Birds of Prey (18 page)

The confusion on the pirate vessel itself was suddenly more than raucous blood-lust. Genuine flames amidships were rolling clouds of smoke as white as steam out of the crumpled sail. Half the men still aboard the shallow vessel were either trying to fight the fire or were shouting at it in pointless terror instead of trying to board the
Eagle.

Perennius saw a chance and took it. The two ships were rotating slowly about their common center. In a few minutes, the
Eagle
would be taken aback, her untended sail fluttering back against her mast as the combined momentum of the vessels torqued her into the wind. At the moment, however, the liburnian's canvas and bluff side were downwind of the pirates. If the ships had not been linked by the grappling lines, they would already have begun drifting apart.

And there were only two lines still fastened.

The axe-wielding Herulian who had been facing Sestius danced back, aiming a cut and a curse at the Roman agent who had just appeared on his right flank. Perennius ducked his upper body away from the blow. He made no attempt to parry the heavier weapon with his sword. More surprisingly to anyone who had seen Perennius fight before, the squat Illyrian did not exploit the German's loss of balance. The fellow stood with his shield wide to the left fronting Sestius. His axe pulled the right side of his body around to follow his backhand blow.

The Herulian was not the most important target. Perennius squatted and cut at the horsehair rope reeved through the shaft of the nearest grapnel. His sword tore chips from the edge of the runway which acted as his chopping block. The wound in Perennius' thigh burned and his leg threatened to buckle, but he could not have reached the hawser without bending at the knees.

A Goth clung to the rope as his feet slid on the shaft of the oar he was trying to climb. He screamed and tried to thrust his spear at the agent left-handed. To the other side, the Herulian with the axe cried out also. Sestius had used the diversion to pin his opponent's knees together by thrusting below the German's wicker shield. The Herulian fell backward as the government-issue spear tore through ligaments and the porous ends of the leg bones. The Herulian might still have swung at Sestius' ankles while the centurion drew his sword, but Sabellia slipped past her lover with something bright in her hand. As Perennius had suspected before, the finger-length blade of her knife was long enough to let out all a man's blood through his throat.

Oarsmen were fighting their way onto the deck by both hatches and through the ventilator whose grating had been lifted by the initial shock. If the sailors had been armed and trained, their numbers would have been decisive. As it was, their terror was likely to demoralize the Marines who had been holding steadily despite their losses. Flight was obvious suicide, but the instincts of battle are housed far deeper in a man's brain than is the intellect which seeks to direct them. Perennius cursed and cut again. Both ends frayed into anemone-tufts of horsehair as the hawser sprang apart under tension. The Goth's despairing spear-thrust nocked the side of the
Eagle
as the man himself hit the water. He was dragged instantly to his death by his equipment and his inability to swim.

The agent levered himself to his feet, using the Gothic sword as a crutch. The blade bowed under his weight. It did not spring back when he lifted its point from the wood.

There was no way this side of Hell that Perennius could reach the remaining grappling line. It was fast in the outrigger, twenty feet aft of where he stood. Already fresh Germans boarding the
Eagle
were running toward the agent instead of joining the rank that faced the Marines.

The grapnel Perennius had cut free lay on the deck before him. The released tension of its line had sprung free the one of its three hooks which had been embedded in the liburnian's deck coaming. The agent thrust the point of his sword under a hook and flipped the iron up into his left hand. He could not afford to bend over. Perennius' right thigh was spasming even though he was trying to keep his weight off it. “Cut the other line!” he shouted in Greek. He brandished the grapnel, holding it by its eighteen-inch shaft as an explanation and a way to call attention to himself in the tumult.

Wailing, bloody oarsmen forced their way up from the chaos in the rowing chamber. Some of them were even throwing themselves over the port side, though they could be only a brief salvation even for those who could swim. “We've got to separate the ships!” shrieked Perennius in a hopeless attempt to be heard above their clamor.

The Goth who rushed Perennius along the outrigger's runway wore a helmet of silvered iron. Its fixed visor flared over his brow like the bill of a Celtic woman's bonnet. There was nothing feminine about his long sword or the strength with which he cut at the agent's torso with it.

Perennius interposed the grappling iron as if it were a buckler. The claws were thumb-thick and forged from metal as good as that in the Goth's sword. Sparks flew from both objects. The shock to Perennius' left arm was severe, but the two feet of greater leverage almost tore the quivering sword from the Goth's hand.

The agent tried to thrust at his opponent. His bent blade and the weakness of the leg that should have carried him made the attack more of a stumble. The German skipped back anyway, disconcerted by his numb sword-hand. As the pirate did so, the deck lurched and he lost his footing. Screaming, he fell backward onto the oar-blades. Despite the desperate clutching of his hands, the Goth slipped off and went head-first into the sea.

Perennius went down also. The wind blew a pall of smoke from the other vessel. It reeked of leather and wet wool. Out of it came another German with his metal-shod shield raised and his spear poised to stab the kneeling agent.

There was nothing wrong with Perennius' right arm. He hurled his sword against the warrior's trousered shins. The weapon clanged and cut. The pirate gave a yelp and pitched headlong. His helmet fell off and he dropped his shield to scrabble at the deck coaming with his left hand.

Perennius hit him on the temple with the grappling iron. The German's legs relaxed, but there was still life in his arms until the agent struck twice more. The body slid sideways off the runway, as the other had done before it.

Blazes, there was open water between the ships!

A freak of the breeze sucked away the bitter smoke for the moment. The ships had lain parallel with their starboard bows interlocked. Now there was a broad V of water between the liburnian's bow and the cutwater of the pirate vessel. There was still a grappling line snubbed to the
Eagle.
Even as Perennius stared, the hooks of that iron tore free. They took with them a foot of the deck coaming. The
Eagle
lurched again. Without the drag of the smaller ship, the wind was already starting to swing her head to leeward.

The agent risked a glance over his shoulder. Behind him, Calvus was straightening. The tall man held the boat-pike near the butt as he twitched its head free of the pirate's hull planking.

The traveller had just pushed the two ships apart single-handedly.

The
Eagle
's defenders could not see what had happened. The roar of despair on their own vessel was enough to cause the pirates who had boarded already to glance around. There were less than a dozen of them. The Marines' tight ranks and full armor had made them dangerous opponents when there was nowhere for them to run.

Perennius grabbed a fallen spear to replace the sword which had splashed over the side. He was still on his knees. “Get'em from behind with your pike!” he cried to Calvus, but when he looked around he saw that the tall man was stiff in his trance state.

The line of Germans broke from the flank nearest Perennius and his companion.

It was as sudden and progressive as cloth ripping under tension. A red-bearded pirate flung the spear with which he had been sparring with Sestius. It clanged on the centurion's shield boss. The German dropped his own shield and ran. He launched himself from the deck of the liburnian and into the waist of his own vessel despite the widening gap that separated them. Behind him came his companions.

The pirates broke so suddenly that the exhausted Marines had no time to pursue. Gaius alone followed them. The courier had a deep cut on his left shoulder and the light of battle in his eyes. Blood rippled into droplets from the point of his long sword as he brought it around in a final arc. A Herulian with a wolf-skin kirtle screamed as the Roman blade severed one heel even as he threw himself overboard. In the water, men drowned or splashed to hand-holds on the pirate ship's gunwale.

And there were no pirates alive on the
Eagle.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Perennius was dizzy, sick with blood loss and reaction. He tried to rise but found that even holding himself on knees and knuckles required all his concentration until the moment of vertigo had passed. God of Morning, he thought with his eyes closed. Let your servant behold you once again. But it was now late in the afternoon, and the second pirate vessel was luffing toward them with men at her rail.

Hell, he was never very good at resting anyway, the agent thought. He rose carefully. Calvus' hands were at his shoulder and wounded thigh. Their dry warmth offered more comfort than the burden they took from Perennius' own muscles.

The
Eagle
was not entirely clear of the first pirate vessel, for that matter. The survivors of that smoldering craft seemed as disinterested in continuing the fight as were those standing in the carnage of the liburnian's deck. Neither ship was under control. Because the
Eagle
's sail was set and her sides were higher than those of the pirate craft, she was drifting downwind faster than the Germans were. That was not going to be sufficient so long as the liburnian shared the sea with an undamaged shipful of pirates.

The captain, Leonidas, was obviously aware of that. He was shouting at the mate. That officer in turn was holding a pair of seamen and actually placing their hands on the shroud he wanted trimmed. Both sailors were blood-spattered and slack-faced. Perennius recognized one of them from the ballista crew. No wonder the mate was having difficulty raising him out of shock. A wonder that the man had survived at all, the way Gaius had rushed them into the melee.

Calvus was bandaging Perennius' thigh. The tall man was using a length of wool and a jeweled brooch that the agent had last seen fastening the cloak of a Goth he had killed. The wool provided absorption and a compress, all you could do while you waited to see whether the wound festered and killed you.… “Can you make the winds blow the way you want?” Perennius asked. He rotated the spear in his hand so that its iron ferule rapped the bloody deck.

The traveller straightened. “No,” he said. He pointed at the bandage, partly visible beneath the torn edge of the agent's tunic. “It will hurt as it heals, and there'll be the usual stiffness,” he said. “But no infection.”

All over the deck, men were sorting themselves out. Leonidas had disappeared down the after hatch. Missing seamen were beginning to reappear on deck for their officers to put to work. Speaking harshly under the rein that kept him from rushing back to present needs himself, the agent demanded, “How did you separate us from the pirates?” He waved at the shallow, wallowing craft which was now well astern of the
Eagle.
“How?”

“You said we had to loose ourselves from them,” the tall man said simply. “I could not have reached the line without being killed myself, but I could push the ships apart with my pike. Eventually the line would give or the hooks would pull out.” Calvus' tongue touched his lips in a gesture of hesitation which Perennius did not remember the traveller showing in the past. “That meant that I could not help you fight, but … you need little help in that.”

Perennius closed his eyes, then opened them to snarl with a frustration directed against the world, “Could you lift this fucking ship? Could you do that?”

“No, Aulus Perennius,” the traveller said.

The agent spun on his left heel. “Let's see what we've got left to kill the next hundred with,” he said.

“Aulus!” shouted the courier when he noticed the agent, “Gods above, we massacred them!” Gaius' enthusiasm was as natural as it was premature. He had not yet learned the lesson that it does not matter in war how well you fight, but only whether or not you win. The
Eagle
had fought very well indeed; but Perennius' mind, unlike his protégé's, was on the unscathed company of pirates rather than on those whose blood painted the liburnian's foredeck.

Gaius waved his sword with an abandon that showed he had forgotten it. Blood had dried on its point and edges and was streaked darkly across the flats of the blade as well. Perennius stepped to the younger man and grasped his sword wrist. “Clean your equipment, soldier!” he ordered harshly. Gaius' present euphoria was as incapacitating as the blubbering despair which would follow it if the agent did not shock him back to reality at once. They all needed the courier's demonstrated charisma if they were to survive.

The wound on Gaius' shoulder was not as serious as the agent had feared. The segmented body armor had sleeves and a skirt of studded leather straps. A blow had severed two of the straps, but the cut beneath the young man's bloody tunic was short and shallow. There was no grating of bone ends when Perennius probed it firmly.

“Yes sir!” Gaius said. He braced to attention despite the twinge as the squat agent tested his shoulder.

Perennius grinned like a shark as he turned to Sestius and the Marines. Gods! but the kid was good. Men 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.