In the morning they lightened the raft again, hauled it to the east sh.o.r.e of the island, and paddled it across to the mainland. A sea monster poked its head out of the water and eyed them, but a huge roc bird just happened to fly by, and the sea monster ducked out of sight.

Gwenny realized that the winged monsters were indeed keeping an eye on them. That left her with mixed feelings.

She wanted to make it on her own, but still it was comforting to know that they would not be gobbled by a monster. So maybe this was a reasonable compromise: the three of them were being allowed to proceed without interference from either hostile or friendly creatures. Maybe they would have less need for protection as they gained experience.

They found a magic path and followed it inland. It would lead to Castle Roogna, because all the paths of the region did. Gwenny had visited the castle once, with her companions after Dolph and Electra's wedding. It was an impressive edifice. Much nicer, if the truth be confessed, than Goblin Mountain.

Suppose she just came to Castle Roogna, and didn't leave it? Then she would lose her chance to be lady chief, but she would be safe.

She shoved away the temptation. It wasn't that she wanted to be chief, it was that she had to be, so as to change the course of goblin history, and therefore Xanth history. It was her duty and her destiny. She dreaded it, but she could not flee from it.

Then she realized something. She had been making decisions. She had thought of a good idea that got them to sh.o.r.e. She was learning how to be a leader. She might not be very good at it, yet, but she was getting better. Maybe, just maybe, by the end of this journey, she would have learned it well enough. So there was a scintilla, or perhaps even two iotas, of hope for her.

So, resolutely, she proceeded on toward Castle Roogna.

Chapter 3.

Okra's mind tended to keep pace with her body. Since that was now rowing hard, she was thinking hard, but since there wasn't much to think about at the moment, she thought about her past, seeming almost to relive it.

She had been delivered by the stork fourteen years before, to a small community of ogres still living beside Lake Ogre-Chobee. It seemed that they had gotten turned around during the migration to the Ogre-Fen-Ogre Fen and returned here without quite realizing. After a few decades they had caught on, but by then it was too late to catch up to the main party, so they had remained.

Okra's ogress mother, disappointed by Okra's pipsqueak size, had tried to compensate by giving her a name to grow into: Okra Cordata Saxifrage Goatsbeard Ganas Ogress. Unfortunately she hadn't grown enough and was singularly small and plain for her kind. She didn't even have any warts or fangs; her stare would never curdle milk.

She was also embarra.s.singly weak; she had to use both hands to crush juice from a rock. But her worst failure was in her mind: she was not nearly stupid enough. This defect had a minor compensation: she was smart enough to hide this fault and to pretend to be only a little less stupid than the other ogre whelps. But she could not hide it from herself, and it was her constant shame.

Okra tended to stay close to home, so as not to be teased by her peers.

Other ogres thought that peers were wooden structures that projected into the water of Lake OgreChobee and had no concern about them, but Okra knew better. Peers were other ogres her age, and they were the very worst company for her. She was content to stir the pot and sc.r.a.pe the dirt off the floor, and to think her frustratingly smart thoughts.

If she ever let slip how unstupid she was, they would throw her away.

But some events she had been unable to escape. Her stylishly brutish parents had taken her to the monster marriage mash of Conan the Librarian and Tasmania Devil.

Conan was said to have been able to squeeze a big dictionary into a single word, and to be able to use two heavy tomes to pound the civilization right out of any creature in short order. Tasmania was hailed as the meanest shecanine of an ogress of her generation. So it was a perfect match. Alas, the marriage did not work out well. Conan was too literate for Tasmania's taste, and she had a restless spirit.

When the blood was on the moon she would feed him wild poison mushrooms that she ground up and mixed into his sea oat cakes. He loved the taste of those cakes, but the poison only gave him romantic notions. She wished he would lie down and die so that she could marry her first cousin Tasmaniac and gain status, but instead he was fired up for twice the usual amount of stork summoning, and their family grew at an ogreish rate.

But that was irrelevant. It was at this wedding that Okra's mother, Fem Kudzu, had gotten Okra's horrorscope cast in iron. The ogre tribe's midwife, who helped point out the right families when the stork couldn't tell one from another, was also the diviner. She announced that the runes, ox entrails, and stars pointed to good news and bad news. The good news was that Okra would eventually become a significant figure in Xanth. The bad news was that she had been cursed by a stray random accidental curse that escaped from a curse fiend without finding its proper object, and so had a magic talent.

Kudzu had reacted to this outrage as any ogress would: she had smashed the diviner into the lake, where she had disappeared without significant trace; only a few fragments of bones showed at the water's edge, and the chobees soon gulped those down. She jammed the iron cast down into the ground so deeply that molten lava filled in the hole it left. Then she hauled Okra back into the midst of the festivities-the mashing and bashing, the slam dancing, and the floor show with the drunken harpies harping-and pretended that the horrorscope had never been cast.

But Okra knew better. Ashamed, she slipped away from the festivities and hid in the cold, slimy, rat-infested cellar. That was a pleasant place, but still someone might find her, so she went down the winding narrow stone steps, down, down to the main kitchen where the wedding feast had been prepared. Pieces of chopped monsters lay scattered around; they must have fallen off the platters. As Okra's reddened eyes grew accustomed to the smoky gloom she saw sea oat cakes, both plain and poison (tastes differed), strewn on the stone floor. Someone had spilled a keg of wine dregs all over the kitchen table, the floor, and a drunken rat who lay in a stupor under the table. It was a very pleasant retreat, and Okra was able to hide there until the commotion above ground down into a dull roar.

That was one of Okra's early memories, and not unpleasant as ogre experiences went. But the knowledge that she was cursed with a magic talent haunted her thereafter.

All ogres had magic, of course, and plenty of it; it was magic that gave them their vaunted strength, ugliness, and stupidity. But a separate talent? That was awful! No wonder she was small and plain and unstupid; her natural magic had been siphoned away to make this other talent.

But maybe with luck she would never discover what it was.

Her other big memory was when she was thirteen. It rained, as it did every afternoon in this season. Thick steamy clouds wet on those below with torrents of sheets of deluge that drenched the hot rocks and cooled the hot pools. Steam puffed up, but the freezing rain sliced on through, making a turmoil of vapor that suffused the caves and made it almost impossible to breathe. It was wonderful.

The dining room smelled of spoiling cabbage and stewed carca.s.ses. That, too, was wonderful. Okra mussed up her unogreishly blond hair so that it would better hide the IQ vine circlet she wore as a wreath, and went inside. IQ vines had little effect on most ogres, because twice nothing remained nothing, but it helped Okra be alert enough to conceal her other liabilities. One was asthma; a siege of it had somehow found her, and it refused to depart. So she had to pretend to be fashionably hoa.r.s.e, though actually she was having trouble breathing.

She remained naive enough to fancy that a birthday was important to anyone other than the owner of it. This was the day that cured her of that notion. It was just a pretext for another bash, and a new horror.

She would later wish she had never had that birthday, but at the time she hadn't known how it would turn out. She had retained a taller of innocence.

In an effort to sweeten the air, Okra's grandmother, that great burgundy queen Opuntia, had arranged to intermix heaps of wilted flowers with the rushes strewn about the dining room. There was a riotous show of color: white magnolias, yellow, orange, and red hibiscus, deep purple jacaranda, bougainvillea, and the famous fragrant lavender blooms from which Grandmother Ogre's medicinal soap was made. All of this was quickly trampled under the humongous hairy feet of the ogre clan as they pounded in to eat. Soon the dining room looked like an elegant woman dressed in soiled and tattered rags, feeling somewhat the worse for wear.

The door from the kitchen opened, and the old servant Troika Troll tromped in, bearing the largest soup tureen.

Behind her other servants came, each bending under the oppressive weight of the food piled on their serving platters. The last person in was Magpie, Okra's tutor. She was in black leather and black feathers. Her outfit was dated by a century or two, but that was understandable, for Magpie was a demoness who had served similarly in many places and times.

She had even been at the fabulous human Castle Roogna, with Princess Rose, serving at her wedding to Good Magician Humfrey. Later Rose had gone to h.e.l.l in a handbasket, but remained a good person; h.e.l.l needed more roses, and roses were her talent. Who knew what else Magpie had seen during her immortal existence!

No wonder she liked being a servant.

But someone tripped and dropped a platter, and its contents spewed across the table and floor. "Incompetent!" screamed the cook. Enraged, she threw crockery, handfuls of ground pepper, and finally Okra's birthday cake across the room. That caused the ogres to think that there was a food fight in progress, and they gleefully pitched in, filling the air with flying food. The original purpose of the party was forgotten. Now the dining room smelled not only of spoiled cabbage and wilted flowers, but also of every other type of bad food.

Okra, appalled, wept. That was of course a giant yes, yes of a no-no, and gave her an ogre-sized headache. She fled the hall-only to collide with Great Auntie f.a.n.n.y.

"Why ogrette, whatever's the matter?" f.a.n.n.y inquired.

A male ogre child was an ogret, and a female an ogrette, of course, not that anyone cared. Well, maybe the goblins cared, but only because they had goblets and goblettes.

" They ruined my birthday party!" Okra cried.

"Oh, is that the occasion! I thought it was a routine food fight."

"It is now."

"Well, then, there will surely be other birthdays! How old are you?"

"Thirteen today, Auntie," Okra replied, beginning to feel less worse.

"Great gobs of gook!" Auntie exclaimed politely. " Petard and brimstone! You are overdue for marriage! You're so small it never occurred to me-but I will speak to my husband, Bareface Von Wryneck, at once. We will check the grapevine to see which first cousin ogres are available."

"But-" Okra tried to protest.

"Let's see. There's young Crawling Banks. He's so stupid that if he had dynamite for brains, he could not clear one hairy nostril. He's ideal! But I think another ogress has her eye and maybe a ham hand on him already. There's the twins Slow Comb and Fast Comb, but it's too hard to choose between them because each one's duller than the other.

Well, you'll probably have to wed the widower Zoltan Dread Locks."

That name was unfamiliar. "Who?"

Auntie poked her head through the door, because it happened to be closed. The wood splintered. It was the door's own fault for being in the way. She pointed a ham finger.

"See that dirty old ogre dressed in animal-skin slippers and the mask of the black death? That's him. Yes, I think he's the one. You know, my first, second, and third husbands were widowers when I wed them, so I can recommend the type. An ogre doesn't get to be a widower unless he treats his ogress pretty roughly, it stands to reason. So he'll be fine for you."

Okra backed away and stared around her, petrified with a little loathing and a lot of fear. Just before she fainted she had a vision of a great gray city crowded with gargoyles made of stone.

Fortunately Auntie f.a.n.n.y thought she must have knocked Okra out with an accidental sweep of her ham hand and didn't realize how unogreishly sensitive and weak she really was. f.a.n.n.y proceeded forthwith setting up the marriage. However, none of the top prospects was interested in Okra; they pointed out with some justice that she was too small and scrawny to stand up to much punishment, and her looks were so plain as to be disgusting, and there was even an ugly suspicion that she wasn't as stupid as she pretended to be. Her parents finally gave up and turned her over to her more understanding grandparents, and the search began anew.

So it was another year before a suitable prospect was lined up: Smithereen, an ogre from the far Ogre-Fen-Ogre Fen who had never seen Okra so didn't know her liabilities. He started down to meet her, but there were distractions along the way, such as trees that had not been twisted into pretzels and small dragons who had not learned fear.

Thus his progress was slow, for of course he was doing what it was in an ogre's nature to do: setting the world along his route into ogreish order. When he arrived, he would do the same for Okra, everyone fondly hoped, for her need was obviously great.

When the blood was on the moon shortly after Okra's fourteenth birthday-there was no party, because she was getting entirely too long in the tooth for marriage, as if her faults weren't already bad enough-the third big ugly event in Okra's life occurred. Her kindly (for ogres) grandparents disappeared, leaving her in the charge of her uncle Marzipana Giganta la Cabezudos fen Ogre, and his toady henchmen Numb Nuts and Big Blue Nose. Marzipana was a fine specimen of an ogre; he liked to stick pins into living b.u.t.terflies and wear them on his head. Every time he suffered a difficult thought his laboring brain heated up his head and the b.u.t.ter melted, but that was no problem. He seldom bothered with difficult thoughts, and it was easy to catch new b.u.t.terflies.

Okra knew that creatures disappeared on occasion.

Ogres did all manner of stupid things, such as barging through dragon conventions or walking off sheer cliffs, and were generally then heard from no more. No one thought anything of it except Okra, who discovered yet another peculiarity of her nature: grief. She missed her grandparents, and was sorry to think that anything bad could have happened to them. Naturally she kept this sentiment to herself, because of her primary flaw: her intelligence.

Unable to sleep, Okra roamed the dank chambers and dusky tunnels of their home caves by night. During one of these dismal jaunts she happened to overhear the voices of her Uncle Marzipana and his henchmen.

It seemed that the Ogre-Fen-Ogre Fen ogre Smithereen had been spied bashing small dragons over their heads with fresh pretzel treetrunks, and would bash his way on to Lake OgreChobee any day now. They were afraid he would balk when he actually saw Okra. So they planned to carve a petrified pumpkin into the shape of an ogre face-any random pounding and slashing would do for that-and jam it on Okra's head so that she would look uglier than she was, at least until after the wedding. Then it wouldn't matter, of course; the ogre would pull out her hair and bash her real head into any new ugliness he preferred.

For some reason Okra wanted neither the pumpkin treatment nor the marriage. She realized that she just didn't fit in ogre society. So with shame she did her final unogreish thing: she bugged out. She packed her dragonleather knapsack and made her way out to the dark slurpy sh.o.r.e of the lake where her little homemade oxblood boat lurked.

Ogres were no sailors, so none of the others had ever recognized the nature of this craft, let alone connected it to her. She had often rowed around the lake by night, finding it blissfully peaceful. That of course marked one more flaw in her nature: no good ogre desired peace.

But once she was in her boat and fleeing the ogre caves, she realized that she had nowhere to go. She was unlikely to get anywhere if she had no destination, so she pondered, and by and by it came to her. She would go to the Good Magician for an Answer! Since she didn't have a Question, she would have to come up with one. She cogitated and pondered and considered and thought about it until her skull began to overheat, and finally decided that she would simply ask for her fortune.

Whatever the Good Magician had to offer was bound to be less worse than whatever else she faced.

But she didn't know where the Good Magician lived.

So she solved that problem ogre fashion: she just rowed and rowed until maybe she'd get where she was going.

While she did, she continued to think-that was a lifelong fault of hers-and realized that she might have a better chance if she did not leave her fortune up to the Good Magician. She should frame her Question so that the Answer would give her the clue to improving her fortune. But how could she do that?

Questions flitted tantalizingly around her ears, never quite entering her head. She began to get annoyed. That gave her a notion. Maybe she should ask whether she should keep her temper, and if so, where should she keep it? But after a time she realized that the Good Magician might simply answer "No," and charge her a year's service. So she discarded that one and continued to ponder.

She rowed and rowed, because she couldn't see where she was going but obviously wasn't there yet. That gave her plenty of time to think.

Finally she came up with what she thought was the perfect Question: how could she become a Main Character? For it was evident that every creature was a character in the realm of Xanth, but some were more important than others. All of them suffered sundry travails, but the main characters had a much better record of survival and success than did the throwaway characters. Most ogres were obviously throwaways, which was why their lives were so wretched. But if she could somehow manage to become important, then her fortune would take care of itself.

The night had brightened into day, and the day had darkened into night, several times during the course of these deliberations. Still she hadn't gotten there, and she was beginning to get somewhat tired and hungry. But she was afraid that if she stopped rowing, she would get distracted and never get there.

Then there was a horrendous b.u.mp. She had gotten there! But when she looked around she discovered that it was only a bare sh.o.r.e; there was no Magician's castle in sight. "Oh, everything's going wrong!" she exclaimed. "I'll never find the Good Magician!"

"h.e.l.lo."

Startled, Okra screamed and leaped into the air. She came down on her feet outside the boat, halfway frazzled.

She hadn't realized that anyone was close.

It turned out to be a merwoman in nymph form named Mela. They talked, and decided to cross the lake-it was now the Kiss-Mee-together, because Okra had the boat and Mela knew where to go. Okra tossed the boat back into the water and they started off. Okra rowed vigorously, having recovered some strength during the brief pause, and encouraged because now there was someone to show the way.

Mela was saying something, but Okra couldn't hear over the sound of her rowing. But when her thoughts had run their course, catching her up to the vicinity of the present, she became aware of something else: the sky was darkening. Was it night already? No, it was a big thick cloud getting ready to rain on them. Well, a little rain wouldn't hurt, unless it filled the boat. Maybe it would be better to go to land and wait out the storm, as they would not make much progress in a storm.

She paused in her rowing. "Do you think we should-?" she inquired.

"Too late!" Mela cried. A gust of wind chose that moment to blow her hair halfway across her face. "Fracto has cut off our retreat.

"Fracto?"

"King c.u.mulo Fracto Nimbus, the worst of clouds. He always makes trouble."

"But ogres like trouble!"

"Can you swim?"

"No."

"Then you won't like Fracto's kind of trouble."

She had a point. Okra tried to turn the boat around and row toward sh.o.r.e, but the wind gusted up hugely and blew them the opposite way. Now she saw that the cloud had formed a big misty mouth and was blowing right at them.

The wind was whipping up the waves, which were becoming mountainous.

Rain started, first a few fierce drops, then a drenchpour.

"Eeeek!" Mela screamed, pulling her bare legs up.

"Fresh water!"

"What's wrong with that?"

"I'm a salt.w.a.ter creature. Fresh water foozles my tail."

"But you're wearing legs."

"I don't know how to swim with legs. Anyway, it foozles my skin, too."

Indeed, her skin was getting all blotchy where the rainwater was striking it.

Okra tried to scoop out the water in the boat with her hands, but it was coming in too fast. So she grabbed her oars again. "Maybe we can get somewhere," she said.

Mela looked doubtful, but whatever she was trying to say was lost in the howl of the wind and roar of the waves.

Okra saw a huge wave looming, trying to swamp them, but she managed to heave the boat forward enough to elude it and ride its swell after it settled a little. Waves could be handled; they were like dragons-not too bad if closely watched and tackled from behind.