“I don’t know either,” the traveller said. He gestured westward again. “The – heat of the air currents rising shows that there is land, but I don’t know which land. I have many abilities, Aulus Perennius, but not many skills. Strength doesn’t make me a trained warrior, and seeing farther into the – seeing light when others cannot, let me put it that way – doesn’t teach me geography.”
“Help me,” called Sabellia.
Sestius and the agent reacted with equal cold-eyed promptitude. “Mine, by the Lord,” muttered a seaman in Syriac. Perennius rabbit-punched him, spilling the man down on his side before he could snatch at the amphora Sabellia was trying to raise through the ventilator.
The crew was expected to buy their food each evening when the ship was beached. There was a quantity of emergency stores, however, grain and wine, for times when they made land after dark or a storm prevented proper foraging. Those stores were still stowed below between the benches. The fact had been forgotten by men to whom the rowing chamber had become a place of fear and rising water. While the men of her own party were preoccupied, Sabellia had slid down through the vent and had manhandled free an amphora of wine. Sheer determination did not, however, give her the strength to lift the awkward five-gallon container over her head unaided.
“Take the jar,” Perennius said to the centurion. There was already a movement of men toward the container. Some crewmen started to slip below to get their own. Leonidas cried out in fury. The agent ignored him. He bent at the waist, offering his left hand to Sabellia when Sestius had snatched the amphora up by its ears. With her weight on his good leg, Perennius lifted her. He shouted, “More wine below! Enough for all of us!” Under his breath, he added to the man and woman, “Now, let’s get the hell out of here.”
The sea was growing darker now. The sky was still clear and seemingly bright, but the individuals of the Eagle’s crew were losing definition even as the liburnian’s bow slipped lower. “Wait,” said Sabellia, knotting her sash around the neck of the amphora. The others stood in a watchful circle around their prize. They exuded a tense willingness to fight the increasingly raucous crowd of seamen if necessary. “We’ll be all right without food,” the woman said as she jerked the knot tight, “but the sun’ll be our death if we’re still out in the morning with nothing to drink.”
“The Sun is life,” Perennius said sharply as Sabellia’s words tripped a childhood recollection of blasphemy. But he was beyond that now in his conscious mind; beyond trust in anything but himself and perhaps – “Let’s get in the water,” the agent said. He bent and lifted one end of the twenty-foot grating.
Perennius slid into the sea after the makeshift float. He made as little noise as possible. Sestius followed with a huge splash, as attention-getting as it was unnecessary. The port outrigger from which they were abandoning ship was only three feet above the water now. Sabellia knelt, tossed the free end of her sash to her lover, and lowered the amphora with the minimal commotion of a duck diving. The jar was heavier than water, but the sea buoyed it up enough that the wool sash was an adequate shackle. The woman’s tunic billowed up away from her body as she slipped in feet-first.
The sea was ice encasing Perennius’s battle-heated body. The salt was fire on his wound. The lips of the wound puckered. The agent gasped. It felt for a moment as if lava were being sucked into his marrow.
“Gaius, Calvus!” Perennius hissed “Get in!” He could not have shouted even if the situation permitted it, but the harsh fragment of voice which pain left him suited well the whispered imperatives needed at the moment.
Gaius stared at the float with the expression of a man startled by Medusa. Both his hands were locked on the hilt of the sword sheathed at his right side. The skin over his knuckles was as mottled as that of his face. The grating had begun to drift away from the liburnian, pushed lightly by the pressure of the three who had caught hold of it.