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about?”
    “Let me see for myself,” Abeleyn snapped. He clambered over the ship’s rail and began climbing the shrouds. In seconds he was up in the maintop with Tasso, the lookout. The sailor looked both amazed and terrified at finding himself on such close terms with a king.
    “Point them out to me,” Abeleyn commanded.
    “There, sire. They’re almost hull up now. They have the wind on the starboard beam, but you can see their oars are out too. There’s a flash of foam along every hull, regular as a waterclock.”
    Abeleyn peered across the unending expanse of white-streaked sea while the maintop described lazy arcs under him with the pitch and roll of the carrack. There: six sails like the wings of great waterborne birds, and the regular splash of the oars as well.
    “How do you know they’re corsairs?” he asked Tasso.
    “Lateen-rigged on all three masts, sir, like a xebec. Astaran and Perigrainian galleasses are square-rigged on fore and main. Those are corsairs, sir, no doubt about it, and they’re on a closing course.”
    Abeleyn studied the oncoming ships in silence. It was too much of a coincidence. These vessels knew what they were after.
    He slapped Tasso on the shoulder and sidled down the backstay to the deck. The whole crew was standing staring, even the Hebrian soldiers and marines of his entourage. He joined Dietl on the quarterdeck, smiling.
    “You had best beat to quarters, Captain. I believe we have a fight on our hands.”
     
    THREE
     
    A T times it seemed as though the whole world were on the move.
    From Ormann Dyke the road curved round to arrow almost due south through the low hills of northern Torunna. A fine road, built by the Fimbrians in the days when Aekir had been the easternmost trading post of their empire. The Torunnan kings had kept it in good repair, but in their own road-building they had never been able to match the stubborn Fimbrian disregard for natural obstacles, and thus the secondary roads which branched off it curved and wound their way about the shoulders of the hills like rivulets of water finding their natural level.
    All the roads were clogged with people.
    Corfe had seen it before, on the retreat from Aekir, but the other troopers of the escort had not. They were shocked by the scale of the thing.
    The troop had passed through empty villages, deserted hamlets, and even a couple of towns where the doors of the houses had been left ajar by their fleeing occupants. And now the occupants of all northern Torunna were on the move, it seemed.
    Most of them were actually from Aekir. With the onset of winter, General Martellus of Ormann Dyke had ordered the refugee camps about the fortress broken up. Those living there had been told to go south, to Torunn itself. They were too big a drain on the meagre resources of the dyke’s defenders, and with winter swooping in—a hard winter too, by the looks of it—they would not survive long in the shanty towns which had sprung up in the shadow of the dyke. Hundreds of thousands of them were moving south, trekking along the roads in the teeth of the bitter wind. Their passage had had a catastrophic effect on the inhabitants of the region. There had been looting, killing, even pitched battles between Aekirians and Torunnans. The panic had spread, and now the natives of the country were heading south also. A rumour had begun that the Merduks would not remain long in winter quarters, but were planning a sudden onslaught on the dyke, a swift sweep south to the Torunnan capital before the heaviest of the snows set in. There was no truth to it. Corfe had reconnoitred the Merduk winter camps himself, and he knew that the enemy was regrouping and resupplying, and would be for months. But reason was not something a terrified mob hearkened to very easily, hence the exodus.
    The troop of thirty Torunnan heavy cavalry were escorting a clumsy, springless carriage over the crowded roads, battering a way through the crowds with the armoured