Maybe the ship could get him back to the fireoak tree.
He didn't really want to go to the moon, though the view of all that fresh cheese made him hungry. After all, it had been at least an hour since he had eaten that bushel of fruit. So he checked the panel before him and found a couple of projecting brass sticks. He grabbed them, wiggling them about.
The moon veered out of the mirror-picture, and Smash was flung about in his chair as if tossed by a storm. Fortunately, the straps held him pretty much in place. He let go of the sticks-and after a moment the moon swung back into view. Evidently he had messed up the ship's program. His Eye Queue curse caused him to ponder this, and he concluded that the sticks controlled the ship. When they were not in use, the ship sailed where it wanted, which was evidently a hole in the cheese of the moon. Maybe this Luna shuttle was the mechanism by which the moon's cheese was brought to Xanth, though he wasn't sure what use metal people would have for cheese.
Smash took hold of the sticks again and wiggled more cautiously. Ogres were clumsy only when it suited them to be so; they could perform delicate tasks when no one was watching. The moon danced about but did not leave the screen. He experimented some more, and soon was able to steer the ship where he wanted and to make it go at any speed he wanted.
Fine-now he would take it back to Xanth and land beside the fireoak tree. Then he could turn it over to Biythe Brassie so she could fly back to her city and building.
Then blips appeared on the screen. They were shaped like little curse-burrs and were hurtling toward him. What did they want?
Then flashes of light came near him. The ship shook. The screen flared red for a moment, as if it had been knocked half silly. Smash understood this sort of thing. It was like getting knocked in the snoot by a fist and having stars and planets fly out from one's head. The entire night sky was filled with the stars flung out from people's heads in the course of prior fights, but Smash didn't care to have his own lights punched out. The thing to do was to hit back and destroy the enemy.
He checked the panel again, enjoying the prospect of a new type of violence. There was a big button he hadn't noticed before. Naturally he thumbed it.
A flash of light shot toward the blips, evidently from his own ship. It was throwing its sort of rocks when he told it to. Very well, in this strange gourd world, he could accept the notion of a fist made of light. But it wasn't aimed well, and missed the blips. It lanced on to blast a chunk of cheese out of the moon. Grated cheese puffed out into space in a diffuse cloud, where some of the blips went after it; no doubt they were hungry, too.
Smash pressed the button again, sending out another fist of light. This one missed both blips and moon.
But he was getting the feel of it; he had to have his target in the very center of the mirror, where there was a faint intersection of lines like the center of a spider web. Funny place for a spider to work; maybe it had been trying to catch stray stars or blips or bits of blasted cheese.
To center the target, he had to work the two sticks in a coordinated fashion. He did so, after glancing nervously about to make quite sure no one was near to see him being so well coordinated. Of course, it took more than strength to balance his whole body on a single hamfinger or to smash a rock into a particular grade of gravel with one blow, but that was an ogre secret. It was fashionable to appear clumsy.
When he had a blip centered, he pushed the button with his big left toe so he wouldn't have to stop maneuvering. This time his aim was good; the beam speared out and struck the blip, which exploded with lovely violence and pretty colors.
This was fun! Not as much fun as physical bashing would be, but excellent vicarious mayhem. Ogres could appreciate beauty, too-the splendor of bursting bodies or of blips flying apart, forming intricate and changing patterns in the sky. He oriented on another blip, but it took evasive action.
Meanwhile, all the other blips were nearer, and their light-fists were striking closer. He had to dodge them, and that interfered with his own strikes.
Well, he was not an ogre for nothing! He licked his chops, worked his sticks, looped about, oriented, fired, dodged, and oriented again. Two more blips exploded beautifully.
Then the fight intensified. But Smash loved combat of any kind and was good at it; he didn't have to use physical fists. He almost liked this form of fighting better, because it was less familiar and therefore more of a challenge. He knocked out blip after blip, and after a while the remaining blips turned tail and fled past the moon. He had won the battle of the Luna fringe!
He was tempted to pursue the blips, so as to continue the pleasure of the fight a little longer, but realized that if he wiped them all out at this time, they would not have a chance to regenerate and return for future battles. Better to let them go, for the sake of more fun on future days. Also, he had other business.
He turned the ship about and headed for Xanth which resembled a small disk from this vantage, like a greenish pie. That made him hungry again. Well, he would be careful not to miss it. He accelerated, zooming happily onward.
Chapter 8. Dragon's Ear
He was back in Xanth. 'Smash, something else is coming!' Tandy cried.
'That's all right,' he said. 'I've won another battle. I feel stronger.' And he did; he knew he was winning the gourd campaign, getting closer to the Night Stallion, and recovering physical strength in the process.
It had been in large part his former hopelessness that had weakened him. He had believed his soul was doomed, until learning that he could fight for it in another gourd.
Biythe Brassie was still here. Now he wondered-how had she been carried out with him, when he had not been physically in the gourd?
His Eye Queue curse provided him with the answer to a question any normal ogre would not even have thought of. Biythe was here in spirit, just as he had been inside the gourd in spirit. It was very hard to tell such spirit from reality, but each person knew his own reality and was not fooled. No doubt Biythe Spirit's real body remained in the gourd, in a trance-state; since the brassies spent much of their time as statues anyway, waiting for someone to come push their button, no one had noticed the difference. Or rather, they had noticed, and been alarmed because she remained a statue while they were animate. So they knew that her vital element, her soul, was elsewhere. Yes, it all made sense. Everything in Xanth made sense, once a person penetrated the seeming nonsense that masked it. Different things made different sorts of sense for different people.
He would have to take the brass girl back. His curse not only forced intelligence on him, it forced un-ogrish moral awareness. At the moment he wasn't even certain that such awareness was a bad thing, inconvenient as it might be when there was mayhem to be wreaked.
But the tree-chopping attack party was coming again. Smash oriented on the group as it galloped just beyond view. The villagers must have gotten reinforcements. The individuals were larger than basilisks-evidently Biythe had deposited the chickatrice safely elsewhere-but smaller than sphinxes. They were hoofed. In fact-
'That's my brother!' Chem exclaimed. 'Now I recognize his hoofbeat. But there's something with him-not a centaur.'
Smash braced himself for what could be a complicated situation. If some monster were riding herd on his friend Chet...
They hove into view. 'Holey cow!' the Siren breathed. That was exactly what it was-a cow as full of holes as any big cheese. She had holes in her body every which way through which daylight showed.
She was worse than the moon! A big one was in her head, about where her brain should have been; evidently that didn't impede her much. Even her horns and tail had little holes. Her legs were so holey they seemed ready to collapse, yet she functioned perfectly well.
In fact, she carried two human riders who braced their hands and feet in her holes. She was a big cow, and her gait was bumpy, so these handholds and footholds were essential.
Now Smash recognized the riders. 'Dor! Irene!' he cried happily.
'Prince Dor?' the Siren asked. 'And his fiancee?'
'Yes, they are taking forever about working up to marriage,' Chem murmured with a certain equine snideness.
'It's been four years now...'
'And Grundy the Golem!' Smash added, spying the tiny figure perched on the back of the centaur. 'All my friends!'
'We're your friends, too,' Tandy said, nettled. The party drew abreast of the fireoak tree. 'What's this?'
