Easy would be to join them and escape. He saw the first pas-sengers jump from deck. But, leaped through him, but what of those who were trapped below? Already the enemy surrounded the hatches.
He himself would embrace oncoming spearheads before he went into fetters, a market, the dust and dung, whippings and longings that would be his existence as a slave. Or he might be made a show. . . once when ashore he had seen a bear, weeping pus around the ring in its nose, dancing without hope at the end of a chain while onlookers laughed. . . . Did those who trusted him not have a right to the selfsame choice?
And they bore too much of Liri; the sea-wives loose in the water were too few to keep the tribe alive.
He was their king.
“Forward!” he roared. Planks thundered beneath his charge.
His trident lay in a cabin, but he had his thews. A pike thrust
at him. He caught the shaft, wrenched it free, whirled the butt around, dashed a brain from the skull. Clubbing, stabbing, kick-ing, trampling, bellowing, he waded in among the foe. A man got behind him and lifted an ax to cleave his spine. Meiiva arrived, knife in her grasp, hauled back the fellow’s chin and laid his throat open. Mermen who had been deckhands rallied, joined those twain, cast their might and deep-seated vitality against whetted steel. They cleared a space around one of the hatches. Vanimen called to the mermaids. They and their children poured forth, to the rails and overboard. For them, his little band stood off the humans.
On the castle of the galley, crossbowmen took aim.
The merfolk might well have won that battle-had war been
in their tradition. They had no training, though, no skill at the slaughter of people they had never met before. Vanimen should not have bidden the swimme,rs stay. He realized that after the iron closed back in on him, and cried out for their help; but they heard him not through the din, and merely moved about, bewildered. Some took crossbow quarrels in their bodies, as the shooters no-ticed them.
Two or three on board died likewise. The Venetians there recovered formation, counterattacked, made a melee that smeare the deck with blood. Most of those they slew were females and young on the way out, but they got every mennan on the hulk save for Vanimen.
Dimly, he felt himself pierced and slashed. Somehow-Meiiva beside him, striking out like an angry cat-he forced a path. Together they reached the side and sprang.
Salt water took him as once his mother had. He sank into cool green depths, his friends swanned close, none but their dead were left behind, he had saved them from slavery, his task was done and now he could rest. . . .
No. The blood streamed out of him, dark to see, bitter to taste. Those were great wounds; he must go ashore where they could be properly stanched, or else join the slain. Likewise others, he saw through tides of murk. Female after female, child after child, had suffered hurt.
“Come,” he did or did not tell them.
They reached the mainland, coughed their lungs clear, and
crept from their sea.
No doubt the Venetians too were shaken by the encounter. They kept to galley and hulk for an hour or more. Meanwhile, in their sight, the fugitives cared as best might be for the injured, with moss, cobwebs, woven grass that bound a gash tight.
Once more their lack of soldierliness betrayed that folk. They should have swum off as soon as treatment was done, despite certain loss of the most badly lacerated. Vanimen would have made them do so. But he lay half in a swoon and there was no proper second in command. The rest crouched where they were, frightened, desultorily talking, never agreeing to a single action.
The slavers observed and plucked up resolution. Weird though yonder beings were, they could be overcome, to sell for a much higher price than any Saracens or Circassians would fetch. The master of the galley was a bold man. He reached his decision and issued his orders.