When I looked north, I saw another vessel speeding along with the world’s wind. This one was bigger than a fishing boat, though a little smaller than the Gamemeno. She seemed to be coming right down on us, swelling alarmingly as she closed.

Tasos shouted at her through cupped hands. He shouted at her through a megaphone. He could have shouted at her with Eliphalet’s great voice. The world’s wind would have flung his words back in his face all the same. The world’s wind didn’t like us that day.

He shouted again, this time to his sailors. The rudder and the sails took the Gamemeno out of the oncoming ship’s path. An instant later, that other ship swerved so we were back in her path again. I thought her skipper must have been a clumsy, bungling oaf.

Even I can be naive.

Tasos, who always infested these waters, should have known better. We should have turned away from the other vessel long since. With the world’s wind and Stagiros’ working together, we could have run away from anything. But we didn’t.

And then, when she was almost within crossbow range of us, that other ship ran up the white flag with the black hand. I don’t know how long pirates have been flying that flag. If the black hand would grab them all by the throat and choke them, I’d be a lot happier, and so would every honest sailor in the world. I do know that.

Tasos let out a bleat like a sheep that just found out where mutton comes from. He shouted to his sailors one more time. We couldn’t just turn around and run away. That takes time and room, and we had neither. All we could do was twist aside. If once we could get the pirate ship downwind of us, we’d be safe. Her weatherworker wouldn’t be able to beat back against the world’s wind the way Stagiros could. But she had the weather gage on us, and she wasn’t about to let go on us.

We zigged. She zigged with us. We zagged. So did she. Her captain made his not too poor but not too honest living outguessing other skippers. Tasos was a pretty good sailor, at least as long as he had Stagiros with him. Nobody, though, would ever have accused him of being long on brains-and there were good and cogent reasons why nobody would have accused him of it, too.

He did have the sense to send crossbowmen forward and to serve out a variety of lethal hardware to the rest of the sailors. My sword was belowdecks, so for my very own I got an iron rod about three feet long. Not an elegant weapon, but one good for a few fractures here and there. Max was already armed and presumed dangerous.

“Don’t swallow anybody else’s sword, mind you,” I told him.

He made as if to bow. “Let me write that down.” Eliphalet pickle me if he didn’t pull out a little notebook and do it, too.

Crossbow quarrels started to fly. The pirates opened up on us before they should have. The first few shafts fell in the sea. Then they thunked into our planking. Then one of them thunked into a man. He made the most appalling noises. People aren’t made to be pierced by sharp steel points traveling much too fast. It happens all the time, but it really shouldn’t. Something should be done.

I’d seen fighting with the Hassocki army. I knew what battle was like even then. Since those days, of course, we’ve seen the War of the Kingdoms, which made what I’d seen-and the Nekemte Wars, too-seem like playground games by comparison. Maybe that was enough to teach us all a lesson. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t. I wouldn’t bet anything I could afford to lose.

We started shooting back. Since we couldn’t run away, we bloody well had to fight. Pirates are not nice people. If they took us, they wouldn’t invite us aboard for tea. The chivalrous rogues of romance are murderous bastards for real. I cheered like a madman when one of them took a quarrel right between his beady eyes.

Much too soon, they lay right alongside us. Grappling hooks flew out and bit into our rail and our deck, locking the two ships in an unwelcome embrace. Our sailors cut a couple of ropes, but they got shot doing it, too. More hooks stuck fast. Pirates began leaping from their ship to ours. Gangplanks thrust out across the narrow strip of sea between us. More pirates crossed on them. I even wished the Klephts were still on board. The pirates had the same motley assortment of ironmongery as we did, but there were more of them and they looked meaner.

They reckoned without Stagiros.

There, by Eliphalet’s windy homilies, was a weatherworker in a million! He turned the gale that had been in the Gamemeno’s sails on the pirates. Sails are made to withstand such a storm. Pirates aren’t. Some of them went to their knees. Some of them got blown over the side. Since the Gamemeno and the pirate ship were smashing together and then pulling apart, in the drink between them was not a good place to be. I heard shrieks, a couple of them abruptly cut off as the ships came together again. I was too busy to waste much pity on the poor uninnocents.

The weatherworker’s gale affected his shipmates not a bit. He even remembered to include Max and me in that protection. I brought my iron bar down smartly on the head of a pirate who’d been blown to the deck. He groaned and let go of the cutlass he was carrying. Since he didn’t seem to need it any more, I picked it up myself. With it in my right hand and the bar in my left doing duty for a shield, I was a fairly formidable fellow.

Someone’s head rolled along the pitching deck. I wasn’t sorry to see it didn’t belong to anyone I knew. Whoever he was, he was making a mess on the timbers. I would have complained, but I didn’t think he was in a mood to listen.

Max examined his blade, which was red all the way to the hilt. “I really will have to clean this before I swallow it again,” he said, and then went back to the fight.

That didn’t last much longer. The pirates abruptly lost their enthusiasm for it. Instead of pushing forward, all of a sudden they were scrambling to get back aboard their own ship. They pulled the gangplanks away from the Gamemeno. They might have feared we would follow them. They cut the lines that bound their ship to ours. In fact, they cut them while a couple of their friends were still on our ship. Those friends didn’t stay there long, at least not in any state to complain about the accommodations we offered.

The pirate ship put on a full spread of canvas and sped off to the south before the world’s wind. Their weatherworker added whatever he could to it. They wanted to get away from us as fast as they could. We held in our grief at the parting.

Two or three of the pirates on our deck were still writhing and moaning. We put an end to that nonsense in short order. After a few whacks with an iron bar, no one moans any more. We threw the bodies into the sea. There were nine of them, not counting the ones who’d gone overboard. We’d lost two of our own, plus another three wounded.

Tasos scraped my face with his unshaven chin as he kissed me on both cheeks, a pleasantry I could have done without. “Thou art a lion!” he cried in Hassocki. “Thou art an eagle! Thou art a very dragon of bravery and might! My withers are wrung with sorrow that I might have lived my days without the boon of seeing thy valor on display!”

Then he pulled Max down to somewhere close to his level and delivered another set of kisses. He gave Max a set of endearments not the same as mine but cut from the same bolt of fabric.

As Max turned away, he spoke in Schlepsigian: “Well, that was fun.” I don’t know whether he meant the fight or Tasos’ congratulations. Either way, I thought I might have scented a whiff of irony in the air along with the iron stink of blood and the latrine reek of bowels loosed in death.

I went back to the poop deck. Whether Tasos knew it or not, Stagiros was the one who really deserved all the praise he could get. “I thought we were dead men,” I said. “And we would have been, too, if not for you.”