A seaman was scrambling down the ladder from the poop. Instead of waiting for him, Perennius gripped the poop coaming with both hands and swung himself up - waist high, then legs slicing sideways in an arc. His sword and dagger still lay on the main deck where he had been working, but the pouch he had snatched from the cabin slammed him leadenly in the ribs.
The captain was a Tarantine named Leonidas whose experience had been entirely on the smaller Customs vessels. Now he was screaming toward the mainmast. The Marine detachment was becoming entangled with the bosun and a party of seamen who were attempting some activity with the sail. Sestius was already sorting out the confusion. The centurion was leading half the small unit sternward, while the remainder stumbled toward the bow with Longidienus, their original commander.
Ignoring the tangle as a problem solved, Perennius rose to his feet in front of the captain. "Why are we sailing toward the pirates instead of away?" the agent demanded. The short question ended loudly enough to be heard all over the ship, because Leonidas had started to turn away while the agent addressed him.
The Greek seaman spun back around with a look of fury. "Do you want to take over?" he screamed in the agent's face. "Aren't you quite sure your orders have gotten us killed already? Hermes and Fortune, I'm sure!"
Sick despair threatened to double Perennius up. There was no unified command on the Eagle. That was his fault. It was perhaps inevitable as well, because Perennius had neither the talent nor the training for organizing other people. He could carry out a task himself or lead others if they cared to follow him; but he had never cared enough about command to try to learn why men who were not self-starters as he was seemed willing to take suicidal risks for some officers.
So the agent had command of the Eagle only by virtue of orders on a scrap of papyrus. That had increasingly little effect as death reached for the liburnian against the wind. Perennius had shown no interest in Leonidas and his deck crew, so long as they provided the transportation he required; and if the efforts of the oarsmen below were meshed effectively with those of the seamen proper, then that was nothing for which Perennius could take credit either. Now the ship was in danger, and there was no plan for how it could fight or run as a unit.
Swallowing an anger that was now directed at himself and not the captain, Perennius said, "Leonidas, I'll do what I can to save us now, but you'll have to tell me what to expect."
. Behind Leonidas there were four sailors instead of the usual one, leaning their weight on the tiller which controlled the paired steering oars. The liburnian was heeling enough to the right that Perennius suspected the blade on the port side must barely be clipping the waves. The starboard oar would be providing full turning force. Leonidas gestured toward his straining men and said, "If the gods grant the wind freshens, we'll pass to port of both of those bastards and be able to make land safely if the oarsmen hold out - as they will not." He spat over the railing with an angry intensity which he seemed to be trying to direct away from the agent. He looked back again sharply. "No way we can keep them from stripping and burning the ship, but we can maybe get our own bums clear."
The agent's mouth was dry. He wished he had his sword hilt for his hand to squeeze. "All right," he said, looking past the windward edge of the sail toward the pirate who was already more nearly ahead of them than on their port quarter. Even if a fresher breeze did add a knot or two to the Eagle's speed, it was too late to hope that would get them clear. "Can we ram?" Perennius went on with as little emotion as possible. As if he did not know the bronze beak had not been replaced, as if he had not heard Niger's sneering certainty that any of the laid-up vessels would crumble to dust if they struck another ship.
"Buggering Zeus!" screamed the Tarantine captain as panic and frustration overcame his momentary control, "don't you see the fucking mast's still stepped? We're not in fighting trim, we're cruising. If we hit anything now, the whole thing, spar, cordage, and sail, comes down across our deck and the oars! Wouldn't you rather we just lay to and surrendered without all that fuss?"
The bosun shrieked a question to Leonidas from amidships. It was unintelligible to Perennius not for language - the vessel worked on Common Greek - but for vocabulary. The captain pushed past Perennius to answer, and this time the agent let him go. Leonidas would do his best in conditions which were likely impossible. For his own part, the agent now had an idea that might at least offer more than prayer seemed likely to do.
Perennius leaped to the main deck again with a crash of boots which the confusion swallowed. He landed near the aft hatchway, which he ignored. If he went below that way, he would have to struggle the length of the rowing chamber while it was filled with fear and flailing oar-handles. Despite the chaos on deck, the agent could get to the small galley forward better by dodging the sailors and humming ropes above.
One of the pirates was close enough to be seen clearly, now. As the agent had feared, the vessel was not of Mediterranean design at all. The sail was the pale yellow of raw wool, criss-crossed diagonally by leather strips sewn across the stretchy fabric. The wool bellied noticeably in the squares within those reinforcements, but even a lands-man like Perennius could see that the pirates' sail met the wind at a flatter angle than did that of the Eagle.
Half a do/en years before, the Goths and Borani had begun raiding the Black Sea coasts in ships crewed by Greeks from the old settlements at the mouth of the Danube. In the past year, however, another tribe, the Herulians, had made the long trek to the Black Sea. The Herulians had begun building craft of the same type as their ancestors had used to sail the Baltic. If the Eagle's opponents had depended on Greeks, either hirelings or slaves, there would have been a slender hope of confusion or mutiny within the pirate ranks. There was no hope of that now.
The liburnian was so much bigger than her opponents - heavier, in all likelihood, than both together - that she looked to overmatch them entirely. Perennius kept thinking of a cow pursued by wolves. From the expressions on the faces of the seamen he passed, most of them took an even less optimistic view of the Eagle's chances than he did himself. The nearer of the pirates was in plain view. The ship was as broad as the liburnian, but it had only a single open deck over the ribs which joined together the hull planks. It was shorter than the liburnian, seventy-five or eighty feet long in comparison to the Eagle's hundred and ten feet at the water line. As such, the Germans should have sailed poorly against the wind. That they did not was a result of three developments, visible as the ships bore down on their prey.
First, there were flat cutwaters fore and aft. These increased the effective length of the hulls and greatly aided the vessels' resistance to slipping sideways under the pressure of breezes from ahead or alongside. Second, when the prow of the nearer pirate lifted from a wave with a geyser of foam and a cheer from her complement, Perennius could see that the cutwaters were extended below the shallow hull by a true keel. Though the pirate vessels still drew far less water than the Eagle, the sheer-sided keel was clearly an advantage against stresses in which the liburnian's rounded bottom allowed her to wallow. The final development was the one which gave the Germans' bulging sails the effectiveness of the tighter, civilized Ro-
man weave. A long pole was socketed in the lee gunwale of each ship. The pole reached across at a diagonal to the forward edge of the sail, half-way up, where it was clamped. The pole kept the edge of the sail from fluttering and halving its effect as it met the wind at a flat angle.