"
"Well?" Charlie's eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the wall
behind my chair.
"I don't know how we fought. The men were trampling all over my back, and I
lay low. Then our rowers on the left side--tied to their oars, you know--began
to yell and back water. I could hear the water sizzle, and we spun round like
a cockchafer and I knew, lying where I was, that there was a galley coming up
bow-on, to ram us on the left side. I could just lift up my head and see her
sail over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow to bow, but it was too late.
We could only turn a little bit because the galley on our right had hooked
herself on to us and stopped our moving. Then, by gum! there was a crash! Our
left oars began to break as the other galley, the moving one y'know, stuck her
nose into them. Then the lower-deck oars shot up through the deck-planking,
butt first, and one of them jumped clean up into the air and came down again
close to my head."
"How was that managed?"
"The moving galley's bow was plunking them back through their own oarholes,
and I could hear the devil of a shindy in the decks below. Then her nose
caught us nearly in the middle, and we tilted sideways, and the fellows in the
right-hand galley unhitched their hooks and ropes, and threw things on to our
upper deck--arrows, and hot pitch or something that stung, and we went up and
up and up on the left side, and the right side dipped, and I twisted my head
round and saw the water stand still as it topped the right bulwarks, and then
it curled over and crashed down on the whole lot of us on the right side, and
I felt it hit my back, and I woke.
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