«Right now, she's carrying my child,» he answered, and took her in his arms. The cabin did have a door, and shutters over the windows, but sailors still walked past it every minute or so. That meant, for dignity's sake, they had to be very quiet. To his surprise, Maniakes had found that sometimes added something. So did the gentle motion of the Renewal on the sea—for him, at least. Lysia could have done without it.

«Get off me,» she whispered when they had finished. She looked slightly green, which made Maniakes obey her faster than he might have otherwise. She gulped a couple of times, but things stayed down. She started to dress. As she pulled her undertunic on over her head, she said in reflective tones, «It's just as well my belly will stop you from getting on top after a while. My breasts are sore, too, and you squashed them.»

«I'm sorry,» he answered. He'd said that during each of her pregnancies. She believed it each time—believed it enough to stay friendly, and more than friendly, at any rate. A good thing, too, he thought. Without her, he would have felt altogether alone against the world, as opposed to merely overmatched.

Behind Gavdos rose the mountains in the center of the Key. Thrax let out a small laugh. «I remember the first time I brought the Renewal into this port, your Majesty.»

«So do I. I'm not likely to forget,» Maniakes answered. He'd been a rebel then and had managed to bring part of the fleet that sailed from the Key over to his side. Had the rest of that fleet not gone over to him after he sailed into Gavdos… had that not happened, Genesios would still be Avtokrator of the Videssians.

Maniakes' mouth twisted into a thin, bitter line. Everything Genesios did had been a catastrophe—but when Maniakes overthrew him, Videssos had still held a good chunk of the westlands, and the lord with the great and good mind knew no Makuraners had come over the Cattle Crossing to stare up close at the walls of Videssos the city with hungry, clever eyes.

He cursed Genesios. He'd spent a lot of time cursing Genesios, these past half-dozen years. The incompetent butcher had left him nothing—less than nothing—with which to work.

And yet… Just before he'd taken Genesios' head, the wretch had asked him a question that had haunted him ever since: «Will you do any better?» So far, he could not say with certainty the answer was yes.

Oarsmen guided the Renewal alongside a quay. Sailors leapt up onto it and made the dromon fast. More sailors set the gangplank in place, to let people go back and forth more readily. When Maniakes set foot on the wharf, he wondered if he'd arrived in the middle of an earthquake: the planks were swaying under his feet, weren't they? After a moment, he realized they weren't. He'd never spent so long at sea before, and found himself without his land legs.

Waiting to greet him was the drungarios of the fleet of the Key, a plump, fussy-looking fellow named Skitzas who had a reputation for aggressive seamanship that belied his appearance. «Hello, your Majesty,» he said, saluting. «Good to see you're here and not there.» He pointed west.

«I wish I were there and not here, and my army, too,» Maniakes answered. «But, from the messages that got through to me, Sharbaraz and Etzilios have made that a bad idea.»

«I'm afraid you're right,» Skitzas said. «The Kubratoi are playing it smart, may Skotos drag them down to the eternal ice. Their monoxyla aren't a match for dromons: they've learned that the hard way. So they aren't even trying to fight us. They just keep sneaking across to the westlands, mostly at night, and carrying Makuraners back toward Videssos the city. After a while, they'll have a good many of them on the side where they don't belong.»

«Makuraners don't belong on either side of the Cattle Crossing,» Maniakes said, and Skitzas nodded. The Avtokrator went on, «What are you doing about it?»

«What we can,» the officer answered. «Every so often, we'll meet up with a one-trunk boat in the water and put paid to it. We've been scouring the coast north and east of Videssos the city, too, doing everything we can to catch the monoxyla beached. We've burned a good many.» He made a sour face. «Trouble is, the cursed things are easy to drag up well out of the water and hide. Once the masts are off them, they're only tree trunks, after all. We aren't having all the luck we ought to, I own that.»

«All right,» Maniakes said, and then held up a hand. «All right that you've given me a straight answer, I mean; I needed one. What's going on by the city isn't all right, not even a little bit.»

«I know that, your Majesty,» Skitzas said. «The one thing we and the fleet in Videssos the city have done is, we've managed to keep the Kubratoi from getting a big flotilla of monoxyla over to the westlands and ferrying the whole Makuraner army over the Cattle Crossing in one swoop. To the ice with me if I ever thought I'd be happy about delaying the enemy instead of beating him, but that's how it is right now.»

«They caught us with our drawers down,» Maniakes said, which wrung a grunt of startled laughter out of Skitzas. «Delaying them counts; I was wondering if I'd come back only to find the city Men.»

«The good god forbid it.» Skitzas sketched the sun-circle. «Anything I can do to help you along—»

«I think Thrax has that well in hand,» Maniakes said. The drungarios of the fleet was bellowing instructions at the officers who had advanced to see what he required. He told them in alarming detail. When he had a chance to prepare in advance, he was a nonpareil.

Before long, laborers started carrying sacks of flour, sacks of beans, barrels of salted beef, and jars of wine aboard the ships of his fleet. Others brought coils of rope, canvas, casks of pitch, and other nautical supplies. By the time the sun went down, the fleet was in better shape than it had been since the day after it sailed out of Lyssaion.

Sunset turned clouds in the west the color of blood. Maniakes noted that, at first made nothing of it, and then turned back to look at the sunset again. He hadn't seen clouds in the west for a good long while now. Were they harbingers of the storm Bagdasares had predicted?

If they were, could he wait out the storm here at Gavdos and then sail on to Videssos the city undisturbed? He wished he thought the answer to that were yes. But he had the strong feeling that, if this was a coming storm and he waited it out, another would catch him as soon as he put to sea. He'd gain nothing that way, and lose precious time.

«We'll go on,» he said aloud. «Whatever my fate is, I'll go to meet it; I won't wait for it to come to me.»

The Renewal bounced and shook in the waves as if it were a toy boat in a washbasin inhabited by a two-year-old intent on splashing all the water in the basin onto the floor before his mother could finish washing him. Rain drummed against Maniakes' face. The wind howled like a whole pack of hungry wolves. Thrax screamed something at him. The drungarios of the fleet stood close by Maniakes, but he had no idea what his naval commander was saying. The rain plastered Thrax's thick pelt of white hair against his skull, giving him something of the look of an elderly otter.

Whatever my fate is, I'll go to meet it. Maniakes savored the stupidity of the words. He'd been overeager again. That was easy enough to see, in retrospect. There were storms, and then there were storms. In his haste to get back to Videssos the city, he'd put the fleet in the way of a bad one.

Thrax tried again, but whatever he'd bellowed got buried in a thunderclap that made Maniakes' ears ring. The Renewal nosed down into a trough between two waves. It nosed down steeply, for the waves were running very high. Maniakes staggered, but managed to keep his feet. Thrax stayed upright without apparent effort. Whatever his shortcomings, he was a seaman.