Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  Perennius had aiming points, but for now he was not really trying to choose his targets. The range and relative motion of the ships would have made it difficult to snipe at individuals—though it was a thing he would have managed, trust the gods and his own trained eye, if one of the chitinous Guardians had shown itself with the pirates. Now there was no need to be choosy. The Germans were clustered too thickly to miss. A round glanced from the bronze helm of one and into the throat of the fellow screeching just behind him. Both Germans fell in a confused tangle of limbs and weapons. One pirate was much the same as another, with the champions and bare-chested mad-men of the front rank more likely as more worthy victims.

  An arrow with a barbed iron head thumped the parapet of the tower. An inch higher and it would have been in the agent’s knee. The archer was a naked man who squatted amidships near the beitass, the pole which stiffened the forward leech of the sail. Perennius ignored him as he ignored the handful of other archers. Statistically, they were not a serious threat; and there was no way to get through the next minutes save by trusting Fortune and the best chances offered.

  The short German bows were unlikely to disable any of the armored Marines if they hit, and accurate archery from shipboard was almost impossible anyway. Waves and fluctuations in the breeze kept moving vessels trembling up and down even in calm seas. That did not affect a slinger, since the bullet would hold the plane of its arc no matter what the ship did in the instant between aim and release. Perennius could not have called the gyroscopic effect by name, but he used its results like any good empiricist. A one-inch twitch in the arrowhead meant the shot missed by a man’s height at a hundred feet—that was if it had been properly aimed in the first place. Perennius had the gravest regard for the rush of a hundred German swordsmen; but their archers, like thirst, were simply a factor that had to be ignored in battle.

  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 shouted. 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 diversio
n 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.

  If Perennius jumped forward, the Goth would spit him on the shaft of his rising spear—but the agent might get close enough to kick the bastard’s brains out. Perennius tensed, and the Goth tensed, and the boat-pike Calvus swung like a flail dished in the side of the pirate’s skull.

  Sabellia and Calvus had appeared around the swollen belly of the sail. They held pikes from the rack on the mast. The Gallic woman was screeching as she thrust at another pirate around the corner of the tower. Her pike thumped his breast plate, leaving a bright streak on the bronze disks and a scar on the leather backing when it skidded off. The point did not penetrate.

  The strength required to swing the full length of a fourteen-foot pike was amazing even by the standards Calvus had already demonstrated, but it was also an absurdly awkward way to use the thrusting weapon. The traveller must have been watching Sabellia even as he clubbed down the Goth. He shifted his grip. He was still holding the pike well behind its point of balance. The pirate Sabellia had struck now raised his shield and stepped forward again. The long, round-tipped sword in his right hand was poised for an overhand cut.

  Perennius held the free end of his sling and flipped the handle-weighted length of it down to entangle the German’s sword wrist. Calvus lunged, ramming his pike through the shield, the startled pirate, and an inch or more of the fighting tower beside. The crackle of wood and bones was as sharp as nearby lightning.

  Perennius sprang down. His right leg collapsed as he had expected, but it held him again when he thrust himself back off the deck with both hands. The Goth pinned to the tower’s planking was thrashing. His arms and legs hammered the wood as all his muscles retracted simultaneously, relaxed, and clamped again. The whites of his eyes had rotated up. His sword dropped beside him. The agent snatched the German-made weapon, careful to keep his right leg straight as he bent over.

  * * *

  Sestius and his Marines held a surprisingly solid line between the fighting tower and the mast. Gaius was still on his feet, the agent saw with relief. The young Illyrian stood in the center of the fight, everything a commander should be with his bright armor and his long, bloody sword. The pirates had so awkward a path to board that their numbers could not tell fully. Beyond that difficulty, it was clear that the strength and enthusiasm of the men who remained to board the liburnian was less than that of the individuals in the first wave.

  The German leader, if he were still alive, had shown as little of generalship as had Perennius himself. Unlike the Imperial agent, the mixed force of Germans had no subordinate officers to make up for defects in command—the way Gaius, Sestius, and Leonidas on the poop had done. Only two Goths had circled the fighting tower instead of charging straight for the line of Marines. A serious attempt—and one aimed at the shieldless backs of the Marines instead of the galling slinger on the tower—would have ended all resistance on the liburnian’s deck in a minute or less. Now the ignored path around the flank was Perennius’ to exploit—as point man and not as commander, of course.

  Sabellia was trying to turn and face the main German threat. Sestius himself held the tower end of the Marine line. The Gallic woman clearly wanted to be beside her lover. She was not large even for her sex, however. Her pike weighed over twenty pounds and was very clumsy besides. When Sabellia tried to raise the shaft and turn, the pike head fouled one of the forestays of the mast.

  Calvus was trying to withdraw his own weapon. When he tugged backward, the point squealed out of the tower. The Goth remained hopelessly impaled. Clearing that pike was obviously a task for whoever survived the battle. To the agent’s amazement, the traveller continued to jerk at the shaft as if he could somehow overcome the friction of perforated wood, bronze, and bone with nothing more than the corpse’s mass to hold against his tugging.

  “Blazes!” screamed the agent. “Take hers and come along with me!” For all that Calvus seemed genuinely dim-witted about practical things, his demonstrated strength was too obvious an asset now to be neglected. Sabellia’s instincts and courage were all that Perennius could have hoped for at his back—but a man who could drive a pike like a ballista bolt was utterly beyond a soldier’s hopes.

  There was a splotch on the ragged edge of the agent’s tunic. The wound oozed, however, with none of the fierce arterial spurting that would have meant the agent’s death by now. It made him weaker and slower, but he was Aulus Perennius. When a black-bearded German faced him with a shout at the starboard side of the tower, Perennius cut him down. The blow would have decapitated the German if the sword-edge had been up to the job.

  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 a
nd 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.