The mast partners, the great timbers that spread the thrust of the sail across six deck beams, held – forcing the mast itself to shear just above them. Tons of mast, spar, and canvas lurched forward, driven by its inertia and the breeze still trying to fill the collapsing sail. The mast itself struck the parapet of the fighting tower and continued driving forward. The rear wall of the tower smashed in and all the cleats pulled out of the deck. Even so, the tower saved the contingent standing forward to repel boarders. The top-hamper would otherwise have spread general death and maiming among them.
What was happening aboard the pirate craft defied belief.
The German warriors had been screaming insults and descriptions of their battle prowess as the two ships drew closer. When the pirates realized what was about to
happen, even the front rank of slaughter-maddened berserkers was shocked into a different – if no more sane – state of mind. Men who had steeled themselves to face swords and missiles realized that eighty tons of timber would make no more of their courage than it made of the water creaming to either side of the prow. Their surge forward, shields raised, spears clanging, suddenly reversed into a panicked flight toward the stern with all weapons dropped or forgotten.
The attempt to escape was both useless and too late. The gunwale splintered. The pirates’ bow dipped under with a rush. Panicked warriors were ground between pine keel and oak decking like olives in a press. The wood shrieked louder than the men.
The sea did not enter the pirate craft through a hole but rather over the whole forward half of the ship. The stern heaved up, throwing the furious steersman to meet the oncoming Eagle with the broken tiller in his hands. The sea churned up foam and blood and splinters as the liburnian plowed on.
The low-decked pirate vessel squeezed sideways with its port hull in the air. Its own mast did not break as the liburnian’s had: it ripped apart the keel into which it was butted. As the ship went fully under water, it belched a huge gulp of air which had been trapped by the suddenness of the disaster between the hull timbers and the decking immediately over them. Then the pirate ship was gone. With it went almost every one of the men who had been screaming for blood less than a minute before.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Eagle herself was proceeding only on inertia. The shock had thrown her oarsmen off their stroke and generally off their benches, though there was nothing like the number of serious injuries below that the first attack had caused. The previous impact had been transmitted through the oars and the men who had cushioned it with their bodies. This time, the liburnian’s hull had no such cushion. What that meant was not long to be explored.
Perennius lay under a flapping edge of the sail. He tried to stand up but was surprised by the weight of the spray-dampened linen. Calvus gripped a double handful of the canvas and lifted it for the agent and Sabellia. “It’s just my damned leg,” Perennius muttered in self-apology.
“Come on, come on,” Sestius was demanding, “Get up, you don’t want to roll overboard now, do you?” He rapped at the heels of Marines who still lay on the decks, using the vine-wood baton that served him both as rank insignia and a practical tool.
“Glad I wasn’t on that,” Gaius muttered as he surveyed the remains of the fighting tower. The thigh-thick mast lay across it.
The cry from below decks was wordless and riveting. It was a moment later before the screams, swelling stern-ward from the front of the rowing chamber, finally contained a message intelligible to those standing frozen above: “Water! We’re sinking!”
The Eagle had drifted to a halt several hundred feet from where she ground the pirates under. There was some flotsam off the stern to starboard, but none of it appeared to be living. There was nothing else on the sea for scale or reference except the liburnian’s own shadow dimming the brighter highlights of the waves.