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the ogre's reach, poised to take advantage of any opening; and a heat of
energy, a sharpness of perception was coursing all through him. He was
discovering that, with fights as with a great many similar things it was only
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the beforehand part that was bad. Once battle was joined, several million
years of instinct took over and there was no time or thought for anything but
confronting the enemy.
So it was, now.
The ogre moved in on him again and that was his last intellectualization of
the fight; for everything else was lost in the moment-to-moment efforts to
avoid being killed and, if possible, to kill, himself.
It was a long, blurred time about which, later, he had no clear memory. The
sun marched up the long arc of the heavens and crossed the midday point and
headed down again. On the torn, sandy soil of the causeway he and the ogre
turned and feinted, smashed and struck at each other. Sometimes he was in the
air, sometimes on the ground. Once he had the monster down on one knee, but
could not press his advantage. At another time they had fought halfway up the
slope to the tower and the ogre had pinned him in a cleft between two huge
boulders. The club was hefted for the final blow that would smash Jim's skull.
Then he had somehow wriggled free, between the very legs of his opponent; and
the battle was on again.
Now and then, throughout the fight, he would catch brief kaleidoscopic
glimpses of the combats being waged about him: Brian, wrapped about by the
blind body of the worm, its eye stalks now hacked away, and the knight
striving in silence to draw free his sword and sword arm, which were pinned to
his body by the worm's encircling form. Or there would roll briefly into Jim's
vision a tangled, roaring tumble of flailing, leathery wings and serpentine
bodies that was Smrgol, Bryagh, and the mere-dragon. Once or twice he had a
momentary view of Carolinus, still standing erect, his staff upright in his
hand, his long white beard flowing forward over his gown, like some old seer
in the hour of Armageddon. Then the gross body of the ogre would blot out his
vision and he would forget all but what was before him.
The day faded. A mist pressed inward from the sea and fled in little wisps
and tatters across the battlefield. Jim's body ached and his wings felt
leaden. But the ever-grinning ogre and his sweeping club seemed neither to
weaken nor to slow. Jim drew back in the air for a moment, to catch his
breath; and in that second he heard a voice cry out.
"Time is short!" it called, in cracked tones. "We are running out of time!
The day is nearly gone!"
It was the voice of Carolinus.
Jim had never heard it raised before with such a desperate accent. Even as he
identified it, he realized that it had sounded clearly to his ears and that
for some time now, upon the causeway, except for the ogre and himself there
was silence.
He had been driven back down from the slope to the area from which he had
started. To one side of him, the snapped ends of Blanchard's bridle dangled
limply from the earth-thrust spear to which Brian had tethered the horse
before advancing against the worm. A little off from the spearshaft from which
the terrified horse had evidently broken free stood Carolinus, leaning heavily
on his staff, his old face shrunken, almost mummified in appearance, as if
life had been all but drained from it.
Jim turned back to see the ogre nearly upon him once more. The heavy club
swung high, dark and enormous in the dying day. Jim felt in his limbs and
wings a weakness that would not let him dodge in time; and with all his
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strength, he gathered himself and sprang instead up under the sweep of the
monster's weapon and inside the grasp of those cannon-barrel-thick arms.
The club glanced off Jim's spine and he felt the ogre's arms go around him,
the double triad of bone-thick fingers searching for his neck. He was caught,
but his rush had knocked the ogre off its feet.
Together they rolled over and over, on the sandy earth, the ogre gnawing with
his jagged teeth at Jim's chest and striving to break the spine or twist the
neck, while Jim's tail lashed futilely about.
As they rolled against the standing spear and snapped it in half, the ogre
found his neck hold and commenced to twist Jim's neck as if it was a chicken's
being wrung in slow motion.
A wild despair flooded through Jim. He had been cautioned by Smrgol never to
let the ogre get his arms around him. He had disregarded that advice and now
was lost, the battle was lost. Stay away, Smrgol had warned, use your brains&
But the wild hope of a long chance sprang suddenly to life in him. His head
was twisted back over his shoulder and he could see only the darkening mist
above him; but he stopped fighting the ogre and groped about with both
forepaws. For a moment of eternity, he located nothing and then something hard
nudged his right foreclaw, a glint of bright metal flashed before his eyes. He
gripped what he had touched, clamping down on it as firmly as his clumsy claws
would allow
And, with every ounce of strength that was left to him, he drove the broken
half of the snapped spear deep into the middle of the ogre, who now sprawled
above him.
The great body bucked and shuddered. A wild scream burst from the idiot mouth
beside Jim's ear. The ogre let go, staggered back and up, and tottered to its
feet, towering above Jim as the stone edifice itself towered above them both.
Again, the ogre screamed, stumbling about like a drunken man, fumbling at the
broken end of the spear that was sticking out of him. Jerking at the shaft, he
screamed again; and lowering his unnatural head, bit at it like a wounded
animal. It splintered in his teeth. He then screamed a final time and fell to
his knees. Slowly, like a bad actor in an old-fashioned movie, he rolled over
on his side and drew up his legs like someone with a cramp. An ultimate scream
was drowned in the bubbling in his throat; black blood trickled from his
mouth. He lay still.
Unsteadily, Jim crawled to his feet and looked about him.
The mists were, oddly, drawing back from the causeway and the thin light of
late afternoon stretched long across the bouldered slope, the tower above it
and the small plain below. In the rusty light, Jim saw that the worm was dead,
literally hacked in two. Aragh lay, grinning, a splint on his broken leg.
Brian, in bloody, dented armor, leaned wearily on a twisted sword not more
than a few feet from Carolinus. Dafydd was down, his shirt half torn off, the
shape of a harpy sprawled motionless across his chest. Danielle stood above
him, an arrow still notched to her own bow. As Jim watched her, she slowly
lowered her weapon, cast it aside and dropped down beside the Welshman.
A little further off, Secoh raised a bloody neck and head above the
motionless, locked-together bodies of Smrgol and Bryagh. The mere-dragon
stared dazedly at Jim. Jim moved painfully, over to him.
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Looking down at the two immense dragons, he saw that Smrgol lay with his jaws
locked in Bryagh's throat. The neck of the younger dragon was broken.
"Smrgol& " Jim croaked.
"No& " gasped Secoh. "No good! He's gone& I led the other one to him. He got
his grip and then he never let go& " The mere-dragon burst into sobs and
lowered his head.
"They all fought well," creaked a strange, harsh voice.
Jim turned and saw the knight standing at his shoulder. Brian's face was as
white as sea foam below the now-helmetless tousled brown hair. The flesh of
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