Fires of Scorpio (16 page)

A rock rose from the Shank. Turning over and over in the air it arched up to splash into the sea twenty paces short. A howl of derision sparked from our prijikers.

The two girls remained calmly at their varters.

Another missile flew to drop short.

Again that derisive yell broke from our ranks.

If one of those rocks hit our group, there would be yells aplenty.

Wilma said, “I will take the forrard varter, sister.”

“Aye, sister,” said Alwim. “And I the aft.”

A couple of spare men apiece had been detailed to wind the windlasses for the girls. Wilma and Alwim were by way of being Varter Chujiks, a corrupt term and a slang way of saying they were gun captains in Earthly parlance. By this time I had formed a high opinion of their accuracy and expertise. If they could knock out the enemy artillery we stood a much better chance of carrying out the plan.

The next rock sloshed down just overside to larboard. The spray went whipping aft.

We roared on, with the ship leaping under the thrust of the oars. The Shank’s waist ahead of us swarmed with men. Her sweeps lashed the water, clumsily trying to turn her. For a single instant only a flashing remembrance of the time we went roaring down to attack a Shank leaped into my mind. Then we had smashed into the Shank and after a tremendous fight had bested him. But then we had been fighting with hardened Vallian seamen from a Vallian galleon, and we had a strong contingent of Chulik marines. Now we had a swordship and a handful of fighting men.

No, this time was going to be far different, if they got aboard us, from the time of Captain Lars and his splendid galleon
Ovvend Barynth
.

The two girls let fly their varters and the rocks crunched in. Then the arrows began to crisscross. We shot all the way in. And we were shot at all the way in.

Unlike the shanks in the ship
Maskinonge
we’d fought in the old
Ovvend Barynth
, these Fish-heads had two arms. We could see them busily drawing and shooting their reflex bows. Our archery replied. Arrows fleeted in. They were yelling over there as the ships closed. Rather, the noise was that thin devilish screeching any man, hearing, must shudder at. My shaft glanced off something in the way, and missed my aim. Philosophically, I drew and loosed again. One cannot always hit one’s target with the first shaft. Not like Seg.

Asnar the Grolt said: “Uhoongg!” or something that sounded like that. I gave him a quick glance. A long barbed arrow pierced his face, tearing away his cheek and exposing his teeth and eyeball. Blood ran. He did not speak again; but fell down onto the deck. In those closing moments as we bore in to ram, all a fighting man could do was commend poor Asnar the Grolt to his particular gods, and turn more sternly to face the enemy.

A rock appeared to me to be aimed straight at me.

It lolloped on like a friendly puppy about to lick your outstretched hand, only this puppy would rip off that hand and pulp the body attached to it.

The rock skimmed over our heads. In the din I did not hear it crash. The screams ripped out as though tearing men’s lungs with them. The stink of fish grew as we closed with the Shanks, that odious fishy stink that makes any man of Paz wrinkle his nose in disgust.

From our perch in the forecastle we could look down on the waist of the Shank. That space was crowded with men, with beast-men, man-beasts, halflings, all with scales and stinking fish heads and squabby fish tails. There was no drawing away as we foamed in to ram. Pompino saw that.

“Remember!” he yelled, hoarsely, making himself heard in the uproar. “Keep them off. We do not board.”

“Aye, horter,” said Rondas the Bold in his vulture’s voice. As a paktun his humor tended to the macabre kind. “We might not want to board; they will.”

“Then,” said the Chulik, Nath Kemchug, “we stop them.” Their sense of humor is atrophied, Chuliks; but they have voracious appetites for a fight. “By Likshu the Treacherous! I will take a double handful of them with me if I go down to the Ice Floes this day.”

“We just need to keep them from getting aboard in the few moments between ramming and drawing off!” shouted Pompino.

My Khibil comrade had not, I judged, seen a very great deal of sea-borne action. If those devils of Shanks got their hooks into us, we’d have the self-same devil’s job to break free.

An arrow sprouted suddenly from Wilma’s arm. She gave a scream of shocked surprise; then tried to carry on. She bent to her trigger as her crew finished winding. Pompino saw.

“Wilma! Go off the castle—”

“If someone will snap the arrow it can be drawn—”

“Go down, Wilma. D’you want to look like a pincushion?”

A rock hissed past so close it stirred our hair.

And, all the time these incidents had been occurring, little splinters of hardness in a sea of noise and stink and movement, we had been forging on and on toward the Shank.

“Prepare to Ram!” screeched Chandarlie the Gut. His voice bashed back to Murkizon. The drum beat increased, a frantic blam-blam that got into the blood and vibrated the nerves.

Redfang
fairly leaped the last few paces into the flank of her quarry.

Those last few moments before we hit passed as though I observed them in a dream, and all the fighting that followed, slow, hazy, almost perversely unreal, while the real events took place swiftly and in stunning flashes of rapid action. This strange dilation of time meant only that one lived through the horror for longer than it really lasted.

We hit.

The ram struck shrewdly along the Shank’s underbelly and so nicely timed were Murkizon and Chandarlie’s commands, that the oars flurried into powerful backwatering on the same instant.

Everything lurched forward. People clung onto whatever happened to be close. The jolt of impact juddered through
Redfang
. Some careless idiots lost their grips and sprawled headlong. Ropes strained and some parted. The ship jolted as though she’d run head on into a brick wall.

The Shank rolled. Now we should slide off neatly and our proemblion prevent the ram from entering too far into the side of the rammed vessel. Our oars, smashing the sea into foam, would haul us off.

Grapnels soared up against the sky.

Hard three-hooked iron shapes, they swung up and over and slogged down to bury their barbed fangs into
Redfang
. We had been hooked.

“Backwater!” Chandarlie yelled and heaved his gut around. “Their lines won’t hold!”

The drum rolled and rattled.

The oars dug deeply, all in perfect rhythm, all pulled through the sea together. The sea roiled away, churned into suds, and
Redfang
did not move.

“The ropes hold us,” said Pompino.

A boarding axe was grasped in my fist. Do not ask me how it got there, and my thraxter stuffed away in the scabbard and the bow discarded. The axe was there. I leaped from the forecastle down onto the beak. Grapnels stood there, their arms stuck, their shanks up and taut with the strain of the ropes. Like any sensible sailor who wishes to grapple a ship, the Shanks had used chains for a goodly length before bending on their ropes. I’d have to crawl right forward to get past the iron chains and slash the ropes. There was not a chance in hell of prying the grapnels loose under the strain on them, and the axe wouldn’t look at the chains. An arrow stood up by my head, going thwunk into the wood. Damned arrows! They would have to be ignored. I went on crawling forward.

“Cover him!” Pompino must have shouted that before he jumped down after me. I guessed it would be him.

The first grapnel rope parted — and believe me I hit the thing only a hand’s-breadth up from the link to the iron chain!

The second went and an arrow struck the blade of the axe as I withdrew. The haft vibrated like a harpstring. I held on to it and struck at the next. By this time I was beginning to become a trifle warm.

The height of
Redfang
over the Shank waist meant they had to shoot upward from there. The archers in the ungainly square end castles were shooting down on me. This was not, I may say, a particularly comfortable position. I hit the next grapnel rope and she parted, and that cleared all along the beak. At the time I was doing that, others of
Redfang’s
company were busily parting grapnels nearer to them.

And, just as I was about to congratulate myself on a job well done and to feel satisfaction that we’d denied the Shanks the chance of boarding us easily, I looked down over the enemy’s waist.

As I looked down on that crowding mass of scaled helmets and scaled men, a rock swathed through them. It chopped down five of them and mangled them in spraying green ichor. At least one of the girls was still in action, and archers as well, as the shafts spat in. Down there on that alien deck they were screeching their chants, waving their tridents, desperately trying to stop us from pulling back.

“Ishtish! Ishtish!” they screeched, in their own tongue, fishy and hissing and nasty as it was.

Then, as I looked down on that scaly mass a Fish-head somersaulted away from a door that evidently closed off a companionway leading below. He sprawled on the deck. In the doorway stood a man — an apim. Naked, hairy, he glared madly upon the scene on deck, and then looked up. He stared directly at me.

“Help!” he yelled over all the din, a ferocious bellow. “Help!”

The Fish-heads heard him. Tridents menaced him and the other apims and diffs of familiar features of Paz who came trooping up from below. It took little deductive skill to deduce these men were slaves, maintained to pull the oars in the fluky winds off the coast. No doubt when the Shanks were finished here they’d hurl the apims and diffs of Paz overboard.

Chandarlie the Gut bellowed at my back.

“That’s Quendur the Ripper! And I’ll wager that
^’
s his foul pirate crew with him!”

“Leave ’em!” someone else shrilled. “Pull back!”

“For the sake of Opaz!” screamed Quendur the Ripper.

“Let the renders go hang!”

An arrow scorched past my ear.

Pompino spat his words out in the uproar. “What now, Jak?”

“Why, Pompino, we cannot leave a fellow human to these fishy horrors, can we?”

“Back!” Chandarlie was yelling, and I could imagine him waving his arms, his stomach aheave-ho.

“They are pirates, and would have done us no good had they taken us.”

“Aye, you are right. But, by the Black Chunkrah, I would deny the worst fellow you could imagine to these Shanks.”

With that I threw the axe at a tall Fish-head who looked important and knocked his head all sideways, and snatched out my thraxter, and leaped down onto the deck.

Pompino’s despairing yell bounced after me: “Jak — you get onker!”

And then he was jumping with me and, as we had been before, we were in action shoulder to shoulder.

All a mad bedlam, a welter, a chaos, a leaping and skipping and slashing... We battled the Shanks on their own deck. Tridents against swords, the Fish-heads tried to bring us down. The rescued renders were not wholly helpless, for they had snatched up weapons in their escape. They began to bash their way from the companionway door toward us.

A little fellow with a droopy moustache and spaniel eyes screeched and flopped forward with a trident lodged in his back. He’d go no more a-roving across the wine-dark sea...

Our Rapa and Chulik comrades joined us, and we battled on. For a space it was touch and go; but the very audaciousness of the hairy filth, as the Shanks called us, leaping down into the attack confused them in their own onslaught. We had, as it were, thrown a spanner into the works, and now we had to extricate said spanners without loss. We could see no crossbows among the Shanks, and so they had none to span, but they’d know what a spanner was in this context — a fellow of Paz to be slain.

Fish-heads hissed and gibbered away around us, scales glistened. They wore ornamental branches of coral of various colors in their helmets. They carried spears and swords as well as tridents. They used heavily-curved bows. And they knew how to fight. By Krun, they knew how to fight.

We lost more men from the render crew before they could be hoisted up at our backs. The muscled body of the pirate chief, Quendur the Ripper, covered with the weals of the lash, pressed past. His face was a single black blot of anger. He held a trident and he stabbed and thrust and slashed with it as though a demon jerked his muscles.

“Fish-heads,” he kept on saying, over and over. “Fish-heads. Fish-heads.” Saliva spittled his lips. He looked mad enough to be loaded with chains against himself.

“Get aboard, dom,” I called across. “Sharpish.”

He kept on alongside us, slashing his trident about, and croaking out: “Fish-heads. Fish-heads.”

I put some snap into my voice. My words were interrupted twice by the need to knock a Shank over in the interim.

“Quendur! Get aboard the swordship!
Bratch!
”

He glared sideways at me. A trident hissed past and I grabbed it out of thin air, reversed it, hurled it back.

“You—!” he croaked.

“Get aboard.” I did not repeat that harsh word of command, bratch, for he had the message. He turned and leaped for
Redfang
. I didn’t know him. Maybe he knew me, or thought he did... Unlikely...

“Get going Rondas!” I bellowed it out. “Up with you, Nath Kemchug.”

They were both still alive, which was miracle enough, although both wounded. Pompino was still untouched. We fought for long enough to get the mercenaries away and then it was the old duel between my fellow kregoinye and myself. I was not prepared to make an issue of it. To do so would get us both killed.

“Are you going, Pompino, you stiff-necked Khibil?”

“I am in command here, Jak, you pompous apim. Get aboard and leave the man’s work to me.”

“Fambly,” I said, and leaped for
Redfang
. Before I hit the beak I was yelling for archers. Larghos the Flatch and his comrades laid down a carpet for Pompino, and I contributed as soon as I laid my hands on a bow, and the two girl varterists shooting superbly, swathed away the raging Shanks. Wilma’s wound was barely bound, and leaked red blood. But the mercenaries of Kregen are not quite like your mercenaries of Earth. The outmoded concepts of honor and pride and service rendered for payment given are not outmoded on Kregen. Perhaps the nearest to that you’d get on Kregen would be the masichieri; bandits who call themselves paktuns, to their shame.