The pirates hung like a missile at the top of its arc. Then their ship began to slide toward the liburnian at a falling missile’s deadly, increasing pace as well. Behind the agent, Leonidas was calling directions to his coxswain and steersmen alternately. Beside Perennius, Sestius repeated in stumbling Syriac the orders he had just given his men in Greek and Latin. “Keep your shields low. Duck beneath them but don’t raise the shields or the bastards’ll hock you sure from below.”
Still slipping to starboard, but with enough way on to curl water around its bow, the pirate vessel bore down through bowshot to javelin-throw. The liburnian was moving at a fast walk. Cutting into the wind as she was, the
German craft could add no more than a knot to the closing speed. That the rush together of prey and slayer seemed so awesomely fast was an effect of the players’ size. No beast carries forty tons above the surface, and the sail swelling over the pirates’ deck at a sharp angle to starboard added bulk beyond its mass. A German archer, ordered sternward by men whose honor lay in their spears, managed to put an arrow through the forward leech of his own sail.
Perennius knew the men with him on deck were tensely listening for the sound of thole-pins being pulled and the oars themselves being shipped rattlingly as they had been during the first attack. Instead, the pattern of stroking remained the same, only one per four seconds, because the oarsmen were exhausted. The volume diminished, however, as for a stroke and another stroke the starboard oarsmen marked time with their blades lifted high and dripping back into the sea.
There was a hoarse cry from among the pirates. Even the Goths understood what was about to happen sooner than did the men on the liburnian’s deck. The view of the men on the Eagle was blocked by the fighting tower and the overhang of the deck. The liburnian’s bluff bow swung starboard half a point. The German craft a hundred, fifty, twenty feet away would have crunched along the starboard hull as her predecessor had done. Now the curling bowsprit and the jib for the unset boat-sail bisected the view of onrushing attackers.
As Perennius had anticipated, the pirates had shifted forward when the ships closed. Their weight lifted the stern and dissolved the last chance that the Herulian steersman would be able to prevent the Roman plan from succeeding. All the liburnian’s oars stroked together once more. The pirates’ sail was slatting down according to prearranged plan. It was unable to change their attitude at the last instant, and the steering oar only clipped the wavetops with the load of warriors forward.
The Eagle rode the Germans down with the merciless assurance of a landslide.
The liburnian had been designed to hole her opponents below the waterline when she rammed. Her projecting bronze beak had been removed when she was laid up, however, and it had not seemed either practical or necessary to the agent to have it refitted before they set out. As a result, it was the liburnian’s up-curved stem-piece which made the first contact with the pirate craft. It rode over the Germans’ gunwale just starboard of their cutwater.
The crash threw down everyone in both ships.
One of Sestius’s Marines rolled over the edge, but his screams were lost in other sounds. For long seconds, mechanical noise was the only thing which the world permitted to exist. Though the pirate ship was smaller and lighter, it was built Northern fashion of rough-sawn oak. Its hull could not withstand the mass of the liburnian, but it resisted to the point of mutual destruction as the aged pine planking ground through it.
The Eagle’s mast snapped at the deck. The mast could be stepped or unstepped depending on whether the ship was being readied for cruising or war. The certainty that the larger vessel would be crippled if it rammed with its sail set had probably convinced the Herulian captain that nothing of the sort could be intended. Like Leonidas, he was too much a seaman to imagine another captain so wantonly destroying his own vessel. Perennius, living through the result the Tarantine had forseen, wondered whether the traveller’s persuasion had been only verbal.