John Norman - Guardsman of Gor

“Callisthenes! Callisthenes!” we cried. Hats were flung into the sir. Rejoicing, we embraced one another. Tears of joy streamed down grizzled faces. Even soldiers of Ar, at our benches, crying out, seized up shields and bucklers, and smote them with the blades of spears and the flats of swords.

“The tide turns!” cried an officer. “The tide turns!”

Callisthenes commanded twenty ships.

“Keep your benches!” called the oar master. “The fleet of the Voskjard approaches!”

“Callisthenes!” we cried, joyfully. “Callisthenes!” Joy, too, reigned on the decks of the Olivia . We could hear cheering even from the Tais , alongside of the Olivia .

“We are saved!” cried a man.

Callimachus, alone on the deck of the stem castle, with a glass of the Builders, surveyed the fleet, flung out across the horizon, advancing astern.

I climbed, joyfully, to the top of the rowing frame. The galleys, I could see, stretched from horizon to horizon. Suddenly I felt sick. “It cannot be Callisthenes,” I said. “There are too many ships.”

A man looked at me, startled, disbelievingly.

“It can only be ships of the Voskjard,” I said.

This insight was not unique to me. Almost simultaneously the cheering on the Olivia and on the Tais , too, ceased. Our three ships, silent, rocked on the water. We could hear battle horns, now, from not only the forces of the Voskjard moving towards us, off our bows, but we could hear, too, the notes of battle horns drifting across the water towards us from astern.

“It is the attack,” said a man, reading the notes.

“We are trapped,” said another man.

“To your stations, Lads!” called Callimachus.

I took my place at the oar. I was in consternation, and stunned. These ships, advancing from the south, were clearly ships of the Voskjard. But they could not approach from the south in such force, for the south was guarded by the fleet of Callisthenes. To bring a fleet in such force through the cut chain would seem impossible. Presumably it would have been brought, beached and on rollers, about the south guard station. This was the major danger we had anticipated in defending the river. It was for such a purpose that we had placed the twenty ships of Callisthenes at that point, to guard against this major weakness in our defenses. That the new ships of the Voskjard were bearing down now upon us, and in such force, suggested that they had not been opposed, that either they had been permitted to cut the chain and advance unmolested, or, more likely, perhaps, that they had been permitted to circumvent the chain by the use of the beach route about the south guard station.

“Ready!” called the oar master.

Callisthenes must have withdrawn his ships from their position. Too, his information on the power of the Voskjard had proved haplessly inadequate. The error in his intelligence on such matters must have been of the nature of a factor of almost three. His sources had been proved again, and even more seriously, unreliable. The ships of Callisthenes had been essential to our defense of the river. They had failed to support us in our fight at the chain. Now, it seemed, they had failed, too, even to prevent the third fleet of the Voskjard from making an unimpeded entry into the waters east of the chain, from which position, of course, they could take the defensive fleet in the rear. Callisthenes must have abandoned his post. He must have withdrawn his ships. He must, perhaps feeling battle fruitless, have retired to Port Cos.

Battle horns, then, from off our bows and astern, shattered the air of the Vosk.

“It is the end,” said a man behind me.

Notes of answering battle horns, from our stern castle, and from the stern castles of the Olivia and the Tais , almost lost in the din of enemy signals, gave response.

“Stroke!” called the oar master.

The Tina shuddered in the water, and then, once more, with her sisters, the Olivia and the Tais , her oars catching at the water, her ram half lifting, dripping, from the Vosk, defiant and gallant, leapt forward.

“There is the Tamira ,” said a man, pointing to starboard, at one Voskjard ship among others.

I discarded my sword, and seized up a knife from the deck. I placed it between my teeth. I dove into the water, from the bow railing of the Tina .

I was then among slashing oars and swimming men. An arrow pierced the water near me, then bobbed to the surface.

Behind me I heard hulls grinding together.

Voskjard ships crowded about the Olivia , the Tais and Tina . On bloody decks men held discourse with steel. The twang of bowstrings rang in the air.

I clung to a piece of wreckage. A man clung, too, to the other end of the section of planks. I did not know if he were a pirate or not.

It was late afternoon.

It was like a lake of bloody wood in the center of the Vosk. The ships of the Voskjard so pressed about our three ships that they could not use their rams or shearing blades. More than one Voskjard ship had been set afire by flaming pitch cast from another. More than one, at the waterline, or on her decks, it falling among crowded men, had been smitten with stones cast from the catapults of their own ships.

Fusillades of javelins, struck from springals, hailed down on pirate ships as frequently as they did on ours. Even arrows, as often as not in the fray, in the mixings and shiftings of men, indiscriminately, to the consternation of pirates, found unintended targets.

There was a movement in the water behind me, and I twisted suddenly to the side, turning, and catching the arm, its knife in hand, striking toward me. “For the Voskjard!” hissed the man. We struggled, in the water. I dragged him to me. I got the knife from my teeth and, under the water, thrust it, edge up, into his abdomen, and then drew it, deeply in him, diagonally, upward and to the right. The smell came up through the water. I kicked him away from me and, half submerged, he floated backwards away from the wreckage.

I turned to the fellow who had been clinging to the wreckage with me. “I am from the Mira , from Victoria!” he said.

“No, you are not,” I told him.

“I am!” he cried.

“Who was the commander of the Mira ?” I asked him.

Swiftly then did the fellow, turning white, swim from the wreckage. I did not pursue him. Temus, who had been the captain of the Mira , had been taken aboard the Olivia , that he might, by his skills of seamanship, give aid to the men of Ar.

A longboat was some twenty yards away. Archers were in it. They were hunting the waters. Already the men of the Voskjard were killing survivors.

I saw a man stroking toward me, knife in fist. He was a bearded, vicious-looking fellow. “For the Voskjard!” he said.

I slipped beneath the water. I came up behind the fellow and took his neck, bending back his head, in the crook of my left arm.

Almost at the same moment I saw the fellow at the tiller of the longboat turn it towards us. Archers stood between its thwarts, arrows fitted to the strings of their bows.

I lifted the bloody knife in my right hand. I let the fellow I had seized drift away from me.

“For the Voskjard!” I grinned, brandishing the knife.

The archers lowered their bows. “Well done, Fellow,” said the fellow at the tiller of the longboat.

I treaded water, and watched the longboat draw away. I heard, several yards behind me, the rending of strakes, taken by a ram. One of the Voskjard’s ships, in the press of battle, had struck her fellow.