The Shards of Heaven (30 page)

Looking around, he could see that the second trireme that had rammed them was bringing men over the side now, too. Beyond it, in the haze of the rain and waves, still more vessels were moving, circling like vultures around a kill.

Vorenus got to his feet and spun to take on the newcomers, adjusting his balance to keep from falling in the pitch and roll of the stormy sea. The tied-off grappling irons were making it worse, he could tell, catching tight to jolt the ships as each wave passed under. More than once in the ensuing bloody seconds and minutes he was knocked to his knees by the tightening ropes and the slick, rain-soaked surface beneath his feet. A few times it seemed that every man was felled by the shifting deck, and the melee paused for a moment while friend and foe alike got back onto their feet. But still they fought on, killing and being killed. Vorenus took a cut across his left forearm blocking a swing meant for his gut. He earned another slash on his right thigh from a man lying along the side railing that he'd thought was dead.

He was preparing to put the latter finally to rest when the sea itself seemed to groan: a low and long yawning that froze his strike and made him stare out into the rain. The waters over the side—he blinked to believe it—were, like a falling tide, receding away to the north, racing in smooth waves toward Octavian's ships. Even the rain appeared to be slanting back in that direction, as if Neptune himself stood somewhere out in the fog beyond Octavian's fleet, drawing in his breath. Yet the stormy northern wind was still pushing against them, as if water and air worked against one another.

The other men aboard the flagship, moments earlier committed to each other's deaths, had ceased fighting, too. Antony, surrounded by loyal men near the prow, had turned to stare. So did they all.

“By the gods,” one of Octavian's nearby marines gasped.

“What's—” started another.

Like a sudden exhalation, matched with an echoing boom that reverberated in Vorenus' chest, the rain came back against them, faster than even the hard wind itself, stinging like a thousand tiny arrows.

And behind the rain came the roar of an angry god.

Some men stood where they were, transfixed. Some walked forward against the gale, trying to see. Vorenus, without thinking, sheathed his gladius and dove away from it all toward the center mast of the flagship. His hands scrabbled to find holds among the coils of rope there, winding lines tight to his forearms and lowering his head as he braced for the impact. He didn't need to look up to see the wave rushing toward them. He could feel it in his bones: a terrible, awesome power bent on their destruction.

It hit like a thunderbolt from the hand of Jupiter himself, bursting into the three interconnected ships with a world-quaking power Vorenus could not have imagined. As the instant of the impact stretched out, the noise of fierce destruction was everywhere all at once around him—wood ripping, men screeching, limbs snapping—until Vorenus heard nothing at all and had to shut his eyes against the pain as his body flapped against his grip, pulling the rope into the flesh of his forearms as the water roiled over him. His heart pounded in his chest like a trapped beast eager to flee. Everything churned around him—up, down, in, out—and when he screamed he was uncertain if any noise left his throat.

Sound returned with a disturbed rush of wind. His scream popped out into the air, bubbling the seawater clinging to his face. He felt as if he were hanging in suspension for a moment, then his stomach was in his throat as he felt himself falling.

The flagship struck the water with a crash, and Vorenus smashed into the deck a moment later. He felt something snap in his left arm. And then the wave was gone. The rain was falling in natural sheets. The lean and lurch of the deck returned to the mere bucking of the storm. Vorenus rolled to his side, taking a deep breath and coughing out the sting of saltwater, but smiling in momentary gratitude to be alive as air returned to his lungs.

The flagship rumbled beneath him, and over the sound of the roiling waves Vorenus heard the mad rush of water pouring into space.

“The hooks!” Antony's voice shouted over the storm. “Cut the hooks! Cut it loose!”

Vorenus frantically unwound the rope from around his forearms, trying to ignore the wide welts along the inside of them where the rope had burned into skin not covered by his bracers. He felt confident that his left arm had indeed broken, but by a miracle it had been a clean break and the bones hadn't shifted. The bracer was helping to hold it in place. For the moment his hand still worked, painful though it was.

He got to his feet as quickly as he could, even as he felt the deck of the flagship begin to lean to port, in the direction of the second ramming trireme. He looked up and saw Antony amid a small knot of surviving men along the opposite, high side of the ship near the railing, gesturing wildly back the other way. “Cut it loose!”

Vorenus' head turned to follow Antony's fingers—too slow, he thought, as his senses slowly returned—and he saw that the snapped-off mast of the second trireme was slipping out of sight over the railing. The deck, moments earlier cluttered with men and bodies and debris, had been swept clean of all but the embedded arrow points that Vorenus used to stagger down the side-sloping wet wood to the railing.

The wave had ripped the second trireme in half, as if it were a child's plaything. Bodies, twisted and torn, lay scattered about in the waves. Few of them were moving. The forward half of the trireme was still attached to the flagship by its grappling lines, and the water was fast swallowing it, pulling the ropes tight and tugging the side of the flagship down. As it did so, more and more water was surging through the hole that the trireme had punched in their ship's side. Now that he knew the rumbling belowdecks for what it was, he could hear behind it the screaming from the throats of the rowers who'd survived. How many, he wondered, dozens? Hundreds?

The deck canted further with a sound of cracking and moaning wood, and Vorenus had to grab the rail to keep his balance. His head at last cleared through its daze and he drew his blade.

“Jump for it!” he heard Antony shouting to the men on the other side of the ship, and he imagined them scrambling over the side, trying to jump across to the first ramming trireme, which must have survived the wave.

A grappling hook was buried in the railing right in front of him, and Vorenus cut at its knot, watching the line flip over the side with a snap. There was a momentary pause in the tilting, but too many other lines held them to the sinking ship. Looking fore and aft he could see at least half a dozen more straining at the wood, pulling them down. The deck pitched over a few degrees more.

One of Octavian's men appeared at the railing, his eyes wide with terror and shock. Two of the hooks were within striking distance for him.

“Cut the ropes!” Vorenus screamed at him. “Cut us loose!”

The man looked at the grappling irons and the tightened ropes attached to them, then looked at the bloodied sword in his hand, then back to Vorenus.

“Cut them!” Vorenus yelled again, then turned his back to the man to run forward to the next line and slash it. One more line held closer to the bow, and he cut that, too, before turning back toward the rear of the ship. Octavian's man was hacking at one of the lines, but he was too scared and shaking to connect properly with the rope. It was frayed, but it held. “Cut it!” Vorenus yelled and began running.

The starboard side of the deck pitched up into the air as the bound-up remains of the trireme slipped fully into the water at last. The man screamed and dropped his sword in the lurch. The tilting sped up, and Vorenus' footfalls started to come down in the crack between rail and deck, his good arm desperately swinging the gladius at the ropes as they did so. He cut two, but only half-severed two others before he ran into his enemy.

“Climb to starboard!” Vorenus shouted, shoving him toward the skyward side of the deck. “Go!”

They began scrambling, trying to claw their way up the wet deck, but even with the arrow points as holds it was too slick. Time and again they slid back to the railing and to the ever-nearing water, their hands bloodied from the splintered wood. The other man began to cry.

The splash of the waves beneath them was loud, and the larger ones were now crashing over the flagship's railing and into their legs. The water was very cold.

Vorenus pushed the man along the railing to midship, where the main mast stuck out of the deck at an angle growing frighteningly close to parallel with the choppy waters. The sails had partly unfolded from above, dangling at the tops of the waves, and their rope lines swung about in the wind. Sheathing his gladius, Vorenus grabbed one of the lines and began climbing, bellowing at Octavian's man to follow. The line ran to the mast, and Vorenus was able to swing himself up onto it despite his increasingly useless left arm. The other man began to scream horribly, and Vorenus straddled the round wood for a moment to look back down at him.

The tilting of the flagship had sent a rope netting sliding down into the man, and his foot was caught, wrapped tightly in the mesh. He was pulling as hard as he could, but the foot would not come loose. The railing had sunk into the waters now, and the waves were breaking against the floor of the deck. He was halfway up to his knees in the frigid sea, the breakers striking him in the torso, and still they were sinking. His scream was piercing.

Vorenus grabbed a line dangling down from the masthead and quickly wrapped it around his right forearm before allowing himself to spin around the mast, hanging with his legs wrapped around the damp wood and his right arm extended behind him. He reached out toward the trapped man with his left arm. “Take my hand!” he yelled.

The water was up to the man's knees, and he flailed wildly for long seconds before their hands finally met.

“Don't let go!” the man shrieked. The water was breaking at his chest. Vorenus pulled as hard as he could manage, screaming in agony as the break in his arm stretched out against the muscles trying to keep the bones in place. His legs slipped, but they held.

The water seemed to yawn and open to take the man in. Vorenus pulled as hard as he could, but the man was held too fast. “Don't leave me!” he shouted, the pitch of his voice high as the cold took his chest and constricted his lungs.

The draft of water was pulling the man away from Vorenus, their grips straining. The rope wrapped around his outstretched right forearm began to burn and tear the flesh from friction, adding new welts to those he'd already received. He felt liquid running up his shoulder from the wrist, and it felt thicker than the rest of the rainwater covering his body. Octavian's man screamed desperately, but the waters were too strong, and the waves began to crash over his head. Vorenus heard the muting of the man's voice as he began to swallow water, and then the sea at last pulled them apart.

Vorenus watched the thrashing of the man's arms in the water for only a heartbeat before he pulled himself upright on the mast and tried to reach the other side of the ship, where Antony and the others had gone.

He couldn't make it. His left hand alternatively screamed in pain and went numb, the fingers unable to work individually, and the deck was too steep and wet for him to make it one-handed. Vorenus sat for a moment on the mast, seawater stinging his eyes, the sound of the drowning man very close in his ears, before he chose a course of action. The mast was slick, but it was at least out of the water. Using the line leading to the masthead to help pull himself along, he began to shimmy up the wood and out into the space above the sea.

The yard—a heavy crossbeam normally mounted horizontal to the mast to secure the top of the sail—was angled strangely, but it had somehow remained intact in the punishing wave. Vorenus had nearly reached it when he looked back and could see over the side of the flagship to the other trireme. The grapple lines connecting it to the flagship had been cut, and its ram had pulled free from their side as the flagship had rotated, but it was still tantalizingly close. The battle yet raged there, as if the unnatural wave had never struck, and men lay like sacks of supplies across the deck amid the flurry of bloody activity. Antony was there among them, hacking in furious rage. He'd managed to rally his men to him on the enemy deck. At least six of them, Vorenus could see, had somehow maintained holds on their shields through the chaos—or found some close at hand, he supposed—and Antony's makeshift force was advancing across the trireme's deck behind their shield wall in trained legionnaire formation. The numbers of Octavian's men had clearly been obliterated by the wave, and Vorenus could see that it was possible—just possible—that Antony and his men might actually win the ship.

Pullo! Vorenus thought with a jolt. Where was Pullo? Not on the deck of the trireme with Antony. Vorenus would have been able to recognize his old friend even from the distance in a storm.

Vorenus started to look out to the bodies on the sea, to the few arms still waving for rescue, when the mast beneath him creaked and shook.

No, he thought, looking up. Not—

The strangely angled yard above him shuddered, rocking free of the mast. Lashings began to snap, one at a time, as if an invisible hand were counting them off:
one, two, three …

Vorenus cursed. Half his mind told him to give up at last, but the other half insisted that he was going to make it through this, rescue Pullo from wherever he was hiding, and then explain to the sacrilegious old bastard that
this
was exactly why he believed in the gods. The possibility that Pullo might be dead was spared only the most passing thought before it was swept aside by the final crack. And then the wide beam, as wide as the great flagship itself, came loose and fell.

Vorenus scrambled his feet against the mast, searching for purchase even as he tried to tighten the tired grip of his right hand on the masthead line. He had time only to roll the rope once, twice, three times around his forearm—he'd have no skin at all on the inside of it before long, he thought—before the yard was bouncing and twisting down, crashing and catching through ropes, the sail unbound now and adding its own madness to the falling tumble. His feet caught on the wood an instant before it all struck and he kicked off, swinging out of the way and into the rain.