But it didn't matter; Tandy didn't use it. She curled up against his furry shoulder and slept.
What was her destiny? he wondered before he crashed into his own heavy slumber. He now understood that she was looking for a human husband and was destined to find one on this journey-but time was running out for her, too. He hoped whoever she found would be a good man who would appreciate her spunky qualities and not be bothered by her tantrum-talent. Smash himself rather liked her tantrums; they were a little like ogre love taps. Perhaps his first inkling of liking for her had been when she threw a tantrum at him. She wasn't really a bad-tempered girl; she just tended to get overly excited under extreme stress. There had been some of that on this journey!
Too bad, he thought again, that she couldn't have been an ogress. But, of course, ogresses didn't have magic tricks like tantrums, or cute little ways of expressing themselves-like kissing.
He shook his head. He was getting un-ogrishly maudlin. What could an ogre know of the refined raptures of human love? Of the caring that went beyond the hungers of the moment? Of the joy and sacrifice of helping the loved one regardless of the cost to oneself? Certainly not himself!
Yet there was something about this foolish, passionate, determined girl-human creature. She was so small she was hardly a good morsel for a meal, yet she was precious beyond the comprehension of his dim ogre wit. She had shown cunning and courage in catching and riding a nightmare to escape her amorous demon, and other excellent qualities had manifested since. He would miss her when she found her proper situation and left him, as had the other girls.
He thought to kiss her again, but the last time he had tried that, she had awakened instantly and things had gotten complicated. He wanted her to complete her sleep in peace this time, so he desisted. He had no business kissing a human girl anyway-or kissing anything, for that matter.
A drop of rain spattered on her forehead. No, not rain, for the night was calm and the nightmare of Rains was nowhere near. It was a tear, similar to the ones she had dropped on him when she had so angrily demonstrated how human beings expressed affection. A tear from his own eye. And this was strange, because no true ogre cried. Perhaps it was her own tear, recycled through his system, returning to her.
Carefully he wiped away the moisture with a hamfinger. He had no right to soil her pretty little brow with such contamination. She deserved much better. Better than an ogre.
The tromp of enormous, clumsy feet woke them in the morning. The ogres were coming!
Hastily Smash and Tandy got up. Smash felt a smidgen stronger; perhaps his soul had grown back a little while he slept. But he was nowhere near full strength yet. Knowing the nature of his kind, he worried some about that.
The Ogres of the Fen arrived. Small creatures scurried for cover, and trees angled their leaves away. No one wanted trouble with ogres! There were eight of them-three brutish males and five females.
Smash gazed at the ogresses in 'dim wonder. Two were grizzled old crones, one was a stout cub, and two were mature creatures of his own generation. Huge and shaggy. with muddy fur, reeking of sweat, and with faces whose smiles would stun zombies and whose frowns would bum wood, they were the most repulsive brutes imaginable. Smash was entranced.
"Who he?" the biggest of the males demanded. His voice was mainly a growl, unintelligible to ordinary folk; Smash could understand him because he was another ogre. Smash himself was unusual in that he could speak comprehensibly; most ogres could communicate verbally only with other ogres,
Suddenly Smash was fed up with the rhyming convention. What good was it, when no one who counted could understand it anyway? "I am Smash, son of Crunch. I come to seek my satisfaction among the Ancestral Ogres, as it is destined."
"Half-breed!" the other ogre exclaimed. "No need!" For Smash's ability to talk unrhymed betrayed his mixed parentage.
Smash had never liked being called a half-breed, but he could not honestly refute it. "My mother is a curse-fiend," he admitted. "But my father is an ogre, and so am I."
One of the crones spoke up, wise beyond her years. "Curse-fiend, human bein'," she croaked.
"Half man!" the big male ogre grunted. "We ban!"
"Might fight," the child ogress said, eyes lighting. It was true. An ogre could establish his place in a tribe by fighting for it. The male grunted eagerly. "He, me!" He naturally wanted to be the first to chastise the presumptuous half-breed.
"What are they saying?" Tandy asked, alarmed by the increasingly aggressive stances of the Fen Ogres.
It occurred to Smash that she would not approve of a physical fight. "They merely seek some ogre fun,"
he explained, not telling her that this was apt to be roughly similar to the fun the lions of the den had had with him. "Fun in the Fen."
She was not fooled. "What ogres call fun, I call mayhem! Smash, you can't afford any trouble; you're only at half-strength."
There was that. Fighting was fun, but getting beaten to a pulp was not as much fun as winning. If anything happened to him here, Tandy would be in trouble, for these ogres were not halfway civilized, as Smash himself was. It was galling, but he would have to pass up this opportunity. "No comment," he said.
The ogres goggled incredulously. "Not hot?" the male ogre demanded, his hamfists shuddering with eagerness to pulverize.
Smash turned away. "I think what I want is elsewhere after all," he told Tandy. "Let's get away from here." He tried to keep the urgency suppressed; this could get difficult in a moment. At least he was not caged in, the way he had been with the lions.
The male made a huge jump, landing directly before Smash. He poked a hamfinger at Smash's soiled orange centaur jacket. "What got?" he demanded. This was not curiosity but insult; any creature in clothing was considered effete, too weak to survive in the jungle.
Smash raged inwardly at the implication, but had to avoid trouble. He stepped around the ogre and went on north, toward the Fen.
But again the male leaped in front of him. He pointed at Smash's steel gauntlets, making a crudely elaborate gesture of pulling dainty feminine gloves on his own hairy meat hooks. The humor of ogres was necessarily crude, but it was effective on its level. Smash paused.
"Me swat he snot!" the ogre chortled, aiming a wood-sundering blow at Smash's head. Smash lifted a gleaming fist of his own, defensively.
"No!" Tandy screamed.
Again Smash had to avoid conflict. He ducked under the blow in a gesture that completely surprised the ogre and continued north, inwardly seething. It simply wasn't an ogre's way to accept such taunts and duck away from a fight.
Now one of the mature females barred his way. Her hair was like the tentacular mass of a quarrelsome tangle tree that had just lost a battle with a giant spider web. Her face made the bubbling mud of the Fen seem like a clear mirror. Her limbs were so gnarled she might readily pass for a dead shagtree riddled by the droppings of a flock of harpies with indigestion. Smash had never before encountered such a luscious mass of flesh.
"He cute, cheroot," she said.
That was a considerable come-on for an ogress. Since there were more females than males in this tribe, there was obviously a place for Smash here, if he wanted it. Good Magician Humfrey had evidently known this, and known that Smash needed to settle down with a good female of his own kind. What the aging Magician had overlooked was the fact that Smash would arrive at half-strength, and that Tandy would not yet have found her own situation. Thus Smash could not afford to accept the offer, however grossly tempting it might be, because he could not fight well and could not afford to leave Tandy to the ogres' mercies. For a female went only to the winner of a fight between males. So once again he avoided interaction and continued on. north.