Renegade of Kregen Read Online Free PDF Page B

swifter is your true galley, lean and deadly; these boats, although slender of build, hauled their single bank of oars over the gunwales, in closed rowlocks of rope and thole pins, and they possessed neither ram nor beak that I could see.
    "You look a fighting-man," said Captain Andapon. "But your man—?"
    Duhrra was standing near. "He is not my man," I said. "He is my comrade."
    "Can he fight — with one arm?"
    "I will fight with one arm," said Duhrra of the Days. How anyone could ever imagine him an idiot — even with that idiot’s face — amazed me then.
    The master nodded briskly and went off shouting to his crew. The Bloody Menahem are accustomed to fighting. Thinking about that statement makes me realize that most nations of Kregen are accustomed to fighting, and there are many fighting-men; but not all men fight, as you know. Perhaps there is a greater proportion of warriors on Kregen than on this Earth in these latter days.
    This would be a bloody affray. If Captain Andapon struck without a fight the renders would probably butcher us all. There was the chance they might offer us the choice. If we fought I did not think we would win, for they outnumbered us. But from the tenor of the crew’s voices, and the way they handled their weapons, I knew they would fight.
    The men were talking among themselves and I overheard the way they called on the Gross Armipand to blight, wither, and destroy these rasts of renders. The name of Opaz was called on, also, with pleas for a successful outcome. How strange it is that a man can feel fellow feelings for men who are supposed to be his mortal foes! I did not like the Bloody Menahem. But I felt a surge of spirit as these Menaheem prepared for battle. If we were all slain we would all go down to the Ice Floes of Sicce together — blade comrades. Odd — odd and unsettling, those feelings that would not be denied.
    The four boats pulled up and then separated out of varter range to take us on the two quarters and bows. The crews of the varters were busily engaged in greasing and winding and coddling, and selecting their best chunks of rock, their straightest darts. A kind of ballista, the varter, with great penetrative and smashing power, hurling a dart of iron, or a rock, in a hard, flat trajectory.
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was not equipped with catapults. Their higher trajectory and longer range might have been useful; I could see artillery in the boats and so the varters would have to be adequate until the renders closed and boarded.
    Then it would be cold steel
    I had no bow.
    Standing higher out of the water,
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could shoot her varters earlier than the boats might. With that thrilling screeching clang the first varter loosed. The rock plunged into the sea alongside the first boat, raising a water spout. The other three followed, and the rocks flew. Very quickly the varters in the boats opened up and scored. A rock flew to thud most messily onto our deck, smashing two men and a boy into red ruin. How this brought back the memories!
    There were no grand concussions as the great guns fired, no leaping rumble through the decks, no swathing clouds of gunsmoke. But in all else — oh, yes, I had not been a sailor in Nelson’s navy for nothing!
    The boats came on. One drifted away, her larboard bank of oars ripped and idle, water slopping inboard, men tumbling out and swimming desperately for the nearest boat. A Deldar of the top spun about, there on the deck, clapped a hand to what was left of his face, trying to scream and only gurgling. Lines parted aloft and blocks spattered down. A bowman fell from the maintop screeching like a leem pierced through with a lance. Blood stank on the air, bright in the sunshine over the deck.
    "Prepare to receive boarders!" bellowed Andapon. He swaggered aft to his poop-ladder, clambered up, and so pushed through the afterguard clustered there to the starboard quarter. He wore a back and breast, and a huge helmet adorned with a mass of blue