“What are you doing?” Quidprobe shouted.
“My horse is stuck to his shoe!”
A moment later Caligorant tripped over something and crashed to the ground, then began thrashing and bellowing even louder in pain and frustration, unable to get up. By the time Pogo reached him the giant was wound head to foot in a net of fine silvery mesh. The trussed Caligorant made an enormous hocking noise, then finally managed to spit out the plug of glue. It bounced away across the swamp like a hooked tee shot, ants hanging on for dear life and the yellowjackets fizzing angrily.
“Helb me!” the ogre cried, his nose swollen into a crimson volleyball. “Me caught in Vulcan’s Det! Helb!”
“Why should I help you, dude?” Pogo asked. “You were going to eat me!”
The giant looked at him, considering. “You helb, me let you go, just eat your friend.”
Pogo examined the mess that had been noble Rabican, knightly charger. Pretty much the only thing recognizable in the smear on the giant’s heel was the saddle chased in silver, shiny once but now slightly dulled by horse juices, and a few fragments of the enchanted horn. Pogo wasn’t going to be drinking out of it any more.
Quidprobe hurried up, eyeing the tangled giant warily. “Middens of Moorcock, how are we going to finish the quest?” he wailed. “Without a horse we’ll never get anywhere!” He looked at the ogre and scowled. “At least we can kill this ugly big bastard now.”
“Just because me try to eat you . . . ?” Caligorant grumbled. “Seem like over-reaction.”
“No, we’re not going to kill him,” Pogo told the dwarf. He’d been thinking about how Big Ed sometimes lifted Little Ed up on his shoulders to take things off the high shelves so he didn’t have to go downstairs to the stockroom for the ladder. “We’re going to ride him.”
“Me want to file formal protest,” the ogre complained as Pogo and Quidprobe tightened the girth strap around his neck. Quidprobe, not trusting the Pogocashman’s knots, also checked to make sure the giant’s hands were securely tied behind his back. “Treaty of Pax Nicephori specify no saddles on prisoners.”
“You tried to eat us,” the Pogocashman pointed out. “And you stepped on my horse. So, basically, shut up.”
Quidprobe had just got used to riding atop the huge battle charger, but now they were traveling at the height of the treetops. The forest itself was pretty in a primitive sort of way, its trees, streams, and meadows as well-ordered as one of the departmental schematics Digry was always making him study, but the rest of the experience wasn’t ordered at all. In fact, it was downright disturbing, especially the part about having a skeleton. How did these creatures live with these weird struts inside them? Flexibility was almost nil . . .
“Who are those guys?” the Pogocashman asked, pointing to a small group of mounted, armored men in the distance. “Oh, and there’s some more over there. Wow, there’s a ton of ’em. What are they doing?”
Quidprobe shrugged. “Performing quests, most of them. The Forest of Ardennes is a busy place. If we bump into any knights they’ll probably want to fight, so tell them you’re on a holy quest or you’ll have to stop and joust every ten minutes. Do you know what that means?”
“Oh, hell yeah!” The creature nodded his head vigorously. “I took this hippie chick to the Renaissance Fair in Agoura once. I wanted to watch the jousting, but all she wanted to do was get her tarot cards read. Like three times! Two bucks a pop! I didn’t even have enough left to get a turkey leg!” The Pogocashman shook his head in sad recollection. “I really wanted to try one of those turkey legs.”
“Yes, very sad,” said Quidprobe. “But we must keep our minds on the matter at hand. With our horse dead there’s no point in meeting Bradamant because we have nothing to exchange for the hippogriff, so we might as well go straight to Prester John. The only problem is, he’s in Ethiopia.”
The ogre made a noise of irritation. “Me not swimming to Africa.”
The Pogocashman wasn’t listening—he had been distracted by a loud clanging from nearby. “What’s that?” he asked.
Quidprobe listened for a moment, then felt the disturbing sensation of his hackles lifting. “Oh dear, I completely forgot about Orrilo.”
“Maybe you ride him,” suggested Caligorant.
“What’s an Oh Real Oh?” the Pogocashman asked.
“Orillo. He’s an infamous bandit. Very dangerous, very cruel. And because of a magical spell, nothing can kill him.” Even as Quidprobe spoke the din from the clearing ahead of them grew louder, and now they could see the shapes of armored men through the trees. Three knights, one in shiny black, the other two in more colorful outfits, were fighting with swords, the two bright against the dark one. “Poor fools,” he said. “They haven’t a chance against Orrilo.”
“Why not?” the Pogocashman asked. “They look like they’re doing pretty good.”
“Watch.”
Even as the dwarf spoke, one of the knights managed to cut off the black knight’s arm. The Pogocashman gasped as the black knight’s sword clattered to the ground, but strangely, no blood came from the wound. Even so, the other attacker took advantage of the enemy’s literal disarming and lopped off Orrilo’s head, but the bandit knight only bent over, picked up his arm and put it back on his shoulder, where it connected and stuck; then, as his two enemies watched in dismay, he found his head and returned that to his shoulders, where it also stuck. A moment later he was attacking the knights again.
“Why are you laughing?” Quidprobe asked the Pogocashman.
“Because I saw this movie,” Pogo told him. “You know, ‘I fart in your general direction!’ It’s those Nudge-Nudge guys!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Quidprobe said, “but I promise you that Orrilo is real and very dangerous.” He watched the black knight hammering his enemies, who were definitely beginning to look as if they would rather be somewhere else. “Unless his spell of invulnerability is broken, nothing can kill him.”
“How do you break the spell?”
“I don’t know,” said Quidprobe with a touch of aspersion. “I don’t know because some idiot burned our book of spells.”
“You don’t have to be all vague and sarcastic,” Pogo said. “I know you’re talking about me.”
At that moment, one of the colorful knights snuck a lucky swipe past Orrilo’s guard and lopped off his head again. The force of the blow sent it rolling across the clearing. It fetched up near Caligorant’s immense feet.
“Me smell something yummy,” the giant said.
The Pogocashman climbed out of the saddle and jumped down to examine the bandit’s head.
“Use caution—he’s very dangerous . . . !” Quidprobe warned.
“Be cool, dude! I just want to check this out!”
There was no blood dripping from the severed neck, but the Pogocashman still held the head at arm’s length by its feathered crest before opening the visor. The face inside was cheerful if a bit sweaty, with handsome features, a grayshot beard, and black, beetling eyebrows.
“Toss me back to my body, will you?” said Orrilo’s head. “Then if you want to have a go, just stick around. I’ll soon have finished carving up these two.”
The Pogocashman, head dangling in one hand, climbed laboriously back onto the giant’s neck.
“What if I don’t?” he asked the head when he was back in the saddle. “I mean, what if I just hang onto your head up here? You won’t be able to do much then, right?”
“Yes, but my body will follow you around until it gets my head back, and then you’ll have to fight me anyway.” Orrilo’s head grinned. “I can’t be killed, remember? So basically, you’re in deep merde either way.” He saw the puzzled expression on the Pogocashman’s face. “That’s French for ‘shit’,” the bandit explained.
“Oh.”
The knight’s armored body turned and hastened toward them at a clanking trot; the other two knights, choosing discretion over pointless valor, took adv
antage of the distraction to flee the clearing. Within moments the body had reached them and was jumping up and down in front of the giant trying to reach its dangling head.
“Him smell good,” said Caligorant, but the Pogocashman was busy trying to work through what the black knight had told him.
“So no matter what I do, I’m going to have to fight you?”
“Pretty much,” said Orrilo. “Say, you don’t have a drop of claret, do you? I’m parched. Better wait until I’m back on my body, though, or it will just run out onto the ground and that would be a sad waste of wine. Ho ho!” He was amused by his own joke. “Ho, ho! Funny, eh? Too bad most people don’t get to know that side of me.” Orillo’s head looked around as best it could while dangling in mid-air. “Now, where did my body go?” He tilted his eyes down as far as he could. “Seriously, where is it?”
“How should I know?” The Pogocashman was clearly feeling grumpy.
Quidprobe pulled on his sleeve and pointed down. “Ummm, you might . . . want to . . . ”
“What? What’s the problem now, little dude?”
Quidprobe pointed. “Look.”
A pair of legs clad in black armor were poking out of the giant’s mouth, kicking as haphazardly as a child failing a swimming test.
“Oops,” said the Pogocashman. Quidprobe thought it was a bit of an understatement.
The head was beginning to get frustrated. “Oops? Oops what? Where’s my body?”
“Spit that out,” the Pogocashman told the giant. “Go on. Spit it out.”
Caligorant quickly swallowed down the rest of the body. When the ogre spoke, it was in tones of perfect innocence. “Spit out what?”
“Where’s my body?” shouted the head. “I’m telling you, there’ll be trouble here. The Royal Assize is going to be passing through here in a fortnight or so and if someone’s nipped off with my body there’ll be hell to pay, sure enough!”
“Don’t know what this royal ass size is,” the Pogocashman whispered to Quidprobe, “but maybe we better not stick around.”
“You may have something there,” Quidprobe said. “In fact, I’m sure you do.”
Despite the stream of invective coming from it, the Pogocashman didn’t seem to remember he was still holding Orrilo’s head until they were a good distance from the clearing. The giant, belly full, was whistling happily as he walked.
“I can’t believe this!” The bandit’s head hadn’t stopped shouting for a moment. “I can’t believe you just let your pet giant . . . eat my body like that. That’s not right!”
“Is he really going to live forever like this?” the Pogocashman asked Quidprobe as the black knight’s head described all of his important friends at the court of Charlemagne, as well as several more among the nobility of Faerie, and listed the various penalties that could be levied against the owners of a dangerous steed like a giant. “With no body?”
“I think so.”
“Then find me something to put this damn head in.”
When they found a suitable sack, still smelling of the onions that Quidprobe had hastily transferred to the saddlebag, Pogo dropped the head in.
“You’re not really going to do this to me, are you?” Orrilo’s head demanded.
“Damn right. Until you learn to shut up.” The Pogocashman twisted the top of the sack and tied it closed.
“Merde,” said the head’s muffled voice.
“Yep.” The Pogocashman looked down with no little satisfaction at the giant’s distended stomach. “Sooner or later.”
“Me hungry again,” said the giant as he waded through the waves toward the Ethiopian shore. “Swimming hard work. Food was stringy, too.”
“I’ll thank you to speak a little more courteously about me,” Orrilo’s head complained from the sack. “Or about my body, anyway. I mean, I’m right here! How do you think I feel? And I’m not stringy—I’m sinewy.”
“You say sinewy—me say stringy. Point is, not enough good stuff.”
“Will you both shut up?” Pogo asked. The two of them, giant and disembodied head, had spent the entire swim arguing about what kind of whalefish that was, and whether the wind was nor’east or nor’south or nor’something. It was like listening to Big Ed and Little Ed endlessly stupid disputes about whether Han Solo could beat Dirty Harry in a fist-fight. “Head, if you can’t keep quiet in that bag I’ll put you down the back of the giant’s pants instead. You think you’ll like that better?”
“Charmless,” said Orrilo, but fell silent.
“So what now?” Pogo asked the dwarf.
“Bradbury only knows,” Quidprobe said glumly. “This is a fictional universe originally created by Poul Anderson, based on a world created by a bunch of medieval poets. But this is some other writer doing a cheap knock-off of Anderson’s world, with characters taken from Ariosto’s version. And you.” He blanched. “I just had a horrid thought—what if this hack chose you as the protagonist on purpose? We could be in the hands of a madman!”
“Yeah,” Pogo agreed, although he hadn’t understood anything the dwarf had just said. Harry Ostro and Pole Anderson sounded like the names of Muppets. “So, like I said, what now?”
“If this story were being written by a real writer like Anderson I might have some idea,” the dwarf said, scowling. “But with this fool in charge—well, anything could happen. And since they couldn’t even send me a proper Anderson hero with a working knowledge of science and engineering and such . . . well, whatever does happen is bound to be pretty stupid. What did you say you did for a living, anyway?”
“Retail management,” said Pogo promptly. That always sounded better than mentioning the shoe store.
“Well, that should do us a world of good.” The little man didn’t really sound like he meant it.
As the day wore on, the hilly slope continued to lead them upward through dry, mostly barren country until Pogo could see they were climbing the highest of a small range of rocky hills. As they neared the top of the hill, Pogo noticed what he at first thought were large birds wheeling in the air above the hilltop, although something about their shapes didn’t look quite right.
“We’re getting near,” said Quidprobe.
“That’s good, right?”
“Good in the sense that we’re at the next stage of the quest,” said Quidprobe. “Bad in that we’re going to have to deal with the harpies somehow, and to be honest, I can’t imagine what we’re going to do in a million years.”
“Harpies?”
“Horrible female demons. They persecute Prester John. He’s blind. They steal his food.”
“Whoa, I saw this movie!” Pogo said. “There were skeletons in it too. And Hercules. I think it was called Jason and the Astronauts.”
The dwarf made a noise of irritation. “This is not a movie. This can kill you. But to be fair, Ariosto did steal that bit from the original Jason and the Argonauts, so in that sense you’re right.” A hopeful look momentarily lit the dwarf’s brown, wrinkled face. “How did they deal with the harpies in this moving picture?”
“I dunno. I was kind of stoned, to be honest. I think they threw a net on them and whacked the shit out of them with swords or something. Too bad we didn’t save the giant’s net, huh?”
Quidprobe sighed. “Yes. And I’m guessing a proper Poul Anderson hero would have remembered that before we swam across the ocean.”
“We?” inquired the giant. “Me think not.”
“Yeah, it’s a bummer.” Pogo was getting a bit tired of the adventure now. It had gone on way too long to be just an acid flashback, at least as far as he knew, although to be fair, pretty much all he knew about flashbacks were health class warnings and what he’d seen on Hawaii Five-O and Streets of San Francisco. Also, the thing Quidprobe had said about “this can kill you” hadn’t exactly made him feel warm and tingly.
Speaking of not feeling warm and tingly, the closer to the hilltop they got, the easier it was for Pogo to see that the flying shapes weren’t anything
like birds: they were human-sized, and their wings looked more like the kind you saw on bats. Stuff that was cool on movies and television seemed a lot less fun when it was flying back and forth not far away, letting out nasty screechy noises that echoed down the dusty hillside.
“May I just mention that it’s really getting unpleasant inside this sack,” announced Orrilo’s head. “If I’d known I was going to spend hours smelling my own breath I would have taken up that newfangled teeth-cleaning fad.”
“Why you complain?” said Caligorant. “You ride in nice bag. Me have to carry you all. Uphill, too.”
“You tried to eat us,” Pogo reminded him.
“He did eat me,” said the head in the bag.
“Me didn’t ride you,” the giant said, sulky as a sixth-grader whose parents would only buy him cheap knock-off running shoes instead of Pumas. “Me play fair.”
“I don’t recall you being particularly fair to me when you ate my body,” Orrilo said. “One moment it was just standing there, the next moment—hey-presto, it’s lunchtime!”
“Me couldn’t help it. Was right there, begging me eat it.”
“It wasn’t doing anything of the sort,” said the muffled voice from the sack. “Because it didn’t have a head on. So spare us the untruthful excuses.”
“Me meant metaphorically.”
“Well, then I wish you would have only eaten my body metaphorically too, you large oaf. Then I wouldn’t be bouncing along here all day having to smell the onion I broke my fast on two days ago—and it wasn’t even a particularly nice onion. If I’d known I was going to spend the rest of my life in a sack I would doubtless have been a bit more selective . . . ”
Pogo smacked the bag so hard that Orrilo’s teeth clicked together. “Jeez, just shut up!”
“You should be quiet too, Pogocashman,” the dwarf said in hushed tones. “We’re almost there and harpies have sharp ears.”
As they neared the top of the hill, Pogo could see the ruins of what had once been a castle. The harpies were swooping in and out past the broken walls, busy as mosquitoes during swim trials at fat camp. Someone seemed to be shouting at them.