Ivy was restricted, for no reason at all, to Castle Roogna, and of course it was overwhelmingly boring. Her mother Irene had recently gotten quite fat in the tummy, but kept right on eating and pretending it was wonderful and didn’t seem to have much time for Ivy any more. To make things worse, her father King Dor had ordered a baby brother for her. Ivy did not need or want a baby brother. How could they have been so thoughtless as to order something like that without consulting the one most concerned? What good was a baby, anyway–especially a boy?
But now the infernal thing had arrived, and Irene had evidently celebrated by using a thinning spell, because she was suddenly back to normal weight, but she still had next to no time for Ivy. To heck and damnation with all cabbage leaves! Even drear Mundania, she decided, could not be worse than this.
For a time, she played with the items sent by her pun-pal, Rapunzel, who had very long hair and was similarly confined to her castle. Ivy was still too young to read and write, so they exchanged small objects, and that usually worked well enough. But there was only so much a person could do with puncils and hot-cross puns, and Ivy soon tired of them.
She found herself watching the magic tapestry in her room for hours on end and more hours sidewise; the idiot cloth had become her amusement of last resort. Its moving pictures showed everything that had ever happened in the Land of Xanth. But the pictures were fuzzy, and she wasn’t much interested in history, anyway. It was so much more fun in the jungle, playing with clouds and tanglers and gourds!
As the tapestry played over a sequence several hundred years in the past. Ivy became aware of company. One of the castle ghosts was in the room. In fact, it was watching the tapestry.
Ghosts did not bother Ivy, of course; in fact, it tended to be the other way around. Ghosts avoided her because trouble seemed to follow only half a footstep behind her, and the haunts of Castle Roogna, like others of their kind, were basically settled creatures. So the presence of this one surprised Ivy, yet hardly alarmed her. She peered at it, but the outlines were fuzzy, and she could not make out which one it was. So she asked, “Who are you?”
“Jordan,” the ghost replied faintly. It was hard for ghosts to speak with any volume, because their volume was mostly vapor, but they could do it when they concentrated.
Oh, yes. Jordan was the one who had helped Mare Imbri save Castle Roogna from the Horseman oodles of time ago, before she arrived on the scene. “What are you doing?”
“Watching my history.” The ghost became clearer as she concentrated on it, shifting from amorphous cloud shape to humped sheet shape, which was an improvement.
Ivy suffered a flicker of interest. ” Your history? That’s Xanth history, silly!”
“I lived in Xanth four hundred years ago,” Jordan said, becoming a vague human form.
“Was it as dull as it is now?”
“No, it was exciting!” the ghost said with greater animation than before. “It was a terrific adventure–I think.”
“You think?” Ivy wanted to nail this down, because if there was anything interesting in Castle Roogna, she wanted to find it.
“Well, I died from it.”
Oh. “I’m about to die from boredom,” Ivy asserted.
“Oh, no,” Jordan protested. “You’re a Sorceress. You will grow up to be King of Xanth.”
This was nothing new, but Ivy’s interest increased. Now Jordan was a fully formed man, partly white, partly translucent, fairly large, young, and handsome. A white lock of hair fell down partway over his right eye, which was also white. Most ghosts were white; Ivy wasn’t sure why. “How did you die?”
Jordan shook his head. “I can’t quite seem to remember. I’ve been dead a long time.”
“But that’s easy to remember!” Ivy exclaimed. “Dying is a big deal, like getting born.”
“Do you remember getting born?”
“Of course not. Animals get born. I was found under a cabbage leaf. I should have kicked over the cabbage behind me, because now they’ve found Dolph under it and they’re making him my baby brother.” She pouted, as the memory rankled. “If I’d been smart, I’d have sneaked out at night and thrown all the cabbages into the moat before Dolph arrived. It’s probably all his fault I’m grounded.”
“Yes, boys are a lot of trouble,” the ghost agreed. “Almost as much trouble as girls.”
“What?”
The ghost drifted away from her, realizing that he had said something provocative and unwarranted. Everybody knew that boys were much worse than girls. But Ivy decided to forgive him his transgression, because even ghostly company was better than none. “Tell me the adventure of your life.”
“Well, I don’t quite remember that, either. I know it was exciting, and that there were monsters and magicians and swords and sorcery and beautiful women, but the details have fogged out.”
“Then how do you know your life is playing on the tapestry now?” Ivy asked alertly.
“I recognize bits of my life when I see them played. Fighting a dragon, kissing a woman–it begins to come back. I know I was there.”
“Fighting a dragon?” Ivy asked. “Not the Gap Dragon?”
“I think I avoided that one,” Jordan said. “It’s alive today, isn’t it? So I couldn’t have slain it.”
“Good.” Because the Gap Dragon had become Ivy’s friend, she didn’t want anything bad to have happened to him, even four hundred years ago. The Gap was now being patrolled by Stacey Steamer, the female of his kind. Eventually Stanley would grow up and return to the Gap, but that was long ago in the future and she didn’t worry about it. “Who’d you kiss?”
The ghost concentrated. “Several beautiful women, I think, but the last was most. There was a cruel lie, and I died. So I hate her. But I found a better woman after I died, so maybe it’s all right after all.”
This was getting downright fascinating! “How can you find a woman after you’re dead?”
“A dead woman, naturally. A ghost, like me.”
Ivy had always known the ghosts of Castle Roogna, but hadn’t thought to question them about their lives. “What happened to her?”
“She’s still here, of course. She’s Renee.”
“Oh, Renee! I hear her singing sometimes. Faint, sad songs.”
“Yes, she is often sad. But she’s a wonderful person. If I were alive again, I’d marry her.”
“Silly, ghosts can’t live again!” Ivy chided him.
“What about Millie?”
Millie the Ghost had been a resident of Castle Roogna for eight centuries, until restored to life. She had married the Zombie Master and now had twin teen-aged children, Hiatus and Lacuna, who on occasion baby-sat for Ivy.
“That was prehistoric,” Ivy said shortly. “Back when Good Magician Humfrey was still practicing as an old man. He helped bring her back to life. Everybody knows that. But Magician Humfrey isn’t animating ghosts any more, and nobody else knows how. How can you live again?”
“Well, my talent is healing,” Jordan said. “So if my bones were found and brought together, maybe–“
“Where are your bones?”
“I’ve forgotten, if I ever knew,” the ghost confessed, abashed.
So Jordan represented a mystery. Ivy was now fully intrigued. “This cruel lie–what was it?”
Jordan spread his hands. “I don’t remember that, either. I thought if I watched it replayed on the tapestry, maybe–“
“Why not,” Ivy agreed. They focused on the tapestry. It showed a towering wall of rock, the face of an almost vertical cliff. Down this cliff a huge snail was crawling–and a man clung to the snail’s shell.
“Oh, yes, the snail,” Jordan said. “That’s me, riding it.”
Ivy had never thought of snail-riding, but of course she had never encountered a snail big enough. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t remember, but it was somewhere I had to get to.”
“Why are you riding it, instead of walking there yourself? That snail’s pretty slow.”
“I don’t remember that, either. But I think I had no choice. Maybe if we could see more detail–“
They peered closely, and the picture enhanced itself somewhat, as things did when Ivy paid attention to them. They made out a shadow, as of some monstrous bird, but they could not tell where the cliff was or how extensive. The progress of the giant snail was tediously slow; it was evident they would have to wait for an hour to see significant progress. That was the problem with the tapestry; it ran scenes through at regular speed. It was possible to reset it, but that tended to jump the picture to some quite different scene, and the original one could be lost for days. So it was necessary simply to let it play through at its own rate if a person wanted to see how a particular scene ended. This was no good for a bored child.
But Ivy’s curiosity, once fairly aroused, did not accept denial. “We must find out,” she declared. “I want to know all about that snail–and your life, and especially about the cruel lie.” She put her hands on her hips, in the manner her mother did, to show the severity of her resolve.
“I’m sure I could remember, if the pictures were clearer,” Jordan said.
Ivy contemplated the tapestry. “It’s gotten sort of grubby over the centuries,” she said. “And I guess my using it to wipe off my hands before dinner doesn’t help much, either.” Adults always had these pointless rules about clean hands for eating, so Ivy knew it really wasn’t her fault, but now she wished she had wiped her hands somewhere else. “Maybe if we can clean it off, it will have better pictures.”
They tried. Ivy fetched a bucket and water, but found she couldn’t scrub the tapestry clean. The pictures were permanently dull, even when wet. “We need something better to clean it,” she said, frustrated.
They tested everything they could think of, but nothing helped. Ivy was getting dangerously close to annoyance, which was another mood she had inherited from her mother. But she was determined to find a way. “Good Magician Humfrey would know, ‘cept he’s pretty young now,” she said. “Still, he’s probably better than nothing.”
But how was she to get to the Good Magician’s castle when she wasn’t allowed out of Castle Roogna? Certainly her folks wouldn’t take her there right now! Not when they were so confoundedly absorbed with the idiotic new baby. But she just couldn’t wait till she was ungrounded; that would be forever or three more days, whichever was longer.
Fortunately, Jordan had a notion. “There’s an old night mare shoe in the cellar,” he said. “With that you could get in and out of the gourd.”
Ivy clapped her hands, delighted. The gourd had turned out to be a pretty interesting place, but the problem of getting out of it made her cautious. She hadn’t realized that it was the horse shoes that enabled the night mares to do it, but of course that made sense. One of the mares must have lost a shoe when trying to flee an awakening sleeper, because night mares were never supposed to be seen by awake folk. “Show me!”
Jordan guided her down to the cellar crevice where the shoe lay, and Ivy pulled it out. The thing was made of old rusty metal and was bent in the shape of a U; no wonder the mare had left it behind. “Ooo, ick!” Ivy exclaimed, shaking the gook off it. “How does it work?”
“You have to go into a gourd,” Jordan said. “Then you travel through the gourd world until you come to one that’s near your destination, and–“
“I know that, dummy! I mean how do I get there?”
“The mare shoe should make the rind pervious, so–“
“Where’s a gourd?” Ivy was edgy and impatient because she was getting nervous about this business, so she was rushing things before she could make the mistake of thinking about the matter sensibly.
“There’s one growing at the castle wall,” Jordan said. “It’s not supposed to be there, but it’s hidden, so no living person has spotted it yet.”
“Take me to it,” Ivy ordered. She had to go somewhere fast, for her knees were threatening to knock. The gourd world was, after all, the place of bad dreams, and she suspected there were more hideous things in there than the night mares ever let ordinary people see.
Jordan took her to it. It was just outside a large crevice at ground level. She reached through, caught hold of the vine, and hauled the gourd in. “But don’t look at the peephole!” the ghost warned.
“I know.” Ivy had learned about peepholes recently; it seemed her mother had been perturbed to learn that Grandpa Trent had been into one and somehow had thought it was Ivy’s fault. Possibly the grounding had something to do with that. “Now how does–?” She extended the bent shoe toward the gourd.
“Wait!” Jordan cautioned, in the manner adults had. “I think you need a map, to–“
The shoe touched the surface of the gourd–and sank in. Ivy, expecting resistance, lost her balance and fell forward. Her arm passed in and the rest of her did too, though the gourd was much smaller than she was. Suddenly she was inside and falling.
She started to scream, but before she could work it up properly, she landed on something soft. It was a huge marshmallow. So she filed the scream away for later reference, got up, and looked about. This wasn’t nearly as bad as she had feared.
She was in a candy garden. Lollipops grew from the ground, and the weeds were licorice. She started to pick a pop, then hesitated; she was inside the gourd. If she ate anything, would she be able to leave? She wasn’t sure; the gourd had funny rules. So she exerted supreme control well beyond the call of little-girl duty and left the candy alone. She had a feeling she would regret this the rest of her life, but she couldn’t take the chance.
The night mares traveled through Xanth by going in one gourd and out another; there was always a gourd close by a sleeper who needed a bad dream. She had gone in at Castle Roogna; she needed to come out at the Good Magician’s castle. But where was it?
Jordan was right; she needed a map–and she didn’t have one. Well, she would just have to find her own way.
She walked down the hard chocolate path, past all the delicious-looking and smelling confections, her mouth watering painfully, until she came to a house made of wood. She knocked on the door, but there was no answer except a faint chittering. So she turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside.
The door swung closed behind her. Suddenly the chittering became loud. Things rustled over her feet. As her eyes adjusted to the interior gloom, she discovered that the room was filled with insects. “Ooo, ugh!” she exclaimed with girlish distaste. “This is a bug-house!”
Indeed it was. Bugs of every description crawled on the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and the door behind her. Others fluttered in the air. One bug-eyed monster buzzed up to her, waving its purple antennae.
Ivy used the scream she had saved. She tried to use the mare shoe to fend off the bug, but the shoe missed and struck the wall instead. Shoe and hand sank through the wall, and Ivy stumbled after, stepping through as a ghost might.
She blinked in bright sunlight. She stood on a beach, just outside a gourd. Across the water she saw a large island, and near the island was a raft with a centaur standing on it. That must be Centaur Isle, down at the south of Xanth. She had come a long way!
But that wasn’t where she was going. So she nerved herself and touched the mare shoe to the gourd. She was getting the hang of this. She fell right into the bug-house again.
Hastily she opened the door and plunged outside. She remained in the gourd, since she hadn’t used the shoe this time. But now the garden was not candy; it had changed radically for the worse. Awful spinach grew all about, along with turnips and radishes and onions and other terrible stuff, the kind that existed only to nauseate children at mealtimes. There were even–horrors!–cabbages. She held her nose and hurried along the garden path until it came to a lake of placid, brownish fluid.
What could this be? Surely not anything worse than mashed squash! She touched her finger to it and tasted a drop, her curiosity leading her unerringly into mischief.
Instantly she spat it out. This was the worst yet! It was castor oil–the stuff used to lubricate rolling castors, the bane of all children.
She looked about. How could she get out of the gourd for another peek at real-life Xanth? She might be close to Humfrey’s castle, and didn’t want to pass it by. But with no walls to touch–
Then she had a notion. Carefully she touched the mare shoe to the surface of the stinking oil lake. It sank through, drawing her along with it. She held her nose and her breath, closed her eyes tightly, and passed painlessly through the surface to come to rest on firm ground. She opened her eyes and found herself standing in front of a gourd in sight of the Good Magician’s castle. She had nerved herself to take the most obnoxious route, which naturally was the proper one, and she was there!
Well, almost. There was the little matter of getting in. She was standing outside the moat; there was no drawbridge, and the walls looked most forbidding.
First she had to cross the moat. She looked around. Under a spreading tree she found several small stones. “Stepping stones!” she exclaimed, recognizing the type.
She picked them up, but they were hard to hold all together, so she reached for a big green leaf to wrap them in. But lo, it was not a leaf; it was the wing of a giant luna moth. The creature was motionless, and just dangled when she picked it up; she realized reluctantly that it was dead. A tear squeezed from her eye; she hated to see pretty things die.
She found some blanket moss, set the stones, moth, and mare shoe on it, and carefully drew up the corners of the blanket so she could carry it as a bundle. She saw herself as a fairly resourceful child, so of course she was. Then she walked to the moat, held the bundle in one arm, and used her free hand to cast the first stone.
The stepping stone plopped onto the surface, hobbled, expanded somewhat, and settled firmly, the top of it just above the water. She tossed a second one a little farther out, and it settled similarly on the surface. When she had a somewhat irregular line of several–for stepping stones never settled regularly, no matter how accurately they were placed–she stepped carefully on the first. It gave slightly but supported her weight; that was, after all, its nature, enhanced by her talent. Incorrectly placed, a stepping stone could become a stumbling block, but she had set these down properly.
She stepped on the second, and the third, then tossed out a couple more. This was nervous business, especially when she stepped across deep water, but she had enough stones and she made it all the way across with one to spare. That was excellent management, if she did say so herself.
Now she was on a narrow bank between the moat and the castle wall. On one side, the bank narrowed until there was no space between the wall and the water, so she couldn’t go there. On the other side, it curved around the castle. She was sure there was a door somewhere, so she started walking.
She passed an alcove that was absolutely dark; no light penetrated its depths at all. That was interesting, but not very; she moved on. Then she rounded a corner and encountered blinding brightness. She shaded her tender eyes, but the light squeezed through the crevices between her fingers and pierced her eyelids anyway. It was just too bright!
She retreated around the corner, and the day returned to normal, with only a dull red spot that played tag with her peripheral vision. How could she pass that region? If the door she wanted was there, she would be unable to see it. She might even blunder into the moat and get her feet all wet; that would be awkward to explain to her mother! Irene might have no time for Ivy when Ivy wanted attention, but she would appear like magic the moment those little feet and shoes got wet; that was the way mothers were. Also, Ivy wasn’t sure just how fast her sight might recover, after too great an exposure to that light; how awful it would be to be blind! If she came home blind, they would feed her nothing but–screaming horrors!–carrots, because they had a magic yellow ingredient that was good for vision. There was no question about it: she had to find a different way.
“Come on. Ivy,” she chided herself. “You’re smart enough to figure out how to get through a little light!” Whereupon she became smart enough; confidence was wonderful stuff, especially when abetted by magic.
Ivy returned to the dark alcove and reached inside. Sure enough, there was a dark lantern. She brought it out, and its darkness spread all around her, converting day to night. Fortunately, she was able to see a little dim light ahead, around the corner, and she headed for that.
As she rounded the corner, the effulgence surrounded her–and was met by the darkness radiating from the dark lamp. The two struggled and canceled out, and an approximation of normal daylight returned. A small globe of darkness remained about the lantern itself, into which her arm disappeared, while the bright lantern remained too bright to gaze upon. But in between were the shades ranging from night to day. If Ivy had been of a more philosophical bent, she might have realized that life itself was like that, with the impossible extremes of good and bad at either side and many gradients between, through which normal folk navigated with indifferent success. But she was as yet too young for such a thought, so she shoved it aside and proceeded through the shades of gray until she rounded another corner. Then the dark lamp became too dark, blotting out everything; she set it in an empty alcove and went on.
But a new threat materialized. A small winged cat screeched and circled above her. When she tried to take a step, the cat circled lower, claws extended. This was too little to be a cat-bird; it was a kitty-hawk, and it would not let her pass.
She looked in her blanket bag, where there was one stone, the dead moth, and the mare shoe. She might throw the stone at the creature, but she doubted she could score; the throwing arm of a five-year-old girl wasn’t strong. So she left that stone unturned. She needed another way.
As she pondered, the kitty-hawk circled lower. Ivy was right at the edge of its attack range and the creature hesitated. Probably it didn’t want to get too close to the brilliance around the corner, as that would blind the kitty-hawk as readily as it blinded her. So this was a safe place to pause.
Ivy watched the creature, noting the separate components of its body. The hawk-wings were of the bird kingdom, with brown feathers, and there was a feathered tail to match; the head and legs were of the cat kingdom, with white teeth and claws. She wondered which kingdom was dominant. Did the creature lay eggs or give live birth? Animals had more direct and crude ways of reproducing themselves than people did; maybe cabbages didn’t grow for animals. She blushed to be thinking such naughty thoughts, but still, she was curious. She knew that some creatures birthed and others hatched, or maybe it was the other way around, and people arrived under cabbage leaves, and then there was the matter of the storks–
Ivy frowned, because that reminded her of Baby Brother Dolph again. Too bad the stork hadn’t brought him, because then there would have been a chance of dropping the bundle into a nest of cockatrices, or maybe onto a bad-tempered needle-cactus. She could almost see the needles flying out, striking the little cockatrices, who naturally glared balefully about, turning everything around them to sludge. Or was it stone? Anyway, the little birdbrained lizards were getting stabbed by flying stone needles, and it served them right.
Ivy caught a flicker of something just off the edge of her vision. It looked like a swishing horse’s tail. The day mare! Imbri had brought her the nice, violent day-dream, but now the mare had to gallop off to her next delivery.
There was a yowl. Ivy looked up. The kitty-hawk had come quite close to her and was having some kind of problem. The parts of it had intensified, the cat-head and feet becoming more feline and the bird-wings and tail more avian. Now they were fighting for dominance. The head was reaching around to bite at the wings, and the wings were pounding on the head.
Ivy watched closely, so of course the intensification of separate qualities continued. The fight got worse. Feathers and tufts of fur flew out. Finally the kitty-hawk spun out of control, crashed into the moat, and was gone. This was one experiment of nature that didn’t seem to have worked out. The sharpening of its facets, as it had approached Ivy and her violent day-dream, had caused the creature to fragment and destroy itself.
Ivy walked on, glad to be past the kitty-hawk but sad how that had happened. She was still looking for the door into the castle. She came to a small plot that contained a single headstone. It was in the shape of the head of an old man, with sparse stone-gray hair and white whiskers. It looked almost alive, and became more so as she contemplated it; its stony gaze was fixed on her. Slowly one mineral eye closed in a wink.
“You are alive!” she exclaimed, startled.
“No, snippet, I’m just cold stone,” it said. “I take the form of the head of whoever is buried near me. That is my nature; I’m a headstone.”
“You mean you look like–” she began, glancing at the oblong of dirt in front of it.
“Exactly, peanut. Like the loudmouthed old man who is buried here.” Actually, he sounded to Ivy like a loudmouthed golem, but maybe all loudmouths were similar.
“That’s interesting,” Ivy said. This headstone didn’t seem like much of a threat.
“Last year I was planted near a lovely, dead, young woman; you should have seen me then! My surface was like polished alabaster, and my shape was beautiful.”
“That’s nice,” Ivy said, losing interest. “I’ve got to go now.”
“Ah, but if you try to pass me, I’ll yell, and you’ll get the brush-off,” the headstone warned.
“Oh, pooh!” she said. “You can’t do anything, rockhead!” She walked on defiantly.
“Intruder alert!” the headstone yelled loudly. “Undisciplined child! Probably a real brat! Give her the brush-off!”
From around the castle flew the most awesomely terrible object Ivy could imagine: a huge hairbrush. She scooted back the way she had come, covering her behind. That headstone hadn’t been bluffing!
Ivy backed up against the wall so that her tender posterior wouldn’t be exposed. What was she to do now? She couldn’t face that–or turn her back on it, either.
The brush hovered a moment. Then, spying no naughty posterior, it flew back the way it had come. Ivy relaxed; she had escaped this time.
But she knew with sick certainty that the moment she passed the headstone again, it would cry another warning and that horrendous brush would return. She was stuck. She was a fairly self-assured little girl, but that brush–! She had to figure out a way to be rid of it!
Then she had another notion, for her mind was filled with notions, some of them almost as cute as she was. Suppose she nullified the headstone instead? If she could just stop that loudmouth from blabbing, somehow silencing it–She looked in her bag again. Maybe she could get creative. Stone, mare shoe, dead moth. Nothing here to–
Then a creative bulb lit up, for an instant flashing as brightly as the brightside effulgence she had so recently negotiated with the dark lamp. Yes, there was a way, maybe!
She marched up to the headstone. “Hi, rockbrain!” she said boldly.
The stone eye eyed her stonily. “You again, twerp? If you try to pass this point, I’ll see that you get the brush-off for sure. You won’t be able to sit down without blistering the chair!”
“I’ve got something for you,” she said, taking out the dead luna moth. “Let me just scrape out some dirt beside you here–” She dug a little hole.
“That doesn’t look like much,” the headstone said. “If you dig too deep, you may encounter something you don’t like, sweetie-pie.”
“I just want to bury this closer to you than that,” Ivy said and dropped the dead moth in the hole. Then she swept the dirt over and patted it firm.
She stood and watched. If what the headstone had told her was true–
It was. The headstone began to change. The human features weathered into anonymity and assumed a greenish cast. Then a new form took shape. It was the head of a luna moth, with furry antennae and lovely color.
“That’s very pretty,” Ivy said and walked on by.
The stone-moth’s antennae waved frantically, but there was no sound, for moths did not make sounds in the human range. The giant brush was not roused, and Ivy passed the dread region without hindrance. She had navigated the final hurdle, thanks to her creativity. She had used a dead moth in a way no one had thought of before.
She walked around to the castle door and pushed it open. A young and pretty woman came to meet her. “Why, hello, Ivy–you surprised me. Why didn’t you use the carpet to fly in, as you usually do?”
Ivy didn’t care to explain about being grounded; Zora was very nice, but no adult could be completely trusted in a matter like that. “This is business, Zora”, she explained. “I have to see Good Magician Humfrey.”
Zora shrugged. She was a zombie, but it was almost impossible to tell, for no flesh fell from her. She had been baby-sitting the Good Magician for two years because it was her talent to make people age faster. She was married, but when she turned on her talent, other people became nervous, fearing they were aging, too. Ivy didn’t understand why anyone should object to getting older; maybe they had all forgotten what it was like to be a child. But it seemed they did fear age, and the older they were, the more they feared it. So Zora’s husband Xavier tended to absent himself when Zora turned on.
Ivy understood the practical aspects of all this, if not the emotional ones, and wasn’t worried. She often visited the Good Magician herself, enhancing Zora’s talent with her own, so that Humfrey aged at several times the normal rate. It would not be long, as such things went, before he was an adult again; meanwhile, he seemed to be enjoying his second childhood.
Zora escorted her to Humfrey’s playroom. The Good Magician was now about Ivy’s size, which meant he had averaged about three years for one, for he was small for his age. “Hi, Ivy!” he said. “Come to put some more years on me?”
“No, this is a business call,” Ivy repeated. Humfrey she had to trust, even if she didn’t want to. He knew everything anyway, or seemed to, that being his talent. Physically, he was now a child, so perhaps would not be inclined to betray her to the grown-ups. “I’m grounded for no reason and had to sneak out.”
Humfrey smiled in a too knowing way. “No reason, as you define it, being the leading of your grandfather in a merry chase through tangler, jungle, and gourd, all because you didn’t stay on course or heed his warnings, and causing the Night Stallion to shoot fire from his nostrils when he saw the damage to his haunted house set?”
“That’s what I said,” Ivy agreed uncomfortably. “No reason at all. So let’s make this quick, before I get in trouble for even less reason if they discover I’m. gone. I need an Answer.”
“That will be one year’s service,” he informed her. “In advance.”
“Well, I’ve already added more than that to your life by enhancing Zora when she ages you, so we’re even. And if I do it much more, you’ll owe me another Answer.”
Humfrey stared at her belligerently. “What kind of logic is that, woman?”
“Female logic, of course,” she informed him. “Want to make something of it?” Ivy already had a fair notion how to handle men, even those who could not readily be charmed.
“Um, no,” Humfrey said. “Some distant day you’re going to be King of Xanth, may the Demon have mercy on that day.”
“I already know that, dummy, so watch your step.” She had learned about firmness from her mother, just as she had learned about pedestals from her father. It would never do to let any man get the upper hand. As Irene had muttered ominously, there was no telling where he might put it.
“Okay, okay, where’s your Question?” Humfrey asked grumpily.
“I need something to clean up the magic tapestry so Jordan the Ghost can remember.”
Another person might have had difficulty grasping this, but Humfrey, young as he was, was the Magician of Information. He had had over a century of experience before being accidentally youthened back to babyhood, along with Stanley Steamer; now his power was returning, as was his irascible nature.
Humfrey pondered a moment, then brightened. “The Big Book should have it,” he exclaimed. Ivy knew that some people claimed there was no such thing as a Big Book of Answers for all Questions, but those people had never seen Humfrey’s study. The Good Magician went over to a table where a huge tome rested, and he scrambled up on the high stool to reach it. He turned the ancient pages. “Good thing I’ve learned to read again,” he grumped as he pored over the fine print. “Tables…tadpoles…tailspins…talismen…tangle trees…tapestry! Nature of. History of, Present Location of. Abuse of–aha! Cleaning of!”
“That’s it!” Ivy exclaimed.
“Quiet, woman, while I’m researching,” he snapped.
Ivy opened her mouth to retort suitably, but decided to restrain herself until Humfrey produced the Answer. Timing was important when dealing with men, as her mother had said. Anyway, it was no insult to be called “woman.” She was glad he hadn’t paused to read the entry under “Abuse of” because that very well might mention the wiping-off or laying-on of hands on its surface, which would be awkward to explain.
“Use crewel lye,” he read. “Recipe as follows: half a tumbler of–“
“Wait, I can’t remember a whole recipe!” Ivy protested. “I have trouble remembering the recipe for hard-boiling an egg! I need a written copy–and no big words.” Ivy was learning to read, but preferred words like “Fun” and “Joy” to ones like “Delinquent” or “Punishment.”
Humfrey blew air through his cheeks, exactly as he would when a century or so older. “Then fetch me that copy-cat.”
Ivy looked where he pointed. In a corner sat a creature like a contracted caterpillar, with only four legs, one tail, and several long whiskers. It looked rounded, furry, and soft, but evinced an attitude of independence and aloofness.
She went and tried to pick up the creature, but it sort of slid through her hands and remained on its soft pillar. She tried to haul it up by the tail, but its eyes glowed in yellow slits, claws sprang out from its paws, and it yowled, so she desisted. It certainly was a strange animal!
Then Ivy tried another system. She walked in front of it. “Here, copy, copy, copy, copy!” she called. And the copy-cat came, walking exactly the way Ivy was walking.
When they reached the table, she pointed to its surface. “Jump, copy!” She jumped herself, to show how it was done, and the copy-cat jumped. But it jumped just the way she did, up and down on the floor.
So Ivy scrambled up on the table herself, to the Good Magician’s annoyance. “Up!” she called, and the copycat scrambled up beside her.
“Don’t stand on the pages!” Humfrey cried, grabbing the copy-cat and plunking it down on the page. “Copy that copy, cat.”
The cat sat on the crewel lye recipe. It purred. In a moment it opened its mouth and extruded its tongue, which was a sheet of paper.
Humfrey tore off the paper–an act that startled Ivy–and handed it to her. “There’s your copy. Now go away.”
Naturally, Ivy got ready to argue, but realized that she wanted to go away, now that she had what she wanted, so she kept silent. Sometimes the directives of men had to be obeyed, when they chanced to be correct, annoying as that was. She scrambled down off the table and left the little Good Magician to his reading. He had become entirely distracted by the text before him, which happened to be taxidermy, while the copy-cat continued to extrude copies of the crewel lye recipe. A copy fell down before him, obscuring his text, at which he stared at the cat speculatively. “Very interesting techniques here,” Humfrey murmured. “I wonder–” but at that point the cat hastily jumped clear of the text, not having the same interest in studying, or in being a subject for, taxidermy that Humfrey had.
The Gorgon greeted Ivy as she departed. The Gorgon was an elegant, tall, veiled woman with snake hair, the Good Magician’s wife and the mother of Hugo, Ivy’s friend. “Won’t you stay for a cookie, dear?” she asked.
Ivy started to decline, but the Gorgon produced the biggest, loveliest, most aromatic punwheel cookie imaginable, and Ivy was overwhelmed. She realized that the Gorgon was probably lonely for living female company, so it would be only proper to visit for a while. She decided to stay for one cookie.
In due time, Ivy returned to Castle Roogna with the recipe, retracing her route through the gourd. No one had missed her except the ghosts–which, of course, was part of her problem. All anyone paid attention to these days was the confounded baby. She’d like to drop him into the peephole of a gourd, without the mare shoe!
But now she could clean the tapestry and get Jordan’s complete story. All she had to do was use the recipe to make the cleaner. Fortunately, the ghosts knew where all the supplies were. Ivy got a pot and some lye and some fat and stuff and cooked them together according to instructions. The lye was strong stuff that tried to burn her little hands, but the recipe told her how to be careful. Jordan’s friend Renee Ghost helped Ivy to read the more difficult parts of the instructions, so that she made no mistakes. She had to say several spells along the way, to turn the lye into the crewel, but finally she had a bottle of the elixir.
She got a sponge, soaked it with her lye mix, and wiped it across the surface of the tapestry. The result was startling. There was a swath of much brighter and clearer images. The stuff was working!
Ivy went carefully over the entire tapestry until it fairly shone. The moving pictures looked so real she almost believed she could walk into them. “Oh, yes!” Jordan exclaimed. “I can see every detail! The memories are flooding back!”
“Now tell me your story,” Ivy ordered him.
She settled back before the tapestry, watching, while Jordan concentrated on the beginning of his story. With Ivy’s help, because the ghost could not make the tapestry respond by himself, he got the correct sequence of pictures to form. Then, as the pictures showed the action, Jordan narrated the story as he remembered it. He skipped over the dull parts, such as sleeping, and lingered on the good parts, such as fighting monsters and kissing fair maidens and encountering strange magic. It was a genuine tale of Swords and Sorceries and Goods and Evils and Treacheries, and Ivy was entranced. She loved tales with guts. She watched and heard the caustic yarn as if she were there herself. She thrilled to the Thud and Blunder of it and suffered fervently with the revelation of the UnKind Untruth.
