“That remains to be seen,” answered T’heonax. “But a race which can fly across The Ocean in less than an equinoctail day must know some handy arts.”

He whirled on a quivering Van Rijn. With the relish of the inquisitor whose suspect has broken, he said curtly: “Maybe we can get you home somehow if you help us. We are not sure how to get you home. Maybe your stuff can help us get you home. You show us how to use your stuff.”

“Oh, yes!” said Van Rijn. He clasped his hands and waggled his head. “Oh, yes, good sir, I do you want-um.”

T’heonax clipped an order. A Drak’ho slithered across the deck with a large box. “I’ve been in charge of these things,” explained the heir. “Haven’t tried to fool with it, except for a few knives of that shimmery substance—” Momentarily, his eyes glowed with honest enthusiasm. “You’ve never seen such knives, father! They don’t hack or grind, they slice! They’ll carve seasoned wood!”

He opened the box. The ranking officers forgot dignity and crowded around. T’heonax waved them back. “Give this blubberpot room to demonstrate,” he snapped. “Bowmen, blowgunners, cover him from all sides. Be ready to shoot if necessary.”

Van Rijn took out a blaster.

“You mean to fight your way clear?” hissed Wace. “You can’t!” He tried to step between Sandra and the menace of weapons which suddenly ringed them in. “They’ll fill us with arrows before—”

“I know, I know,” growled Van Rijn sotto voce. “When will you young pridesters learn, just because he is old and lonely, the boss does not yet have teredos in the brain? You keep back, boy, and when trouble breaks loose, hit the deck and dig a hole.”

“What? But—”

Van Rijn turned a broad back on him and said in broken Drak’ho, with servile eagerness: “Here a… how you call it?… thing. It makes fire. It burn-um holes, by Joe.”

“A portable flame thrower — that small?” For a moment, an edge of terror sharpened T’heonax’s voice.

“I told you,” said Delp, “we can gain more by dealing honorably with them. By the Lodestar, I think we could get them home, too, if we really tried!”

“You might wait till I’m dead, Delp, before taking the Admiralty,” said Syranax. If he meant it as a joke, it fell like a bomb. The nearer sailors, who heard it, gasped. The household warriors touched their bows and blowguns. Rodonis sa Axollono spread her wings over her children and snarled. Deckhand females, jammed into the forecastle, let out a whimper of half-comprehending fear.

Delp himself steadied matters. “Quiet!” he bawled. “Belay there! Calm down! By all the devils in the Rainy Stars, have these creatures driven us crazy?”

“See,” chattered Van Rijn, “take blaster… we call-um blaster… pull-um here—”

The ion beam stabbed out and crashed into the mainmast. Van Rijn yanked it away at once, but it had already made a gouge centimeters deep in that tough wood. Its blue-white flame licked across the deck, whiffed a coiled cable into smoke, and took a section out of the rail, before he released the trigger.

The Drak’honai roared!

It was minutes before they had settled back into the shrouds or onto the decks; curiosity seekers from nearby craft still speckled the sky. However, they were technologically sophisticated in their way. They were excited rather than frightened.

“Let me see that!” T’heonax snatched at the gun.

“Wait, Wait, good sir, wait.” Van Rijn snapped open the chamber, in a set of movements screened by his thick hands, and popped out the charge. “Make-um safe first. There.”

T’hoeonax turned it over and over. “What a weapon!” he breathed. “What a weapon!”

Standing there in a frosty sweat, waiting for Van Rijn to spoon up whatever variety of hell he was cooking, Wace still managed to reflect that the Drak’honai were overestimating. Natural enough, of course. But a gun of this sort would only have a serious effect on ground-fighting tactics — and the old sharper was coolly disarming all the blasters anyway, no uninstructed Diomedean was going to get any value from them -

“I make safe,” Van Rijn burbled. “One, two, three, four, five I make safe… Four? Five? Six?” He began turning over the piled-up clothes, blankets, heaters, campstove, and other equipment. “Where other three blasters?”

“What other three?” T’heonax stared at him.

“We have six.” Van Rijn counted carefully on his fingers. “Ja, six. I give-um all to good sir Delp here.”

“WHAT?”

Delp leaped at the human, cursing. “That’s a lie! There were only three, and you’ve got them there!”

“Help!” Van Rijn scuttled behind T’heonax. Delp’s body clipped the admiral’s son. Both Drak’honai went over in a whirl of wings and tails.

“He’s plotting mutiny!” screamed T’heonax.

Wace threw Sandra to the deck and himself above her. The air grew dense with missiles.

Van Rijn turned ponderously to grab the sailor in charge of Tolk. But that Drak’ho had already away to Delp’s defense. Van Rijn had only to peel off the imprisoning net.

“Now,” he said in fluent Lannachamael, “go bring an army to fetch us out of here. Quick, before someone notices!”

The Herald nodded, threshed his wings, and was gone into a sky where battle ran loose.

Van Rijn stooped over Wace and Sandra. “This way,” he panted under the racket. A chance tail-buffet, as a sailor fought two troopers, brought a howl from him. “Thunder and lightning! Pest and poison ivy!” He wrestled Sandra to her feet and hustled her toward the comparative shelter of the forecastle.

When they stood inside its door, among terrified females and cubs, looking out at the fight, he said:

“It is a pity that Delp will go under. He has no chance. He is a decent sort; we could maybe have done business.”

“All saints in Heaven!” choked Wace. “You touched off a civil war just to get your messenger away?”

“You know perhaps a better method?” asked Van Rijn.

When Commander Krakna fell in battle against the invaders, the Flock’s General Council picked one Trolwen to succeed him. They were the elders, and their choice comparatively youthful, but the Lannachska thought it only natural to be led by young males. A commander needed the physical stamina of two, to see them through a hard and dangerous migration every year; he seldom lived to grow feeble. Any rash impulses of his age were curbed by the General Council itself, the clan leaders who had grown too old to fly at the head of their squadron-septs and not yet so old and weak as to be left behind on some winter journey.

Trolwen’s mother belonged to the Trekkhan group, a distinguished bloodline with rich properties on Lannach; she herself had added to that wealth by shrewd trading. She guessed that his father was Tornak of the Wendru — not that she cared especially, but Trolwen looked noticeably like that fierce warrior. However, it was his own record as a clan-elected officer, in storm and battle and negotiation and everyday routine, which caused the Council to pick him as leader of all the clans. In the ten-days since, he had been the chief of a losing cause; but possibly his folk were pressed back into the uplands more slowly than would have happened without him.

Now he led a major part of the Flock’s fighting strength out against the Fleet itself.

Vernal equinox was barely past, but already the days lengthened with giant strides; each morning the sun rose farther north, and a milder air melted the snows until Lannach’s dales were a watery brawling. It took only one hundred thirty days from equinox to Last Sunrise — thereafter, during the endless light of High Summer, there would be nothing but rain or mist to cover an attack.

And if the Drakska were not whipped by autumn, reflected Trolwen grimly, there would be no point in trying further; the Flock would be done.