Shef heard Ordlaf shouting encouragingly: “The wind’s rising! We’ll get round in time.”
Maybe, thought Shef. But just the same, they were too close. Time to check them. He nodded to Cwicca, crouched expectantly by the release.
Cwicca hesitated for only an instant. He knew the plan was to sink the lead center ship, the one with the great gilded snake’s head on its prow. But his mule was still not bearing directly on it. Impossible to train it round. Waiting a split second for the heel of the waves, he jerked free the release bolt.
A flash of motion, a violent thud against the padded beam, a thud that shook the whole ship and seemed for an instant to check her way. The black streak that was a thirty-pound boulder lashing across the water. A streak that ended just behind the prow of the ship immediately to port of the Frani Ormr.
For a second or two the advancing line of ships seemed to roll on as if nothing had happened, sending Shef’s heart leaping into his mouth. Then tiredly, irresistibly, the ship fell apart. The flying rock had smashed the stem-post to matchwood. The planks carefully fitted into it sprang from their notches. Below the waterline the sea rushed in, forced on by the ship’s own motion. As it shot through the well the sinews holding planks to ribs and ribs to keel sprang apart. The mast, its keelson pulled from under it, swayed forward, held for an instant by its stays, then swung wearily to one side. Like a giant’s club it scythed through the gaping crew of the ship next alongside.
To the watchers in the English line it seemed as if the ship had suddenly vanished, been pulled under by one of the water-hags of Brand’s stories. For a moment or two they could see men apparently standing on the water, then fighting for their footing on loose planks, then down in the sea, or struggling for a hand-hold on the gunwales of the ships alongside.
And then the Suffolk too brought her mule to bear. Another streak flashed into the heart of the Ragnarsson fleet. And another as the third ship in line swung round.
Suddenly, as Shef gaped, noise seemed to be added to the battle. All at once he was aware of the snap of the crossbows, the song of the rope as Cwicca’s handlers frantically wound their machine, the crash of rock on wood and waves of cheering as Brand’s ships swung round to come in on the Ragnarsson flanks. At the same time Shef felt a sudden lash of rain and the ships opposite blurred for a moment. A rain shower passing over the sea. Would it soak the ropes and at this worst moment take his artillery out of action?
Out of the blur came three dragon prows, shockingly close. Not the snake’s head of the enemy flagship, now a hundred yards behind them, but some other alert enemy skipper, who had cast his grapnels free and re-manned his oars, realizing his foe had no intention of closing to fight fair. If they managed to lay alongside…
Cwicca raised a thumb. Shef nodded. The bone-jarring thud again, the streak of movement that ended this time almost before it had begun, at the very base of the center ship’s mast. Again, suddenly, no ship, just a flurry of planks and men gasping in the water.
The other two were still coming on, only yards away now, men in each prow with grapnels swinging, fierce bearded faces staring over their shields, a simultaneous deep grunt as the oarsmen took one last stroke to drive themselves over the gap.
A storm of cheering almost in Shef’s ear and a great bulk like a whale shouldering past only feet in front of the Norfolk’s bow. One of Brand’s ships driving in under oars to intercept. Its prow swept along the starboard side of the Ragnarsson ship at a closing speed of twenty miles an hour, snapping the oars, hurling their butt-ends back to cave in the ribs and shatter the spines of the rowers. As the two ships ground past each other Shef saw the Wayman rowers rising from their benches to pour a storm of javelins over the side at point-blank range. The third Ragnarsson ship saw the carnage, swung away past the Norfolk’s stern, picking up speed for the open sea.