The Curse of the Giant Hogweed Read Free

wouldn’t have allowed him to remain draped over the bar for some wandering professor to see and to deride. They’d have dragged him over and laid him down on one those oaken benches so picturesquely hollowed by so many generations of bucolic buttocks.
    His wisest course might therefore be to select a likely root and lie down upon it, perhaps conjuring up a few robins to cover him with leaves for added comfort. Then he could dream himself to sleep so that he could wake up on all levels of consciousness at once, and get the show back on the road.
    Why couldn’t he have simply dreamed himself out into that fine stand of hogweed? He could have got in a spot of preliminary investigation and saved himself some time. Peter could see no hogweed around here, wherever here might be. Too shady, no doubt. It was going to be a howling shame to cut down such noble trees as these. They’d have to go sometime, though, so the land could be cleared for farming. He hoped he’d wake up before that happened.
    Peter was getting concerned about his companions. Dan Stott, to be sure, had festina lente engraven on his backbone, but Tim was brisk enough. Unless his mind wandered to trace elements. Cripes, if Dan had got to ruminating and Tim to pondering the subtler nuances of boron in the beet fields again, he could be stuck in this imaginary forest till the cows came home.
    Assuming there were any cows to come. So far, Peter had seen no sign of life except that one gnat, which he’d swatted out of whatever existence it might have been supposed to possess. He was getting lonesome. Maybe that dream about the roomful of snickering students would have been preferable, after all. Why didn’t something happen?

Chapter 2
    H IS GRANDMOTHER HAD ALWAYS said it wasn’t safe to wish for anything because if you did, you might get it. Shandy was kicking petulantly at a root, bemoaning like Arthur Guiterman’s cam-u-el his too-distinguished onliness, when he got poked in the chest by a harp.
    “What the hell?” was his natural reaction.
    “Oh, sorry.” Above the twanging of agitated harp strings, the apology came loud and clear. “Force of habit.”
    The speaker was, as perhaps Peter might have expected, a giant. A mere stripling among giants, to be sure: probably not more than seven feet in height and a paltry yard or so across the shoulders. Still, this was an impressive enough giant to dream up on one’s first try. Peter Shandy would not have wanted a larger giant. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted this one.
    However, the giant’s not uncomely countenance looked amiable enough, not to say contrite. “ ’Tis this goddamn enchantment I be under,” he was explaining. “I haven’t got used to traveling without my lance. I mean, ye meet a wizard, it’s ye customary etiquette of ye geste to ram ye old lance tip up against his tabard and make him confess what he hath been up to. Ye blasted wizards be always up to something.”
    He straightened the wreath of giant hogweed that had slid cockeyed on his flowing golden locks, hitched up the skirt of his white robe to scratch a thigh the size of an oak bole, and sighed. “I forget what ye protocol be for a bard in a situation like this. Ye wouldn’t happen to recall, I misdoubt me?”
    “Sorry,” Shandy answered. “I’m a—er—stranger here, myself. Do I gather you are in fact a knight errant who’s been turned by some form of necromancy into a traveling poet?”
    “Urrgh,” said the giant. “I hight Torchyld y Dewr. Highted, I mean, until this morning. I wot not what I hight now. Torchyld yr Anobeithiol, perchance.”
    “Too bad,” Shandy replied, knowing somehow that the former meant The Intrepid and the latter meant The Hopeless. “Not about the Torchyld part, I mean. Torchyld’s a first-rate name. I know somebody with a name very much like it. As a matter of fact, you remind me—”
    “Arrgh!” the giant interrupted. “Never mind that. Ye be supposed to tell me how ye hight. I