Birds of Prey (14 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

The sails were to windward of them. That was bad enough. What was worse was the fact that their attitude shifted even as Perennius watched them. If he was correct, the vessels were turning toward the
Eagle,
not away. In this age, in these waters west of Cyprus, no honest seaman wanted to meet another ship.

“Those two ships are turning toward us,” said Calvus, as if to put paid to the hopeful doubt in the agent's mind. Perennius glanced sidelong at the tall man, wondering just how sharp his eyesight really was. “Why are they doing that?”

“Herakles, Captain!” cried the lookout who had given the initial alarm a minute before. “They're making for us! Pirates!”

“That seems to me to cover it, too,” said Perennius. He struggled to keep from vomiting. Disaster, disaster … not unexpected in the abstract, but its precise nature had been unhinted only minutes before. The voyage had been going well. The oarsmen and the Marines were both shaking down in adequate fashion—

Across the surface of the agent's mind flashed a picture of his chief, Marcus Optatius Navigatus, burying himself in trivia as the Empire went smash. It was easier to think about the way a rank of Marines dressed than it was to consider chitinous things that spat lightning—or the near certainty that he would have to battle pirates with a quarter of the troops he had thought marginally necessary to the task.

Screw'em all. Aulus Perennius had been given a job, and he was going to do it. Not “or die trying”; that was for losers.

There were men shouting on deck and below it. The captain was giving orders to the coxswain through a wooden speaking tube. The agent turned his eyes toward the putative pirates again. They were still distant. Though interception might be inevitable, it would not be soon. With genuine calm rather than the feigned one of a moment before, Perennius said, “It could be that these aren't simply pirates, Calvus. Like the bravos we met in Rome weren't just robbers. Can you protect us against thunderbolts here like you did then?”

“No,” Calvus said as he too continued to watch the other sails. The upper hull of the nearer of the vessels was barely visible. It was a sailing ship, and that was at least some hope. “Their weapons—and I can only assume that what you face here is identical to what we knew—their weapons will strike at a distance of—” a pause for conversion. The agent would have given a great deal to know the original measurement—“two hundred double paces, a thousand feet. My capacity to affect anything physical, or even—” a near smile—“mental, falls off exponentially with distance. At ten feet, perhaps, I could affect their weapons. No further.”

“All right, we'll keep you out of the way,” Perennius said. His mind was ticking like the fingers of an accountant. “Put you on an oar, you're strong, or maybe the cabin's the best idea, just in case we do get close enough you can—”

“Aulus Perennius,” the traveller said, interrupting for the first time, “I said that if there are Guardians on those ships, they can tear this craft apart from a thousand feet.”

“And if it's just pirates, they can't!” the agent snapped back. “Think I didn't goddam listen to you?” He pointed toward the cabin into which Gaius and Sestius had disappeared at a run. Their armor was there. “I'll have hell's own time finishing this job if you've caught a stray arrow on the way. And if it's your lobster buddies after all, well … I just might be able to arrange a surprise for them even at two hundred paces. For now, get to blazes out of my way so that I can get on with what I need to do!”

Which was to kill people, the agent thought as he strode to the forward fighting tower. “You two!” he shouted to a pair of nervous-looking seamen. “Give me a hand with these cables!”

It was nice to have a skill that was in demand.

*   *   *

Perennius and his scratch team had three sides of the tower cleated together and were raising the fourth when Sestius and a pair of the Marines staggered forward. The soldiers were in armor and were carrying the ballista. With its base and a bundle of iron darts, it was a load for all of them.

“Drive home that peg!” the agent ordered. He thudded one warped timber against another with the point of his shoulder. Sestius dropped his burden obediently and rapped at the peg with his helmet, the closest equivalent to a hammer. Perennius grunted and lunged at the wall again. Sestius struck in unison, and the pieces of the tower locked in place. The sailors were already completing the task by dogging the bottom edges of the tower into the bronze hasps sunk permanently in the deck for the purpose.

“You pair, lift the roof in place,” Perennius wheezed to the Marines. “There's a horizontal stud on the inside of the walls to peg it to.”

The men looked at one another blankly for an instant. Then the centurion repeated the order in Greek. With a willingness that at least mitigated their ignorance of
every
goddam thing, the men dropped the ballista and began lifting the remaining square of planking.

“Do you want me to raise the aft tower while you arm yourself?” Sestius asked. Perennius had stripped off his cloak and equipment belt for the exertion of erecting the tower. Sweat glittered on his eyebrows and blackened the breast of his tunic in splotches. The Centurion looked fully the military professional by contrast. His oval plywood shield was strapped to his back in carrying position. His chest glittered with armor of bronze scales sewn directly to a leather backing. The mail shirt was newly-issued, replacing the one whose iron rings were welded to uselessness during the ambush in Rome.

“No goddam point,” the agent said. “We don't have enough men to need this one,” he added, levering himself away from the tower which supported him after he no longer needed to support it. It wasn't that he was getting old, not him. Even as a youth Perennius had paced himself for the task, not the ultimate goal. Here his strength and determination had gotten the heavy fighting tower up in a rush that a dozen men could have equalled only with difficulty. It didn't leave him much at the moment, but the pirates weren't aboard yet either. He could run on his nerves when they were. “Get the ballista set up and pick a crew for it—”

“Me?” Sestius blurted. “
I
don't know how to work one of these things.” He stared at the dismantled weapon as if Perennius had just ordered it to bite him. “Sir, I thought you … I mean, these Marines, what would they…?”

“Good work, Centurion,” Gaius called brightly as he strode to the fighting tower. He wore his cavalry uniform complete to the medallions of rank. They bounced and jingled against the bronze hoops of his back-and-breast armor. The armor was hinged on his left side and latched on the right. The individual hoops were pinned to one another in slots so that the wearer could bend forward and sideways to an extent. That was fine for a horseman who needed the protection of the thick metal because he could not carry a shield and guide his mount with his left hand. It should serve Gaius well here, also, in a melee without proper ranks and the support of a shield wall.

Perennius had a set of armor just like it back in the cabin, and he would not be able to wear it—blast the Fates for their mockery!

“I'll take over with this now,” the younger Illyrian was saying cheerfully. He lifted the heavy ballista base. “You, sailor—scramble up there and take this! And I'll need both of you to crew the beast.”

The seamen Perennius had commandeered looked doubtful, but it was toward the agent and not toward their own officers that they glanced for confirmation. Perennius nodded briefly to them. “Right,” he said. “I'll be back myself in a moment.”

“Marines to me!” Sestius was calling in Latin, then Greek, as he trotted amidships. He obviously feared that if he stayed nearby, Perennius would assign him to the ballista after all. The centurion was more immediately fearful of the hash he would make trying to use a weapon of which he was wholly ignorant than he was of the fight at odds which loomed.

*   *   *

Perennius slapped Gaius on the shoulder and ran back toward his cabin. Men and gear made an obstacle course of the eighty-foot journey. The deck was strewn with the personal gear of the Marines. They were rummaging for the shields and ill-fitting cuirasses which might keep them alive over the next few hours. There was neither room nor permission for them to store their belongings below as did the deck crew and oarsmen. The seamen resented the relative leisure of men so recently slaves. Now, the rush to packs lashed to the deck cleats had created more incidental disruption than one would have guessed a mere score of men could achieve.

It occurred to the agent that this might well be Gaius' first real action. That at least explained the youth's enthusiasm. The boy had been given all the considerable benefits of training and preferment which Perennius could arrange for him. Gaius had thrown himself into each position with ability, though without the driving ambition that might have gained him a provincial governorship before he reached retirement age.

Or a stage above that, whispered a part of the agent's mind. Perennius hurtled a Marine an instant before the fellow straightened up the spear he had drawn through the lashings of his pack. How many provincial governors had become emperors during Perennius' own lifetime?

But Gaius, for all his skills and willingness, had never been closer to the front lines of a battle than the day he stood with the troop of personal bodyguards around the Emperor at Arlate. Accidents could occur—as they had to Gallienus' own father and co-emperor, captured two years before by the Persians. But as a general rule, the safest place to be during a battle is with a commander. It had proven so that day, despite the vicious struggle of the Alemanni. The boy's first front-line experience was going to be in this shipboard chaos without real lines.

As accommodations on the small warship went, the poop cabins were the height of luxury. Each had a glazed window in the rear bulkhead. The stocky agent still had to pause to let his eyes expand for the dimmer interior. Time was at a premium, and he knew consciously that no one inside was waiting to brain him; but it was a survival reflex of more value than the seconds he might have saved by over-riding it.

Sabellia edged aside to let Perennius by. The centurion had presumably ordered her under cover, but she had taken station in the hatchway. Perennius did not need the glint of steel to know what the Gallic woman held in her hand. Calvus stood silently at the inner bulkhead which separated the passengers' cabin from that retained by the ship's officers. Calvus was clear, by chance or intention, of the agent's gear stored against the curving outer hull of the ship.

The tall man
could
not be as calm as he looked, Perennius thought as he thrust aside his own heavy body armor to get at the pack beneath it. He had seen Calvus' face work when the tall man discussed the Guardians and the threat he was sure they posed to the Empire. And while Calvus had a level of unworldliness as surprising as his linguistic knowledge, he was not a fool. It required no particular experience to understand how dangerous a threat to their mission was posed by the two raw-looking pirate vessels bearing down on the
Eagle.

Perennius found the weapon and ammunition in their leather pouch. “If you want to curse me for the chance I took going by sea, you can,” he said angrily to Calvus. He slung the strap of the pouch over his shoulder and reached for his helmet. “But it was still the better chance, Hell take it!”

“Aulus Perennius,” the traveller replied, “you will do what can be done by man.” Calvus' smile looked thin, but again—as a rarity—it looked real. “I was not raised to be concerned about tasks that are the domain of others.”

The agent swore and slid past Sabellia to the deck again. He felt a sick fury at what he saw. The pirate ships had been at the limit of sight on the horizon. They had now halved the distance separating themselves from the liburnian, even though they were beating to windward. A major reason that the pirates were closing so fast was that the liburnian had sheered slightly to starboard but had not turned directly away from the hostile ships.

Before the sighting, the
Eagle
had been proceeding toward her next landfall on the fair wind and a reduced stroke by all her rowers. The oars had added perhaps two knots to the three that sail alone would have offered her. Now the sea was frothing to either side under the full power of the oars, increasing the ship's speed by at least a half despite the state of the hull and the rowers' inexperience. In consequence, the
Eagle
was nearing the pirates—or the one of the pair which lay half a mile to the other's port—that much the faster.

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.