bobby R. Bogle—the Trance Plant; Manuel Enriquez—Bed Bugs; Matt Mason—the Lady-Fingers Plant; Sean Logan correctly pointed out that the Time of No Magic in
The Source of Magic
should have abolished the Forget-Spell on the Gap Chasm; Alec Pontenberg—the Bumble Bee and the Armor-Dillo; Judy-Lynn del Rey—the Fountain of Youth, which just happens to occupy the same spot in Mundania as it does in Xanth, and the Gorgon-zola cheese; Freeda Scanlan—the game of People-Shoes; Liz Slaughter—the Chocolate Moose; Chris Carden—the Mouth Organ; Ben L. Geer, who didn’t exactly send a pun but pleaded for more Xanth because it is his only link to reality (I know the feeling!); Bern “Pern” Eagan (evidently a refugee from another series—we do get all kinds here), who introduced me to his friend the Centaur of Attention, though that creature fled before I could capture him for this novel, being shy; and John Caporale, who sent me this plot summary: Dor and his friends use the Centaur Aisle of magic to cross over to the author’s CLUSTER science fiction framework and explore for an Ancient Site. Sigh; I regret to report that the gulf between different publishers can be greater than that between genres; our heroes would never make it across unscathed. But this does show how much more imagination my fans have than I do.

And now it is done, and I think this is punnishment enough. Please, fans, don’t deluge me with another squintillion puns; my mind may go up in smoke and I won’t dare sneak any more of these volumes out of Xanth. Getting through Parnassus is difficult enough as it is. Also, please don’t feel obliged to write me letters just because you feel I am neglected; benign neglect is vital to a writer. One month I answered over sixty letters and got behind on my novel typing. My publishers frown on that sort of thing, and such frowns can be as petrifying as the Gorgon’s stare. Just read and enjoy and keep your groans about the worst puns to yourself so people won’t stare at you. There will probably be another Xanth novel along in a year or
so, not much worse than this one. In fact, if you read this one carefully, you’ll have a better notion than I do what that one is about, but I’ll give you title and description anyway:
Crewel Lye
, a Caustic Yarn about an Unkind Untruth.

Till then—

P
IERS
A
NTHONY

Books by Piers Anthony