my eye, and that
only now and again, for the fishers, despite their ill-knowledge of
fence, and the clumsiness of their weapons, had heavy numbers, and most
savage ferocity; and as they made so confident of being able to pull
us down, it required more than a little hard battling to keep them from
doing it. Ay, by the Gods! it was at times a fight my heart warmed to,
and if I had not contrived to pluck a shield from one fool who came too
vain-gloriously near me with one, I could not swear they would not have
dragged me down by sheer ravening savageness.

And always above the burly uproar of the fight came very pleasantly to
my ears Phorenice's cry of "Deucalion!" which she chose as her battle
shout. I knew her, of course, to be a past-mistress of the art of
compliment, and it was no new thing for me to hear the name roared out
above a battle din, but it was given there under circumstances which
were peculiar, and for the life of me I could not help being tickled by
the flattery.

Condemn my weakness how you will, but I came very near then to liking
the Empress of Atlantis in the way she wished. And as for that other
woman who should have filled my mind, I will confess that the stress of
the moment, and the fury of the engagement, had driven both her and her
strait completely out beyond the marches of my memory. Of such frail
stuff are we made, even those of us who esteem ourselves the strongest.

Now it is a temptation few men born to the sword can resist, to throw
themselves heart and soul into a fight for a fight's sake, and it seems
that women can be bitten with the same fierce infection. The attack
slackened and halted. We stood in the middle of a ring of twisted dead,
and the rest of the fishers and their women who hemmed us in shrank back
out of reach of our weapons.

It was the moment for a truce, and the moment when a few strong words
would have sent them back cowering to their huts, and given us free
passage to go where we chose. But no, this Phorenice must needs sing a
hymn to her sword and mine, gloating over our feats and invulnerability;
and then she must needs ask payment for the bearers of her litter whom
they had killed, and then speak balefully of the burnings, and the
skinnings, and the sawings asunder with which this fishers' quarter
would be treated in the near future, till they learned the virtues of
deportment and genteel manners.

"It makes your backs creep, does it?" said Phorenice. "I do no