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with great authority. These fish-men were of a stature to compare with a normal-sized human being. They danced and wriggled and fought as I cleaved my way through them. The captain yelled his orders in a high hissing voice, and I understood them.
    “Sinotas! Defend the stairway!” There followed a curse that meant nothing to me. “The hairy filth press close!”
    Aye
! I said to myself, slicing my clanxer neatly across a thrusting mackerel snout.
Aye, we hairy ones press you damned close, you stinking fishy cramph!
    So we pressed on, and for all the viciousness of their fighting, the shanks fell back, and faltered. If one may ever take a pride in fighting and war and battle, and that is a debatable question, I think the men of Vallia might take pride from that fight they put up from
Ovvend Barynth
against the leem lovers’ ship that I learned was called
Maskinonge.
    We might yet have won.
    We might yet have done something that had never been done before, to my knowledge.
    We might have taken the ship and carried her triumphantly as a prize of war into the great harbor of Vondium.
    As was proper I had taken no part in the management of the galleon. The captain was the master of his vessel, and would command her. My part, as Prince Majister of Vallia, had been to take overall command. Now that I could sense victory within our grasp I began to think that I had not bungled the task. Regretting all the good men dead would not bring them back to life, and there had been no mortal way of escaping a fight with
Maskinonge,
for her superior sailing qualities had given her the dictation in maneuver.
    I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of Captain Ehren and Insur ti Fotor with a small group of hands they had collected making frantic attempts to free us from the entanglement of the shank. My part had led me to an attack upon the fish-men’s ship, and now I stood upon her quarterdeck past the barricades, traps, and hooks, face to face with her barracuda-like captain. I would take this ship and then, freed from
Ovvend Barynth,
claw her off the shoals.
    For, louder now over the clash of the melee, I could hear the sullen rumble of surf.
    We were perilously close to the shore.
    The vessels lurched beneath our feet as the currents took them. We fought on, steel against steel, hairy ones against scaly ones. At last I was within sword length of the fish captain, slashing at his bodyguard, feeling my men with me as we made the final charge.
    Then my clanxer snapped clean across.
    I hurled the hilt into the face of a yelling shank and saw him go down. I ripped out my rapier. This was not the most handy of weapons for this scramble of a fight, this close-quarters melee; but I was adept enough in the use of any weapon to make the most of it.
    The trident hissed toward me and I parried it away with the forte of the rapier, much as one would use a small sword; then the slender blade, gleaming clean silver in the declining rays of the suns, skewered forward, neatly, precisely, punching past the rim of the golden-scaled corselet and transfixing that scaly shank neck.
    Green ichor spouted as I withdrew, and the captain fell.
    The shanks were now in complete rout.
    “Vallia! Vallia!” my men were shouting. But only when they began another shout did I realize they were not my men. For they began the old cry: “Hai Jikai! Jikai! Prince Dray! Hai Jikai!”
    A dark shadow fleeted across the deck.
    The shadow was hard and black and sharp of edge. It was no cloud.
    Well, we had been fighting our own fight and we had been drifting nearer and nearer the coast of Hamal. There were other people involved in this fight now.
    The Hamalese flier turned, coming up against the wind after its first inspecting pass. I knew what it would do. The shank vessel was a shambles. The galleon was in little better case. The Vallians’ attempts to free the wreckage had so far been fruitless and, locked together, the two vessels drifted down upon the low-lying