“So what’s to do?” asked Howel.

Baudouin was already off his horse. “These are our seas. Let us use them.” And presently, under his direction, the troopers had seized the four small boats that were beached there, and were manhandling them down from their safe moorings and into the edge of the tide. They were barely launched, half afloat, when the three men who had been sent to the village came down the little valley at their horses’ fastest pace. On the saddle in front of each man was a bundle roughly tied in sacking. The leading trooper held a blazing torch high in one hand.

A man by the boats gave a shout and pointed. “My lord! There they come!”

Still far out, low in the water, the longships stole round the point. Their sails were furled, and oars flashed in the sunlight. One of the men gave a short laugh. “Hard work, that. Happen they’ll be past fighting by the time they get ashore.”

“They will be dead when they get ashore,” said Baudouin calmly, and proceeded to give his orders.

So it was that the Saxons, rowing their armed fleet into the quiet-seeming bay, found themselves suddenly in the grip of a fierce current that threatened to sweep them straight out to sea again. The strength of the current took them by surprise, driving their ships off course and turning them sideways to the shore. As the rowers, bending to their oars, fought to bring the craft back again, and force them nearer inshore, a shout came from the Saxon lookout.

Out from the south side of the bay, where the rough jetty had hidden them from view, appeared a small flotilla of boats. They seemed to be unmanned. They bobbed away from the jetty, spun for a few moments aimlessly in the waves, then, as the outgoing current took them, they gathered speed and headed, as directly as if aimed, for the Saxon longships.

As they bore down on the vessels still helplessly wallowing in the tide-race, it could be seen that smoke was rising from the little boats, smoke which burst, suddenly and vividly, into flame. Then the Cornish boats, well ablaze, were in among the longships, driven against them and held there by the current, while the Saxons, abandoning their rowing, fought to fend them off with oars which flamed and charred and spat fire into their own ships. Three of the Saxon ships, tangled with the fireships into a blazing mass, caught fire and burned. Some of the men managed to scramble aboard the other vessels, one of which capsized. One longship only escaped the fire. Bravely, the men aboard her tried to hold her clear of the blazing wreckage, and pick up the struggling swimmers, but the heavy load and the driving current were too much for them, and at length the surviving ship, overloaded as she was, managed to fight her way back to seaward, and, leaving the smoking wreckage and the despairing cries for help in her wake, vanished once more beyond the point.