Question Quest Part 17

Chapter 11: Lethe.

I returned late from Castle Roogna. Our own reconditioned castle was quiet. Rose was not there. Where was she?

Then I saw a parchment on the table. It was in my wife's hand. It was a letter from Rose! I read it wonderingly.

Dearest Husband Humfrey, Where are you, my beloved? If you do not rescue me soon from this h.e.l.l, I fear for the consequences. Each day I walk the Castle Walk, in the lonely Silver Rain, from the Sand Castle Inn to the Castle in the Sky, but you do not appear. I told the demon in charge of this h.e.l.l that at long last I am prepared to give anything to see you and love you one more time. I have talked to the trees here and they whisper that my banishment from Xanth will not be one times nine years, or two times nine years, but ten times nine years, unless you rescue me immediately. Why have you not come? I have only one more Day of Grace, and then I am locked here for the full term.

Oh my love, everywhere I walk Forget-Me-Nots in thyme spring up to cover my footprints of blood in the white snowsand. My soul is being tugged from me; it will be encased in rose quartz in the rose garden of Castle Roogna unless you rescue me today! It shames me to confess it, but I have bribed a demon with a kiss to deliver this letter to our home. I beg you, if you love me as I love you, come take me away from all this before it is too late!

Rose of Roogna.

As soon as I finished reading it, the letter burst into flame. It was a missive from h.e.l.l, all right! It was gone.

I glanced at the calendar an ogre had left. I remembered the date on Rose's letter. I had evidently gotten more deeply embroiled in the research at Castle Roogna man I had realized. Four days had pa.s.sed.

I was one day past Rose's deadline. I had already missed my chance to rescue her. I could not redeem her from h.e.l.l. I was the Magician of Information, not of Power, and I knew I lacked the power to bring her from that infernal region. Maybe if I had been able to learn more-but she had been helping me to learn, and without her I knew I could not research well enough to find out how to free her, a.s.suming that there was a way. So she was lost.

I could not live with that. I would have to kill myself and join her in h.e.l.l. I knew I would not mind it much, in her company.

I started to put the castle in order for my departure. My vials of potions, my collected spells, my almost-complete Book of Answers-it would not do for these to be left out for any pa.s.serby to take! Suppose they fell into evil hands? But where could I put them where they would be safe?

Castle Roogna, of course. So I carried the flying carpet out to the landing place beside the moat and began loading it.

Souffle lifted his head from the water. He had moved here from Castle Roogna when we did, because it was pointless to defend an empty castle that needed no additional defense, he claimed. Actually, it was because he liked Rose. She looked good enough to eat.

I gazed into the monster's eyes. How could I face that Rose was gone and that I would be too? I remembered that I had commitments here that I could not simply desert. For one thing, I had to be ready in case I was needed as king again, much as I loathed the thought. The arrogant Storm King had put in a law that all human citizens of Xanth had to demonstrate a magic talent by age twenty-five or be exiled. That was foppish, and unfair. If I didn't want to be king again myself, I had at least to keep looking for another Magician and train him, so that when he became king he would abolish that law.

No, I could not desert my post, even for Rose. Yet I could not endure without her. I couldn't even find my socks, alone! I would need a woman for that-and how could I marry again, loving Rose as I did? The answer was that I couldn't. Not as long as I remembered my love for her.

There was only one thing remaining to do. I stepped to the cupboard and fetched my vial of Lethe elixir. There was enough in here to make a man forget something for eighty years. By that time I should be safely dead and with Rose in h.e.l.l. For this potion affected only the living mind, not the dead mind. It was ideal.

"Rose!" I cried, naming the thing I had to forget, and lifted the vial to my mouth. I drank down the whole of it.

I looked around, bewildered. What was I doing here? I stood in the middle of an arcane study with a vial in my hand. The last thing I remembered was discovering Castle Roogna. I had been approaching the ramparts, and I had seen a moat monster. Then-nothing.

Was I inside the castle, having hit my head during the entry? No, I had no bruise, and anyway, this wasn't Castle Roogna; the smell of it was different. This was somewhere else. More must have happened than simple entry; somehow I had been transported elsewhere.

Maybe that was the castle's last defense: it used magic to move anyone who entered to a different castle. Maybe the-a memory glimmered from the fog-the Nameless Castle. The castle of which I had not heard, which ignorance had cost me a good grade. Somewhere, sometime. But I could not remember more of that matter. I seemed to have forgotten a lot.

I peered more closely at the vial. Now I saw a label on it: LETHE.

I had just drunk the elixir of forgetfulness! Whatever had possessed me to do that?

Slowly I figured it out: there was a period of my life missing. I must have entered Castle Roogna, then traveled here and set things up to suit myself, and then taken a drink of potion to forget it all. Why?

I didn't know but was sure that if I had done it voluntarily there had to have been excellent reason. So my best course was not to inquire into the matter. In due course the elixir would wear off-there was no telling how much had been in the bottle-and then I would remember. Meanwhile, I should go about my business, awaiting that revelation.

Just how much time had been wiped out by the elixir? I looked at the calendar again, this time checking the year. My mouth fell open. It was the Year 1000! It had been 971 before. I had lost twenty-nine years of my life! Instead of being thirty-eight years old and fresh from my stint as king of Xanth, I was now sixty-seven years old and not fresh at all. Indeed, the weight of those extra decades now came down on my shoulders, and I felt stooped.

But there was no sense groaning over squished milk pods. I would simply have to make the best of it, hoping that it wasn't unbearably bad. It had obviously been bad enough to make me take Lethe, though.

I explored the castle, which turned out to be not the Nameless Castle, but the ancient Castle Zombie. I must have discovered this in my travels, after leaving Castle Roogna, and decided to patch it up and live in it. But it was too well kept; there seemed to be a woman's hand in this. I must have had a servant maid. What had happened to her? She was certainly not here now. Whoever she was, she had been highly competent, because everything was in far better order than I was capable of managing.

I located the bed chamber, and found therein only one bed, large enough for two. On one side were my things, such as a lost sock; on the other were a woman's, such as the perfume of roses. Obviously we had been close.

I spied a magic mirror on the wall. "What woman was here?" I demanded of it.

"You told me not to answer that, Magician, before you took the Lethe elixir," it replied.

"Well, now I'm telling you to answer," I said shortly. I tended to be shorter now than before being shortened by those extra twenty-nine years.

"But then you were in command of your faculties," it responded with a sneer. "None of the magic items here will answer you now."

I realized that it was true. I would not have taken Lethe if I had wanted to remember what I was trying to forget.

I also discovered in a closet a fat tome labeled BOOK OF ANSWERS. Now this was interesting. Where had I gotten this? But as I turned the pages, I recognized the handwriting: it was my own, with cross-references by some other party, evidently an a.s.sistant.

Well, maybe this would help me. I needed a woman to find my socks; where was she? I tried to use it to ascertain what woman had been here, but it balked me, as I had expected. I had been routinely thorough, before, as befitted me. But I should be able to use this and the other magic items in other ways so that I could get on with my life.

I thumbed through the pages. Soon I located WOMAN.

There were pages of types, but there was no SOCKS subheading. Too bad. So I checked for the next best thing, and there it was: WIFE.

I discovered that this was a spelled entry: it changed as I watched it, listing names and descriptions of marriageable females. I could fix it on any one who interested me by touching the entry with my finger; when I removed my finger, the entries started rotating again.

But I didn't want to choose randomly. So I tested its resources. "I want the best sock finder available," I said, and stabbed my finger down without looking. If this worked the way it should, that name would be the one.

And there it was: SOFIA SOCK SORTER. Her description was ordinary, and she lived in- Oops! This was a problem. She lived in Mundania.

Well, either I wanted the best or I didn't. Of what mettle was I made, today? I decided to go fetch Sofia, regardless.

I packed those spells I recognized from my early days of collecting. I found a magic carpet I seemed to have acquired in my missing years. I carried it outside, looking for a suitable place to launch it.

There was the moat monster, whose name, I had learned, was Souffle Serpent. No doubt because that was what he would make of any intruder. "I am going to find a woman," I announced. "I shall return. Guard the premises well."

Souffle nodded and settled back into the water.

I unrolled the carpet, set my things on it, sat on it myself, and gave it the standard takeoff command. It lifted smoothly; it was a good piece of work.

I flew north and slightly west-and soon discovered below a monstrous chasm. Where had that come from? I remembered nothing of the sort in Xanth! I fetched up my notepad-and there was a note: GAP CHASM-FORGET SPELL ON. Oh. That explained it. I admired the scenery, continuing my flight across the varied landscape of Xanth until I reached the isthmus. There I landed and hid the carpet away in a tree, putting a routine invisibility spell on it from my collection. Then I used a temporary neutrality spell on the Shield that enclosed Xanth, and walked safely through it. It was evident that my hiatus of lost memory had not impaired my routine skills; I seemed to be about as good as ever, apart from being older.

There was a peculiar thing I remembered about Mundania: it had little if any magic. However, I had found a vial of magic dust I had gotten from somewhere, and that would enable me to do such magic as I required, if I didn't waste it.

I set out on foot across drear Mundania. It would be pointless to recount my experience there; no one cares to learn any more about that boring and backward place than the absolute minimum. I shall just say that I found Sofia the sock sorter at the mundane company she worked for. She was about thirty years old and plain, but her hands sorted socks of all types with marvelous dexterity.

I sprinkled some magic dust and then used certain other spells, to set up the interview. This made me imperceptible to other Mundanes and made my words intelligible to Sofia. Take my word: such steps are necessary when operating in such a region, silly as they may seem to ordinary folk.

"I have come to take you away from all this to a realm of magic," I told her.

She considered a moment. "Okay," she agreed in the Mundane way.

So we walked back to Xanth, chatting as we went, and got to know each other as well as was necessary. We pa.s.sed back through the Shield and I fetched the carpet. We sat on it, and it lifted.

Sofia screamed and almost jumped off. "What's the matter, woman?" I demanded with justified irritation.

"It's magic!" she cried.

"Of course it is. I told you this was a land of magic."

"But I didn't believe you."

"Then why did you come with me?"

"Because anything is better than being an old maid in Mundania."

She had a point. "Well, you will just have to learn to live with magic, because I am a Magician." I had found a scroll attesting to my degree from the demon's University of Magic, so knew that in my missing years I had become a certified Magician. In fact, when I saw that, I remembered an entire year-long episode with Professor Grossclout, Beauregard, and Metria. The demoness had for some reason wanted to seduce me, but had failed (which was even less explicable), and I had completed my studies. That was good.

Sofia decided that she would live with it. But she seemed quite nervous about the height and exposure of the carpet, until I uncorked a relaxation spell and she relaxed.

We came to the castle. "Oh, it's beautiful!" she exclaimed. "Just like a fairy tale!"

"No fairies here," I corrected her. "They live elsewhere in the forest."

She glanced at me, then laughed, though I wasn't sure what she found funny.

She seemed somewhat in awe of the castle, especially its appurtenances like the moat monster, until she saw my mound of unsorted socks. "Now that I understand!" she exclaimed. "There's enough here to keep me busy for years!"

Precisely.

We settled into what she termed a common-law marriage. She was good in the kitchen, once she learned how to use simple spells and how to harvest ripe pies from the garden. She was good with clothing, once she learned about shoe trees and such. She discovered a rose garden in back, and tended to it carefully, for the flowers were similar to those she knew at her home. Actually, that rose garden seemed to be magic, flourishing with no care, but the roses bloomed more readily when someone paid attention to them.

But she did have one problem. It seemed that she felt I should at some point break off my study of the fascinating Book of Magic and do something with her on the bed. It seemed to be some sort of custom in her land.

Perplexed, I went to a magic mirror, one which gave straight answers. It showed a flying stork.

"Oh, you want to summon the stork!" I exclaimed.

She laughed, again finding something mysteriously funny.

So I put a place marker in the book and went to make this sacrifice. She was in some kind of nightie, and actually looked somewhat fetching; I hadn't really looked at her before. It must have been some time since I had indulged in this activity, because I became quite interested in it once I got started and wound up spending the rest of the night with Sofia on the bed. Apparently she had learned to be dexterous with more than mere socks during her prior dull life.

The next time she was interested in this activity, I was quicker to catch on. I was in my seventh decade, but my dunking in the healing spring kept me healthy, and I felt more like thirty-nine, which was the age I was when I got my degree in Magic, and my last memory until my jump into the present. So, in my experience, I was that age, and perhaps that counted for something.

The following year our son was delivered. Sofia named him Crombie, after an obscure relative of hers who had been a soldier, once she got over the shock of seeing the stork land with the bundle. Apparently she had expected another manner of delivery. There's no accounting for the expectations of Mundanes. Then she shrugged. "When in fairyland, do as the fairies do," she said. I didn't bother to try to understand what she meant by that. Just so long as she was satisfied with the baby. He did seem to have a certain Mundanish cast, but this sort of thing happened when one married a Mundane.

Meanwhile, I was getting involved in something new. I did not recognize its implications at the time. A former approached the castle. "I hear tell you are a Magician," he said.

"So?" I agreed noncommittally.

"Do you have a spell I could use to make the most beautiful girl in my village fall madly in love with me?"

I looked at him. He was a rare b.u.mpkin, smelling of manure. Only a cow flop could love that kind. But as it happened, I had found a number of bottles and vials on my shelf, and one was labeled LOVE, so I presumed it contained elixir from a love spring. I did not know how long it had been there or whether the potency of such water faded with time, so it would be good to test it.

I poured a few drops of it into a smaller container. "Put this in her drink or simply sprinkle it on her," I said. "Make sure that you are the first man she sees thereafter."

"Hokay," he said. "Whatcha want for it?"

It hadn't occurred to me that this was a trade, but I realized that it did make sense. I didn't want the whole village coming to get free love potion! "We do have a garden plot to dig," I said, remembering that Sofia had expressed the desire to try growing some Mundane plants here. Why she should want to do such a thing was beyond me, but I attributed it to the mysteriousness of women. I knew from my limited experience with her that it was best to humor her whims. Otherwise she might mismatch my socks.

So the farmer took his spade and did what he did best, and in a day had a nice garden plot dug. Sofia was thrilled, and not only were my socks extra sweet for the next week, so was she. Good deeds had their-rewards. The fanner went back to his village, and later we heard the village wedding gong sounding, and I knew that the potion had been effective.

After that more villagers did come. Some wanted healing, which my supply of healing elixir did, and others wanted curse spells for their neighbors, and sundry others had sundry other requests. I was able to accommodate them all, for the needs of rustics were elementary, but in an effort to discourage such business I gradually increased my demands for trades. This process continued for years, and finally it reached to the point of equilibrium: there would be three formidable challenges for each person just to gain admittance to the castle, and then he would have to give me a year's service or something equivalent, before I would answer his Question. Then the flow of folk finally diminished, and I had no more calls than I wanted, which was on the order of one a month. Sofia agreed with this policy; as a Mundane she did not feel entirely at home in Xanth and preferred seclusion for the raising of her son.

That turned out to be more complicated than antic.i.p.ated. Remember, Sofia was Mundane; she was learning about magic but it wasn't natural to her, and she had no magic talent of her own. She did not understand the pitfalls of it. I was busy with my own pursuits and did not think to inquire, and in any event Sofia would not have been able to tell me what was happening, because she had no basis for suspicion. The consequence of this was to be unfortunate. Had I the chance to play that portion of my life over, I would pay better attention and spare my son grief and alienation. But all I can do now is tell what happened, with my regrets.

When Crombie was three years old, an eight-year-old boy came for an Answer. I knew instantly that he was a Magician, and in the guise of making him serve me a year, I trained him in certain necessary things. I was quite excited, and my enthusiasm spread to Sofia, who had never seen magic like this before. In fact it was about at this point that she became a believer. Thus we were both distracted and did not think of the effect on our son. That was my error, one of a number whose memory forever plagues me. Sometimes I am almost tempted to take Lethe again, to abolish such embarra.s.sments. I will discuss the business with the other boy in the next chapter; this one is for Crombie.

When Crombie saw our attention taken by the other boy, who was resident at the castle for that time, he was jealous and resentful. He had an excellent talent of his own, but it was not close to Magician level, while the other boy's was. Crombie was somewhat annoyed with me for being distracted, but he had little contact with me in the best of times, so that was not the problem. It was when Sofia also got involved that Crombie's helpless rage overflowed. She was his mother; how could she be neglecting him in favor of this stranger? A few words could have eased his pa.s.sion, but we were not alert, and they went unsaid.

So Crombie did what made sense to him: he sought another mother. A better one. One who would pay him full attention, to the exclusion of all other children. Oh, the subtle mischief of that quest!

His talent was to find things. All he had to do was fix a thing in his mind, close his eyes, turn himself around, and point, and his finger would be pointing in the direction that thing was to be found. It had been interesting discovering this; at first he had been a baby, too small to point, but once he started walking Sofia kept finding him into the cookie jar, no matter where she hid it, and finally discovered that he was Finding it He could find anything, even intangible things, but could not be sure how far away they were. He was sure only of the direction. Since he wasn't allowed out of the castle alone, he didn't have much opportunity to use it for more than cookies.

But this time, in his rage, he broke the rule. He spun around, pointed, and opened his eyes. Then he walked in the direction he was pointing.

Into a wall. His Finding sense took no note of intervening obstacles, it merely pointed the way. So he walked through the doors and out of the castle and tried it again. This time he was pointing across the moat.

He knew he shouldn't cross it, but his rage pushed him on. If he got out into the jungle and got lost, it would serve his mother right. Maybe he would never return home; it would serve her right. But of course he could find home by using his talent, if he changed his mind.

So he crossed the drawbridge. Souffle lifted his head from the water and hissed warningly; he knew the boy was not supposed to go out alone. But Crombie ran on across, and the monster couldn't stop him, for he certainly wasn't going to bite my son.

Crombie did his Find routine again, and followed his finger into the jungle. Souffle, alarmed, slid out of the moat and into the castle, coming to warn us. But Sofia would have none if it. "You're getting my carpet wet!" she screamed. "Get out of here this instant!" And Souffle, cowed, slithered hastily back out. There are rare times when it is a disadvantage to be unable to speak the human way, and this is one of the few examples I can muster.

The serpent then crossed the moat and slid after Crombie. But it was slow, sniffing out the lad's trail, and soon he lost it in the welter of odors around the castle. Defeated, he returned to the moat and sank down under the water, miserable. He could only hope that the boy returned safely of his own accord.

Crombie, undaunted by the big outside world, followed his finger. It led him through forest and dale, until he came to a big pot of honey. There was candy around its rim. Well, now! He walked up and ripped off a gumdrop.

The gumdrop clung to the pot. Crombie pulled, and it came off, connected to the rim by a thinning string of gum. He yanked harder, and the connection stretched and thinned further.

Then he put it in his mouth and chomped down on it.

The honeypot exploded into smoke. "Yow!!" The gumdrop became smoke too, and curled back into the main cloud.