This was fun! Not as much fun as physical bashing would be, but excellent vicarious mayhem. Ogres could appreciate beauty, too-the splendor of bursting bodies or of blips flying apart, forming intricate and changing patterns in the sky. He oriented on another blip, but it took evasive action.
Meanwhile, all the other blips were nearer, and their light-fists were striking closer. He had to dodge them, and that interfered with his own strikes.
Well, he was not an ogre for nothing! He licked his chops, worked his sticks, looped about, oriented, fired, dodged, and oriented again. Two more blips exploded beautifully.
Then the fight intensified. But Smash loved combat of any kind and was good at it; he didn't have to use physical fists. He almost liked this form of fighting better, because it was less familiar and therefore more of a challenge. He knocked out blip after blip, and after a while the remaining blips turned tail and fled past the moon. He had won the battle of the Luna fringe!
He was tempted to pursue the blips, so as to continue the pleasure of the fight a little longer, but realized that if he wiped them all out at this time, they would not have a chance to regenerate and return for future battles. Better to let them go, for the sake of more fun on future days. Also, he had other business.
He turned the ship about and headed for Xanth which resembled a small disk from this vantage, like a greenish pie. That made him hungry again. Well, he would be careful not to miss it. He accelerated, zooming happily onward.
Chapter 8. Dragon's Ear
He was back in Xanth. "Smash, something else is coming!" Tandy cried.
"That's all right," he said. "I've won another battle. I feel stronger." And he did; he knew he was winning the gourd campaign, getting closer to the Night Stallion, and recovering physical strength in the process.
It had been in large part his former hopelessness that had weakened him. He had believed his soul was doomed, until learning that he could fight for it in another gourd.
Biythe Brassie was still here. Now he wondered-how had she been carried out with him, when he had not been physically in the gourd?
His Eye Queue curse provided him with the answer to a question any normal ogre would not even have thought of. Biythe was here in spirit, just as he had been inside the gourd in spirit. It was very hard to tell such spirit from reality, but each person knew his own reality and was not fooled. No doubt Biythe Spirit's real body remained in the gourd, in a trance-state; since the brassies spent much of their time as statues anyway, waiting for someone to come push their button, no one had noticed the difference. Or rather, they had noticed, and been alarmed because she remained a statue while they were animate. So they knew that her vital element, her soul, was elsewhere. Yes, it all made sense. Everything in Xanth made sense, once a person penetrated the seeming nonsense that masked it. Different things made different sorts of sense for different people.
He would have to take the brass girl back. His curse not only forced intelligence on him, it forced un-ogrish moral awareness. At the moment he wasn't even certain that such awareness was a bad thing, inconvenient as it might be when there was mayhem to be wreaked.
But the tree-chopping attack party was coming again. Smash oriented on the group as it galloped just beyond view. The villagers must have gotten reinforcements. The individuals were larger than basilisks-evidently Biythe had deposited the chickatrice safely elsewhere-but smaller than sphinxes. They were hoofed. In fact-
"That's my brother!" Chem exclaimed. "Now I recognize his hoofbeat. But there's something with him-not a centaur."
Smash braced himself for what could be a complicated situation. If some monster were riding herd on his friend Chet...
They hove into view. "Holey cow!" the Siren breathed. That was exactly what it was-a cow as full of holes as any big cheese. She had holes in her body every which way through which daylight showed.
She was worse than the moon! A big one was in her head, about where her brain should have been; evidently that didn't impede her much. Even her horns and tail had little holes. Her legs were so holey they seemed ready to collapse, yet she functioned perfectly well.
In fact, she carried two human riders who braced their hands and feet in her holes. She was a big cow, and her gait was bumpy, so these handholds and footholds were essential.
Now Smash recognized the riders. "Dor! Irene!" he cried happily.
"Prince Dor?" the Siren asked. "And his fiancée?"
"Yes, they are taking forever about working up to marriage," Chem murmured with a certain equine snideness.
"It's been four years now..."
"And Grundy the Golem!" Smash added, spying the tiny figure perched on the back of the centaur. "All my friends!"
"We're your friends, too," Tandy said, nettled. The party drew abreast of the fireoak tree. "What's this?"
the golem cried. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?"
Smash stood among the damsels, towering over them, not comprehending the reference. But the Eye Queue curse soon clarified it, obnoxiously. Some of the Mundane settlers in Xanth had a story by that title, and, compared with Smash the Ogre, the seven females were dwarvishly short, as was even Chem the Centaur.
"It seems you have a way with women. Smash," Prince Dor said, dismounting from the holey cow and coming to greet him. "What's your secret?"
"I only agreed not to eat them," Smash said.
"To think how much simpler my life would have been if I had known that," Dor said. "I thought girls had to be courted."
"You never courted me!" Princess Irene exclaimed. She was a striking beauty by human standards, nineteen years old. The other girls all took jealously deep breaths, watching her. "I courted you! But you never would marry me."
"You never would set the date!" Dor retorted. Her mouth opened in a pretty O of indignation. "You never set the date! I've been trying to-"
"They've been fighting about the date since before there was anything to date," Grundy remarked. "He doesn't even know what color her panties are."
"I don't think she knows herself," Dor retorted.
"I do, too!" Irene flashed. "They're-" She paused, then hiked up her skirt to look. "Green."
"It's only a pretext to show off her legs," Smash explained to the others.
"So I see," Tandy said enviously.
"And her panties," John said. She, like Fireoak, the Siren, and Chem, didn't wear panties, so couldn't show them off. Biythe's panties were copper-bottoms.
"You creatures are getting too smart," Irene complained. Then she did a double take, turning to Smash.
"What happened to your rhymes?"
"I got cursed by the vine," the ogre explained. "It deprived me of both rhyme and stupidity in one swell foop."
"In a foop? Oh, you poor thing," she said sympathetically.
"Now that incorrigible ogre charm is working on Irene, too," Prince Dor muttered.
"Of course it is, idiot," she retorted. "All women have a secret passion for ogres." She turned to Smash.
"Now you had better introduce us all."
Smash did so with dispatch. "Tandy, Siren, John, Fireoak, Chem, Goldy, and Biythe-these are Dor, Irene, Grundy, and Chet, and vice versa."
"Moooo!" lowed the holey cow, each o with a big round hole in it.
"And the Holey Cow," Smash amended. Satisfied, the bovine swished her tattered tail and began to graze. The cropped grass fell out the holes in her neck as fast as she swallowed it, but she didn't seem to mind.
"I delivered your message," Chet said. "King Trent has declared this tree a protected species, and all the other trees in sight of it, and sent Prince Dor to inform the village. There will be no more trouble about that."
"Oh, wonderful!" the hamadryad cried. "I'm so happy!" She danced a little jig in air, hanging by one hand from a branch. The tree's leaves seemed to catch fire, harmlessly. Both nymph and tree were fully recovered from the indisposition of their recent separation. "I could just kiss the King!"