Knot Gneiss (8 page)

“We need that stink horn,” Wenda said.

“I could fly up and get it,” Meryl said. “But I’d have to let go.”

“Maybe not,” Jumper said. “I have the talents of size and form, thanks to my beloved Eris. If you don’t mind standing on me, I can lift you up.”

“I’ll do it,” Meryl agreed. She spread her wings and flew up to sit on him, without letting go of his foot.

Then Jumper expanded, becoming twice his prior size, then three times, carrying Meryl upward until she could reach the plant. She extended one hand, carefully.

“Handle it gently!” Wenda called. “Very gently!”

But then Meryl lost her balance, and instead of carefully lifting the horn from its mooring, she punched it. The thing blasted out a foul-smelling noise and issued a bilious colored smell. Both spread disgustingly out to fill the V of the valley. The people could not escape the sound or the cloud. Suddenly they were dipped in nausea.

Their pile collapsed in a sickly heap. But the job was done: the giant stone ear, similarly oppressed by the awful noise, was melting. Wenda could hardly blame it; all of them were retching. There was nothing quite as offensive as a ruptured stink horn.

They dragged themselves to their feet and scrambled over the sagging stone before the ear could recover from the awful sound. They were not much better off than it was.

But they were not yet through. “I don’t think I like these puns,” Dipper remarked, shaking his head to clear a dribble of vomit from his beak.

“That is the heck of it,” Ida said. “No person in his or her right mind would enter a Strip unless desperate. Unfortunately, we
are
desperate. We have no other way to return to Xanth.”

As their sickness from the dreadful stink horn eased, they saw that they faced a pleasant scene where assorted hoodlike hats floated. “What is this?” Meryl asked suspiciously.

“It must be a pun we won’t like,” Dipper said.

“But there seems to be no way through except there,” Jumper said, reverting to manform. This time the mermaid glanced at his body and did not protest or freak out. In fact her expression seemed appraising. Jumper glanced similarly at her bare body, and did not freak out. They were getting acclimatized. It was interesting seeing it happen, stage by stage.

“We shall just have to endure it,” Wenda said. They were all still linked by their hands.

They forged together into the scene. The hats swirled, then flew to the head of each person, including the bird, and lodged there.

The effect was immediate. All of them became children.

“Oh, no!” a nine-year-old Ida exclaimed. “They are Child Hoods!”

“So what, dummy?” Jumper demanded.

“
You’re
the dummy!” Ida retorted.

“Am not!”

“Am too!”

“Children!” Wenda said sternly. “Don’t quarrel. It isn’t nice.”

Both turned on her. “Oh, yeah?” Jumper demanded.

“Yeah!” Wenda said. Then, realizing that she was being just as childish as they, she tried to correct it. “Those hoods are making us naughty children. We have to take them off.”

“You first,” Ida said.

“I don’t have a free hand, dummy,” Wenda said.

“I do,” Meryl said, showing a trace of maturity. She put her free hand to her head, trying to lift off the hood. “It won’t come off.”

Wenda wanted to check her own hood, but didn’t dare let go of Jumper or Ida. So she made a childish squeal of frustration.

“I’ll check,” Dipper said, putting a wing to his head. “Bleep!”

“It seems we can’t get them off,” Jumper said. “We’re locked into Child Hood.”

“This is all your fault,” Dipper said to Wenda.

“Is not!” Wenda said, then caught herself. Somebody had to be un-childish. “I mean, I’m sorry.”

Ida made an effort and spoke like an adult. “It’s no one’s fault. It’s just part of the Strip. We just have to handle it. Does anyone have an idea?”

That shamed the others into momentary maturity. “There must be something,” Meryl said. “This Strip seems to be like the Good Magician’s Challenges: there’s always a way, if you can just fathom it.”

“That must be where the old gnome got the idea,” Dipper said, cackling.

“I think it is actually that puns have an affinity for anti-puns,” Ida said. “Opposites attract, and actions generate equal and opposite reactions. The effect is similar: we can nullify the puns if we just see how.” Then, worn out by her effort of maturity, she lapsed into a childish giggle.

Wenda wracked her young brain. What would nullify a Child Hood? She couldn’t think of anything.

“What’s that?” Dipper asked. He was looking at a patch of fuzzy little plants that grew into the shape of the letters E or T.

“Those are mist E’s or miss T’s,” Wenda said, because she had seen them on occasion in the forest. “They generate wisps of fog.”

“What good is that?” the bird demanded truculently.

“Aren’t human children afraid of the dark?” Jumper asked.

That crystallized a notion. “Yes!” Wenda agreed. “Meryl, get over there and stir up those E’s and T’s.”

“You aren’t my mommy,” Meryl said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Wenda choked down her urge to shout, “Nyaa Nyaa fraidy cat!” and rephrased her request. “Please, pretty please with sugar on it, go mess up those plants.”

“Well, in that case, okay.” The mermaid flew over the patch, not letting go of Jumper’s hand, and swept her tail through the patch.

The plants, outraged, puffed out a huge quantity of fog. It rose up in a roiling cloud and surrounded them. Suddenly everything was black.

Wenda was terrified. Children were indeed afraid of the dark, and she was a child. She screamed. So did the others, overwhelmed. But they all clutched one another’s hands.

She felt something happen on her head. That was what she wanted. “Flee forward!” she cried, lurching forward herself.

They stumbled forward. In barely a moment and a half they plunged out of the shroud of fog.

“The hoods are gone!” Meryl exclaimed.

“Yes,” Wenda said. “They didn’t like being terrified, so they jumped off. Now we’re beyond their range.”

“You figured it out,” Meryl said in a mature manner. “I apologize for my prior attitude.”

“You were a child,” Wenda reminded her.

“We were all children,” Jumper said. “We all apologize. Wenda came through for us.”

But they were not yet out of the world of Comic, or even the Strip. Now the way was barred by a large armored figure with a sword. He stood menacingly before them; on his chest was a sign:
I AM THE SILENT KNIGHT. I HAVE TAKEN AN OATH OF SILENCE. I SHALL ALLOW NO TALKING PERSON OR CREATURE TO PASS.

“But we need to pass,” Wenda protested. “We don’t belong here.”

The sign changed.
TOO BAD FOR YOU. YOU SHALL NOT PASS.

“He means it,” Ida said. “He is using sign language.”

Wenda glanced at Jumper. “Could you maybe grow in size and move him out of the way?”

“No,” Jumper replied. “I would have to let go of your hands, and we don’t want to do that. Besides which, he would probably lop off a limb or two if I challenged him. Even in my spider form I wouldn’t like that.”

He was right. They needed to find some other way.

“Why did you take that oath?” Meryl inquired.

The Knight’s visor oriented on her. It seemed to brighten. Was he gazing on her bareness and freaking out? That might be a way.

But Meryl was only the upper half of a woman. Wenda, though, was a whole woman. If Meryl could half freak him out, maybe Wenda could do the whole job.

“I think I need to strip,” she murmured.

Meryl glanced at her appraisingly. “Maybe you do,” she agreed. She helped undress Wenda, because she had a free hand. It was tricky getting her sleeves off without letting go of the two hands she held, but they managed it through extremely careful maneuvering.

Wenda stood in her bra and panties, slowly turning around. “Silent Knight!” she called. “Gaze on me a moment.”

He did, but did not freak. Maybe his visor obscured the view enough to protect him. She had assumed the visor was to stop him from getting poked in the eye with an arrow or spear, but maybe it also served for dangerous visions.

She would just have to up the ante. With Meryl’s help she removed her underwear and stood embarrassingly bare and blushing. As a species of wood nymph she had been normally nude, but now she was a whole woman, and that was different.

It didn’t work. The Silent Knight remained immune.

“Mud and brambles!” she swore as she hastily donned her clothing. She was almost as angry about having exposed herself for nothing, as for the fact that they remained balked.

“We have a problem,” Ida murmured.

Wenda looked. The Knight hadn’t freaked out, but Jumper had. At least that showed that her body had not lost its power. Clothed, Wenda snapped her fingers, and he came out of it. “Did it work?” he asked blankly.

“Not the way we wanted,” Wenda said.

The Silent Knight still stood guard, completely sober. His closed helmet did not give even the hint of a smile. “This guy’s a barrel of laughs,” Dipper remarked.

“Barrel of laughs,” Jumper echoed. “I wonder whether that could be literal? And if so—”

“A wooden barrel,” Wenda said. Wood was her domain. She sniffed the air. Sure enough, she caught a faint whiff. “That way,” she said, pointing with her nose.

The valley had opened out somewhat. There was a vile tangle of thorny mean-spirited vines on either side of the Knight, that would surely prevent any passage, but farther back the vegetation was halfway normal. There was an old dead beerbarrel tree in the direction Wenda was pointing. From it leaked a few muffled laughs.

“It got infected with bad humor and died,” Wenda said. “Beerbarrels can’t stand bad taste.”

They made their way to it as a linked group. They pushed, and the old trunk fell over as a sealed barrel. They rolled it back to the path, then up to rest before the Knight.

“Now heave it forward,” Wenda said.

The got behind the barrel and heaved together, so that it rolled right into the Knight. The Knight reacted automatically, swinging his sword and cleaving the barrel in two. There was an explosion of crude laughs.

They were contagious. In half a moment all the members of their party were rolling on the ground and helplessly laughing. There was nothing funny about it, but the bad humor had infected them and they had no choice.

And so was the Knight. “Ho ho ho!” he roared as he rolled.

“Move!” Wenda gasped between laughs.

They scrambled mostly to their feet and staggered past the helpless Knight. He had violated his Oath of Silence and was powerless to stop them. Soon they were beyond.

And there was the Sidewalk. “Sidle to the right!” Ida said. “That’s the Door to Xanth.”

“What’s on the left?” Meryl asked.

“The Door to Elsewhere. We dare not risk it.”

They sidled to the right, and in barely more than half an instant reached the Door. It was at the end of the walk, solid and closed. Meryl opened it, and they piled through.

They had won free of the Comic Strip. They collapsed in half a heap, recovering from the assault on their sanity.

“Let’s not do that again soon,” Jumper said.

“Never would be too soon,” Meryl agreed.

4

P
RINCE
H
ILARION

They looked around. They were at the edge of a swamp. The Door behind them had disappeared. “Where are we?” Jumper asked as he put on the clothes Wenda returned to him. They no longer needed to hold hands, being safely out of the Strip.

Wenda did not recognize it; this was not her part of the forest. She spied a small boy making some kind of a net. She went to talk with him. “Excuse me, do you live here?”

“Sure, for now,” the boy said.

That was slightly odd, so she changed the subject. “What is it that you are making?”

“A hare net,” the boy said proudly. “So I can catch a rabbit.”

“That’s very clever.” Wenda looked around. “I am new here. Can you tell me where this is?”

“It is near the Otterbee Swamp,” the boy said, proud of his knowledge. “The otterbees are taking care of me, because I’m an orphan, but I want to learn to forage for myself.”

Wenda kissed him on the forehead. She couldn’t help it; in the past year she had come to realize how much she liked children. She wished she could take this orphan boy home with her, but of course she couldn’t, for multiple reasons. “That is very smart of you,” she said.

The boy beamed with pleasure. Wenda tore herself away and returned to the group. “He says this is near the otterbees. I don’t know what that means.”

But Ida did. “The otterbees!” she exclaimed happily. “This is their swamp!”

“The whats?” Dipper asked.

“The otterbees are kindhearted swimming creatures who do what they feel they otter. They rescued me from the Faun & Nymph Retreat when I was a baby, so I wouldn’t forget each day the way the nymphs do. They raised me, and brought in an itinerant centaur—his name was Cerebral—who educated me in the Human manner. The otterbees told me I otter bee looking for my destiny, so I left them.”

Wenda realized that the otterbees were still doing what they otter, helping children. The little boy had departed with his hare net. He was surely being well cared for.

“Your destiny was to be the twin sister of King Ivy?” Jumper asked.

“Yes, as it turned out. We were twins, but the stork lost me, so only Ivy was delivered. I don’t remember the details, only the way the otterbees helped me. Now I will see them again.”

“So this is a harmless place the Door put us,” Meryl said. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ida agreed. “Oh, I must talk with my old friends! I should have done this years ago.” She clapped her hands. “Otterbees! It is Ida, with some Companions. It is safe to appear.”

Wenda felt the magic as the masquerade spell was abbreviated for half a moment so that Ida’s real name could be heard by others.

And a number of swimming creatures appeared. They had to have been in the area, but hiding, uncertain of the nature of these sudden intruders.

“Ida?” one asked. “She’s a princess now. Not an old crone.”