on the ground ahead, but was driven on down the slope, ripping it open as though with four giant ploughs.
Chapter 26
Thomas bellowed, forcing the battle fury up in himself, stepped forward. The animal was driven up to him. Screaming, Thomas brought his sword down on the huge head covered with bony plates. Splinters flew about, like small silvery fish, the sword was all but wrenched out of hands, as if he had struck with all his might on an anvil, fingers got numb and aching. Thomas could barely keep the sword, so heavy it got at once, his mouth cold and dry, his heart stopped beating. In place of three thick horns on the beast’s snout, there now were only two — and a slantwise-cut stub in place of the third one. The monster uttered an insulted roar, darted on his enemy. Thomas was burnt with heat and fell down at once, as the beast shoved him with its side. Thomas rolled, his sword still in hand, jumped up studiedly and struck again: on the long green moss-covered tail that was sliding past him. The sword was cast away, its blow left a whitish stripe on the tail, and Thomas saw it was a different animal, while the one with cut-down front horn, roaring madly, broke into the lines of perplexed pilgrims.
He heard crash and roar, caught glimpses of horrible paws, as the huge animal was rolling on the ground in a ball, crushing rocks and leaving a wide stripe of dead soil, trampled to the hardness of stone, behind. Terrified, Thomas could not believe his eyes: the monster and the wonderer had grappled each other, both roared, wrestled, rolled on the ground… Thomas yelled, rushed to them with his sword raised, but a mountain bumped into his side, his armor crunched, and Thomas was blown away like a leaf torn off the tree.
The earth trembled, as if mountains were collapsing. The mad roar was about to break his skull. Thomas managed to raise himself a bit, feeling as though all of his bones were… more than broken: reduced to hash, with the largest fragment as big as his nail. With a moan, he leaned against his sword. A green log hit his legs at once. Falling flat, Thomas caught a glimpse of the animal, which had knocked him down with the very end of its tail. The beast roared with pain and fury: the wonderer took a grip of its jaws and was tearing them apart, as though to look into the red crater of throat. The foaming blood, strangely white, gushed out. The animal gave a howl, waving its paws blindly. One of them caught the wonderer’s belt, the strong claws about to welt him. With a dirty curse, the wonderer left the jaws and gripped momentarily, with two hands, the animal’s thick paw. Before Thomas could say “mom,” the paw gave a dry crunch, as though a thick pole broken, the terribly roaring beast collapsed on its side, started to beat the air convulsively with the rest three paws. The wonderer jumped aside, picked up his sword.
Thomas got up to his fours, had time to see another monstrous animal jumping on the wonderer before something pounced on Thomas’s back with a crunch, pressed him into the hard trampled ground. He lay half- stunned, waiting for terrible jaws to touch the back of his head, to come together once and bite his armor through, like a forest nut, and spit out the iron shell after having milled him, Thomas Malton, a noble Angle from the banks of Don, with strong teeth…
Suddenly the noise in his head subsided, but he heard roar, dull thumps, and shouts instead. With effort, he turned in the pit, which his iron armor had made in his fall, to see the blue sky and, against the blue, the bustle of monstrous bodies and clawed paws.
Then the wonderer cropped up into his eyesight. Oleg breathed heavily, his face wild, his eyes goggled still. Blood trickled down from his forehead, poured over eyebrows. Irritated, the wonderer wiped it off with his blooded palm. “Are you alive, Sir Thomas?”
Thomas tried to rise but fell prone: his arms were fragile as grass blades. Oleg supported him by shoulder. “And… beasts?” Thomas asked in a husky voice.
Oleg waved away. “All right. Fighting, what else?”
Thomas sat up, shook his head, trying to regain his senses. He was sitting among broken and squashed twigs, limpid juice oozing from them, their leaves carpeting the ground. From the roadside, crash and heavy rumble were coming, along with heavy strikes and mad shouts.
“Lie down,” Oleg said. His breast rose frequently, the air rattling and howling in it, like a snowstorm in a chimney. He wiped the blood off his forehead again. His eyebrow was matted, his copper-red hair stuck up in a strange way. “Lie… They’ll cope on their own.”
Thomas got up with effort, leaning on his sword, like an old man on a staff. He turned to the road: that last blow — with a tail, as far as he could recall — had flung him past the roadside. On the road, in puffing bitter dust, inconceivable things were going on: the last beasts had run down the slope, roaring and thundering, and pilgrims darted about, brandishing their staffs and chains. Three monsters, with their heads smashed and spines broken, lay at the roadside, their bony shields, impossibly thick, gaping with terrible cracks. Thomas was startled to see the head of the nearest monster flattened, as though between the hammer and the anvil of unthinkable size, its hind paw torn out with a bit of meat. Huge white gristles seen in the horrible wound, still oozing with blood, which made the ground hiss and swell in blisters.
The last animal, a late one, thundered down the slope, came running into the old, grey-haired man, the one who had denied assistance to travelers so coldly. Displeased, he stepped aside, socked the beast on head with his staff. Thomas expected to see the immediate death of old fool, but the colossal head, armored in thickest shell and resembling a granite boulder, cracked under the staff blow, broke in halves, like a rotten egg. Small splinters flew in all directions, blood gushed out in thick gurgling mass. The animal’s broken mug hit the ground. The beast, unable to stop at once, turned overhead and remained on its back, its broad crest pressed down with a crunch.
Along the road, in hundred steps both on the left and on the right from it, pilgrims were hitting the beasts angrily with staffs, crutches, chains, and fetters. The air was full of terrible crunch and crash, death rattles and dreadful howls. Stupefied, Thomas saw that one pilgrim seized a monstrous creature by its thick tail, yanked it up into the air, whirled overhead, as though to knock down other animals with it as a club — but there was a loud crackle, the green tail remained in hands, while the beast flew over the road and collapsed, with bony thunder, onto the trampled shrubs. The suddenness of it made the pilgrim fall on his back, into a puddle of whitish blood and entrails of another dead animal. The man was thin, yellow, his face gaunt, his skinny body covered with rags.
Thomas jumped up in fear when a heavy hand fell with a clang on his shoulder. “They’re almost done with it. Let’s go to them.”
“Aren’t they angry with us?” Thomas said, his voice was unsteady. “We brought the beasts on them… Did you run here on purpose?”
“I felt our Russian pilgrims going,” Oleg replied evasively.
The last animal was finished off by crutches, its shell cracked, as though beaten by iron logs, blood spurting out. One pilgrim threw away with disgust his crutch, with green moss and small bone splinters stuck to it. The crutch fell in front of Thomas, went into the stone-hard ground for a length of hand. Driven by natural gratitude, Thomas hurried to stoop for it, to pick up and clean, as it was not disgraceful even for a king to render services to ecclesiastics, even those of other religions…
His iron fingers slid off with a grinding sound. Thomas get none of it, gripped the crutch with both hands, hooking it from below, and jerked up — but it seemed to have grown into the earth. Thomas felt as though gripping the middle of the protruding root of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. He saw a friendly banter in Oleg’s tired face, bit his lip, frowned, took a firm stand and yanked the crutch up with all his might.
He felt his legs breaking the hard crust of trampled earth, sinking into it, but that amazing crutch had only one of its ends raised a bit! Thomas went crimson, trying to hold it, but the crutch slipped off, squelched on the ground. That time Thomas could see, for sure that was neither his imagination nor illusion, that the earth was shaken with its fall and the crunch subsided as if it were mud, not well-trodden soil, as solid as stone.
Oleg embraced Thomas, urged him to the battlefield. “Leave it, or you’ll bust a gut… No less than forty poods of iron in that staff. Their chains and fetters the same.”
Thomas was astonished. “Why?”
“To make them heavier,” Oleg explained shortly.
Thomas turned his head, looked with mistrust, but the wonderer’s face was absolutely honest. “Why?” the knight asked again.
“That’s a feat, as Ruses see it. Asceticism! It’s only hard to defeat a dragon until you try to defeat yourself… No beast that brutal, strong, and cunning. A beast that always prevails: by ruse or by caress, by stubbornness or
