Both men were silent for a time as their boat approached the foreign ship. Dion revised his estimation of the warship’s length, reckoning it was closer to eighty feet long, with a beam of about ten feet. It was nearly flat-bottomed, designed to be sailed during the day and beached at night, and although the central main mast was tall, he guessed that the power of the wind was intended to augment the oarsmen. The timber it was constructed from appeared to be pine.

‘Have you ever seen such a thing?’ Dion murmured.

‘My guess is she is not from our part of the world. One of the Salesian lands, I’d say. Look at the one directing them.’

They were now sailing close enough to make out individual faces and Dion saw a man with a barrel chest and curled black beard calling out orders to the workers. The commander’s yellow robe was unmistakably foreign, not the dress of Galea at all.

‘She must have been damaged in the tremor,’ Dion said. ‘They are repairing her. By Silex, look at her ram!’

The ship’s prow jutted out from above a painted eye, and Dion guessed there would be another eye on the other side. The prow curved inwards and followed the bow, where she would carve the waves, before curving again below what would be the waterline and spearing forward in a ten-foot-long bronze ram.

He thought about the damage such a weapon would inflict on another vessel. Suddenly he understood the full import of what he was seeing.

A foreign warship had come to Phalesia. And despite Phalesia’s sizable navy, this ship outclassed the Phalesian vessels in every way. The thought filled him with dread.

‘Take us closer still.’

The black-bearded commander was now staring at their small boat and glaring at its two occupants, his arms folded in front of his chest. Undeterred, Dion continued his assessment of the warship, feeling dwarfed by the monstrous rudder, which was as tall as the sailing boat’s mast.

It had three decks, two for the rowers, open at the sides with scores of holes for the oars, and an upper deck giving a roof to those below.

Dion realized the simplicity of the design and wondered that it was only now that someone had thought of such a thing. He murmured to himself more than to Cob, ‘A bigger ship is slower in the water, harder to move . . . makes it more difficult to increase to ramming speed. But more oarsmen create more power. So to keep the ship’s length and beam the same we add another row of oarsmen, so that one is on top of the other.’

‘It’s a clever design.’ When Dion glanced back at Cob he saw his friend was nodding as he spoke, but the wrinkles on his forehead showed concern.

‘I count thirty ports for oars,’ Dion said.