Chalmers was watching the giants without concern. He resisted Shea's desperate tugs. "Harold, what's gotten into you?"
"The giants, Doc."
Quixote had finally spotted them, too. Hah, Freston!" he snarled. "Vile wizard—no doubt these monsters are your doing." He uncovered his lance and couched it. His visor clanged down over his face, and he dug his spurs into Rosinante's sides. He roared, "Do not fly, cowards, vile creatures, for it is one knight alone who assails you!" and charged across the plain toward the approaching giants.
Chalmers might as well have been a tree, rooted in the middle of the road. "Those aren't giants, Harold. They're windmills," he said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.
They looked like giants to Shea. However, niggling doubt rose in the back of his mind. He stopped trying to pull his boss back up the road for a moment, and stared at the approaching monsters. The giants swung their warclubs and roared and shrieked. "Do you see windmills?" he asked, suddenly uncertain.
Chalmers sighed, the brilliant lecturer faced with an especially slow pupil. "No, I don't," he said, and his voice dripped with strained patience. "I see giants. But I know they're windmills. And so do you."
The hot breeze, however, reeked with the stench of never-washed bodies, with fetid breath and sweat and filth—and Harold, without another word, ran for the hills. Sancho Panza, on his fine Arab mare, passed him almost instantly, his beast galloping flat out. The ground shook. The air rang with Quixote's battle cries and oaths and the screams of wounded giants. Over the noise, Harold clearly heard Chalmers' bellow— "Harold, wait for me!"
Harold glanced over his shoulder. Chalmers was racing, face red, away from the mayhem on the plain. Behind him, Quixote, astride Rosinante, challenged the monsters. They surrounded him and towered over him, paying no attention to the easier prey that fled down the road. When he saw that, Harold ran behind a rock and crouched there to watch from a point of relative safety. Chalmers joined him, panting and dripping sweat.
Don Quixote's shattered lance stuck out of the side of one fallen giant. He wielded his sword, which blazed with a pure white light that made the sun dim by comparison. Astride his great horse, he darted among the forest of swinging clubs, slashing and stabbing. Already, giants' severed hands and massive war-clubs littered the plain. Quixote fought well—but the giants outnumbered him dreadfully.
Then Chalmers gasped. "Look, Harold, the giants' arms are growing back!"
Shea realized that his associate was right. The only giant who was not still in the fight was the one Quixote had killed with the lance. "We've got to help him. Doc," he said. He unsheathed his saber and got ready to charge into the fray.
"Wait!" Chalmers wrung his hands. "Surely if we intervened magically from a distance—"
"We don't know the rules of magic here," Shea objected.
Chalmers shrugged. "The Laws of Contagion and Similarity should hold. They have everywhere else we've been."
''Fine. Then do something helpful—watch your decimals, though. We don't want a hundred pacifist giant-killers instead of one that will do the job." Shea looked over the top of the rock, and noticed that the tide of battle was going against the Knight of the Woeful Countenance. "If we don't do something quick, though, he's going to look like a Buick that collided with a brick wall." Shea ran back down the road. Behind him, he could hear Chalmers beginning an incantation that sounded suspiciously like 'The number of things in a given class is the class of all classes—" Shea grinned in spite of everything. Good incantations needed rhyme and meter. Doc's incantations never had much of either. He was a great magician—but a lousy poet.
Harold Shea's smile died quickly. As he raced closer, the appalling stench of giant assailed him, and the monsters—big as the windmills they had once been—shook the very earth over which he ran. Shea realized his saber would reach no higher than mid-calf on the monsters. Thus, his assistance to Don Quixote would be limited to acting as a distraction and stabbing the nightmare in the legs—provided his saber would penetrate giant flesh.
Suddenly Sancho Panza was at his side, sliding out of his saddle and pressing the Arab mare's reins into Shea's hands. "Sir Geraldo," the squire said, "since you go to help my master, ride Dapple. And Godspeed."
Shea nodded and mounted. He cantered toward the battle, saber drawn. The nearest of the giants sniffed the air, then turned from watching Quixote and stared straight at him. The monster glared with milky-white, slit-pupilled eyes, and loosed a gape-mouthed roar which revealed green, dagger-pointed teeth that angled back in rows—like shark's teeth. Shea gulped. Oh, God—" he whispered—
—And his whisper took on the same odd, echoey character Don Quixote's oaths had.
Magic. Don Quixote had used it—had compelled Shea to tell the truth by an oath sworn to God and the old knight's lady. Could Harold Shea use the same formula?
"God," he said louder, and was rewarded with an increase in the volume of the echoes. "On my honor, let me—uh, smite— these giants with my sword that, um, blazes—for the ah, glory of my own fair lady, Belphebe of Ohio."
His saber burst into oily blue flames that licked along the blade. Good enough, Shea thought. If the sword blazed, it probably smote serviceably, too. He galloped to one side of the nearest giant, darted around behind him, and stabbed the monster through the back of the knee. The wound smoked, then ignited with a vigorous "whoosh," and the giant went down like a condemned skyscraper.
Shea, keeping out from underfoot, bellowed "For Belphebe!" and galloped behind the next nearest giant. His blazing saber burned brighter. Clubs whizzed past his ears, and the Arab mare pranced and started, but Shea avoided contact, delivered his stroke to the back of the next monster's knee, and got out again.
The giants paid him more attention after that, and he found eluding their massive clubs more difficult. He did the best he could—he was not able to hit fast or often, but he counted six giants down to his credit at one point.
Don Quixote attacked head on, lopping off arms; Shea brought the stinking, club-swinging titans down from behind. The only problem was that the hands regenerated, the knee wounds healed, and the giants got back up, evidently refreshed from their little rests.
Time passed and stretched; the battle became surreal, an inescapable nightmare. Dapple wore a thick coat of lather, her nostrils flared, and her sides heaved. Rosinante, moving the armored knight around, was in the same state. Quixote's sword strokes were still fierce, but they looked a bit less well-aimed to Shea— and he wasn't surprised. His own muscles ached from swinging and thrusting. The giants' blows struck closer as the knight and the psychologist tired. Death became personal to Shea, and felt very near.
What was taking Chalmers so long? The older magician should have figured out something—if he did not come up with a spell quick, he would not need to bother. "God knows," Shea muttered, darting out of range of an eight-armed monster that plodded after him, swinging, "I wish these troglodytes would turn back into windmills." Abruptly, they did.
Shea hung in his saddle and gasped for air and stared. All around him sat windmills and the toppled, battered remains of windmills. Most lacked an arm or two or three; a few burned steadily. In each of them, he recognized details transmuted from giant to giant structure. Perhaps he anthropomorphized the buildings—but he did not think so.
It occurred to Shea that his wish had echoed loudly in his ears when he made it. Somehow, his statement fitted in with the structure of magic in Quixote's world. Either that, Shea reflected, or Chalmers hit on a solution just as he made his wish. He could check on that later, he decided. Don Quixote, surveying the wreckage with evident surprise, trotted across the battlefield to join the psychologist.