who crouched beside the
thwarts-Carians with thin birdlike faces-were in a pitiable case, their
hands blue with oar-weals and the lash marks on their shoulders
beginning to gape from sun and sea. The Lemnian himself bore marks of
ill usage. His cloak was still sopping, his eyes heavy with watching,
and his lips black and cracked with thirst. Two days before the storm
had caught him and swept his little craft into mid-Aegean. He was a
sailor, come of sailor stock, and he had fought the gale manfully and
well. But the sea had burst his waterjars, and the torments of drought
had been added to his toil. He had been driven south almost to Scyros,
but had found no harbour. Then a weary day with the oars had brought
him close to the Euboean shore, when a freshet of storm drove him
seaward again. Now at last in this northerly creek of Sciathos he had
found shelter and a spring. But it was a perilous place, for there
were robbers in the bushy hills-mainland men who loved above all things
to rob an islander: and out at sea, as he looked towards Pelion, there
seemed something adoing which boded little good. There was deep water
beneath a ledge of cliff, half covered by a tangle of wildwood. So
Atta lay in the bows, looking through the trails of vine at the racing
tides now reddening in the dawn.

The storm had hit others besides him it seemed. The channel was full
of ships, aimless ships that tossed between tide and wind. Looking
closer, he saw that they were all wreckage. There had been tremendous
doings in the north, and a navy of some sort had come to grief. Atta
was a prudent man, and knew that a broken fleet might be dangerous.
There might be men lurking in the maimed galleys who would make short
work of the owner of a battered but navigable craft. At first he
thought that the ships were those of the Hellenes. The troublesome
fellows were everywhere in the islands, stirring up strife and robbing
the old lords. But the tides running strongly from the east were
bringing some of the wreckage in an eddy into the bay. He lay closer
and watched the spars and splintered poops as they neared him. These
were no galleys of the Hellenes. Then came a drowned man, swollen and
horrible: then another-swarthy, hooknosed fellows, all yellow with the
sea. Atta was puzzled. They must be the men from the East about whom
he had been hearing. Long ere he left Lemnos there had been news about
the Persians. They were comin