"Malloreans ahead! On the north bank!" the lookout at the mast shouted. "About a half a mile!"

"Wet down the decks," Barak ordered.

The sailors tossed buckets on long ropes over the side, hauled up water, and soaked the wooden decks.

"Signal the ships behind us," Anheg told the bearded sailor standing in the very stern of the ship. The sailor nodded, turned and lifted a large flag attached to a long pole. He began to wave it vigorously at the ships strung out behind them.

"Be careful with that fire!" Barak shouted to the men clustered around a raised platform filled with gravel and covered with glowing coals. "If you set us ablaze, you'll all have to swim to the Sea of the East."

Just to the front of the platform stood three heavy-limbed catapults, cocked and ready.

King Anheg squinted ahead at the Malloreans gathered around a dozen or so siege engines standing solidly on the north bank. "Better send in your arrow-boats now," he suggested.

Barak grunted and waved his arm in a broad chopping motion to the six narrow boats in his wake. In answer, the lean little boats leaped ahead, cutting through the water. Mounted at the prow of each arrowboat stood a long-armed catapult armed with a loosely packed bundle of arrows. Aided by the current, the narrow little boats sped past, their oars bending.

"Load the engines!" Barak roared to the men around the gravelbased fire. "And don't slop any of that tar on my decks."

With long iron hooks, the sailors lifted three large earthenware pots out of the coals. The pots contained a seething mixture of tar, pitch, and naptha. They were quickly dipped in tar barrels and then hastily wrapped in naptha-soaked rags. Then they were placed in the baskets of the waiting engines.

As the arrow-boats, speeding like greyhounds, swept in close to shore where the Malloreans struggled to aim their catapults, the arrow-bundles were suddenly hurled high into the air by the lashing arms of the Cherek engines. The arrows rose swiftly, then slowed at the top of their arching flight, separating and spreading out as they flew. Then, in a deadly rain, they fell upon the red-tunicked Malloreans.