But luck turned against them: one of the lord’s servants on the far bank, evidently in charge of getting the entire assembly across the river and looking exasperated and hot, with a few strands of hair straggled loose from his neatly swept-back arrangement, caught sight of the boat. He called out to them peremptorily, beckoning—you there, you, the boat—plainly wishing them to come and assist in the ferrying, despite the scowls of the ferrymen.
Laurence pretended not to hear, not to see; he rowed onwards with more vigor, trying to evade the clumsy-handled ferries, crammed too full of men. But an eddy pushed one of the waddling boats towards their little fishing-boat and bumped her, and a disapproving older woman in the prow took the opportunity to reach over and swat him reprovingly, gesturing back at the crowded bank as she chided him.
The swat dislodged the rag covering his hair; one of the samurai aboard the ship glanced over, and, after a moment of confusion, a recognition dawned. The samurai leaned over, and sought to grab him; Laurence shipped one oar and seized the other mid-stem, jabbing the handle hard into the man’s belly, and tipped him over the side. Another was standing up in the ferry, trying to draw his sword, which he would have needed to practice a good deal more on the water before trying to accomplish it on a wallowing tub of the sort. Before he could get it out, Laurence swung up the flat of the oar and struck the man a hard and ringing clout across the head, knocking him down to the floor of the ferry.
The two boats were yet entangled. “Ma’am, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said to the old woman, who was still sitting ramrod-straight in the ferry over the side from him and regarding him with a flat expression of utter disapproval and not the least evidence of fear; he put out a boot over the side and shoved the ferry off with a heave, and they were loose.
But the entire retinue were now alive to his presence, swarming out upon the banks, and a couple of the samurai wading out towards them with blades drawn: the ford was shallow enough to make attack practical, the river not waist-high on a man. “Take the oars!” Laurence said to Junichiro, who was hesitating with his hand on the hilt of his blade—he could scarcely have been eager to strike men of rank, of his own nation.
Junichiro looked even more torn; but he seized the oars and began awkwardly to pull. One of the samurai had reached them, catching at the boat’s side: Laurence gripped the man’s wrist to hold away the blade, and with his other hand closed hard struck him across the face and away from the boat. Another was struggling furiously through the current, almost there, but Junichiro had mastered the boat, and they were moving into deeper water.
Laurence ducked a last wild desperate swing of blade, and then he sat again and took the oars—pulled as urgently as ever he had pulled in his life: no longer the easy strokes he had used to move them along, but deep cupping sweeps, legs and back and shoulders all gone into every stroke. He had put a hundred yards between them and the ford before the first ferry could be emptied of her passengers, and a pursuit began to organize. Then he was further on, around a bend of the river, and they had vanished from sight.
He did not slacken his pace; he thought at first he might hope to escape the pursuit—the boats at the ford had by no means been very serviceable, and any rowers they had were like to be unhandy. But as he pulled them onwards, a blue flare went shooting up, back from the ford, and burst with a great thunderclap noise and a shining light on the water. A signal, and faintly he heard an answering roar—a dragon, alerted.
“They will set the patrols on us now,” Junichiro said. “We will be taken,” with a calm certainty, given almost in a conversational tone. He had straightened up in the boat, and looked as though he were already preparing himself to meet his fate.
“I do not propose to be quite so dull a fox as that,” Laurence said. “Pick up that bundle, and jump for the shore when we are near enough.” He turned them towards the left, where the bank came low to the water, with trees close together but not impassable.
LAURENCE PUSHED THE FISHING-BOAT off, water already rising inside from the hole he had stove in her hull, and saw her go away downriver not without a qualm: even if remaining aboard would have been certain doom, she was still the quickest road to the sea, and the only one at all familiar. He had left the remains of his already-tattered old shirt wrapped around a bundle of branches to make a sort of scare-crow, standing up in the prow and fluttering out white; if only the boat evaded capture long enough to get some distance away before she sank, he hoped it might prove some source of confusion, if not long defer the pursuit.
At least it would conceal where they had gone, for a little while. Junichiro was already doing his best to obscure the marks their landing had made in the bank with more dead leaves and branches.