Birds of Prey

by David Drake

  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.

  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 g
one. 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.”