When the storm at last blew itself out and we poor souls, numbed and drenched, could crawl on deck and discover to our surprise that Zim and Genodras still smiled down upon us from a clear sky, the dreaded cry went up.
“Swordships! Swordships!”
The deck was in a frightful mess, cumbered with wreckage, raffles of cordage, splintered timbers, everything that had not been washed overboard. We rushed to the rail. There they came, long lean shapes spurring through the sea. With deadly intent they closed in on us. Helplessly, we wallowed in the sea as those sea-leem ringed us.
“Swordships! Swordships!”
CHAPTER TEN
“Swordships!”
I eyed the lean low-lying leem-shapes surging through smothers of foam all about us. Slender, cranky, spray-drenched craft, they clearly had put out from some pirates’ lair hidden on a nearby island. They were closing in for the kill. Soon our decks would run red with blood.
“Oh, Dray!” said Tilda, grasping my arm in a convulsive grip. Snuggled against her side and held by her other arm, Pando — who was a Kov although he did not know it — stared with all his boyish excitement and venom out to sea and those slender hungry shapes.
A hail from forward distracted my attention from the swordships for a moment. Then I saw the cause. Tangled together in a raffle of mutual destruction two other argenters from our shattered armada wallowed toward the shore. I saw the scheme of the swordships now. They would wait until Dram Constant had run athwart those other two dismal wrecks and then they would have us all, three fat ponshos, in the killing circle.
On the drifting wrecks the frantic forms of men ran and scuttled, and I caught the gleam of weapons across the water.
Very well.
We would fight.
Captain Alkers, pale but determined, gave his orders and his men were issued with axes and spears, boarding pikes and bows. Bows! Yes — to begin with, a little artillery might soften up the opposition. I disengaged my arm, very gently, from Tilda.
“You did Inch and me the great honor of asking us to be your champions, Tilda the Beautiful. Now, we will see about honoring our side of the bargain.”
“But, Dray!” she wailed. “There are so many of them.”
About to make the habitual response, I checked, as Inch, with a gusty laugh, said it for me.
“All the more of them to kill, Tilda of the Many Veils!”
I cocked an eye at the suns as I went aft to the staterooms to collect my Lohvian longbow that was built of true Yerthyr wood. How old that bow might be I did not know; but it was of great, price, and I thanked Sosie once again as I brought it forth. I buckled my Krozair long sword at my waist, along with the rapier. There would be need of those later.
Ax in hand, Inch waited my return.
“It will be dark in three burs or so,” I said. A Kregan bur, being some forty Earth minutes long, meant we had two hours before we stood a chance of escape in the darkness. Like any Kregan, I carried a kind of almanac of the motions of the seven moons in my head, and I knew we had a bur or so of true darkness, lit only fitfully by a small and hurtling lesser moon, before the twins, the two second moons of Kregen, eternally orbiting each other as they orbit the planet, would rise to cast down their pinkish light. Would they rise before we could escape? Would we all be dead before the last orange glow of Zim faded from the western sky?
Soon after the twins would rise She of the Veils. Then the darkness would be dispelled completely. We had to hold out against the swordships. We must!
The corsairs opened away before us and a single bank of oars flashed, dripping, rising and falling, from each lean flank as the swordships heaved and rolled in the running sea after the gale. Two-masters, the swordships, with a low profile extending into a familiar beak and rostrum forward, a compact forecastle, a sweeping length of deck packed with men and half-men half-beasts, and a single-decked castle aft from which blazed and fluttered many gaudy flags and banners. The swordships carried varters mounted forward and on the broadside. All our varter and catapult artillery had been smashed and swept away in the hurricane.
We were not entirely defenseless. I watched a swordship surging up alongside, as a ponsho-trag herding a straying ponsho, worrying, attempts to push the recalcitrant animal back among the others, and I saw the way the water broke over her deck. I saw the spume shooting up, and the way the oars flailed and lost their rhythm, and the quick falling-off of the head to the wind to ease the swordship’s motion. Waterlogged, Dram Constant rolled sluggishly onward, steady as a half submerged rock. Lifting the bow and doing all the instinctive complicated mathematics of wind and relative velocities instantly in my head, without conscious thought, I loosed. The shaft struck the helmsman. He threw both arms up and pitched forward.
A great yell went up from Dram Constant.
The next instant the swordship abaft the one I had so suddenly and summarily deprived of her steersman loosed her starboard bow varter. The chunk of rock, as large as a fine amphora, flew over our wreckage-cumbered decks and splashed into the sea well forward of our starboard beam. Again the crew of Dram Constant cheered.
But there were bowmen of Loh aboard the swifters, also, and a dozen multicolored arrows sprouted from the timbers of the argenter, and a crewman staggered back, cursing wildly, a long shaft embedded in his shoulder, the dark blood running down.
Wasting arrows has been a pastime in which I have never been interested. I shot only when absolutely sure of hitting a target; and I made of those targets the chief men of the swordships, for one oarsman more or less will not halt a galleass in full course.
The island richly clothed in a choked and brilliant vegetation toward which we drifted was appreciably closer now. The swordships closed in. There were seven of them, and they worked as one, obviously under the orders of a single commander. I call them galleasses because, in truth, lean and low in the water though they were, they were built with a far greater freeboard than the swifters of the Eye of the World. They would have need of that freeboard on the outer oceans. To add to the correctness of my description they carried varters in the broadside position, shooting over the single bank of oars. When an arrow feathered itself into the planking hard by Pando, and Tilda screamed, I told Inch to take them both into the aft staterooms. I wanted Inch out of this long-range stuff, just as much as Tilda and her son, for his ax would be invaluable at close-quarters; now he was merely a target. The swordships kept on with their attack. I fancied they were as unhandy in the sea as is any compromise between the out-and-out galley form and the complete sailing vessel. They looked dangerous ships — dangerous to those who sailed them.
The very aftermath of the storm, the long deep-swell waves, were aiding us by preventing the typical galley tactic of ram and board.
Soon, however, we must tangle up with those other two hopeless wrecks and strike the shore. When that happened the swordships’ crews would beach and board us. We had little chance, for the pirate ships carried large crews.