CHAPTER XX

The Mamelukes were stunned. To say this is an understatement. They were shaken, terrified, horror-struck, and a thousand more emotions--all bad--filled their hearts than they could ever have catalogued.

They were very brave men indeed, but they had never seen a gorilla, and certainly never a gorilla that appeared out of the sea to stand waving a Crusader's broadsword on their deck. As one man they stiffened, and gaped, and were lost. For Godwin, with a somewhat shortened repetition of his initial greeting, was bounding into their midst before they could budge.

One man died with the dice in his hand. Another lost his head before he could recover his wits. A third put hand to hilt and was cloven with a leer of terror still on his face. The fourth managed to get his scimitar cleared. Precious little good it did him. It came from the sheath only to clatter on the deck.

The Nubian slave at the tiller was a different proposition. He was as tall as Godwin, a thick-legged old warrior, with broken teeth and scarred face to attest his many battles. Leaving his post, and catching up a naked scimitar (that was easily six feet in length) as he passed the rail where it had lain propped, he ran at Godwin full tilt, yelling a battle slogan from his homeland far to the south.

Godwin thrust out his blade to parry the first vicious swinging cut. The swords clanged like hammer on anvil. The black was skillful. Godwin had all he could do to keep the singing steel from his chest. He tried a two-handed swipe, which the slave ducked blithely, and the scimitar came licking in to draw a thin scarlet line across the gorilla's belly. Half an inch further and Godwin's guts would have been spilt on the sun-hot boards.

Godwin's new reach, a stupendous one, was an advantage. In ferocity and broadsword skill he was unbeatable, but a long scimitar was a terribly formidable weapon in the hands of such a swordsman as his opposite number. He parried, parried and cursed the fact that this tall grinning half-naked black should keep him at bay so long. From the corner of an eye he saw more Saracens emerging from a hatch up forward. It was no time to stand and fight according to gentlemen's rules. He had a job to do, and this Nubian might very well cry halt to that job. Given equal weapons, Godwin would have dueled with him thus by the hour; but now he needed quick victory.

"Sorry about this," he grunted, in apology for the dirty trick he meant to play. He did not need to play it. The Nubian fell back, eyes and mouth starting wide.

"It spoke!" he cried out, and flung down his scimitar. "Oh, Allah, it spoke!" He turned and ran for the rail and dived over it like a man fleeing the wrath of Eblis. Godwin could not help laughing. Evidently, to this fellow's way of thinking, a gorilla that climbed out of the sea and fought with a broadsword was acceptable, but one that did these things and spoke in Arabic also was an intolerable wonder and a thing to boggle the mind. There was a loud splash. Another foeman was dispensed with.

There were half a dozen coming up the deck toward him: his estimate of the crew had been right. He saw two bowmen among them. Bad! He tucked his broadsword into its sheath and bent his knees and leaped for the yard of the lateen sail, caught it by both paws, hoisted himself like a gymnast up and over and knelt on the yard, balancing by a palm on the bellying sail. Carefully he got to his feet, which were prehensile enough to grip the round yard and give him a feeling of confidence in his balance. Commending his soul to his God, he ran straight down the yard until he had reached the mast. Behind him four arrows had thunked through the sail as the bowmen shot at the places they thought he might be.

* * * * *

He shinnied up the mast, which was on the opposite side of the sail, luckily, from the crew, and cautiously peered round it. Something out on the ocean caught his gaze, and he saw it was a small black dot, rapidly receding from the ship. The Nubian swordsman was still in a hurry.

The bowmen would be on his side of the sail in six jumps. The only solution to his plight burst into Godwin's brain like a crossbow bolt from the sky. He slid down the mast, came to a teeth-jolting stop as his feet hit the yard, took the mast between both powerful paws and shook it. It was stout, but thin compared with the masts used in other rigs. Fangs bared with effort, hind feet curled and braced round the yard, he exerted all the lusty power of the gorilla's arms, all the brawn of the strapping torso, all the pent-up energy that roiled and pulsed beneath the tough old hide. One mighty heave he gave, and another, and a third.

The mast complained, creaked like the nine-mile-high gate of Hell opening, and splintered in two as if struck by lightning.

Of all Godwin's feats of strength--and they were many--this was surely the greatest. As the mast crashed downward, carrying the ripping sail with it to the deck, he stood on the swaying yard and ostentatiously dusted his hands together. Suppose it had been done by the body of a jungle beast? Was he, Godwin, not inside it?

The broken mast struck with a crash that shook the ship and brought a chorus of piercing squeals from the imprisoned rats below. The yard swung violently and its end thudded to the deck, so that Godwin was knocked off balance and only saved himself by a quick kneeling and grab with both paws.

A large area of the main deck was covered by the collapsed dark sail, beneath which struggled a number of formless lumps that were the crew. Godwin picked himself up again and ran like a tightrope artist down the slanted yard to the poop, where he leaped off and turned at bay, teeth and claws and broadsword all bristling and ready.

The bumps in the sail moved about futilely, hunting an exit. The invisible rats made the air hideous with their unclean, abominable rantings.

The thing to do was go down and wade into those lumps with his sword. It may not have been precisely a fair attack, but Godwin was not absorbed with fairness at that time. He had taken two steps, the short ferocious steps of the gorilla, when an archer found the edge of the sail and rolled out from under it, an arrow nocked on his bow. He sighted Godwin at once and the bowstring tightened. Lying on his back, he took swift aim at the chest of the slavering horror on the poop deck.

* * * * *

There was no time to reach him, no barricade to dodge behind, and the distance was too long to fling his sword accurately. Godwin jerked his head round. A brazier of burning coals stood on a brass trivet at his side. Quicker than thought he had caught up the pot of them and in the same sidearm motion flung them down at the bowman. The man saw them coming, let fly his arrow and tried to roll out of range. Several coals took him in the face and neck. Seared and scorching flesh sent up an acrid, nauseous stench as the poor wretch screamed with agony. His arrow had gone wild by the slimmest of margins.

The other archer emerged from the opposite edge of the sail, shaking his head. He was bleeding from the nose and his eyesight had gone slightly awry. He leaned on the bulwarks and rubbed a fist into his eyes. He looked up and saw the gorilla coming at him over the crumpled, heaving sail.

He plucked an arrow from his belt and fitted it hastily to the string. He did not understand in the slightest how this awful creature had appeared aboard his ship, but it had fled once from his bow and so it might be slain by a mere mortal. He was a Seljuk Turk, this archer, proud and cruel and infinitely superstitious; he felt sure that Godwin was a spirit of some kind, yet he knew that spirits may be slain and all the odds seemed to be on his arrows.

The first one twanged out from his short sturdy bow.

Godwin saw it hurtle at his breast, and in his proper shape might only have watched it strike him, for he had no shield and only the smallest fraction of a second in which to take thought. But the gorilla's body was made of faster muscles, quicker reflexes, than ever a knight possessed. One arm flicked across his chest, and the arrow was caught in flight, three inches before it would have buried itself feather-deep in his thorax.

The Turk, a second arrow already on the string, froze. Before he could force action into his petrified hands, the gorilla was upon him. Great black paws took him by throat and groin, he was lifted over the brute's head, and the air whistled around him as the waves of the Mediterranean reached up to assuage their age-old hunger for living flesh.

Godwin watched him vanish into the sea. Weighted by his armor, he never came up. Godwin grinned.

Unnoticed behind him, the coals from the brazier had started a fire in the fallen sail, a fire which was rapidly spreading in a score of directions.