powers, they were being shown how to fight in a bigger and better way. Only the Grimnal seemed to be learning, however. Oh, the Kali listened, and even followed directions, but they seemed incapable of understanding that slamming two corvettes upwind into the guns of eight first-liners was simply not good military tactics.

They had a game. Something like Tag in reverse. One man was It, and everyone on ship tried to catch him. He could go anywhere, do anything, even cut the rigging as long as it didn't endanger the ship. The more daring he was, the better. Ward had watched one make a hundred and fifty foot dive from a skysail yard with the ship making about twenty knots in a heavy sea. How do you go about explaining caution to a people like that?

But he had to. Somehow. Since the big boys had taken sides the Kali had been losing. Or, more accurately, Ward had been losing.

Ward's wandering mind snapped back. This was a new verse.

A polite cough from behind reminded him that Captain Tahn was still in the cabin. The Kali coughed to express anything from rage to sheer joy, and this one probably meant that Ward's hearing the last verse was an accident. Ward swung around and glanced at him, but the Kali deliberately kept his slitted eyes on the chart before him. Ward was reminded again of the Kali likeness to the long vanished American Indian: black, straight hair; narrowed, snapping black eyes; high, angular cheek bones. But not much beyond that. If you took a fine featured Sioux of long ago ... shortened him about a foot, thinned him down—bones and all, raised his shoulders to a perpetual shrug, stretched his arms so that they still reached his hips, then starved him for a month ... you might be close. But if you took a picture of him then, and looked at it slightly sideways, you would almost have it. An extremely thin, short, shrugging strip of muscled rawhide.

Tahn coughed again; the your-attention-please cough. He swung a chart around for Ward to see. It was a rough drawing of Anda-Ke, the largest of the Grimnal Group, and more or less the home island. It looked somewhat like a startled elephant: mouth open, trunk arced out at an angle. The mouth was Anda Bay, and was guarded by Anda Passage where the lower lip came within two miles of the upper. The trunk was Pelo Head, and was broken about halfway down by Pelo Break. The area between the drooping trunk and the neck was the Grimnal Sea. It was into this that the Kali fleet was charging like a peanut sailing for the mouth.

Tahn tapped a pencil-like 

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