eir sails, creeping along coasts rather than venturing too far
into dangerous seas, sometimes even tying up at the shore each night.
There had been other ships, leaner, hardier. Those had plunged into the
unknown, touching lands beyond the sea mists, sailed and oared by men
plagued by the need to learn what lay beyond the horizon.

And here was such a ship, taut, well kept, larger than the Viking
longboats Ross had watched on the tapes of the Project's collection, yet
most like those far-faring Terran craft. The prow curved up in a mighty
bowsprit where was the carved likeness of the sea dragon Ross had fought
in the Hawaika of his own time. The eyes of that monster flashed with a
regular blink of light which the Terran did not understand. Was it a
signal or merely a device to threaten a possible enemy?

There were sails, now furled as this ship bored on, answering to the
steady throb of what could only be an engine. And his puzzlement held. A
Viking longboat powered by motor? The mixture was incongruous.

The crew were uniform as to face. All of them wore the flexible pearly
armor, the skull-strip helmets. Though there were individual differences
in ornaments and the choice of weapons. The majority of the men did
carry curve-pointed swords, though those were broader and heavier than
those the Terran had seen ashore. But several had axes with
sickle-shaped heads, whose points curved so far back that they nearly
met to form a circle.

Spaced at regular intervals on deck were boxlike objects fronting what
resembled gun ports. And smaller ones of the same type were on the
raised deck at the stern and mounted in the prow, their muzzles, if the
square fronts might be deemed muzzles, flanking the blinking dragon
head. Catapults of some type? Ross wondered.

"Rosss--" His name was given the hiss Loketh used, but it was not the
Wrecker youth who joined him now at the stern of the ship. "Ho ... that
was strong magic, that fighting knowledge of yours!"

Vistur rubbed his chest reminiscently. "You have big magic, sea man. But
then you serve the Maid, do you not? Your swordsman has told us that
even the great fish understand and obey her."

"Some fish," qualified Ross.

"Such fish as that, perhaps?" Vistur pointed to the curling wake of
foam.

Startled, Ross stared in that direction. Torgul's command was the
centermost in a trio of ships, and those cruised in a line, leaving
three trails of troubled wave behind them. Comi