Kyrios, after a moment of stunned disbelief, had the presence of mind to drop to the deck, beneath the cover of the timber bulwark. He looked up and saw the tiller banging aimlessly back and forth as the ship drove on under the erratic thrust of her oars. He shouted to one of his crew, who had also had the good sense to take cover, and pointed to the tiller.
“Matlos! Take the helm!”
The man looked at him, wide-eyed with terror, and shook his head. Kyrios mouthed a string of terrible curses and threats at him, then, still crouching below the bulwark, began to move toward him, drawing a curved knife from his belt. Matlos looked at the first mate, then at the untended tiller. The storm of arrows and darts seemed to have abated. Carefully, he rose to a crouch and moved toward the tiller, his eyes riveted on the fierce, unforgiving features of the first mate, and the wickedly gleaming knife in his right hand.
He rose tentatively, peering over the bulwark. The little ship was barely forty meters away now. Exposing no more than the top of his head, he reached up for the tiller.
At that precise moment, Stig’s first shot from the Mangler slammed into the pine railing that topped the bulwark, centimeters away from the tiller itself.
The iron warhead smashed through the timber, sending a storm of splinters flying. Matlos lurched away from the railing, his forehead lacerated by a flying piece of pine eight centimeters long. He yelled in pain and fright. Kyrios stared at him, aghast, wondering what sort of weapon could cause such damage.
One thing he knew, he wasn’t about to put his head above the railing to find out. He cowered on the deck.
Farther forward, in the waist of the ship, the fighting crew continued to yell curses and threats at the Heron. So far, the missiles from the little ship had concentrated on the steering position in the stern, and the rest of the crew were untouched. One of them, emboldened by this fact, seized a heavy spear and stepped up to the bulwark, his arm drawn back to throw it, his eyes searching for a suitable target. He made out two figures crouched over what appeared to be a massive crossbow in the bow of the other ship. He half turned toward them, taking his arm back a few more centimeters to get the maximum power behind his throw.
He never managed it. An arrow suddenly thudded into his chest. The spear fell from his nerveless fingers, clattering on the deck. Another crew member turned toward him. The movement saved his life, as another arrow from Gilan’s bow struck him in the upper arm. A second earlier and it would have pierced his heart.
Even so, the shock and the pain were unbearable. He dropped to his knees, holding the wound and sobbing in pain.
Stig’s second shot, from point-blank range, smashed into the twisted birch ropes that held the tiller in place, severing most of them so that the tiller dropped to one side, loosely attached by only a few remaining fibers. A few seconds later, the third and final shot severed the remaining fibers and the tiller fell overboard, into the Ishtfana’s wake.
On board Heron, Hal saw the tiller drop into the sea. “Oh, good shot, Stig!”
The galley could only be steered by the oars now, and the rowers were in a totally disorganized state. He could see no sign of anyone taking control on the stern. Farther forward, as Gilan and Lydia concentrated their barrage of arrows and darts on the rest of the crew, men were falling and crying out in pain.
He came to a sudden decision. Now was the time to take advantage of all this confusion.
“Tack to starboard!” he yelled, and saw the faces of the sail handling crew turn toward him, understanding on their features. “Now!”
He swung the helm, bringing the ship spinning on its heel to starboard. Watching the other ship, he sensed rather than saw the Heron’s port side sail come sliding down, the starboard sail whipping up. He heard the WHUMP of the sail filling and felt it through the soles of his feet as it reverberated through the deck planks.
In a matter of seconds, the little ship had turned through one hundred and eighty degrees, pivoting on the fin keel that gave her a solid grip on the water, and a fulcrum about which to turn.
Gilan and Lydia had shifted to the port side and were ready to let fly at anyone who showed themselves above the bulwarks. Nobody had been sufficiently foolhardy to do so for the past few minutes. None the less, Gilan sent an arrow humming just above the bulwark to keep their heads down.
The Heron gathered speed and Hal turned to Thorn, standing ready a few meters away. “I’m going to take out their starboard side oars.”
Thorn nodded understanding. Rudderless, the galley was out of control. Her only way of steering now would be with the oars. If Hal could disable some of them, it would make that task much more difficult. Besides, there was another opportunity. The galley’s officers and crew were disorganized and demoralized.
This was the perfect time to board.
As Hal angled the Heron in toward the starboard bank of oars, Thorn dashed forward and seized a grappling iron and a length of rope from under the rowing benches. He stood poised beside Lydia and the Ranger.
“Hang on to something,” he warned. “Hal’s going to hit her.”
They could see it coming, although the Ishtfana’s crew, cowering out of sight, had no idea what was about to happen. Hal arrowed the Heron in at an angle, sending her strengthened bow post slicing into the starboard side oars like a giant ax blade.
There was an ear-splitting crash of wood shattering as the oars split and splintered under the impact. Oar shafts and blades spun up into the air as the bow smashed through them. Splinters flew in a further deadly storm. Heron’s crew were ready for the sudden impact and crouched down undercover as their ship plowed its way through the rearmost six rows of oars.
On board Ishtfana, the rowing deck was in chaos as the butt ends of the oars were suddenly jerked and smashed in all directions, hurling rowers off their benches to send them sprawling on the deck, breaking bones and bruising limbs. The slave master, who had bent to peer out through an oar port to see what was going on, was caught across the jaw by one of the leaping oar butts. He fell senseless to the deck. Two of the rowers, seeing their chance, leapt on him, drawing the long knife from his scabbard. The rowing master had whipped too many slaves in his time.
He would never do it again.
On deck on the Heron, Thorn felt the ship come to a momentary halt, her bow wedged at an angle against the galley, with the surface of the water between them littered with broken oar shafts and blades.
He swung the grapnel line up and over, letting it slam into the wood at the galley’s stern, then heaved hard on it to set it tight.
As Hal called for Ulf and Wulf to loosen the sheets, Heron began to drift astern. Thorn quickly measured the distance with his eye and took a turn around one of the Heron’s bollards with the grapnel rope. The rope came up into a straight line, then, with a jerk, Heron began to move forward, towing in Ishtfana’s wake. Amazingly, some of the forward rowers were still at work, sending the ship crabbing through the water. Thorn gestured to Stefan and Jesper, then pointed to the rope.
“Haul us in!” he yelled. “We’ll board her!”
Hearing the call, Stig and Ingvar left the Mangler and scrambled for their weapons. Thorn glanced round and saw Selethen standing ready a few paces away. His curved sword was still in its scabbard. But now he had a small, spiked shield on his left arm. Thorn gestured to him.
“You coming, your Wakirship?” he asked, with a savage grin.
Selethen returned the grin with a smile on his narrow, hawklike face. He had a score to settle with the skipper of the galley.
“Just don’t get in my way, northman,” he said.
chapter twenty-two
As the crew hauled in on the grapnel rope, Thorn leapt up onto the bulwark beside the bow post. He had donned his fighting hand, and carried his small shield in his left hand.
The bow bumped against the stern of the Ishtfana, and as Ulf and Wulf m
ade it fast, Thorn leapt up onto the bigger ship’s rail.
“Come on!” he roared.
Stig was close behind him and they dropped lightly to the deck, turning to meet the group of men charging aft to defend their ship. The first to reach them drew back his sword, yelling a curse at them.
It was the last sound he ever made.
Stig’s ax cut the cry short and the man stumbled before falling over on his side, a shocked look on his features. Thorn parried another man’s sword with his club-hand, then slammed his small shield into his attacker’s face, sending him flying across the deck.
Selethen swarmed over the railing behind them, his attention falling instantly on Kyrios, who was slinking toward Stig and Thorn from slightly behind them, a heavy-bladed cutlass in his right hand and his knife in his left.
Kyrios was suddenly aware of Selethen’s gaze. The Wakir, taking in the other man’s ornate garb—he was dressed in a white silk shirt and wide-legged red trousers of fine linen, with a broad-brimmed felt hat adorned with a long peacock’s feather—mistook him for the corsair captain.
“Philip!” Selethen shouted. “Throw down your weapons!”
Kyrios made no reply, but he lunged forward, swinging the heavy sword down in an overhead stroke that would have split Selethen to the chin.
Had it landed.
The Wakir contemptuously flicked the blade aside with his shield, then swung his scimitar in reply, in a bewildering combination of strokes.
Side cut, back cut, overhead. The flashing blade seemed to come from several different directions at once. Kyrios blundered back in panic, barely managing to evade the lightning strokes of the master swordsman. With the dim thought that he should try to turn defense into attack, Kyrios attempted a clumsy lunge at his tall opponent. His sword slid along Selethen’s, the blades rasping together. Then, with a twist of his wrist, Selethen deflected Kyrios’s cutlass, leaving the first mate open to his riposte. The curved scimitar blade darted forward and back like a snake’s tongue.
But, unlike a snake’s tongue, the scimitar bit, and bit hard. Kyrios barely felt the impact. But he looked down in wonder at the spreading red stain on his shirt.
“I’m . . . not Philip,” he managed to croak, although he wasn’t sure why he felt that needed to be said. Then his legs gave out under him and he fell to the deck.
With the threat from behind eliminated, Selethen turned his attention back to Stig and Thorn, and the rest of the corsairs.
The latter stood uncertainly in a ragged semicircle facing the two Skandians. Two of their number were already out of action, and the remainder had witnessed the incredible speed and power of the Skandian warriors as they dealt with that first attack. They had also seen the ease with which Selethen defeated Kyrios. As a result, none of them was willing to be the first to face fighters such as these.
A deep growl began to form in Thorn’s chest. He hated indecision and delay. He knew momentum was everything in a fight like this, where he and his companions were outnumbered. He was on the brink of launching an attack at the hesitant Hellenes. Behind him, he heard Ulf and Wulf scramble over the rail and drop onto the deck. That made five of them on board now and that, thought Thorn, was plenty to take on these overdressed popinjays. He tensed his muscles, singling out the first man he would strike down with his fearsome club-hand.
The he heard rushing feet behind him, and a huge voice roared:
“Clear the way!”
Next minute, Thorn was shouldered aside by a heavy body and Ingvar, spectacles firmly lashed in place and his voulge held across his body in both hands, surged past him to attack the Ishtfana’s crew.
Ingvar swung the voulge horizontally to the left, allowing his right hand to slide down from its position halfway along the shaft until it was adjacent to his left hand, on the butt end, adding immense leverage to the stroke.
The ax blade of the long weapon came round with a deadly hissing sound, like a scythe cutting into barley.
And, like a scythe, it cut down three of the Ishtfana’s crew, sending them sprawling and their weapons clattering to the deck. The first stroke was barely completed before Ingvar reversed the movement, snagging the shoulder of another corsair’s leather breastplate with the hook on the back of the voulge and jerking the man forward, off his feet. As he hit the deck, Ingvar jerked the hook free and lunged with the spearhead of the voulge at a fifth crewman.
This one had a shield and he tried desperately to block Ingvar’s stroke. But the big boy had lunged forward, stamping his right foot for extra power, and putting the force of his legs behind the thrust, as Thorn had taught him in their long hours of drilling as they sailed down the Iberian coastline.
As Thorn had predicted, with the force of his legs behind the thrust, Ingvar’s attack was unstoppable. The wood of the shield split and the spear point went through as if there were no resistance at all. It took the corsair in his left shoulder and he cried out, releasing the shield, leaving it dangling awkwardly on the end of Ingvar’s voulge. Then, clutching his shattered, bleeding shoulder, the Hellene turned and ran.
Enraged by the broken shield impeding his weapon, Ingvar got rid of it in the quickest way possible. He whipped the voulge back and forward in a violent movement that dislodged the splintered shield and sent it hurtling into the group of men facing him, knocking another to the deck, unconscious.
And that was enough for the rest of them. Terrified by the awesome figure with the shining black circles for eyes and the deadly long-handed triple weapon, they turned and ran.
Ingvar roared again and set off after them.
“Let’s get ’em!” he bellowed to the others. As Stig, Selethen and the twins surged forward after him, Thorn paused and leaned back, more than a little affronted.
“I’m supposed to say that,” he said indignantly.
Hal, having turned over the helm to Edvin, found Thorn standing, decidedly discontented, on the rear deck of the galley, glaring forward as the others surrounded the beaten corsair crew. As the latter let their weapons fall to the deck in a shower of swords, knives and spears, the shabby warrior gestured at the scene with his club.
“He stole my fight,” he said resentfully. “Ingvar stole my fight out from under my nose.”
Hal grinned. “He had plenty of room to move then,” he said. Then, shaking his head in wonder as he saw his massive friend terrifying the cowed galley crew, he added, “I guess the fight’s over.” He patted Thorn’s shoulder and the two of them started forward to join their victorious friends.
• • • • •
But the fight wasn’t over. Not completely. Three of the galley’s fighting crew, the first to turn tail and run, had made their way down through a hatch to the rowing deck below. The lines of rowers, chained to their oars, glared at them with hatred. With no one to command them, they had finally stopped sweeping their oars back and forth and the ship rocked in the even swell. The first of the corsairs, a man named Davos, looked at the angry eyes surrounding them. The rowers were chained, but how long they would remain that way was anyone’s guess. He saw the slumped figure of the rowing master on the catwalk between the rowing benches. Somewhere on his body was the key that would release the rowers. Perhaps they had already found it. It wasn’t a healthy place to be for too long.
“Let’s get out of here,” he muttered.
“Where?” One of his companions was wide-eyed with panic. He looked from side to side, seeing the hatred that surrounded them.
“We’ll go aft and out a rowing port,” the leader decided. “We’ll take their ship and cut her loose. There can’t be more than two or three people left on board her. And they’ll be sailing crew, not fighting crew.”
Which showed how little he understood the composition of a Skandian crew. On a Skandian ship, everyone was a member of the fighting crew.
They ran aft, crouching under the
low headroom, their progress marked by muttered curses from the rowing benches. But, in addition to the fact that the rowers were constricted by their chains, the three men were all armed with swords and none of the slaves was ready to confront them.
They reached the aftmost oar port on the starboard side. Here was the point where Heron’s ramming had caused the most damage. Several men were lying awkwardly on their benches and the oars themselves were splintered and foreshortened.
“Come on!” said Davos. The slave on the bench was huddled over, clutching a broken forearm, moaning in pain. The corsair jerked him roughly out of the way and leaned his head and shoulders out the oar port. The oar, shattered by the collision with Heron, was no longer in place to impede him.
He gave an exclamation of satisfaction as he saw the bow of the other ship no more than a few meters away, surging up and down on the waves, snubbing against the hawser that connected her to the galley.
He sheathed his sword and hung his upper body out the oar port again, gripping the railing above him with both hands. Then he kicked his feet clear of the port and worked his way, hand over hand, along the rail until he could grip the rope. He transferred his weight to the rope, feeling it sag under his weight, then swung himself across to the other ship.
His companions were close behind him. The three of them dropped lightly to the Heron’s deck and took stock of the situation.
There seemed to be only two crew members left aboard the little ship. One of them, Davos saw with a grunt of satisfaction, was a girl. The other was a youth. He was wearing a sword but he was small and slimly built. So far, neither of them had noticed the three corsairs who had just boarded the ship. Their attention was focused on events happening on the galley.
“Easy meat,” muttered Davos to his friends. He took a pace forward.
And froze.
The growl was deep and threatening. So deep that he knew it must come from a massive chest. And presumably that massive chest would have a massive head with massive teeth to match. He dropped his hand onto his sword hilt.