Skipping like melonseeds, the pirate vessels closed on the fat liburnian. They sailed at an angle the Eagle could not have matched except when she was driven solely by her oars. It was obvious now to the agent why Leonidas had been unwilling to try to flee into the wind.
Perennius would have cheerfully granted sailing excellence to the Northerners if the Eagle had aboard the eighty trained soldiers whom he had requested. Physical danger frightened the Illyrian less than other aspects of life did; but even so, the threat they faced - he and Calvus and the mission - with twenty ex-slaves chilled him. The pirate ships were not being rowed, though they surely had some provision for sweeps. One of the reasons the oars were not in use was the fact that both ships were packed to the gunwales with men.
There must have been over a hundred Germans on the nearer vessel, though the way they crowded into the bow permitted only a rough estimate. Nearer to their enemies, nearer to slaughter and gory .. . Many of the warriors wore scraps of armor, a breastplate or helmet or even, in one case, a pair of bronze greaves which must once have guarded the shins of some gladiator. The glittering metal gave more the impression of gaudy decoration than it did a fear of wounds, however. The Germans' clothing was a similar melange. It ranged from skins worn flesh-side out, through the booty of civilization - tunics of linen and wool, and a flowing silk chlamys which must have draped a very wealthy lady indeed at formal gatherings - to more or less total nudity.
In a few cases, the nudity might have had a religious significance, but Perennius suspected that in general it was merely a response to the sun reflecting from the southern sea. Besides body armor, most of the Germans carried shields. These were either simple disks of wood or wicker, or heavier items captured from the imperial forces.
Axes, swords and daggers were common, but every man seemed to carry a spear in his right hand. As they neared their victim, the pirates began clashing the flats of their spear-blades against their shields while they howled. There was no attempt to shout in unison. The deliberate cacophony rasped over the waves. It had the nerve-wracking timbre of millstones grinding with no grain between to cushion their sound.
Gaius called from the fighting tower. Longidienus was trying to grab the agent's arm. "No time!" Perennius shouted as he swept past. The forward hatch was closed. Perennius wrenched it up with a bang. The galley was the area forward of the rowing chamber where the bows narrowed. As the hatch lifted, the boom of the coxswain's drum and the grunt of the oarsmen in unison hammered the agent's ears. Six faces stared up in terror - the cook and his assistant, and four slaves, probably brought aboard. as officer's servants despite Perennius' orders to the contrary. Even in the present crisis, veins stood out in the agent's neck at proof that his will had been flouted.
Ignoring the companion ladder as usual, the stocky Illyrian jumped below. A slave squealed and rolled out of the path of the hobnails. The lower deck was a stinking Hell, its air saturated with the sweat of men rowing for their lives. The drum boomed its demands from the coxswain's seat in the stern. The coxswain's assistant paced nervously along the catwalk between the rowing benches, shrieking encouragement and flicking laggards with a ' long switch. The law did not permit the whipping of I freemen, citizens of Rome, without trial; but the nearest * magistrate was a dozen miles away, and there were two shiploads of Germans in between.
The galley was not intended for cooking while the Eagle was under way. The liburnian had no sleeping accommodations for the oarsmen, one for every foot of her hull length. Thus she virtually had to be docked or beached every night. The galley did provide a location for the cook to chop vegetables and grind meal for the next day's bread, however, and to cook under cover when conditions on shore were particularly bad. Men bore cold rain under a leather tarpaulin far better with a hot meal in their
bellies than they did without. The ship's ready stores were kept in amphoras, pottery jars whose narrow bases were sunk in a sand table to keep them upright while the ship rolled.
And with the foodstuffs was another jar which held the coals from which the oven and campfires would be kindled when the ship made land. That had been a source of unspoken fear to Perennius in the past days. He had seen a warship burn in the harbor at Marseilles, the pitch and sun-dried wood roaring into a blossom of flame with awesome suddenness. Startled sailors had leaped into the sea or to the stone docks with no chance to pick a landing spot, some drowning, some smashing limbs. But at this juncture, the danger of self-destruction was outweighed by the certainty of what the pirates would do if the agent did not accept the risk.
"Oil!" Perennius snapped to the cook who jumped back as if the finger pointed at his face were a weapon.
"Which is the bloody oil jar?" the agent shouted. He began opening the stores containers and flinging their clay stoppers behind him in fury. Grain, grain . . . fish sauce, half-full and pungent enough to make itself known against the reek of the rowing chamber -
The cook's assistant, an Egyptian boy, had not cringed away from Perennius' anger. He reached past the agent and tapped an amphora with the nails of one smooth-fingered hand.
Perennius grunted thanks and gripped the jar by its ears. The amphora was of heavy earthenware with a clear glaze to seal it to hold fluids. It was held so firmly by the sand and the adjacent vessels that the agent's first tug did not move it. With the set face of one who deals with a problem one step at a time, Perrennius lifted again with a twist. The oil jar came free with a scrunch of pottery, allowing the jars beside it to shift inward. The cook stared in amazement. He would not have tried to remove a jar without knocking loose the wedge that squeezed all six into a single unit.
"Longidienus!" the agent shouted to the open hatchway as he swung with his burden. The watch-stander and a majority of his Marine section were already staring into the galley in preference to watching the oncoming pirates. "Take this and hand it up to Gaius in the tower!"
The Marine reached down and grunted. He had been unprepared for the amphora's weight by the ease with which it had been swung to him. Perennius ignored the oil jar as soon as it left his hand. What he needed now was the container with the fire. Its slotted clay stopper identified it with no doubt or frustration, with only a thrill of fear.
"Help the Legate with his jar!" Longidienus ordered the Marines as he shuffled toward the tower with his own load. His men looked in concern at one another. The Latin command was not one they had practiced during the voyage. In any case, Perennius had no intention of trusting the fire pot to any hands but his own at the moment. The earthenware was startlingly warm to the touch; not so hot that it could not be handled, but hot enough that the flesh cringed at first contact as it would from a spider leaping onto it unseen. Perennius locked the jar between his left forearm and his tunic as he climbed the ladder. It felt first like a warm puppy, then like the quiet beginnings of torture. On the main deck again, the agent paused and gripped his amphora by the ears, just as the ballista fired with a crack like a horse's thigh breaking.
Perennius and everyone else on the Eagle's deck turned to mark the flight of the bolt. Its steel head and two bronze fins all glittered in the sun. Though the missile did not rotate, it quivered in the air on its long axis with a busy attraction that belied its purpose. The bolt's flat arc seemed to peak some two hundred and fifty paces away. It dropped into the sea at a much steeper angle than it had risen, still well short of the pirate vessel. The shot had been perfectly aligned, however, and there was a pause in the bellowed threats from the Germans.