"Help!" he roared, in a voice capable of arousing the Seven Sleepers, "help! He is killing me!"
"I knew what would be the end of it!" cried Dame Zudár, gnashing her teeth. "The poltroon is betraying us himself. Let him perish if he does not know how to live."
"Scoundrel!" Bodza shouted to him. "What! cannot you die speechless like a Julius Cæsar? And when the common cause demands that you should keep silence too! Fie upon you, I say!"
Ivan, in his desperation, writhed over the gulf beneath him, and forgetting everything but the horrible death awaiting him, bellowed hoarsely to those standing below:
"Help, for the love of Christ. Men, I say! do not let me perish! I am falling! I am dying. Woe is me! Spread straw underneath, can't you? Hold a carpet below me! Mercy, mercy! Let me go, Mekipiros! I beseech you, for God's sake, let me go!"
But it was no part of Mekipiros' plan to plunge down to the ground all by himself. For the last hour or so he had been joyfully awaiting this sweet moment, for this he had laughed, for this he had frisked about so uproariously. He was unable to conceal his delight. If only he could be alone with his tormentor at that giddy height, suddenly seize him, and hurl him down with himself from the roof, fly for a few seconds through the air, and then lie stretched upon the earth in a smashed and broken mass, so that it would be impossible to distinguish the one from the other—ah! then how happy he would be!
And—better than that even—his victim had clutched hold of something in the very act of falling, and so the delicious moment was indefinitely prolonged! He heard how his prey roared for help, saw how he writhed convulsively in the desperate hope of saving himself, how half out of his mind he even begged him, Mekipiros! for life: "Mekipiros, dear good Mekipiros, let me go, and plunge down alone!"
"Hamamama! hamamama!" gurgled the monster with a grim cruel voice, and he kicked the wall with his feet to make Ivan let go the quicker, and buried his scanty teeth in the fleshy legs of his victim, and worried him like a dog.
"Mercy, mercy! Help! I can hold out no longer!" gasped Ivan, his sinews beginning to stretch beneath the pressure of the double load. No help was possible. Those standing below cursed him for rousing the castle with his shouts. The narrow edge of the gutter was gradually slipping through his nerveless fingers. And now one hand relaxed its hold, and only by a last convulsive effort did he manage to hold on for a few seconds by the other.
"Hamamama!" screeched the monster, and then a yell, as of the lost, resounded from height to depth, and a huge round, black, writhing, coil came bounding rapidly to the ground, and there, the next instant, lay a mangled mass of flesh, in which perhaps at one time two souls had dwelt.