Sestius was bullying and cajoling injured sailors to pick up weapons in their good hands. Some of the men were hunched over cracked ribs or were weaving from concussion. Most of them would be able to stand with a spear leaned against them and at least give the appearance of defense. The survivors of the original Marine contingent looked glumly from their reinforcements to the hundred or more Germans. The pirates shouted as they eased in with a brail or two furled in the canvas. Several
of the Marines seemed to be in no better condition than the broken seamen who were joining them.
“Perennius, this is yours,” Sabellia said quietly.
Her voice broke into what was less a reverie than a waking nightmare, as the agent surveyed his troops. He looked at the woman, then took from her the silken sling. It ran through his fingers undamaged, slick and deadly and quite useless to him now that it would tear him open to use it. Just a tool, unnecessary now and easily to be replaced . . . but Perennius smiled and took the sling and dropped it back into his pouch with the remainder of the bullets. “Glad you found it,” he said truthfully.
Sabellia’s short hair was damp. She had taken the time to wash the gore from it and her face before approaching the agent. Julia had had black hair, but both of the women were short and had the same non-Gallic – non-Aryan – features. “What should the rest of us do now?” she asked, and the voice was an echo both of the far past and of the alley in Rome where –
Perennius felt his skin grow hot with a surmise for which he had neither evidence nor time. He deliberately lifted his right leg, pivoting it at the hip so that the icy pain would sear away all thought of other times. “We stand to arms, looking like we’re preparing to be boarded,” he heard his voice say as the world narrowed down to the present again. He lowered his leg carefully. “Might help if we looked like we were scared to death.” He glanced past Sabellia to the pirates. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”
As Perennius spoke, the German seamen committed their craft. The pirates had been bellying over the waves some thousand feet from the liburnian – ahead and starboard on a parallel course. Their helmsman was a grizzled man whose hair and beard flared with milkweed fluff from beneath his peaked iron helmet. He threw the crossbar of his steering oar hard forward. The bow of his ship swung to port. The beitass was already clamped in place. As the port leech of the sail came up-wind, its two divisions damped each other fluttering at the rigid pole.
The helmsman gave a raw-voiced command. Loin-clouted Herulians snubbed or slacked the lines at which they were stationed, whichever the need might be. The square, leather-tightened sail swung on the mast to catch the wind at increasingly closer angles. As it did so, the sail’s leverage rotated the vessel through the medium of the sailors straining at their lines. Gothic landsmen ducked or cursed as sheets snapped toward them.
Gaius jumped down from the tower, a perfect, boot-first arc controlled by his left palm on the wooden parapet. The tip of his scabbard rang on the deck as his knees flexed to absorb the shock. “A fine time to see how they’d swallow a ballista dart,” the youth said with a toss of his head toward the pirates. He drew his long-bladed spatha. The nicks in its edge were obvious now that the steel had been rinsed of its coating of blood.
Perennius was returning to the state of mindless calm with which he generally entered battle. He was vaguely aware that Calvus stood beside him. The traveller was as still and erect as the pike in his hands. “Yes,” the agent said. He imagined the chaos among the Germans if their seamen dropped their straining lines when a missile screamed down at them. Then he said, “Here they come.”
The pirate craft had seemed to hover as it came about. Its starboard side, to leeward, had dipped and rolled a great swell in the direction of previous motion. Neither the keel nor the shallow draft of the German vessel were adequate to keep her from making leeway, sliding broadside over the sea. Because the Eagle was still plowing forward on the same course, however, the imperfection of the lighter vessel’s sailing was disguised.