More arrows struck the akatos' planking. The pirates had several archers, the Aphrodite only Sostratos. Several shafts whistled past him as they tried to bring him down. None bit. As coolly as if exercising at a gymnasion, he kept shooting back. Another pirate wailed. He fell into the sea with a splash. “Oh, very well shot!” Menedemos exclaimed. “They aren't pulling away,” Dioldes said. “I see that,” Menedemos answered. “Let's see if we can take out their portside oars and cripple them.” “Same trick we pulled on the trireme, eh?” After a moment's thought, the oarmaster dipped his head. “Worth a try. Safer than ramming, that's certain.” Another sailor on the Aphrodite —not a man pulling an oar— screeched and crumpled, clutching his leg. The hemiolia was terrifyingly close now, her oars rising and falling, rising and falling in smooth unison. Seeing how well the pirates rowed worried Menedemos. With a crew like that and a fast, fast ship, their skipper could make plans of his own. If he swerved at the last instant. . . “Portside oars—in!” Diokles bellowed. At the same time, the pirate ship's keleustes roared out an order of his own. And, at the same time as the Aphrodite's, portside rowers brought their oars inboard, so did the hemiolia's. Neither hull crushed the other ship's oars beneath it; neither set of rowers had arms broken and shoulders dislocated as oars flew out of control. But the men who would have sat at the rear of the hemiolia's upper bank of oars had none to serve once the ship's mast was stowed. As the two ships passed close enough to spit from one to the other, several of them flung grappling hooks at the Aphrodite. “Cut those lines! Cut them, by the gods!” Menedemos shouted. Suddenly locked together in an embrace of anything but love, the two galleys pivoted around a common axis. The Aphrodite's sailors frantically hacked at the ropes attached to the grapples, while the pirates hauled on those lines and drew the ships closer together yet. With wild cries that hardly sounded like Greek at all, the first pirates leaped across three or four cubits of open water and onto the merchant galley. Sostratos shot one last arrow at the shouting men aboard the hemiolia, then set down Menedemos' bow, yanked his sword from the scabbard, and rushed to join the fight in the waist of the Aphrodite, “Dung-eating, temple-robbing whoresons!” he screamed, and swung the sword in an arc of iron at a pirate who was kicking a sailor in the face. The blade bit between neck and shoulder. Blood spurted. It stank like hot iron. The pirate let out a horrible screech. He whirled toward Sostratos, who stabbed him in the belly. The fellow crumpled. Sostratos stepped on him to get at the next foe. Madness in a very small space—that was how Sostratos remembered the fight afterwards. The Aphrodite 's crew by itself crowded the akatos. Having twice as many men aboard the ship meant, in essence, that no one had room for anything but seizing the closest foe and trying to kill him. Even telling who was friend and who foe wasn't easy; one of the Aphrodite 's sailors almost brained Sostratos with a belaying pin. “Aphrodite!”
Вы читаете The Gryphon's Skull
