“Ziz-zii! Zuz-zii! ZIK!”
Though the anticipated happened, Hank still had difficulty believing that it had. He was facing the west, and there suddenly appeared before him in the air a multitude of winged creatures. It sounded like a vast shooting gallery as they came out of nowhere. The air abruptly displaced by their presence made small explosions, a detail which Baum had neglected to describe when he wrote the first Oz book. Or perhaps he had forgotten it.
The entire horde must be here; it speckled the sky before him as if God had dumped a vast pepper shaker. The chattering and the yelling were terrifying. It shook the three men, and it scared the watching hawks and eagles from their perches.
Glinda had told him that each of the four rows of inscriptions commanded a different type of operation. One called the Monkeys in a limited number to the operator. The second summoned all the Monkeys no matter how widely scattered they were. The third could send the Monkeys in a limited number to a certain spot if the operator had been there. The fourth would send the whole horde to a certain area if the operator had once been there.
Hank knew only one, and that was because he had read the operation directions in Baum’s book and his mother had also told him about it. When he was young, he had played at being in Oz and had gone through the ritual with a paper Golden Cap many times.
Baum had mentioned only one row of inscriptions, and he had said that Dorothy could read that. Actually, Dorothy had managed to surreptitiously read the directions in the notebook of the West Witch. The Witch had been very old, and her memory had been drying up as fast as her body. She had had mnemonics all over the castle.
Hank glanced at Erakna’s birds. One was flying off to bring the news of the Monkeys to the queen.
A big Monkey landed near Hank and walked up to him.
“I am the king,” he said. “King Iizarnhanduz the Third, you son of a bitch.”
The king had to obey Hank, but he did not have to like it. It was evident from the loud and bitter complaints of his subjects that they, too, did not care for their sudden displacement. Whatever they had been doing, sleeping, eating, excreting, mating, playing, they had been snatched away to do some hard and probably dangerous task. It must have been very disconcerting to be snoozing away and suddenly find oneself a thousand miles away and falling through the alien air.
Hank told him exactly what must be done.
“For God’s sake!” the king said. “If this keeps up, we’ll become extinct!”
Hank felt sorry for him, but he said, firmly, “Get going! Now!”
Iizarnhanduz (Iron-handed) jabbed a finger at the simians on the field.
“Women and children, too? Have a heart, man!”
“No,” Hank said. “They can stay out of it.”
“Sure. And what will they do when all their menfolks are killed?”
“All I want is for those birds there to be killed or run off. And a little holding action... I told you what to do!”
“Yeah, and afterwards, if there is any afterwards, we have to fly all the way back home. You know how far that is?”
Whatever it was in the Golden Cap that moved and controlled the Monkeys, it must be losing its power, Hank thought. He suspected that there was some kind of machinery enclosed in the walls of the Cap and this was activated by the words he had spoken. What the energy source was, he had no idea. In any event, the king was showing much more reluctance than he had in any reported situation before.
“The last time the Cap was returned to you, by my mother, by the way,” Hank said, “you people were supposed to be free forever from control by others. But you weren’t smart. You didn’t hide the Cap, and so it was stolen. I’ll tell you what. I promise that after you carry out my orders, I’ll put it some place where no one will ever find it. Will that make you happy?”
The king grinned, his long sharp teeth a fearsome sight.
“Very.”
He turned and ran on all fours to his people. After a lot of jabbering, he arranged his males in formation on the meadow. Then, starting at the southeast corner, going into the wind, they began running. Their wings flapping, they leaped into the air and slowly ascended. Some seemed to be too heavy or too slow; they had to retreat to the corner and try again.
When the lead row had turned and was coming with the wind carrying them toward the birds now circling nearby, Hank led the two men to Jenny. Bargma, who had been hiding on the floor of the front cockpit, fluttered up to sit on the windshield edge.
“You get back there with Sharts and Blogo for now,” Hank said.
Sharts, at Hank’s direction, primed the carburetor with ether. He also spun the propeller when Hank yelled, “Contact!” so that Jenny would not have to use so much energy to get the engine started. It caught at once, and presently the 150-horse-power Hisso engine was roaring. Sharts and Blogo waited until the engine was warmed up, then they yanked out the logs that chocked the wheels. They ran to climb aboard while Jenny was moving slowly towards the takeoff point. She had to skirt the edge of the meadow because all of the male Monkeys had not yet gotten off the ground.
The trees protected the plane from gusts, but when she got into the open, she would be subject to ground loops. Hank depended upon her reflexes and the fact that she could use energy to lift or lower her wings to cancel the gusts.
By then the hawks and eagles had closed with the Monkeys. Most of them, anyway. Some of the birds had figured that there was no use being brave against such numbers. They fled, and, within a minute or two, those birds who could extricate themselves did so. None headed towards the east. They made a wide half-circle and sped southward. They did not care to face the queen’s anger.
The farmland was on a lower level than the road on this side of the gate. Hank could not see what was happening there. However, he surmised that the Gillikin soldiers had charged. The Monkeys were flapping towards the road. All they had to do was to check the Gillikins’ advance until Jenny was airborne.
The plane got to the takeoff point without dragging either end of its wingtips against the ground. She moved slowly into the wind, then began rolling forward swiftly. And she was up. He knocked on the instrument panel to indicate that he was now the pilot. After clearing the trees on the hills beyond the farm, he banked sharply and brought her around in line with the road. As he passed over the meadow, he noted that the Monkey females and children were jammed into the southeast comer. They were waiting until the plane had gone over before they started the southward migration.
He dipped Jenny’s nose until she was only ten feet above the ground. Then he raised it, and he came up over the gate with the wheels a few feet above the fence. To the Gillikins and Monkeys struggling ahead of him, it must have looked as if the plane had been shot by a rocket from the landing field. He brought Jenny up sharply, remembering suddenly that there might be some Monkeys in the air. It would be ironic and not at all funny if he collided with a Monkey.
All of them, however, were on the ground in close combat with the van of the army.
Hank dived to bring Jenny close to the battle. The roar of the engine would notify the Monkeys that they could quit fighting and go home. However, that was not so easy. If they turned tail, they might be cut down from behind. Also, they could not get into the air without a long run, and they had no room for that on the body-strewn road.
Hank could not worry about them. It was every man—every Monkey—for himself. He zoomed down the road and pulled on the cable. Both machine guns fired. Good. He had been worried that they might jam. They had always seemed to do so just when he needed them while dogfighting or strafing over France.
The road was packed with troops. To make consternation, disorder, and panic, he loosed four bursts among them. Those who had not been hit were diving onto the side of the road or trying to.
Ahead near the crossroads on a field was something that stood out. A big white coach with eight moose hitched to it.
“The queen’s,” Hank muttered.
He lifted up, then made a shallow dive. The people standing around it began running. No. One had not. She was dressed in a long all-white robe. Erakna. Only witches were allowed to wear a dress which was entirely white. She sat on a chair near the coach. The scarlet object propped against it had to be her umbrella, the sign and symbol of a red witch.
Erakna sat calmly, or seemingly so, until Hank fired. Seeing the twin line of bullets striking the earth and racing toward her, she abandoned the chair and her dignity. She threw herself to one side.
Hank brought Jenny up while he cursed.
“Missed!”
He turned and dived again. Erakna was not in sight. She must be hiding on the other side of the coach.
His bullets tore into the coach, and the moose, recovering from their paralysis, or perhaps they had been obeying the queen’s orders to stand still until then, pulled the coach away in mad flight across the meadow. Erakna was exposed now, but she had time to run. Lifting her long skirts with both hands, she sped like a rabbit with a hawk after her. She did not make the mistake of trying to run across the open fields but headed towards the mass of soldiers lying on the ground. There, no doubt, she would order some soldiers to throw themselves over her.
When Hank had turned and started another strafing run, he saw that soldiers were indeed clustered around. But when he started firing, the soldiers scattered. The queen was left alone, a white target.
Her hair was so blonde that it looked almost as white as her garment. Hank thought, irrelevantly, Glinda is a white witch with red hair, and Erakna is a red witch with white hair.
The queen threw herself to one side and rolled.
Hank did not know whether or not he had missed again until he climbed and turned again. He felt vibrations behind him and turned his head quickly to see what was causing them. Sharts was pounding on the side of the fuselage and grinning. He pointed downwards. Hank looked down and saw that Erakna was lying on the ground with a red stain on her skirt. She had been hit in the leg.
“This should do it,” Hank thought. “I’ll put an end to her and the war!”
The queen had other ideas. She rose and lifted her skirts high, showing that she was standing on the unwounded leg. Then she began whirling like a ballerina, her arms stretched out.
“What the hell?” Hank muttered. He had the feeling that something had suddenly gone wrong, that he was dealing, with forces that he did not understand. Nevertheless, he pulled on the cable, and the machine guns chattered on the wing above him.
Erakna disappeared.
Groaning, Hank let loose of the cable. He had no idea where she was. He doubted that she had made herself invisible. If she had, she still would have been hit by the bullets. She was probably in her suite in the castle now.
He turned southward. There was no use wasting more time and fuel. Twisting around, he beckoned that Bargma should come to the front cockpit. He could not see Blogo because he was sitting in Sharts’s lap, but the giant was evidently raving and ranting. The owl, when she had worked her way to him and clutched his shoulder, yelled, “Tough luck!”
“When I get back to Glinda, my name’ll be mud!” he shouted.
“You did your best. Which, I don’t mind saying, was better than most men would’ve done!”
They passed over the Monkeys, flying in a long ragged file, and then Hank saw Balthii below. She had been hanging around somewhere near the farm, observing. Now she’d be taking the message to Glinda that Erakna was still alive.
A half hour later, a storm came from the southeast the like of which Hank had never flown in and hoped he never would again. It was so bad that he momentarily had the crazy thought that Erakna had summoned it up against him. Whatever its cause, it surrounded him with wild black clouds in which he was not sure that he was not sometimes flying upside down. His compass whirled insanely. Updrafts and down-drafts seized Jenny, some holding her so long that he prayed that they would not be dashed against a mountain.
He had perhaps fifteen minutes before the fuel tank was empty when Jenny burst into an open sky and comparatively calm air. He did not know where he was. Neither did Bargma.
“That’s the ruins of a city of the Long-Gones!” the owl said.
“Hell, we couldn’t have been blown that far,” Hank said. “Glinda told me that the ruins were in the extreme northwest corner of the land. In Nataweyland.”
“I said a city. I’ve heard rumors and stories about other lost ruins.”
Hank had been looking for ten minutes for a place to land in the mountains. He alone had a parachute, and so he could abandon ship if he did not find somewhere to set Jenny down. But he would not say goodbye to Jenny and his human passengers until he absolutely had to. There was also the possibility of a deadstick landing on top of the trees, but he did not know if he should chance killing himself for the sake of the unsavory characters in the rear cockpit. Anyway, Jenny was capable of doing that by herself.
Her destruction would make him feel far worse than the deaths of Sharts and Blogo.
“I’ll be a hero for Glinda, but not for those two,” he muttered.
Still, he was hanging on until he had three minutes of fuel left. But he may not have estimated the quantity correctly.
“There’s a place to land,” Bargma screeched in his ear.
Hank looked down and saw a level and relatively tree-free place which had suddenly appeared. He turned towards it, noted which way the wind was bending the treetops and bushes, and turned. He rapped on the panel for Jenny to take over. She could handle gusts better than he. Not to mention landings in calm air.
“Good luck,” the owl said, and she launched herself up and out.
When the engine had turned off, Hank climbed to the ground, relieved himself, and then spoke to Jenny.
“Well, old girl, it looks as if your passengers will have to hoof it all the way back to Suthwarzha. Unless we can find some alcohol in this God-forsaken area. I didn’t see a single village or house anywhere.”
“You can’t make any alcohol?” Jenny said plaintively.
“Maybe. We’ll see. Don’t worry. I won’t desert you unless there’s no other alternative. And I’ll come back to get you. I swear I will.”
The first thing to do was to push Jenny under the protection of the trees and stake her down. He started to tell the other two that, but Blogo, a minute tempest, stormed at him.
“Why in hell did you land here? Don’t you know that the Very Rare Beast is supposed to haunt the Long-Gone ruins?”
“Shut up, stupid!” Sharts said. “If he hadn’t landed here, we’d be dead!”
“Maybe we’d be better off,” Blogo muttered.
Hank got Jenny taken care of and then asked Bargma if she would try to find her way back to Glinda.
“Who’s going to guide you if you do get Jenny up again and do find a familiar landmark?”
“I don’t know. But if Glinda knows where we are, she might be able to get us back somehow.”
“A fat chance of that. She’s a witch, but she’s not a miracle-worker. I’m going now but not very far. I have to find something to eat.”
That reminded Hank that he was hungry. He took the last of the cheese, nuts, and raisins from the knapsack and devoured them. He was still hungry. Maybe he’d starve to death. No, not if he could kill an animal. He did not care if the others would be horrified. He was not going to die just because meat-eating was tabu. Anyway, they would not have to know about it.
He thought about the pleas of the mouse caught by the owl in Abraam’s barn. Could he kill a sentient creature for food? The empty belly knows no conscience, he told himself.
The question would be answered when he was starving.
He walked to the edge of the plateau from the meadow. A thousand or more feet below the sheer cliff was a river. An equally high cliff rose on the other side two miles or so away. Mountains surrounded this area, those to the west seeming to be the highest. He had been lucky to come through a pass. A mile to t
he right, a mile to the left, and he’d be dead now. He fingered his mother’s gift, the housekey.
To the southeast, near the lip of the plateau, were some hills on which were the ruins of the ancient city. Most of it must be buried under soil and vegetation, but there were enough exposed buildings to indicate that this had once been a populous area. He did not know why the Long-Gones had had a city in this high, remote, and isolated area. Perhaps for the same reason that the city of Machu Picchu, discovered twelve years ago in the Andes, had been built.
Hjs desire to explore the ruins was shelved by hunger. He joined the other two as they set out to hunt. Sharts walked towards the ruins, but Blogo insisted that they go north instead. Sharts said, “Very well. If you’re afraid, we won’t go there.”
Blogo thumped his chest, and his cock’s comb got even redder.
A BARNSTORMER IN OZ by Philip José Farmer Page 26
