But it just got worse. Sheets of water swept across, making Mela scream piercingly enough to be heard even above the storm, and filled the boat rapidly. Okra couldn"t row; she had to bail. So she shipped the oars and started scooping out water with both hands. It flew out in gouts, lowering the level, and that saved the boat from sinking. But that meant that they were entirely at the merciless mercy of the wind and waves. In addition, Okra could feel an asthma attack coming on; the exertion, wind, and soaking were making her breath clog. Asthma always waited for the worst times.
Then the awfullest wave yet charged them. It picked them up and carried them at a horrendous rate into obscurity. All they could do was hang on, soaked through by the seething foam; they were doomed to go wherever the wave took them, with no argument.
The boat crashed onto a sandy, hairy crumb of a rock.
It overturned, dumping them out. The water receded, leaving them sitting high and wet. Mela was huddled and shivering, and even Okra was cool. That had been a nasty storm, but they had after all made it to land.
The storm moved on, leaving only a few satisfied rumbles behind. It was through with them.
"Oh, no!" Mela exclaimed as she straightened up and sat down, more or less in one motion.
Okra looked. There was a great moving mound of sand coming toward them, giggling. " Gotcha in my sand trap!" it said. "Hee hee hee!"
"No, she, she," Okra gasped. "Two she"s, not three he"s." She hoped her breath would unclog soon.
"It"s a sandman," Mela said. "And he"s caught us in his sand trap. That"s why Fracto dumped us here."
"Sand trap?" Okra stood-and sat again as the sand went out from under her.
"It catches you so you can"t get out of it. I"ve heard about it, but never been in it before. The sandman will cover us over until we smother, and then we"ll dissolve away until only our heads are left, and we"ll be beachheads."
"Hee hee hee!" the sandman repeated, agreeing.
Okra focused her brain and thought heavily for a moment. She knew she couldn"t fight the sandman, because she could hardly breathe and was getting horribly weak.
So she had to use her brain, such as it was.
A dim bulb flashed, heating her head. She had a feeble notion! She reached into her soaking wet knapsack and pulled out her lunch: a bottle of door jam. She hated to waste it, but it seemed necessary. She twisted the cap, making it ajar, and dumped the jar of it into the sand around her.
The sand swarmed over the sticky stuff and got jammed.
More sand came in, and it too got jammed. Soon there was nothing but jammed sand.
Okra got to her feet and stepped on it. The surface was now firm because of the sand. The jam nullified the looseness of the sand, and the sand nullified the stickiness of the jam. She could walk on it.
But the effect did not reach to Mela. So Okra stood at the edge of the jammed sand and reached out to catch the merwoman"s hand and draw her in. Then the two of them stepped out of the sand trap.
The sandman was so annoyed that he sank back into a blah mound. Good riddance.
But this turned out to be an island, not the far sh.o.r.e of the lake. They would have to stay here overnight, for the storm could turn around and get them again if they tried to leave before it did. Okra dumped the remaining water out of the boat and set it out to dry in the sun.
They found a pool of firewater. Mela decided that this was better than fresh water, so they had a bath in it, using a cake of carved soapstone they found nearby. Soon they were free of the last of the horrible froth Fracto had dumped on them. Okra"s asthma gave it up as a bad job., and let her breath unclog. They rubbed their hair dry with a towel from a cottonwood tree. Then Mela sang a siren song as she combed her long tresses, making them magically l.u.s.trous.
Okra watched, intrigued. She pulled out a lank strand of her own hair.
It had never occurred to her that hair could be beautiful, and it was not the ogre way to-but still...
Mela smiled. "Would you like me do your hair, too?"
Okra blushed, which was another unogreish thing to do, and agreed. So Mela used her magic brush and song, and soon Okra"s hair had changed from dank strands to l.u.s.trous tresses. She looked at her reflection in the pool, and was amazed.
The light was getting all lavender, purple and soft. It was time to find something to eat, before the light moved on to deep purple and black. They gathered beach nuts, sand dabs, beached banana boats, and finally found a coconut tree with several nuts full of fresh cocoa. That gave them plenty to eat and drink, despite the loss of Okra"s door jam.
Then they collected driftwood and made a drifter"s hut to sleep in.
Okra"s boat, turned upside down, made the roof. They gathered fresh pillows and sheets from pillow bushes, forming a comfortable bed. They slept.
In the morning they scrounged for more food, finding some crabapples they cooked in the hot spring until they stopped squirming, and set out again. Okra had new confidence, because she discovered she liked having a companion instead of being alone. Mela was not at all like an ogre, she was beautiful and nice and fun to be with.
"May I ask you something, Okra?" Mela asked.
"Sure. But I may not know the answer. Ogre"s aren"t very smart."
"You seem smart enough to me. What I want to know is, why is it that you don"t talk like an ogre?"
"I do talk like an ogre, but not as loud."
"No, you don"t. You don"t rhyme."
"Ogres don"t rhyme!"
"Yes, they do. They say things like The think you stink." Crude rhymes. You don"t talk that way."
Okra considered. "Maybe we just sound that way to others. We don"t to ourselves."
"Or maybe your ogre tribe is different from the other ogres."
"Maybe. I"ll try to rhyme if you wish."
Mela laughed musically. "Don"t bother! I like you as you are."
Okra rowed, and they made progress toward the far sh.o.r.e of the lake. But Okra, facing back, spied a cloud on the horizon which rapidly grew larger as it approached.
"I think Fracto is coming after us again," she said.
Mela turned back to look. "You"re right! That"s the demon cloud. Can we get to land before he reaches us?"
"We can try." Okra bent to it with new vigor, and the light craft leaped ahead. Still, Fracto gained, and would have caught them except that his leading winds just blew them farther ahead. He couldn"t suck them back into himself.
However, they didn"t have much choice about where they landed, and didn"t have much chance to check around before the storm hit. They s.n.a.t.c.hed burlap from a tree, strung it over a branch, and weighted down the ends with heavy sh.e.l.ls. This gave them some shelter from the wind and rain, and they huddled inside it while the storm raged outside. At least they had made it all the way across the lake.
It remained day, but there was nothing to do except wait out the storm.
Okra was really getting to dislike Fracto! It rained every day at home, too, but that wasn"t malignant; Fracto evidently stormed just to make trouble for travelers. So they lay down and slept.
Okra was a light sleeper, for an ogress; anything out of the ordinary made her alert. Thus she woke when the burlap and sh.e.l.l curtains shook and tinkled as if blown open by a wet breath of wind. The thing was, there was no wind at this point; the storm had wandered elsewhere.
A billowing dribble touched Okra"s arm and then landed with a soft splat on the floor. It was a very faint sound, but it was unfamiliar, so it brought her fully awake. Once when she had slept in the garden at home, a snake had paused and thought about performing a snakely function, and the sound of that thought had awakened Okra.
As it happened, she was glad to wake, because she had been dreaming of riding a night mare, and that was not her favorite occupation. She had never ridden anything, preferring to use her legs on land or her rowing arms in her boat on the water. But she was aware that the dangers of the waking state could be almost as bad as those of dreams.
She opened her eyes and looked at what had fallen beside her. It was a fat luna-tick, ready to gorge itself on her blood. Even now it was using its stubby legs to crawl toward her, hoping to bite her in an unseen place and get her blood without waking her. It was about the size of her fist, and twice as ugly. A nest of such ticks could drain a person"s whole body during sleep, so that the victim never did wake up.
Of course that meant that there was no more for the ticks to eat, and most of them died. That was one reason they were called luna-ticks, they were crazy.
But how had the tick come here? Her eyes flicked to the sloping side of the impromptu tent, but there was no hole there. So it hadn"t dropped in from outside. Since luna-ticks couldn"t fly, it must have been thrown there.
It was not true that ogres always blundered noisily when they moved, they could act quickly and silently when they had to. They seldom had to, as it was normally easiest simply to bash something into oblivion.
But Okra, being the least of ogres, had learned more of silence than was useful. Her hand went soundlessly to her knapsack beside her and her fingers closed about the handle of her skinning knife. But she didn"t stab the tick; that was a minor pest.
She wanted to be ready for the major one she knew had to be near.
Then, carefully, she turned her head. There was an awful figure standing over Mela"s still form. There was the smell of fresh blood.
She had thought it was from the tick, but now she knew better.
Okra recognized the figure. It was a geek. They were lesser humanoid monsters, smaller and weaker than ogres or trolls, but they made up for it by being nastier in personality. No geek was ever up to any good, that was in the big book of monster rules.
Okra"s arm moved. She threw the knife at the geek. But the geek, with the evil cunning of its kind, turned to flee the blade. He was too slow; the steel of it buried itself in his back. But of course he didn"t die; geeks had no hearts, so stabbing one in the heart wasn"t properly effective. But the puncture did cause some discomfort, and the creature fell out of the tent.
Okra leaped to her feet to pursue him, for if she didn"t finish him off he would only return for more mischief. She strode out of the tent, and paused in dismay. There was a slew and a half of geeks climbing all over her oxblood boat, and luna-ticks were trying to suck the ox blood from it.
Outraged, Okra advanced on them. She had forgotten to recover her knife, but her fists would do. "You ridiculous geeks, what are you doing on my boat?" she demanded.
They looked at her. "We want to talk you into coming with us, of course," one said. Geeks were not the smartest of creatures; in fact some were rumored to be almost as stupid as ogres. So it didn"t occur to them not to answer a question. "Once we have you, we will tie you up and hit you, for no reason at all, until your willpower is gone and we can start work on your won"t power. When you finally give us the pleasure of dying, we will feed your carca.s.s to our hungriest luna-ticks." He had an oily, stinky voice and the smell of a dung beetle; those were his better aspects.
"But you geeks don"t know how to row a boat," Okra protested, for the moment being almost as stupid as they.
It was expected of an ogre, after all.
"We will make you row it to our hideout, where there are many more of us. We will take the merwoman along too; she looks luscious enough to give us some pleasure before we take all her blood."
Okra didn"t know quite what he meant by that, but was sure it wasn"t anything nice. She had heard enough; it was time to act. So she waded in, forming her best emulation of ham fists and knocking geeks every which way. She was the smallest and weakest of ogres, but these were only geeks. Soon she had scattered them to a suitable degree; they would not bother her for a while.
Then she picked up her knife and returned to the tent to check on Mela.
The geek had set several ticks on her, and they were already gorging.
There were scarlet ribbons of blood on her face, hands, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The worst of it was that she remained asleep; the bites of the ticks were painless, so Mela didn"t even know how she was being drained.
"Mela, wake up!" Okra said urgently.
Now the merwoman woke. She felt the ticks on her body, looked down at them, and exclaimed "Yeeeech!!!!"
Okra was startled. She had never before heard a fourpoint exclamation, but the exclamation points were definitely there, just like little clubs. Then she got into action, pulling the ticks off Mela and squishing them with blows of her mini-ham fists.
Then Okra donned her knapsack and led Mela out. The merwoman remained weak and dizzy, having expended much of her remaining store of energy in the production of that excellent exclamation. She would need further attention, but first they had to get to a safer place.
Mela blinked as she stepped out and looked around.
"Ek," she said, managing a quarter point scream that was hardly audible.
"What are those things doing draped across the branches of trees, and with their heads rammed through knotholes, and with their feet sticking up from the mudbank?"
"Those are geeks," Okra explained. "I asked them to get out of our way."
"Oh." Then Mela"s eyes fastened weakly on the boat.
"Eek." That scream was a little better formed and more emphatic than the last, but still not in the same universe as the first exclamation.
Okra picked up the boat and shook it, dumping the luna-ticks into the water. Mela relaxed.
They left the dangerous bay behind them, going out onto deep water.
There was no sign of Fracto, fortunately; the late afternoon was beautiful.
Okra shipped the oars and dug in her knapsack for her medical kit. This was yet another unogreish artifact she had picked up; most ogres took no note of pain and less of injury. She dabbed at the tick bites with unguent, but didn"t accomplish much. Mela had lost too much blood.
Even the twin firewater opals she wore on the chain around her neck looked listless.
So Okra did the best thing she could think of: she rowed back to the island. There she avoided the sand trap and hauled Mela to the hot pool and washed her off. Then Mela began to revive, for a hot bath had a magical effect on any woman. Her listless straw hanks of hair began to turn to golden tresses, which turned a pretty green under the water.
Okra found a timely thyme plant, and a medicinal mint herb. She dipped them in a mug of the hot water, concocting first one tea and then two teas. She gave these to Mela to drink, and these teased her into further improvement. Then Okra set her on pillows and sang ogreish songs until Mela faded away to sleep. Unfortunately the only one she could remember was "Happy Birthday."
A rare blue moon came up. Okra admired its color; this was the first time she had seen this hue on the moon. She wished she could get some blue cheese from it, but couldn"t reach that high. Then she slept, especially lightly, ready to wake at any sign of trouble.
In the morning Mela felt better, but Okra felt worse.
She was hardly able to get into the boat to resume rowing.
Yet she wasn"t wheezing. What was the matter with her?
"Let me check this," Mela said. "Take off your knapsack." She helped Okra remove it. "Ha! I thought so. There"s a tick on you."
Indeed, the tick was on Okra"s back, hidden by the knapsack, which she had not removed overnight. It must have crawled into the knapsack while Okra was dealing with the geeks, then gotten on her while she slept.
Mela took pleasure in drowning the tick in the hot pool.
Then she took care of Okra, the way Okra had taken care of her, and by the end of the day Okra was feeling better.
They had a meal of fresh coconut cocoa, breadfruit, and a variety of b.u.t.ters from beach b.u.t.tercups.
The following morning Okra rowed them back across to the western sh.o.r.e.
Mela used her opals as searchlights to find a safe path that would guide them across a mountain of sand dunes and down into a huge cave with magic springs, an underground stream, and a colony of freshwater merfolk. She had a little manual in her invisible purse that described the locations of the various merfolk tribes, and there was supposed to be such a colony here.
For she depended on these cousin creatures to give her directions to reach the castle of the Good Magician. The freshwater folk had little a.s.sociation with the salt.w.a.ter folk, but merfolk were bound to support merfolk.