That might have seemed courage to some and madness to others, but it was neither. The siege machines might have been effective against the sort of fleet Fabio had hoped to raise, a flotilla filling the harbor with wood from wharf to seawall. My fleet was too small to provide anything close to a good target. Stones and timbers, chains and rubbish, an unnatural hail whirled through the air, but the Barhead Shark passed through it all unscathed. The Leviathan lost its spinnaker to a length of chain, and a stone crushed the figurehead on the Swordfish, but both boats kept coming.
The ship at anchor lowered a boat, but even with all eight men aboard pulling hard, they could not reach the dock before the Barhead Shark. To port the Leviathan sped on despite having lost a sail, and on the starboard the Swordfish rammed the longboat and sank it. Behind me Doc and Hal furled the sails, while Marlin brought the fishing boat close in to the dock.
Too close, as it turned out. The Barhead Shark's prow hit the dock dead on, splitting the first half-dozen planks before pilings squeezed it to a stop. I know this because the sudden cessation of our forward movement catapulted me through the air. During my first somersault I realized I had been lucky in that my course remained true and that when I hit, I would still be on the dock. During my second revolution I acknowledged a less heartening fact: my landing would bring me perilously close to the first three men running out to oppose my fleet.
While my martial training, especially that involving equestrian pursuits, had never been the sort of success my father had wished for, it had endowed me with a knowledge of how to fall and bounce to minimize injury. I curled up into a ball, holding the pommel of my Sword in both hands, with the blade extended to the side rather like a scythe, so I would not impale myself if I hit wrong.
The blade turned out to be held more like a scythe than I had hoped. I landed hard on my shoulderblades and bounced through a roll toward my feet. My Sword-blade caught on something. I twisted to the left, felt my left hip bump something else, and heard a couple of yelps. Then the dock was firmly beneath my feet.
A splashing noise prompted me to open my eyes and turn slightly to the left. As I did so, I brought the bloodied Sword across in a short arc in front of my face. Chang! It blocked a thrown dagger, dropping the lesser weapon to the pier beside the unconscious form of the man whose legs I’d slashed during my roll.
Of course, I knew instantly that what I had done-which included blindly bumping the center man into the third man and sending them both into the bay-was highly improbable. Parrying the thrown dagger was nothing more than luck, and my fingers still tingled with the impact of the knife against my Sword. Still, the men now standing a dozen meters away clearly took the carnage as a result of purposeful action, and their reluctance to engage me showed.
Before they could persuade themselves, the wind shifted and the gods again intervened on my behalf. The Leviathan flashed past on my left, its speed unabated as it drove straight at the pirates’ wharf. The man at the tiller tried to bring the ship around and back out to sea, but the changeling wind shoved the ship to starboard. With a horrendous cracking and crashing, the Leviathan broadsided the dock ahead of me, tumbling me to my knees. Near the point of impact, the dock tipped up, launching a full dozen pirates into the bay.
The impact vaulted the Leviathan’s fishing nets up and over the gunnels as neatly as if cast by a master fisherman. By the time I had regained my feet, the ship had already rebounded from the collision and made headway while pulling out to port. The nets, which had draped themselves over a number of recumbent pirates, dragged their catch off with them. Hastily, I estimated that more than a third of the men facing me had succumbed to the Leviathan’s misadventure.
I drove forward, wanting to reach the rammed section of the dock before the pirates could cross it. I knew, from countless legends of epic battles, that defending the uneven territory would be far simpler than allowing my foes to stand on equal footing. It did not really occur to me until I came close enough to cross blades with the pirates that the valiant defenders upon which I had chosen to model myself usually died at the end of their fights. I also realized that defending in a situation that clearly called for offense was less than satisfactory, but attacking would have pressed my luck even further than it had been pressed so far!
A swordsman I am not, so I steeled myself against my eventual steeling by the pirates and determined to give as good as I got. By the strangest coincidence, though, their thrusts missed me by centimeters while my Blade slipped fortuitously beneath guards or over parries. As part of me tried to catalog each cut and each block for my experiment in folklore, another part identified fencing styles and suggested simple strategies that succeeded in even the most improbable situations.
As much damage as I did to them, I believe that they did more. Rinaldo’s men seemed as adept at sticking each other as they were at missing me. Pressed forward by the men behind them and tripped up by the wounded in the front, their blades spilled more pirate blood than mine, and it almost seemed as if letting them surround me would prove more devastating to their number than the advent of Fabio’s future fleet.
Bleeding and howling men fell from the dock or went staggering back through the press of their companions. Before I knew it I had crossed the treacherous length of canted dock and was actually forcing the pirates into a general retreat! It was impossible, unbelievable, but I was doing it. I looked at them saw fear in their eyes. For the barest of moments I knew what Fabio had read in my eyes during our duel, and in that burning second of shame, I faltered in my advance.
Even as I paused, my momentum lost, a giant of a man bearing a cutlass in each colossal fist pushed forward through the crowd to demand my attention. He looked like Fabio, except that he was taller, stronger, and had a wolfish intelligence in his dark eyes. Most disturbing of all, I noted as he set himself, he bore no deformities or scars. That fact told me that my time as a hero was over. When he squinted at me, then contemptuously cast aside the sword in his right hand, I got all the confirmation I needed of my impending opportunity to solve the mystery of life after death.
A gull wheeled overhead and ridiculed me mightily-or so I interpreted his raucous cry, before a splotch of white washed my enemy’s left eye away. The man pulled his left hand up to swipe at the guano in a reaction automatically reflexive. The dull edge of his cutlass smacked him squarely between the eyes, momentarily stunning him. Off balance and still half-blind, a staggering misstep sent him off the edge of the dock and into the ocean.
I assumed the gape-jawed look of surprise on the pirates’ faces mirrored the one on my own. Coincidence after coincidence had piled one on top of another high enough to have toppled over faster than the man now sputtering in water. I knew the chances of my having gotten as far as I had were slimmer than none.
There was no reasonable, no possible, explanation, except one. I glanced at the Sword I held. This has got to be Coinspinner, the Sword of Chance! It is known to move about by its own volition, entrusting itself to those who need it. I saw a brief flash of white on the hilt, and observed three and four pips on the dice respectively.