At long last the magic path ended in a pool of sinister mist. She didn't quite trust this, so she grasped a tough root growing from a crevice in a ruin. After several timid little tries she managed to haul herself through muck and mud up to a higher level. She was, she hoped, safe for a while.
"How I wish I could fly, fly, fly up to the stars once more," she breathed. But she was too tired to fly, even if she hadn't been caught in a deep dank gloomy cave unimaginably far below anywhere she cared to be. So she did the sensible thing and let herself collapse into sleep.
After a time she had no idea when she woke, the Demi-Luna moon's silvery beams were streaming in through a network of cracks in the cave's ceiling. She lay quietly beneath her spread cape, barely breathing as she sought answers to the questions that squeezed into her helpless little head at too rapid a pace.
"Where am I?" she murmured, momentarily disoriented.
"In a long-forgotten cave," came a whisper, perhaps from a stony face. Somehow this did not seem unusual. She was probably imagining it anyway.
"Am I alone?" she asked.
"Yes and no," came the cold whisper. The stone face didn't move, so that wasn't it. In any event she knew stone didn't speak. Whence came the windy voice, since there seemed to be no one else in the cave?
Maybe this was sleep, and this was a dream a night mare brought. So all she had to do was wake up. She pinched herself cruelly on the arm, but though it hurt, nothing else changed. Except that now she became aware of her feet. Something was nibbling on her tasty little toes.
She moved her head, looking about. She lay with her head in a nest of egg-shaped stones and her feet in a circulating pool of chill water. There were indeed cute little fish tasting her toes, though they weren't actually biting. Maybe they were just trying to alert her to her situation.
She sat up, wrapped her cape around her, and climbed to her feet. She shouldn't have. She screamed with pain. Her right knee was swollen as big as a globular little gourd, and it hurt twice as large. She quickly sat down again. She was hungry, she was thirsty, and she missed her mother Glory Goblin and her father Hardy Harpy and her tutor Magpie ever so much. Why had she ever come to a place like this? She took sober little stock. Well, she could do something for the thirst. Carefully she lowered her face to the cold, crystal-pure pool of water and touched it with her lips. She sucked in several greedy little gulps, and her raging thirst eased.
Now, with her face close to the pool, she paid attention to the gold and scarlet shapes in it. They were three tame Coy fish she knew from her occasional swims on the surface. She recognized their distinctive patterns. They weren't trying to eat her; they just wanted company.
She reached down with one hand. "I won't hurt you," she said. "I'm in the same position you are. Come, let me tickle you, and I'll share my life-and-death struggle with you." They wiggled appreciatively, and played faint music on their scales.
Suddenly the presence of the fish unnerved her. They gave her hope, and that frightened her. Maybe she could give them a message to take to the harpies, to come and rescue her. So she couldn't just give up and peacefully expire.
"Go, friends, and tell my folk where I am," she said. "Especially Magpie, if you can find her." Because Magpie, as one of the few caring demonesses, would surely have the will and ability to help.
The fish played another little melody and scooted away.
Gloha lay down again, trying to return to sleep, as there wasn't much else to do except suffer. It took her only eight long minutes and two or three short ones to realize that sleep was unlikely to come. She just lay there, cold, hungry, wretched, and rigid on the bed of egg stones, wishing it were made of ruffled feathers, though she had never been exactly comfortable on those either. The stones glowed in pretty colors, but remained uncomfortable.
So she got up, putting her weight on her swollen knee very carefully so that the pain was almost bearable. She walked to the largest crack in the cave wall. She looked at each stony detail with a reasonably clear and open little orb or two. If this were harpy thyme for her, so be it. She would make it as pensively little pleasant as she could.
She made her way to the center of the ruins in the cave, hummed to herself, and thought about Magpie. If the fish found her, she would come. If not-
Gloha tapped a column. It rang with a somber note. She tapped another. Its note was different. She found several other notes. She organized them into a tune, and sang along with it, setting the golden motes to dancing in the shards of sunlight which now fell through the jagged cave cracks. The rays of light vibrated like the strings of a harp, changing color, touching different places on the sandstone slab. The effort warmed her body, and perhaps the stone too. Each ruined runic surface seemed to resonate to her music, becoming friendlier. The spirits of the stones whispered counterpoint to her song, and clustered around a breach in the wall she hadn't seen before. She went there, and lo, it was a window to another world that might be part of the surface of Xanth, or might lead to it. This could be her way home. If she could just somehow wedge her battered little body through the crack and follow the new chamber up and out.
Her awareness of the surroundings increased, and she heard the whispering voices of the stoned gathering of gargoyles. Now she knew their identity, and what had happened to them. "Some day your story will be known, O gargoyles," she said. Then their faint voices increased, becoming an incoherent babble, as if the air were being sucked out of the cave. The cavern began to shake, and stone fragments flaked off the ruins. The crevice before her yawned wider.
Afraid that the cavern was collapsing on her, Gloha screamed and with a dreadful little determination jammed herself through the crack, out of the cave, and into the next. She fell down slippery shale and slid to the base of the scene.
Was she truly free, or was this but a tantalizing dream? She would soon enough find out. She half ran, half flew, taking as much weight off her bad knee as she could without rising up to bang into the rough ceiling. She followed the steep trail up and around-and it opened on the surface, in sight of the harpy caves. She ran out, and the scene changed. She tripped, almost falling, and turned around.
There were no ruins behind her, no caves. Just Xanthly forest. So had it all been a bad dream? She wasn't sure.
Gloha blinked, realizing that another wave of madness had passed, leaving her damp but no longer immersed. She had relived the time she got lost in the nether caves-the ones the harpies claimed didn't exist. She knew better, and perhaps some day she would be able to prove it.
"So there are ancient ruins with gargoyles," Trent remarked. "Someone should excavate them and restore them to their original grandeur."
"You could see to that," Gloha reminded him, "if you decided not to fade away yet."
He smiled. "There will be others after me. It would be no good for us old folk to remain too long, cluttering the later history of Xanth. That's one reason the Good Magician keeps the secret of the Fountain of Youth."
She thought of something else. "Why is it my madness that keeps being explored? Doesn't anyone else have any bad memories?"
"Not I," the Demoness Metria said. "I'm infernal. I have no soul, therefore no conscience. My past doesn't bother me, so I would not have any bad memories or dreams even if I cared."
"I have no soul either," Marrow said. "But I would like to have one. Then perhaps I could suffer sieges of madness too."
"Which leaves me," Trent said. "I suppose if I stood upwind of you, I would feel the next wave of madness first, and perhaps then it would be my bad memories that animated."
Gloha hastily moved downwind from him. "Be my guest, Magician!"
Metria formed her smoky features into a huge sneer. "Twenty-five years of kingship-that must be a horrible memory!"
"From 1042 to 1067, when Magician Dor assumed the throne," Trent agreed. "However, the twenty years before that I spent in Mundania. You might consider that a terrible memory."
"Ugh, yes," Gloha agreed.
"What is so bad about Mundania?" Marrow asked.
"Everybody knows it's the dreariest place imaginable," Gloha said. "Because it has no magic. No wonder Magician Trent was desperate to return to Xanth."
"Not necessarily," Trent demurred. "Mundania just needs understanding."
"Here comes another wave," Metria said with relish.
Gloha found herself on the bank of a river. A solid stone bridge with a wooden drawbridge crossed it, and a group of women were washing clothing nearby in the shallow edge of the water. A two-wheeled covered cart drawn by a single unicorn-no, a horse, because it had no horn-was just crossing the bridge.
She looked down at herself. She was a child of five or six, wingless, in a human skirt and jacket, sitting on the bank above the women.
She looked to the other side, and saw a man standing not far off. He was sort of thin-haired, looking almost bald, with a short reddish beard and brown eyes. He had a funny little stand with a board on it, and he was facing it and looking every so often at the women and the bridge. Then she realized that he was painting the scene. So she got up and started toward him, to see what his painting looked like.
"Child!" one of the women screamed. It was the girl's mother; she just knew that without remembering it. "Stay away from that man! He's mad!"
So Gloha had to reverse course. Regretfully she went toward the bridge. The cart had gone on, but now a single man was walking across it. He was oddly dressed, and seemed to be somewhat confused. But he was somehow familiar.
He was Magician Trent! Looking much the way he did now, in his youthened state. But she knew that this was the original young Trent-and this must be Mundania, because it certainly wasn't Xanth. She was sharing his madness vision of his past.
She tried to call to him, but could not. The child she animated just watched. He crossed the bridge, then looked around. He saw Gloha but seemed not to recognize her. This wasn't surprising, because she wasn't herself at the moment. Then his eye fixed on the painter. He left the road and walked across to approach the man.
Gloha wanted to listen to their conversation, but knew her Mundane mother would forbid her getting close. So she busied herself on the bank, chasing down a bug, going one way and another, just sort of coincidentally getting closer to the painter. Finally she sat on the bank, and managed to scoot a bit nearer yet.
But she was disappointed. Trent tried to talk to the painter, but the man seemed not to understand him at all. Gloha realized what the problem was: Trent was speaking Xanthian, which came naturally to all residents, while the painter was speaking Mundanian. With different languages they could not communicate with each other very well.
Finally Trent gave up and went on. Gloha wanted to follow, but couldn't; the girl just was not going that way. She wrenched herself, trying to prevail. To her surprise, it worked, maybe. Something happened.
Then she was in an orchard. The fruit trees were flowering beautifully. They seemed to have hardly any leaves, but were completely covered with flowers. The painter was out there, painting the scene. She was unable to approach him again, because the woman she occupied was just walking by, but at least she could tell that this was a different day and different place.
However, it was Trent she wanted to see, not the painter. She wrenched again, and this time found herself in another body, watching him. He was somewhat ragged now; time must have passed, and he had had a hard time foraging for food in this strange country. But now he had found work at a farmstead, doing menial work, and seemed to be learning the language. Food and shelter seemed to be part of the deal; he might have to sleep in the loft of the barn with the chickens, but right now he was being served a wooden bowl of gruel by a plain young woman who must be the farmer's daughter. There was something familiar about her-
"Metria!" Gloha tried to exclaim, but of course nothing came out. She was just another farm child snooping on others' business. She was also-oops-male. A farm boy. Part of his body was weird. So she wrenched out of there and went to watch the mad painter. Well, he wasn't mad, of course; she just thought of him that way because this was a scene in the wave of madness, and he was the first man she had seen here. Still, the way her body glanced glancingly at him suggested that this native considered the painter highly eccentric if not outright crazy. But his painting was nice enough; it was of a wheat field, with a city in the background, and there was a sort of soft rounded quality to the wheat plants. And-he was animated by Marrow Bones. He didn't look like Marrow, but there was just something about the way he moved and the shape of his skull that made her certain. So he was a significant character of some sort, and it behooved her to keep-an eye on him until she discovered how this sequence played out.
She found that she could control her wrenches better with practice. Each one took her approximately where she wanted to go, but always forward in time. She could see the season advancing with each jump. She had started in early spring; now it was summer.
Trent's relationship with the farmer's daughter improved. She evidently liked him, but was shy because she wasn't pretty. She was lean and homely, but of good character. Something was definitely developing there.
Meanwhile the mad painter was everywhere. Each day he tramped out to establish his position, and then he just stood there and painted. On rainy days he did "still lifes"-tables with fruit and pottery. But most days he was out painting the town in all its aspects. Trees, flowers, fields, clouds, houses, the sea, boats, and people. All of them had his rounded, sometimes slightly fuzzy flair, but all were pretty and realistic in their mad way. It was amazing how much variety he could find in what had seemed to Gloha like a pretty dull Mundane town. He never seemed to do anything with the paintings; they just got stacked up and forgotten. No one else seemed to want them.
Trent married the farmer's daughter. Gloha was gradually learning how to understand the weird Mundane language and writing, seeing it through the eyes of those she occupied, so now she was able to understand the information on the wedding paper: this was a place called Aries in a region called France at a time called 1888. All of that was meaningless to Gloha, but since she was here now she might as well know it.
The mad painter kept right on painting as the season progressed. Sometimes he painted at night and slept in the day. Sometimes he went inside and painted piles of books, or a pair of shoes, or chairs, or people eating at tables. But mostly he painted fields and houses and people going among them. Often he made sketches, and then completed the painting later. As winter came he painted flowers in pots. He seemed to be satisfied only when he was actually in the process of painting; the rest of his life was blah. But he really was mad, because he got into a fight with another painter-friend, then cut off part of his own ear, and took it to a house where a number of women lived. Their profession was something Gloha was not competent to fathom; it seemed to relate to making men happy for short periods. They weren't bad women; in fact they understood the mad painter about as well as anyone did, and showed him some sympathy. They had him taken to a place where folk got repaired and bandaged so that he wouldn't bleed to death. That slowed down his painting.
Trent was doing better. He came to know the painter, perhaps because both of them were considered mad in their ways, and now they were able to talk. If Trent told the man of the wonders of his homeland, no one would believe it if the painter spoke of it elsewhere. Maybe he did, and that only increased his seeming madness, because in the spring the painter went to a special place for the mad folk. He kept on painting, and when he couldn't go out he painted pictures of himself and others there, or even invented figures. Gloha was startled to see him paint a picture of her, with her wings, though she had none here. Either Trent had told-no, he couldn't have, because this was before Gloha had ever existed!-or the mad painter somehow saw without seeing.
Trent's wife ordered a baby the Mundane way, which Gloha found so weird that she didn't watch. There was no stork; instead-never mind. In the Mundane year 1889 it arrived, a boy, and
on occasion Gloha animated it. But she also wrenched out to watch the mad painter, who was really more interesting right now. He finally left the madhouse and went to another town where a Mundane healer called a doctor tried to take care of him. That didn't seem to help much, but the painter did like the healer's slender sweet daughter. Suddenly Gloha was animating the girl, who was exactly her age of nineteen, and the painter painted her in a garden, and as she was playing a music machine called a piano. Then, suddenly, he killed himself.
Gloha, shocked, returned to Trent's family. This was proceeding normally. She watched the little boy grow older. But this lacked flair; she had become distracted by the mad painter, and now that he was gone she just wanted to get out of this scene. So she jumped ahead as fast as she could, seeing the boy become a, teenager, almost a man-and suddenly a bad illness came, and Trent's wife and son died.
"Oh!" Gloha cried. "That was awful!"
"Yes," Trent agreed. "She was the only woman I ever loved, and the only son. There was nothing to do but to return to Xanth, where I had more power. But that was a separate story."
"The mad painter-" she said.
"I liked him too. He was named-" He paused, working to remember it after all this time. "Go. Van Go. Something like that. I think people got interested in his paintings after he died. But they all thought him mad while he lived. He wasn't; he merely had strong artistic passions. He understood about Xanth; he was the only one who believed me. That's why I liked him." He sighed.