Menaham army was slogging on toward the capital of Tomboram, Pomdermam, and thereby keeping in play King Nemo and all his forces. But, secretly, across the wide waters of the Bay of Panderk, a mighty armada of ships of all descriptions was sailing on, packed with men, to come upon Pomdermam from the sea and in a sudden and savagely unexpected onslaught rout the Tomboramin utterly.
This was bad enough. But, at least for Inch and me, there was far worse information. One of the spies, an agile pirate who hailed from Menaham and had been consigned to the galleys and subsequently followed the usual path to the island of Careless Repose, reported a choice tidbit of gossip. The Kov of Bormark — “a mere stripling!” — and his mother had been forced to flee and were hiding somewhere, Pandrite knew where.
I said one word: “Murlock!”
Inch nodded. “It would be like him, the obvious thing for him to do.”
“But he must be mad! Blind! Cannot he see that Menaham will use him and then toss him aside? He’ll never recover his estates and his title, by the Black Chunkrah!”
“Murlock Marsilus,” said the spy, his blackened teeth exposed as he smiled knowingly. “That’s the name. But he is not with the fleet for Pomdermam. He was seen — a girl I know told me, with many giggles — heading for Pomdermam itself, astride a zorca that he rowelled as though Armipand himself, may Opaz rot him, was after him.”
Then, bringing the problem squarely before me, the Menaham pirate nodded over the bulwark to the northeastern horizon. Black thunderheads piled there. All about our island anchorage the water lay listless and still, glassy, unbreathing.
“By Diproo the Nimble-fingered!” said the pirate, and spat — by which I knew him to have been a member of the thieves’ fraternity. “That fleet may just scrape through to Pomdermam, but no ship will follow for days!”
Everyone, it seemed all of a sudden, was looking at me. I could feel their eyes, like scarlet leeches, sucking at me.
An instant decision would be easy, perhaps fatally wrong. Just how far these pirates would follow my lead remained also a factor to be considered. I grunted something to Inch and Valka and went into my cabin. I automatically looked around for the scarlet-coated marine sentry at attention with his musket and bayonet — so far gone aboard ship was I in problems.
This was Kregen, four hundred light-years from the nearest Royal Marine and his musket and bayonet. I already knew the answer, in truth, this atypical and cowardly hesitation was merely my self-excuse for once again failing Delia. I loved Delia, and Delia loved me. We both knew each loved the other. Therefore there could be between us none of these adolescent lovers’ tiffs of immature passion, those fits of jealousy and rage — no lovers’ quarrels. So much of the literature of Earth no less than Kregen is consumed by these juvenile lovers’ quarrels, and disbeliefs, and worries over faithfulness. I knew Delia would not despair of me and I knew she would not marry of her own free will; it was chicanery that I feared for her, the deep plots of her autocratic father. She would know my duty lay with Tilda and Pando for the moment and then — then to face her father. I would have to be ruthless with him. Have to be. . Love gently forces one to adjust mental horizons. If love is selfish, crying: “She is
“There is much loot aboard the armada of The Bloody Menaham. That loot will be ours. Afterward, we will smash The Bloody Menaham and take from them wealth enough to make us all rich for the rest of our lives.”
I turned to Valka, who stood now in the position of my first lieutenant, Spitz taking the responsibility of varter Hikdar. “Make the signal to weigh. We sail at once.”
For a long moment there was complete silence.
Had I failed? Would they disobey? Then Inch tossed his hat in the air. “The Bloody Menaham!” he roared. “We rend them utterly! Hai, Jikai! Hai, Dray Prescot!”
After that it was a matter of getting the hook up and of setting all our oarsmen at pulling and heaving. One by one the other swordships followed our lead, for they recognized a strong hand at the helm and had no other plan. As we gathered into our stride a longboat rowed alongside, her oars splashing frantically. A tossed rope hauled up a chest and on its second cast fished up Viridia. She bounded onto the deck, shook the dark hair out of her eyes, and declared roundly: “By Opaz, Dray Prescot! You won’t get rid of me so easily!”
Nodding to that ominous blackness all across the horizon, I said so that only she could hear: “You may have joined me for your last voyage, Viridia the Render.”
She laughed recklessly, tossing the hair out of her eyes. “And if I have I would sail on that last voyage to the Ice Floes of Sicce with no other man than you, Dray Prescot.”
The black storm clouds whirled up into the zenith and the opaz light of the twin suns was blotted out in a hell of roaring wind and smashing seas and of a blackness like an impiter’s wings enfolding us. We battened everything down and held on under storm canvas. Now the swordships must prove if they were sea boats or not. Some render captains turned back, out of cowardice, out of prudence, out of dire necessity of a sinking vessel beneath their feet. But
And then — “Sail ho!”
Ahead of us and spreading across the horizon in a great cloud of canvas toiled the armada from Menaham. They straggled. They had caught the outskirts of the gale’s violence. The twin suns were sliding down into the sea, staining the vast expanse of ocean in bruised rubies and jades. Signals flashed from swordship to swordship, so that my fleet held back, riding out the last of the swell-waves, repairing damage, giving the tired crews time to rest and recuperate. Signals among shipping on Kregen had not reached to the sophistication of the signal book as invented by Kempenfelt and Popham; but by flag and lamp I was able to get my message across.
The fallacy that ships may be drilled like soldiers still holds among landsmen, and although the Navy had achieved remarkable evolutionary prowess, navies still could not under the conditions of sail and oar take up long neat lines of upward of a thousand ships, in four ranks, with outriders and scouts, as though they drilled on Salisbury Plain. For one thing, the length of lines of galleys, marshaled abeam, makes for vast acres of sea coverage, and the distances are such that signals take a good long time to reach from the commander in chief to the outer horns of his lines. So I had simply adapted a Nelsonian piece of advice:
“Sail or row toward your enemy whenever you see him. Any render captain who places his swordship into the guts of his opponent will not do wrong.”
Perhaps, at another time, I will speak more fully of that battle in the Bay of Panderk off Pomdermam. With the coming of the twin Suns of Scorpio the sea woke to long swaths of crimson and emerald. Birds flew low over the water, screaming. The sea lay heaving in glassy swells after the storm, and the wind died to a zephyr, so that it was all oar-work, and rowing, with the men standing and flinging themselves against the oars. Benches are provided aboard swifters and swordships where anything from four to ten men may labor at a single loom, and these benches are thickly covered with ponsho skins. There is nothing of the genteel sitting in your seat and resting your feet in slides and rowing as though you pulled an eight in some university boat race. The one-man-to-one-oar zenzile craft share something of that finesse. Not so the swordships. Here men stand and grip the loom and thrust it down and then, lifting it high, hurl themselves bodily backward, crashing down with numbed buttocks onto those benches and those thoughtfully provided ponsho skins. The benches exist to prevent them from smashing back to the deck, to support them for the next convulsive effort of jumping up and thrusting down. All the body is used in rowing a swordship or a swifter. Every ounce concentrated on dragging those massive blades through the water. So we thrashed on through the water. So we thrashed on through the glassy swells, the white water creaming from our bronze rams, bearing on in lethal pursuit of the armada of The Bloody Menaham.
The greatest problem would be that of individual renders taking an argenter and stopping for plunder. The
