Crewel Lye Read Online Free PDF

people. That was why we had a warrior tradition; we needed bold young men to fend off stray monsters. We were near the north-east border of Xanth, beside what was later to become known as the Ogre Fen, but at that time the ogres were far away, still migrating clumsily northward. My boots tended to bog down in the interminable reaches of the fen, and I soon realized that it was a long way to the heart of Xanth, where the fabulous Castle Roogna stood. It would take me forever or so to get there by foot, and I found I really didn't like walking. I needed a ride.
    That was a problem. There weren't any centaurs in our isolated region of Xanth, and dragons did not make good steeds--they tended to conspire to carry their passengers inside their bodies instead of outside--and I was afraid to fly with a flying creature; never could be quite sure where one of those might drop you off. I knew there were sea-horses in the sea, but I was trekking inland. There was a man in Fen Village who made hobby-horses, but I hadn't thought to check with him before starting off. In any event, his horses didn't really carry people, they just seemed to. What was I to do?
    I knew what: I had to toughen my legs so I could walk all day without getting so fatigued that I lost the pleasure in the adventure. So far, adventure wasn't really much fun. There was a lot to be said for staying home and starting a family. I almost turned about--but again found I could not. To turn back then, I would have to admit my error--that I had been wrong to leave Elsie. That was more difficult to do than fighting a dragon. If I had not been wrong, I think I could have turned back; but since I was wrong, I could not do it.
    I think now, after four hundred years as a ghost to reflect on philosophical matters--ghosts are better with intangibles than they are with tangibles, because they are intangible themselves--that women are more practical than are men, and the reason that women have most of the sex appeal is to enable them to lure men away from the foolishness they are otherwise prone to seek. Certainly my adventure, when considered as a whole, was a consummate exercise in folly, and would have been even if it hadn't cost me my life. I could have had night after night with Elsie; instead I courted--and won--disaster. If vanity be the name of woman, folly is the name of man!
    So I walked on--and fate came to me, undeserving as I was. At first it didn't seem good, but that is often the way of things. The bad seems good, like a pleasant path leading to the tentacles and maw of a tangle tree, and the good seems bad, like the pooka.
    It was dusk, and I had scrounged up some sugar sand and tapped a beer-barrel tree for beer, the true barbarian beverage. My head was spinning pleasantly, detaching my mind from my tired feet, when I heard the sinister rattling of a chain. Now, I was young and foolish and a coward about personal relations, but very little of the physical world scared me. Yet this rattle did--and that brought me alert. If that sound sent a cold shiver along my spine, it had to be because it was meant to--and that meant magic. Therefore I was intrigued, for strange magic was part of what I sought. I had the sword; I needed the sorcery.
    I quickly got up, drew my sword, and stalked the rattle. I heard it again, farther away, so I hurried to catch up. But still it was distant, leading me through the wildest and most desolate landscape. The trees were silhouetted by fuzzy moonlight and looked like gnarled giants frozen in place. But one was not frozen; when I brushed against it, its tentacles grabbed for me, and I realized that I had blundered into the clutches of a tangler, one of the most fearsome vegetables of Xanth. So I slashed about me with my blade, severing the tentacles, and the tree quickly let me go. My sword was not magic, precisely, but it was good and sharp, and I wielded it well; I really did not fear a tangle tree, either. To a barbarian, cold steel is the