Wolff and Chryseis took partial cover behind two boulders and renewed their rear attack. Five more fell, but the quivers of both were empty. Wolff said, “Pull some from the corpses and use them again. I’m going to help him.”
He picked up a spear and ran at an angle across and up the hill, hoping that the savages would be too occupied to see him. When he had come around the hill, he saw two savages crouched on top of the boulder. These were kept from jumping down upon the Yidshe’s rear by the overhang of the roughly shaped boulders. But they were waiting for a moment when he would venture too far out from its protection.
Wolff hurled his spear and caught one in the buttocks. The savage cried out and pitched forward from the rock and, presumably, on his fellows below. The other stood up and whirled around in time to get Wolff’s knife in his belly. He fell backwards off the rock.
Wolff lifted a small boulder and heaved it on top of one of the great boulders and climbed up after it. Then he lifted the small boulder again, raised it above his head, and walked to the front of the great boulder. He yelled and threw it down into the crowd. They looked up in time to see the rock descending on them. It smashed at least three and rolled down the hill. At that, the survivors fled in a panic. Perhaps they thought that there must be others than Wolff. Or, because they were undisciplined savages, they had been unnerved by too many losses already. The sight of so many of their dead shot down behind them must also have added to their panic.
Wolff hoped they would not return. To add fuel to their fright, he leaped down and picked up the boulder again and sent it crashing down the hill after them. It leaped and bounded as if it were a wolf after a rabbit and actually struck one more before it reached bottom.
Chryseis, from behind her boulder, put two more arrows into the savages.
He turned to the baron and found him lying on the ground. His face was gray, and blood was welling from around the spearhead driven into his chest.
“You!” he said faintly. “The man from the other world. You saw me fight?”
Wolff stepped down by him to examine the wound. “I saw. You fought like one of Joshua’s warriors, my friend. You fought as I have never seen fight. You must have slain at least twenty.”
Funem Laksfalk managed to smile a trifle. “It was twenty-five. I counted them.”
Then he smiled broadly and said, “We are both stretching the truth a trifle, as our friend Kickaha would say. But not too much. It was a great fight. I only regret that I had to fight unfriended and unarmored and in a lonely place where none will ever know that a funem Laksfalk added honor to the name. Even if it was against a bunch of howling and naked savages.”
“They will know,” Wolff said. “I will tell them some day.”
He did not give false words of comfort. He and the Yidshe both knew that death was around the corner, sniffing eagerly at the end of the track.
“Do you know what happened to Kickaha?” he said.
“Ah, that trickster? He slipped his chains one night. He tried to loosen mine, too, but he could not. Then he left, with the promise that he would return to free me. And so he will, but he will be too late.”
Wolff looked down the hill. Chryseis was climbing toward him with several arrows which she had recovered from corpses. The blacks had regrouped at the foot and were talking animatedly among themselves. Others came out of the jungle to join them. The fresh ones swelled the number to forty. These were led by a man garbed in feathers and wearing a hideous wooden mask. He whirled a bull-roarer, leaped up and down, and seemed to be haranguing them.
The Yidshe asked Wolff what was happening.
Wolff told him. The Yidshe spoke so weakly that Wolff had to put his ear close to the knight’s mouth.