It was something of the same problem that caused Gaius to overshoot his intended target. He had aimed for the pirate steersman, in the stern with two other men. A swell threw the missile high, so that it should have cleared them by thirty feet - but Fortune favors the bold. The blazing arrow thudded through the sail and into the top of the mast. The bolt and its result were lost to almost the entire companies of both ships as they prepared to come to grips.
At the coxswain's order, the Eagle's rowers had stopped stroking and had attempted to draw their oars in through the ports. It was an operation the men performed every night and during intervals of the day when their stroke was not called for. In those cases, however, there was leisure to pull one oar in at a time and to take care that the handles cleared the men and benches across the rowing chamber. There was neither time nor calm now. The men on deck feared the foaming, furious Germans. The oarsmen were crowded together with no view but a flash of sea through their ports, even that occluded by the runnels of sweat in their eyes. Drowning, fire, missiles rained down on them through the ventilators - every man could feel his own terror approach through the swimming blackness. When through the fog of adrenalin and fatigue poisons they received the order to secure oars simultaneously, they obeyed; but they obeyed in anarchic panic.
The Eagle slowed as its oars ceased their stroke. In the rowing chamber, men fell as oar-butts slammed their temples. The ship itself resounded with the battering of oars into benches; sometimes the same oar repeatedly, as a terror-blinded seaman kept jerking against immovable timber instead of angling his shaft an inch to one side or the other to clear. There was no one on deck to drop the yard and sail. Leonidas could only hope that the leverage of the high-hung weight would not be enough to snap the mast and bury the Eagle's fighting complement in a tangle of sail and cordage. No one else aboard knew or remembered to care.
The German steerman and the pair of men with him in the stern were darker and more squat that the general run of the pirates - Herulians among Goths. None of the three were armed at the moment, though their spears and shields were laid against the low gunwale beside them.
The man at the oar snouted. His two companions tugged at the windlass that raised and lowered their own sail.
Perennius sighted over the mass of Germans now almost below him. He shot the steersman in the chest.
The Herulian straightened with a cry. He fell forward, across one of the men who had just unblocked the windlass. The yard clattered down in a rush. The belly of the sail flapped, then crumpled flaccidly, as the wind had its will. The pirates had been making only a knot or two into the wind. Their mass and headway were too slight to keep their bow from swinging slightly as the wind took them aback. The closing impact was therefore the two knots driven by the Eagle's sail alone. It was still awesome.
The liburnian displaced some eighty tons; the pirate vessel perhaps half that. The crews alone massed ten tons apiece. All of that kinetic energy had to be absorbed by the hulls as the ships ground together, starboard to starboard. In the Eagle's rowing chamber, that meant death and maiming despite the best efforts of the coxswain and his assistant.
The oars could not be fully withdrawn, but with care all but the blade-tips could have been sheltered within the hull and outrigger. There had not been time for care. Now the pirates' cutwater slammed along the side of the liburnian, catching every oar that still projected. The oar-looms turned into flails within the rowing chamber. The ashen oars broke, but more limbs and bodies broke also. Men on deck heard a screaming like that of pigs in an abattoir. Twelve feet of oar-shaft flipped up, dislodging a ventilator grate.
It was small consolation to the victims that something similar was happening to the pirates.
The skill of the Herulian seamen was no more in doubt than was the courage of the Gothic berserkers pressing forward in the bow. The Eagle was probably the first oared warship the pirates had tackled, however, and that led to a misjudgment. No one on the pirate ship was prepared to see the oar-blades rise into a chest-high obstruction as the ships swept together. Men waiting to board either ducked or were struck down by blades and shafts splintered on the cutwater. Leonidas' exercise had been a protective one, intended to save his oars and rowers. Because the liburnian had twice the pirate vessel's height above the water, the half-effective defensive move proved to be a shattering offensive weapon.
Alone, it was not enough. A German with naked, tattooed limbs hurled the first grappling iron aboard even as an oar struck him down. There were three more irons clawing the Eagle's foredeck and outrigger before the ships ground to a complete halt. Marines staggered as their deck lurched and the liburnian's sail thrust against the combined mass. Howling with glee, pirates began scrambling over writhing comrades and up the oars.
'Let's get the bastards!' Gaius shouted. He drew his long cavalry sword with a flourish. The young Illyrian leaped down from the tower. His waist-length dress cloak flared behind him like a crimson membrane. To Perennius' utter amazement, the two seamen snatched up ballista bolts and followed Gaius to the deck. If they had stayed where they were and thrown the bolts, they might have been of use. Charismatic leadership did not seem to confer tactical skills when it suppressed the instincts of naked men to run from armored attackers.
Well, Aulus Perennius might not be able to get a sailor to follow him into a whorehouse, much less a battle, but he didn't need anyone to teach him his present business either.
More than half the Marines surged forward to meet the Germans. Only one of the scratch force turned and jumped down the forehatch. It was a better percentage than the agent would have guessed. He had no time for the melee, because the Herulians in the stern had noticed the smoke puffing from the ends of their loose-folded sail.
The ballista bolt had been snatched from the mast by the weight of the yard and sail. Hidden but not suffocated, the oily rag had ignited the sail. Perennius had not expected his makeshift fire-arrows to do serious damage. He had hoped for a diversion which, had it occurred early enough, might have permitted the liburnian to run past the pirates as Leonidas had planned to do. Perennius had his diversion now, though it was probably too late.
One of the Herulians snatched up the bucket which lay
in the shallow bailing well aft. He turned and the sling bullet took him on the point of his hip. A trifle low, but the angle was tricky . . . and it would serve for the time, as the man bled and screamed and tried with both hands to compress the shattered bone into unity.
A spear thrust at the agent over the tower parapet. Perennius skipped back, putting the frame of the ballista between himself and the German who wanted his life. The remaining Herulian amidships was the only one of the pirates who seemed to retain an interest in his own ship. He was short-gripping his spear to probe at the sail with the point in an attempt to find the source of the smoke.
'Fire, you donkey-fuckers!' Perennius shouted, hoping Germans from the Danube migrations could understand the dialect he had picked up on the Rhine. 'Your ship's burning!' He shot the Herulian seaman through the center of his boiled-leather breast-plate, just as a Goth stabbed the agent from behind in the right thigh.
There had been a brief struggle as Marines on the catwalk tried to throw back the pirates climbing aboard. The Germans were handicapped by their need to scramble up oar-shafts with their shields slung and a hand for their spears. They had both numbers and fury, however. The angle gave them an unexpected advantage as well. The German spears tended to be longer than the eight-foot javelins issued to the Marines. When the pirates thrust up from their deck or a shifting perch among the cars, their points passed below the Roman shields. Three Marines crashed down with their calves pierced before the rest hopped back onto the deck proper. Germans leaped after them, pushing the defenders back further by sheer weight.
Perennius threw himself forward with a cry. The weapon that had pierced his leg was a poor grade of iron and not even particularly sharp. It had the strength of a hulking, two-hundred-and-fifty pound pirate behind it, however. Blood leaped after the black iron as the agent drew himself off the point. The pirate grunted and raised his weapon to finish the job.
Flat-footed on deck, the Goth was as tall as the fighting tower. To thrust over the parapet, he had to raise his spear overhead with both hands, but that awkwardness was slight protection to Perennius. The German wore silvered chain mail, but his head was bare. His blond hair was long. It was gathered on the left side by a knot close to the German's scalp, so that it streamed like a horse's tail past his shoulder.
The agent's sword lay somewhere on deck. His shield was packed in the cabin with his body armor. With a bullet in its cup, the sling would have been an effective flail even though the range was too short for normal use. And any thought of further retreat ended with the crunch of iron against the mechanism of the ballista behind him. The German who had driven Perennius to the back of the tower had not forgotten the slinger either.
