Jon-Tom found himself smiling, too. Soon he, Weegee, and Cautious were rolling about on the ground, holding their sides. Mudge was hard pressed to retain his composure long enough to finish the extended joke and barely managed to wind it up with a flurry of distorted expressions and a neatly placed punch line. This grand finale resulted in sufficient hysteria to shake leaves from the nearby trees.
Knowing something of the joke in advance, Weegee was the first to recover her senses. She gestured and winked until her companions got the idea and the four of them began, still laughing uproariously, to slink away through the trees. Possibly the dragon saw them but in any event it was laughing too hard to pursue.
“That,” wheezed Jon-Tom when they’d made good their escape and he could finally breathe freely once more, “was the funniest story I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I know.” Weegee was leaning against Mudge and he against her. “Mudge told it to me one night on the ship to Orangel. I’m sure I laughed so long and so hard that the crew thought there was something seriously wrong with me. I urged Mudge to tell it to the dragon. He made it even funnier this time. That part about the Baker’s College and the traveling lady’s choir always cracks me up.” So saying she fell to her knees with renewed laughter, clutching at her sore ribs. They were all aching from laughing too much.
“I don’t know.” Jon-Tom wiped at the streaks on his face. “I can’t get past the part where the elephant shows up.”
“And the six chimps,” Cautious reminded him. “Don’t forget about the six chimps.”
This provoked a renewed outburst which resulted in all of them rolling about on the ground. When this latest eruption of hysteria was over they were finished, chuckled out, incapable of laughing anymore. Then they picked up their supplies and shuffled off up the trail, unworried by the dragon’s proximity. It wouldn’t be tracking any prey for days. Mudge’s joke had put it in stitches, and it would be some time unknotting its coils.
That night as they were sitting around the campfire finishing their supper Jon-Tom’s eyes locked with Cautious’s and he said simply, “The elephant.”
Cautious replied by saying, “Six chimps,” thus beginning the entire round of laughter one more time. Exhausted not by their tense confrontation with the dragon but by Mudge’s joke telling, all fell into a deep and restful sleep.
The next day the trail began to climb, winding its way up one steep hillside only to switchback down the other and then repeat the cycle on the slopes of the mount beyond. By mutual consent there was no mention of elephants, chimps, bakers or any other portion of what had come to be known as The Joke. Jon-Tom didn’t want to lose any more time. The woods through which they were tramping still qualified as jungle, though it had lost some of the steamier aspects of rain forest. Brush lizards swarmed in the trees, dropping down fearlessly to inspect the travelers. Their relative tameness was a sure sign that this region was little visited.
Civilization in this part of the world hugged the temperate coast and left the vast jungle lands alone. At times the narrow trail they were following vanished entirely, swallowed by the dense undergrowth. This did not slow down the seekers. Not with two otters and a raccoon as members of the expedition.
Cautious was chewing on a leaf from a variety of tree that was new to him. “Not so much many kinds where I come from.”
“Far more than where Mudge and I come from, too.” Jon-Tom hesitated. Where he and Mudge came from, he’d said. Was he beginning to think of this world as home, then? The thought should have made him uncomfortable. That it did not was surely significant of something.
“Like that one there.” The raccoon pointed to a tree full of what looked like flattened apples. “Look like benina tree but is something else.”
“You mean ‘banana,’” Jon-Tom corrected him.
“What ‘banana’? I mean benina. You never seen benina tree, man? Fruit is bigger and yellow. Peels this way.” He demonstrated. “You eat one, you can’t stop. Want to eat everything on the tree. That why it called what it called. We see someone come back with bad bellyache, holding stomach and moaning, we know he benina tree too long.”
“And I suppose that’s not a mango?” Jon-Tom indicated a small sapling on their left that was heavy with purplish fruit.
“Look like it but really a mungo tree. And that one there look like nielce but ain’t. One next to it got fans like a palm but no nuts, and one here has fruit like shrooms but got branches that look just like a net.”
“Like a what?” Then Jon-Tom felt himself going down under the weight of the falling mesh. Mudge hardly had time to utter an oath while Cautious fought to remove his knife.
“Get ready sell your lives again, friends.”
The otter was struggling with his longbow. “Wish I could, but I’m afraid by now me own’s been ’eavily discounted for anyone in that market.”
The owners of the net surrounded their captives, pinning them to the ground until their wrists were bound securely and their legs shackled together. The scenario was distressingly familiar. The appearance of their captors was not.
“What the devil have we fallen into?” He stared in amazement at the figures surrounding them.
“Devil double.” Cautious was working on the ropes securing his wrists. “I think they called ogres. I never see one but I heard them described, and brother, these sure fit description.”
“Shit, they don’t look like much o’ anythin’, the sorry slobs.” Mudge peered up at his companion. “I’m beginnin’ to get pretty sick o’ this, mate.”
“No more than I am, Mudge.”
“I mean,” the otter continued as they were marched off into the depths of the jungle, “am I bein’ unreasonable? Am I bein’ greedy? All I’d like is to be able to spend one day in your bleedin’ company without bein’ jumped by somethin’ that wants to kill us, keelhaul us, or cook us. Used to be all I ever ’ad to worry about was stayin’ one step ahead o’ the local sheriff or tax collector.”
“You’re just lucky, I guess,” Jon-Tom told him dryly. “It really isn’t part of some sinister plot on my part to run into every tribe of homicidal maniacs between the poles.”
“Wish I ’ad a pole right now,” the otter grumbled. “I know where I’d put it, I do.”
Human ogres Jon-Tom could have handled, but this was Mudge’s world and not his own. Therefore most of the ogres flanking them were grotesque variations of many species and not exclusively human.
On his right strode a snaggle-toothed wolf. One ear grew from the side of his head instead of the top. His left eye was larger than the right and he had puffy, unwolflike paws. Behind him marched a pair of margays, but instead of the handsome, symmetrical faces common to their breed they displayed long upward curving fangs, piggish nostrils and greatly elongated ears that flopped over their foreheads like those of a basset hound. Their whiskers were kinked instead of straight.
Weegee found herself prodded along by a four-and-a-half-foot-tall monstrosity with not one but five stripes running raggedly down its spine. Two of them trailed off to one side instead of continuing on down the tail. One of the major incisors had twisted up and back until it resembled an ivory mustache growing from the upper lip, and both shrunken eyes had shifted over to the left side of the skull. Chipmunk as ogre, Jon-Tom thought. The sight was enough to shake one’s faith in nature. Yet none of their captors limped or looked diseased. All seemed healthy, certainly healthy enough to stomp anyone foolish enough to try and escape.
There was a capybara whose distinguishing characteristic was a complete absence of fur on its back and belly. Overhead flew a pair of ravens with three-foot wingspans and necks like stunted vultures. Several humans brought up the rear. They had megalocephalic skulls, hair growing in long strands from their forearms and calves, and pointed, protruding teeth. There was no sympathy to be had from that quarter, not even for a fellow human in distress.
“Wonder where they’re taking us?” he murmured.
“Ain’t it obvious, mate?” Mudge laid the sarcasm on thick and heavy. “We’re all off to the local snaffleball game. See, this lot o’ fancy dandies were a few lads short so they shanghaied us to fill out their roster.”
“I imagine they’re taking us to their village,” opined Weegee.
“Don’t worry. I’ll use the suar on this simple-minded bunch and we’ll spellsing ourselves free like always.”
“Mate, did it ever occur to you that each time we gets away from some ’ostile natives or other danger that the odds rise against us for the next confrontation? That we’ve been pushin’ our luck for more than a year now, we ’ave, and that maybe ’tis time for it to run out?”
“It can’t, Mudge. Not this close to Strelakat Mews. Not this near to success.”
“Cor, you an’ your bloody deathless optimism. Damned if I don’t think it’ll live on without you.”
“Hey you, good-looking.” A hunchbacked mink with one good eye stepped close to Mudge, eyeing him up and down. “Can I get you something? You want something maybe?”
“Want something? Why sure, lump-lass. I want to leave. I want a million gold pieces. I want two dozen lovely otterish houris to comb out me fur.”
“Watch those wishes.” Weegee bumped him from behind. “They may come back to haunt you someday.”
“Piffle.” Mudge looked at the female ogre. “I wouldn’t mind knowin’ what you lot intend doin’ with me and me friends ’ere.”
“That’s up to the chief.” The mink grunted, spat indelicately into the nearest bush.
“How about a ’int?”
The mink’s distorted brow clenched. There was a revelation, because she smiled brightly. “Food.” She shifted the spiked club she was carrying from one shoulder to the other.
“Hey, ’ow’s that for an optimistic assessment o’ our chances, mate? Sound familiar, wot?”
“We’ll get out of this.” Jon-Tom stumbled, regained his balance. “You’ll see. We always do. We got away from the pirates, we got away from Cautious’s people, and we got away from the normal cannibals. We can get away from the abnormal ones, too.”
“Odds, mate, wot about the odds? They’re runnin’ against us. You can’t throw twelves forever.”
