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.