You lose arrows that way. I lost three and almost lost me.
I tried buckling my belt around the line. That caused me to hang upside down and lost me my Robin Hood hat and more arrows. My audience liked that one; they applauded–I think it was applause–so, for an encore, I tried to shift the belt up around my chest to enable me to hang more or less straight down–and maybe get off an arrow or two.
I didn’t quite lose my sword.
So far, my only results had been to attract customers (“Mama, see the funny man!”) and to make myself swing back and forth like a pendulum.
Bad as the latter was, it did give me an idea. I started increasing that swing, pumping it up like a playground swing. This was slow wore and it took a while to get the hang of it, as the period of that pendulum of which I was the weight was over a minute–and it does no good to try to hurry a pendulum; you have to work with it, not against it. I hoped my friends could see well enough to guess what I was doing and not foul it up.
After an unreasonably long time I was swinging back and forth in a flattish arc about a hundred feet fang, passing very fast over the heads of my audience at the bottom of each swing, slowing to a stop at the end of each swing. At first those spike heads tried to move with me, but they tired of that and squatted near the midpoint and watched, their heads moving as I swung, like spectators of a slow-motion tennis match.
But there is always some confounded innovator. My notion was to drop off at one end of this arc where it just missed the cuff and make a stand there with my back to the wall. The ground was higher there, I would not have so far to drop. But one of those horned horrors figured it out and trotted over to that end of the swing. He was followed by two or three more.
That settled it; I would nave to drop off at the other end. But young Archimedes figured that out, too. He left his buddies at the cliff face and trotted after me. I pulled ahead of him at the low point of the swing–but slowed down and he caught up with me long before I reached the dead point at the end. He had only a hundred feet to do in about thirty seconds–a slow walk. He was under me when I got there.
The odds wouldn’t improve; I kicked my feet clear, hung by one hand and drew sword during that too-slow traverse, and dropped off anyway. My notion was to spit that tender spot on his head before my feet touched the ground.
Instead, I missed and he missed and I knocked him sprawling and sprawled right after him and rolled to my feet and ran for the cuff face nearest me, poking that genius in his belly with my sword without stopping.
That foul blow saved me. His friends and relatives stopped to quarrel over who got the prime ribs before a clot of them moved in my direction. This gave me time to set my feet on a pile of scree at the base of the cliff, where I could play “King of the Castle,” and return my sword and nock an arrow.
I didn’t wait for them to rush me. I simply waited until they were close enough that I could not miss, took a bead on the wishbone of the old bull who was leading them, if he had a wishbone, and let that shaft go with every pound of that heavy bow.
It passed through him and stuck into one behind him.
This led to another quarrel over the price of chops. They ate them, teeth and toenails. That was their weakness: all appetite and too little brain. If they had cooperated, they could have had me in one rush when I first hit the ground. Instead they stopped for lunch.
I glanced up. High above me, Star was a tiny spider on a thread; she grew rapidly larger. I moved crabwise along the wall until I was opposite the point, forty feet from the cliff, where she would touch ground.