Hank felt uneasy, but he clamped down on his strong desire to take over the controls. Jenny taxied perfectly, did as well as he could, turned, faced into the wind, then began moving forward. Hank, fascinated, watched the stick and pedals move. Were they doing this because Jenny moved them, as he would have done, or did she move the rudder and ailerons first and the cockpit controls followed? He would have to ask her.
The takeoff was fine. When the altimeter registered a thousand feet, he knocked hard twice on the instrument panel. Jenny dipped the left wing in acknowledgment.
Hank had ordered Jenny to level off at three thousand feet altitude. She did so, and he wondered how she knew when she was at that point. Did she have some means of reading the altimeter?
He kept his eye on the indicator instruments and the landmarks for a while, then talked with his hawk-navigator. Hank had memorized the landmarks the first time around, but he asked Listiig about them. It would give the hawk a sense of importance or at least of usefulness.
After a while, Hank said, “There is much I don’t understand about this world, of course. I was wondering, for instance, why Ot became dispossessed?”
Listiig, standing on his left shoulder, her talons digging into the leather jacket, the wind ruffling her feathers, screamed in his ear. “I heard about the mind-spirits attacking the flying machine! It’s obvious what happened! One of them tried to take Ot over! It ousted the one that possessed her but failed to get into her!”
Hank grimaced with disgust. This was no explanation.
“No, I mean, just what is a mind-spirit or firefox?”
“Why, it’s a spirit of the dead that has been cleansed of its sins and is sent out to live again in a body! Or it’s an evil spirit that escaped from the Faroff Land and tries to take over a body!”
“Sure,” Hank said. Apparently, all he was going to get was a religious explanation. Which was none at all. “Do you belong to a church?” he said.
“Of course! Doesn’t everybody?”
Now and then, Hank saw large bodies of armed marching men followed by baggage trains. These were going north to help the Ozland troops. There were also cavalrymen riding on deer and moose. Chariots were used only for the castle guards and for ceremonial parades. Once, a long time ago, they had been ridden in battles that took place on large unforested plains, of which there were few now and even fewer then. They were drawn by bovines or cervines that had been bred for many generations for pulling power or speed.
Hank had wondered why the animals, who were citizens, had allowed themselves to be bred for certain qualities. What if a stag, for instance, had desired a mate that the human breeders did not want impregnated?
Animals, though sentient, were more driven by their instincts than humans. A stag might be fonder of a female than he was of others or a female might like a stag more than she did other males. They were, however, subject to rutting seasons, and when these came their sexual drives overcame their personal relationships.
The humans had solved this problem. They fed the animals they did not want to breed one of two mixtures of plants. The males got one which made them sterile, though it did not cut down on their virility. The females got one which effected a pseudo-pregnancy.
There had been and still were animals who had objected to this. But they had a choice of staying with the humans and abiding by the law or going into the woods and taking their chances there.
This was one of the situations where an animal was a second-class citizen. But it had been established through treaty with the animals’ ancestors, and most seemed to accept it ungrudgingly.
The breeding agreement, along with some others, was the only means for animals and humans to live together with both parties profiting. Sheep, goats, cattle, and deer provided wool, hair, milk, and labor. They were not killed for meat, and they could not be worked to death or neglected or be ill-treated. When they died, they were buried side by side with the humans and mourned by the humans and animals who had cared for or loved them. Even if the Amariikian church had conformed in everything else to the Terrestrial Catholic religion, this belief that animals had souls would have made this world’s church heretical.
Cats were a special case here—as on Earth. They were pets, some of them, anyway, but they were useful as home guards and as rodent-killers. Though most wild creatures stayed away from the areas marked off for humans, many mice and rats took their chances. They invaded houses and barns and were thus considered as outlaws. A human could not trap, poison, or shoot them unless he got permission from the courts because of special circumstances. Cats were given a license to kill rodents, which they would have taken anyway. But they were not allowed to kill any birds except outlaws.
There were other beasts among the marchers northward. Hank saw some mammoths and mastodons. Though midgets, they were huge compared to the other creatures.
The pachyderms were used to pull great wagons but would become warriors when at the front. There were also humpless camels which carried packs now but would usually fight unmounted and were led by their own camel officers. Sometimes, they carried archers into battle.
When Hank landed at the capital, he found the scene had changed. Now there was a host of tents outside the glittering walls, and men were drilling in the meadows. The riverfront was jammed with boats and great piles of boxes being unloaded. The Emerald City was getting ready for a long siege.
Hank only stayed down long enough to discharge the Scarecrow, refuel, inspect Jenny’s wires, fittings, and fabric, and feed himself and the hawks. One of them, Wiin, would get a report on the latest news before taking off for Glinda’s capital. A half hour after landing, Hank was lifting off. He had three and a half hours of daylight, plenty of time to get to Niklaz’s castle. The sky was clear except for some cirrocumulus clouds, and the headwind was an estimated four to six miles per hour. He would stay overnight with the Winkie king and start at dawn for the return trip to the Emerald City.
Jenny was at two thousand feet altitude and twenty miles west of the Oz capital when a multitude of dots sprang into being ahead. And behind and on both sides of him.
Listiig screamed, “The Winged Monkeys! Holy Marzha, Mother of God! Erakna is out to get our tail!”
Hank’s skin chilled. It was not just the danger that caused this. The presence of “magic,” the teleporting of these creatures in great numbers from afar to his immediate vicinity, made him shiver. He should be used to such phenomena by now, but he probably never would be.
By now the dots had become silhouettes of winged creatures, a horde distinguishable even at this distance as nonavians. He estimated that there were two hundred straight ahead, and he did not know how many behind him and on each side. All were a thousand feet higher than he and diving to gain speed.
The JN-4H could climb at a rate of twelve hundred feet per minute, three times that of the JN-4D. But the Monkeys were above him, and they would be on him before he could get above them. If he dived, they would dive.
Perhaps his only advantage was speed. He did not think that the simians could go ninety miles an hour on level flight, Jenny’s maximum velocity at this altitude with this load. They were probably too big and heavy for that. But he did not know for sure.
He struck the instrument panel three times. Jenny rolled slightly to right and left to acknowledge that he would be in complete control.
He pushed forward on the stick, sending the plane into a rather flat dive. He would pick up some speed. Maybe enough to get him through and past those ahead. He should also leave behind those aft and to both sides of him.
He was glad that Erakna’s powers were not able to pinpoint the exact area at which the Monkeys would arrive. At least, he assumed that she had lacked those powers. Otherwise, she would have placed the creatures much closer to him and so not given him any time to react adequately.
The oncoming attackers swelled swiftly, too swiftly. Now he could see the batlike structure of the wings projecting from the monstrously large h
ump of back muscles. He could see the short and bird-thin legs. The whiteness of teeth, long and sharp. The reddish hair. The long outstretched arms. The hands clenching knives, short swords, and short spears.
Unlike the illustrations of them by Denslow, they wore no clothes. But the head of one was circled by a silvery crown. The king.
Hank kicked right rudder to put him into an intersecting path with the king.
He calculated that they would meet in about forty seconds.
That would be fatal for both of them, fatal for Jenny, anyway, if the king struck the propeller. Hank had a parachute, and the Tin Woodman might be very damaged by a fall, but he would survive.
Hank looked behind him. The monarch was standing up now, his ax ready. The hawk with him was fastened to the edge of the front windshield, interfering with Hank’s vision. He screamed at her to get back down, but the whistling wind carried his words backward.
He shouted at Listiig. “Get off! Get off!”
The hawk hesitated, then rose and was snatched away.
Hank pulled back on the stick, lifting Jenny’s nose.
The Monkey-King and others near him flattened their dive.
“Are they nuts?” Hank cried. “Trying to commit suicide?”
It would not be easy to shoot a small target like the Monkey-King even if the machine guns had been on the fuselage, just in front of him. But they were mounted on the upper wing. When he fired, he would be depending upon guess to hit his target more than anything else.
His eyes went up, then down. He pulled the cable which actuated the machine guns, and they chattered.
Dark blurs flashed by.
There was a thump, and Jenny rocked.
A Monkey had struck the top of the right upper wing—thank God, it had not smashed into the wing closer to the fuselage or hit the strut wires and parted them—and carried off some fabric and shattered the wooden end. But the damage would not interfere with the flight. Unless more fabric, lifted by the wind now filling that plane, was torn off.
He looked back. The hawks were diving for the shelter of the forest. Some Monkeys were following them, but their chase was hopeless.
Two bodies were still falling. One was the animal that had collided with the wing. The other was the king, crownless now. The silvery symbol was falling, twinkling in the rays of the westering sun.
The others had turned and were flapping mightily. But he could outrun them.
“You’ve wasted one of your wishes!” Hank howled.
Erakna should have waited until he had landed and then launched the Monkeys. That mob could have torn him and the Jenny apart.
His exultation died. If she tried again, she would probably do just that.
She might want to use the second wish for another attack on him, but it did not seem likely. She surely would save her winged slaves for a more important target. But then he did not know the psychology of witches.
Two minutes later, a hundred hawks or more dived out of the sun. They had been waiting for him, placed so that he would be blinded if he looked at the sun. Halfway towards him, the band split, and half turned towards the west. If he got through the advancing wave, he would then be traveling at a rate which would allow the others to match his. They could fly faster than Jenny; they’d try to board him.
And if he turned away from them to flee east, he’d run into the first wave again.
“Skiit!” he said in Quadling.
Now the advancers had turned and were curving away from him. They, too, would try to board Jenny.
Suddenly, they were around him, an envelope of screeches, glaring wild yellow eyes, gaping razor-sharp beaks, and talons ready to rend. They closed in on him.
Hank groaned—it hurt him to hand over the piloting—and he banged the panel twice. But he pulled the cable again, and he had the satisfaction of seeing at least a dozen hawks become feather explosions.
That left only about eighty-eight.
He looked behind him. The Tin Woodman was cutting at a hawk with his ax.
Hank loosed his safety belt so he could turn around if he had to, and he pulled his revolver from the holster. He aimed the .45 at a hawk a few feet from him, but he missed. He had not compensated enough for the wind.
Another shot corrected that.
Twenty hawks had fastened talons into the fabric of the wings and fuselage.
Aiming carefully, Hank blew apart seven with eleven shots. He also put some holes through his wings, but that could not be avoided.
Feathers, bits of flesh, and gouts of blood whirled by him.
All but one of the attackers on the front part of Jenny decided to take Falstaff’s prescription re the better part of valor. The sole brave, or dumb, one flew from the midpart of the upper wings at him. It disappeared halfway just above the windshield, spattering blood on Hank’s goggles. He pushed them up on his forehead and twisted around.
The edge of the ax was just slicing through a hawk before the Woodman. But another had fastened herself on top of the tin head and was blunting its beak and talons on the metal. Another was sliding off the back of the tin trunk down into the cockpit. Beyond the cockpit were two more, clawing their way towards the Woodman.
Hank shot the hawk off of the tin head. The bird that had slid into the cockpit came into sight again, but the Woodman turned and closed his hand around her neck. She beat her wings and tried to fasten onto his resistant body. Niklaz lifted her up and threw her away.
For the moment, they were free. But the hawks were still chasing them. Beyond them were many dots, the Winged Monkeys, outdistanced but not abandoning the chase.
Presently, the yellowish castle came into view. Also, five miles to the right, beyond the hills, a battle was taking place on a farmland. The invaders had traveled more swiftly than the last report had indicated.
Hank would have liked to make strafing runs over Erakna’s forces, but he would be deluged with hawks and monkeys if he did.
Hank shouted at Niklaz. “Strap yourself in! We’re landing!”
He brought Jenny in, crabbing against the southwest wind, and taxied as fast as he dared towards a huge community-storage barn. Soldiers ran to greet him. After turning Jenny to face away from the barn, he cut off the ignition. He and the Woodman got out of the plane. The hawk that had ridden with the Woodman was, like Listiig, long gone.
By the time the hawks arrived, they found the Winkies, with the king at their head, in battle formation. Jenny had been pushed backwards into the barn, the doors of which were half-closed. Twenty archers and twenty swordsmen were on the roof of the barn, and two ranks of archers and spearmen ringed the barn. Before the door was the main force, thirty archers and fifty spearmen. All also carried scabbarded short swords.
Hank stood in the front rank of the troops by the barn door. He held the .30-caliber BAR, and a man who’d been hastily instructed to hand him loaded box magazines stood by his side.
A scouting group of hawks flew over the meadow first. Having made their survey, they flew back to a tree outside of arrow range and reported to a big hawk standing on the branch of an oak. This female, presumably the queen or captain, flew up and circled while the others arranged themselves in ranks of twenty. When the formation was completed, the chief led them to a height of about fifty feet, a half-mile away.
Niklaz told his men to hold their fire until the attackers were within twenty yards.
The Winged Monkeys were visible now, dots like a cloud of midges at an estimated three hundred feet above the ground.
“It might be wise to save most of your bullets for them,” Niklaz said. “They’re bigger targets.”
“We’ll see,” Hank said.
The Woodman was right, but, if enough hawks were killed, the Monkeys might get discouraged before they attacked.
What their enemy should do, Hank thought, was to wait until the Monkeys had arrived, then charge en masse. But if they were too stupid or inexperienced to do that, he was not going to advise them. There was also t
he possibility that the hawks and Monkeys were jealous of each other, and the hawks wanted all the glory and credit. The situation could be a parallel to the interservice rivalry between the Army and the Navy of the United States or of, for that matter, any nation. The two branches of service often tried to shaft each other, even during wartime.
The hawks dived, coming in at about sixty miles an hour, splitting into a large group and a small one. The majority were headed for the men on the ground; the minority, for the men on the roof.
When thirty yards from the defenders, the hawks checked their speed somewhat. They did not want to kill themselves by a too-hard impact against the larger solidly planted bodies.
Niklaz’s voice rang out, and the bowmen fired.
Ten hawks were hit.
A BARNSTORMER IN OZ by Philip José Farmer Page 16
