Smash took hold of the sticks again and wiggled more cautiously. Ogres were clumsy only when it suited them to be so; they could perform delicate tasks when no one was watching. The moon danced about but did not leave the screen. He experimented some more, and soon was able to steer the ship where he wanted and to make it go at any speed he wanted.
Fine--now he would take it back to Xanth and land beside the fireoak tree. Then he could turn it over to Biythe Brassie so she could fly back to her city and building.
Then blips appeared on the screen. They were shaped like little curse-burrs and were hurtling toward him. What did they want?
Then flashes of light came near him. The ship shook. The screen flared red for a moment, as if it had been knocked half silly. Smash understood this sort of thing. It was like getting knocked in the snoot by a fist and having stars and planets fly out from one's head. The entire night sky was filled with the stars flung out from people's heads in the course of prior fights, but Smash didn't care to have his own lights punched out. The thing to do was to hit back and destroy the enemy.
He checked the panel again, enjoying the prospect of a new type of violence. There was a big button he hadn't noticed before. Naturally he thumbed it.
A flash of light shot toward the blips, evidently from his own ship. It was throwing its sort of rocks when he told it to. Very well, in this strange gourd world, he could accept the notion of a fist made of light. But it wasn't aimed well, and missed the blips. It lanced on to blast a chunk of cheese out of the moon. Grated cheese puffed out into space in a diffuse cloud, where some of the blips went after it; no doubt they were hungry, too.
Smash pressed the button again, sending out another fist of light. This one missed both blips and moon. But he was getting the feel of it; he had to have his target in the very center of the mirror, where there was a faint intersection of lines like the center of a spider web. Funny place for a spider to work; maybe it had been trying to catch stray stars or blips or bits of blasted cheese.
To center the target, he had to work the two sticks in a coordinated fashion. He did so, after glancing nervously about to make quite sure no one was near to see him being so well coordinated. Of course, it took more than strength to balance his whole body on a single hamfinger or to smash a rock into a particular grade of gravel with one blow, but that was an ogre secret. It was fashionable to appear clumsy.
When he had a blip centered, he pushed the button with his big left toe so he wouldn't have to stop maneuvering. This time his aim was good; the beam speared out and struck the blip, which exploded with lovely violence and pretty colors.
This was fun! Not as much fun as physical bashing would be, but excellent vicarious mayhem. Ogres could appreciate beauty, too--the splendor of bursting bodies or of blips flying apart, forming intricate and changing patterns in the sky. He oriented on another blip, but it took evasive action.
Meanwhile, all the other blips were nearer, and their light-fists were striking closer. He had to dodge them, and that interfered with his own strikes.
Well, he was not an ogre for nothing! He licked his chops, worked his sticks, looped about, oriented, fired, dodged, and oriented again. Two more blips exploded beautifully.
Then the fight intensified. But Smash loved combat of any kind and was good at it; he didn't have to use physical fists. He almost liked this form of fighting better, because it was less familiar and therefore more of a challenge. He knocked out blip after blip, and after a while the remaining blips turned tail and fled past the moon. He had won the battle of the Luna fringe!
He was tempted to pursue the blips, so as to continue the pleasure of the fight a little longer, but realized that if he wiped them all out at this time, they would not have a chance to regenerate and return for future battles. Better to let them go, for the sake of more fun on future days. Also, he had other business.
He turned the ship about and headed for Xanth, which resembled a small disk from this vantage, like a greenish pie. That made him hungry again. Well, he would be careful not to miss it. He accelerated, zooming happily onward.
He was back in Xanth. "Smash, something else is coming!" Tandy cried.
"That's all right," he said. "I've won another battle. I feel stronger." And he did; he knew he was winning the gourd campaign, getting closer to the Night Stallion, and recovering physical strength in the process. It had been in large part his former hopelessness that had weakened him. He had believed his soul was doomed, until learning that he could fight for it in another gourd.
Biythe Brassie was still here. Now he wondered--how had she been carried out with him, when he had not been physically in the gourd?
His Eye Queue curse provided him with the answer to a question any normal ogre would not even have thought of. Biythe was here in spirit, just as he had been inside the gourd in spirit. It was very hard to tell such spirit from reality, but each person knew his own reality and was not fooled. No doubt Biythe Spirit's real body remained in the gourd, in a trance-state; since the brassies spent much of their time as statues anyway, waiting for someone to
come
push their button, no one had noticed the difference. Or rather, they had noticed, and been alarmed because she remained a statue while they were animate. So they knew that her vital element, her soul, was elsewhere. Yes, it all made sense. Everything in Xanth made sense, once a person penetrated the seeming nonsense that masked it. Different things made different sorts of sense for different people.
He would have to take the brass girl back. His curse not only forced intelligence on him, it forced un-ogrish moral awareness. At the moment he wasn't even certain that such awareness was a bad thing, inconvenient as it might be when there was mayhem to be wreaked.
But the tree-chopping attack party was coming again. Smash oriented on the group as it galloped just beyond view. The villagers must have gotten reinforcements. The individuals were larger than basilisks--evidently Biythe had deposited the chickatrice safely elsewhere--but smaller than sphinxes. They were hoofed. In fact--
"That's my brother!" Chem exclaimed. "Now I recognize his hoofbeat. But there's something with him--not a centaur."
Smash braced himself for what could be a complicated situation.
If some monster were riding herd on his friend Chet...
They hove into view. "Holey cow!" the Siren breathed. That was exactly what it was--a cow as full of holes as any big cheese. She had holes in her body every which way through which daylight showed. She was worse than the moon! A big one was in her head, about where her brain should have been; evidently that didn't impede her much. Even her horns and tail had little holes. Her legs were so holey they seemed ready to collapse, yet she functioned perfectly well.
In fact, she carried two human riders who braced their hands and feet in her holes. She was a big cow, and her gait was bumpy, so these handholds and footholds were essential.
Now Smash recognized the riders.
"Dor!
Irene!" he cried happily.
"Prince Dor?" the Siren asked.
"And his fiance?"
"Yes, they are taking forever about working up to marriage," Chem murmured with a certain equine snideness. "It's been four years now..."
"And Grundy the Golem!"
Smash added
,
spying the tiny figure perched on the back of the centaur.
"All my friends!"
"We're your friends, too," Tandy said, nettled. The party drew abreast of the fireoak tree. "What's this?" the golem cried.
"Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?"
Smash stood among the damsels, towering over them, not comprehending the reference. But the Eye Queue curse soon clarified it, obnoxiously. Some of the
Mundane
settlers in Xanth had a story by that title, and, compared with Smash the Ogre, the seven females were dwarvishly short, as was even Chem the Centaur.
"It seems you have a way with women. Smash," Prince Dor said, dismounting from the holey cow and coming to greet him. "What's your secret?"
"I only agreed not to eat them," Smash said.
"To think how much simpler my life would have been if I had known that," Dor said. "I thought girls had to be courted."
"You never courted me!" Princess Irene exclaimed. She was a striking beauty by human standards, nineteen years old. The other girls all took jealously deep breaths, watching her. "I courted you! But you never would marry me."
"You never would set the date!" Dor retorted.
Her mouth opened in a pretty 0 of indignation. "You never set the date! I've been trying to--"
"They've been fighting about the date since before there was anything to date," Grundy remarked. "He doesn't even know what color her panties are."
"I don't think she knows herself," Dor retorted.
"I do, too!" Irene flashed. "They're--" She paused,
then
hiked up her skirt to look.
"Green."
"It's only a pretext to show off her legs," Smash explained to the others.
"So I see," Tandy said enviously.
"And her panties," John said. She, like Fireoak, the Siren, and Chem, didn't wear panties, so couldn't show them off. Biythe's panties were copper-bottoms.
"You creatures are getting too smart," Irene complained. Then she did a double take, turning to
Smash
. "What happened to your rhymes?"
"I got cursed by the vine," the ogre explained. "It deprived me of both rhyme and stupidity in one swell foop."
"In a foop?
Oh, you poor thing," she said sympathetically.
"Now that incorrigible ogre charm is working on Irene, too," Prince Dor muttered.
"Of course it is, idiot," she retorted. "All women have a secret passion for ogres." She turned to Smash. "Now you had better introduce us all."
Smash did so with dispatch. "Tandy, Siren, John, Fireoak, Chem, Goldy, and Biythe--these are Dor, Irene, Grundy, and Chet, and vice versa."
"Moooo!"
lowed
the holey cow, each 0 with a big round hole in it.
"And the Holey Cow," Smash amended. Satisfied, the bovine swished her tattered tail and began to graze. The cropped grass fell out the holes in her neck as fast as she swallowed it, but she didn't seem to mind.
"I delivered your message," Chet said. "King Trent has declared this tree a protected species, and all the other trees in sight of it, and sent Prince Dor to inform the village. There will be no more trouble about that."
"Oh, wonderful!" the hamadryad cried. "I'm so happy!" She danced a little jig in air, hanging by one hand from a branch. The tree's leaves seemed to catch fire, harmlessly. Both nymph and tree were fully recovered from the indisposition of their recent separation. "I could just kiss the King!"
"Kiss me instead," Dor said. "I'm the messenger."
"Oh, no, you don't!" Irene flashed, taking him firmly by the ear.
"Kiss me instead of Dor," Chet offered. "There's no shrew guarding me."
The hamadryad dropped from her branch, flung her arms about the centaur, and kissed him. "Maybe I have been missing something," she commented. "But I don't think there are any males of my species."
"You could take up with one of the woodland fauns," Princess Irene suggested. "You do have pretty hair." The hamadryad's hair, under its red fringe, was green--as was Irene's hair.
"I'll consider it," Fireoak agreed.
"How did you gather such a bevy?" Prince Dor asked Smash. "They certainly seem affectionate, unlike some I have known." He moved with agility to avoid Irene's swift kick.
"I just picked them up along the way," the ogre said. "Each has her mission. John needs her correct
name,
the Siren needs a better lake--"
"They all need men," the golem put in.
"I need to go home," Biythe said.
"Oh. I'll take you there now." Smash reached for the gourd.
"She's from a hypnogourd?" Princess Irene asked. "This should be interesting. I always wondered what was inside one of those things."
Smash hooked his finger into Biythe's brassiere and lifted her high.
"Well, that's one way to pick up a girl," Dor remarked. "I'll have to try that sometime."
"Won't work," Irene said. "I don't wear a--"
"Not even a green one?" Tandy asked, brightening.
Smash looked into the gourd's peephole.
The two of them were in the brass spaceship, descending rapidly toward Xanth.
"Oh!" Biythe exclaimed, terrified. She flung her brass arms about Smash. "I'll fall! I'll fall! Save me, ogre!"
"But I have to bring it down to return to your building," Smash said. He was having difficulty because there was hardly room for two. He grabbed for a control stick, jerked it around--and the brass girl jumped.
"What are you doing with my knee?" she cried.
Oh. Smash saw now that he had hold of the wrong thing. But it was almost impossible to operate the controls with her limbs in the way. The ship veered crazily, which set Biythe off again. Her nerves certainly were not made of steel! The more she kicked and screamed, the worse the ship spun, and the more frightened she became. They were now plunging precipitously toward ground.
Then they were back under the fireoak tree. "We thought you had enough time to drop her off," Tandy said. Then she paused, frowning.
Biythe was wrapped around Smash, her metal arms hugging his neck desperately, her legs clasping his side. He had firm hold of one of her knees.
"I think we interrupted something," Princess Irene remarked sardonically.
Biythe's complexion converted from brass to copper. Smash suspected his own was doing much the same, as his Eye Queue now made him conscious of un-ogrish proprieties. The two disengaged, and Smash set the brass girl down on the ground, where she sat and sobbed brass tears. "We were crashing," Smash explained lamely.