The crash threw down everyone in both ships.
One of Sestius's Marines rolled over the edge, but his screams were lost in other sounds. For long seconds, mechanical noise was the only thing which the world permitted to exist. Though the pirate ship was smaller and lighter, it was built Northern fashion of rough-sawn oak. Its hull could not withstand the mass of the liburnian, but it resisted to the point of mutual destruction as the aged pine planking ground through it.
The Eagle's mast snapped at the deck. The mast could be stepped or unstepped depending on whether the ship was being readied for cruising or war. The certainty that the larger vessel would be crippled if it rammed with its sail set had probably convinced the Herulian captain that nothing of the sort could be intended. Like Leonidas, he was too much a seaman to imagine another captain so wantonly destroying his own vessel. Perennius, living through the result the Tarantine had forseen, wondered whether the traveller's persuasion had been only verbal.
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.
One of the Marines trembled, then jumped straight over the side. He must have sunk like a stone in his armor. Perennius had other things now to worry about.
The rush on deck this time led by the cook. His assistant and the slaves must have been set to oars for the final pull, because none of them were intermixed with the next score of seamen climbing through the hatchway. The grate had been displaced from the forward ventilator when the first pirate ship struck. Now the vent provided a long, wide passage for rowers who jumped up on their benches and clambered through. Astern, the after hatch was spewing up the rest of the oarsmen despite anything the officers could do. The coxswain's drum could be heard banging furiously over the shouts.
Gaius clutched the agent's wrist in a grip that made the older man wince. "Aulus!" the young courier cried, "what are they doing? We're all right! We're not sinking!"
Got a hundred seamen who'd argue with you, Perennius thought. He was not quite bitter enough at his friend's incipient hysteria to say that out loud, however. Everyone had his own terror. Gaius had hidden his own so well in the past that when it broke out, it was the most irritating, a trusted prybar that suddenly snapped.
Perennius' eyes wandered toward the heap of canvas. It covered the ballista and perhaps the shards and coals of the amphora which had held the fire. Unbanked, scattered, the coals must have gone out by now. Must have. "Whatever it is," the agent said in a voice that reserved judgment, "we'll deal with it." He used his free hand to release the other from his protege's grip. There was nothing clearly useful to be doing. Even the sailors, once they had swarmed from the rowing chamber, only milled around on deck babbling prayers. "Blazes," Perennius muttered, and he climbed down the ladder that had just passed the rowers upward.
When the agent had jumped down to get the fire and oil, the belly of the ship had been full of men and sound.
Now the only men were two officers, the coxswain and Leonidas himself. They were stumbling forward, over the litter of broken benches and the oar handles which swung slowly as the waves levered at their blades. That flaccid creaking was not the only sound below, however. There was also the gurgling rush of water.
The Eagle was decked at about her normal full-load waterline, a little more than two feet above the keel and bottom-planking. There was no proper hold. The liburnian's only cargo was her rowing complement on its two-tiered benches. The bilges had filled within hours of the ship's return to the water, because her seams had opened during the years she was laid up. After the hull planking had swelled, that dangerous flow had subsided to a seepage that kept waste in the bilges wet enough to slosh and stink but which no longer threatened the life of the ship.
The oar deck stood in water forward. The flow was not only in sheets through started seams, but also in an angry geyser around the cook's stores. Part of the bow must have been staved in. The Germans whose flesh had greased the outer hull would shortly have their revenge.