The captain climbed the ladder to the tiller deck and called to the boy atop the mast. The boy turned from the frightening vision of the pair of ships looming closer. He scanned the sea before the bow. Ahinadab spoke to Yada and pointed his fist toward the lion’s head and opened his hand, fingers splayed, at an angle to starboard. The helmsman shoved the tiller to bring the bow about. Ahinadab clapped a hand to his shoulder and called down to Xin.
Xin marched across the deck and growled orders to the rowing boss who set a new rhythm half again as fast. Groans rose from the rowers below, causing Xin to stomp and spit and howl a stream of invective down at the exhausted men. The oars creaked and rose to match the new pace set by the regular thump of the staff on the boards. Boys filled buckets with seawater and threw them in a shower down on the overheated rowers. It was a race against time and exhaustion now.
Ahinadab called orders to the fighting men who were standing idle at the starboard freeboard staring at the sails closing the gap behind them. A score of them rushed aft where the Nubian helm mate handed out wooden mallets and pry bars.
Caroline moved to watch, fascinated as the men, under the direction of the captain, removed the tall structure that rose from the stern to curve high over the helm deck. The thick truss rope was undone and dropped to the deck where crewmen stood holding the slack. Men at the prow undid the truss rope at that end and made it fast to a ringbolt set a meter above the deck.
The towering aphlaston was disassembled in sections by the removal of wooden dowels that were ingeniously concealed in the detailed carvings of crabs and scallops and sea bass that ran about the base of the graceful timber arc.
She was witnessing an action that any archeologist of the classical period would give his Ph.D. to see. So much of the modern understanding of construction and operation of these fabled ships was guesswork.
The entire rear section was hollow rather than formed of solid timbers. It was quickly stripped away to leave a flat area of deck behind and a step lower than the tiller platform. Caroline assumed that the aphlaston was integral to the structure of the ship, a continuation of the keel board. That may have been the case on other ships of this design. On the Lion it was decorative in nature. It most likely served the function of a hiding place for smuggled goods. The sections were hauled down and slid aft to tumble into the water, where they bobbed in the wake and were soon out of sight.
Crewman took the slack stern end of the truss rope and ran it through a ringbolt set aft. The thick line was hauled tight, and the slack end doubled back forward and held in place with cleats. Wooden rods were inserted between the doubled lines. Hand over hand, the men wound the ropes tighter and tighter until the truss line creaked and hummed with their efforts. When the line was turned to its maximum torque, new cleats were hammered in place and secured with dowels.
Xin snapped orders and crewmen hurried to the wooden raft that lay dogged down to the deck by lines. It was the same raft that brought Caroline and Dwayne on board what seemed like an eternity ago. The men lifted the raft and carried it aft where other men struggled with the weight to get it past the tiller. Ahinadab himself lent a hand as the grunting men set the raft in place upon the newly revealed section of deck. A stout line was tied to a heavy iron stanchion on deck and run through a bolt set at one end of the raft.
“What are they doing?” Caroline asked when she sensed Dwayne at her side.
“Beats the shit out of me. I was Army.” Dwayne took a seat with his back to the hull.
She glanced back at him. Dwayne had a broad-bladed sword in his fist and was running a stone along its edge.
“They let you have that?”
“No one tried to take it away from me.” He grinned.
She looked down at his bare torso. Dwayne was lean and covered in the muscles he owed to the hard work of soldiering rather than athleticism. His left side was sheathed in a patch of smooth skin that was not his own. It was a skin graft to repair flesh seared lifeless in the heat of an IED blast.
His arms were covered from shoulder to cuff with tattoos. The Ranger skull with crossed daggers. Paratrooper wings. An ace of spades. A snarling fox with a scroll beneath it that read Rangers Lead The Way. And near his wrist was new ink he picked up somewhere recently: a silhouette of a wooly mammoth. The ink covered ridges of scar tissue he’d earned during long deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
“You pick out a weapon yet?” He squinted up at her and she looked away.
“I have my eye on a few.” She moved aside for crewmen carrying stacks of hemp sacking down the center deck.
The men tossed the sacks down to waiting hands below deck. Consumed with curiosity and anxious for any distraction, Caroline climbed down past the sweating, gasping rowers to follow the sacking down to the hold.
Dozens of crewmen worked in the gloom shoveling ballast sand into hemp sacks held open by others. Once filled with the stinking sand, the sacks were knotted closed and handed up to others in a chain relay until they reached the main deck. The men worked silently and rapidly to fill sacks and raise them to men above waiting to hand them upwards.
She moved
