Free Hercules by Bernard Evslin

head swarm with dizziness. He knew he couldn’t keep it up.
    Now, he had been very careful about choosing the place to take his stand. The marsh was ringed by boulders. Beyond the boulders was a grove of pine trees. He had chosen to meet the birds at a place where one rock lay over two others, making a kind of shelter, which he had known he might need if he were losing the battle.
    He needed it now. He dropped to the ground and crawled into the open cave. Just in time. As he pulled his leg under, a beak drove into the ground; a second later and he would have been nailed there with a beak through his foot. Before the bird could pull away, he smashed its head in with a rock. Then he crouched under his boulder roof as the birds, enraged, dived at the boulder, driving their beaks against it.
    To his horror, he heard the huge rock begin to crack. He had been told that the Spear-birds could crack rocks with their beaks, but he hadn’t believed they could do anything against that heavy boulder. He heard them diving down at it, chipping away at it. He saw small rocks falling off like hailstones.
    “By the gods,” he whispered. “Another hour of this and they’ll break through that boulder and I’ll be like a turtle without its shell.”
    He saw that the low opening of his rock shelter was filling with red light, and he knew that the sun was sinking. He tried to think how long it would be before darkness fell. It was important, because these birds flew by day and roosted by night and would not keep up the attack after dark. So he crouched there listening to the boulder crumble over his head, watching the rocks slide off to make a heap of rocks, watching the red light fade, trying to think of a way to defend himself if the monster birds did break through. So busy was he measuring the light and planning what to do that he forgot about his pain and just prayed for darkness.
    The red light faded, became a purple light, a blackish-blue light, then blackness. He kept watching the boulder overhead, listening to the beaks drive into the rock. And just as the last light went, a beak did come through. But it disappeared immediately and he heard a beating of wings and felt a trickle of draft through the hole in the boulder roof. He knew that the birds were flying away into the darkness and that he was safe until dawn.
    “I can’t sit here,” he said to himself. “I must use this night I have been given. I’ve got to stop this bleeding, get some strength back, and prepare for dawn. They’ll be back at the first light.”
    He pulled oregano leaves from his pouch and chewed them into a pulp, which he then spread over his wounded chest. Chiron had taught him that the leaves of the wild mint plant called oregano had great healing power over wounds made by iron. He felt the pain draining out of his chest, felt the blood beginning to clot. But he had bled so much that he was still weak as he crawled out from under the rock and made his way into the grove of trees.
    For he had a plan. It was a desperate plan, but it was the best he could do. He went among the pine trees, took vines, and braided them into a rope of vines. Then braided the ropes into a cable of vines. He found a young pine tree and bent it to the ground, then let it go. It whipped out of his hands with terrific force, snapped through its own arc, and touched the ground on the other side. He broke off a heavy branch from a fallen tree, fitted its forked end against the top of the pine, and bent the young pine again. He bent it to the ground and let it snap up. Like a giant bow it hurled the stick of wood toward the sky. Hercules bent the pine tree again, tied one of his vine cables to it, and tied the other end of the cable to the base of a nearby tree. It was a clear night, luckily, and he could see by moonlight. He found another young pine and did the same thing. He kept bending pines and tying them in a bent position until he had cocked some forty trees.
    By now he was very