Avenger of Antares by Alan Burt Akers Read Free Book Online

itself.
    “By Vox, Wersting! What vile muck are you burning there?”
    I might have guessed.
    “We found timbers from that Corg-blasted shank, Prince. It is those timbers that stink.”
    “Impregnated with the damned fish stink,” said Captain Ehren.
    I inspected some of the wood the hands had gathered. Of a heavy and close-grained appearance, it bore a greasy greenish texture, somewhat spongy to the feel and, surprisingly, not particularly heavy at all. No one recognized the wood.
    “The wood stinks of itself,” I said. “And I guess it is a capital timber for ship construction.”
    “Aye,” said Lars Ehren. “Capital for fish-men! But I’ll allow their stinking craft outsailed our old
Ovynth,
Opaz rot ’em!”
    I said briskly, “This stink blowing downwind will bring out the locals if I’m not mistaken.”
    How instructive it was to see who made an instinctive check of their weapons, feeling the sword snugged neatly to waist, the spar to hand, the knife at belt!
    We ate the fish, and poor fare it was, too. Then we set about marching from the beach southerly, looking for water.
    The burning stink from our fire wafted with us for a good long way.
    The shank ship, burning, would have alerted the people along this coast, both by fire and smell. We marched, ready for what might befall us.
    In the event the local inhabitants were far more frightened of us than we had need to be of them. We first saw them popping up over the sand dunes inland, where scraggly bushes and coarse rank grasses grew, showing scared faces which seemed all eyes and mouths, before they turned tail and ran. They turned tail quite literally, for these were Yuccamots, a sleek otter-like people with long, broad flattened tails. They had progressed as a race from swimming individually to catch the fish on which they lived, to sailing open boats with purse seines (nets which they looped in a great semicircle and dragged ashore), a whole village hauling on the lines. Their fingers are no longer webbed, but their feet still are. To my delight I found the Yuccamots proud of their webbed feet. How different this was from the shame the Undurkers, those supercilious canine folk from the islands south of Persinia, feel for their hind paws!
    Well, it takes all kinds to make a world. The Gons, as you know, are ashamed of their white hair and religiously shave off every last lock of white from their scalps.
    We made contact with the Yuccamots, and after a time managed to convince them we bore them no ill will. That we might have to steal one of their boats was a question not raised at this time. The boats themselves possessed the tall incurving stem and stern of the type of boat built two thousand years ago in the Mediterranean. They were flat bottomed, broad beamed, and lacked sails. They were propelled by six massive oars, each crewed by at least eight men, often amidships by a dozen, pushing and pulling, after the manner of swordships. These boats, with the bright colors and the otter-eyes painted in the bows, reminded me most, I suppose, of
xavegas.
The
xavega,
a Portuguese boat used against the Atlantic to catch sardines in exactly the same way as the Yuccamots use their boats to catch their fish, is fast dying out on the Earth. A pity.
    The Yuccamots had developed the technique used in
xavegas
of positioning extra men judiciously about the craft and having them haul on lines attached to the looms of the oars. Exactly the same kind of extra manpower on the oars is employed by the captains of the inner sea in their swifters, and the captains of swordships along the coasts of the outer oceans.
    Captain Ehren expressed himself as satisfied with the boats themselves, although wishing for a little more fullness in the bottom lines, or a leeboard, failing a keel. But he was scathing about the absence of masts and sails.
    “We can fashion masts, Captain Lars,” I said. “Aye, and sails, also. If it comes to the fluttrell vane, we can do it.”
    Captain Ehren