They lined up. Dor heard the rustle of rapidly expanding leaves behind him. This was nervous business!
“It’s blossoming,” Grundy said. “It’s beginning to feel its power. Oh, it’s a bad one!”
“Sure it’s a bad one,” Irene agreed. “I picked the best seed. Start wading into the channel. The flower will strike before we reach the sea nettle, and we want the nettle’s attention directed this way.”
They waded out. Dor suddenly realized how constrictive his clothing would be in the water. He didn’t want anything hampering him as he swam by the nettle. He started removing his apparel. Irene, apparently struck by the same thought, quickly pulled off her skirt and blouse.
“Dor’s right,” Grundy remarked. He was riding Chet’s back. “You do have nice legs. And that’s not all.”
“If your gaze should stray too far from forward,” Irene said evenly, “it could encounter the ambience of the stunflower.”
Grundy’s gaze snapped forward. So did Chet’s, Smash’s, and Dor’s. But Dor was sure there was a grim smirk on Irene’s face. At times she was very like her mother.
“Hey, the flower’s bursting loose!” Grundy cried. “I can tell by what it says; it has a bold self-image. What a head on that thing!”
Indeed, Dor could feel a kind of heat on his bare back. The power of the flower was now being exerted.
But the sea nettle seemed unaffected. It quivered, moving toward them. Its headpart was gilled like a toadstool all around. Driblets of drool formed on its surface.
“The nettle says it will sting us all so hard-oooh, that’s obscene!” Grundy said. “Let me see if I can render a properly effective translation-“
“Keep moving,” Irene said. “The flower’s incipient.”
“Now the flower’s singing its song of conquest,” Grundy reported, and broke into the song: “I’m the one flower, I’m the STUNflower!”
At the word “stun” there was a burst of radiation that blistered their backs. Dor and the others fell forward into the channel, letting the water cool their burning flesh.
The sea nettle, facing the flower, stiffened. Its surface glazed. The drool crystallized. The antennae faded and turned brittle. It had been stunned.
They swam by the nettle. There was no reaction from the monster.
Dor saw its mass extending down into the depths of the channel with huge stinging tentacles. That thing certainly could have destroyed them all, had it remained animate.
They completed their swim in good order, Chet and Grundy in the lead, then Dor, Smash, and finally Irene. He knew she could swim well enough; she was staying back so the others would not view her nakedness. She wasn’t actually all that shy about it; it was mainly her sense of propriety, developing apace with her body, and her instinct for preserving the value of what she had by keeping it reasonably scarce. It was working nicely; Dor was now several times as curious about her body as he would have been had he seen it freely. But he dared not look; the stunning radiation of the stunflower still beat upon the back of his head.
They found the shallows and trampled out of the water. “Keep going until shaded from the flower,” Irene called. “Don’t look back, whatever you do!”
Dor needed no warning. He felt the heat of stun travel down his back, buttocks, and legs as he emerged from the water. What a monster Irene had unleashed! But it had done its job, when his own talent had failed; it had gotten them safely across the channel and past the sea nettle.
They found a tangle of purple-green bushes and maneuvered to put them between their bodies and the stunflower. Now Dor could put his clothing back on; he had kept it mostly dry by carrying it clenched in his teeth, the magic sword strapped to his body.
“You have nice legs, too,” Irene said behind him, making him jump. “And that’s not all.”
Dor found himself blushing. Well, he had it coming to him. Irene was already dressed; girls could change clothing very quickly when they wanted to.
They moved on south, but it was a long time before Dor lost his nervousness about looking back. That stunflower . . .
Chet halted. “What’s this?” he asked.
The others looked. There was a flat wooden sign set in the ground.
On it was neatly printed NO LAW FOR THE LOIN.
It was obvious that no one quite understood this message, but no one wanted to speculate on its meaning. At last Dor asked the sign: “Is there any threat to us nearby?”
“No,” the sign said.
They went on, each musing his private musings. They had come to this island naked; could that relate? But obviously that sign had been there long before their coming. Could it be a misspelling? he wondered. But his own spelling was so poor, he hesitated to draw that conclusion.
Now they came to a densely wooded marsh. The trees were small but closely set; Dor and Irene could squeeze between them, but Smash could not, and it was out of the question for Chet.
“Me make a lake,” Smash said, readying his huge hamfist. With the trees gone, this would be a more or less open body of murky water.
“No, let’s see if we can find a way through,” Dor said. “King Trent never liked to have wilderness areas wantonly destroyed, for some reason. And if we make a big commotion, it could attract whatever monsters there are.”
They skirted the thicket and soon came across another sign: THE LOIN WALKS WHERE IT WILL. Near it was a neat, dry path through the forest, elevated slightly above the swamp.
“Any danger here?” Dor inquired.
“Not much,” the sign said.
They used the path. As they penetrated the thicket, there were rustlings in the trees and slurpings in the muck below. “What’s that noise?” Dor asked, but received no answer. This forest was so dense there was nothing inanimate in it; the water was covered with green growth, and the path itself was formed of living roots.
“I’ll try,” Grundy said. He spoke in tree language, and after a moment reported: “They are cog rats and skug worms; nothing to worry about as long as you don’t turn your back on them.”
The rustlings and slurpings became louder. “But they are all around us!” Irene protested. “How can we avoid turning our backs?”
“We can face in all directions,” Chet said. “I’ll go forward; Grundy can ride me facing backward. The rest of you can look to either side.”
They did so, Smash on the left, Dor and Irene on the right. The noises stayed just out of sight.
“But let’s get on out of this place!” Irene said.
“I wonder how the loin makes out, since this seems to be its path,” Dor said.
As if in answer to his question, they came upon another sign: THE LOIN IS LORD OF THE JUNGLE. Obviously the cog rats and skug worms didn’t dare bother the loin.
“I am getting more curious about this thing,” Irene said. “Does it hunt, does it eat, does it play with others of its kind? What is it?”
Dor wondered, too, but still hesitated to state his conjectures. Suppose it wasn’t a misspelling? How, then, would it hunt, eat, and play?
They hurried on and finally emerged from the thicket-only to encounter another sign. THE LOIN SHALL LIE WITH THE LAMB.
“What’s a lamb?” Irene asked.
“A Mundane creature,” Chet said. “Said to be harmless, soft, and cuddly, but stupid.”
“That’s the kind the loin would like,” she muttered darkly.
Still no one openly expressed conjectures about the nature of this creature. They traveled on down to the southern tip of this long island. The entire coastline of Xanth, Chet explained, was bordered by barrier reefs that had developed into island chains; this was as good and safe a route as they could ask for, since they no longer had a boat.
There should be very few large predators on the islands, since there was insufficient hunting area for them, and the sea creatures could not quite reach the interiors of the isles. But no part of Xanth was wholly safe. All of them were ready to depart this Isle of the Loin.
As they came to the beach, they encountered yet another sign: A PRIDE OF LOINS. And a roaring erupted
