"None of that. This ain't the old days, you know? We just protect him and keep order in the territory we occupy, and he'll give us small land grants where n.o.body's settled yet. He says Xanth's underpopulated. And there'll be--he'll encourage the local gals to marry us, so we can have families. If there aren't enough, he'll bring in gals from the real world. And meanwhile, he'll transform some smart animals into gals. I thought that was a joke, but after what I hear about those c.o.c.ks--" He grimaced. "I mean those basks--" He shook his head and grimaced again, in pain.

"Keep your head still," Fanchon told him, too late. "It's true about the c.o.c.katrice and basilisk; we were them. But animal brides---"

"Oh, it wouldn't be so bad, miss. Just temporary, until real gals arrived. If she looks like a gal and feels like a gal, I wouldn't blame her for being a b.i.t.c.h before. I mean, some gals are b.i.t.c.hes---"

"What's a b.i.t.c.h?" Bink asked.

"A b.i.t.c.h? You don't know that?" The sailor grimaced again; either he was in considerable pain or it was a natural expression. "A female dog. Like Jennifer. h.e.l.l, if Jennifer had human form--"

"Enough," Fanchon muttered.

"Well, anyway, we'll get homesteads and settle in. And our kids will be magic. I tell you, it's that last that recruited me. I don't believe in magic, understand--or I didn't then--but I remember the fairy tales from when I was a little tyke, about the princess and the frog, and the mountain of gla.s.s, and the three wishes---well, look, I was a metalworker for a crooked shop, know what I mean? And I really wanted out of the rat race."

Bink shook his head silently. He understood only part of what the sailor was saying, but it did not make Mundania look very good. Stores that were built off balance, crooked? Rats that raced? Bink would want to get out of that culture, too.

"A chance to have a decent life in the country," the sailor continued, and there was no question about his dedication to his vision. "Owning my own land, making good things grow, you know? And my kids knowing magic, real magic--I guess I still don't really believe that part, but even if it's a lie, you know, it's sure nice to think about."

"But to invade a foreign land, to take what doesn't belong to you--" Fanchon said. She broke off, evidently certain that it was pointless to debate that sort of thing with a sailor. "He'll betray you the moment he doesn't need you. He's an Evil Magician, exiled from Xanth."

"You mean he really can do magic?" the man asked with happy disbelief. "I figured all this stuff was sleight of hand, you know, when I really thought about it. I mean, I believed some of the time, but--"

"He sure as h.e.l.l can do magic," Bink put in, becoming acclimatized to the sailor's language. "We told you how he changed us--"

"Never mind about that," Fanchon said.

"Well, he's still a good leader," the sailor insisted. "He told us how he was kicked out twenty years ago because he tried to be King, and how he lost his magic, and married a gal from here and had a little boy--"

"Trent has a family in Mundania?" Bink asked, amazed.

"We don't call our country that," the sailor said. "But yes--he had a family. Until this mystery bug went around--some kind of flu, I think, or maybe food poisoning--and they both got it and died. He said science hadn't been able to save them, but magic could have, so he was going back to magicland. Xanth, you call it. But they'd kill him if he just walked in alone, even if he got by the thing he called a Shield. So he needed an army-oooh!" Fanchon had finished her work and heaved his shoulder up onto a pillow.

So they had the sailor as comfortable as was feasible, his shoulder bound up in stray cloths. Bink would have liked to hear more of the man's unique viewpoint. But time had pa.s.sed, and it was apparent that the other ship was gaining on them. They traced its progress by its sail, which moved laterally, back and forth, zigzagging against the wind--and with each pa.s.s it was closer. They had been wrong about the capabilities of ships in adverse wind. How much else were they wrong about?

Bink went into the cabin. He was feeling a bit seasick now, but he held it down. "Jennifer," he said hesitantly, proffering some of the dog food they had found. The small spotted monster wagged her tail. Just like that, they were friends. Bink screwed up his courage and patted her on the head, and she did not bite him. Then, while she ate, he opened the chest she had guarded so ferociously and lifted out the vial of greenish fluid he found therein, in a carefully padded box. Victory!

"Miss," the sailor called as Bink emerged with the vial. "The Shield--"

Fanchon looked about nervously. "Is the current carrying us into that?"

"Yes, miss. I wouldn't interfere, but if you don't turn this boat soon, we'll all be dead. I know that Shield works; I've seen animals try to go through it and get fried."

"How can we tell where it is?" she asked.

"There's a glimmer. See?" He pointed with difficulty. Bink peered and saw it. They were drifting toward a curtain of faint luminescence, ghostly white. The Shield!

The ship progressed inexorably. "We can't stop it," Fanchon cried. "We're going right through."

"Throw down the anchor!" the sailor said.

What else was there to do? The Shield was certain death. Yet to stop meant capture by Trent's forces. Even bluffing them back by means of the vial of elixir would not suffice; the ship remained a kind of prison.

"We can use the lifeboat," Fanchon said. "Give me the vial."

Bink gave it to her, then threw over the anchor. The ship slowly turned as the anchor took hold. The Shield loomed uncomfortably close--but so did the pursuing ship. Now it was clear why it was using the wind instead of the current; it was under control, in no danger of drifting into the Shield.

They lowered the lifeboat. A reflector lamp from the other ship bathed them in its light. Fanchon held the vial aloft. "I'll drop it!" she screamed at the enemy. "Hit me with an arrow--the elixir drowns with me."

"Give it back," Trent's voice called from the other ship. "I pledge to let you both go free."

"Ha!" she muttered. "Bink, can you row this boat yourself? I'm afraid to set this thing down while we're in range of their arrows. I want to be sure that no matter what happens to us, they don't get this stuff."

"I'll try," Bink said. He settled himself, grabbed the oars, and heaved.

One oar cracked into the side of the ship. The other dug into the water. The boat skewed around. "Push off!" Fanchon exclaimed. "You almost dumped me."

Bink tried to put the end of one oar against the ship, to push, but it didn't work because he could not maneuver the oar free of its oarlock. But the current carried the boat along until it pa.s.sed beyond the end of the ship.

"We're going into the Shield!" Fanchon cried, waving the vial. "Row! Row! Turn the boat!"

Bink put his back into it. The problem with rowing was that he faced backward; he could not see where he was going. Fanchon perched in the stem, holding the vial aloft, peering ahead. He got the feel of the oars and turned the boat, and now the shimmering curtain came into view on the side. It was rather pretty in its fashion, its ghostly glow parting the night--but he recoiled from its horror.

"Go parallel to it," Fanchon directed. "The closer we stay, the harder it'll make it for the other ship. Maybe they'll give up the pursuit."

Bink pulled on the oars. The boat moved ahead. But he was unused to this particular form of exertion, and not recovered from his fatigue of the swim, and he knew he couldn't keep it up long.

"You're going into the Shield!" Fanchon cried.

Bink looked. The Shield loomed closer, yet he was not rowing toward it. "The current," he said. "Carrying us sideways." He had naively thought that once he started rowing, all other vectors ceased.

"Row away from the Shield," she cried. "Quickly!"

He angled the boat--but the Shield did not retreat. The current was bearing them on as fast as he could row. To make it worse, the wind was now changing--and rising. He was holding even at the moment, but he was tiring rapidly. "I can't--keep this-up!" he gasped, staring at the glow.

"There's an island," Fanchon said. "Angle toward it."

Bink looked around. He saw a black something cutting the waves to the side. Island? It was no more than a treacherous rock. But if they could anchor to it- He put forth a desperate effort--but it was not enough. A storm was developing. They were going to miss the rock. The dread Shield loomed nearer.

"I'll help," Fanchon cried. She set down the vial, crawled forward, and put her hands on the oars, opposite his hands. She pushed, synchronizing her efforts with his.

It helped. But Bink, fatigued, was distracted. In the erratic moonlight, blotted out intermittently by the thickening, fast-moving clouds above, her naked body lost some of its shapelessness and a.s.sumed the suggestion of more feminine contours. Shadow and imagination could make her halfway attractive---and that embarra.s.sed him; because he had no right to think of such things. Fanchon could be a good companion, if only- The boat smashed into the rock. It tilted--rock or craft or both. "Get hold! Get hold!" Fanchon cried as water surged over the side.

Bink reached out and tried to hang on to the stone. It was both abrasive and slippery. A wave broke over him; filling his mouth with its salty spume. Now it was black; the clouds had completed their engulfment of the moon.

"The elixir!" Fanchon cried. "I left it in the--" She dived for the flooded stem of the boat.

Bink, still choking on sea water, could not yell at her. He clung to the rock with his hands, his fingers finding purchase in a crevice, anchoring the boat with his hooked knees. He suffered a foolish vision: if a giant drowning in the ocean grabbed on to the land of Xanth for support, his fingers would catch in the chasm, the Gap. Maybe that was the purpose of the Gap. Did the tiny inhabitants of this isolated rock resent the crevice that Bink's giant fingers had found? Did they have forget spells to remove it from their awareness?

There was a distant flash of lightning. Bink saw the somber ma.s.s of ragged stone: no miniature people on it. But there was a glint, as of light reflecting from a k.n.o.b in the water. He stared at it, but the lightning was long since gone, and he was squinting at the mere memory, trying to make out the surrounding shape. For it had been a highlight from something larger.

Lightning flashed again, closer. Bink saw briefly but clearly.

It was a toothy reptilian creature. The highlight had been from its malignant eye.

"A sea monster!" he cried, terrified.

Fanchon labored at an oar, finally extricating it from its lock. She aimed it at the monster and shoved.

Thunk! The end of the oar struck the armored green snout. The creature backed off.

"We've got to get away from here," Bink cried.

But as he spoke, another wave broke over them. The boat was lifted and wrenched away from his feet. He put one arm about Fanchon's skinny waist and hung on. It seemed the fingers of his other hand would break--but they remained wedged in the crevice, and he held his position.

In the next trough the lightning showed small saillike projections moving in the water. What were they?

Then another monster broke water right beside him; he saw it in the phosph.o.r.escence that the complete darkness had attuned his eyes to. It seemed to have a single broad eye across its face, and a round, truncated snout. Huge wattles were at the sides. Bink was transfixed by terror, though he knew that most of the details were really from his imagination. He could only stare at the thing as the lightning permitted.

And the lightning confirmed his imagination. It was a hideous monster!

Bink struggled with his terror to form some plan of defense. One hand clung to the rock; the other held Fanchon. He could not act. But maybe Fanchon could. "Your oar--" he gasped.

The monster acted first. It put its hands to its face---and lifted the face away. Underneath, was the face of Evil Magician Trent "You fools have caused enough trouble! Give me the elixir, and I'll have the ship throw us a line."

Bink hesitated. He was bone weary and cold, and knew he could not hold out much longer against storm and current. It was death to stay here.

"There's a crocodile sniffing around," Trent continued. "And several sharks. Those are just as deadly as the mythical monsters you are familiar with. I have repellent--but the current is carrying it away as rapidly as it diffuses into the water, so it's not much help. On top of that, sometimes whirlpools develop around these rocks, especially during storms. We need help now--and I alone can summon it. Give me that vial!"

"Never!" Fanchon cried. She dived into the black waves.

Trent snapped the mask back over his face and dived after her. As he moved, Bink saw that the Magician was naked except for his long sword strapped to a harness. Bink dived after him, not even thinking of what he was doing.

They met in a tangle underwater. In the dark and bubbly swirl, there was nothing but mutual mischief. Bink tried to swim to the surface, uncertain as to what foolishness had prompted him to dive here but sure that he could only drown himself. But someone had a death grip on him. He had to get up, to get his head in air so he could breathe. The water had hold of them all, carrying them around and around.

It was the whirlpool--an inanimate funnel monster. It sucked them down, spinning, into the depth of its maw. For the second time Bink felt himself drowning--and this time he knew no Sorceress would rescue him.

Chapter 11: Wilderness.

Bink woke with his face in sand. Around him lay the inert tentacles of a green monster.

He groaned and sat up. "Bink!" Fanchon cried gladly, coming across the beach to him.

"I thought it was night," he said.

"You've been unconscious. This cave has magic phosph.o.r.escence, or maybe it's Mundane phosph.o.r.escence, since there was some on the rock, too. But it's much brighter here. Trent pumped the water out of you, but I was afraid--"

"What's this?" Bink asked, staring at a green tentacle.

"A kraken seaweed," Trent said. "It pulled us out of the drink, intending to consume us---but the vial of elixir broke and killed it. That's all that saved our lives. If the vial had broken earlier, it would have stopped the kraken from catching us, and we all would have drowned; later, and we would already have been eaten. As fortuitous a coincidence of timing as I have ever experienced."

"A kraken weed!" Bink exclaimed. "But that's magic!"

"We're back in Xanth," Fanchon said.

"But--"

"I conjecture that the whirlpool drew us down below the effective level of the Shield," Trent said. "We pa.s.sed under it. Perhaps the presence of the elixir helped. A freak accident--and I'm certainly not going to try to reverse that route now. I lost my breathing apparatus on the way in; lucky I got a good dose of oxygen first! We're in Xanth to stay."

"I guess so," Bink said dazedly. He had gradually become accustomed to the notion of spending the rest of his life in Mundania; it was hard to abandon that drear expectation so suddenly. "But why did you save me? Once the elixir was gone--"

"It was the decent thing to do," the Magician said. "I realize you would not appreciate such a notion from my lips, but I can offer no better rationale at the moment. I never had any personal animus against you; in fact, I rather admire your fort.i.tude and personal ethical code. You can go your way now--and I'll go mine."

Bink pondered. He was faced with a new, unfamiliar reality. Back in Xanth, no longer at war with the Evil Magician. The more he reviewed the details, the less sense any of it made. Sucked down by a whirlpool through monster-infested waters, through the invisible but deadly Shield, to be rescued by a man-eating plant, which was coincidentally nullified at precisely the moment required to let them drop safely on this beach? "No," he said. "I don't believe it. Things just don't happen this way."

"It does seem as if we're charmed," Fanchon said. "Though why the Evil Magician should have been included ..."

Trent smiled. Naked, he was fully as impressive as before. Despite his age, he was a fit and powerful man. "It does seem ironic that the evil should be saved along with the good. Perhaps human definitions are not always honored by nature. But I, like you, am a realist. I don't pretend to understand how we got here--but I do not question that we are here. Getting to land may be more problematical, however. We are hardly out of danger yet."

Bink looked around the cave. Already the air seemed close, though he hoped that was his imagination. There seemed to be no exit except the water through which they had come. In one nook was a pile of clean bones--the refuse of the kraken.

It began to seem less coincidental. What better place for an ocean monster to operate than at the exit to a whirlpool? The sea itself collected the prey, and most of it was killed on the way in by the Shield. The kraken weed had only to sieve the fresh bodies out of the water. And this highly private cave was ideal for leisurely consumption of the largest living animals. They could be deposited here on the beach, and even given food, so that they would remain more or less healthy until the kraken's hunger was sufficient. A pleasant little larder to keep the food fresh and tasty. Any that tried to escape by swimming past the tentacles---ugh! So the kraken could have dropped the human trio here, then been hit by the elixir; instead of split-second timing, it became several-minute timing. Still a coincidence, but a much less extreme one.

Fanchon was squatting by the water, flicking dry leaves into it. The leaves had to be from past seasons of the kraken weed; why it needed them here, with no sunlight, Bink didn't understand. Maybe it had been a regular plant before it turned magic--or its ancestors had been regular-and it still had not entirely adapted. Or maybe the leaves had some other purpose. There was a great deal yet to be understood about nature. At any rate, Fanchon was floating the leaves on the water, and why she wasted her time that way was similarly opaque.

She saw him looking, "I'm tracing surface currents," she said. "See--the water is moving that way. There has to be an exit under that wall."

Bink was impressed again with her intelligence. Every time he caught her doing something stupid, it turned out to be the opposite. She was an ordinary, if ugly, girl, but she had a mind that functioned efficiently. She had plotted their escape from the pit, and their subsequent strategy, and it had nullified Trent's program of conquest. Now she was at it again. Too bad her appearance fell down.

"Of course," Trent agreed. "The kraken can't live in stagnant water; it needs a constant flow. That brings in its food supply and carries away its wastes. We have an exit--if it leads to the surface quickly enough, and does not pa.s.s through the Shield again."

Bink didn't like it. "Suppose we dive into that current and it carries us a mile underwater before it comes out? We'd drown."

"My friend," Trent said, "I have been pondering that very dilemma. We can not be rescued by my sailors, because we are obviously beyond the Shield. I do not like to gamble on either the current or what we may discover within it. Yet it seems we must eventually do so, for we can not remain here indefinitely."

Something twitched. Bink looked--and saw one green tentacle writhing. "The kraken's reviving!' he exclaimed. "It isn't dead!"

"Uh-oh," Trent said. "The elixir has thinned out in the current and dissipated. The magic is returning. I had thought that concentration would be fatal to a magic creature, but apparently not."

Fanchon watched the tentacles. Now others were quivering. "I think we'd better get out of here," she said. "Soon."

"But we don't dare plunge into the water without knowing where it goes," Bink objected. "We must be well below the surface. I'd rather stay here and fight than drown."

"I propose we declare a truce between us until we get free," Trent said. "The elixir is gone, and we cannot go back the way we came from Mundania. We shall probably have to cooperate to get out of here--and in the present situation, we really have no quarrel."