Another man moved, with first a grunt and then a curse. “Water! Hmp-it’s food this snarling belly wants!”

Cormac was removing his sleeveless tunic of linked chain. “Food! That, Half-a-man, we’ll have, for there are tasty gulls-”

“Arrgh,” Halfdan Half-a-man growled, and he made a face.

“-and wild geese or ducks,” the man of Eirrin went on. “And it’s their blood we’ll be drinking, Wulfhere, and proclaiming it the fairest quencher of thirst on the ridge of the world!”

On his feet, Wulfhere poked a finger into his scarlet beard to scratch. He nodded, a giant with breast muscles that bulged like a brace of shields beneath his corselet of scalemail. He grunted when he stooped for his horned helmet. With that on his head he was even more formidable and giant-like.

“Ummm,” he agreed in a rumbling grumble. “We shall not die of thirst or starvation, then. And meanwhile-what do we do here?”

“Care for our armour,” Cormac advised. With his removed, he folded his legs and lowered himself to the sand. He commenced a meticulous wiping of each of the many links of good small chain, to rid it of salt and rust-bringing water.

Thirst and rumbling bellies were ignored as one, then three, and at last eight others followed his example. A man could stand his hunger and his dry throat. Arms and armour, though-on those his life depended. Despite the fact that this island was surely abandoned by the gods, and unpeopled by the sons of man so that it might be home now in both life and death, the nine survivors of Wolfsail sat, and squinted, and rubbed and picked and polished.

As he had begun first and had no scales to lift, it was Cormac who first finished and rose. As though he might at any instant meet an army of attackers, he doggedly fastened armour and arms about his lean, rangy form. Wulfhere glanced up.