‘Hercules’ hairy arse!’
The Armata ran into something. She was smashed sideways. Across the deck men were knocked off their feet, sent sliding down towards the starboard rail.
‘All hands, larboard,’ bellowed Bruteddius. ‘Now!’
Ballista did not think. He skidded around the corner of the cabin, and set off between it and the back of the rear helmsman. The deck lurched up in front of him. He was thrown flat. He was slipping backwards in a deluge of water. His foot hit something, broke the momentum. His fingers found purchase in a join in the deck. Wulfstan was slithering past. Ballista put out a hand, grabbed the boy by the scruff of his tunic.
‘Larboard now!’ Bruteddius’s voice was cracked. ‘The next one will turn us over.’
A few steps and Ballista’s chest collided with the rail. Locking his forearms under it, he gripped for dear life. A body banged in on either side, another from behind.
Looking up, Ballista saw that a mountain of water was heading straight for him. The third of the rogue triple waves towered over the boat.
Ballista forgot to breathe before the impact. Saltwater forced its way into his mouth, up his nose. It tried to rip him from the rail. The Armata was tipping. Ballista tried to breathe out. He failed. The boat reared still higher.
Ballista’s body forced him to try and breathe. Nothing but water, choking, down into his lungs, drowning him. The boat literally hung in the balance.
Allfather, this is it, thought Ballista. I am going to die.
Then wonderful, sweet air. Gulping, coughing, Ballista felt the rail start to fall. Slowly at first, then faster, the Armata began to right herself.
‘Rowers, back to your benches.’ Bruteddius was indestructible, a thing of nature. ‘Balance the boat.’
From below, the sounds of the starboard oarsmen stumbling, bumping to their places – a herd of weird migrating animals.
All around Ballista, cheering, faces with insane grins. Someone was thumping him on the back. Saved! Saved! Gods be praised!
The stern of the boat lifted on a normal wave.
‘Man overboard!’ The shout came from the stern. Ballista staggered towards it.
Hippothous was pointing. The Armata was sliding up the wave – nothing to be seen but water.
The boat crested the wave, and there was a small head in the water. Arms wide, thrashing in a wild crawl.
‘Bauto!’ Wulfstan screamed.
The Frisian boy was going up the front of the following wave. He went over the top.
Ballista hugged Wulfstan to him, as tight as his own child.
The Armata slid up the wave, hung on its peak. And Bauto was gone. Nothing but empty, pitiless water.
‘The Goths! They are gone.’
It meant nothing to Ballista. There was no room in his thoughts for anything but a small boy lost in a wild sea.
The storm went as it came – gradually. All the long day, and most of the following night, the Armata ran, as far as could be told, a little east of south-east.
Dawn found the ship crawling past the mole into the miraculous safe harbour of Amisus. She was leaking like a sieve. Several planks sprung, the two great ropes of the hypozomata that girdled the hull and held her together were loose. The water had risen past the bilges. The pump and bailing barely held it at bay from the lower benches. Only the natural buoyancy of a wooden boat was stopping her sinking.
The human cost could have been worse. Five broken limbs, three arms, two legs. Several bad cuts and rope burns. Two men knocked senseless. Just one dead – a young boy drowned in the immensity of the Kindly Sea.
PART THREE
The Mountains of Prometheus
(The Caucasus, Summer-Autumn, AD262)
Slim indeed are our hopes, if we must entrust our safe return to women.
XX
When the sea fret lifted, there, fine over the starboard bow, were the Caucasus mountains. Forty, fifty or more miles away, the immense green-grey slopes thrust up and, far behind them, cloud-topped, the jagged white peaks of the mountain wall. They were, thought Ballista, a fitting place for a high god to chain an immortal traitor.
Ballista had crossed the Alps several times, and as a young man he had served in the Atlas, but those mountains were as nothing to this eastern range. He could see why some men held that the Caucasus might stretch as far as India. Somewhere high in that wilderness of rock and snow, he had to seduce a king from his Persian inclination and cajole him back into friendship with Rome. Somewhere up there was a grim pass he had to defend from the savage northern nomads. It was the far edge of the world; a sort of armed exile.
‘Arrian was right,’ Hippothous said. ‘The Phasis river does have a strange colour.’
Ballista looked. Mud carried down by the great river of Colchis stained the sea in a wide yellowish fan. The waters of the Phasis were indeed light with a tawny shade, just as the bookish governor of Cappadocia had written more than a century before. For these Greeks and Romans, everything was seen through a filter of literary texts.
The Armata turned and nudged in towards Phasis. The last leg of the furthermost run had been slow. They had taken eight days at Amisus repairing the trireme after the storm. It had been a miserable time: hard, dirty work tightening the hypozomata around the vessel, making sound the sprung planks, caulking the seams, splicing and replacing damaged rigging, cleaning the fouled bilges. The spirits of the passengers as well as the labouring crew had been oddly oppressed by the fate of one young barbarian slave boy. The death on shore of one of the unconscious crewmen had passed almost unnoticed.
Two days out from Amisus, they had docked in the neat man-made harbour below the towers of Trapezus and a smoke-blackened temple to Hadrian and Rome, where a battered statue of the deified emperor pointed out to sea. They had gone ashore. The fold of his toga over his head, Felix had sacrificed an ox, inspected its entrails – nothing untoward – and poured a libation. Trapezus was the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet, and the most important garrison town for the army at the eastern end of the sea. The next morning, the consular, for all the world as if he were the governor of Cappadocia, had inspected the ships, the troops, their weapons, the walls, the trench, the sick, the muster rolls, and the food supplies. All were sadly depleted. Only a few years earlier, the Classis Pontica had boasted no fewer than forty warships here; there had been some ten thousand local troops as well as many regulars. But then the northmen had come, the garrison had failed in its duty and courage and the Borani had sacked the city. Now there were but ten liburnians – four of them laid up – and just three units of soldiers. The two units of local infantry, Numeri I and II Trapezountioon, numbered no more than a hundred and fifty men each, and the cavalry regulars, Ala II Gallorum, about two hundred, even including those absent without leave and the ill.
The subsequent two days, a similar story had played out. Just down the coast at the fort of Hyssou Limen,
