Bones of the Dragon - Margaret Weis [230]
“At least let me stay to bid farewell to my friend,” Skylan asked.
The warriors jeered at him.
“Garn’s spirit would curse us all if we allowed you to be present at his funeral,” Bjorn said.
They hauled Skylan off down the beach. With his legs hobbled, he could not walk. He stumbled, fell. The men did not give him a chance to stand, but dragged him through the sand.
The morning was hot and breathless. No air stirred. The sun beat upon the shore. Heat rose in shimmering waves. The sea was flat. The tide had gone out. The shallow water stirred sluggishly beneath an oily film. The men carried him onto the wounded dragonship. Bjorn and Erdmun picked him up by the arms and legs and threw him down the ladder and into the darkness of the hold. They tossed down a skin containing fresh water and shut the trapdoor.
He heard the scraping sound as the men hauled over something heavy—probably one of the water barrels—and placed it on top of the door to keep him from escaping.
Skylan lay where he fell, too weary and dispirited to rise. The ropes were tight and cut into him. The wound on his chest burned. His body hurt, but the pain in his heart was far greater. Garn was dead, and Aylaen might as well have been. She was dead to him.
And what had become of Wulfe? He should have been back by now. Something had happened to the boy. He was probably dead.
I will be dead before long.
Oddly, the thought of death didn’t frighten Skylan. He almost welcomed it. His heart and soul had died already.
He heard the men begin to sing the death-song, and he caught a whiff of smoke. Skylan crawled across the floor and peered through one of the gaps in the planking.
The men tossed torches onto the pyres. The wood, daubed with pitch, caught fire immediately. Smoke rolled from the pyres. Skylan could smell burning flesh.
The smoke hung in the breathless air, forming a blinding cloud that set men gagging and ended the death-songs. Tendrils of smoke crept in through the slats in the wood. Skylan coughed. The smoke stung his eyes. He blinked his burning eyes and stared out between the gaps in the planks.
The men, their mouths and noses covered against the smoke, stood around the pyres, waiting for the spirits to depart. That would happen only when the pyres collapsed and the bodies were consumed.
The men choked and coughed. Their clothes were drenched with sweat from the intense heat and caked with ashes and soot. The smoke grew too thick for Skylan to see. He was thirsty, his mouth parched and his throat clogged. He hobbled across the deck to the waterskin. He managed to pick it up with his bound hands and lifted it to his lips. He was about to drink when he happened to glance through another gap.
He dropped the waterskin.
A ship rode at anchor in the deep water near the sandbar. The ship was huge, with three decks, three banks of oars, two masts near the center and a smaller foremast near the front. The rowers sat idle, watching men streaming down a gangplank, landing on the sandbar. The men were warriors. Each man wore a helm with wing flaps that covered his cheeks and armor made of overlapping strips of shining metal. The segmented armor protected each man’s shoulders, his upper arms, his breast and the back. Strips of leather studded with metal formed a skirt that protected the warrior’s groin and thighs. Each man carried a sword and a large rectangular shield.
Skylan lurched toward the gap and stared out. His eyes stung from the smoke, and he blinked and wiped them and stared again. He could not believe what he was seeing.
The shields bore the image of a winged serpent.
The moment each warrior landed on the sandbar, he ran to join the ranks of his fellows. No man spoke. All was done swiftly and in disciplined silence. An officer gave a signal, and the men plunged into the shallow water and began wading toward the shore, holding their swords and their shields above their heads.
This was an ambush. The enemy was bearing down on Skylan’s men. Skylan hobbled back to the other side of the hold. He moved too fast, lost his balance,