One of the dromons far enough south for its captain to be able to see around the bulk of Videssos the city sent a horn call back toward the rest of the fleet. Other ships echoed it, spreading the word as fast as they were able. «That's enemy in sight,» Rhegorios breathed.
«Yes, it is, isn't it?» Maniakes said. He looked up into the heavens and sketched Phos' sun-circle above his breast. He felt taller, quicker, more agile, as if an enormous weight had just fallen from his shoulders.
Thrax shouted to the oarmaster. The deep drum picked up the beat. The Renewal fairly leapt over the waves, speeding toward the foes who had shown themselves at last. Maniakes peered south and east, for once regretting Videssos the city's seawall, because for some little while it kept him from learning how great a threat he, the city, and the Empire faced.
«By the good god,» he said when the Renewal, like that first dromon, had come far enough to let him get a good look at the foe. Dozens of monoxyla bobbed in the chop of the Cattle Crossing. Their paddles rose and fell, rose and fell, in almost the same rhythm as the dromons' oars. Since the wind came out of the west, their masts were down.
Thrax shouted again, this time to the trumpeter: «Blow each ship pick its own foe.» The call rang out and quickly went through the fleet.
Spying the Videssian warships between them and their allies, the Kubratoi shouted to one another. «If you were in one of those boats, what would you do?» Rhegorios asked Maniakes.
«Me?» The Avtokrator considered. «I'd like to think I'd have the sense to go back to dry land and try again some other day.» He shook his head. «I'd probably press on, though, figuring I'd come too far to turn back. I've made a lot of mistakes like that, so I expect I'd make one more.»
«Here's hoping it is a mistake,» Rhegorios said, to which his cousin could only nod.
Mistake or not, the Kubratoi kept coming. Now they shouted not just back and forth among themselves but also at the Videssians. Maniakes did not understand their language. He did not need to understand it to get the idea that they weren't paying him compliments. If the fists they shook at the Videssian dromons hadn't given him a clue, the arrows arcing toward his fleet would have.
Those first arrows fell short, splashing into the sea like flying fish. Most of the dromons carried dart- throwers that could shoot farther than any archer. When their darts missed, they kicked up bigger splashes than mere arrows. When they hit, as they did every so often, a couple of Kubratoi would suddenly stop paddling, slowing their monoxyla by so much.
As the one-trunk boats and the dromons drew nearer to one another, the Kubrati archers began scoring hits, too. Here and there, Videssians crumpled to the decking of their ships. One or two of them fell into the water. Maniakes saw one wounded man bravely strike out toward the shore less than half a mile away. He never found out whether the fellow made it.
More and more arrows rained down on the dromons. More and more men cried out in pain. «Is this going to give us a lot of trouble?» Maniakes asked Thrax.
The drungarios of the fleet shook his head, then brushed disarrayed silver locks back from his forehead. «This is like a mosquito bite, your Majesty. It itches. It stings. So what? Fights on the sea aren't like your fights on land. A bunch of silly arrows don't decide anything, not here they don't.»
He sounded perfectly confident. Maniakes, knowing himself only a spectator on this field, could but hope the drungarios had reason for confidence.
Up ahead, the dromon that had first spotted the monoxyla raced straight toward one, seawater slicing aside from its ram. It struck the one-log boat amidships. The crunch of the bronze-shod ram striking home was audible across a couple of furlongs. The dromon backed oars. Water flooded into the monoxylon through the gash the ram had torn. The Videssian vessel rowed off toward another victim.
«That one!» Thrax pointed at a one-trunk boat. The men at the steering oars swung the Renewal in the direction he had ordered. He called out course corrections with calm certainty. He'd done this before, after the storm on the Sailors' Sea. Anything he'd done before, he did well.
But, however well he did, the monoxylon escaped him. Maybe its Kubrati captain had as much experience dodging dromons as Thrax had in running down the smaller vessels. As the one-log boat and the war galley closed on each other, the monoxylon put on a sudden burst of speed, so that the dromon's ram slid past its stern.
Thrax cursed foully. «He was lucky,» Maniakes said, which was not strictly true—the Kubrati had shown both nerve and skill. The Avtokrator went on, «We have plenty of monoxyla left to hunt, and they can't all get away.» They'd better not all get away, he added to himself.
«Phos bless you, your Majesty, for your patience,» the drungarios of the fleet said.
While Thrax swung the Renewal toward the next nearest one-trunk boat, Maniakes turned to Rhegorios. «I've been patient with him, all right—patient to a fault. If I had anyone better—'»
«You would have put him in Thrax's place a long time ago,» Rhegorios broke in. «You know that. I know that. Maybe even Thrax knows that. But you don't. Sometimes there aren't enough good men to go around, and that's all there is to it. He's not bad.» Maniakes didn't answer. Having the fate of the Empire depend on a man who wasn't bad gnawed at him. But the sea fight, as it developed, didn't really depend on Thrax alone. It was every Videssian captain for himself, trying to crush enemy vessels that seemed as small and quick and elusive as cockroaches scuttling from one side of a room to the other.
One of those cockroaches would not get away. The Renewal rode up and over a monoxylon, capsizing it and spilling most of its warriors into the green-blue waters of the Cattle Crossing. The collision had slowed the dromon. Would it be able to reach the next nearest one-trunk boat before the latter could speed off? Maniakes shouted in delight as the ram bit into the monoxylon near the stern.
«Back oars!» Thrax shouted. The Renewal pulled free. The one-log boat filled rapidly. It did not sink—it was, after all, only wood. But the Kubratoi aboard, regardless of whether they eventually managed to reach Across, would bring back no Makuraners to attack Videssos the city.
Monoxylon after monoxylon was holed or capsized by the Videssian fleet. The imperials did not quite have it all their own way. Some of the Kubratoi shot fire arrows, as they had in Maniakes' earlier encounter with them. They managed to set a couple of dromons afire. And four monoxyla converged on a war galley that had trouble freeing its ram from the one-log boat it had struck. The Kubratoi swarmed onto the dromon and massacred its crew.
«Ram them,» Maniakes said, pointing to the nomads who exulted on the deck of the dromon. Thrax, for once, did not need to be told twice. The Renewal had not been too near the captured galley, but quickly closed the distance. Thrax guided the flagship between two of the one-log boats still close by the dromon. The Kubratoi had barely got the unfamiliar ship moving by then. It moved no more after the Renewal's ram tore a gaping hole in its flank.
Maniakes peered toward the western shore of the Cattle Crossing. A couple of monoxyla had managed to make the crossing despite all the Videssian fleet could do. Makuraner soldiers were running toward them and scrambling inside. A lot of Makuraners stood drawn up over there, awaiting transport over the narrow straight to Videssos the city. By the way the sea fight was going, most of them would wait a long time.
Together, Kubratoi and Makuraners shoved into the sea once more one of the boats that had made the crossing. Before Maniakes could order the Renewal to the attack, two other Videssian dromons raced toward the eastbound monoxylon. Abivard's men, being armored in iron, went to the bottom faster than Etzilios'. Otnerwise, there was not much difference between them.
«It's a slaughter!» Rhegorios shouted, slapping Maniakes on the back. «By the good god, it is,» Maniakes said in some astonishment.
Few uncapsized monoxyla still floated. Some of those that did, having managed to escape the righting, were paddling back toward the shore from which they had come. Kubratoi bobbed in the water, a few still swimming or clinging to wreckage but most of them dead.
«Haven't I said all along, your Majesty,» Thrax boomed proudly, «that if we ever got the chance to fight a big sea battle, dromons against monoxyla, I mean, we'd smash them to flinders? Haven't I said that?»
«So you have,» Maniakes said. «It seems you were right.» That Thrax had also said a fair number of things that had turned out to be wrong, he did not mention. The drungarios had redeemed himself today.
«I didn't think it would be this easy,» Rhegorios said. He was looking at bobbing bodies, too.
«I did,» Thrax said, which was also true. «These one-trunk boats, they're good enough to carry raiders, but they've always taken lumps when they went up against real war galleys. The Kubratoi know it, too; they aren't in
