Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [404]
‘We certainly need that garrison, poor devils. If we stay here we’ll be slaughtered.’
There was no way in which thirteen men, poorly armed, could defend themselves against four boatloads of troops armed with wheel locks.
It was then that the sea rose, opened, and rained assatassi.
From one end of the Sea of Eagles to the other, assatassi flew like darts from sea to shore.
Fisherfolk who understood the sea kept this day and the following one for celebration and feasting. It was a day which occurred only once early every summer during the Great Summer, at the time of high tide. In Lordryardry, nets were ready. In Ottassol, tarpaulins were spread. In Gravabagalinien, the queen’s familiars had warned her to stay away from the deadly shore. What was a feast of plenty for the knowledgeable became a rain of death for the ignorant.
Swimming in from far mid-ocean, shoals of assatassi headed for land. Their migrations during the Great Summer spanned the globe. Their feeding grounds were in the distant reaches of the Ardent Sea, where no man had visited. On reaching maturity, the shoals started their long swim eastwards, against the flow of ocean currents. Through the Climent Sea they went, and on through the narrow gates of the Straits of Cadmer.
This narrowing brought the shoals into greater proximity. The enforced closeness, together with the onset of monsoon weather in the Nannosset Sea, brought a changed behaviour pattern. What had been a long leisurely swim, without apparent aim, became a race – a race which was destined to end in the death-flight.
But for that actual flight, that desired death along thousands of miles of coast, another factor was necessary. The tide had to be right.
Throughout the centuries of winter, Helliconia’s seas were all but tideless. After apastron and the darkest years, Freyr again began to make its influence felt. As its gigantic mass beckoned the chill planet back towards the light, so too it stirred the seas. Its pull on the ocean mass was now, only 118 Earth years from periastron, considerable. The time in the small year had arrived when the combined mass of Batalix and Freyr worked together. The result was a sixty percent increase in tidal strength over the winter situation.
The narrow seas between Hespagorat and Campannlat, the strong flow of the current to the west, conspired to make the spring tides mount and break suddenly with dramatic force. On that phenomenal flow of water shoreward, the shoals of assatassi launched themselves.
The ships of the Sibornalese fleet found themselves first with no water under their draught, and then battered by a tidal wave rising precipitously and without warning from the sea. Before the crews could realise what had hit them, the assatassi were there. The death-flight was on.
The assatassi is a necrogenetic fish, or more properly fish-lizard. It reaches a length of eighteen inches at maturity; it has two large multifaceted eyes; but what chiefly distinguishes it is its straight bill of bone, supported by a boney cranium. On its death-flight the assatassi reaches speeds high enough for this bill to penetrate a man to the heart.
Off Keevasien, the assatassi broke from the surface a hundred yards further out than the Golden Friendship. So full did the air become with them that those which flew low enough to skim the water and those who gained heights of fifty feet alike formed part of a solid body of fast-moving fish-lizard. They gleamed like a myriad of sword blades. The air became a sword blade.
The flagship was raked by assatassi from stem to stern. Anyone standing on deck was struck. The seaward side of the ship was covered with creatures, hanging skewered by their bills. So with the three other ships. But it was the boats, already waterlogged by the tide, which suffered most. All their company was wounded, and many were killed outright. The boards were stove in. All four boats began to sink.
Cries of pain and terror sounded – lost beneath the shriek of birds who plunged down