The ogre sat up, but remained in the midst of the coils of the dragon. The two grotesque heads of ogre and dragon faced each other, snout to snout. Smash realized that this time he had gotten himself into an encounter whose outcome he could not know. The Gap Dragon was his match.
Delightful! For the first time since attaining his full strength, Smash could test his ultimate. But at the moment they were all tangled up in an ineffective configuration, unable to fight decisively.
Smash made a face, bulging his eyes and stretching his mouth wide open. "Yyrwil!" he yyrwiled.
The Gap Dragon made a face back, wrinkling up its snout horrendously and crossing its eyes so far that the pupils exchanged places. "Rrooarw!" it rrooarwed.
Smash made a worse face, swallowing his nose and part of his low forehead. "Ggrummf!" he ggrummffed.
The dragon went him one better, perhaps two better, swallowing its snout up past the ears and partway down its neck. "Ssstth!" it ssstthed.
The monster was outdoing him. Petulantly, Smash bit into a rock and spit out a stream of grave! The dragon's teeth were pointed, so it could not match that. Instead, it hoisted a petard of steam at him, the greasy ball of vapor curling the hairs of his face and clogging his nostrils.
So much for the niceties. Now the real action commenced. Smash threw himself into the sheer joy of combat, the fundamental delight of every true ogre. It had been some time since he had crunched bones in earnest. Of course, this dragon was mostly boneless, but the principle remained.
He punched the dragon in the snout. This sort of punch could put a fist-sized hole in an ironwood tree, but the dragon merely gave way before the force of it and was only slightly bloodied. Then the dragon struck back, snapping sidewise at Smash's arm. That sort of bite could lop a mouthful of flesh from a behemoth, but the gauntlet extended back far enough to catch the edge of the bite and strike sparks from the teeth.
Then Smash boxed the dragon's right ear with his left fist-and the ear squirted right off the skull and flew out of sight. The dragon winced; that smarted! But the monster hardly needed that ear, and came
back with a blast of steam that cooked the outer layer of the ogre's head. Smash's thick skull stopped the heat from penetrating to the Eye Queue-corrupted brain-more was the pity, he thought.
So much for the second exchange of amenities. Smash had had slightly the better of it this time, but the fight was only warming up. Now the pace intensified.
Smash took hold of the dragon's upper jaw with one hand, the lower jaw with another, and slowly forced the two apart. The dragon resisted, and its jaw muscles were mighty, well leveraged, and experienced, but it could not directly withstand the full brute force of a concentrating ogre. Slowly the jaws separated.
The dragon whipped its body about. In a moment the sinuous length of it was wrapped about the ogre's torso, engulfing him anew. While Smash forced open the jaws, the dragon tightened its coils,
constricting him.
All this was in slow motion, yet it was a race. Would Smash rip the head apart first, or would the dragon squeeze the juice out of him? The answer was uncertain. Smash was having trouble breathing; he was beginning to lose strength. It seemed to him that this should not be happening, or at least not this fast.
But the dragon's jaws were now quite far apart, and should soon break.
Neither ogre nor dragon would give. They remained, their strength in balance. The jaws were on the verge of breaking, the torso on the verge of smothering. Who would succumb first? It occurred to Smash that he might break open the dragon's jaw, but be unable to extricate himself from its convulsed coils and smother because he couldn't breathe. Or the dragon might crush him-but suffer a broken jaw in Smash's dying effort. Both could lose this encounter.
In the good old days before the Eye Queue vine had fallen on him. Smash would not have wasted
tedious thought on such a thing; he would merely have bashed on through, to kill and/or be killed, hardly caring which. Now he was cursed with the notion of meaning. To what point was this violence if neither participant survived?
It was discomfiting and un-ogrish, but Smash found he had to change his tactic. This one had little promise of success, since it would not free him from the serpent's toils. He was in a dire strait, and bulling ahead would only worsen it.
He drew the dragon's head forward, toward his own face. The dragon thought this meant Smash was weakening, and went forward eagerly. In a moment, the dragon believed, it could chomp the ogre's face off. Its breath steamed out, its woodsmoke fragrance toasting Smash's skin. He tried to sneeze, but was unable to inhale because of the constriction in which he was held.
Sure of victory now, the dragon cranked its jaws marginally closer together and lunged. Smash deflected the thrust as much as he could and jerked his head to the side. The dragon's head plunged down as Smash's hands let go-and the huge wedge-teeth chomped savagely on the uppermost coil. This was a device Smash had used on the tangle tree with good effect.
It took the Gap Dragon a moment to catch on. Meanwhile, it chewed. It surely felt the bite, but did not yet realize that this was its own doing, or that its teeth had not contacted ogre flesh. It took a while for the difference in taste to register. The dragon wrenched its supposed prey upward, driving the teeth in deeper. The coil loosened, giving Smash half a gasp of breath.
Then at last the dragon realized what it was doing. Its jaws began to open, to free itself from its own bite and to emit a honk of sheer pain and frustration-but Smash's two gauntleted hamhands came down on
either side of it, clasping the snout, pressing it firmly closed on the meat. The jaw muscles were weaker this way; the dragon could not release its bite. Still, the ogre could not use his hands for further attack, for the moment he let go, the jaws would open. It was another position of stalemate.
Blood welled out around the dragon's lower fangs and dripped off its chin, coating Smash's gauntlet. The fluid was a deep purple hue, thick and gooey, smelling of ashes and carrion. It probably had caustic properties, but the gauntlet protected Smash's flesh, as it had when he held the basilisk. The centaur gifts were serving him well.
Now it was the dragon's turn to scheme. Dragons were not the brightest creatures of Xanth; but, as with ogres, their brains were largely in their muscles, and they were cunning fighters. The dragon knew it could get nowhere unless it freed itself from its own bite, and knew that its own coils anchored the ogre in place so that he could put his clamp on that bite. By and by, it realized that if it released the ogre, the ogre would lack anchorage and could then be thrown off. So the dragon began laboriously uncoiling.
Smash held on, gasping more deeply as the constriction abated. His strategy was getting him free-but it would free the dragon, too. This fight was a long way from over!
At last the coils were gone. The dragon wrenched its forward section away-and Smash's lower hand slipped on the blood coating it, and he lost his hold.
Now they faced each other again, the dragon with bloodied jaw and little jets of purple goo spurting from the deep fang-holes in its body, the ogre panting heavily from sore ribs. On the surface Smash had had the better of this round, but inside he doubted it. His rib cage was made of ogre's bones; nevertheless, it was hurting. Something had been bent if not broken. He was no longer in top fighting condition.
The dragon evidently had found the ogre to be stiffer competition than anticipated. It made a feint at Smash, and Smash raised a fist. Then the dragon dived abruptly back, as if fleeing. Suspicious, Smash paused-then saw that the dragon was going after Fireoak the Hamadryad, who was still lying helplessly on the ground.
This was very bad form. It suggested that Smash was no longer worth noticing as an opponent. His temper heated and bent toward the snapping point.