The two rudder-deldars were yelling for help and reliefs rushed high upon the poop to grasp the rudder handles, to control the two paddle-shaped rudders, one on each quarter. Even as they reached the poop the galley rolled and squiggled in her snakelike fashion. To a groaning of timbers and sheets of spray flying inboard the starboard rudder snapped across.
Lilac Bird lurched to starboard, her larboard rudder almost out of the water. She spun around and water and wind smote her without mercy. Zenkiren had been standing near me, shouting to his men. As his ship lurched it caught him unexpectedly so that he staggered, tottered across the deck, and hit his head hard against the break of the poop. He dropped to the deck, senseless.
His second in command, a certain Rophren, jumped up, his face an unhealthy color. He stood shaking. Now, through the sleeting smash of the spray and the whine of the wind, we could hear, clear and close and ominous, the roaring sound of great waves battering rocks.
“It is all finished!” shouted Rophren. “We must jump for it — we must abandon the swifter!”
I went up to him quickly. I hit him alongside the jaw and I did not bother to catch him as he fell. The galley heaved up and down beneath me as I ran back.
“Keep on that rudder!” I shouted at the deldars there. “Hold her when she comes around.”
Then I ran forward, pushing past the spray-drenched whip-deldars who stared upon me with frightened, puzzled faces. At the main mast I collared some of the sailors skulking there and kicked them into hoisting a scrap of the sail, the yard braced hard up diagonally across the deck. Wind filled that bit of sail at once, pouting it out, hard and drumming. But the galley responded, impossible sea boat though she was. The foremast yard I had likewise braced hard around. We were drifting away to leeward like a bit of driftwood. Down there, iron-fanged rocks awaited us. Now, through the gloom, I could just make out the spout and leap of spray.
I had a moment of doubt that we could weather that fanged pile of rock. We were being carried broadside on downwind.
“Keep that rudder hard down!” I bellowed into the wind.
Slowly, slowly, we were forereaching on the rocks. But, I thought, too slowly, too slowly. Spray stung my eyes and I brushed it impatiently away.
I dared not hoist any more canvas; the galley would simply spring away like an arrow and impale herself on the rocks if she did not simply roll over in the first few moments before her head came around. Water broke over her in torrential sheets.
I clung on and hoped.
Rophren had regained consciousness. He had a group of officers with him as he approached me. Their faces showed the fear of the sea corroding within them, the hatred of me.
“You — the Lord of Strombor! You are under arrest!” Rophren spoke flatly, his fear shrieking at the end into his words so that he stammered over them. “We are all doomed — because you stopped me giving the order! We could all have jumped when I said and been saved — now we are too close to the rocks! Cramph! You have killed us all!”
A youngster with a florid face and close-set eyes whipped out his long sword.
“He won’t go under arrest! For I shall cut him down — now!”
The long sword glimmered silver in the spray, high over my head. It slashed down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I moved sideways and I kicked that florid-faced young man where I had kicked Cydones Esztercari, neatly, making him double up and retch all over the sea-wet deck. I took the long sword away. I held it so that Rophren and his friends could see it.
“Countermand a single order I have given,” I said, “and you die.”
Their hands bunched on their sword hilts. They were proud, arrogant men, used to command. They lurched on the decks as the galley surged and bucked and fought the sea. I stood there, limber and straight, balanced, and the sword in my fist maintained a steady arc upon them. Whether they would have charged me, desperate in their ill-founded belief that I was consigning them all to a watery grave, whether they would have remained, like chained leems, snarling and impotent, I do not know. I rather suspect the latter, for I have been told that when I, Dray Prescot, challenge a man with a sword in my fist I present a most daunting and unhealthy spectacle.
As they stood there, wet, miserable, and frightened, facing the boiling sea or the bright menace of my sword, a sharp hail lifted from the bows.
Up there Nath, my Nath of the galley bench, perched. He pointed and waved a dripping arm.
“Clear, Stylor!” he screamed. “We’re clear!”
We looked, those men like chained leems, and I. The rocks were moving astern of us, their spouting white-fanged venom dropping astern as we pulled away. Slowly, struggling for every inch, Lilac Bird labored her way past that cruel point of rock and so weathered the cape and we could run more comfortably into the gulf beyond.
After that it was merely a matter of a routine court of inquiry when Zenkiren regained consciousness. Rophren was placed under arrest. The florid-faced young man, Hezron of High Heysh, also was placed under arrest; but in his presence I spoke for him, knowing this had been his first cruise as an officer aboard a swifter and this his first storm.
“The dangers of the sea vary in proportion as one comes to know them,” I said. “I do not hold it against Hezron that his untutored fear impelled him to seek to kill me. Perhaps he may hold it against me that I kicked him between wind and water.”
Zenkiren did not smile; but I was watching his face as he sat in the seat of judgment at his table, with the other officers present and the glowering, pasty-faced Rophren between two men-at-arms, and I thought he might have smiled at another time. Zenkiren was a jolly man who loved a good belly laugh despite his ascetic brilliance.
“What do you say to that, Hezron?”
Hezron of High Heysh lifted his head. He was a boy who was used to throwing his weight about, that was clear, a member of a rich and powerful family in Sanurkazz.
“I do not forget an injury,” he said, and his words splintered in the cabin as Lilac Bird pulled toward the harbor. “I shall hold it against you that you demeaned me, that you dared lay a hand on me. I, Hezron of High Heysh. You will not forget that lightly, barbarian.”
I looked at him. I had heard the opprobrious epithet barbarian applied to me, as a stranger from the outer seas, more than once, but never like this, never with so much venom. I thought of the galleys of the inner sea, I thought of their fighting qualities, and I wondered. Those ships of Zenicce, which city was not popular on the outer oceans, and the wide-ranging fleets of Vallia, were they fashioned by barbarians?
Was the gorgeous enclave city of Zenicce barbarous? If it was, it was of a form and style of barbarity these swifter-men of the Eye of the World could not understand.
“If you wish to make an issue of that,” I said, and I know I spoke in a harsh and barbaric voice, “you are welcome to meet me at any time with weapons in our hands.”
“That is enough of that!” said Zenkiren. He looked annoyed. “Only through the courage and skill of the Lord of Strombor was Lilac Bird saved.” He made a face. “Both our consorts were lost.” This was true. Their timbers were washed up over the days that followed, with dead bodies. The slaves, where they floated ashore on balks of timber, were still chained to those timbers. Rophren was remanded to await judgment by the court of the high admiral. That was what, in effect, he was, although his Kregish title ran for five lines of purple prose.