Harpy Thyme (20 page)

“I have no soul either,” Marrow said. “But I would like to have one. Then perhaps I could suffer sieges of madness too.”

“Which leaves me,” Trent said. “I suppose if I stood upwind of you, I would feel the next wave of madness first, and perhaps then it would be my bad memories that animated.”

Gloha hastily moved downwind from him. “Be my guest, Magician!”

Metria formed her smoky features into a huge sneer. “Twenty-five years of kingship-that must be a horrible memory!”

“From 1042 to 1067, when Magician Dor assumed the throne,” Trent agreed. “However, the twenty years before that I spent in Mundania. You might consider that a terrible memory.”

“Ugh, yes,” Gloha agreed.

“What is so bad about Mundania?” Marrow asked.

“Everybody knows it's the dreariest place imaginable,” Gloha said. “Because it has no magic. No wonder Magician Trent was desperate to return to Xanth.”

“Not necessarily,” Trent demurred. “Mundania just needs understanding.”

“Here comes another wave,” Metria said with relish.

Gloha found herself on the bank of a river. A solid stone bridge with a wooden drawbridge crossed it, and a group of women were washing clothing nearby in the shallow edge of the water. A two-wheeled covered cart drawn by a single unicorn-no, a horse, because it had no horn-was just crossing the bridge.

She looked down at herself. She was a child of five or six, wingless, in a human skirt and jacket, sitting on the bank above the women.

She looked to the other side, and saw a man standing not far off. He was sort of thin-haired, looking almost bald, with a short reddish beard and brown eyes. He had a funny little stand with a board on it, and he was facing it and looking every so often at the women and the bridge. Then she realized that he was painting the scene. So she got up and started toward him, to see what his painting looked like.

“Child!” one of the women screamed. It was the girl's mother; she just knew that without remembering it. “Stay away from that man! He's mad!”

So Gloha had to reverse course. Regretfully she went toward the bridge. The cart had gone on, but now a single man was walking across it. He was oddly dressed, and seemed to be somewhat confused. But he was somehow familiar.

He was Magician Trent! Looking much the way he did now, in his youthened state. But she knew that this was the original young Trent-and this must be Mundania, because it certainly wasn't Xanth. She was sharing his madness vision of his past.

She tried to call to him, but could not. The child she animated just watched. He crossed the bridge, then looked around. He saw Gloha but seemed not to recognize her. This wasn't surprising, because she wasn't herself at the moment. Then his eye fixed on the painter. He left the road and walked across to approach the man.

Gloha wanted to listen to their conversation, but knew her Mundane mother would forbid her getting close. So she busied herself on the bank, chasing down a bug, going one way and another, just sort of coincidentally getting closer to the painter. Finally she sat on the bank, and managed to scoot a bit nearer yet.

But she was disappointed. Trent tried to talk to the painter, but the man seemed not to understand him at all. Gloha realized what the problem was: Trent was speaking Xanthian, which came naturally to all residents, while the painter was speaking Mundanian. With different languages they could not communicate with each other very well.

Finally Trent gave up and went on. Gloha wanted to follow, but couldn't; the girl just was not going that way. She wrenched herself, trying to prevail. To her surprise, it worked, maybe. Something happened.

Then she was in an orchard. The fruit trees were flowering beautifully. They seemed to have hardly any leaves, but were completely covered with flowers. The painter was out there, painting the scene. She was unable to approach him again, because the woman she occupied was just walking by, but at least she could tell that this was a different day and different place.

However, it was Trent she wanted to see, not the painter. She wrenched again, and this time found herself in another body, watching him. He was somewhat ragged now; time must have passed, and he had had a hard time foraging for food in this strange country. But now he had found work at a farmstead, doing menial work, and seemed to be learning the language. Food and shelter seemed to be part of the deal; he might have to sleep in the loft of the barn with the chickens, but right now he was being served a wooden bowl of gruel by a plain young woman who must be the farmer's daughter. There was something familiar about her-

“Metria!” Gloha tried to exclaim, but of course nothing came out. She was just another farm child snooping on others' business. She was also-oops-male. A farm boy. Part of his body was weird. So she wrenched out of there and went to watch the mad painter. Well, he wasn't mad, of course; she just thought of him that way because this was a scene in the wave of madness, and he was the first man she had seen here. Still, the way her body glanced glancingly at him suggested that this native considered the painter highly eccentric if not outright crazy. But his painting was nice enough; it was of a wheat field, with a city in the background, and there was a sort of soft rounded quality to the wheat plants. And-he was animated by Marrow Bones. He didn't look like Marrow, but there was just something about the way he moved and the shape of his skull that made her certain. So he was a significant character of some sort, and it behooved her to keep-an eye on him until she discovered how this sequence played out.

She found that she could control her wrenches better with practice. Each one took her approximately where she wanted to go, but always forward in time. She could see the season advancing with each jump. She had started in early spring; now it was summer.

Trent's relationship with the farmer's daughter improved. She evidently liked him, but was shy because she wasn't pretty. She was lean and homely, but of good character. Something was definitely developing there.

Meanwhile the mad painter was everywhere. Each day he tramped out to establish his position, and then he just stood there and painted. On rainy days he did “still lifes”-tables with fruit and pottery. But most days he was out painting the town in all its aspects. Trees, flowers, fields, clouds, houses, the sea, boats, and people. All of them had his rounded, sometimes slightly fuzzy flair, but all were pretty and realistic in their mad way. It was amazing how much variety he could find in what had seemed to Gloha like a pretty dull Mundane town. He never seemed to do anything with the paintings; they just got stacked up and forgotten. No one else seemed to want them.

Trent married the farmer's daughter. Gloha was gradually learning how to understand the weird Mundane language and writing, seeing it through the eyes of those she occupied, so now she was able to understand the information on the wedding paper: this was a place called Aries in a region called France at a time called 1888. All of that was meaningless to Gloha, but since she was here now she might as well know it.

The mad painter kept right on painting as the season progressed. Sometimes he painted at night and slept in the day. Sometimes he went inside and painted piles of books, or a pair of shoes, or chairs, or people eating at tables. But mostly he painted fields and houses and people going among them. Often he made sketches, and then completed the painting later. As winter came he painted flowers in pots. He seemed to be satisfied only when he was actually in the process of painting; the rest of his life was blah. But he really was mad, because he got into a fight with another painter-friend, then cut off part of his own ear, and took it to a house where a number of women lived. Their profession was something Gloha was not competent to fathom; it seemed to relate to making men happy for short periods. They weren't bad women; in fact they understood the mad painter about as well as anyone did, and showed him some sympathy. They had him taken to a place where folk got repaired and bandaged so that he wouldn't bleed to death. That slowed down his painting.

Trent was doing better. He came to know the painter, perhaps because both of them were considered mad in their ways, and now they were able to talk. If Trent told the man of the wonders of his homeland, no one would believe it if the painter spoke of it elsewhere. Maybe he did, and that only increased his seeming madness, because in the spring the painter went to a special place for the mad folk. He kept on painting, and when he couldn't go out he painted pictures of himself and others there, or even invented figures. Gloha was startled to see him paint a picture of her, with her wings, though she had none here. Either Trent had told-no, he couldn't have, because this was before Gloha had ever existed!-or the mad painter somehow saw without seeing.

Trent's wife ordered a baby the Mundane way, which Gloha found so weird that she didn't watch. There was no stork; instead-never mind. In the Mundane year 1889 it arrived, a boy, and on occasion Gloha animated it. But she also wrenched out to watch the mad painter, who was really more interesting right now. He finally left the madhouse and went to another town where a Mundane healer called a doctor tried to take care of him. That didn't seem to help much, but the painter did like the healer's slender sweet daughter. Suddenly Gloha was animating the girl, who was exactly her age of nineteen, and the painter painted her in a garden, and as she was playing a music machine called a piano. Then, suddenly, he killed himself.

Gloha, shocked, returned to Trent's family. This was proceeding normally. She watched the little boy grow older. But this lacked flair; she had become distracted by the mad painter, and now that he was gone she just wanted to get out of this scene. So she jumped ahead as fast as she could, seeing the boy become a, teenager, almost a man-and suddenly a bad illness came, and Trent's wife and son died.

“Oh!” Gloha cried. “That was awful!”

“Yes,” Trent agreed. “She was the only woman I ever loved, and the only son. There was nothing to do but to return to Xanth, where I had more power. But that was a separate story.”

“The mad painter-” she said.

“I liked him too. He was named-” He paused, working to remember it after all this time. “Go. Van Go. Something like that. I think people got interested in his paintings after he died. But they all thought him mad while he lived. He wasn't; he merely had strong artistic passions. He understood about Xanth; he was the only one who believed me. That's why I liked him.” He sighed.

“And the girl he painted, near the end? Who played the music.”

“The doctor's daughter, Marguerite. A nice girl. Like you.”

“This is odd,” Marrow said. “I have never been a mad Mundane painter before. If I were capable of such emotion, I would have considerable sympathy for the man.”

“He warranted sympathy,” Trent agreed. “Had he lived in Xanth, magic could have helped him. He might have been successful and happy here. Instead he had to face life in Mundania.”

“And he couldn't face it,” Marrow said.

“I don't know how anyone faces drear Mundania,” Metria said. “No magic-my kind doesn't even exist there.” She hesitated. “Yet there was a certain ambiguity of feeling.”

“A certain what?” Gloha asked.

“Doubt, uncertainty, indefiniteness, vagueness, equivocation-”

“I believe she had the right word the first time,” Marrow said.

“Whatever,” the demoness agreed crossly.

Trent glanced at her. “You animated my wife for a summarized period of fifteen years,” he said. “I must say that if you did not feel emotion, you emulated it well enough to fool me.”

“I felt it,” Metria said, looking unusually pensive. “Understand, in real life I think you're an impossibly rejuvenated over-the-hill mortal human man, a fit object for endless scorn. But in that mad vision, I-she-” Something very like a tear glistened in her eye. “She did love you, didn't she?”

Gloha understood how that could be. “And I loved her, and my son,” Trent agreed. “Others called her unlovely, but in her spirit she was beautiful, and I think as time passed that came to be reflected in her physical aspect. She did not understand me as the painter did, but she treated me well from the outset, and taught me the language and ways of that land, and when we came to love each other, I learned responsibility in a way I had never known before. She made me what I was when I returned to Xanth.”

“And you made her lovely,” Metria said. “And she got you a fine son. Then that evil magic came-”

“A plague,” he agreed. “An illness that swept across that land of France, and other lands, taking its toll of folk each time. I don't know why it spared me. I sold the farm we had inherited to finance an expedition to Xanth, which I happened to know how to reach, and recruited soldiers of fortune, trained them, prepared them to face magic, and then had the irony of achieving the kingship of Xanth without conquering it. But I would never have returned, if I had not lost those I loved.” There seemed to be a tear in his own eye. The mad scene had shaken him. That, too, Gloha understood.

Meanwhile, she was also amazed. She was learning aspects of the Magician's history she had never suspected. “Didn't you love Queen Iris?” she asked.

“No. That was a marriage of convenience. We both understood the necessity.”

“And your daughter, the Sorceress Irene?”

“Her, yes. And my grandchildren. Which is why I am ready to fade out of the picture and leave Xanth to them. My day is past.”

Still Metria was unusually hesitant. Now she assumed the form of the woman she had animated in the vision, of mature age, with her hair tied back in a bun. She was not laughing at them or dissolving into smoke. She just gazed at Trent without speaking again.

“Please don't tease me with that form,” Trent said mildly. But Gloha remembered how deceptive his mildness could be. His true emotion was not far from expression.

“I-I know it is the madness,” Metria said. “But I never felt feeling before. Would you-”

The Magician evidently didn't trust this. “Would I what?”

The demoness actually fidgeted. “Would you-kiss me?”