John Norman Gor 06 Ra

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Port kar waited.
We had struck from various sides, at various times. And Telima had often
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raised the piping cry of the marsh gant. The men of Port Kar knew, as I had
not, that rencers communicate in the marshes by the means of such signals. The
face, delightful to me, taht Telima s skill was such that actuall marsh gants
frequently responded to her cries was, I expect, less delightful to those of
Port
Kar. In the darkness, peering out, not seeing, they had no way of knowing
which was a marsh gant and which an enemy. For all they knew, they were
encirclesd by rencers, somehow masters of the great bow, That the great bow
was used they understood from the time I struck the second helmsman, pinning
him to the tiller beam.
Occassionally they would fire back, and the bolts of crossbows would drop into
the marshes about us, but harmlessly. Usually they fell far wide of our true
positon, for, following each of my fired shafts, Telima would pole us to a new
point of vantage, whence I might again, when ready, pick a target and loose
yet another of the winged shafts. Sometimes merely the movement of a
tharlarion or the flutter of a marsh gant, something completely unrelated to
us, would summon a great falling and hissing of bolts into the marsh.
In the darkness, Telima and I finished some rence cake we had brought from the
island, and drank some water.
How may arrows have you left? she asked.
Ten, I said.
It is not enough, she said.
That is true, I said, but now we have the cover of darkness.
I had cut some marsh vine and had, from this formed a loop.
What can you do? she asked.
Pole me to the fourth barge, I said.
We had estimated that there had been more than a hundred warriors on the six
barges, but not, perhaps, many more. Counting the kills, and other men we had
seen, the barges hulls, there might be some fifty men left, spread over the
six barges.
Silently Telima poled our small craft to the fourth barge. The most of the
warriors, we had noted, were concentrated in the first and last barges.
The barges, during the afternoon, had been eased into a closer line, the stem
on one lying abeam of the stern of the next, being made fast tehre by lines.
This was to prevent given barges from being boarded separately, where the
warriors on one could not come to the aid of the other. They had no way of
knowing how many rencers might be in the marshes. With this arrangement they
had greater mobility of their forces, for men might leap, say, from one
foredeck of one barge to the tiller deck of the other. If boarding were
attepmpted toward the center of the line, the boarding party could thus be
crushed on both flanks by warriors pouring in from adjacent barges. This
arrangement, in effect, transformed the formerly purposes, a long, single,
narrow, wooden-walled fort.
These defensive conditons dictated that the offense, putatively the male
population of one or perhaps two rence communities, say, some seventy or
eighty men, would most likely attack at either of the first or the last of the
barges, where they would have but one front on which to attack and little, or
nothing, to fear from the rear. That the punt might be used to bring men
behind attacking rencers was quite improbable; further, had it been used,
pressumably it would have encountered rencers in their several rence craft and
been threby neutralized or destroyed.
In this situation, then, it was natural, expecting an attack on either the
first or the last barge, that the officer, he of the golden slashes on the
temples of his helmet, would concentrate his men in the first and last barge.
her as silently as a rence flower might have drifted to her side.
We had come now to the hull of the fourth barge, and we had come to
Having no large number of men at my disposal, it seemed best to me to let the
men of Port Kar themselves do most of my fighting.
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Standing below the hull, quite close, in the shifting rence craft, I made a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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