Warnings - A Ship is Seen - Battle Alignment - Battle

  An arc of arrows rose ahead. They passed through the ranks, some sticking to Pai’s boat, others into rowers. Archers from Pai’s side let loose a volley. Pai saw most dive harmlessly into the water or rattle against shields that materialized. Another round of arrows came from the Plu’kwa’s forward boats. They zipped low across the water such that Pai didn’t realize they’d been shot until they whistled past him. Men in boats to either side of Pai were struck. One had an arrow embed into his neck. The fletching was through his wind pipe, the tipped end sticking out through his nape. He gasped as he tried to retrieve it. The man sitting behind him yelled to leave it, but as he gripped the arrow to pull it, another arrow threaded through the socket of his eye and his head slumped down, the arrow point sticking skywards.

  Pai was at once focused on his own oar, paddling to Ta’maal’s count, and aware of the boats ahead. Some of the boat masts were empty of sails but festooned with human skulls. They jangled loosely, sun bleached, the craniums bearing fractures. The faces of the oarsmen were gaudy and mean, expressions grotesque: wide bloodshot eyes, tongues stretching, mouths yodeling a high screech like bats being twisted to death. It was all more horrible than Pai could have imagined.

  The first sounds of boats crashing together came from down the line. Loud, percussive smacks of wood. When Pai’s boat hit the ones coming at it, all men of both sides lurched forward. Those who hadn’t prepared and held onto the gunwales flew into the hulls of their enemy. There they were hacked down, their amputated bodies rolled over into the space between boats or left there and trampled.

  Pai had held onto the gunwales. He dropped his oar and stood and lifted his shark tooth sword. He immediately stabbed it through the gut of a man who charged at him. Not aware that the blade had cut him, the man continued to scream and seemed to rush forward as if eager for the sword to go deeper. Pai pushed and twisted the blade, and the man opened his mouth, the air from his lungs rattling in its departure. Pai left him to slump and pant until he died.

  Everywhere men brought death with an oddment of instruments. Swords, dull and dented, dragged from sea-bottom, still plastered with skeletal barnacles. One man swung a jagged rock tied to a rope in broad, centrifugal halos. A fellow, unaware of this orbit, stood up into it, and the rock smashed his temple. The man convulsed; his arm locked in place above his head as he splashed into the water and sank. Pai saw men titled with injury brought down swiftly with indifferent axes, and they were speared screaming at the bottom of their boats. Some tried to flee the melee and slipped unnoticed into the narrow spaces between boats. As the boats moved this and that way, Pai heard from underneath the hulls hard and desperate fists thumping the undersides and then slow and then cease. Many others who seemed committed to fighting, but were too torn to do so, waved their weapons harmlessly at empty air. Their blood loss gathering beneath them until there was more out than in, and they tottered dizzily, hobbling over the bodies that bridged boats, keeping them together, growing whiter and whiter until they collapsed. To Pai, there seemed more Plu’kwa oarsman ahead, bone weapons winking in sunlight, a wall of teeth and eyes poking through breaches in the boat ranks.

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  Now Pai saw a detachment of boats break from the rear of the enemy’s armada and loop out to his right flank. Few others seemed to see what he saw. He saw Ku’mae, spearing with arm and clubbing with the other, leaping from boat to boat and man to man, so slathered with tar black and gore that he might have bathed in it. Pai yelled to him about the impending loss of the fleet’s right flank. Ku’mae rallied a few boats and pulled away from the main battle to meet the strategy. At once, Pai and the other men realized they were choosing to meet a contingent of boats twice their number. Only Ku’mae looked unperturbed. He stood at the bow of the leading boat, the only man not rowing, holding two spears in his hands. He chucked one at close range, and it took down its mark. When near enough, he leaped from his own boat and stabbed at all the men in the boat he landed into, piercing many of them, another one fatally. Ku’mae was in a throe of blood lust, and the Plu’kwa encircled him. Pai couldn’t chop his way through this human moat and stood on the outside as he watched Ku’mae receive the first blow to his shoulder. Ku’mae did not appear to see it. Then a blade passed over his arm. The skin on the bicep split. A cudgel struck his temple. A slurry of matter came from the tear it left, and Ku’mae fell to his knees. Pai saw each blow. He strained to reach Ku’mae, but he was beaten back. He lost sight of Ku’mae as Plu’kwa swarmed atop him, and then he saw a single bloody hand rise above the ruckus, a link of entrails held in its fist.

  What Pai felt was sudden and blinding. A vigorous concentration of mass behind his forehead that exceeded anything he could withstand. He screamed and threw his head backwards and his arms out. The mass vacated him, and he saw it ripple the air like a stone dropped in water. Five men standing before him screamed, their eyes ruptured, keloid scars on their body softened and broke apart into open and minor seams. Pai felt a grisly nausea. He’d never seen such suffering: the men remained alive, wailing at but unable to see their disintegration.

  Cloistered in his own terror, ashamed at what he’d done, he yelled to others, “Can you not see them and end their cries?” His own men were unsure how to react. Two Plu’kwa swiftly killed their kinsmen; the remaining leapt for Pai.

  Pai was beyond thoughts of staging a violent self-defense. He turned and tried to hop to a retreating boat. His footing was uneven and he faltered. Plu’kwa tackled him, bound him quickly, and then pulled him to the boat where Ku’mae’s portioned body lay. Pai yelled out. The screams terrified the Plu’kwa. Word of what he’d done had already spread through their ranks. They shuffled Pai to a rear boat and tossed him onto its galley, where he saw what remained of the battle. The Plu’kwa encircled dozens of boats and wrestled the men in them to submission. Boats, half-filled with villagers, made a frantic escape, and the Plu’kwa let them slip back to the village unchallenged. When the last boat within the Plu’kwa encirclement surrendered, the Plu’kwa clapped their weapons together and screeched. The sound repeated off the karst cliffs until it was the Plu’kwa voice and no other that owned the bay.