Chapter twenty
DeliaA great song has been made of the fight at The Dragon’s Bones, but I will not give you its title. It runs to a mere seventy-eight stanzas, but every one is turned and polished like a gemstone, and when I hear it the blood thumps and thrills through my veins. Perhaps, at least to me, there is no finer passage than that which follows. But I, speaking in English, can only tell you in my plain sailorman’s prose what happened. You must dream of the wonder-images, the defeat and triumph, the despair and hope, the smell of blood and sweat, the slick taste of dust, the feel of a rapier hilt hard in the fingers, the main-gauche gripped in the left fist; hear the devilish shrieks and yells of the wounded and maimed, the screams of the dying. You must blend all this into a mighty
