Read Online The Color Of Her Panties by Piers Anthony - Free Book Online Page A

unogreish thing to do, and agreed.  So Mela used her magic brush and song, and soon Okra's hair had changed from dank strands to lustrous tresses.  She looked at her reflection in the pool, and was amazed.
    The light was getting all lavender, purple and soft.  It was time to find something to eat, before the light moved on to deep purple and black.  They gathered beach nuts, sand dabs, beached banana boats, and finally found a coconut tree with several nuts full of fresh cocoa.  That gave them plenty to eat and drink, despite the loss of Okra's door jam.
    Then they collected driftwood and made a drifter's hut to sleep in.
    Okra's boat, turned upside down, made the roof.  They gathered fresh pillows and sheets from pillow bushes, forming a comfortable bed.  They slept.
    In the morning they scrounged for more food, finding some crabapples they cooked in the hot spring until they stopped squirming, and set out again.  Okra had new confidence, because she discovered she liked having a companion instead of being alone.  Mela was not at all like an ogre, she was beautiful and nice and fun to be with.
    “May I ask you something, Okra?” Mela asked.
    “Sure.  But I may not know the answer.  Ogre's aren't very smart.”
    “You seem smart enough to me.  What I want to know is, why is it that you don't talk like an ogre?”
    “I do talk like an ogre, but not as loud.”
    “No, you don't.  You don't rhyme.”
    “Ogres don't rhyme!”
    “Yes, they do.  They say things like The think you stink.” Crude rhymes. You don't talk that way.”
    Okra considered.  “Maybe we just sound that way to others.  We don't to ourselves.”
    “Or maybe your ogre tribe is different from the other ogres.”
    “Maybe.  I'll try to rhyme if you wish.”
    Mela laughed musically.  “Don't bother!  I like you as you are.”
    Okra rowed, and they made progress toward the far shore of the lake.  But Okra, facing back, spied a cloud on the horizon which rapidly grew larger as it approached.
    “I think Fracto is coming after us again,” she said.
    Mela turned back to look.  “You're right!  That's the demon cloud.  Can we get to land before he reaches us?”
    “We can try.” Okra bent to it with new vigor, and the light craft leaped ahead.  Still, Fracto gained, and would have caught them except that his leading winds just blew them farther ahead.  He couldn't suck them back into himself.
    However, they didn't have much choice about where they landed, and didn't have much chance to check around before the storm hit.  They snatched burlap from a tree, strung it over a branch, and weighted down the ends with heavy shells.  This gave them some shelter from the wind and rain, and they huddled inside it while the storm raged outside.  At least they had made it all the way across the lake.
    It remained day, but there was nothing to do except wait out the storm.
    Okra was really getting to dislike Fracto!  It rained every day at home, too, but that wasn't malignant; Fracto evidently stormed just to make trouble for travelers.  So they lay down and slept.
    Okra was a light sleeper, for an ogress; anything out of the ordinary made her alert.  Thus she woke when the burlap and shell curtains shook and tinkled as if blown open by a wet breath of wind.  The thing was, there was no wind at this point; the storm had wandered elsewhere.
    A billowing dribble touched Okra's arm and then landed with a soft splat on the floor.  It was a very faint sound, but it was unfamiliar, so it brought her fully awake.  Once when she had slept in the garden at home, a snake had paused and thought about performing a snakely function, and the sound of that thought had awakened Okra.
    As it happened, she was glad to wake, because she had been dreaming of riding a night mare, and that was not her favorite occupation.  She had never ridden anything, preferring to use her legs on land or her rowing arms in her boat on the water.  But she was aware