He thought of the amber ring he had given Doriyos.
The amber sun shone over the ship to the water.
That night he awoke with the ring in his hand burning like a live coal. Or thought he woke. But somehow the dream went on. The clamor and the redness, and through it he saw the peaceful deck, the tilted sail, the awning, the other sleepers. At the prow the watch leaned out, and through him and through the Zastis-colored night, blades seared down and up, and great doors rocked, booming.
“What is it?”
Lur Raldnor’s voice, wide awake, came through his skull.
He could not speak.
Suddenly his fingers were being prized open. He heard Raldnor curse, and then the ring was gone.
The night cleared. There was only sea and sky and ship.
“The amber,” said Lur Raldnor, “it’s red-hot.”
“Ankabek,” said Rem. He started to breathe again. He heard himself speak and understood only as if another told him. “Kesarh’s won his battle. The free Zakorians are routed.”
Raldnor said quietly: “How do you know?”
“I saw it. Mind pictures. This has happened, something like this—years—Never quite like this. From my father’s side, maybe.” Rem stared into the merciful, ordinary night. He said, “Zakoris. Routed, turning like a wounded tirr. Not against Lan, Dorthar, Ommos. Ankabek.”
Vodon Am Zakoris had lost the battle and therefore, though he lived, his life.
The thirty-eight ships that had turned for home, heavy with spoils from the southwest rim of Karmiss, last-laden from the rich little Ommos port of Karith they had left alight behind them, had met the navy of the Karmian King lying like a sailed city on the afternoon water.
The ships of Zakoris-In-Thaddra were pirates still, but they had always borne the sigil of Old Zakoris on their canvas. That a king sent out his fleet against them, sigiled in its turn with the Lily emblem of the Karmians, and with, at the prow of all their prows, a ship flying the scarlet Salamander of the King himself— that was challenge for challenge. Kesarh did them the honor of offering them war.
They came together then. The black biremes with terrified slaves at their oars and the leopard-bees of Yl standing ready on their decks. The Karmians’ lighter, Shansarian-modeled vessels, curved like swans, that Kesarh had favored, who favored almost nothing else out of Shansar, were rowed for pay and glory. Fifty-three Karmian ships; a score of whirling flame-throwers; half a score of the giant bows which fired their giant arrows of iron to a range of sixty lengths—capable of splitting timbers and breaking masts, at more intimate range capable of slicing a smaller craft in two; six towering fire-catapults; eleven buffer-shot bombards of oil. And packed on their decks close to five thousand fighting men.
Until this time, such an armament and such a multitude had not been sent against Free Zakoris. Fierce as they were, the Zakorians might yet have stolen victory, or wreaked havoc, or at least won space to win through. But there was not only force, there was deployment and preparation against them. Almost as they closed, they were encircled. As their weapons screamed out incendiaries, defensive shots came from the foremost Karmian galleys, knocking two thirds of the blow away, some of it back on the Zakorians. This was a trick not often mastered, but Kesarh’s men had mastered it. The machines of Karmiss had been perfected and the gangs trained to the job had learned to use these great weights, poised on hair’s breadth slipwires of steel, with the accuracy of deflecting spears. The Free Zakorians’ first rain of arson was dispersed, then, and the second rain came from the Karmian side.
As the fire-clouds rose, and the air-borne blades of Karmiss fell again and again, Vodon drove his own galley to engage the royal ship which, flaunting its Salamander, had drifted to the north.
To kill their King would stand for much, when so much else might be destroyed.
Vodon’s ship was not in time to reach the Salamander. A pair of Zakorian biremes fell upon her. He saw them grapple her, and knew all at once she was too easy to come up with. By then, so it had been found. The figures at her rail were straw dressed as men.
It was a joke in the middle of carnage. There was another joke, a memory of twenty-eight years before. The invaders were still grappled, disengaging, when the Salamander exploded. She had been filled with oil and primed, slow-burning. In a similar way the sea had been fired at Karith in the Lowland War, to repulse the fleets of Vathcri, Vardath, Shansar.
Wreckage and hailing flame showered about Vodon’s galley as they pulled away. The other two, panic and fire, were going down with the Salamander.
Vodon concluded Kesarh had not, after all, come in person to fight. This disheartened him, even as he despaired.
By sunset, it was not only the sun that fell burning.
In the dusk, five free Zakorian ships, scorched and ragged, limped from the maze of steam and smoke. They ran. There was no other word. Vodon’s vessel, which had by lot the battle-command, was the third of these. It was instinct by then. For having failed, having shown weakness, there was no place for which to run.
Trailing through the night at the pace of death, they were not pursued, but some of them were in poor shape and the sea drank two of them under. The other three took up men left floundering in the ocean, as reflexively as they had fled. While different men, those who had died of their injuries during the flight, they cast down there, to the courts of Rorn.
But the Rorn gods in the prows, to whom they had offered lavishly after Karith, went hungry now.
When the dawn came, they huddled at anchor, resting the slaves, not from pity, from necessity. Several were dead, and the corpses were unshackled and flung over after the rest. Thaddrian corpses, Alisaarian, Otts, Iscaians, and Corhls, came between the sun’s path and the water. There was even one blond corpse, a mix from the Old Kingdom, now Vardian Zakoris.
Vodon stood with his two officers of deck and oars, and their two seconds.
Their faces were sullen with knowledge. To return to Zakoris-In-Thaddra would mean death-sentence, and ghastly death, the reward of failure. Their other option was the traditional suicide pact, the recognized exit when contrary odds had proved insurmountable. Vodon, the ship lord, must kill these four men on whom the onus of the lost battle had rested. Then himself, the figurehead. Thus they would assure their families at least survived unmolested, retaining the very little they had. Their names would not be spat on.
They had not got far in the night. The current rocked them, racing in to swell the straits between Dorthar and Karmiss.
The dark men stood looking at the waves. Their hair was black, which, if they had sailed the western or southern oceans, it would not have been. The salt of those seas had a bleaching property, perhaps due to their proximity to the great Sea of Aarl, where volcanoes blew fire spouts as fish blew water.
Vodon brought his mind back to terminus. He made a gesture that they should go below.
Vodon’s deck master caught his arm.
“Wait.”
“For public flogging across chest and loins, slow dismemberment, disemboweling? No.”
“You mistake me. I’m suggesting one more deed before this.”
“What?”
The deck master pointed, away into the straits.
“We must go to Zarduk, or to Rorn. Let’s take him a present. Destroy one of the lives of the yellow men’s woman god.”
The sullen sodden faces sparked alert.
“The Anack temple.”
“Will their King Kesr not have protected it?”
“I never heard he did, Kesr has brought the men gods of Karmiss back. He gives Anack only offal at the feast.”