Birds of Prey (15 page)

The Greek seaman spun back around with a look of fury. “Do you want to take over?” he screamed in the agent's face. “Aren't you quite sure your orders have gotten us killed already? Hermes and Fortune,
I'm
sure!”

Sick despair threatened to double Perennius up. There was no unified command on the
Eagle.
That was his fault. It was perhaps inevitable as well, because Perennius had neither the talent nor the training for organizing other people. He could carry out a task himself or lead others if they cared to follow him; but he had never cared enough about command to try to learn why men who were not self-starters as he was seemed willing to take suicidal risks for some officers.

So the agent had command of the
Eagle
only by virtue of orders on a scrap of papyrus. That had increasingly little effect as death reached for the liburnian against the wind. Perennius had shown no interest in Leonidas and his deck crew, so long as they provided the transportation he required; and if the efforts of the oarsmen below were meshed effectively with those of the seamen proper, then that was nothing for which Perennius could take credit either. Now the ship was in danger, and there was no plan for how it could fight or run as a unit.

Swallowing an anger that was now directed at himself and not the captain, Perennius said, “Leonidas, I'll do what I can to save us now, but you'll have to tell me what to expect.”

Behind Leonidas there were four sailors instead of the usual one, leaning their weight on the tiller which controlled the paired steering oars. The liburnian was heeling enough to the right that Perennius suspected the blade on the port side must barely be clipping the waves. The starboard oar would be providing full turning force. Leonidas gestured toward his straining men and said, “If the gods grant the wind freshens, we'll pass to port of both of those bastards and be able to make land safely if the oarsmen hold out—as they will not.” He spat over the railing with an angry intensity which he seemed to be trying to direct away from the agent. He looked back again sharply. “No way we can keep them from stripping and burning the ship, but we can maybe get our own bums clear.”

The agent's mouth was dry. He wished he had his sword hilt for his hand to squeeze. “All right,” he said, looking past the windward edge of the sail toward the pirate who was already more nearly ahead of them than on their port quarter. Even if a fresher breeze did add a knot or two to the
Eagle
's speed, it was too late to hope that would get them clear. “Can we ram?” Perennius went on with as little emotion as possible. As if he did not know the bronze beak had not been replaced, as if he had not heard Niger's sneering certainty that any of the laid-up vessels would crumble to dust if they struck another ship.

“Buggering Zeus!” screamed the Tarantine captain as panic and frustration overcame his momentary control, “don't you see the fucking mast's still stepped? We're not in fighting trim, we're
cruising.
If we hit anything now, the whole thing, spar, cordage, and sail, comes down across our deck and the oars! Wouldn't you rather we just lay to and surrendered without all that fuss?”

The bosun shrieked a question to Leonidas from amidships. It was unintelligible to Perennius not for language—the vessel worked on Common Greek—but for vocabulary. The captain pushed past Perennius to answer, and this time the agent let him go. Leonidas would do his best in conditions which were likely impossible. For his own part, the agent now had an idea that might at least offer more than prayer seemed likely to do.

Perennius leaped to the main deck again with a crash of boots which the confusion swallowed. He landed near the aft hatchway, which he ignored. If he went below that way, he would have to struggle the length of the rowing chamber while it was filled with fear and flailing oar-handles. Despite the chaos on deck, the agent could get to the small galley forward better by dodging the sailors and humming ropes above.

One of the pirates was close enough to be seen clearly, now. As the agent had feared, the vessel was not of Mediterranean design at all. The sail was the pale yellow of raw wool, criss-crossed diagonally by leather strips sewn across the stretchy fabric. The wool bellied noticeably in the squares within those reinforcements, but even a landsman like Perennius could see that the pirates' sail met the wind at a flatter angle than did that of the
Eagle.

Half a dozen years before, the Goths and Borani had begun raiding the Black Sea coasts in ships crewed by Greeks from the old settlements at the mouth of the Danube. In the past year, however, another tribe, the Herulians, had made the long trek to the Black Sea. The Herulians had begun building craft of the same type as their ancestors had used to sail the Baltic. If the
Eagle
's opponents had depended on Greeks, either hirelings or slaves, there would have been a slender hope of confusion or mutiny within the pirate ranks. There was no hope of that now.

The liburnian was so much bigger than her opponents—heavier, in all likelihood, than both together—that she looked to overmatch them entirely. Perennius kept thinking of a cow pursued by wolves. From the expressions on the faces of the seamen he passed, most of them took an even less optimistic view of the
Eagle
's chances than he did himself. The nearer of the pirates was in plain view. The ship was as broad as the liburnian, but it had only a single open deck over the ribs which joined together the hull planks. It was shorter than the liburnian, seventy-five or eighty feet long in comparison to the
Eagle
's hundred and ten feet at the water line. As such, the Germans should have sailed poorly against the wind. That they did not was a result of three developments, visible as the ships bore down on their prey.

First, there were flat cutwaters fore and aft. These increased the effective length of the hulls and greatly aided the vessels' resistance to slipping sideways under the pressure of breezes from ahead or alongside. Second, when the prow of the nearer pirate lifted from a wave with a geyser of foam and a cheer from her complement, Perennius could see that the cutwaters were extended below the shallow hull by a true keel. Though the pirate vessels still drew far less water than the
Eagle,
the sheer-sided keel was clearly an advantage against stresses in which the liburnian's rounded bottom allowed her to wallow. The final development was the one which gave the Germans' bulging sails the effectiveness of the tighter, civilized Roman weave. A long pole was socketed in the lee gunwale of each ship. The pole reached across at a diagonal to the forward edge of the sail, half-way up, where it was clamped. The pole kept the edge of the sail from fluttering and halving its effect as it met the wind at a flat angle.

Skipping like melonseeds, the pirate vessels closed on the fat liburnian. They sailed at an angle the
Eagle
could not have matched except when she was driven solely by her oars. It was obvious now to the agent why Leonidas had been unwilling to try to flee into the wind.

Perennius would have cheerfully granted sailing excellence to the Northerners if the
Eagle
had aboard the eighty trained soldiers whom he had requested. Physical danger frightened the Illyrian less than other aspects of life did; but even so, the threat they faced—he and Calvus and the mission—with twenty ex-slaves chilled him. The pirate ships were not being rowed, though they surely had some provision for sweeps. One of the reasons the oars were not in use was the fact that both ships were packed to the gunwales with men.

There must have been over a hundred Germans on the nearer vessel, though the way they crowded into the bow permitted only a rough estimate. Nearer to their enemies, nearer to slaughter and gory … Many of the warriors wore scraps of armor, a breastplate or helmet or even, in one case, a pair of bronze greaves which must once have guarded the shins of some gladiator. The glittering metal gave more the impression of gaudy decoration than it did a fear of wounds, however. The Germans' clothing was a similar melange. It ranged from skins worn flesh-side out, through the booty of civilization—tunics of linen and wool, and a flowing silk chlamys which must have draped a very wealthy lady indeed at formal gatherings—to more or less total nudity.

In a few cases, the nudity might have had a religious significance, but Perennius suspected that in general it was merely a response to the sun reflecting from the southern sea. Besides body armor, most of the Germans carried shields. These were either simple disks of wood or wicker, or heavier items captured from the imperial forces. Axes, swords and daggers were common, but every man seemed to carry a spear in his right hand. As they neared their victim, the pirates began clashing the flats of their spear-blades against their shields while they howled. There was no attempt to shout in unison. The deliberate cacophony rasped over the waves. It had the nerve-wracking timbre of millstones grinding with no grain between to cushion their sound.

Gaius called from the fighting tower. Longidienus was trying to grab the agent's arm. “No time!” Perennius shouted as he swept past. The forward hatch was closed. Perennius wrenched it up with a bang. The galley was the area forward of the rowing chamber where the bows narrowed. As the hatch lifted, the boom of the coxswain's drum and the grunt of the oarsmen in unison hammered the agent's ears. Six faces stared up in terror—the cook and his assistant, and four slaves, probably brought aboard as officer's servants despite Perennius' orders to the contrary. Even in the present crisis, veins stood out in the agent's neck at proof that his will had been flouted.

Ignoring the companion ladder as usual, the stocky Illyrian jumped below. A slave squealed and rolled out of the path of the hobnails. The lower deck was a stinking Hell, its air saturated with the sweat of men rowing for their lives. The drum boomed its demands from the coxswain's seat in the stern. The coxswain's assistant paced nervously along the catwalk between the rowing benches, shrieking encouragement and flicking laggards with a long switch. The law did not permit the whipping of freemen, citizens of Rome, without trial; but the nearest magistrate was a dozen miles away, and there were two shiploads of Germans in between.

The galley was not intended for cooking while the
Eagle
was under way. The liburnian had no sleeping accommodations for the oarsmen, one for every foot of her hull length. Thus she virtually had to be docked or beached every night. The galley did provide a location for the cook to chop vegetables and grind meal for the next day's bread, however, and to cook under cover when conditions on shore were particularly bad. Men bore cold rain under a leather tarpaulin far better with a hot meal in their bellies than they did without. The ship's ready stores were kept in amphoras, pottery jars whose narrow bases were sunk in a sand table to keep them upright while the ship rolled.

And with the foodstuffs was another jar which held the coals from which the oven and campfires would be kindled when the ship made land. That had been a source of unspoken fear to Perennius in the past days. He had seen a warship burn in the harbor at Marseilles, the pitch and sun-dried wood roaring into a blossom of flame with awesome suddenness. Startled sailors had leaped into the sea or to the stone docks with no chance to pick a landing spot, some drowning, some smashing limbs. But at this juncture, the danger of self-destruction was outweighed by the certainty of what the pirates would do if the agent did not accept the risk.

“Oil!” Perennius snapped to the cook who jumped back as if the finger pointed at his face were a weapon.

“Which is the bloody oil jar?” the agent shouted. He began opening the stores containers and flinging their clay stoppers behind him in fury. Grain, grain … fish sauce, half-full and pungent enough to make itself known against the reek of the rowing chamber—

The cook's assistant, an Egyptian boy, had not cringed away from Perennius' anger. He reached past the agent and tapped an amphora with the nails of one smooth-fingered hand.

Perennius grunted thanks and gripped the jar by its ears. The amphora was of heavy earthenware with a clear glaze to seal it to hold fluids. It was held so firmly by the sand and the adjacent vessels that the agent's first tug did not move it. With the set face of one who deals with a problem one step at a time, Perrennius lifted again with a twist. The oil jar came free with a scrunch of pottery, allowing the jars beside it to shift inward. The cook stared in amazement. He would not have tried to remove a jar without knocking loose the wedge that squeezed all six into a single unit.

“Longidienus!” the agent shouted to the open hatchway as he swung with his burden. The watch-stander and a majority of his Marine section were already staring into the galley in preference to watching the oncoming pirates. “Take this and hand it up to Gaius in the tower!”

The Marine reached down and grunted. He had been unprepared for the amphora's weight by the ease with which it had been swung to him. Perennius ignored the oil jar as soon as it left his hand. What he needed now was the container with the fire. Its slotted clay stopper identified it with no doubt or frustration, with only a thrill of fear.

“Help the Legate with his jar!” Longidienus ordered the Marines as he shuffled toward the tower with his own load. His men looked in concern at one another. The Latin command was not one they had practiced during the voyage. In any case, Perennius had no intention of trusting the fire pot to any hands but his own at the moment. The earthenware was startlingly warm to the touch; not so hot that it could not be handled, but hot enough that the flesh cringed at first contact as it would from a spider leaping onto it unseen. Perennius locked the jar between his left forearm and his tunic as he climbed the ladder. It felt first like a warm puppy, then like the quiet beginnings of torture. On the main deck again, the agent paused and gripped his amphora by the ears, just as the ballista fired with a crack like a horse's thigh breaking.