“I can’t do that,” she said.
“You wouldn’t want those men to get her, too. She’s only a little girl but they’ll not stop for that”
Alice looked as if her face was going to crumple and wash away with tears. But she did not weep. She said, “Very well. It’s no sin now, killing yourself. I just hope…”
He said, “Yes.” He did not drawl the word; there was no time to drawl anything out. The canoe was within forty feet of them.
“The next place might be just as bad or worse than this one,” Alice said. “And Gwenafra will wake up ail alone. You know that the chances of us being resurrected at the same place are slight.”
“That can’t be helped,” he said.
She clamped her lips, then opened them and said, “I’ll fight until the last moment. Then. .’
“It may be too late,” he said. He picked up his bow and drew an arrow from his quiver. De Greystock had lost his bow, so he took Kazz’s. The Neanderthal placed a stone in a sling and began whirling it. Lev picked up his sling and chose a stone for its pocket. Monat used Esther’s bow, since he had lost his, also.
The captain of the canoe shouted in German, “Lay down your arms! You won’t be harmed!” He fell off the platform onto a paddler a second later as Alice’s arrow went through his chest. Another arrow, probably de Greystock’s, spun the second man off the platform and into the water. A stone hit a paddler in the shoulder, and he collapsed with a cry. Another stone struck glancingly off another paddler’s head, and he lost his paddle.
The canoe kept on coming. The two men on the aft platform urged the crew to continue driving toward The Hadji. Then they fell with arrows in them. Burton looked behind him. The two schooners were letting their sails drop now. Evidently they would slide on up to The Hadji where the sailors would throw their grappling hooks into it. But if they got too close, the flames might spread to them.
The canoe rammed into The Hadji with fourteen of the original complement dead or too wounded to fight. Just before the canoe’s prow hit, the survivors dropped their paddles and raised small round leather shields. Even so, two arrows went through two shields and into the arms of the men holding them. That still left twenty men against six men, five women, and a child. But one was a five-foot high hairy man with tremendous strength and a big stone axe. Kazz jumped into the air just before the canoe rammed the starboard hull and came down in it a second after it had halted. His axe crushed two skulls and then drove through the bottom of the canoe. Water poured in, and de Greystock, shouting something in his Cumberland Middle English, leaped down beside Kazz. He held a stiletto in one hand and a big oak club with flint spikes in the other.
The others on The Hadji continued to shoot their arrows. Suddenly, Kazz and de Greystock were scrambling back onto the catamaran and the canoe was sinking with its dead, dying, and its scared survivors. A number drowned; the others either swam away or tried to get aboard The Hadji. These fell back with their fingers chopped off or stamped flat.
Something struck on the deck near him and then something else coiled around him. Burton spun and slashed at the leather rope, which had settled around his neck. He leaped to one side to avoid another, yanked savagely at a third rope, and pulled the man on the other end over the railing. The man, screaming, pitched out and struck the deck of The Hadji with his shoulder. Burton smashed in his face with his axe.
By now men were dropping from the decks of both schooners and ropes were falling everywhere. The smoke and the flames added to the confusion, though they may have helped The Hadji’s crew more than the boarders.
Burton shouted at Alice to get Gwenafra and jump into The River. He could not find her and then had to parry the thrust of a big black with a spear. The man seemed to have forgotten any orders to capture Burton; he looked as if he meant to kill. Burton knocked the short spear aside and whirled, lashing out as he went by with the axe and smashed its edge against the black’s neck. Burton continued to whirl, felt a sharp pain in his ribs, another in his shoulder, but knocked two men down and then was in the water. He fell between the schooner and The Hadji, went down, released the axe, and pulled the stiletto from its sheath. When he came up, he was looking up at a tall, raw boned, redheaded man who was lifting the screaming Gwenafra above him with both hands. The man pitched her far out into the water.
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