Chapter 15. Point of View
But in a moment he realized this was not serious. "I have your half soul," he said. "Take it back." He put his huge paw on his head and drew out the fillet. It adhered to his own soul, with which it had temporarily merged; evidently the two souls liked each other, different as they were. At last her soul rested in his palm.
Then he moved the faintly luminous hemisphere to her head and patted it in. The soul dissolved, flowing back into her. "Oh, that feels so good!" she exclaimed. "Now I know how much I missed my soul, even the half of it!"
Smash, back to his own half soul, suddenly felt tired. He sank down on the rock where he was resting. It was dark here, but he didn't mind; it was easy to rest in this place.
Tandy sank down beside him. "I think my soul feels lonely," she said. "It was half, and then it was whole with yours, and now it's half again, with maybe the better half missing."
"Yours is the better half," he said. "It's cute and spunky and sensitive, while mine is gross and stupid."
"But strong and loyal," she said. "They complement each other. A full person needs strength and sensitivity."
"An ogre doesn't." But now he wondered.
She found his hamhand with her own. "Okay, Smash, I remember our missions now. I wanted to find a good husband, and you-"
"Wanted a good wife," Smash finished. "I didn't know it, but the Good Magician evidently did. So he sent me where I could find one. But somehow the notion of sharing the rest of my life with an ogress no longer appeals. I don't know why."
"Because true ogres and ogresses are brutes," she said. "You really aren't that kind, Smash."
"Perhaps I wasn't when I had the Eye Queue curse. But when I lost it, I reverted to my natural state."
"Are you sure your natural state is brutish?"
"I was raised to be able to smash ironwood trees with single blows of my homely fist," he said. "To wrestle my weight in 'dragons and pulverize them. To squeeze purple bouillon juice from purple wood with my bare hands. To chew rocks into sand. To-"
"That's impressive. Smash. And I've seen you do some of those things. But are you sure you aren't confusing strength with brutishness? You have always been very gentle with me."
"You are special," he said, experiencing a surge of unfamiliar feeling.
"Chem told me something she learned from a Mundane scholar. Chem and I talked a lot while you were in the gourd, there in the Void, because we didn't know for sure whether we would ever get free of that place. The scholar's name was Ichabod, and he knew this little poem about a Mundane monster
resembling a tiger lily, only this one is supposed to be an animal instead of a plant."
"I have fought tiger lilies," he said. "Even their roots have claws. They're worse than dandy-lions."
"She couldn't remember the poem, exactly. So we played with it, applying it to you. 'Ogre, ogre, burning bright-' "
"Ogre's don't burn!"
"They do when they're stepping across the firewall," she said, "trying to fetch a boat so the rest of us can navigate past the loan sharks. That's what reminded Chem of the poem, she said. The flaming ogre.
Anyway, the poem tells how they go through the jungle in the night, the fiery ogres, and are fearfully awful."
"Yes," Smash said, becoming pleased with the image.
"We had a good laugh. You aren't fearful at all, to us. You're a big, wonderful, blundering ball of fur, and we wouldn't trade you for anything."
"No matter how brightly I burn," Smash agreed ruefully.
He changed the subject. "How were you able to function without your soul? When you lost it before, you were comatose."
"Partly, before, it was the shock of loss," she said. "This time I gave it away; I was braced, experienced."
"That shouldn't make much difference," he protested. "A soul is a soul, and when you lose it-"
"It does make a difference. What a girl gives away may make her feel good, while if the same thing is taken by force, it can destroy her."
"But without a soul-"
"True. That's only an analogy. I suppose I was thinking more of love."
He remembered how the demon had tried to rape her. Suddenly he hated that demon. "Yes, you need someone to protect you. But we found no man along the route, and now we are beyond the Good
Magician's assignment with-out an Answer for either of us."
"I'm not so sure," she said.
"We're drifting from the subject. How did you survive, soulless? Your half soul made me strong enough to beat another ogre; you had to have been so weak you would collapse. Yet you didn't."
"Well, I'm half nymph," she said.
"Half nymph? You did seem like a nymph when-"
"I always thought of myself as human, just as you always thought of yourself as ogre. But my mother is Jewel the Nymph. So by heredity I'm as much nymph as girl."
"What's the difference?" He knew there was a difference, but found himself unable to define it.
"Nymphs are eternally young and beautiful and usually none too bright. They are unable to say no to a male for anything. My mother is an exception; she had to be smart and reliable to handle her job. She remains very pretty, prettier than I am. But she's not as smart as I am."
"You are young and beautiful," Smash said. "But so is Princess Irene, and she's a human girl."
"Yes. So that isn't definitive. Human girls in the flush of their young prime do approach nymphs in appearance, and have a number of nymphal qualities that men find appealing. But Irene will age, while true nymphs won't, She loves, while nymphs can't love."
"Can't love?" Smash was learning more than he had ever expected to about nymphs.
"Well, my mother does love. But as I said, she's a very special nymph. And my father Crombie used a love-spell on her. So that doesn't count."
"But some human people don't love, so that is not definitive, either."
"True. It can be very hard to distinguish a nymph from a thoughtless human girl. But one thing is definitive. Nymphs don't have souls."
"You have a soul! I am absolutely certain of that! It's a very nice little soul, too."
He could feel her smile in the dark. Her body relaxed, and she squeezed his paw. "Thank you. I rather like it myself. I have a soul because I'm half human. Just as you do, for the same reason."
"I never thought of that!" Smash said. "It never occurred to me that other ogres wouldn't have souls."
"They're brutes because they have no souls. Their strength is all magic."
"I suppose so. My mother was a variety of human, so I inherited my soul from her."
"And it gave you strength to make up for what you lost by being only half ogre."
"Agreed. That answers a mystery I was never aware of before. But you still haven't explained how you-"
"Functioned without a soul. Yes. It was simply a matter of how I thought of it. You see, human beings have always had souls; they have no experience living without them. Other creatures never had souls, so they have learned to cope. My mother copes quite well, though I suppose some of my father's soul has rubbed off on her." Tandy sighed.
"She's such a good person, she certainly deserves a soul. But she is a nymph, and I am half nymph. So I can function without a soul. All I had to do, once I realized that, was to think of myself as a nymph. It made a fundamental difference."
"But I think of myself as an ogre-yet I have a soul."
"Maybe you should try thinking of yourself as a man, Smash." Her hand tightened on his.
"A man?" he asked blankly. "I'm an ogre!"
"And I'm a girl. But when I had to, I became a nymph. So I was able to operate without sinking into the sort of slough I did before, in the gourd. I was able to follow your fight, and to step in when I needed to."