The Man Who Counts

XVIII

Briefly, Wace felt sick. Had it all come to this, a chipped flint in his skull after Delp’s army had beaten off the Lannachska?

Then he remembered standing on the cold black beach of Dawrnach, shortly before they sailed, and wondering aloud if he would ever again speak with Sandra. “I’ll have the easy part if we lose,” he had said. “It’ll be over quickly enough for me. But you—”

She gave him a look that brimmed with pride, and answered: “What makes you think you can lose?”

He hefted his weapon. The lean winged bodies about him hissed, bristled, and glided ahead.

These were mostly troopers from the Mannenach attempt; every ice ship bore a fair number who had been taught the elements of ground fighting. And on the whole trip south to find the Fleet, Van Rijn and the Lannacha captains had exhorted them: “Do not join our aerial forces. Stay on the decks when we board a raft. This whole plan hinges on how many rafts we can seize or destroy. Trolwen and his air squadrons will merely be up there to support you.”

The idea took root reluctantly in any Diomedean brain. Wace was not at all certain it wouldn’t die within the next hour, leaving him and Van Rijn marooned on hostile timbers while their comrades soared up to a pointless sky battle. But he had no choice, save to trust them now.

He broke into a run. The screech that his followers let out tore at his eardrums.

Wings threshed before him. Instinctively, the untrained Drak’ho lines were breaking up. Through geological eras, the only sane thing for a Diomedean to do had been to get above an attacker. Wace stormed on where they had stood.

Lifting from all the raft, enemy sailors stooped on these curious unflying adversaries. A Lannacha forgot himself, flapped up, and was struck by three meteor bodies. He was hurled like a broken puppet into the sea. The Drak’honai rushed downward.

And they met spears which snapped up like a picket fence. No few of Lannach’s one-time ground troopers had rescued their basketwork shields from the last retreat and were now again transformed into artificial turtles. The rest fended off the aerial assault — and the archers made ready.

Wace heard the sinister whistle rise behind him, and saw fifty Drak’honai fall.

Then a dragon roared in his face, striking with a knife-toothed rake. Wace caught the blow on his shield. It shuddered in his left arm, numbing the muscles. He lashed out a heavy-shod foot, caught the hard belly and heard the wind leave the Drak’ho. His tomahawk rose and fell with a dull chopping sound. The Diomedean fluttered away, pawing at a broken wing.

Wace hurried on. The Drak’honai, stunned by the boarding party’s tactics, were now milling around overhead out of bowshot. Females snarled in the forecastle doors, spreading wings to defend their screaming cubs. They were ignored: the object was to capture the raft’s artillery.

Someone up there must have seen what was intended. His hawk-shriek and hawk-stoop were ended by a Lannacha arrow; but then an organized line peeled off the Drak’honai mass, plummeted to the forecastle deck, and took stance before the main battery of flamethrowers and ballistae.

“So!” rumbled Van Rijn. “They make happy fun games after all. We see about this!”

He broke into an elephantine trot, whirling the great mallet over his head. A slingstone bounced off his leather-decked abdomen, an arrow ripped along one cheek, blowgun darts pincushioned his double cuirass. He got a boost from two winged guards, up the sheer ladderless bulkhead of the forecastle. Then he was in among the defenders.

“Je maintien drai!” he bawled, and stove in the head of the nearest Drak’ho. “God sent the right!” he shouted, stamping on the shaft of a rake that clawed after him. “From, from, Kristmenn, Krossmenn, Kongsmenn!” he bellowed, drumming on the ribs of three warriors who ramped close. “Heinekeri’s Bier!” he trumpeted, turning to wrestle with a winged shape that fastened onto his back, and wringing its neck.

Wace and the Lannachska joined him. There was an interval with hammer and thrust and the huge bone-breaking buffets of wing and tail. The Drak’honai broke. Van Rijn sprang to the flamethrower and pumped. “Aim the hose!” he panted. “Flush them out, you bat-infested heads!” A gleeful Lannacha seized the ceramic nozzle, pressed the hardwood ignition piston, and squirted burning oil upward.

Down on the lower decks, ballistae began to thump, catapults sang and other flamethrowers licked. A party from the ice ship reassembled one of their wooden machine guns and poured darts at the last Drak’ho counterassault.

A female shape ran from the forecastle. “It’s our husbands they kill!” she shrieked. “Destroy them!”

Van Rijn leaped off the upper deck, a three-meter fall. Planks thundered and groaned when he hit them. Puffing, waving his arms, he got ahead of the frantic creature. “Get back!” he yelled in her own language. “Back inside! Shoo! Scat! Want to leave your cubs unprotected? I eat young Drak’honai! With horseradish!”

She wailed and scuttled back to shelter. Wace let out a gasp. His skin was sodden with sweat. It had not been too serious a danger, perhaps… in theory, a female mob could have been massacred under the eyes of its young… but who could bring himself to that? Not Eric Wace, certainly. Better give up and take one’s spear thrust like a gentleman.

He realized, then, that the raft was his.

Smoke still thickened the air too much for him to see very well what was going on elsewhere. Now and then, through a breach in it, appeared some vision: a raft set unquenchably afire, abandoned; an ice vessel, cracked, dismasted, arrow-swept, still bleakly slugging it out; another Lannacha ship laying to against a raft, another boarding party; the banner of a Lannacha clan blowing in sudden triumph on a foreign masthead. Wace had no idea how the sea fight as a whole was going — how many ice craft had been raked clean, deserted by discouraged crews, seized by Drak’ho counterattack, left drifting uselessly remote from the enemy.

It had been perfectly clear, he thought — Van Rijn had said it bluntly enough to Trolwen and the Council — that the smaller, less well equipped, virtually untrained Lannacha navy would have no chance whatsoever of decisively whipping the Fleet. The crucial phase of this battle was not going to involve stones or flames.

He looked up. Beyond the spars and lines, where the haze did not reach, heaven lay unbelievably cool. The formations of war, weaving in and about, were so far above him that they looked like darting swallows.

Only after minutes did his inexpert eye grasp the picture.

With most of his force down among the rafts, Trolwen was ridiculously outnumbered in the air as soon as Delp arrived. On the other hand, Delp’s folk had been flying for hours to get here; they were no match individually for well-rested Lannachska. Realizing this, each commander used his peculiar advantage: Delp ordered unbreakable mass charges, Trolwen used small squadrons which swooped in, snapped wolfishly, and darted back again. The Lannachska retreated all the time, except when Delp tried to send a large body of warriors down to relieve the rafts. Then the entire, superbly integrated air force at Trolwen’s disposal would smash into that body. It would disperse when Delp brought in reinforcements, but it had accomplished its purpose — to break up the formation and checkrein the seaward movement.

So it went, for some timeless time in the wind under the High Summer sun. Wace lost himself, contemplating the terrible beauty of death winged and disciplined. Van Rijn’s voice pulled him grudgingly back to luckless unflying humanness.

“Wake up! Are you making dreams, maybe, like you stand there with your teeth hanging out and flapping in the breeze? Lightnings and Lucifer! If we want to keep this raft, we have to make some use with it, by damn. You boss the battery here and I go tell the helmsman what to do. So!” He huffed off, like an ancient steam locomotive in weight and noise and sootiness.

They had beaten off every attempt at recapture, until the expelled crew went wrathfully up to join Delp’s legions. Now, awkwardly handling the big sails, or ordered protestingly below to the sweeps, Van Rijn’s gang got their new vessel into motion. It grunted its way across a roiled, smoky waste of water, until a Drak’ho craft loomed before it. Then the broadsides cut loose, the arrows went like sleet, and crew locked with crew in troubled air midway between the thuttering rafts.

Wace stood his ground on the foredeck, directing the fire of its banked engines: stones, quarrels, bombs, oil-streams, hurled across a few meters to shower splinters and char wood as they struck. Once he organized a bucket brigade, to put out the fire set by an enemy hit. Once he saw one of his new catapults, and its crew, smashed by a two-ton rock, and forced the survivors to lever that stone into the sea and rejoin the fight. He saw how sails grew tattered, yards sagged drunkenly, bodies heaped themselves on both vessels after each clumsy round. And he wondered, in a dim part of his brain, why life had no more sense, anywhere in the known universe, than to be forever tearing itself.

Van Rijn did not have the quality of crew to win by sheer bombardment, like a neolithic Nelson. Nor did he especially want to try boarding still another craft; it was all his little tyro force could do to man and fight this one. But he pressed stubbornly in, holding the helmsmen to their collision course, going belowdecks himself to keep exhausted Lannachska at their heavy oars. And his raft wallowed its way through a firestorm, a stonestorm, a storm of living bodies, until it was almost on the enemy vessel.

Then horns hooted among the Drak’honai, their sweeps churned water and they broke from their place in the Fleet’s formation to disengage.

Van Rijn let them go, vanishing into the hazed masts and cordage that reached for kilometers around him. He stumped to the nearest hatch, went down through the poopdeck cabins and so out on the main deck. He rubbed his hands and chortled. “Aha! We gave him a little scare, eh, what say? He’ll not come near any of our boats soon again, him!”

“I don’t understand, councilor,” said Angrek, with immense respect. “We had a smaller crew, with far less skill. He ought to have stayed put, or even moved in on us. He could have wiped us out, if we didn’t abandon ship altogether.”

“Ah!” said Van Rijn. He wagged a sausagelike finger. “But you see, my young and innocent one, he is carrying females and cubs, as well as many valuable tools and other goods. His whole life is on his raft. He dare not risk its destruction; we could so easy set it hopeless afire, even if we can’t make capture. Ha! It will be a frosty morning in hell when they outthink Nicholas van Rijn, by damn!”

“Females—” Angrek’s eyes shifted to the forecastle. A lickerish light rose in them.

“After all,” he murmured, “it’s not as if they were our females—”

A score or more Lannachska were already drifting in that same direction, elaborately casual — but their wings were held stiff and their tails twitched. It was noteworthy that more of the recent oarsmen were in that group than any other class.

Wace came running to the forecastle’s edge. He leaned over it, cupped his hands and shouted: “Freeman van Rijn! Look upstairs!”

“So.” The merchant raised pouched little eyes, blinked, sneezed, and blew his craggy nose. One by one, the Lannachska resting on scarred bloody decks lifted their own gaze skyward. And a stillness fell on them.

Up there, the struggle was ending.

Delp had finally assembled his forces into a single irresistible mass and taken them down as a unit to sea level. There they joined the embattled raft crews — one raft at a time. A Lannachska boarding party, so suddenly and grossly outnumbered, had no choice but to flee, abandon even its own ice ship, and go up to Trolwen.

The Drak’honai made only one attempt to recapture a raft which was fully in Lannacha possession. It cost them gruesomely. The classic dictum still held, that purely air-borne forces were relatively impotent against a well-defended unit of the Fleet.

Having settled in this decisive manner exactly who held every single raft, Delp reorganized and led a sizable portion of his troops aloft again to engage Trolwen’s augmented air squadrons. If he could clear them away, then, given the craft remaining to Drak’ho plus total sky domination, Delp could regain the lost vessels.

But Trolwen did not clear away so easily. And, while naval fights such as Van Rijn had been waging went on below, a vicious combat traveled through the clouds. Both were indecisive.

Such was the overall view of events, as Tolk related it to the humans an hour or so later. All that could be seen from the water was that the sky armies were separating. They hovered and wheeled, dizzingly high overhead, two tangled masses of black dots against ruddy-tinged cloud banks. Doubtless threats, curses, and boasts were tossed across the wind between them, but there were no more arrows.

“What is it?” gasped Angrek. “What’s happening up there?”

“A truce, of course,” said Van Rijn. He picked his teeth with a fingernail, hawked, and patted his abdomen complacently. “They was making nowheres, so finally Tolk got someone through to Delp and said let’s talk this over, and Delp agreed.”

“But — we can’t — you can’t bargain with a Draka! He’s not… he’s alien!”

A growl of goose-pimpled loathing assent went along the weary groups of Lannachska.

“You can’t reason with a filthy wild animal like that,” said Angrek. “All you can do is kill it. Or it will kill you!”

Van Rijn cocked a brow at Wace, who stood on the deck above him, and said in Anglic: “I thought maybe we could tell them now that this truce is the only objective of all our fighting so far — but maybe not just yet, nie?”

“I wonder if we’ll ever dare admit it,” said the younger man.

“We will have to admit it, this very day, and hope we do not get stuffed alive with red peppers for what we say. After alls, we did make Trolwen and the Council agree. But then, they are very hard-boiled-egg heads, them.” Van Rijn shrugged. “Comes now the talking. So far we have had it soft. This is the times that fry men’s souls. Ha! Have you got the nerve to see it through?”