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.