The company set to work with a will. Most of the ships were badly burned and even the surviving vessels suffered from shriveled rigging, or smoldering caulking. Skaldi filled the chill morning air with a stream of complaints about shoddy manling and Khazaki craftsmanship. The dwarf selected one of the long ships furthest from the center of the blaze. He stomped up and down the deck of his chosen vessel scowling like a thundercloud.

"Aye this is the best of a bad lot manlings, but she will still leak like a grobbi tunnel. We need to seal it or we will be swimming with the sharks! Cut down some of those pines and get a fire going!" the dwarf roared at the exhausted great swords. The exhausted soldiers looked up at the dwarf in weary incomprehension. 

"We don't have axes," one of the men protested, as he unlatched his breastplate to cool off. Even in the chill of Nordland heavy armor became a furnace within a few minutes. Perversely it would be shiveringly cold within a few minutes. The dwarf gripped the gunnel with his sausage sized fingers, splintering the fire dried timber.

"The lass is out there in the hands of these Khazaki scum. I don't care if you have to cut them down with your teeth! And you'd better hope Cydric dosent..." 

Both men sprang to there feet and started up the beach with nervous glances in the direction of the Ostlander sergeant. One of the pair found an abandoned Norscan axe and hefted it in one hand with a satisfied grunt. 

"Riders!"

Men grabbed for weapons and shook out into a loose formation across the shale covered beach, locking shields into a loose wall. For long moments there was a silence broken only by wind, the slop of surf and the creak of shifting timbers. The look outs, two of the scouts that had accompanied Cydric, slid down the side of the bluff, weapons in hand, creating a small shower of gravel in their haste to join the formation. A moment later two figures on horseback came over the rise and began to pick their way down to the rocky incline.

One was a grim looking man in late middle age and patchwork armor. The other was a slightly plumpish red head, whose sour expression ruined her otherwise pretty face. Both horses were heavily loaded and just about played out judging by the amount they were blowing. Foam gathered at the corners of the beast mouths. The men relaxed, not abandoning their weapons but certain that such a pair didn't come with hostile intent. The man road forward towards the line, pausing twenty feet from the nearest swordsman.

"Morning!" he yelled in a lower class Altdorf accent. He reached up and brushed stringy greish blond hair from his face. The woman behind him cleared her throat pointed.

"My name is Yantz,"he took a deep breath as though he were about to do something he knew would be deeply embarrassing.

"And this is Dietrichia Von Grimmelhausen, we are looking for someone named Byrdic or Checker or something like that," he declared with an apologetic grimace.