by neetha Napew
'Fire!' shouted the artillery captain. A pause, and then a volley of shots.
So began the battle of Keevasien sandbar.
The Golden Friendship was close enough for Hanra TolramKetinet to make out the faces of the soldiery along its rail. He saw the artillerymen taking aim at him. By now, the insignia on the sails had revealed that these were Sibornalese vessels, surprisingly far from home. He wondered if his opportunist king had concluded a treaty to bring Sibornal into the Western Wars on Borlien's side. He had no reason to believe them hostile - until the weapons were raised.
The Friendship swung almost side on to him, to present the artillerymen with the best line of fire. He estimated that its draught would allow it to come no farther in. The Union was ahead of its flagship, curving round to TolramKetinet's left, getting uncomfortably close to the east end of Keevasien Island. He heard shouted orders coming across the water, as the Union's main and mizzen sails were taken in.
The two smaller ships, which had sailed closer to the Randonanese shore, were cutting in to his right. The Good Hope was still battling against the broad brown flood from the western arm of the Kacol, the white Vajabhar Prayer was past - could indeed be said to be almost behind him, though still some distance away. On all these ships except the Good Hope, he could see the glint of gun barrels, pointing towards him.
He heard the artillery captain's order to fire. TolramKetinet dropped his flag, turned about, plunged into the water, and commenced swimming strongly back to the sand pit.
GortorLanstatet was already providing him with covering fire. He got his men down behind a shale ridge and directed half of his fire power at the flagship, half at the white caravel, the Vajabhar Prayer. The latter was still coming in fast, heading towards their position. The lieutenant had with him a good crossbowman; he directed him, and another man to prepare a pitch fire-thrower.
Lead balls smacked in the water round the general. He swam underwater, coming up for air as infrequently as he could. He was aware of dolphins milling about close by, but they made no attempt to interfere with him.
Suddenly the firing stopped. He surfaced and looked back. The white caravel which bore the hierogram of the Great Wheel upon its sails had unwisely cut between him and the Golden Friendship. The Shiveninki soldiery, crowding on the topmost deck, were preparing to fire on the defenders of the spit.
Waves burst over him. The shore was unexpectedly steep. TolramKetinet grasped hold of a root and hauled himself among bushes, working forward a few feet into cover and then collapsing. He lay breathing heavily, his face against the brown sand. He was unhurt.
Before his inward view rose a memory of the lovely face of Queen MyrdemInggala. She was speaking seriously. He remembered how her lips moved. He was a survivor. He would win for her sake.
Yes, he was not clever. He should not have been made general. He did not possess the natural ability to command men which Lanstatet had. But.
Since he had received the queen of queen's message in Ordelay - the first time she had ever addressed him on a personal level, even at secondhand - he had thought of the king's intention to divorce her. TolramKetinet feared the king. His allegiance to the crown was divided. Although he understood the dynastic necessity for JandolAnganol's action, that royal decision had altered TolramKetinet's feelings. He told himself that the attraction he felt for the queen was treasonable. But the queen in exile was a different matter; treason no longer entered the question. Nor did loyalty to a king who had sent him off out of jealousy to die in a Randonanese jungle. He got to his feet again, and ran for GortorLanstatet's besieged strip.
His Borlienese troops gave him a cheer as TolramKetinet threw himself down among them. He embraced them as he peered out to seaward over the shingle ridge.
In a minute, the scene had changed in certain dramatic respects. The Golden Friendship had taken in its sails and lowered fore and aft anchors. It lay about two hundred yards offshore. A lucky fire bolt from the crossbow had set part of its bow and the artemon mast alight. As sailors fought the blaze, two longboats full of soldiers were pulling away from the ship; one of the boats - though the information would have been lost on TolramKetinet - was led by Admiral Odi Jeseratabhar, who stood rigid in the stern; SartoriIrvrash had insisted on accompanying her and sat rather ignominiously at her feet.
The Union had almost beached itself away to the left of the small island, and was embarking troops into the shallows; they waded doggedly ashore. Rather nearer was the Vajabhar Prayer, stuck in the shallows with sails hanging limp, and a boat full of soldiery making inexpertly for the shore. This boat was the nearest target, and matchlock fire was causing some damage to it.
Only the Good Hope had not changed position. Caught in the flow of the outpouring Kacol, it remained with all sail hoist, bowsprit pointing towards Keevasien Island, contributing nothing to the struggle.
'They must believe they are facing the entire Keevasien garrison,' GortorLanstatet said.
'We certainly need that garrison, poor devils. If we stay here we'll be slaughtered.'
There was no way in which thirteen men, poorly armed, could defend themselves against four boatloads of troops armed with wheel locks.
It was then that the sea rose, opened, and rained assatassi.
From one end of the Sea of Eagles to the other, assatassi flew like darts from sea to shore. Fisherfolk who understood the sea kept this day and the following one for celebration and feasting. It was a festivity which occurred only once early every summer during the Great Summer, at the time of high tide. In Lordryardry, nets were ready. In Ottassol, tarpaulins were spread. In Gravabagalinien, the queen's familiars had warned her to stay away from the deadly shore. What was a feast of plenty for the knowledgeable became a rain of death for the ignorant.
Swimming in from far mid-ocean, shoals of assatassi headed for land. Their migrations during the Great Summer spanned the globe. Their feeding grounds were in the distant reaches of the Ardent Sea, where no man had visited. On reaching maturity, the shoals started their long swim eastwards, against the flow of ocean currents. Through the Climent Sea they went, and on through the narrow gates of the Straits of Cadmer.
This narrowing brought the shoals into greater proximity. The enforced closeness, together with the onset of monsoon weather in the Narmosset Sea, brought a changed behaviour pattern. What had been a long leisurely swim, without apparent aim, became a race - a race which was destined to end in the death-flight.
But for that actual flight, that desired death along thousands of miles of coast, another factor was necessary. The tide had to be right.
Throughout the centuries of winter, Helliconia's seas were all but tideless. After apastron and the darkest years, Freyr again began to make its influence felt. As its gigantic mass beckoned the chill planet back towards the light, so too it stirred the seas. Its pull on the ocean mass was now, only 118 Earth years from periastron, considerable. The time in the small year had arrived when the combined mass of Batalix and Freyr worked together. The result was a sixty percent increase in tidal strength over the winter situation.
The narrow seas between Hespagorat and Campannlat, the strong flow of the current to the west, conspired to make the higher tides mount and break suddenly with dramatic force. On that phenomenal flow of water shoreward, the shoals of assatassi launched themselves.
The ships of the Sibornalese fleet found themselves first with no water under their draught, and then battered by a tidal wave rising precipitously and without warning from the sea. Before the crews could realize what had hit them, the assatassi were there. The death-flight was on.
The assatassi is a necrogenetic fish, or more properly fish-lizard. It reaches a length of eighteen inches at maturity; it has two large multifaceted eyes; but what chiefly distinguishes it is its straight bill of bone, supported by a boney cranium. On its death-flight the assatassi reaches speeds high enough for this bill to penetrate a man to the heart.
Off Keevasien, the assatassi broke
from the surface a hundred yards further out than the Golden Friendship. So full did the air become with them that those which flew low enough to skim the water and those who gained heights of fifty feet alike formed part of a solid body of fast-moving fish-lizard. They gleamed like a myriad of sword blades. The air became a sword blade.
The flagship was raked by assatassi from stem to stem. Anyone standing on deck was struck. The seaward side of the ship was covered with creatures, hanging skewered by their bills. So with the three other ships. But it was the boats, already waterlogged by the tide, which suffered most. All their company was wounded, and many were killed outright. The boards were stove in. All four boats began to sink.
Cries of pain and terror sounded - lost beneath the shriek of birds who plunged down to snatch a meal from the air.
The first wave of assatassi lasted for two minutes.
Only TolramKetinet's men survived without injury. The tidal wave had washed right over them, so that they were still prostrate and half-conscious when the assatassi came over.
When the bombardment ceased, they looked up to see chaos all round. Sibornalese troops were struggling in the water, where large predatory fish were closing in. The Good Hope appeared to be drifting helplessly out to sea, its main mast shattered. The fire in the masts of the Golden Friendship was raging unchecked. All round, rocks and trees were covered with smashed bodies of fish. Many assatassi had impaled themselves by their bills high up in branches or trunks of trees, or were lodged in inaccessible crannies in the rocks. The death-flight had taken many fish a long way inland. The sombre jungles overhanging the mouth of the Kacol were now interpenetrated by fish-lizards which would be rotten before Batalix-set.
Far from being some morbid fancy, assatassi behaviour was proof of the versatility by which species were perpetuated. Like the otherwise dissimilar biyelk, yelk, and gunnadu, which covered the icy plains of Campannlat in winter, the assatassi were necrogenes and gave birth only through death.
Assatassi were hermaphrodite. Formed in too rudimentary a way to carry within them the normal apparatus of reproduction, assatassi propagation involved destruction. Germination budded within their gut, taking the form of threadlike maggots. Embedded safely within the parental intestine, the maggots survived the impact of the death-flight and lived to feed on the carrion thus provided.
They ate their way to the outside world. There the maggots metamorphosed into a legged larval stage, closely resembling miniature iguana. In the autumn of the small year, the miniature iguanas, hitherto land-bound, made their way back to the great parent sea, fading down into it, sinking into it as tracelessly as grains of sand, to replenish the cycle of assatassi life.
So startling was the sudden turn in events that TolramKetinet and Lanstatet stood up on their spit to look about them. The huge wave which had drenched all the foreshore was the prelude to an onrushing flood which set the Sibornalese struggling ashore into difficulties.
The first wave had rushed up the Kacol. Its spent waters were now returning, bringing black muds which stained the sea with their eddies. More ominously, to TolramKetinet's left, a stream of bodies was making sodden progress out from the river mouth, accompanied by screaming seabirds. The general's guess was that these were the slaughtered dead of Keevasien, about to find burial.
The incoming wave had overturned the Golden Friendship's longboat. Those who did not stay submerged long enough rose to meet the clouds of fish-lizard.
SartoriIrvrash found himself struggling in the water with the wounded, among whom he soon saw Odi Jeseratabhar. One of her cheeks was torn, and a fish-lizard was embedded in the flesh of the back of her neck. Many of the wounded were being attacked by predatory gulls. SartoriIrvrash himself was uninjured. Fighting his way over to Odi, he lifted her in his arms and began to wade ashore. The water kept getting deeper.
His face came close to the assatassi embedded in her neck, his eye close to its great boney eye, from which all life had not yet faded.
'How can mankind ever build up bulwarks against nature, when it keeps flooding in like a deluge, indifferent to what it carries away?' he said to himself. 'So much for you, Akhanaba, you hrattock!'
It was all he could do to keep the unconscious Odi's head above water. There was a spit of land only a few yards distant, yet still the water rose about him. He cried in fear - and then on the spit he saw a man who resembled JandolAnganol's hated general, TolramKetinet.
TolramKetinet and GortorLanstatet were studying the Sibornalese ship, the Vajabhar Prayer, which lay only a short distance to their right. The tidal wave had flung it ashore, but a swirling rebate of waters from the Kacol floated it again. Apart from the assatassi peppering its starboard side, it was in good order. The crew, thoroughly demoralised, were throwing themselves ashore and making off into the bushes to safety.
'The ship's ours for the taking, Gortor. What do you say?'
'I'm no sailor, but there's a breeze rising from the shore.'
The general turned to the twelve men with him.
'You are my brave comrades. None of you lacks courage. If one of you had lacked courage for a moment, we all would have perished. Now we have one last exploit before we are safe. There is no help for us at Keevasien, so we must sail along the coast. We are going to borrow this white caravel. It's a gift - though a gift we may have to fight for. Swords ready. Follow me!'
As he ran down the strand, his force following, he almost bumped into a bedraggled man struggling for the shore with a woman in his arms. The man called his name.
'Hanra! Help!'
He saw in astonishment that it was the Borlienese chancellor, and then the thought came, Here must be another that JandolAnganol has cheated...
He halted his party. Lanstatet dragged SartoriIrvrash from the flood, two of the men took hold of the woman between them. She was moaning and returning to consciousness. They dashed on to the Vajabhar Prayer.
The crew and soldiery of the Shiveninki vessel had suffered casualties. Some were killed; any wounded by the assatassi were mostly ashore. Birds darted over the ship, eating fish-lizards caught on the rigging. There remained a handful of soldiers with their officers to put up a fight. But TolramKetinet's party swarmed up the seaward side of the vessel and took them on. The opposition was already demoralised. After a halfhearted engagement, they surrendered and were made to jump ashore. GortorLanstatet took a party of three below, to round up any hiding and get them off the ship. Within seven minutes of boarding, they were ready to sail.
Eight of the men pushed the caravel. Slowly, the ship swung about and the sails filled, torn though they were by the fish-lizards.
'Move! Move!' shouted TolramKetinet from the bridge.
'I hate ships,' GortorLanstatet said. He fell on his knees and prayed, hands above his head. There was an explosion, and water sprayed all over them.
Their piracy had been seen from the Golden Friendship. A gunner was firing one of the cannon at them from a range of two hundred yards.
As the Prayer, at no more than walking pace, glided out of the shelter of the overhanging jungle, a stronger breeze caught it. Without needing to be told, two gunners among the Borlienese manned one of the cannon on the gundeck. They fired it once at the Golden Friendship; then the angle between the ships became so acute that the muzzle of the cannon could not be turned sufficiently in the square gunport to aim at the flagship.
The gun crew in the flagship were faced with the same problem. One more ball flew over, landing in the undergrowth of the island, then silence. The eight men in the water swarmed up boarding nets and climbed on deck cheering as the Prayer gathered way.
The island foliage slid away to port. Trees were being attacked by the scavenging birds, devouring impaled assatassi, while the hornets and bees they disturbed buzzed savagely round them. The Prayer was about to pass the Uskuti ship, Union, still beached with its bows into the land.
'Can you blow it up as we pass?' GortonLanstatet shouted down to the gundeck.
&n
bsp; The gunners ran to port, opened the gunport, primed the clumsy cannon. But now they were moving too fast, and the gun could not be made ready in time.
The disgraced Io Pasharatid was among the crew and soldiery on the Union who had deserted ship to flee from the death-flight into the island jungle. He went first. His desertion owed more to calculation than panic.
Alone among the Sibornalese in the fleet, he had once visited Keevasien. That had been during his tour of duty as ambassador to the Borlienese court. While he had no love of the place, it was in his mind that he might purchase supplies there to eke out the boredom of ship's rations. His calculation was that he might take off two hours during the general panic without being missed.
Seeing the burnt-out ruins of the town had changed his mind. He returned to the scene of action in time to witness the Vajabhar Prayer gliding by his own ship, with Hanra TolramKetinet, favourite of the queen of queens, standing on its quarterdeck.
Io Pasharatid was not entirely sunk in self-interest, though in this instant jealousy played some part in his actions. He ran forward, rallying the men who crouched among the bushes; driving them back aboard the Union. The tidal wave had set it on a strip of beach, unharmed.
After some manoeuvring with oars, assisted by the flood tide, they floated the carrack free of the beach. The sails were trimmed and, slowly, her bows drifted round towards the open sea.
Signal flags were run up, reporting that the Union was in pursuit of the pirate. The signal was intended for the eyes of Dienu Pasharatid on the Golden Friendship; but she would never read another signal. Hers was one of the first human deaths occasioned by the death-flight of the assatassi.
Only when they were out of the bay and a fresh west wind was carrying them slowly against the prevailing ocean stream, did TolramKetinet and SartoriIrvrash take the chance to embrace each other.
