Van Rijn grabbed the astonished ballista captain by the hands and danced him over the deck, bawling out,
Another canoe swung about, close-hauled. Wace saw its flamethrower crew bent over their engine and hurled himself flat under the low wall surrounding the ice deck.
The burning stream hit that wall, splashed back, and spread itself on the sea. It could not kindle frozen water, nor melt enough of it to notice. Sheltered amidships, a hundred Lannacha archers sent an arrow-sleet up, to arc under heaven and come down on the canoe.
Wace peered over the wall. The flamethrower pumpman seemed dead, the hoseman was preoccupied with a transfixed wing… no steersman either, the canoe’s boom slatted about in a meaningless arc while its crew huddled — “Dead ahead!” he roared. “Ram them!”
The Lannacha ship trampled the dugout underfoot.
Drak’ho canoes circled like wolves around a buffalo herd, using their speed and maneuverability. Several darted between ice vessels, to assail from the rear; others went past the ends of the wedge formation. It was not quite a one-sided battle — arrows, catapult bolts, flung stones, all hurt Lannachska; oil jugs arced across the water, exploding on ice decks; now and then a fire stream ignited a sail.
But winged creatures with a few buckets could douse burning canvas. During all that phase of the engagement, only one Lannacha craft was wholly dismasted, and its crew simply abandoned it, parceling themselves out among other vessels. Nothing else could catch fire, except live flesh, which has always been the cheapest article in war.
Several canoes, converging on a single ship, tried to board. They were nonetheless outnumbered, and paid heavily for the attempt. Meanwhile Trolwen, with absolute air mastery, swooped and shot and hammered.
Drak’ho canoes scarcely hindered the attack. The dugouts were rammed, broken, set afire, brushed aside by their unsinkable enemy.
By virtue of being first, of having more or less punched through the line, the Rijstaffel met little opposition. What there was, was beaten off by catapult, ballista, fire pot, and arrows: long-range gunnery. The sea itself burned and smoked behind; ahead lay the great rafts.
When those sails and banners came into view, Wace’s dragon crewmen began to sing the victory song of the Flock.
“A little premature, aren’t they?” he cried above the racket.
“Ah,” said Van Rijn quietly, “let them make fun now. So many will soon be down, blind among the fishes, nie?”
“I suppose—” Hastily, as if afraid of what he had done merely to save his own life, Wace said; “I like that melody, don’t you? It’s rather like some old American folk songs. John Harty, say.”
“Folk songs is all right if you should want to play you are Folk in great big capitals,” snorted Van Rijn. “I stick with Mozart, by damn.”
He stared down into the water, and a curious wistfulness tinged his voice. “I always hoped maybe I would understand Bach some day, before I die, old Johann Sebastian who talked with God in mathematics. I have not the brains, though, in this dumb old head. So maybe I ask only one more chance to listen at Eine Klelne Nachtmusik.”
There was an uproar in the Fleet. Slowly and ponderously, churning the sea with spider-leg oars, the rafts were giving up their attempt at evasion. They were pulling into war formation.
Van Rijn waved angrily at a Whistler. “Quick! You get upstairs fast, and tell that crockhead Trolwen not to bother air-covering us against the canoes. Have him attack the rafts. Keep them busy, by hell! Don’t let messengers flappity-flip between enemy captains so they can organize!”
As the young Lannacha streaked away, the merchant tugged his goatee — almost lost by now in a dirt-stiffened beard — and snarled: “Great hairy honeypots! How long do I have to do all the thinkings? Good St. Nicholas, you bring me an officer staff with brains between the ears, instead of clabbered oatmeal, and I build you a cathedral on Mars! You hear me?”
“Trolwen is in the midst of a fight up there,” protested Wace. “You can’t expect him to think of everything.”
“Maybe not,” conceded Van Rijn grudgingly. “Maybe I am the only one in all the galaxy who makes no mistakes.”
Horribly near, the massed rafts became a storm when Trolwen took his advice. Bat-winged devils sought each other’s lives through one red chaos. Wace thought his own ships’ advance must be nearly unnoticed in that whirling, shrieking destruction.
“They’re not getting integrated!” he said, beating his fist on the wall. “Before God, they’re not!”
A Whistler landed, coughing blood; there was a monstrous bruise on his side. “Over there… Tolk the Herald says… empty spot… drive wedge in Fleet—” The thin body arced and then slid inertly to the deck. Wace stooped, taking the unhuman youth in his arms. He heard blood gurgle in lungs pierced by the broken ends of ribs.
“Mother, mother,” gasped the Whistler. “He hit me with an ax. Make it stop hurting, mother.”
Presently he died.
Van Rijn cursed his awkward vessel into a course change — not more than a few degrees, it wasn’t capable of more, but as the nearer rafts began to loom above the ice deck, it could be seen that there was a wide gap in their line. Trolwen’s assault had so far prevented its being closed. Redstained water, littered with dropped spears and bows, pointed like a hand toward the admiral’s floating castle.
“In there!” bawled Van Rijn. “Clobber them! Eat them for breakfast!”
A catapult bolt came whirring over the wall, ripped through his sleeve and showered ice chips where it struck. Then three streams of liquid fire converged on the Rijstaffel.
Flame fingers groped their way across the deck, one Lannacha lay screaming and charring where they had touched him, and found the sails. It was no use to pour water this time: oil-drenched, mast and rigging and canvas became one great torch.
Van Rijn left the helmsman he had been swearing at and bounded across the deck, slipped where some of it had melted, skated on his broad bottom till he fetched up against a wall, and crawled back to his feet calling down damnation on the cosmos. Up to the starboard shrouds he limped, and his stone ax began gnawing the cordage. “Here!” he yelled. “Fast! Help me, you jelly-bones! Quick, have you got fur on the brain, quick before we drift past!”
Wace, directing the ballista crew, which was stoning a nearby raft, understood only vaguely. Others were more ready than he. They swarmed to Van Rijn and hewed. He himself sought the racked oil bombs and broke one at the foot of the burning mast.
Its socket melted, held up only by the shrouds, the enormous torch fell to port when the starboard lines were slashed. It struck the raft there; flames ran from it, beating back frantic Drak’ho crewmen who would push it loose; rigging caught; timbers began to char. As the Rijstaffel drifted away, that enemy vessel turned into a single bellowing pyre.
Now the ice ship was nearly uncontrollable, driven by momentum and chance currents deeper into the confused Fleet. But through the gap which Van Rijn had so ardently widened, the rest of the Lannacha craft pushed. War-flames raged between floating monsters — but wood will burn and ice will not.
Through a growing smoke-haze, among darts and arrows that rattled down from above, on a deck strewn with dead and hurt but still filled by the revengeful hale, Wace trod to the nearest bomb crew. They were preparing to ignite another raft as soon as the ship’s drift brought them into range.