Crimson Shadow, The - R. A. Salvatore Page 0,261

Leary of the good boat Finwalker noted this fact with great concern. They were making the Huegoths work hard, peppering them with arrows and probably wounding or killing a few, but the outcome seemed assured. The more boats the Colthwyn defenders lost, the more quickly they would lose more. When a dozen additional Colthwyn ships were caught and sunk, the support for the remaining boats would be lessened, and all too soon it would reach the point where the defenders had to flee back to port, scramble out of their boats helter-skelter, and run the path to the monastery.

The defenders needed a dramatic victory, needed to send one of those seemingly impregnable longships to its watery death. But how? Arrows certainly wouldn’t bring one down and any attempt at ramming would only send the Colthwyn boat to the bottom.

As he stood in thought, Finwalker rushed past the wolf’s-head forecastle of a longship, close enough so that the captain could see the Huegoth’s ram under the water. The Huegoth was in the midst of a turn, though, with little forward momentum, and Finwalker’s crew got off a volley of arrows, taking only a few in return as the boat glided past.

Leary looked to the woman at the wheel. “North,” he instructed.

The woman, Jeannie Beens, glanced over her shoulder, to the longship and the two Colthwyn boats that had been working in conjunction with Finwalker. If she turned north, she would leave the Colthwyn boats behind, for one of them was sailing southeast, the other due west. The Huegoth, though, was facing north, and with those forty oars would soon leap in pursuit.

“North,” Leary said again, determinedly, and the steers-woman obeyed.

Predictably, the Huegoth came on, and though the wind was from the southeast, filling Finwalker’s sails, the longship was swift in the pursuit. Even worse, as soon as the general battle, and the other two Colthwyn boats, were left behind, the Huegoths put up their own single square sail, determined to catch this one boat out from the pack and put it under.

Leary didn’t blink. He told his archers to keep up the line of arrows, and instructed the steerswoman on the course he wanted.

Jeannie Beens stared at him blankly when she deciphered the directions. Leary wanted her to swing about, nearly out of the bay, and come back heading south much closer to the shore.

Leary wanted her to skim the reef!

The tide was high, and the rocks would be all but invisible. There was a break along the reef—Nicker’s Slip, the narrow pass was called—that a boat could get through when the water was this high, but finding that small break when the rocks were mostly submerged was no easy task.

“You’ve sailed these waters for ten years,” Captain Leary said to the woman, seeing her uncertainty. “You’ll find the Slip, but the longship, turning inside our angle and flanking us as they pursue, will only get their starboard side through.” Leary gave a mischievous wink. “Let’s see how well half a longship sails,” he said.

Jeannie Beens set her feet wide apart and took up the wheel more tightly, her sun-and-wind-weathered features grim and determined. She had been through Nicker’s Slip on two occasions: once when Leary wanted to show her the place for no better reason than to prove to her that she was a fine pilot, and a second time on a dare, during a particularly rowdy party when a dorsal whale had been taken in the bay. On both of those occasions, though, the tide had been lower, with the rocks more visible, and the boats had been lighter, flat-bottomed shore-huggers that drew only a couple of feet. Finwalker, one of the largest fishing boats this far north in the bay, drew nine feet and would scrape and splinter if Leary tried to put her through when the tide was low, might even rub a bit now, with the water at its highest. Even worse for Jeannie was the damned fog, which periodically thickened to obscure her reference points.

When the high dark outline of the monastery dipped behind her left shoulder, Jeannie Beens began her wide one-hundred-eighty-degree turn back to the south. As Leary had predicted, the Huegoth turned inside Finwalker, closing some ground and giving chase off the fishing boat’s port stern. Now the Huegoth archers had a better angle and their bows twanged mercilessly, a rain of arrows, broadheads, and flaming bolts falling over Finwalker.

Two crewmen fell dead; a third, trying to put out a fire far