Wace stood his ground on the foredeck, directing the fire of its banked engines: stones, quarrels, bombs, oil-streams, hurled across a few meters to shower splinters and char wood as they struck. Once he organized a bucket brigade, to put out the fire set by an enemy hit. Once he saw one of his new catapults, and its crew, smashed by a two-ton rock, and forced the survivors to lever that stone into the sea and rejoin the fight. He saw how sails grew tattered, yards sagged drunkenly, bodies heaped themselves on both vessels after each clumsy round. And he wondered, in a dim part of his brain, why life had no more sense, anywhere in the known universe, than to be forever tearing itself.
Van Rijn did not have the quality of crew to win by sheer bombardment, like a neolithic Nelson. Nor did he especially want to try boarding still another craft; it was all his little tyro force could do to man and fight this one. But he pressed stubbornly in, holding the helmsmen to their collision course, going belowdecks himself to keep exhausted Lannachska at their heavy oars. And his raft wallowed its way through a firestorm, a stonestorm, a storm of living bodies, until it was almost on the enemy vessel.
Then horns hooted among the Drak’honai, their sweeps churned water and they broke from their place in the Fleet’s formation to disengage.
Van Rijn let them go, vanishing into the hazed masts and cordage that reached for kilometers around him. He stumped to the nearest hatch, went down through the poopdeck cabins and so out on the main deck. He rubbed his hands and chortled. “Aha! We gave him a little scare, eh, what say? He’ll not come near any of our boats soon again, him!”
“I don’t understand, councilor,” said Angrek, with immense respect. “We had a smaller crew, with far less skill. He ought to have stayed put, or even moved in on us. He could have wiped us out, if we didn’t abandon ship altogether.”
“Ah!” said Van Rijn. He wagged a sausagelike finger. “But you see, my young and innocent one, he is carrying females and cubs, as well as many valuable tools and other goods. His whole life is on his raft. He dare not risk its destruction; we could so easy set it hopeless afire, even if we can’t make capture. Ha! It will be a frosty morning in hell when they outthink Nicholas van Rijn, by damn!”
“Females—” Angrek’s eyes shifted to the forecastle. A lickerish light rose in them.
“After all,” he murmured, “it’s not as if they were our females—”
A score or more Lannachska were already drifting in that same direction, elaborately casual — but their wings were held stiff and their tails twitched. It was noteworthy that more of the recent oarsmen were in that group than any other class.
Wace came running to the forecastle’s edge. He leaned over it, cupped his hands and shouted: “Freeman van Rijn! Look upstairs!”
“So.” The merchant raised pouched little eyes, blinked, sneezed, and blew his craggy nose. One by one, the Lannachska resting on scarred bloody decks lifted their own gaze skyward. And a stillness fell on them.
Up there, the struggle was ending.
Delp had finally assembled his forces into a single irresistible mass and taken them down as a unit to sea level. There they joined the embattled raft crews — one raft at a time. A Lannachska boarding party, so suddenly and grossly outnumbered, had no choice but to flee, abandon even its own ice ship, and go up to Trolwen.
The Drak’honai made only one attempt to recapture a raft which was fully in Lannacha possession. It cost them gruesomely. The classic dictum still held, that purely air-borne forces were relatively impotent against a well-defended unit of the Fleet.
Having settled in this decisive manner exactly who held every single raft, Delp reorganized and led a sizable portion of his troops aloft again to engage Trolwen’s augmented air squadrons. If he could clear them away, then, given the craft remaining to Drak’ho plus total sky domination, Delp could regain the lost vessels.
But Trolwen did not clear away so easily. And, while naval fights such as Van Rijn had been waging went on below, a vicious combat traveled through the clouds. Both were indecisive.
Such was the overall view of events, as Tolk related it to the humans an hour or so later. All that could be seen from the water was that the sky armies were separating. They hovered and wheeled, dizzingly high overhead, two tangled masses of black dots against ruddy-tinged cloud banks. Doubtless threats, curses, and boasts were tossed across the wind between them, but there were no more arrows.
“What is it?” gasped Angrek. “What’s happening up there?”
“A truce, of course,” said Van Rijn. He picked his teeth with a fingernail, hawked, and patted his abdomen complacently. “They was making nowheres, so finally Tolk got someone through to Delp and said let’s talk this over, and Delp agreed.”
“But — we can’t — you can’t bargain with a Draka! He’s not… he’s alien!”
A growl of goose-pimpled loathing assent went along the weary groups of Lannachska.
“You can’t reason with a filthy wild animal like that,” said Angrek. “All you can do is kill it. Or it will kill you!”
Van Rijn cocked a brow at Wace, who stood on the deck above him, and said in Anglic: “I thought maybe we could tell them now that this truce is the only objective of all our fighting so far — but maybe not just yet, nie?”
“I wonder if we’ll ever dare admit it,” said the younger man.
“We will have to admit it, this very day, and hope we do not get stuffed alive with red peppers for what we say. After alls, we did make Trolwen and the Council agree. But then, they are very hard-boiled-egg heads, them.” Van Rijn shrugged. “Comes now the talking. So far we have had it soft. This is the times that fry men’s souls. Ha! Have you got the nerve to see it through?”
XIX
Approximately one tenth of the rafts lumbered out of the general confusion and assembled a few kilometers away. They were joined by such ice ships as were still in service. The decks of all were jammed with tensely waiting warriors. These were the vessels held by Lannach.
Another tenth or so still burned, or had been torn and beaten by stonefire until they were breaking up under Achan’s mild waves. These were the derelicts, abandoned by both nations. Among them were many dugouts, splintered, broken, kindled, or crewed only by dead Drak’honai.
The remainder drew into a mass around the admiral’s castle. This was no group of fully manned, fully equipped rafts and canoes; no crew had escaped losses, and a good many vessels were battered nearly into uselessness. If the Fleet could get half their normal fighting strength back into action, they would be very, very lucky.
Nevertheless, this would be almost three times as many units as the Lannachska now held in toto. The numbers of males on either side were roughly equal; but, with more cargo space, the Drak’honai had more ammunition. Each of their vessels was also individually superior: better constructed than an ice ship, better crewed than a captured raft.
In short, Drak’ho still held the balance of power.
As he helped Van Rijn down into a seized canoe, Tolk said wryly: “I’d have kept my armor on if I were you, Eart’a. You’ll only have to be laced back into it, when the truce ends.”
“Ah.” The merchant stretched monstrously, puffed out his stomach, and plumped himself down on a seat. “Let us suppose, though, the armistice does not break. Then I will have been wearing that bloody-be-smeared corset all for nothings.”
“I notice,” added Wace, “neither you nor Trolwen are cuirassed.”
The commander smoothed his mahogany fur with a nervous hand. “That’s for the dignity of the Flock,” he muttered. “Those muck-walkers aren’t going to think I’m afraid of them.”