The Benedictine monks, however, did not flee as Chalmers had guessed. Instead, one of the two drew patterns in the air with his hands, while the second chanted something and threw a handful of powder toward the charging knight. Instantly, a giant thicket that glittered with thorns grew across the road.
Quixote waved his lance and called out a promise to his lady Dulcinea in his ringing battle-voice, and the thicket smoked and burst into flames and cleared itself out of his way.
Behind the thicket lay a sea. The disguised enchanters and the giant coach had vanished. "Hah!" Quixote roared, and touched the water with his lance. It hissed and drew back, and Rosinante cantered across the path between the two towering walls of water. With every foot the knight won, the sea shrank, until knight and horse reached the other side—and nothing was left of the sea but a puddle, rapidly evaporating in the heat of the day.
The enchanters were busily at work, building yet another spell. Quixote galloped nearer.
"Freston, you carrion rot—I know your handiwork! I'll have your head, by God and all that is fair!" The knight waved his lance.
Sancho Panza kept back, behind the line where the magical thicket once blocked the road, crossing himself vigorously and praying loudly for deliverance from the evil wizards.
Shea slipped off his shurdono, grateful for the respite from the beast's hideously uncomfortable back. He watched the magical attacks and feints of the knight and the two enchanters, and as he did, the irksome insistence that he was missing something important began to grow on him.
Say, Doc," he said, "didn't Quixote have some kind of clause in his agreement with God about not fighting for any other purpose until he won Florimel's freedom?"
Chalmers, watching Quixote, said, "Um-m-m—I think so."
Shea forced himself to get back on the shurdono. "Then if this were not a battle for Florimel, he wouldn't be able to fight it."
"He's fighting Freston, one of his delusions," Chalmers said. An expression of envy flickered across his face, though, as Quixote turned one of the two enchanters into a small green bird. "Why can't I do that?" he muttered.
The transformed enchanter turned himself back into a man, and stretched his hands, clawlike, at the knight. Something disgustingly slimy and sticky-looking shot from his fingertips and enmeshed Quixote.
"There are two enchanters over there. Doc. What if Freston and Malambroso have joined forces? Couldn't Florimel be in the carriage?"
Panza took a moment from his prayers to give the two of them an indignant glare. "Certainly the Lady Florimel is in the carriage—why else have we come this way to meet the enchanters? Why else does the great knight Don Quixote fight?"
Shea and Chalmers exchanged glances.
Chalmers grimaced. "Harold, I must register my protest toward your getting involved with this fight. I feel if you had not returned Quixote to his delusional state, Florimel would be with us and we would be home by now." The psychologist twisted his shurdono's reins between his fingers. "If you stay out of this, Quixote may once again snap back to rationality. If, however, you feed his delusions by participating in them, we will certainly loose any chance of that happening—and I may never find Florimel."
Harold Shea raised an eyebrow, then slowly shook his head. "Quixote didn't snap out of his delusional state. You transformed him into Señor Quixiana. Think about this. Heed. I postulate that this situation illustrates your theory of delusional states perfectly— except that we're in the universe Quixiana tapped into, and not in the universe he inhabited."
Chalmers' face reddened, and he asked, "But if we are in a genuine magic-based universe, why doesn't my magic work?"
Shea's attention drifted to the battle between Quixote and the enchanters. Amazing things were happening. The booming of oaths and counter-oaths filled the air. Fires flickered and vanished, thunderheads formed and unformed. One of the enchanters conjured a cloud of giant bats, and Quixote quickly changed them into roses, which fell to the ground and littered the plain like the tribute of invisible maidens. Quixote sent a giant lizard at the wizards—it became a little yapping lap-dog.
"Sometimes your magic does work," Harold Shea said. "Just try to remember what you were doing when it did." He drew his saber and kicked his shurdono into action. He was jouncing painfully toward the fight when an idea occurred to him. "By God and my lady," he yelled, "if I can't have a horse, I want a saddle for this thing!" A weirdly shaped, wonderfully comfortable saddle appeared between Shea and the shurdono's bony back. He sighed happily and urged the chicken-steed into a lumbering gallop.
Shea was always terrified at the beginning of a battle—but the terror wore off quickly, as the practical issue of survival pushed the fear from his mind. As he assessed the ongoing battle, he grew calmer.
Quixote's second lance had broken early on, and he was lighting close in and on horseback with a heavy, double-edged straight blade. Rosinante, Shea noted, was as much a weapon as Quixote's sword. The ineffable horse leapt and kicked with deadly accuracy; his schooled moves were as perfectly executed as any Shea had seen the famous Lippezan stallions perform in his own world.
Quixote saw Harold ride up and yelled, "I must defeat Malambroso, on my oath and honor. Do you then take on that despoiler, Freston?"
Harold Shea, armed with his saber and riding the effable shurdono, was not sure how much help he was going to be. Still, he thought, I made a difference with the giants. "I will, sir knight!" he answered.
He raised his saber, keeping a close eye on Freston, who was trying to get behind Quixote to bespell him. "By Belphebe and God, I'm going to pound you into the ground, Freston!" Shea swore. He urged the shurdono forward. The shurdono, sensing danger, balked. Shea kicked, he pled, he smacked the shurdono's rump with the flat of his blade, and finally he snarled at the heavens, "By God and the saints and Belphebe and the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, I want a good fighting horse, and I want him NOW!"
The sheet lightning that surrounded him left him seeing stars and smelling ozone—but the horse beneath him, huge as Rosinante, lunged at Freston with minimal urging.
Freston saw trouble coming. He waved his hand over his mule. "By Satan's spawn, I'll ride a tiger to your doom, you spineless outlander." Freston's mule became a mammoth orange Bengal tiger that roared and pounced.
"Aaagh!" Shea yelled, and then yelped, "Flame, sword, by God!" The tiger made for Shea's horse's throat, the horse made a fancy little dressage side step out of the tiger's way, and Shea, a good rider but certainly no master horseman, found that the horse had stepped completely out from under him, and he was riding air—with a blazing sword in his hand and a tiger coming directly at him.
His rump hit the dirt with a painful thump. Still, he brandished the sword, and the tiger laid its ears back and snarled. Freston, astride the tiger, was starting into another curse. Meanwhile, the wizard's big cat crouched, close enough that Shea could smell his breath, and the cat's tail twitched restlessly. His eyes never left Shea's throat. When Harold saw the tiger's rump wiggle in the same way housecats did just before they attacked, he panicked. "Yah!" he shouted, and straightened his arm and lunged. The flaming blade nicked the tiger's nose and singed his fur, and the giant cat leapt back and to one side; as quickly as that, Freston landed in the dirt. The tiger, with one backward snarl, padded toward the hills.