The Lion withdrew, backing off, beyond the reach of the spearmen and the effective lethal range of the slingers. Still, men were down where they were slashed or punctured by spear blades. Boys moved among the wounded, touching cauterizing iron brands to wounds to halt the bleeding. Dwayne saw a man lying sightless against a gunwale, an entry wound between his eyes that a bullet might have made. Beneath their feet, round lead pellets rolled across the deck like marbles. The slinger boys rushed to gather them for their own use.
Dwayne stood and looked forward. The Carthaginian ship was struggling to turn about, against a current striking it abeam. The middle section facing the torrent was missing the lower banks of oars midships where the prow of the Lion shattered them or drove them violently inboard. The reduced oars were backing to aid the rowers on the opposite hull who were working to bring the prow back into the current. It was a feeble effort but the bow, faced with the head of a screaming hawk, was turning to the attack. The hole rammed in the hull was invisible below the waterline. The damage was not enough to sink the trireme outright.
Ahinadab walked the centerboards, speaking to the hands. Though he couldn’t understand the words, Dwayne understood the message. It was a locker-room speech at half-time. The captain touched men on their shoulders and tousled the hair of the boys he passed. They were ahead on points, but the game wasn’t over. Time to man up and protect their lead.
Looking back astern, Dwayne saw the wolf’s head vessel floundering helplessly toward the rocks at the base of the crater walls. The few remaining oars of the top tier along the damaged port side flailed at the water. The starboard oars were only serving to send the ship into a rotating spiral.
The Lion’s oars banked to slow their rearward progress and then shifted to power them forward again toward the holed ship now blocking the only escape route.
Xin stood in the shelter of the prow and urged the fighting men forward. On his orders they formed a barricade of shields before and above them, creating a roof and walls to resist the coming onslaught. Dwayne gripped his sword in one hand and held the shield up to overlap those of the men on either side of him. Pellets were beginning to strike the shield surfaces and ring off the iron bosses.
Through a narrow gap between the massed shields, he could see the deck of the trireme rising before them. A group of men were winding the handles of a ballista thrust against the freeboards. This was ancient artillery. They were seconds from getting hammered by a projectile that would crash through their shield wall like paper and the flesh behind it like grass.
The hull of the trireme grew to fill his limited field of vision and Dwayne set one foot behind him to brace for the strike.
The Lion’s ram struck the enemy ship just where the hawk-beak prow curved back to join the main body of the hull. The combined force of the turning ship and the speeding ram created a collision that shook both vessels end to end. The bronze talon of the Lion ripped through the copper hull plates and punched a hole in the boards at the waterline.
The ballista aboard the Carthaginian, loosed its missile to fly harmlessly over the deck of the smaller vessel and raise a gout of green foam in the water beyond. Armored men crowded to the fore to throw spears down onto the mass of men huddled below them. Slingers, loosed pellets, to drive fist-sized dents in the shield faces. The Lion’s ram was stuck fast in the ragged fissure it had torn in the hull planks of the larger ship.
Ahinadab stood unheeding of the deadly lead balls tearing past him. He cursed the rowing boss and the oarsmen to pull harder to free them. A pellet took a slinger boy near him in the eye. The adolescent spun against him, spraying blood on the captain’s armor before dropping kicking to the boards. This only served to increase Ahinadab’s rage. He clambered below decks and set about the heaving rowers with the flat of his sword, hollering and red-faced. They dragged and raised, dragged and raised, but the Lion only shifted to stern a few degrees.
The hammer of spear points and pellets died away, Dwayne looked up over the top of his shield as a woeful cry rose from the men around him. Above them, scowling men were climbing down the hull of the trireme and sliding along the shafts of oars to reach the deck of the ship that had gored them. More were dropping down lines slung from cleats along the gunwales. These men wore no armor. They moved nimbly with the surety of seasoned sailors from the world’s most fearsome naval power. They held swords in their fists with wickedly curved blades that grew broader at the tip. A chopping blade. A killing blade.
They leaped fearlessly onto the fence of spears held out to them. Some were run through, and others dropped on the roof of shields to grab spear hafts and pull their bearers low. The effect was a collapse at the center of the phalanx. More sailors descended from the trireme’s hull, and Xin
