TLV - 01 - The Golden Horn by Poul Anderson Page B

with a rasp.
    Long had the Saracens been harrying the Greeks at sea from their bases in Africa and Sicily. In this year Lycia and the Aegean islands suffered cruelly from their raids. It was against these that Harald sailed. He was in charge of several dromonds and chelands manned by his own folk with a scattering of Greeks; the whole fleet, adding up to some twenty craft, was under a Thracian whom Harald grudgingly admitted was an able sailor.
    They went down the Sea of Marmora and out the Dardanelles, to find themselves in water which sparkled a lighter and happier blue than the Black Sea. Islands dotted it, rising steep and rocky to a little green and a few huts on top; humble fishing and trading boats cruised by, to be hailed and asked if they knew aught of the enemy's whereabouts. It was a stain of smoke on a cloudless sky which told that.
    The fleet rowed into a harbor in the Cyclades where a town was burning. It was not a large town, a huddle of cottages near the shore, nets still staked on the beach and boats drawn up. Harald rowed in with some others to make inquiry.
    He saw a woman sitting on a charred beam. The house behind her was a sour, stinking ash heap, blackened walls gaping to a careless heaven. She was fat and middle-aged, dressed in worn clothes, and she held a man's head in her lap. The man was dead with a spear thrust between his ribs, and the blood had clotted on the woman's skirts.
    Harald loomed over her, the sunlight savage off his mail. She looked up, blindly, her eyes red but dry as if she had wept out all her tears long ago. "Who are you?" he asked.
    "I am no one," she said. "No one at all."
    "Was that your husband?"
    She shifted the gray head on her knees. "They killed the priest," she said in a thin frightened voice. "How shall he get Christian burial?"
    "I want to know which way they sailed," said Harald patiently.
    Something like hope flickered in the dimmed eyes. "If you can catch them ... my son is aboard," she whispered. "They took him for a slave. They'll geld him and ... He was a good boy, he was a good boy, wasn't he, Georgios?" She stroked the dead man's cheek.
    "They didn't take the baby," she said after a moment. "They dashed his brains out against a wall. Then the house fell down and he is under the ashes. My baby is cooked like a pig. ... I heard the flesh sizzle on his small bones, I swear I did." She shook her disordered head, vaguely. "North. Their ships were black."
    Harald laid a gold coin in her lap. She didn't seem to see it, and he wondered what she could buy with it anyhow. But ... as he turned away, she began singing her husband to sleep.
    "Northward, eh?" The Byzantine captain frowned. "I think I know the way they are headed, then. Perhaps we can overtake them. They haven't much of a start, but we'd best move fast."
    "You have some evil foes," said Harald.
    "These were not men of the Saracen host who did this. They must be stateless pirates, using the war for their own good. The infidels fight honorably, if only because we may be the victors, but corsairs have nothing to await save impalement."
    With a clash of armor and rattle of anchors, the galleys got under weigh. It was a hot, windless day, tar bubbled between the deck planks and the creak of oars was loud and weary. Impatient, Harald went below to see if more speed could be gotten out of the rowers.
    They were free men, rather well paid for their brawn, but this was not a Northern vessel, open to the clean sea winds. Here was a narrow foulness lit only through the ports by shifting streaks of sunlight that gleamed off sweat runneling down nearly naked bodies. The beat of the coxswain's drum would soon have maddened him. Almost as loud as the drum and the creak of shafts in tholes was the sound of harsh breathing. He returned topside, for it was plain to see that nothing indeed could be done to hasten the ship . . . and that was a refined torture by itself.
    But in the late afternoon, the Imperialists did raise the