The Sea Peoples(104)
His eyes blinked three times in astonishment before the face went slack.
Ah, Mother-of-all receive him in the Summerlands, órlaith thought. I wish I hadn’t seen that. It’s not the sort of furniture you want in your mind, coming back in dreams or idle moments.
Then a huge grinding roar as four of the Korean warships crashed into the Sea-Leopard, two each amidships on either side, and two more at the bows. The great ship staggered in the water, and half the crew fell as the deck pitched. órlaith braced herself with the lower point of her shield and stayed upright. A hard clarity filled her, where she seemed to see everything at once, know everything at once.
Grapnels flew and tangled in the frigate’s rigging, dozens of them, or crunched their points into the bulwarks. Heaved tight, they held the ships together. Crewfolk rushed to hack at them with axes and cutlasses, but the last yard of each hawser was wound with steel rope, and sparks flew where the weapons struck. Arrows came up in clouds from the decks of the enemy ships, or down from sharpshooters in their rigging. Everyone who could tucked themselves under the inward slant of the bulwarks, or raised bucklers in protection. Many of the arrows struck the maze of hawser and rope in the rigging, or the sails, or masts and spars or the netting. Plenty got through, and more lofted with that ugly hissing sound massed archery made.
órlaith put her shield up above her with a quick punching twist of her left arm; two shafts rammed into it and through the sheet metal of its facing with punk-punk sounds, into the bison-hide and plywood of its core, feeling like a pair of hard sharp pushes.
Karl Aylward Mackenzie had a bleeding cut on one leg just below the knee and the hang of his kilt. He examined it, shrugged, and snarled:
“And it’s two can play at that game! Mackenzies—take the ones in the rigging, the others are dropping their shafts blind!”
“We are the point—
We are the edge—
We are the wolves that Hecate fed!
We are the bow—
We are the shaft—
We are the darts that Hecate cast!”
The clansfolk chanted as they drew their great yellow yew bows, aiming upward at the enemy snipers in their posts high above their decks. Men fell shrieking or quiet, or dropped and hung from the rope-slings they’d secured themselves with. The catapult crews were pouring up the companionways from the gun-deck beneath, their personal weapons in their hands, rushing with the Marine contingent to the bulwarks. Boarding ladders were raised high on the enemy ships and toppled forward, thudding down with the thick slightly curved spikes—at home in Montival they called them raven-beaks—on their undersides striking into the bulwarks to hold them.
“Juche! Juche! Juche!”
The Korean war-shout burst from a thousand throats in barking unison; the Sword told her it meant something like by our own efforts or on our own, but with a dark overtone of we alone are fit to live that felt a little . . . green, as if it were a new shoot of meaning from an older word.
And a snarling brabble of: “Jug-ida! Jug-ida!” which hardly needed translation: Kill! Kill!
The first wave reached the tops of the boarding ramps where they ran up from the lower decks of the smaller Korean ships. Before her Karl Aylward Mackenzie barked:
“On me! The boarders to the left!”
Longbow shafts flicked out, barely visible over the short distances, over the heads of the two ranks of Protector’s Guard men-at-arms before them; the first were kneeling, the second in a low wide-legged stance, both with their big kite shields up in an overlapping fortress. Sir Droyn Jones de Molalla stood on their right flank, his sword out and motionless hilt-forward over his plumed helmet.
Morfind and Faramir and Suzie Mika were using their short recurve saddlebows on the same targets. Through the vision slit of her sallet’s visor she saw a man at the front of the nearest boarding ramp take an arrow in one eye and pitch forward bonelessly. Half a dozen others fell in the same moment, bodkin-point arrows smashing into faces and through the light chain or studded-leather armor most of the enemy wore. One sank only a handspan as it met the tougher lamellar cuirass of an officer, but he staggered as it sprouted from his chest and didn’t notice the boarding pike that slammed seven inches of sharpened metal through his throat . . . or at least didn’t notice it until far too late.
As he fell, the hundreds of crewfolk crouching under the bulwards rose and leveled their crossbows and fired. At close range the brutal power behind the pile-shaped heads of the bolts would send them even through a knight’s armor. Against the more lightly-clad Koreans they were like spikes bashed through softwood, and some of them went right through bodies and limbs and into the man behind. The other half of the sailors struck with glaives and half-pikes, stabbing or trying to knock the boarders off the narrow planks and into the water.
órlaith could feel the attack waver, that impalpable balance when blind determination to rush forward or die began to be poisoned by doubt springing from warrior to warrior. Then another figure came aboard at the bows—not in the spiked, flared lobster-tail helmets of the Korean elite warriors, but in a tattered motley of strings and tufts of cloth, with a three-pronged gold headdress on this head and cords masking his face.
A hand-drum thuttered in his hand as he wailed and chanted. órlaith could feel the dark threads that connected the magus to the enemy host, and the impact of the snarled command that sent them forward. More ran up the boarding-ramps, throwing themselves bodily on the waiting points to clear the way for those behind.