The nearest watch-horn hallooed. Others responded.
Not long after, two of the black biremes—only two, for they were disdainful—put out after the phantom ship.
The slaves shackled to the oars were fairly fit, for they had been allowed only a ration of beer, and no women. The torrent of Zastis had for centuries been reckoned a handy extra scourge against these men. At such times, mercilessly chained and prevented from relieving their sexual frenzy save in the crudest and most haphazard way, the Star might send some of them mad. Yet the unexpanded, unfulfilled energy lent power to the oars.
Losing their slack sleeping look, the biremes shot out on to the straits in the wake of their prey, like two lean black dogs.
They caught her inside a mile and offered no violence, for they could see she was apparently deserted and adrift.
Such a thing was not uncanny. Pirates, they had frequently come on vessels in a similar state. Fat merchants and their crews took to the boats, or swam for land at hint of a superior force of reavers. It had happened often enough, and there was, often enough, easy spoil as a result, items too bulky to have been rescued.
Presently they grappled her and swarmed aboard, taking care that none lay concealed below, but all was empty as a scoured jar.
The jars, on the other hand, were full.
She was nothing more or less than a wine-shop, her holds crammed with cibba-wood casks, leather skins, stone and clay jugs. They held the perfumed heady wines of Vathcri and Vardath, and Tarabann, the only good to come from that accursed continent beyond Aarl-hell.
They knew Tjis waited not many miles off up the coast, but they could let her wait, her ecstasy of fear only the more climactic for being prolonged by foreplay. There was even a jest the town might have sent the wine to placate them, and it raised much laughter.
It was the league of their patriotic and lawless brotherhood that made them assume the ship’s cargo and return to share it with the other five biremes. The salamander galley they fired and left, a new sunrise on the water behind them.
There was not, of course, quite enough of the wine to go round. In the traditions of their land, they fought each other for it. Several men were knocked unconscious, or maimed, and a couple killed. The joyous riot of drinking was general enough and lavish enough and headlong enough so that by the time they knew they had been tricked, which was quite soon, it was too late.
When the first casualties began to display their symptoms, they were mocked as weak stomachs. Drunks who collapsed senseless, or rolled moaning and throwing up, were compatible phenomena. Yet presently the men of every ship became affected. Tearing gripes ravaged their intestines or their throats, their vision fragmented, they lost the powers of speech and movement. Men spewed blood, and the last disbelievers were enlightened. There had been some virulent poison in the wine. They did not know if they would die of this agent—in some cases it seemed likely, in others it was accomplished. Their terror and impotent anger were to no avail. Even the captains and officers had drunk the wine, they more than any. Bedlam and horror ruled, and in the midst of it, two Karmian galleys rounded the headland beyond Tjis and stole into the cove.
The small percentage who had not drunk, or who had not taken much, ran or crawled to their stations. Knowing their drill, this scatter of men attempted to operate the flame-throwing devices with which two of the Free Zakorian vessels were equipped. But the fires were out and all human fire out with them. Only one missile was released, fell short, and perished in the sea, drizzling. The pirates, those who could stand, could do little else. Some of the purged staggered to the rails, their knives and swords in readiness. And here and there an archer loosed a shaft, or a spear was flung. But their aim was mostly out, and their heart was gone.
The first Karmian, unlike the Free Zakorians, had come prepared. She had mounted on her deck, of Suthamun’s bounty, one of the great spoon-catapults the Shansarians had perfected for naval use. Kesarh Am Xai, positioned at the prow, now gave the crew of the ballista leave to fire. Instantly the catapult thundered and spat. The large globule of flame soared out, roaring and whining as it parted the air, and splashed down on the foremost of the black ships. Primed now, again and again the spoon thudded against its buffer and the volcanic charge flew forth.
The Free Zakorians were burning, and those that could leapt in the sea, where the Karmians quickly picked them off with spears and lances, as if piking fish. The sick and the crazed even began to call for help to the ships with the salamander on their sails. While out of the thickening smog of smoke and between the towers of fire there came the crunch and crack of parting timbers and a fleece of sparks as the tall masts crashed. Beyond these noises, even as they stood away, the Karmian vessels heard the screams of the rowers trapped beneath their enemies’ blazing decks.
The captain of the first Karmian turned to the Prince Am Xai. The captain was of mixed blood also, but in the modish celebrated fashion of the hero Raldnor, his skin very dark against golden hair.
“My lord, it’s well-known Zakorian pirates employ only slaves at their oars.”
Kesarh looked at him, unhelpful and remote.
“My lord, the men burning to death down there will be Alisaarians, Iscaians, Thaddrians, men of lands we have no quarrel with.”
Kesarh smiled with such magnetic charm the captain smiled in return before he could prevent himself.
After a pause, Kesarh stopped smiling.
“If it concerns you, captain, you have my leave to go and get them out. Provided, that is, you go alone.”
In flat truth, not many had compassion for the chained slaves and their agonies. The odds had been too vast against the Karmians, and now were nothing. They had already begun to shout, over and over, Am Xai! Am Xai! A din that gradually almost drowned the other, of dying ships and men.
By midmorning, only skeins of charcoal and metal bits and a heaven-touching smolder marked where the Zakorian pirates had gone down.
Those who had got ashore, less than thirty men, were pursued by Kesarh’s own mounted guard and a pack of yowling sailors eager with blood-lust. It was butchery, not killing, on the uplands.
Some few others may have escaped by swimming under the ships and then on toward Dorthar, but the chances were against that. If the fire and the spears did not finish them, the sea and the poison maybe did.
For a long while after, Tjis drank peculiar toasts with her wine. The town chronicler made haste to note in his history what had gone into the wine of that night. Anything that was bane—rank herbs, opiates, lamp oil, emetics, purgatives, and liniments for zeebas—all these, providing they had slight taste and lesser odor, or at least so long as they smelled and tasted sweet. Even perfumes had been poured into the vats and jars. To Free Zakoris, the wines of the southern continent were scented and honeyed beyond any they knew. They took the thickness, and the unexpected first reply of nostril, palate and belly merely for the unusual at work. And drank deeper to grow accustomed. It might not have killed them, but it gave them to be killed.
Kesarh returned into Tjis, and the golden afternoon dulled on his darkened sword. It was not the sword the magician had made from a serpent, but his own blade, forged a year ago when no battle at all had been in the offing. Nor were the Zakorians he had ridden down on the hill the first men the Prince had slain.
Rem, who had also killed men, had been the swing and cut of that sword, and glimpsed the white fixed grin that involved only lips and teeth, the eyes hard and cold, deadly as hell, above it.
They said, Rem had heard it often, that Kesarh at fifteen or sixteen had now and then had himself shut in with armed felons, and so learned to polish his fighting, to the death. Princes sometimes trained themselves in this way in northern Vis, if not at the imperial academies of arms, but always a guard stood ready to aid beyond the door.