Bows thrummed, and arrows sailed down to thud into the tunnel for half its length.
Sir Orin shook his head. “See how high the feathers stand, my lady! The heads have pierced that armor and stuck in it. Perhaps a sally party might chop it up—or perhaps not, too.”
“Then we shall have to summon a greater force.” Jimena drew her wand, waved it at the heavens, and chanted,
A shadow darkened all the castle and most of the army around it. Men looked up, then recoiled, arms up to protect their heads, cursing and crying out in terror.
Jimena looked up, too, and saw a hawk shape silhouetted against the sky, already covering half the vault and growing bigger.
“Lady, what have you done?” Sir Orin called in fear.
The first blast of wind from those huge wings struck, and he held fast to a merlon to steady himself. Jimena stumbled, and he stretched out the other hand to steady her.
“I—I may have summoned more than I knew,” Jimena admitted, staring upward wide-eyed.
Then the feathers of the bird’s belly covered the whole sky, and claws the size of wagons reached down and clamped around the tunnel. Up the bird rose, shaking men out of the timber and leather contraption as it went. Before it was twenty feet in the air, the empty structure crumpled in the huge talons and fell back to earth in scraps.
Soldiers howled and ran about, trying to dodge, for some of those scraps were ten feet long and a foot wide.
“Cheat!” a huge basso voice bellowed. “Where is the food you promised me? This was nothing but a decoy!”
“What horrendous noises it makes!” Sir Orin groaned, still holding fast to the merlon. “It is like the thunder!”
“It is speech,” Jimena exclaimed in wonder. “The huge bird is talking!”
“What language could it be?”
“Arabic,” Jimena answered. “At least, it is close enough to that of the Mahdi’s Moors that I can make it out.” She shouted up to the gargantuan hawk, “Your pardon, O Mighty One! I had not thought so great a creature as you would answer my little plea!”
“There is something familiar about your speech,” the vast avian rumbled.
“Familiar?” Jimena stared up at it blankly. What could be familiar, when she had never seen anything like this before?
Then she pulled her wits together; what mattered was to keep the bird talking. “I marvel that your speech is of a pitch high enough for folk as small as we to understand!”
“A wizard far to the east taught me to speak in so high and thready a voice as this, so that you grubs can hear it as words,” the monster boomed.
Grubs? Jimena had to get its mind off food! “This wizard … was he brown-haired, a little taller than this man beside me?”
“He was! Now I know the sound of your accent, of your manner! It is like his!”
“Then you have seen my son!” Jimena cried. “Tell me, is he well?”
“Well, and making the airways unsafe by shooting about on a flying carpet,” the roc answered. “I left him at Jerusalem. He gave me a nickname—Rocky!”
Jimena winced. “Yes, that would be my Matthew.”
“But he did not yank me out of my sky and halfway across the world with a spell!” the giant bird thundered. “He did not promise me food!”
“Oh, as to that, there is a village a few hundred miles to the northwest that is plagued with a giant worm growing in the village well,” Mama answered.
“The Laidly Worm!” Sir Orin gasped in shock.
“The villagers are worried that it will escape,” Jimena explained to Rocky, “for it is already forty feet long, and still growing.”
“A toothsome morsel! If it is as good a meal as you say, I shall feast and go my way!” Rocky rumbled. “If it is not, I shall come back and take whatever lives! Farewell, mother of mayhem!” Then with wing-beats that made the castle shake, the great bird lifted up and away.
As she diminished in the sky, light flooded in where her shadow had been, showing the armies of all three dukes streaming away from the castle and toward the hills, overcome by superstitious fear. Their lords rode before all of them, leading as good lords should.
“Praise Heaven!” Jimena’s face glowed as she watched the rout. “We are saved, and the siege is lifted!”
“But the bird, our rescuer!” Sir Orin protested. “That ‘worm’ she seeks is a dragon, nay, something worse, if report holds true. All that will save the feathered one is the worm’s youth—it has not yet grown wings! Have you sent this high hawk to its death?”
“I think not, Sir Orin,” Jimena said, perfectly composed. “At the worst, though, I have set one problem to cure another.”
A crafty look came over Sir Orin’s face. “Do you intend, then, for the bird to die?”
“I do not,” Jimena said. “If the worm is a threat of any kind, it is far more likely to give Rocky indigestion than wounds.” She shook her head. “Rocky indeed! How like my son!”
“The bird’s anger lessened when you spoke of him,” Sir Orin pointed out. “Can the Lord Wizard have aided us even at so great a distance?”
“It would seem so, though I doubt he intended it,” Jimena said.
Then strong arms swept her up in an embrace that crushed the breath from her lungs. “Mi corazon, I feared so when I saw that huge bird plummet toward your wall! Thank Heaven you are safe!” Ramon set her down, gazing deeply into her eyes. “But how did you send the monster away?”
“My dear, it was I who summoned it.” Jimena stepped a little away from her husband, tucking dislodged hairs back into place.
“You summoned it?” Ramon stared, then smiled. “But of course! It dispersed the enemy! How, though, could you be sure of controlling it?”
“Well, I had not thought it would be quite so large,” Jimena admitted, “but I did know where I could find a morsel that would tempt it away from us.”
“The Laidly Worm,” Sir Orin said grimly.
“What a stroke of genius—and what a morsel!” Then Ramon frowned. “But if curing the cure was so readily done, does it not seem to you that the disease itself was too easily dealt with?”
“The dukes, you mean?” Jimena frowned, too. “At least our daughter-in-law will know whom to chastise upon her return! But yes, I think you have the right of it, Ramon-they were scarcely determined.”
“Or depending too much upon magical siege engines,” Sir Orin put in.
“Well said.” Ramon turned to the knight. “But why would they depend on magic when their sorcerers were so inept?”
“Could it be they expected aid which did not come?” Jimena asked.
Both men turned to her, eyes widening. “That would explain it,” Sir Orin said, “but why would a sorcerer promise them a victory he would not give?”
“He has weakened the queen by turning her vassals against her,” Ramon said thoughtfully, “and the fact that they needed little tempting does not lessen the offense.”
“The sorcerer’s true objective, then, was not to win this castle?”
“Now that you mention it, that would have been most foolhardy,” Jimena answered. Her brow knit in thought. “Still, if it was not, then what was?”
“Their true objective, you mean?” Ramon frowned, too.
“Weakening her by turning three dukes against her?” Sir Orin shook his head. “Surely that could not be enough of a goal to warrant so broad an attack.”
“The children!” Jimena stiffened, staring in horror. “While we have been distracted with this charade of an assault, neither of us has been guarding our grandchildren!”