Kingdom Of Royth

CHAPTER 10

Except for six guards on watch aboard each ship, all of the three hundred-odd men in Cayla's squadron slept through most of the day. Toward evening they began to wake and make final preparations-oiling weapons and armor, donning clean clothes, smearing their faces with soot for concealment in the darkness. The armsmasters set up their grinding wheels on deck and put razor edges on any weapon offered to them; the surgeons arrayed their salves and bandages and the less reassuring saws and hammers. By the time it was fully dark, the squadron was ready for action, and Cayla ordered Tuabir and Esdros and their first mates over to Sea Witch for a final council of war.

«We will pull alongside the breakwater to the canal and put the landing parties ashore. Thunderbolt's men will head straight into town; Prince's will move on the harbor. Witch's will hold the breakwater and enter the fort where the toll money is stored.

«Remember,» she went on, «don't get caught in any serious fighting with regular troops. The local citizenry may be armed, but your men can certainly take care of any shopkeeper rushing out with a club to defend his wares. And don't try to bring any ships away from the harbor. We will have to head north as fast as we can afterwards, and prizes will slow us down. Snatch as much as you can, then set the ships on fire. Do the same thing with the shops in town.»

Tuabir looked shocked. Wanton destruction of ships and property was not a pirate habit. They tended to leave what they could not carry away in the hope of being able to some day pay a return visit. But he had sense enough not to protest in those terms. Instead, he said, «If we set the whole cursed town alight, Sister Captain, how are we going to get out of it safely?»

Cayla shrugged. «Use your own judgment. But I want to see a good blaze against the sky before we shove off.» Blade had hardly expected her to admit her real reasons for wishing a thorough vengeance on the Counts of Tram.

The sea outside the inlet was almost as calm as that inside. The ships seemed to creep wraithlike across the glassy water. Blade finished his inspection of the crew manning the catapult erected on Witch's bow and came back to stand beside Cayla on the quarterdeck. She was grinning savagely, teeth gleaming in her blackened face.

«There will be screams and death tonight in Tram, as there were screams and death in our shrines. Yessssss,» trailing off into what seemed to Blade's tense ears horribly like a serpent's hiss. Then she also was silent as the ships continued their slow progress toward Tramport.

Only a little more than the promised two hours later, they saw a yellow light gleaming dimly ahead and beyond it in the darkness a spangle of fainter lights in various colors. «That's the lighthouse on the end of the breakwater,» said Cayla. «Alert the catapult crew» Blade went forward and watched as the men wound up their machine and loaded it with a whole cluster of heavy-headed lead bolts. Now the breakwater was clearly visible, silver gray in the darkness, snaking its way out from shore-did everything make him think of snakes? — toward the approaching ships.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a shout from ahead. The words came shrill and clear over the water. «Neralers! Neralers! Turn out the guard!» Blade nodded, the catapult twanged, its load of bolts hurtled towards the lighthouse. The light promptly went out. The oarsmen shouted warcries and bent to their oars, sending Witch surging ahead.

They crashed alongside the breakwater, and Blade was the first man to leap ashore from the still-moving ship. Men were already swarming toward him from both directions. For a moment he had to whirl and leap like a dervish to keep from being spitted like a fowl. Then more of Witch's men were dropping their oars and scrambling ashore, and the other two ships came sliding in and began disgorging their fighting men too. Blade heard Tuabir's voice bellowing farther up the breakwater. «Move, you sea turtles! We've got a long way to run!» and the clatter of weapons and pounding of feet as his men moved out, brushing through the scattered guards.

The lighthouse was clear of defenders now. Blade stationed half a dozen men with bows to hold it, then led the rest of Witch's landing party up the breakwater behind the other crews. There were already at least a score of bodies littering the breakwater or bobbing in the water beside it. He didn't have time to count whether they were pirates or defenders.

The map showed the toll fort as lying off to the right of the breakwater, up a short path and through a grove of tall trees. He led his men up the path at a trot without incident, but as they reached the trees crossbows suddenly began to twang from inside the grove. Blade saw two of the men behind him topple to the path and lie there writhing. But the whole force of fifty odd pirates were moving so fast that they were closed with their opponents before another volley hurtled from the slow-firing crossbows. Screams, oaths, the clang of swords on swords and the chunk of swords carving human flesh rose into the night.

Blade found himself confronted by a grotesquely short man with a plate cuirass, wielding a sword taller than himself with both fury and skill. He steadily gave way before the flailing dwarf, waited until the man was forced by the trees to shorten his stroke, then lunged past his guard into his face. Leaping over the body, Blade reformed his men with bellowed oaths and brandishings of his sword and led them quickly up to the fortress wall.

As a «fort» the toll establishment would never have stood against a major force equipped with even a few siege engines. But Blade's force was one of pirates equipped with nothing but their personal weapons. They would have been baffled utterly by the fort's ditch and single eight-foot wall if Blade had not noticed that several large trees had been allowed to grow within their own height of the wall.

He gave his orders quickly. Archers climbed some of the trees to pick off anyone on top of the wall. Axe men attacked four of the trees nearest to the wall. The remaining pirates drew back under cover. Bows began to twang and axes to flash and hack. «Make those chips fly!» called Blade. «We haven't got all night!»

He had barely finished speaking when with a crackle of splitting wood and breaking branches one of the trees tipped drunkenly, seemed to hang against the sky for a moment, then toppled over with a crash. It slammed straight down onto the wall, making a bridge over both ditch and wall. Blade ran monkeylike up the fallen trunk before it had stopped rocking, sword out and yelling to his men to follow.

Two of the men atop the wall had been crushed into red pulp by the falling tree, but some of their fellows were still alive and fighting. Two of them came at Blade with pikes leveled. He twisted, parried one pike thrust with his sword, grabbed the man by the collar, and slung him bodily off the wall into the ditch. The other drew back, but not fast enough, as Blade's sword whistled down and slashed through the pike shaft and one of the arms holding it. Then others of Witch's crew were coming up behind Blade to help clear the wall, and he was able to seize a branch and swing himself down to ground level inside the fort.

Another tree came crashing down and more broken branches and stones pattered down about Blade. He looked around him. Inside the wall was a small flagstoned courtyard, with three buildings set in a rough triangle in the middle of it. As he ran toward the first one, four more soldiers ran out of it. Blade stepped back before their rush, noting almost with detachment their shoddy swordsmanship. This was a sleepy and over-confident garrison. In a moment half a dozen of his own men again caught up with him, and the four soldiers died where they stood.

That was very much the story of the whole battle for the fort. Little knots of resistance popped up unexpectedly and chaotically and died minutes later. Perhaps the pirates were clumsy on land, but they were also numerous this night. Not that the pirates escaped unscathed. Six of them were lying dead or dying by the end of the fighting, and more were wounded. But even the dying raised a cheer when Blade, using the keys snatched from the body of the fort's commander, opened the huge iron-shod doors of the vault. Soon they saw their fellows bringing out chest after chest of gold and silver pieces, jewels, fine silks, painted vases, ornamented weapons-everything the Counts of Tram had taken as tolls from passing ships during the months gone past.

It took nearly half Blade's force to simply carry the chests, so he was just as glad there was only one prisoner to guard. The fort commander's daughter was a girl of nineteen, small, blonde, vaguely pretty. She must have been shy and nervous at the best of times and was now fortunately scared almost senseless and certainly far beyond making any attempt to escape. Blade had her hands tied behind her back and one of the pirates led her with a rope around her neck.

The fort's buildings were stone, but everything inside them was blazing as merrily as possible when Blade led his richly encumbered raiders back toward the waiting ships. In the confusion of his own battle, he had almost forgotten about the other two parties. But now as he looked up at the sky, he saw it flaring red and orange over both the town and the harbor. Then as he led his men out of the grove and down the path toward the water, he stopped abruptly.

A solid mass of helmeted and armored men, the heads of their pikes and halberds gleaming in the firelight, had blocked off the end of the breakwater. Blade saw swords and cutlasses flashing just in front of the soldiers, as the pirates tried to break up that solid front, but the wall of points and blades was too strong. Somebody had called out the regular infantry. From what Blade remembered of the Swiss pikemen whom these men resembled, if they once got a good start down that breakwater, they would sweep the pirates aside as inexorably as an advancing tidal wave and then turn to the ships.

Blade was not going to let the pirates become involved in a general disaster like that, regardless of what he might think of them in general, and particularly when Brora-and yes, Tuabir-would be involved in it as well as himself. He quickly gave his orders. Eight of the able-bodied men would stay behind and guard the chests and wounded. The rest-again he waved his sword, this time towards the rear of the infantry formation, and ran down the slope.

As he ran, he noticed a small figure slipping into the water and a bright blonde head swimming up the breakwater until it was just behind the front rank of the infantry. Cayla! Before Blade could wonder what she was doing, he saw her reach up and jerk one infantryman by the ankle. He went over with a yell and a splash. Before the weight of his armor could take him down, she thrust her sword up into the groin of a second man. As he screamed and crumpled, she leaped like a salmon out of the water into the midst of the close-packed soldiers. A moment later, the same mass of soldiers cut off his view of her, and he had too many other things to think about.

Blade's forty men were outnumbered at least five to one by the soldiers, but the soldiers were packed close together and concentrating completely on the enemy to their front. The pirates bit them from behind, by surprise, and at a dead run, yelling like a horde of fiends and laying about them like madmen. Some of the soldiers tried to turn and bring their pikes and halberds to bear. The pirates spitted most of these before they could strike a blow. Some dropped their pole weapons and drew short swords. These lasted a little longer. Some simply dropped everything including helms and armor and ran for it or leaped into the water and swam for it. These mostly got away, because Blade and his men were too busy with the ones who stayed to fight.

Blade was keyed up to the highest pitch, and he was a terrifying sight as he lunged and slashed and hacked and yelled. Run his dagger through the hand of a man trying to bring a halberd down on him, then take the man's head off with a backswing. A swordsman coming at you? Kick him in the knee and then stab him in the neck as he goes over. Blade's sword stuck in the wood of a halberd shaft and was wrenched out of his hands. He let it go, grappled with the halberdier and snapped his neck like a carrot, then darted under a sword thrust and butted the swordsman in the belly so hard that he crashed backward against two of his fellows and all three of them went over the edge of the breakwater to be carried under by the weight of their armor.

There were shouts and yells and running feet behind him, such an uproar that it penetrated even his battlefogged brain. He turned to see Tuabir, carrying off all things a quarterstaff, charging toward the breakwater at the head of his crew. They too were yelling like fiends. Blade saw the soldiers turn toward the new attack. Then by one accord and at one instant they broke, and there was a mad scramble to shuck off armor, helms, and weapons and get into the water and safety.

Not all of them found it. The archers in the lighthouse had plenty of light and great sport. And Blade saw Cayla splashing merrily about in the water, as at home as any seal or otter, coming up behind soldiers, jerking their heads back, and smoothly cutting their throats. The water was blotched with red patches when she finally pulled herself out of the water and came up to Blade.

Her shirt was hanging in shreds about her waist, and there was a feather-thin red line across the skin of her left breast. All of the rest of the blood that dyed her trousers was from her score or more victims. She was maddening and deadly and frightening and beautiful, and Blade felt nothing strange for once in reaching out and pulling her against him.

A cough from Tuabir interrupted him. «Sister Captain, Master Blahyd. I see Esdros' men coming up across the canal bridge. I judge it were time we were thinking of gathering ourselves together and making for the open sea.»

«True,» said Cayla slowly, as if reluctant to leave before she had thought up some other way of wreaking vengeance on the Counts of Tram. «A good night's work we've had.»

«The night isn't over,» said Tuabir with a note of impatience in his voice. «And we'd best be putting what's left of it to use in getting well clear of here before the war fleet comes down on us.»

Cayla nodded sharply, and all her dreaminess left her. She began barking orders with all her normal briskness, and soon men and booty were streaming aboard all three ships. Without waiting to stow or count the booty, the men took their places at the oars, the lines were cast off, and the last sentries recalled. All three ships backed hastily out into the approaches of the canal, turned north, and fled away as fast as their battle-weary rowers could thrust them along.

Half the sky was filled with a bloody glow behind them as they pounded along. Cayla, a blanket hastily wrapped around her, stood watching it as it slowly receded behind them. Blade went up to her and said, «Captain, how do we break through to the open sea?» He swallowed. «Do we use the same-method-we used coming in?»

Cayla turned at the note in his voice and glared at him. «You dislike the Guardians of the Cult?» Blade had sense enough to shake his head. «No, Blahyd, we head straight north. Before long we will come to the coast of a wide stretch of land long in dispute between Mardha and the neighboring barbarians to the north. It is a wild land, shunned by most. But there are numbers of little creeks and river mouths. We can find fresh water and lie concealed until the count's warfleet has exhausted its rowers beating up and down in search of us. And we can divide the booty and perhaps find some entertainment.» There was a glint in her eyes as she said that last word that made Blade feel vaguely uneasy.