Tiger veered to port to pass wide of the pirate. He almost felt the sigh of a relief go up from the enemy ship. 'Fecklessness!' Erimenes cried disdainfully. At the last possible instant, the Tiger swung back at her foe.
'Star'rd oars, traill' Shend howled. As one, thirty-six oars snapped back alongside the ship, resting inside the line of her iron sheathing.
The pirate never had a chance. Tiger's prow ran over her oars. Damned wails and screams burst from the pentekonter as her starboard oarsmen were crushed between oars and benches. When at last the horrid grinding was over and the Tiger swung around her foe's high stern, the pirate galley lay motionless in the water.
Then with a thump and a scrape, the bireme came alongside. Fost forgot the Tiger.
Moriana had kept her eye on the approaching bireme and sent some shrewdly aimed arrows in its direction. Now she laid her bow aside and took up sword and shield. She had provided herself with a light leather jerkin for body protection and her Grasslander boots were rolled up to protect her thighs. Fost hoped it was enough. He hoped he had enough, too, with shield and helmet augmenting his tattered mail vest.
Screeching like angry ravens, the pirates swarmed up over the side. The bireme only lacked a foot of Wyvern's freeboard, so there was only Onsulomulo's crew to fend them off. Wyvern held a hundred and twenty men; the bireme easily three times that many. The fight was hopeless from the outset.
'Magic!' Erimenes cried as Moriana and Fost engaged yelling pirates in a skirl of blades. 'Use your magic!'
'Can't!' she cried, taking the thrust of a boarding pike on her shield. 'Too many!'
'A fireball'd cool their ardor,' said the genie, mixing metaphors wildly. 'Shrewdly struck, friend Fost.'
'It'd set the ship ablaze, you dunce!' Fost shouted back, as the partner of the man he'd just killed swung an axe at his head.
The battle came to him in surrealistic flashes. Bearded faces distorted with rage or pain as his blade bit home; Moriana's slim sword flickered like a tongue of flame, its tip tracing lines of blood in the air as it struck and darted away; Onsulomulo danced through the crush of sweating, bloody bodies and fought using two short swords, hamstringing, stabbing kidneys, capturing swung cutlasses between his blades and spinning them away with a scissors twist; Magister Banshau, prodded in the belly by a blond-bearded pirate, raised a shrill keening of fury, swept a large tar barrel up above his head and sent it bowling down the decks like a runaway boulder crushing half a dozen pirates to bloody gruel. They all fought well. Erimenes crowed encouragement and Ziore, wincing with pain at what she must do, clouded the minds and slowed the reactions of pirates as they closed with Moriana. But it was all in vain, as Fost knew when he thrust his sword into an angry face and counted the eighth he'd killed with no slackening in the tide of enemies. The day was lost. Sheer value wouldn't offset the crushing weight of numbers.
Then with a bang! the Tiger drove its spur through the bireme's stern and her corvus thumped against the stern to allow Tim Devistri to lead the Tolvirot crew, rowers and all, up and over and in among the pirates. The battle was as good as ended.
Later, Fost and Moriana lay exhausted in their stateroom. The sweat of battle had been washed from their limbs in a cold stream of water pumped by bloody, bandaged, grinning seamen. Now their limbs were clad in the sweat of lovemaking of a fervor unusual even for them. The nearness of death had made the sensations all the sharper.
Moriana lay at Fost's side running fingers through the hair on his chest. He yelped as they explored a sticking plaster the ship's surgeon had slapped over a shallow puncture where a lucky pike thrust had popped a few more rings of his hapless chain mail shirt.
'I never would have thought the Tolvirot could fight like that,' she mused. 'They're mercenaries, after all. They fight for money, not conviction.'
'They've convictions. They're protecting freedom of trade, and that's powerful medicine to a Tolvirot. And does a highly paid artisan do lesser work merely for being higher paid?'
'I suppose not.' The ship creaked and sighed about them, a note of smugness in the sounds, as if the ship, too, were happily surprised to find itself still alive and free.
'Most of all, I guess, they fight for pride. A sense of honor.' He shrugged. 'Most soldiers fight for that, in spite of claims for creed or country.' 'You may be right.' She turned to nibble on his ear.
He squirmed. He resisted, only for the sheer pleasure of prolonging the sensation. She reached down and grabbed none too gently.
'Oh, well,' he said as he turned eagerly toward her. 'At least we're safe. Nothing can get past the Tiger.'
CHAPTER TWELVE
The whole populace of High Medurim had turned out to greet the Wyvern, complete with a skirling and banging military band, colored streamers and a troupe of naked dancing girls and boys, without which no public occasion was complete.
'At last,' Erimenes had said, puffing up like a courting frog, 'we receive attention commensurate with our status.'
Burly stevedores had swung Wyvern's fat stern up to the pier. The joyous tumult climaxed as the long wooden ramp was let down and the weary, shaken, but nonetheless gratified travellers set foot on the ancient stone of High Medurim. Singing traditional songs of welcome, the crowd swept forward…
… and engulfed Zolscher Banshau, hauling his vast bulk up onto its collective shoulders, bearing him forward in triumph to a state carriage waiting at the waterfront. An assembly of great and learned men, if their phenomenal beards and dizzingly tall hats were any indication, welcomed him aboard, while gorgeous maidens wearing diaphanous robes and foil haloes placed a wreath on his head and smothered his moustache with kisses. Magister Banshau, lying at ease on a sumptuous divan, beamed from the depths of gaudy floral wreaths as if he'd been named the Twenty-fourth Wise One of Agift. Shouting with joy, the crowd pelted along the sidewalks on either side of the carriage. The band fell in behind while nude brightly painted dancers scattered flowers and hard candies.
'Welcome to High Medurim,' Ortil Onsulomulo called down sarcastically to Fost and Moriana from the sterncastle. Not even Erimenes had anything to say to that.
They were still standing at the foot of the ramp when a carriage appeared. A fraction the size of the one bearing away the Wirixer mage, it was impressive enough, black enamelled and polished so obsessively that a courtier could use it as a mirror. The muffled, hooded driver brought the landau to a noisy halt in front of Fost and Moriana. A curtained door swung open and a clean-shaven man wearing a gleaming black uniform stepped out.
'I am General Falaris, Imperial Intelligence Service,' he announced. 'You are the Princess Moriana?' Startled, Moriana nodded. He bowed perfunctorily. 'Please come with me, Your Highness.' He shot hurried looks in both directions. 'Get in quickly before anyone sees.'
Fost felt nostalgic tears sting his eyes. 'Imperial Intelligence' was a contradiction in terms. Any Medurimin above the age of three knew who the shiny black landaus belonged to. They could as effectively keep secrets by hiring criers to proclaim that mysterious visitors had arrived by ship to confer with the Emperor.
The general's invitation had not included Fost. Moriana solved that problem by grabbing his arm and dragging him into the box after her. General Falaris looked doubtful at this turn of events but said nothing.
Fost went to Emperor Teom the Decadent's palace in a daze. The familiar sights and sounds of his birth city overwhelmed him. The richness, the poverty, the places of learning, the pits of dismal ignorance. He peered out from behind the golden curtains in the landau and saw urchins begging in the streets, old men, toothless and blind, directing pickpockets and cuffing the younglings incapable of stealing enough. He had been there – once. Now he was on his way to the palace of the Emperor.