Eagle's crew were losing definition even as the liburnian's bow slipped lower. 'Wait,' said Sabellia, knotting her sash around the neck of the amphora. The others stood in a watchful circle around their prize. They exuded a tense willingness to fight the increasingly raucous crowd of seamen if necessary. 'We'll be all right without food,' the woman said as she jerked the knot tight, 'but the sun'll be our death if we're still out in the morning with nothing to drink.'
'The Sun is life,' Perennius said sharply as Sabellia's words tripped a childhood recollection of blasphemy. But he was beyond that now in his conscious mind; beyond trust in anything but himself and perhaps - 'Let's get in the water,' the agent said. He bent and lifted one end of the twenty-foot grating.
Perennius slid into the sea after the makeshift float. He made as little noise as possible. Sestius followed with a huge splash, as attention-getting as it was unnecessary. The port outrigger from which they were abandoning ship was only three feet above the water now. Sabellia knelt, tossed the free end of her sash to her lover, and lowered the amphora with the minimal commotion of a duck diving. The jar was heavier than water, but the sea buoyed it up enough that the wool sash was an adequate shackle. The woman's tunic billowed up away from her body as she slipped in feet-first.
The sea was ice encasing Perennius's battle-heated body. The salt was fire on his wound. The lips of the wound puckered. The agent gasped. It felt for a moment as if lava were being sucked into his marrow.
'Gaius, Calvus!' Perennius hissed 'Get in!' He could not have shouted even if the situation permitted it, but the harsh fragment of voice which pain left him suited well the whispered imperatives needed at the moment.
Gaius stared at the float with the expression of a man startled by Medusa. Both his hands were locked on the hilt of the sword sheathed at his right side. The skin over his knuckles was as mottled as that of his face. The grating had begun to drift away from the liburnian, pushed lightly by the pressure of the three who had caught hold of it.
Without speaking or even appearing to see his comrades in the water, the young Illyrian turned back toward the tumult on deck. Perennius started to call Gaius' name again in furious despair. He was certain that he would have to climb aboard again and try to throw the courier bodily into the water - that or abandon him. Perennius was damned if he was going to abandon - but he need not have worried. He had forgotten Calvus.
The tall man stood in his attitude of concentration. The splash Sestius had made had drawn some attention but no anger, not yet. There was still wine to be looted. The sun bled through clouds on the horizon. The sight of people drifting off toward it still looked like an act of despair, not hope. Later, and not very much later from the speed with which the Eagle's bow settled, Perennius expected a blast of rage directed at everything surrounding those who saw themselves condemned. The agent and his companions had to be well beyond missile range of the liburnian by the time that happened.
Gaius turned back and stepped off the side of the ship. He had the blank-eyed aplomb of a man who had forgotten there was a drop-off. He spluttered in the water. Perennius seized him by the neck of his tunic and dragged him to the float with an expression of relief and joy. Calvus, quiet but now mobile again, sat awkwardly on the catwalk and pushed himself into the sea. Even though his feet were already in the water, the tall man managed to make a considerable splash. The agent continued to grin as he reached out to grab Calvus' hand. The traveller was as clumsy as a hog on ice, but by the gods! he was good to have around in a tight place.
Blazes, they all were - all his companions. If the empire were kept by no one worse ... it would be kept, as it seemed probable it would not in reality.
'I think,' said the agent, shaken by reaction and the rage which was the only way he knew to combat despair, 'that if we all kick together - quietly! - we can get a few hundred feet away without attracting much attention. We'll worry then about navigating. For now, the important thing is not to catch javelins between our shoulder blades.'
Suiting action to his words, the Illyrian scissored out a kick that did not break the surface of the water. It was excruciatingly painful to his right thigh. That was, in its way, a blessing. It took his mind away from the useless- ness of his action and the mission beyond it to the only goal which had mattered to Aulus Perennius for twenty years: the stability of his world.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It became much worse after dark. While there was still a trace of light, it served as a goal toward which to kick. When even that trace had shrunk and vanished, the grating was alone with the sea and the moonless sky. Perennius trusted Calvus' sense of direction, though he did not understand the mechanism. The others seemed to trust Perennius, though the gods alone knew why. He should never have set sail without a full complement of Marines! When he got back, he'd find the bureaucrat responsible and -
It was hard to imagine getting back to Rome, when you were thrusting at the water which surrounded you without even a horizon to be seen.
Sabellia yelped. She began splashing at the water with an arm as well as her legs. Sestius, across from her at the 'bow' end, shouted, 'What is it? What is it?' as the float bobbed and yawed.
The commotion subsided as abruptly as it had begun. 'It's all right,' the woman gasped. She was clinging to the grate with both hands again. They had all stopped their desultory kicking for the moment. It was a good time for another break. 'Something b-bit my toe. It was just a nibble, but . . .' Sabellia did not have to finish the sentence for the others to scan the surface around them. It was so dark that no fin could have been glimpsed against the waves anyway.
There had to be more small fish than sharks, of course. In Italy, still protected from the shambling terror of the Germans, rich men raised mullets as pets as much as for food. The owners could sit on the lips of their ponds and call, while the water boiled with scaly bodies rushing to be the first to caress their master's fingers. That memory was now like a scene from Hell.
'Do you want a sword?' Perennius called forward to the woman. Gaius had kept his blade, lashing it to the grating between him and the agent. If it would offer Sabellia some security, that was better than having the salt etch it uselessly where it was now.
'No, it just startled me,' the woman said. 'I have my knife, if I needed . . .' She reached over with one hand and stroked the clothes in a soggy packet between her and the centurion. All the castaways but Calvus, alone in the stern where his efforts equalled the combined efforts of the rest of them, had stripped off their clothing only minutes after they set out on the float. The cloth had dragged at their limbs, weighting and robbing of force all their attempts to distance themselves from the liburnian. Tied atop the grating, the garments did not interfere with movement, but they were still available against the morrow's sun. Sunburn could disable as thoroughly as blazing oil when its victims were spread-eagled on the sea for its attentions.
A rumbling sound clutched at their bodies in the water seconds before their ears heard it through the air.
'Aulus!' the courier cried. He heaved himself up on the float as if the shock waves were in fact tentacles squeezing and releasing and ready to squeeze again.
'It's just a whale calling,' the agent said sharply. He had been momentarily frozen himself by the immersion in distant sound.
'No,' said Calvus, his voice drifting with the breeze, 'it was the ship. It just went down.'
The cries could as well as not be those of gulls, wheeling against the stars in search of the white water that indicated fish shoaling. Indeed, the cries could be those of gulls even if the flesh that sparkled their thin commotion was not that of fish at all. The sound still told of men dying.
Perennius had seen it happen off Alexandria harbor, a
grain ship foundering within minutes of the help that would have saved at least the crew. The stern rose sharply, its great rudder flapping desperately for help. Then, swifter than a ship on the ways being launched, the vessel had plunged vertically. In its rush for the bottom, the ship sucked in and swept along the screaming crewmen who had flung themselves over the side at the last instant. Compartments crashed inward under the increasing pressure, belching up cargo and timbers and men, some of them still alive. The customs boat Perennius was aboard had saved three men and the ship's cat. It was more than anyone among the rescuers had thought probable.
The Eagle had died without even that hope. Might the merciful Sun take them to his bosom.
'Back to work,' Perennius said aloud. 'We've got a ways yet to go.'
It was hours later that they heard the other ship.
Perhaps Calvus could have said just how many hours it had been. For the rest of them, the time since sunset had been a blur of fatigue punctuated with moments of terror or despair. They had been exhausted, physically and
