More horns, seemingly all around. Allfather, they were in the middle of the enemy. Ballista looked at the others on the quarterdeck. Everyone was unnaturally still. Maximus’s eyes were shut; he was listening. Bruteddius glanced back; a tight smile. The boat glided on.
A disembodied voice floated through the fog. Ballista held his breath. The creak and splash of the oars was hideously strident. The voice came again; muffled, a little off to the left.
‘Cease rowing.’ Only the nearest oarsmen could hear Bruteddius. Those further away followed their lead. The boat’s mo- mentum carried her on.
Another voice, much nearer, to the right. It was German; a question, the words indistinct.
Ballista’s breathing was shallow, panting. He was gripping the sternpost tight, sweating. Around him, the faces of the others were sheened with moisture. Their heads turned this way and that, peering at things they could not see.
The voice came again from the right, nearer still: a hail, a man’s name.
Even the helmsman was trembling. No one was sleeping on the lower benches now. All the men kept glancing at Bruteddius. The trierarch was rock still. If the hail was aimed at them, it was over. The boat was losing way.
Off the starboard bow, something darker than the mist, more solid. A hundred feet, no more: the upswept stern of a galley – the liburnian . The Armata was nearly dead in the water.
A Gothic voice returned the call; clean over the Armata, from further away to the left.
The horns started up again, the notes eddying through the fog.
Bruteddius padded to the nearest oarsmen. He spoke so low that Ballista and the others by the helmsman did not hear. Drops of water fell from the oars as the thranites glanced over their shoulders at the men behind, readied themselves. Bruteddius, nodding calmly, gestured to the two rowers on either side closest to him. They looked at each other, began the stroke. The others copied.
The splash as the blades bit the surface, the creak of wood, the slosh of water. Surely the Goths must hear. One stroke, a second. No outcry yet. The many thousand wooden joints sighed as the ship gathered way. Still no alarm. Someone was muttering a prayer. Another hushed him.
Yet more horns, their piercing volume a blessing from the gods. The dark, solid shape to the right faded aft. In moments, the fog blanketed the sounds of the horns. Ballista drew an almost sobbing breath. The Armata sailed on into the opaque, dark night.
XIX
‘Ships astern, three of them.’
Ballista surfaced from a dead sleep, trying to understand.
Maximus was shaking his shoulder. ‘Goths, less than half a mile away.’
Ballista could barely move. He had slept in his mail coat on the hard wooden deck. Maximus offered him a hand. He saw Wulfstan and Bauto helping Calgacus to his feet. Hippothous, shaven head glinting, was already up.
A breeze had got up in the west. It was tearing away the last shreds of the fog. The sun had just risen. In its raking light, the enemy was in clear sight. Long, low vessels, a prow at either end – unmistakably, northern longboats.
How had they got there? Last night, after the too close encounter with the liburnian, the Armata had rowed on for another three hours; the first just the thranites pulling, then they had rested while the other two levels took over. They should have been well clear. It might be a trick of the current. Certainly, inshore, yesterday, it had run strongly to the east. There again, the Goths might have separated, scouring the sea for their prey. Ballista scanned the horizon through 360 degrees: no other ships anywhere.
A hoom sound rolled across from the Gothic ships: their warriors giving voice. Silhouetted by the newborn sun, there was no chance the Armata could have escaped detection. The Goths were putting out their oars, gathering way. Two of them hauled round to set towards the Armata. The other veered away towards the west, going to get the rest of the wolfpack.
Bruteddius and his officers were hazing the crew back to their stations. The oarsmen were moving stiffly, like old, tired men. No one ever wants to spend a night at sea in the cramped and damp discomfort of a war galley. ‘Out oars, prepare to row, medium pressure. Row.’ The rowing master’s pipe squealed. The blades broke the surface: not too ragged, given the circumstances.
Horns blared from the northern boats. No longer deadened by the fog, the notes skimmed far out across the sea, summoning their kinsmen to the chase. Yesterday evening, the horns had masked the sound of the Armata’s escape; today they were likely to bring its doom. This had the makings of another long, bad day.
The Armata was built for speed. Under oars, she could leave almost anything afloat far behind in her wake. But not when her rowers were tired, hungry and thirsty; not when they had not stepped off the boat for more than twenty-four hours; not when they had not eaten since the previous evening.
The oarsmen sat on sodden cushions. They wore soaking tunics – they had unmuffled their blades in the night. The salt had chafed their skin, their calluses were raw, bleeding. Below them, their own waste slopped and stank. Despite it all, the banks of oars, if they did not rise and fall quite as one, did nothing too dissimilar.
Under Bruteddius’s order, the rowing master kept them only at medium or even light pressure. It was designed to preserve what little energy they still possessed. However, it did not make the Goths fall away astern. A little over three hundred yards of undulating green water separated the Armata from the longboats.
Bruteddius, as ever, stood near the helm. The swell had increased. Bruteddius moved as one with the motion of his ship. His eyes shifted endlessly; measuring, calculating. Behind his beard, he was haggard. Ballista wondered if he had slept at all.
The purser was summoned. Bruteddius ordered the last reserves of water to be rationed out; each man aboard to get the same meagre measure.
Next, Bruteddius called the shipwright to his side. ‘When the men have drunk, clear the passengers out of the way as far as you can, and step the masts.’ Like all the crew, the naupegos was under military discipline, yet he appeared just a little uncertain. Bruteddius looked hard at him. ‘A storm is getting up in the west.’ He smiled. ‘Either it will save us, or kill us.’
A salute. We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready.
The full deck crew, aided by a few of the able-bodied passengers pressed into service, unlashed the mainmast from its horizontal position on the deck and heaved the long, heavy trunk of pine into place to lift. They squared off the endless ropes and tackle, then hauled and hauled: slowly, slowly – with more than one heart- stopping shift and sway – the mast was coaxed upright and its heel slid home into its tabernacle.
‘Rig double stays,’ shouted Bruteddius. He turned to Ballista. ‘The mast can take punishment. I selected her myself: a fine, straight tree, from a good, sunny aspect.’ Then louder, to a wider audience: ‘Sway up the yard.’
Against the squeal of pulleys and the hammering of mallets, Felix spoke. ‘I have stores for myself and my familia in the cabin. They should be distributed to the men.’
The old senator’s offer was accepted most gladly. And so it was that, there in the wastes of the Kindly Sea, the crew, the sweepings of the backstreets of Alexandria, Antioch and Smyrna, many of them brought up on slave bread, were fed by hand all the delicacies the imperium and beyond had to offer. Biscuits, soft and melting, a world apart from ship’s biscuit or the buccellatum of the army, smoked eel from Spain, artichoke hearts in honey vinegar from Sicily, stems of silphium from who knew where, apricot halves in grape syrup… one and all vanished into hungry mouths, delighted rough, untutored pallets.
Shared among two hundred, there was only a mouthful or two each, but it helped. Certainly, it raised spirits. There were smiles, even song – a croaking version of an old favourite about an unusually accomplished girl from Corinth: oh, the things she could do with your prick.
‘I do not understand it at all,’ said Felix almost plaintively. ‘Barbarians, especially northern barbarians, are not noted for their persistence. But these Scythians seemingly would follow us across the Styx.’
‘They know what we carry.’ Bruteddius said, then roared, ‘Tighten that fucking brace.’
Ballista and Maximus exchanged a look, one of total understanding, complete with a small, knowing smile. As
