handled dagger at his side.
Lucius asked, ‘What’s so fashionable about purple sails these days?’
‘Don’t show up against the sea like white,’ snapped the captain. ‘Purple lets a pirate get in close.’
‘You can’t be sure it’s a pirate.’
‘Yeah, and I can’t be sure my mummy ever fucked my daddy, neither. But I’d be prepared to lay a bet on it.’ He swivelled away. ‘Deckhands, break out the starboard oars. On the fuckin’ double!’
The six remaining crewmen obeyed, resting the oars in the six crude holes at either beam, only a few inches above the deck. Instead of rowing benches, such as a warship or quinquireme would boast, this old bucket had only cleats pegged to the deck for bracing. The scraggy-looking sailors braced their bare feet against the cleats and began to heave at the sweeps.
The ship swung onto a course further from the approaching ship – and the approaching ship did the same. The captain cursed again.
‘We’re heading for…?’ asked Lucius.
‘The gates of Hades,’ he growled.
‘You swear too much,’ said a low, steady voice behind him. ‘And my friend here asked you a question. I think you should have the courtesy to give him a plain answer, unadorned by redundant copulative allusions, and explain to him whither we are bound.’
The captain turned in some surprise, and saw the old man with the priestly beard and the certain look in his eye. To Lucius he said grumpily, ‘We’re bound back for the coast of Britain, around Portus Lemanis, if we can make it before our friendly visitors get-’
He was interrupted by a sudden lurch of the boat as the sail ceased drawing and began to flap violently in a wind that was now coming from just forward of the port beam.
The captain roared orders for his men to put out the port-side oars, and there was a mad scramble to do his bidding. He might be a tough old bird who hadn’t smiled in twenty years, but they’d faced hard times before, and he’d always got them through.
‘Furl sail!’ he roared out. ‘Steersmen, hold her west of north!’
The wind now blew in their faces. The buntlines snapped taut and the sail shrank into bundles of canvas along the yard. The Gwydda Ariana lost headway immediately, beginning to roll as she started to move across what had been a following sea. Waves slopped over the bow, the ship wallowed in the trough and nosed slowly forward, as she steered more and more to windward.
‘Row! Row you gutless yellow-livered sea-spawned bastards! Row like you’ve got a knife at your throat and the devil at your back. Remember every tale you ever heard of the tricks of the Saxon pirates, my boys, and row till you bust your guts and spew up blood. Heave at those sweeps, my boys. Push and heave. Tired muscles will mend in a day, but a cut throat takes a little while longer. Ha!’
The captain lined up the rest of the crew to take over at regular intervals as each oarsman tired. ‘If you see a man puke or drop, knock him out the way and take his oar. By the time your wind’s broken we’ll have another man for you.’
Lucius and Gamaliel eyed each other. The foul-mouthed old goat was almost enjoying this, all the more alive in the face of death.
The two men took their place in the prow, and waited.
‘What was wrong with the sail?’ wondered Lucius. ‘We’re hardly moving now.’
The captain was behind them again, glaring over his sweating oarsmen with his hands bunched into fists behind his back. Lucius and Gamaliel jumped as he growled his answer.
‘That’s a fast ship,’ he said. ‘They’d catch us no trouble under sail.’
‘And we’re quicker under oar?’
The captain grinned a black-toothed grin. ‘No fuckin’ chance, mate. They’re faster than us on the oar, too. But the question is: can they be bothered? Any fool can unfurl a sail and sit back farting in the sun. But rowing bow- to-wind takes some determination. All that’s in it for them is the off-chance of some loot. What’s in it for us is our sorry little lives.’ He swiped his arm under his nose and snorted. ‘So who d’you think’s going to row harder?’
‘Well,’ said Gamaliel, nodding towards the purple sail, ‘it looks as if they’re going to do their utmost.’
The captain sucked in a hiss of air over his teeth. For there was the pursuing ship, its big purple sail now shrinking against its yard. At the same time there came flashes of bright light as its crew broke out the oars and began to swing them through the waves in unison. And now her bow, her cruel, sharp-beaked warship bow, was swinging lightly round and coming straight for them.
They rowed on, harder, harder, but it was useless. The distance between them and the warship shrank to three miles, two, one, half a mile… On the deck of the Gwydda Ariana, the broken-winded rowers lay choking in pools of their own vomit while their replacements heaved and sweated in their stead, their muscles burning cords and the soles of their feet splitting against the cleats in their furious press and strain. But strain heroically as they might, there was no escaping the speed of the lean, dark warship.
‘Lay off, men,’ called the captain at last, his voice sounding as weary as they looked.
It was done. They were finished. The Gwydda Ariana wallowed to a sluggish halt in the troughs and waited.
A hundred yards off, and they could see the Saxon crew easing up on their short oars, hefting their great ashen spears in their fists and setting on their plain steel velite helmets. Their warship was beautifully crafted, even Lucius had to admit, predatory, fast and sleek, with a close-packed eighteen oars each side. No wonder the Gwydda Ariana had been so easily outrun. This ship might outrun even the fastest two-banked Liburnian warship in the Mediterranean.
Some forty Saxons crowded silently to the stern. They held themselves erect and expressionless. This was fate. The gods were with them. In their beliefs, none of these fierce Germanic warriors ever had even the room for doubt. Things were as they were. You lived, you fought, you died. All that mattered was to be strong.
Their captain was a blustering, red-faced, barrelchested giant with a bearskin wrap round his beefy shoulders. His eyes were a sharp, keen blue, and a triumphant smile played on his lips.
The lean, cruel-visaged bowsprit eased alongside, a slanted eye painted either side of the beaked prow like that of the silent sea-monster it was intended to represent. The Saxon longship sat lower in the water than the bulky merchant vessel, cutting barely a wave through the glassy sea.
As they hove to and came alongside, the Saxons at least pulled in their vicious-looking iron-bound cathead: that deadly beam which projected sideways from the prow of a warship, and which could sweep close alongside any boat that was its prey and smash every oar to pieces as it passed.
The Saxon captain called out a word or two, and the sharp-beaked corvus, or ‘raven’, slammed down from the back of the longship, its iron-toothed underside biting into the deck of the merchant vessel.
The men lined up and began to cross, led by their burly captain swinging a hand-axe, when they suddenly stopped in bewilderment. Gamaliel was blocking their path, his yew-staff rooted firmly in the planking of the corvus. Only a fraction of a second before, they could have sworn they had seen the old man in the bow of the boat, but now here he was, his eyes boring into them with an intensity that made even these hardened sea-wolves falter. He thumped his staff down on the wooden planks.
‘Do not step aboard this ship,’ he said quietly. ‘Raise the corvus again, go back, and sail on.’
Lucius stepped up beside him, his hand on the pommel of his sword, but Gamaliel ignored him.
The captain gave a roar of laughter, but already there was a strange uncertainty in his eyes. ‘You’re in no position to give orders, old man. Now step out of the way or I’ll have you beheaded over the gunwale and your greybeard old head jammed on our bowsprit for decoration.’
His men laughed, too. But their hearty laughter was drowned by the roar of Gamaliel’s voice, of such a volume that the laughter thinned out and died. Holding his staff out before him, the old man bellowed, ‘ Then you are bound for Hell! ’
The captain reeled back, enraged both by the old man’s words and, even more, by the unsettling, indefinable aura of power that emanated from him. It should have been the easiest thing in the world simply to step up and lop the old fool’s head off with a single swing of his axe. And yet, and yet… he knew that he could not do it, and his heart burnt with rage at this unaccustomed feeling of powerless-ness.
He shouted back, hearing even as he did so the weakness and irresolution of his voice compared to the bewildering storm-blast of the old man’s roar.
