Tides of War (31 page)

Forward where her sail locker had been (my old snoozing spot), the foreships had been reinforced with timbers salvaged from our own ruined hulks. Triple-wide rams had been rigged to counter this innovation
of the Corinthians. These outrigs stood vacant now, but on closing with the foe, marines would mount to each, armed with grapnels. The mass of
epibatai,
my squad and Lion’s, held now aft of amidships, so their weight would keep the prow high and the oxhead clear of the water’s drag. On the forepeak squatted the first of three firepots, from which darts and brands would be lit. A second stood beside me now, amidships, and a third by the steersman’s bunker aft.

From my place inboard of the outrigger I could see into the foreships. Already
Pandora
was taking water in such quantities that the footboards of the hold oarsmen were awash. Scupper lads bailed on the beat, slinging the bilge past their comrades’ ears out the hide-sheathed ports through which the oars projected. Above the oarsmen’s heads, new decks had been framed to support the mob of infantry, archers, and javelineers who now crouched topside, numbers retching already.

We could see the enemy now. His rampart of ships rose like a wall; the harbor had become a lake. Palisades had been erected, plaited with hides to retard incendiary missiles and notched with embrasures from which the enemy would loose his own artillery. Before this the foe had spiked the surface with spars and timbers. A gap had been left of about a furlong. Beyond this in the open sea we could see his warships, above forty, pulling hard in column. They would come to line abreast, three and four deep, to bottle any Athenian breakout. Enemy small craft by the hundred filled out the field of obstacle, while upon both quarters further squadrons launched from shore. The foe held nine-tenths of the harbor perimeter. Gylippus’ army waited at the margins of the swell. God help the ship and crew falling within their killing zone.

The line had been advancing at two-and-one, resting each bank by turns. Now, a half mile out, the boatswain piped “At the triple” and
Pandora
shot forward on the swell. On the forepeak Boros bellowed through his megaphone to skippers port and starboard, as each singled out the vessel he would attack. He scampered back with a little kick-step of joy. “Dolphins, lads! Racing the cutwater!” With a laugh he bolted aft to the steersman’s post. Now came the
prostates,
the bow officer, a midshipman named Milo who had been caught in the grass with his lover and nicknamed Rhodopygos, Rosy Cheeks. He was an anxious sort, always dreading the worst, and now crabbed forward at the crouch, bearing above his crown an oak plank heavy as himself.

“Expecting rain, junior?” Lion called.

Rhodopygos frog-hopped back and forth, peeking over the prow to assess our distance from the enemy. At his signal we would press forward in a body, to launch our own missiles, while our weight would drop the ram at the deadliest instant. That was the plan anyway. In the end as ever chaos prevailed.

Three hundred yards out, clouds of enemy small craft swarmed at us out of the vapor. Darts and firebrands began clattering on the deck. Rosy Cheeks took a spike through the foot; in an instant we were all at the outrigger, unloading everything we had. Dead ahead rose the wall of ships. We would not make it. Two of the foreline converged on us, one a triple with a forepeak of a bare-breasted female, the other a converted galley beamy as a barge. The mob on her deck must have made a hundred.
Pandora
swung bows-on to meet her; the trireme lanced in on us from the flank. On our prow marines were slinging pinwheels onto the triple; arcs of smoke shot across the fast-foreshortening gap. The men launched javelins from their knees, then dropped prone behind the sidescreens as the enemy’s volleys rainbowed in return. Both sides were hurling the rope-handled jars of smoking sulphur the Syracusans call “scorpions” and Athenians “hello-theres.” Already all three craft were afire.

Now came the collision. The ships crunched together,
Pandora
and the converted freighter. But the angle was askew, and both vessels, foreships locked, began to slew sideways along each other’s hull. Our marines flung grapnels across the interval; the foe replied with a fusillade of darts and stones. The enemy had stripped rails and drawn hides across all objects of purchase. Grapnels were bouncing like beans. What heads caught, the enemy bashed free with mawls or hacked through with axes. One luckless bastard had been hooked through the calf and now hung, pinned against the mast step, while three of our marines hauled on the line with all their strength. Moments later Two Tits punched broadside into
Pandora
’s belly, and, instants beyond, our own
Dauntless
reamed her up the ass.

The enemy bore stones, great boulders of thirty and forty pounds which he had stacked as ammunition along his prow and rails. He had his most cyclopean men forward; these now elevated their projectiles and heaved them into our sidescreens, staving them to splinters.

A titan of the foe led their wave. Six and a half feet and naked from the waist up, this ox strode onto our prow unarmed save one massive boulder, a sixty-pounder, which he wielded before him, bowling our marines from their feet. A youth named Elpenor opened the man’s forearm to the bone; the brute turned with a bellow and drove his stone, crushing the marine’s skull, then wheeled and stove another’s face. With thighs like oaks he was kicking men over the side.

This was no time for heroics. I seized two others, Meton Armbreaker and Adrastus, whom they called Towhead, and hauled them to the monster’s rear. We took him three-on-one, putting one spike through his liver and a second into his haunch. Towhead hacked through the hamstring with a boarding pike. The savage dropped to one knee, roaring. He never looked back to see who had unstrung him, just raised the great stone and flung it with all his strength into the bilges. It plunged through the undecked oarsmen’s compartment, shearing off a second-banker at the knee, then crashed through the keelson timbers, shivering the hull like a shot. Up boiled the sea.
Pandora
was sinking.

It is impossible to reconstruct in afterthought the sequence of events, the sequence of sequences, transpiring so rapidly and amid such chaos, when one’s faculties are deranged by rage and terror, fear for his men and himself. At one point a marine of the foe had me by the beard and was pounding the crown of my helmet edge-on with his shield with such fury that I felt the bone of my skull begin to rupture. I seized his testicles with all my strength and wrung free, the mass of my tangled whiskers coming off in his fist. I tumbled over the rail into the gallery of the outrigger. Lion, behind the man, decapitated him with a two-hand swipe, left-handed; helmet and skull pinwheeled onto my belly, gushing fluids, and bounded through the posts into the sea.

There is this aspect to fighting on the water: a man has no place to run. Somehow the mass of our company succeeded in capturing the galley, if such a term may be applied to the occupation of a pack of blazing tinder fast on its way to the bottom, achieving this triumph primarily because the scow was sinking from the stern and we advancing from the bow had the advantage of fighting downhill. We ploughed the enemy into the sea behind a wall of shields. An ancillary battle, grisly as the main, now commenced in the gutter between the burning hulks, as oarsmen of
Pandora
and Twin Tits, forced to abandon ship, grappled
hand-to-hand, each seeking to drown the other. Ax and boarding pike had supplanted spear and javelin as weapons of favor. The shivered oar served as well. Marines hacked and stabbed and clubbed the foe in the water even as the decks on which they stood subsided beneath them. By this time the Athenian third and fourth waves had reached the enemy’s rampart and were attacking it in escalade, like land troops assaulting a fortress. We were taken off the freighter onto
Dauntless
. In moments we, too, were on the wall.

My cousin narrated for me later how this spectacle had appeared from the vantage of shore. The wounded had pleaded with their physicians to bear them down to the sea. Each man’s fate hung on battle’s outcome; they could not bear to loiter in ignorance. The soldiers, too, had pressed down to the water’s edge, even wading into the sea, as did the Syracusans along their shore, straining across the smoke-obscured main for any index of victory or defeat.

In the offing, my cousin said, the wall of ships could not be made out, only the smoke, black at the base and gray as it rose, ascending in thunderheads so dense it seemed the entire firmament was ablaze. In quarters about the harbor battles were being fought of such scale and savagery that, taken apart from this holocaust, would have been called epochal, yet which, accounted here within the context of such numbers of men and vessels in conflict, appeared as sideshows or afterwords. Of ships fighting in open water, my cousin reported, tactics and maneuver had long since been abandoned. Instead vessels grappled one to another and slugged it out, belly-to-belly. The surface of the harbor seemed sown with islands and archipelagoes of ships, four, six, and even ten fused, while the men on deck fought it out hand-to-hand, do or die.

About the ships in uncountable numbers swarmed the small craft of the Syracusans, dinghies and coracles, catboats and even rafts, manned by every urchin and pensioner who could hurl a firepot or bash a sailor’s brains with bat or brick. You could tell which ships were Athenian by the clouds of mosquito boats about them, piking at the steersmen’s blades, slinging missiles or driving into the banks, seeking to foul the oars.

As the tide of battle alternated, the consternation produced upon the men witnessing from shore became excruciating. Directly one beheld comrades embracing in elation, my cousin recounted, as the
warcraft of their nation drove the foe in flight. Now the men’s gaze bent to another quadrant where the opposite state prevailed. Despair at once repossessed their hearts; with dreadful dirges the spectators bewailed their doom, crying to heaven those lamentations as men are wont to make in such hours.

As if this audience may not suffice, a supplemental took station in the summit seats. These were the wives and daughters of the Syracusans, looking on from the city battlements which directly overstood the arena, so proximate that the dames’ cries could be heard by their champions below. Whose ship boldly struck at an Athenian was requited with acclamation resounding, while he, beleaguered, who sought to withdraw retreated into cataracts of scorn.

On the wall of ships, our side was winning.

The enemy had strung together above two hundred vessels, merchantmen and barges, scows and galleys as well as men-of-war, the line bound by rope and timber so that their front presented a solid rampart broadside to the attackers. Against this the ships of Athens hurled themselves. The fight differed from all others in my experience in this particular: nowhere upon the field could one discover vessel or man holding back. So possessed was each side by the passion to prevail, the Athenians to escape extinction, the Syracusans and their allies to wreak vengeance upon those who had made war to enslave them and, more so, to wrest the deathless renown of driving them down to ruin, that none gave thought to saving his skin but each sought to outdo the other in skill and valor. Midway through the forenoon I fell, hamstrung by that hyperextension called a “bonebreaker,” plummeting from the deck of a barge into its belly, which was awash chest-deep and into whose depths I sank like a stone. Chowder hauled me topside, where we discovered a pocket of haven, and he went to work on my leg. “Look there, Pommo”—my mate pointed down the line of strife—“have you ever seen the like of it?”

I stared. As far as sight could carry, the sea stood curtained with smoke and paved with warcraft. Immediately left, a battleship had rammed one of the vessels in the wall; all three of her banks were backing water furiously, to extract and ram again, while across the breach screamed storms of stones, darts, and brands of such density that the air appeared solid with steel and flame. As the Athenian’s ram sucked free,
rending the foe’s guts, a second battleship materialized, hurtling upon the same vessel. Her ram took the enemy’s stern, lifting her entire after-section clear. Men topside spilled like pegs. As the struck ship hung impaled, her elevated weight forcing the ramming vessel’s prow into the sea, while yet denser fusillades screamed between the antagonists, the first ship, having backed clear to a boat-length, rammed the same ship anew. To the opposite hand, three Athenian galleys had grapneled to vessels in the wall. So intervolved were the marines of both sides that there were more Syracusans on the decks of the Athenian ships and the contrary upon the Syracusan. Out beyond the attackers, three more cruisers of Athens passed with murderous slowness, archers unleashing broadsides of tow and pitch over their own and into the enemy. As one vessel in the wall caught, flame leapt to its consort, borne by the wind or men who pitched or hurled or shot it. By sun’s zenith a dozen breaches had been punched in the palisade. At one point, Lion told me later, he saw three battleships of Athens pass abreast through the wall, led by Demosthenes’
Implacable,
making signal “Follow me.”

We had won. And yet…

The enemy still held both jaws of the vise, the city promontory of Ortygia and Plemmyrium, the Rock, the southern mandible of the harbor mouth, between which the wall of ships extended. He had fifty thousand at one end, twenty at the other, and they kept pouring out onto the wall. Where the line of ships had been breached, the foe’s small craft flooded in and sealed the rupture. Flea boats ferried replacements across the breaks, while others hauled themselves over the timber and chain bindings which yet anchored the embattled wall. Morning had gone; we were slaughtering the enemy in such numbers that he could not, it was certain, hold out much longer.

There is an error in densely packed fighting committed by those lacking experience of war, even brave men, as the Syracusans and their allies were, and this is called in Sparta “downstreaming” or “rat-holing.” A man dueling in this fashion will stand against the individual facing him, receive or deliver a blow or several, and then, he and his antagonist unhurt, roll or shift laterally to the next of the enemy, to commence a second bashing match and in turn sideslip again. Fear makes him do this. He seeks a closet of refuge, a “rat hole” amid the slaughter. In Sparta boys are beaten who evince this habit. They are schooled
instead to fight “upfield,” to seize one man and battle him alone until one or the other falls. This the Lacedaemonians call
monopale,
“singling up.” The Syracusans had not learned this art, for all Gylippus’ direction. Now on the wall of ships the superior experience of the Athenians began to tell. It came to this: fighting topside, twenty against twenty, forty on forty, a
parataxis,
pitched battle, in miniature. Or brawling belowdecks man upon man, in water thigh-and hip-deep, the walls, often afire, pinning friend and foe in the cylinder of slaughter. The Athenians had the hang of it. And they possessed a further advantage. Defenders on the sea must of necessity kill men, never an easy business. But attackers need only destroy things. The marines of Athens went after the wall with fire and the ax. Ship after ship had its belly gutted, hull torched; along the rampart hulks settled, sizzling, to the waterline.