Blade raised his arm. Equebus moaned behind his gag. The screen fell away. Blade dropped his arm.
PTHWANGGGGG.
The arc was low. Blade saw the crowd around Otto begin to scatter, tardily, as they realized what was happening. The huge boulder with its human cargo hissed through the air.
Blade, who had not really expected too much - the gesture would have satisfied him - watched with gleeful amazement as the great stone zoomed at its target. It was zeroing in like a guided missile back in Home Dimension.
Otto the Black, who had never known a threat to his person in all his royal life, was equally astounded. When at last he screamed there was no one to help him. They were all running away.
Otto could not stand easily without assistance. He was too fat. Now he tried and fell to his knees. He rolled. He scrabbled. At the very last he cowered and screamed a command at the descending rock. In his very last moment of life Otto saw, or thought he saw, a very strange thing. Something, a man, was bound to the boulder that was about to crush Otto. No! Such things could not be. But this could not be, either. Not to Otto the Black. Death.
The boulder made a squishy sullen thud on impact. Blade was happy that he did not have to see the result. He leaped to the poop and raised his sword and barked out a string of orders. There was much to be done, to be done quickly, before the Queen could come out of shock and realize that Blade did not intend to return to her. And he had killed her only son.
An hour later, during which there was no interference - three small boats sent out to investigate were turned back by the catapults - Blade had the trireme, the Pphira, under way again. The flagship was burning and slowly sinking. Blade had lost all his galleys, though saving some of the men, and only one of Otto's ships, a bireme, remained afloat. It fled to an inlet and refused to fight.
The wind was strengthening all the while. Blade, with a new helmsman, put the Pphira straight at the massive chain. Pelops, who had not wiped the blood from his sword, stood beside him on the deck.
'What of Ixion?' Blade asked.
'He lives, sire. The arrow missed a vital point, though he bled a great deal. I cut oft the arrowhead and withdrew the shaft very skillfully. I am somewhat skilled in medicine, you know, and thought to be the ship's doctor. But now that I am a warrior - '
Blade patted his shoulder. 'Now that you are a warrior you had better pray a little. The chain is coming up. If we cannot break it all our trouble has been for nothing. If we cannot make the open sea we are all as good as dead.'
He turned to the man at the tiller. 'Bear steady. I want the full weight of the wind. Pelops, tell them to step up the oar beat by thirty. We must snap the chain at our first try - if not I doubt that we can do it at all.'
Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-
They rowed for their lives. The big square sail bellied out, full of a following wind. The oars Hashed down and in and up and down again.
Blade took the tiller, Pelops hovering beside him. 'We must hit it dead center,' Blade muttered. 'We must strike the weakened link. Otherwise we are as much prisoners as before.'
'I wish now,' said Pelops, 'that I had believed in Bek-Tor. At least He-She might answer my prayers.'
The Pphira struck the chain at full speed. There was a grinding sound, a crunching, as the boat ran up a bit on the chain. The big vessel shuddered and lost way abruptly. The chain held.
Blade cupped his hands and bellowed. 'Row, damn you, row! Row for your lives!'
Long oars threshed water into creamy frenzy. A moaning song came up from the rowing benches.
'Row!'
The chain parted. The big trireme was free.
Chapter Sixteen
From the writings of Aknir, Palace Philosopher of Greater Sarma, in the year 10536 AB - After Blade - concerning the Secret of the Oxem:
(Oxem is an old Sarmaian word for leather, now generally considered archaic and in some disrepute.) The reference is to a leathern bottle, made water tight with gum, in which the strange writings of Captain Richard Blade were reputed to have been found, washed up by the Purple Sea, after many years, near a small fishing village in what was formerly called Tyranna but has long since been annexed by Sarma. IE - War of Liberation, circa 10344-10350. That Blade ever existed is doubtful, yet the myth persists to this day, and in some parts of Greater Sarma he is regarded as a quasi-deity nearly on a par with Bek-Tor. In writing so long after the events a scholar must go with care, weighing fact against fiction and myth, and I hope I have been sufficiently circumspect in this regard. I myself am disinclined to believe that a Blade ever existed, so the writing in the leather bottle must have been some kind of a hoax. Why? By whom? I cannot answer. There is no question that the myth persists strongly - do we not now date our moon sequences thus, After Blade? The sad truth is that we can never really know for sure. And it is sad because I, Aknir the Philosopher, commissioned by Her Majesty Queen Fertti, Ruler of Greater Sarma, would like to believe in Richard Blade. On the evidence available, as a man of reason, I cannot. I can only present the writings, purported to be written by Blade in the ancient Sarmaian script and translated by me.
A final word about the translation. There were great, almost insurmountable difficulties. If Blade did exist he was certainly no Sarmaian. His grammar is execrable, his choice of words poor, his style - if one may presume to call it by that name - barely on a level with the barest beginner today. Whoever the writer he seems to have had the barest smattering of Old Sarmaian. Many times he uses words that, if not made indecipherable by time and the sea, were surely never spoken by a Sarmaian tongue. This translation had been a labor of love and, in many times, very nearly a labor of hate. My personal physician, Cyclo, will testify how many times I have come to him pleading hysteria as a result of working on this manuscript.
So I can only offer this with the comment that I have don'a9 the best I can. Whether or not Richard Blade ever lived in Sarma, the old Sarma, each reader will have to decide for himself. One thing is sure - there is a vitality, a crispness of spirit, a motivation of freedom and determination, about the tale that strikes the heart even over rational disbelief. This is, to my belief, the first transliteration of the Log, or the Secret of the Oxem, into Modern Sarmaian. I think it will take a firm place in our literature.
