was nearly as good as knowing where.
He undid the rope that had been around his waist so long, he'd almost forgotten it was there. Nothing worse than gentle chop stirred the Renewal's deck under his feet as he walked to the cabin. He opened the door as quietly as he could. Lysia's soft snores did not break their rhythm. He lay down in wet robes on wet bedding and fell asleep himself.
A sunbeam in his face woke him. For a moment, he simply accepted that, as he had clouds at sunset before. Then he sketched Phos' sun-circle over his heart, a sign of delight. He'd never known anything more welcome than a day of fair weather.
Still in those wet robes, he went out on deck. Sailors were busy repairing storm damage to the railing, to the rigging of the square sail, and to rips in its canvas. They'd taken it down fast when the storm struck, but not fast enough.
Thrax pointed north. «Land there, your Majesty. If I remember the shape of it aright, we're not so far from the imperial city as I would have guessed.»
«Good,» Maniakes said. «Aye, that's good.» Spotting small sails on the sea between the fleet and shore, he pointed in his turn, off to the northwest. «Look. All the fishermen who weren't sunk yesterday are out after whatever they can get today.»
«What's that, your Majesty?» Thrax hadn't noticed the sails. Now he did, and stiffened. «Those aren't fishermen, your Majesty. Those are cursed monoxyla, is what those are.» His voice rose to a bellow: «Make ready for battle!»
V
The fleet could hardly have been less ready to fight, battered by the storm as it was. All Thrax had wanted to do, all Maniakes had wanted to do, was limp into Videssos the city, unload the warriors and animals, and take a little while to figure out what to do next. Once again, the Avtokrator wasn't going to get what he wanted. The Kubratoi in their single-trunk boats were making sure of that.
«Dart-thrower's going to be useless,» Thrax grumbled, pointing to the engine at the Renewal's bow. «Cords are sure to be too soaked to do any good.»
Maniakes didn't answer at once. Till this moment, he'd never actually seen any of the vessels the Kubratoi had been using for years to raid his coast. They were, he discovered, more formidable than their name suggested. Each one might have been hewn from a single trunk, but the Kubratoi had taken forest giants from which to make their boats. Some of them looked to be almost as long as the Renewal, though of course they carried far fewer men. Along with their sails, which were made of leather, they were propelled by paddles—and propelled surprisingly fast, too.
They had spotted the Videssian ships, either before they were seen themselves or at about the same moment. Maniakes had expected that would be plenty to make them flee. Instead, they swung toward the Videssians. The paddles rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. Yes, they could make a very good turn of speed.
«We'll smash them,» Maniakes said.
Now Thrax didn't reply right away. He looked distinctly less happy than Maniakes would have liked to see him. At last, he said, «Your Majesty, I'm not worried about the dromons. The transports are a different game, though.» He started shouting orders across the water. Trumpeters echoed his commands. The dromons slid toward the less mobile, less protected vessels they were shepherding to the imperial city. They were none too soon in doing so, either, for the Kubratoi had no more trouble figuring out the way the game needed to be played than did Thrax. Their monoxyla were also making for the slower, beamier ships in the Videssian fleet.
«Maybe we ought to let them try to board one of the troop transports,» Thrax said. «I don't think they'd be glad they'd done it.»
«Something to that,» Maniakes agreed, but neither one of them meant it seriously, as they both knew. Maniakes put that into words: «Too many things could go wrong. They might get lucky, or they might manage to start a fire—»
«Wouldn't be easy, not today,» Thrax said, «not with the timbers soaked from yesterday's storm. But you're right, your Majesty: it could happen.»
One of the dromons, oars slashing the water, rushed at a monoxylon. The Kubratoi not only managed to avoid the bronze-shod ram at the dromon's bow, they sprayed the Videssian ship with arrows. A sailor fell splash! into the sea.
Another single-trunk vessel got up alongside a ship transporting horses. The Kubratoi didn't try swarming aboard the vessel, but, again, shot arrows at it as rapidly as if they were shooting at Videssian soldiers from horseback.
Thrax pointed to that monoxylon. «They're so busy doing what they're doing, they aren't paying any attention to us.» He shouted to the oarmaster: «Build the stroke. Give us everything you have!»
«Aye, lord,» the oarmaster replied. The drum that beat time for the rowers on the two-man sweeps speeded its rhythm. The rowers responded. The wake leaping out from under the Renewal's hull got thicker and whiter. Thrax ran back to the dromon's stern to take charge of one of the steering oars and yell directions to the man at the other.
Maniakes, by contrast, hurried up toward the bow. He hadn't been in a sea fight since the one in the waters just off Videssos the city that let him enter the capital. This wasn't like fighting on land; ships carried a company's worth of men, but were themselves individual pieces, and valuable ones, on the game board.
The Renewal had closed to within fifty yards before the Kubratoi realized the dromon was there. They were close enough for Maniakes to hear their shouts of dismay when at last they spied her. They threw down their bows then and snatched up their paddles, doing their best to escape the pointed, sea-greened beak aimed square at their stern.
Their best was not good enough. They'd slowed to stay alongside the transport, and needed time to build up speed again—time they did not get. Thrax had a nice sense of aim and timing. He drove the ram home as the Kubratoi turned slightly broadside to his dromon.
The ram did not hole the monoxylon, as it would have done to a Videssian vessel. Instead, the Renewal rode up and over the smaller Kubratoi craft, rolling and crushing it. The collision staggered Maniakes, who almost went into the sea. What it did to the Kubratoi—
Heads bobbed in the sea, but surprisingly few of them. The Kubratoi were demons on horseback; Maniakes had never before had occasion to wonder how many of them could swim. The answer, ft seemed, was not many. Some, who might or might not have known how to swim, clung to paddles or other floating bits of wreckage.
Videssian sailors shot arrows at the struggling Kubratoi. From what Maniakes could see, they scored few hits. It didn't matter. Either the Kubratoi would drown, or some Videssian ship would capture them once the sea fight was done. They might well have preferred to drown.
«Well done!» Thrax bellowed. «Now let's get another one.» He steered the Renewal in the direction of the next closest monoxy-ton. «Keep us going there, oarmaster!» he added. The thudding drum that pounded out the strokes never faltered.
Unlike the Videssian fleet, the Kubratoi must have stayed ashore during the storm. That meant they had no trouble getting fires started. Several single-log craft bobbed in the waves near another transport. Smoke trails through the air showed they were shooting fire arrows at it.
Maniakes wished he could have seen more of how that came out, but the Renewal was bearing down on the monoxylon Thrax had chosen as his new target. This one, unlike the first, was not taken unawares, and the Kubrati commanding it was doing everything he could to get away. The little leather sail was raised and full of air; the paddles beat the water to froth as the nomads worked for all they were worth. «Prepare to ram!» This time, Thrax had the courtesy to shout the warning a couple of seconds before his dromon crunched into the single-log boat. Again, Maniakes staggered at the impact. Again, the Renewal went right over the monoxylon. This time, though, that was a slower, more grinding business, because the difference in speed between the two vessels was much smaller than it had been before.
