Off Keevasien, the assatassi broke from the surface a hundred yards further out than the Golden Friendship. So full did the air become with them that those which flew low enough to skim the water and those who gained heights of fifty feet alike formed part of a solid body of fast-moving fish-lizard. They gleamed like a myriad of sword blades. The air became a sword blade.
The flagship was raked by assatassi from stem to stern. Anyone standing on deck was struck. The seaward side of the ship was covered with creatures, hanging skewered by their bills. So with the three other ships. But it was the boats, already waterlogged by the tide, which suffered most. All their company was wounded, and many were killed outright. The boards were stove in. All four boats began to sink.
Cries of pain and terror sounded — lost beneath the shriek of birds who plunged down to snatch a meal from the air.
The first wave of assatassi lasted for two minutes.
Only TolramKetinet’s men survived without injury. The tidal wave had washed right over them, so that they were still prostrate and half-conscious when the assatassi came over.
When the bombardment ceased, they looked up to see chaos all round. Sibornalese troops were struggling in the water, where large predatory fish were closing in. The Good Hope appeared to be drifting helplessly out to sea, its main mast shattered. The fire in the masts of the Golden Friendship was raging unchecked. All round, rocks and trees were covered with smashed bodies of fish. Many assatassi had impaled themselves by their bills high up in branches or trunks of trees, or were lodged in inaccessible crannies in the rocks. The death-flight had taken many fish a long way inland. The sombre jungles overhanging the mouth of the Kacol were now interpenetrated by fish-lizards which would be rotten before Batalix-set.
Far from being some morbid fancy, assatassi behaviour was proof of the versatility by which species were perpetuated. Like the otherwise dissimilar biyelk, yelk, and gunnadu, which covered the icy plains of Campannlat in winter, the assatassi were necrogenes and gave birth only through death.
Assatassi were hermaphrodite. Formed in too rudimentary a way to carry within them the normal apparatus of reproduction, assatassi propagation involved destruction. Germination budded within their gut, taking the form of threadlike maggots. Embedded safely within the parental intestine, the maggots survived the impact of the death-flight and lived to feed on the carrion thus provided.
They ate their way to the outside world. There the maggots metamorphosed into a legged larval stage, closely resembling miniature iguana. In the autumn of the small year, the miniature iguanas, hitherto land-bound, made their way back to the great parent sea, fading down into it, sinking into it as tracelessly as grains of sand, to replenish the cycle of assatassi life.
So startling was the sudden turn in events that TolramKetinet and Lanstatet stood up on their spit to look about them. The huge wave which had drenched all the foreshore was the prelude to an onrushing flood which set the Sibornalese struggling ashore into difficulties.
The first wave had rushed up the Kacol. Its spent waters were now returning, bringing black muds which stained the sea with their eddies. More ominously, to TolramKetinet’s left, a stream of bodies was making sodden progress out from the river mouth, accompanied by screaming seabirds. The general’s guess was that these were the slaughtered dead of Keevasien, about to find burial.
The incoming wave had overturned the Golden Friendship’s longboat. Those who did not stay submerged long enough rose to meet the clouds of fish-lizard.
SartoriIrvrash found himself struggling in the water with the wounded, among whom he soon saw Odi Jeseratabhar. One of her cheeks was torn, and a fish-lizard was embedded in the flesh of the back of her neck. Many of the wounded were being attacked by predatory gulls. SartoriIrvrash himself was uninjured. Fighting his way over to Odi, he lifted her in his arms and began to wade ashore. The water kept getting deeper.
His face came close to the assatassi embedded in her neck, his eye close to its great boney eye, from which all life had not yet faded.
‘How can mankind ever build up bulwarks against nature, when it keeps flooding in like a deluge, indifferent to what it carries away?’ he said to himself. ‘So much for you, Akhanaba, you hrattock!’
It was all he could do to keep the unconscious Odi’s head above water. There was a spit of land only a few yards distant, yet still the water rose about him. He cried in fear — and then on the spit he saw a man who resembled JandolAnganol’s hated general, TolramKetinet.
TolramKetinet and GortorLanstatet were studying the Sibornalese ship, the Vajabhar Prayer, which lay only a short distance to their right. The tidal wave had flung it ashore, but a swirling rebate of waters from the Kacol floated it again. Apart from the assatassi peppering its starboard side, it was in good order. The crew, thoroughly demoralised, were throwing themselves ashore and making off into the bushes to safety.
‘The ship’s ours for the taking, Gortor. What do you say?’
‘I’m no sailor, but there’s a breeze rising from on shore.’
The general turned to the twelve men with him.
‘You are my brave comrades. None of you lacks courage. If one of you had lacked courage for a moment, we all would have perished. Now we have one last exploit before we are safe. There is no help for us at Keevasien, so we must sail along the coast. We are going to borrow this white caravel. It’s a gift — though a gift we may have to fight for. Swords ready. Follow me!’
As he ran down the strand, his force following, he almost bumped into a bedraggled man struggling for the shore with a woman in his arms. The man called his name.
‘Hanra! Help!’
He saw in astonishment that it was the Borlienese chancellor, and the thought came, Here must be another that JandolAnganol has cheated…
He halted his party. Lanstatet dragged SartoriIrvrash from the flood, two of the men took hold of the woman between them. She was moaning and returning to consciousness. They dashed on to the Vajabhar Prayer.
The crew and soldiery of the Shiveninki vessel had suffered casualties. Some were killed; any wounded by the assatassi were mostly ashore. Birds darted over the ship, eating fish-lizards caught on the rigging. There remained a handful of soldiers with their officers to put up a fight. But TolramKetinet’s party swarmed up the seaward side of the vessel and took them on. The opposition was already demoralised. After a halfhearted engagement, they surrendered and were made to jump ashore. Gortor-Lanstatet took a party of three below, to round up any hiding and get them off the ship. Within seven minutes of boarding, they were ready to sail.
Eight of the men pushed the caravel. Slowly, the ship swung about and the sails filled, torn though they were by the fish-lizards.
‘Move! Move!’ shouted TolramKetinet from the bridge.
‘I hate ships,’ GortorLanstatet said. He fell on his knees and prayed, hands above his head. There was an explosion, and water sprayed all over them.
Their piracy had been seen from the Golden Friendship. A gunner was firing one of the cannon at them from a range of two hundred yards.
As the Prayer, at no more than walking pace, glided out of the shelter of the overhanging jungle, a stronger breeze caught it. Without needing to be told, two gunners among the Borlienese manned one of the cannon on the gundeck. They fired it once at the Golden Friendship; then the angle between the ships became so acute that the muzzle of the cannon could not be turned sufficiently in the square gunport to aim at the flagship.