“Buggering Zeus!” screamed the Tarantine captain as panic and frustration overcame his momentary control, “don’t you see the fucking mast’s still stepped? We’re not in fighting trim, we’re cruising. If we hit anything now, the whole thing, spar, cordage, and sail, comes down across our deck and the oars! Wouldn’t you rather we just lay to and surrendered without all that fuss?”
The bosun shrieked a question to Leonidas from amidships. It was unintelligible to Perennius not for language – the vessel worked on Common Greek – but for vocabulary. The captain pushed past Perennius to answer, and this time the agent let him go. Leonidas would do his best in conditions which were likely impossible. For his own part, the agent now had an idea that might at least offer more than prayer seemed likely to do.
Perennius leaped to the main deck again with a crash of boots which the confusion swallowed. He landed near the aft hatchway, which he ignored. If he went below that way, he would have to struggle the length of the rowing chamber while it was filled with fear and flailing oar-handles. Despite the chaos on deck, the agent could get to the small galley forward better by dodging the sailors and humming ropes above.
One of the pirates was close enough to be seen clearly, now. As the agent had feared, the vessel was not of Mediterranean design at all. The sail was the pale yellow of raw wool, criss-crossed diagonally by leather strips sewn across the stretchy fabric. The wool bellied noticeably in the squares within those reinforcements, but even a lands-man like Perennius could see that the pirates’ sail met the wind at a flatter angle than did that of the Eagle.
Half a do/en years before, the Goths and Borani had begun raiding the Black Sea coasts in ships crewed by Greeks from the old settlements at the mouth of the Danube. In the past year, however, another tribe, the Herulians, had made the long trek to the Black Sea. The Herulians had begun building craft of the same type as their ancestors had used to sail the Baltic. If the Eagle’s opponents had depended on Greeks, either hirelings or slaves, there would have been a slender hope of confusion or mutiny within the pirate ranks. There was no hope of that now.
The liburnian was so much bigger than her opponents – heavier, in all likelihood, than both together – that she looked to overmatch them entirely. Perennius kept thinking of a cow pursued by wolves. From the expressions on the faces of the seamen he passed, most of them took an even less optimistic view of the Eagle’s chances than he did himself. The nearer of the pirates was in plain view. The ship was as broad as the liburnian, but it had only a single open deck over the ribs which joined together the hull planks. It was shorter than the liburnian, seventy-five or eighty feet long in comparison to the Eagle’s hundred and ten feet at the water line. As such, the Germans should have sailed poorly against the wind. That they did not was a result of three developments, visible as the ships bore down on their prey.
First, there were flat cutwaters fore and aft. These increased the effective length of the hulls and greatly aided the vessels’ resistance to slipping sideways under the pressure of breezes from ahead or alongside. Second, when the prow of the nearer pirate lifted from a wave with a geyser of foam and a cheer from her complement, Perennius could see that the cutwaters were extended below the shallow hull by a true keel. Though the pirate vessels still drew far less water than the Eagle, the sheer-sided keel was clearly an advantage against stresses in which the liburnian’s rounded bottom allowed her to wallow. The final development was the one which gave the Germans’ bulging sails the effectiveness of the tighter, civilized Ro-
man weave. A long pole was socketed in the lee gunwale of each ship. The pole reached across at a diagonal to the forward edge of the sail, half-way up, where it was clamped. The pole kept the edge of the sail from fluttering and halving its effect as it met the wind at a flat angle.