There had to be more small fish than sharks, of course. In Italy, still protected from the shambling terror of the Germans, rich men raised mullets as pets as much as for food. The owners could sit on the lips of their ponds and call, while the water boiled with scaly bodies rushing to be the first to caress their master’s fingers. That memory was now like a scene from Hell.
“Do you want a sword?” Perennius called forward to the woman. Gaius had kept his blade, lashing it to the grating between him and the agent. If it would offer Sabellia some security, that was better than having the salt etch it uselessly where it was now.
“No, it just startled me,” the woman said. “I have my knife, if I needed . . .” She reached over with one hand and stroked the clothes in a soggy packet between her and the centurion. All the castaways but Calvus, alone in the stern where his efforts equalled the combined efforts of the rest of them, had stripped off their clothing only minutes after they set out on the float. The cloth had dragged at their limbs, weighting and robbing of force all their attempts to distance themselves from the liburnian. Tied atop the grating, the garments did not interfere with movement, but they were still available against the morrow’s sun. Sunburn could disable as thoroughly as blazing oil when its victims were spread-eagled on the sea for its attentions.
A rumbling sound clutched at their bodies in the water seconds before their ears heard it through the air.
“Aulus!” the courier cried. He heaved himself up on the float as if the shock waves were in fact tentacles squeezing and releasing and ready to squeeze again.
“It’s just a whale calling,” the agent said sharply. He had been momentarily frozen himself by the immersion in distant sound.
“No,” said Calvus, his voice drifting with the breeze, “it was the ship. It just went down.”
The cries could as well as not be those of gulls, wheeling against the stars in search of the white water that indicated fish shoaling. Indeed, the cries could be those of gulls even if the flesh that sparkled their thin commotion was not that of fish at all. The sound still told of men dying.
Perennius had seen it happen off Alexandria harbor, a
grain ship foundering within minutes of the help that would have saved at least the crew. The stern rose sharply, its great rudder flapping desperately for help. Then, swifter than a ship on the ways being launched, the vessel had plunged vertically. In its rush for the bottom, the ship sucked in and swept along the screaming crewmen who had flung themselves over the side at the last instant. Compartments crashed inward under the increasing pressure, belching up cargo and timbers and men, some of them still alive. The customs boat Perennius was aboard had saved three men and the ship’s cat. It was more than anyone among the rescuers had thought probable.
The Eagle had died without even that hope. Might the merciful Sun take them to his bosom.
“Back to work,” Perennius said aloud. “We’ve got a ways yet to go.”
It was hours later that they heard the other ship.
Perhaps Calvus could have said just how many hours it had been. For the rest of them, the time since sunset had been a blur of fatigue punctuated with moments of terror or despair. They had been exhausted, physically and emotionally, when they entered the water. The sea’s chill and the difference it provided from what they had been doing before at least colored the first brief span of time on the float.
The remainder of the experience was a white blotch as fatigue poisons leached away the attempts of minds to think along with the ability of muscles to move. When the castaways rested, they lay their heads on the pine grate and were drenched, eyes and noses and the mouths through which they tried to breathe, by seas. The salt water pulsed through the interstices of the grating. When they labored, they stretched at full length in that sea with only their hands on the wood to buoy them and remind them of the purpose for which they punished themselves.