“Hooah!”
Dwayne charged from the confused gaggle of fighting men to rush to Xin’s side and take advantage of that moment’s hesitation among the enemy. He waded into the Carthaginians. He drove the edge of his shield into a mouth, shattering the teeth and crushing the jaw in a bloody shower. His sword separated another man’s arm from the torso at the shoulder. A swipe of his shield bowled two men clean off the deck to cannon back into the sailors behind them. These were little guys, and the Ranger was probably the biggest man they’d ever seen. For Dwayne, it was like fighting children. To them, it was like battling a monster. His size and the violence of his attack backed them off even as more men dropped to the bow deck behind them. But these were mean little children made of piss and gristle, and they recovered quickly to close with him again.
Xin was sucking air and glaring pure hate by Dwayne’s side. He turned his head to roar back at the shifting rank of shields between him and the mast.
“We’re not here to lose!” Dwayne added his own to the battle cry. “Bring it, assholes!”
With a shout, the wall of shields rushed forward, and Dwayne could see the horsehair bristle atop Ahinadab’s helmet behind them. The captain was swinging a spear shaft to urge them forward. It reminded Dwayne of a jump instructor he had at Fort Bragg.
“Don’t be afraid of gravity, ladies. Be afraid of ME!”
Dwayne and Xin formed the point of the spear, and the shields of the Lion’s company joined either side of them in a wedge that drove into the clutch of un-armored swordsmen. Dwayne raised his blade and brought it down again and again as he plowed forward using his shield as a battering ram. The deck beneath his bare feet was slick with greasy blood. He nearly stumbled over the corpses that littered the boards but was pressed on by the shields at his back.
He risked a glance upward to see more men climbing down from the trireme. These men were in plate armor, gripping swords with long straight blades and shields slung on their backs. The A-team was coming. The fight was about to get hotter.
The slingers on the Carthaginian ship were mostly out of the fight. Both sides were locked in tight combat, and a pellet was just as likely to hit friend as foe. The boys on the Lion’s deck weren’t so limited in their options. The armored warriors making their way down the trireme hull made for a target-rich environment.
The slings thrummed, and the boys whooped as round stones and recycled pellets struck home. A Carthaginian in a crested helmet plumed with peacock feathers took a shot to the head that dimpled his helmet with a bang and caused him to lose his grip on the line and glance off the head of the lion at the prow to drop into the churning water between the two entangled vessels.
More soldiers were pelted. A few simply roared in anger. Two more fell atop their own comrades, collapsing the men under their bulk on the Lion’s foredeck. The risk of being drowned by the weight of their own armor damped their ardor for battle. The rain of missiles succeeded in slowing the reinforcements.
Aboard the trireme, the Carthaginian slingers turned their attention to the boys on the Lion’s deck, and a duel erupted with stones and pellets arcing over the heads of the fighting men entangled at the stern. The fusillade lifted, and the armored men resumed lowering themselves down from the Carthaginian vessel to join their brother boarders in the fight.
Dwayne could feel the timbers beneath his feet shifting. Ahinadab set the oarsmen to the task of freeing the ram from the hull of the trireme. He leaped from port to starboard calling orders. The oars would dig in on one side and then the other, moving the ship to port then starboard and back again in an effort to release the ram.
The wedge of defenders flattened as the number of attackers grew. The Carthaginians pressed the Lion’s company amidships. Dwayne and Xin stood with their backs to their own shield wall in the middle of a wicket of clashing spears. The Ranger dodged a spear blade and grabbed at the haft to pull the soldier toward him. He plucked the spearman from the opposing fence of shields like the pit from a cherry. Xin brought his ax down to chop the man’s thigh to the bone. Blood geysered from the screaming man’s femoral, and he flopped to the deck. Xin blew the man’s blood from his lips as he brayed defiance.
Working together, Xin and Dwayne repeated this maneuver to bring down four more Carthaginians until they succumbed to the mounting pressure from the boarders and retreated behind the shields of the defenders. The conflict was moving, step by step, abaft toward the Lion’s mast. More and more boarders were dropping to the deck before them to apply pressure to the front rank.
“We’re losing this bitch!” Dwayne roared. He’d been in enough fights to sense when the balance was shifting. Never was that clearer to him than right now, eyeball to eyeball with both sides only the length of a spear shaft apart. The men on his side were tiring. They were brawlers at best; fierce in a short melee, but not up to the level of the professional soldiers crowding the foredeck. There was no room for tactics. The field of battle was only as wide as the beam of their ship. It was going to come down to who was meaner. Dwayne could feel the spirit fleeing from his new allies, and it was
