“The gypsies!” said Glystra in a choked voice. ”They’ll kill us all!”
“Pah. Dirty animals!” He swung his sword in a wild flourish. “We’ll kill them as they come!” He gave a great exultant roar, a wordless drug-addled cry of pure abandon. Leaping to the rick, he threw armful after armful of branches into the blaze. The smoke poured forth, the Beaujolains inhaled it in tremendous racking gulps. Breaking free to gasp for air, they fell to their hands and knees, crawled back to suck up new lungfuls.
Glystra tugged at his bonds, but they had been well-tied, cinched up with no fegard for circulation. He craned his neck. Where was Nancy? Nowhere in sight. Had she escaped? Where could she escape to? Glystra ground his teeth. The gypsies would take her and there would be no succor this time… Unless she could slip back to the forest during the night. She had clearly fled. The copse was too small to conceal her, and she was nowhere within the range of vision. Twilight was drifting down from the Great Slope—a warm achingly beautiful time of luminous violet air with velvety black and gray shadows below… There was a distant sound that he found himself listening to, a far chanting from the steppe, a stave of four notes on a minor scale, punctuated by a rumbling bellow as of a brass horn.
The breeze shifted. Smoke from the smouldering zygage drifted through the rapt soldiers to float across the bound Earthmen. Twist, turn as they might, avoiding the smoke was impossible. Pungent and sweet, it blossomed up through their nostrils directly into their brains. For a moment they felt nothing; then as one man they lay back, succumbing to the irresistible power of the drug.
The first sensation was double, triple vitality, a thousandfold perceptiveness that saw, heard, felt, smelt with minuscule and catholic exactness. Each leaf on the tree became an identity, each pulse a singular and unique experience. Flitting swarms of pleasant experiences crowded into the mind: triumphs of love, zest of skiing, sailing, space-boating, diving; the joy of colors, the freedom of clouds. At the same time another part of the mind was furiously active; problems beame simplicities; hardships—such as the bonds and the prospect of death at the hands of Charley Lysidder—were details hardly worth attention. And off in the distance the chanting waxed louder. Glystra heard it; surely the Beaujolains must hear it likewise… But if they heard it they heeded it not at all.
The breeze shifted again; the smoke drifted away. Glystra felt an instant resentment; he fought his bonds, looked enviously to the Beaujolains standing quiet, quivering slightly in the rapturous smoke.
The chanting was loud, close at hand. The Beaujolains at last heeded. They stumbled away from the fire, black hats askew, eyes bulging, bloodshot, faces distended, mouths gaping and gasping for air.
The leader raised his head like a wolf, screamed.
The cry pleased the Beaujolains. Each one threw back his head and echoed it. Scream after scream of furious challenge rang out toward the gypsies. Now laughing, crying, they loaded themselves with darts, ran out of the copse toward the gypsy horde.
The leader called out; the soldiers, without halting, ordered themselves into a loose formation, and shrilling the eager challenge, charged into the afterglow.
The copse was quiet. Glystra rolled to his knees, struggled to his feet, looked around for means to loosen his bonds. Pianza called in a husky voice, “Stand still; I’ll see if I can pull the ropes loose.” He rose to his own knees, raised to his feet. He backed against Glystra’s hand, fumbled with the thongs.
He gasped in frustration. “My fingers are numb… I can’t move my hands…”
The Beaujolains had crossed the twilight; now the gypsy chanting came to a halt, and only the deep bellow of the horn sounded. Detail was blurred in the evening; Glystra could see men falling, then a convulsive Beaujolain charge which plunged into the gypsies like a knife.
The battle was lost in the dusk.
8
A Matter of Vitamins
Glystra tried to break loose the knots on Pianza’s wrists, without success. His fingers were like sausages, without sensation. He was suddenly weak, lax; his brain felt inert. The aftermath of the drug.
The lid to the gypsy still quivered, raised. Dripping, sodden, Nancy looked out—wide-eyed, white-faced.
“Nancy!” cried Glystra. “Come here, quick!”
She looked at him as if dazed, moved uncertainly forward, paused, looked out across the steppe toward the melee.
The Beaujolain ululations rose shrill, keen, triumphant.
“Nancy!” cried Glystra. “Cut us loose—before they come back and kill us!”
Nancy looked at him with a strange contemplative expression, as if lost in thought. Glystra felt hopelessly silent. The drugged smoke or the fumes of the still had dulled her reason.
A throbbing chorus of bellows, deep-voiced, rich, rang like bells across the air. There was an intermittent thudding sound, and the Beaujolain yelling choked off, ceased. A voice rose above all others: Heinzelman the Hell-horse. “I kill, I eat your lives!… I kill, kill, kill”
“Nancy!” cried Glystra. “Come here? Untie us! They’ll be here any minute. Don’t you want to live?”
She sprang forward, took a knife from her sash, cut, cut, cut. Earthmen stood about, rubbing their wrists, grimacing at the pain of restored circulation, torpid with zygage hangover.
Glystra muttered, “At least we need worry no further about guarding the Beaujolains… A load off our minds…”
“The gypsies will eat well tonight,” said Bishop. Alone in the group he appeared alert. Indeed, he was more than alert; he evidently retained the mental edge and physical tone which the others had felt under influence of the zygage. Glystra wonderingly watched him prance up and down, like a boxer loosening his muscles. His own frame felt like a sack of damp rags.
Ketch bent with the effort of an old man, picked up a shining piece of metal. “Somebody’s ion-shine.”
Glystra searched the clearing, found his own weapon where it had been carelessly flung. “Here’s mine… They were too steamed up to care about anything.” The breeze brought a wisp of smoke into his face; new fingers of delight searched into his brain. “Whew! That stuff is powerful…”
Bishop had flung himself to the turf and was doing pushups. Feeling the stares of the others he jumped to his feet. “I just feel good,” he said, grinning sheepishly. “That smoke did me good.”
There was silence from the steppes. Overhead in the pale blue-black sky, stars flickered.
The gypsy war-chant rose up, loud, close at hand. Something whickered overhead, slashing through the leaves.
“Down!” hissed Glystra. “Arrows… Move away from the fire.”
Loud came the chant: four notes on a querulous quavering scale, sung with syllables that carried no meaning.
Loud came Heinzelman’s voice. “Come forth, you strange men, you miserable intruders, come forth. Come crouch at my feet while I kill you, while I drink your blood; come forth… I am Heinzelman the Hell-horse, Heinzelman the life-eater, I eat your life, I am the It, the Pain-maker, Heinzelman”
They saw his shape silhouetted, and behind him were a string of zipangotes. Glystra sighted along his ion-shine, then hesitated. It was like felling an ancient tree. He called, “You’d do better leaving us alone, Heinzelman.”