"Ready!" called the oar master.
Callisthenes must have withdrawn his ships from their position. Too, his information on the power of the Voskjard had proved haplessly inadequate. The error in his intelligence on such matters must have been of the nature of a factor of almost three. His sources had been proved again, and even more seriously, unreliable. The ships of Callisthenes had been essential to our defense of the river. They had failed to support us in our fight at the chain. Now, it seemed, they had failed, too, even to prevent the third fleet of the Voskjard from making an unimpeded entry into the waters east of the chain, from which position, of course, they could take the defensive fleet in the rear. Callisthenes must have abandoned his post. He must have withdrawn his ships. He must, perhaps feeling battle fruitless, have retired to Port Cos.
Battle horns, then, from off our bows and astern, shattered the air of the Vosk.
"It is the end," said a man behind me.
Notes of answering battle horns, from our stern castle, and from the stern castles of the _Olivia_ and the _Tais_, almost lost in the din of enemy signals, gave response.
"Stroke!" called the oar master.
The _Tina_ shuddered in the water, and then, once more, with her sisters, the _Olivia_ and the _Tais_, her oars catching at the water, her ram half lifting, dripping, from the Vosk, defiant and gallant, leapt forward.
Chapter 7 — I AGAIN SEE THE _TAMIRA_; I GO FOR A SWIM
"There is the _Tamira_," said a man, pointing to starboard, at one Voskjard ship among others.
I discarded my sword, and seized up a knife from the deck. I placed it between my teeth. I dove into the water, from the bow railing of the _Tina_.
I was then among slashing oars and swimming men. An arrow pierced the water near me, then bobbed to the surface.
Behind me I heard hulls grinding together.
Voskjard ships crowded about the _Olivia_, the _Tais_ and _Tina_. On bloody decks men held discourse with steel. The twang of bowstrings rang in the air.
I clung to a piece of wreckage. A man clung, too, to the other end of the section of planks. I did not know if he were a pirate or not.
It was late afternoon.
It was like a lake of bloody wood in the center of the Vosk. The ships of the Voskjard so pressed about our three ships that they could not use their rams or shearing blades. More than one Voskjard ship had been set afire by flaming pitch cast from another. More than one, at the waterline, or on her decks, it falling among crowded men, had been smitten with stones cast from the catapults of their own ships.
Fusillades of javelins, struck from springals, hailed down on pirate ships as frequently as they did on ours. Even arrows, as often as not in the fray, in the mixings and shiftings of men, indiscriminately, to the consternation of pirates, found unintended targets.
There was a movement in the water behind me, and I twisted suddenly to the side, turning, and catching the arm, its knife in hand, striking toward me. "For the Voskjard!" hissed the man. We struggled, in the water. I dragged him to me. I got the knife from my teeth and, under the water, thrust it, edge up, into his abdomen, and then drew it, deeply in him, diagonally, upward and to the right. The smell came up through the water. I kicked him away from me and, half submerged, he floated backwards away from the wreckage.
I turned to the fellow who had been clinging to the wreckage with me. "I am from the _Mira_, from Victoria!" he said.
"No, you are not," I told him.
"I am!" he cried.
"Who was the commander of the _Mira_?" I asked him.
Swiftly then did the fellow, turning white, swim from the wreckage. I did not pursue him. Temus, who had been the captain of the _Mira_, had been taken aboard the _Olivia_, that he might, by his skills of seamanship, give aid to the men of Ar.
A longboat was some twenty yards away. Archers were in it. They were hunting the waters. Already the men of the Voskjard were killing survivors.
I saw a man stroking toward me, knife in fist. He was a bearded, vicious-looking fellow. "For the Voskjard!" he said.
I slipped beneath the water. I came up behind the fellow and took his neck, bending back his head, in the crook of my left arm.
Almost at the same moment I saw the fellow at the tiller of the longboat turn it towards us. Archers stood between its thwarts, arrows fitted to the strings of their bows.
I lifted the bloody knife in my right hand. I let the fellow I had seized drift away from me.
"For the Voskjard!" I grinned, brandishing the knife.
The archers lowered their bows. "Well done, Fellow," said the fellow at the tiller of the longboat.
I treaded water, and watched the longboat draw away. I heard, several yards behind me, the rending of strakes, taken by a ram. One of the Voskjard's ships, in the press of battle, had struck her fellow.
The _Olivia_, the _Tais_ and the _Tina_ were still afloat. They were protected from the rams and shearing blades of their enemies by the closeness of the quarters. They had managed, almost like a fortress of wood, three ships jammed together, surrounded, under fire, beleaguered, to repel assault after assault, pouring over the rails of enemy vessels. The infantrymen of Ar, in their numbers, inordinate for the vessels involved, and their skills in war, uncommon on the river, stiffened the resistance of the remnants of our small fleet.
Because of the closeness of the quarters, and the ships about, we could not be easily approached, and those who could approach us, actually attempting to board us, must, toe to toe, make the acquaintance of the warriors of Ar. By the buffeting of those mighty shields, by the thrusting of great spears, by the swift, ringing flash of well-tempered steel, wave after wave of boarders was repelled, cut to pieces, swept back like rabble. Yet I knew that in the end even the mighty larl, if chained, must eventually succumb to the attack of endless streams of hissing urts. The tiny gnawings, the miniscule lacerations, the drops of blood extracted, must in their cumulative effect take their inevitable toll.
I looked at the sun. There was blood in the water about me. It was late in the afternoon. A ship of the Voskjard, a hundred yards away, back from the immediate press of battle, was aflame. A Vosk gull had alit on the wreckage to which I had earlier clung. I put the knife in my teeth and swam slowly toward the _Tamira_.
Chapter 8 — I CONDUCT BUSINESS UPON THE _TAMIRA_; I RETURN TO THE _TINA_, BRINGING WITH ME SOME THINGS WHICH I FIND OF INTEREST
I, knife between my teeth, in the water, clung to the starboard rudder of the _Tamira_. Then, lifting myself from the water, clutching at the rudder, I inched my way upward. It was some eight feet in length. I then had my feet on the broad blade of the rudder and grasped the upright shaft. The tarred cables, some four inches in width, moved. The rudder creaked.
I looked over to the windows of the stern cabin. These were high, and formed of a lacing of wood and glass. The _Tamira_ had once been an ornate, richly appointed merchantman. This guise, doubtless, still served her well in her work for the Voskjard. Her darker offices would not be evident from her respectable and stately exterior.
I climbed upward, and swung on ornamental grillwork, toward the windows. Then I stood beside the sill of the port window, back that I not be visible through it. This cabin, surely, would be that of Reginald, her captain. I had little doubt but what I sought, either it or a copy, would lie within.