would follow him to Hell!
Men had. The body immediately underfoot was that of the other ballista crewman. A spear had spilled several feet of intestines from his unprotected body.
Longidienus was dead. An arrow, of all things, through the throat. Sestius had been the real commander of the detachment ever since the first day on board, however. As expected, the centurion was readying his troops for the next fight with professional calm. If he did not demonstrate the verve that young Gaius had, it was because he knew as well as Perennius did how slight their chances of survival were.
Sestius broke off a discussion with the man whose calf he was bandaging when he saw the agent approaching.
'Sir,' he said, the Cilician accent polished out of his voice by fifteen years of Army. 'Four dead, four may as well be. . . .'He and Perennius glanced together at a gray-faced Marine with a broken spear-shaft showing just below the lower lip of his cuirass. 'Three that'll be all right unless they get time for the wounds to stiffen up, which I don't guess they will.' He squeezed the wrist of the man he was bandaging. 'Next!'
'Perennius, are you all right?' Sabellia asked, rising from behind the centurion's armored bulk. She flipped to the deck the arrow she had just forced out of a sailor's biceps point-first so that the barbs would not tear the flesh even wider. The woman's arms were bloody to the elbows. Perennius knew that not all the gore resulted from the medical work she was doing at the moment.
'Huh?' the agent said. Sabellia was bent down again with a water-dripping compress before he remembered his wounded thigh. 'Blazes, I'll live,' he added with a certainty he could not have offered had he thought about the words. 'Sestius, get the casualties stripped, arms and armor collected, and a seaman behind every goddam point or edge of this ship. If they're going to run up on deck screaming, they can damned well stay and soak up an arrow that might waste somebody useful otherwise.'
The man whose arm Sabellia was binding looked up in horror. He was obviously one of the oarsmen who had leaped up on deck just in time to stop a missile.
'Go on, leave the wounded,' Perennius growled to his centurion. 'She can handle the rest.' Sabellia lifted her eyes. They were large and dark, and they covered any emotion the woman might have felt the way straw can momentarily cover a fire it is flung on.
The Eagle's sluggish wake bobbed with flotsam: bodies, stripped and flung over the side. They would float until their lungs filled or the gulls, wheeling and screaming above, pecked away enough of the soft parts that the rest sank for the bottom-feeding eels. Further off, beyond even the smudgy pall of the vessel they had fought, were the heads of men whose arms still splashed to stave off drowning. The ones still alive in the water would be those who had leaped in unburdened by equipment: oarsmen,
driven to panic in the liburnian's belly, Germans who threw away their arms and chose water over fire as a route to Hell. They had no value either as fighters or as hostages. No one on either side would spare a thought for them until long after they had lost their hand-holds on the waves.
But the second pirate ship had sheered slightly from its attempt to close with the Eagle. Perhaps the fact that the liburnian suddenly got under way again was primarily responsible for the change. Now the German craft was wearing around to her disabled consort. As Perennius squinted to see past the Eagle's high stern, blocks rattled and the pirates' sail dropped smoothly.
'Will they let us go now?' Calvus asked in his usual tone of unconcern.
'Can you make them let us go?' the agent asked.
The tall man dipped his head. 'No,' he said, 'at this distance - ' already a quarter mile separated the hunters from their prey - 'I can't affect anyone except my own kind.'
'Then they'll be back,' Perennius said grimly. 'They want to know what happened . . . maybe take aboard some of the able-bodied men, that's all they're doing. But they haven't forgotten us, and unless our rowers are in better shape than I think they are, they've got plenty of daylight to catch us in.' He paused, looking at Calvus with an expression of rueful joy. 'You know,' he said, 'they gave us an old cow . . . but she gored a few Germans, didn't she? I keep thinking that the Empire . . . Ah, screw it, let's find Leonidas and see if he's got any better ideas than I do.'
From the sea astern came the squealing of a windlass. The Germans were raising their sails again. The mechanical sound formed a descant to the pirates' hoarse shouting.
The Tarantine captain rose from the aft ladder as Perennius approached. During brief glimpses caught while the fighting went on, the captain looked cool and aloof in his command chair. The agent had felt flashes of anger, irrational but real none the less when he was bathed with his own sweat and blood in the melee. Closer view provided a reassurance which Perennius needed emotionally if not on an intellectual level. Leonidas too was drenched in sweat, and there was a bubble of blood where he had bitten through his lip during the action. 'Right?' he said sharply, turning to meet the agent.
Despite the fact that the battle was only half over, the anger which had flared earlier between the two men was gone. The tension which had fueled the earlier outbursts had burned away in the open fighting. Each of them was intelligent enough to have noted how the other handled his duties during the crisis. 'We're doing what we can,' the agent said simply. 'The fire was a fluke. I doubt we'll fight them off a second time, even arming some of your seamen. What're the chances that you'll be able to run us clear?'
From below them came a human babble and the clash and rattle of wood. Injured men were coming up the hatchway. Some of them were slung like sides of meat if their own damaged limbs could not get them out of the way unaided.
'Fucking none,' Leonidas said bleakly. 'But we're trying, too. Getting the rowing chamber clear.' There were splashes alongside as broken oars slid into the sea. There was no time to fit the replacements carried in the hold, but at least their burden and awkwardness could be disposed of. 'Capenus'll have a stroke of some sort going any time now, but Fortune! That won't do more than add minutes, the shape the men and hardware is below. Fortune! But we tried.'
'How will they approach us this time, Captain Leonidas?' asked Calvus as the two shorter men started to return glumly to tasks they viewed as hopeless.
The Tarantine's eyes glittered at what seemed now an interruption, but the question's own merit struck him. 'Likely the same way. Our poop's high - ' he rapped the bulkhead beside him with a palm as hard as a landsman's knuckles. 'Can't board us by this. Their little boats aren't high enough to lay alongside, either. That they'll have learned from the first try.' He grinned in fierce recollection. 'Damned if the oars didn't lay out more of them than your lobsters on deck did - not to knock the way the Marines
fought, sir. . . . But they've got the legs to overhaul us, the shape we're in below decks. If they're smart, and if they're not too afraid of your ballista - ' a nod to Perennius - 'they'll lay along the starboard bow again, where there's the most length of hull without the oars to fend them away.'
Oar blades curled into the water on either side. It was a ragged stroke with jolts like mallets knocking as shafts fouled one another, but it brought a cheer from the men on deck. Perennius could glimpse the second pirate ship now. It was nosing past the rising curve of the Eagle's poop at a distance. The Germans were standing off wide to starboard instead of closing directly on the stern of their prey. Little more than half the liburnian's oars were moving, given the damage to the oars and to the men who should have worked them. Besides that, the rowers must be exhausted from their earlier pull. Their second wind could not last long.
'I'd better go help Gaius with the ballista,' the agent said abruptly. 'We were lucky once.' He turned.
'Wait,' said Calvus, touching Perennius' arm. 'Why don't we ram them this time?' he went on. His dark eyes held the Tarantine's.
Leonidas' rage was predictable and this time uncontrolled. 'Listen, fishbrain, I told you why we don't ram! We - ' Calvus raised his index finger in query. The captain's flowing recapitulation choked off, though Leonidas himself seemed puzzled at the fact.
'I understood what you said,' the tall man agreed. Leonidas' eyes bulged. The agent watched Calvus with a care dictated by more than present words. 'We will lose our mast and sail, and our own hull may very well be hopelessly damaged. While there were two pirate ships pursuing us, those were valid arguments against ramming. Are they now?'
'Dammit, I'm not going to sink my ship!' Leonidas shouted.
'Blazes!' Perennius shouted back, aware that they were drawing attention away from the pirates. 'We'll sink ourselves, when the bastards drop us overboard, won't we? Do you think it's a joke, that they sacrifice prisoners to
