“HARD A-PORT!” Cormac bawled.

At the same time, he pounced like a panther to Ferdiad’s oar. A mighty pull he gave that foremost oar, so that the men behind him felt the sudden ease in their own pulling. Their lean captain’s strength was astonishing. The steersman had responded, and Cormac’s impulsive move added to the ship’s sharp swerve. Ferdiad sprawled; Lugh again straightened and launched an arrow. Like all others thus far, it found no fleshy home.

The ship’s stern was more effective. It crushed a carack in its swing. With a cry, one nearly naked Pict went flying to splash, thrown twice the length of his own body. The other man of that boat was surely more fortunate than brilliant; with a warrior’s reflexes he was able to grasp the tiller even as his boat, spear, oar and bow were lost to him.

Like most of his kind he was a short, dark man with long arms slung from prodigiously broad, meaty shoulders. He clung fast to the tiller. The ship lurched. The steersman cursed. Cormac’s voice rose too, cursing magnificently in two, then three languages.

“The fatherless dog clings to the tiller!” the steersman cried.

“Shake him off!” Cormac wrestled with his oar. “Up oars and sweep: One… Two… Ferdiad! No!”

“It’s shaking him off I’ll be,” the hunter had muttered, and he rose to hurry sternward and put an arrow into the clinging enemy.

Even as Cormac shouted his warning, Ferdiad’s right cheek sprouted a gout of blood and a flint arrowhead. The shaft had entered his other cheek to smash through his mouth and pass completely through his. face. Ferdiad was choking on his own blood even as he fell-onto the third starboard oar. Both that oarsman’s curse and his look of horror were purely reflexive. Again Cormac too cursed; already chaos threatened, rising and shaking its shoulders like a grim spectre over his ship.

Shouts arose both within the Irish vessel and on both sides now, and the ship wheeled insanely. Its oars whipped back and forth less than a meter above water level.