The sailor shouts something, drops the sword and throws himself back. He trips on his heels. Without thinking Thomas steps after him and drops its blade into the falling man’s face. The man screams and clamps his hands to the mess of his nose and teeth. He writhes on the pitching deck; a moment later he is choking on his own blood.

The second sailor is there already, big with a wind-burned nose and a thick leather jerkin. He’s behind Thomas and aims a slash at Katherine with a chipped cleaver. She flinches out of the way. The blade whistles past but snags her sleeve. Thomas turns and drives the crown of the axe into the sailor’s armpit, breaking his ribs and sending him staggering over to the ship’s rail where he collapses on his backside, blood all over his hands and his chest, his bare feet scrabbling on the deck. He is gasping; then he too is dead.

‘Oh God Oh God Oh God.’ Thomas’s face is very pale.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Cobham bellows.

There are still three sailors left: men with scarred knuckles and expressionless eyes. One takes up the rusted sword from the deck. Thomas watches him circle to his left, just as the other comes from the right. He wonders how he will fight two at once.

But then another flight of the arrows from the balinger hits the ship’s deck like a ripple of thunder. Five shafts, suddenly there, like a fence, buried up to their shoulders in the deck. The last one catches the sailor’s heel, nailing it to the boards. He throws up his sword, bellowing, flailing at the arrow’s fletch.

Just as the second digs his blade at Thomas. Thomas catches it against the steel languet of the pollaxe, steps into him, and, copying Riven, smashes his left fist into the gristle of the sailor’s nose. Two fangs of blood sprout on his face and Thomas wheels around to drive the axe into the sailor’s knee. The sailor goes down in a tangle on the deck. Thomas drops the fluke on him. It is a wound that won’t kill him for days yet.

The third man comes at Thomas, circling, his blade held low, but he is half-hearted now, and backs off as soon as Thomas levels the axe at him.

‘Help me!’ the sailor with the arrow in his heel keeps crying. ‘Help me! For the love of God! Help me for the love of all that’s holy!’

Now Cobham has had enough. He abandons the tiller, storms down the ladder. He scoops up the rusted sword and advances on the sailor with the arrow in his heel. The sailor looks at him imploringly, then changes expression and tries to scrabble backwards. He holds up his hands.

‘No!’ he screams.