“You won’t be too safe for your own liking.” Ruori forced a grin. “And somebody has to steer this tub home to hand in all those lovely reports to the Geoethnic Research Endeavor.”
He swung down the ladder to the main deck and hurried to the mainmast shrouds. His crew yelled around him, weapons gleamed. The two big box kites quivered taut canvas, lashed to a bollard and waiting. Ruori wished there had been time to make more.
Even as it was, though, he had delayed longer than seemed wise, first heading far out to sea and then tacking slowly back, to make the enemy search for him while he prepared. (Or planned, for that matter. When he dismissed Tresa, his own ideas had been little more than aconviction that he could fight.) Assuming they were lured after him at all, he had risked their losing patience and going back to the land. For an hour, now, he had dawdled under mainsail, genoa, and a couple of flying jibs, hoping the Sky People were lubbers enough not to find that suspiciously little canvas for such good weather.
But here they were, and there was an end to worry and remorse on a certain girl’s behalf. Such emotions were rare in an Islander; and to find himself focusing them thus on a single person, out of all earth’s millions, had been horrible. Ruori swarmed up the rat-lines, as if he fled something.
The blimps were still high, passing overhead on an upper-level breeze. Down here was almost a straight south wind. The aircraft, unable to steer really close-hauled, would descend when they were sea-level upwind of him. Even so, estimated a cold part of Ruori’s brain, the Dolphin could avoid their clumsy rush.
But the Dolphin wasn’t going to.
The rigging was now dotted with armed sailors. Ruori pulled himself up on the mainmast crosstrees and sat down, casually swinging his legs. The ship heeled over in a flaw and he hung above greenish-blue, white-streaked immensity. He balanced, scarcely noticing, and asked Hiti: “Are you all set?”
“Aye.” The big harpooner, his body one writhe of tattoos and
muscles, nodded a shaven head. Lashed to the fid where he squatted was the ship’s catapult, cocked and lo~uded with one of the huge irons that could kill a sperm whale at one blow. A couple more lay alongside in their rack. Hiti’s two mates and four deckhands poised behind him, holding the smaller harpoons— mere six-foot shafts—that were launched from a boat by hand. The lines of all trailed down the mast to the bows.
“Aye, let ‘em come now.” Hiti grinned all over his round face. “Nan eat the world, but this’ll be something to make a dance about when we come home!”
“If we do,” said Ruori. He touched the small boat ax thrust into his loincloth. Like a curtain, the blinding day seemed to veil a picture from home, where combers broke white under the moon, longfires flared on a beach and dancers were merry and palm trees cast shadows for couples who stole away. He wondered how a Meycan calde’s daughter might like it. . . if her throat had not been cut.
“There’s a sadness on you, captain,” said Hiti.
“Men are going to die,” said Ruori. –
“What of it?” Small kindly eyes studied him. “They’ll die willing, if they must, for the sake of the song there’ll be made. You’ve another trouble than mere death.”
“Let me be!”
The harpooner looked hurt, but withdrew into silence. Wind streamed and the ocean glittered.
The aircraft steered close. There would be one on each side. Ruori unslung the megaphone at his shoulder. Atel Hamid held the Dolphin steady on a broad reach.
Now Ruori could see a grinning god at the prow of the starboard airship. It would pass just over the topmasts, a little to windward of the rail. . . . Arrows went impulsively toward it from the yardarms, without effect, but no one was excited enough to waste a rifle cartridge. Hiti swiveled his catapult. “Wait,” said Ruori. “We’d better see what they do.”
Helmeted heads appeared over the blimp’s gallery rail. A man stepped up—another, another, at intervals—they whirled triple-