The Aphrodite seemed to gather herself, then to spring across the water toward the two pirates. The akatos’ rowers couldn’t see the foe, of course; they looked back at Menedemos and Diokles. Diokles had been wise to remind them to obey orders. They relied on the oarmaster and the skipper to be their eyes and brains. They staked their freedom, maybe their lives, on that reliance. By the anxious expressions some of them wore, they were well aware of it, too.
Then Menedemos had no more time to spare for his own rowers. He steered the merchant galley at the two triakonters as they made for the Aphrodite. The eyes at the bows of the pirate ships stared balefully across the water at the merchant galley. Their rams, and the Aphrodite’s, too, gnawed through the sea, churning it to white foam. Their oars rose and fell, rose and fell, not quite so smoothly as the. Aphrodite ’s but at a remarkably quick stroke. Both ships were faster than the akatos. But not by so much as you think, Menedemos told himself. I hope.
“I’ll give you something nice, Father Poseidon,” he murmured, “if you let me come home to do it. I promise I will.” He bargained with men almost every day. Why not with the gods as well?
Things on the sea didn’t always happen swiftly. Even though the Aphrodite and the pirates were closing faster than a horse could trot, they had twenty or twenty-five stadia to cover before they met: close to half an hour. Menedemos had plenty of time to think. So did the pirate captains, no doubt. He suspected he knew what they would do: keep their distance from each other, ply the Aphrodite with arrows for a while, and then close and board from port and starboard at the same time. With numbers thus on their side, they could hardly fail.
As for what he could do to counter that… There, his thoughts remained murkier than he would have liked.
Those pirate ships swelled. Suddenly, Menedemos could hear shouts from the men aboard them, see sunlight spark from swords and spearheads. He didn’t think the shouts were Greek, not that it mattered. There had been plenty of Hellenes aboard the pirate ship that attacked the merchant galley the year before in the Aegean. They counted as pirates first.
He steered the Aphrodite straight for the nearer triakonter here: the left-hand one of the pair. No matter how she altered course-and her fellow with her, in some nice seamanship-he swung the steering-oar tillers so his bow and hers pointed at each other.
“You going to try ramming her, skipper?” Diokles asked. “You want the extra from the rowers now? I think they can still give it to you, though they’ve been working pretty hard.”
“I’ll watch what the pirates do, and that’ll tell me what I can do,” Menedemos answered. “Don’t up the stroke till I yell, no matter what.”
“All right.” The oarmaster didn’t sound doubtful, no matter what he was thinking. That left Menedemos grateful. If Diokles let worry show, it would surely infect the rowers, and that would make a bad situation even worse.
Archers aboard the closer pirate ship started shooting. Their arrows splashed into the Inner Sea well short of the Aphrodite. Menedemos dipped his head in wry amusement. Bowmen were always overeager. Before long, though, the shafts would start to bite. More arrows arched through the air. These fell short, too, but not by nearly so far.
Where time hadn’t mattered much before, suddenly now heartbeats were of the essence. Menedemos swung the Aphrodite hard to port, aiming her ram straight for the side of the second triakonter, the one he’d ignored up till now. “Everything they’ve got, Diokles!” he called.
“Right,” the oarmaster said without hesitation. He upped the stroke: “Come on, boys! You can do it! Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” Not even Talos the bronze man could have held that sprint for long. Gasping, thrusting, faces gleaming with sweat and oil, the rowers gave him everything they had in them. The akatos suddenly seemed to bound forward over the sea.
Menedemos’ only advantage was that he knew what he was doing and neither of the pirate captains did. Had the skipper of the closer ship been more alert, more ready for something unexpected from the Aphrodite, he might have rammed her as she turned toward his comrade. He tried, in fact, but he waited a couple of heartbeats too long before starting his own turn-and the merchant galley’s sudden burst of speed also caught him by surprise. His triakonter passed a few cubits astern of the Aphrodite.
Two arrows hissed past Menedemos from behind. He couldn’t even look back. If he got hit, he hoped Diokles would shove him out of the way and drive home the attack on the other pirate ship. He aimed the merchant galley at a point halfway between the triakonter’s ram and where her mast would go when it was up.
The man at the steering oars on the pirate ship should have started to turn toward the Aphrodite or away from her, to make sure the akatos’ ram didn’t hit squarely. The black-bearded ruffian should have. Maybe he even would have; though taken by surprise, he probably had time to do it. But Sostratos shot three arrows at him in quick succession. Two of them missed. The other one hit him in the neck. He shrieked and clawed at himself and forgot all about steering the triakonter.
“Euge!” Menedemos roared exultantly.
Another pirate pushed the wounded helmsman aside and seized the steering oars. Too late. Much too late. Heartbeats counted now, and the men in the second ship had none to spare. Menedemos heard their screams, saw their mouths-and their eyes-open wide, wide, wide as the ram slammed home. One of them tried to use an oar to fend off the merchant galley, which did him no more good than a straw would have in fending off an angry dog.
Crunch! The impact staggered Menedemos. The ram’s three horizontal flukes stove in the triakonter’s timbers, breaking tenons, tearing mortises open, and letting the sea flood in between planks formerly watertight.
“Back oars!” Diokles shouted. The rowers, who’d known the command was coming, obeyed at once. Menedemos’ heart thudded. If the ram stuck, the pirates could swarm aboard the Aphrodite from their mortally wounded vessel and perhaps yet carry the day. But then he breathed again, for it came away cleanly. He turned the akatos toward the other pirate ship.
A rower howled as an arrow from the stricken triakonter bit. Another sailor took his place. Menedemos thanked the gods that hadn’t happened during the ramming run, or it might have thrown off his timing and made him deliver a less effective blow. He noticed yet another sailor, not a man who’d been pulling an oar, down and clutching at a shaft through his calf. That fellow must have been wounded in the attack, but Menedemos, his attention aimed wholly at his target, hadn’t noticed till now.
Archers aboard the surviving triakonter kept shooting at the Aphrodite, too. Sostratos answered as best he could. One of his shafts hissed just in front of the face of the pirate ship’s helmsman. He jerked back with a startled cry Menedemos could hear across the couple of plethra of water between the two galleys.
He also heard cries for help coming from the ship he’d rammed as she settled ever lower in the water. She wouldn’t sink to the bottom of the sea-she was, after all, made of wood. But already the oars were of little use; when her hull filled completely, they would be altogether worthless. And she was a good many stadia out to sea. Menedemos, a strong swimmer, wouldn’t have cared to try to get to shore from here by himself. And not so many men could swim at all.
The other pirate ship might take her crew off her, but that triakonter was already crowded. Besides, if she came up alongside her stricken sister, she would lie dead in the water, waiting for another ramming run from the Aphrodite.