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for nostrils, came at one with a gruesome and grotesque force.
I do not like fish.
If it is essential, then I will eat fish; but I do not pretend to enjoy a mouthful.
The sight of these fishy excrescences, screeching and hissing, charging on with their weapons lifted, with
their steel and bronze glittering, infuriated me. The sprouting green corals in their helmets, the jewels
fashioned into the likeness of seaweed and swathed in decoration about them, all this piscine splendor
and arrogance, this grotesque transference of the things of one realm to another, repelled me. Yet these
shanks were acting only according to their own lights, their own way. They did what nature impelled them
to do, as did I. (Although, since my arrival on Kregen and up to this point in my story, I had made valiant
attempts to curb my nature, to see things in other ways and with other peoples eyes. I had had some
success, as you know, and some failures.)
As the shanks violently rushed upon us, seeking to slay us and take our possessions for themselves, I
had no right to any other course of action save that of opposing them.
The blades clashed and rang. Arrows hissed spitefully. The shanks used short, heavily curved compound
bows, and they drove barbed arrows in with fiendish cruelty. The Vallians were using bows very similar
to the Valkan bows, for that style had proved itself in the eyes of the Vallians who could not pull a
longbow and so they had adopted it. As the shafts flew I found myself cursing and raging that there was
no contingent of bowmen from Loh with me, and to lead them no one else but Seg Segutorio. And, too,
if Inch had been there with his monstrous ax. And Turko, also, with a massive shield to lift up at my back.
But they were far away, and I was here, caught up in a scene of carnage and savagery.
Our red blood ran to mingle with the greenish blood of the shanks.
They wore armor, of course, and it was fashioned from bronze scales, as would seem inevitable, given
their fishy origins. We fought across the decks of the galleon in the heaving sea and gradually the twin
suns of Kregen, Zim and Genodras, the red and the green, sank to the horizon.
You may feel I have overemphasized the repulsiveness of these shanks. This could be so. But from them
rose a foul aroma, the decaying stench of rotten fish. We gagged as we fought. But, then, I suppose it
would be true to guess we stank in their slit nostrils.
We fought. The suns declined. Backward and forward swayed the fight, first upon our deck, then upon
theirs, and then back again as men shrieked and died and others ran to take their places.
Vallia! Vallia! shouted our men.
Ishtish! Ishtish! screeched the shanks.
I must now relate what was to me a strange phenomenon. In the lands of Kregen whereon I had
wandered this far in my life, the grouping of continents and islands so familiar to me, a grouping that in
after years came to be called Paz, I had always found that among all the myriads of local dialects there
ran the strong sure thread of the Kregish language. That tongue had seemed universal. But now, to my
astonishment, I discovered that my people of Vallia could not understand the language of the shanks.
A few moments reflection convinced me that this was a more natural state of affairs than that around the
curve of the world, on that other grouping of islands and continents, they should speak the tongue we
called Kregish. This reflection was accompanied by much physical exercise in slitting throats, and gouging
fishy eyeballs, and inspecting what fishy tripes might be like.
During this stage of the combat I began to have hopes that we would win.
The coded genetic language pill given to me by Maspero so long ago in Aphrasöe, the Swinging City,
ensured that with a little application I could perfectly understand the language of these fishy people. In the
heat of conflict I discarded that information and bashed on.
Vallia! Vallia! Opaz is with us! The shouts grew triumphant now as we smashed the shanks back, over
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