by Chuck Dixon
From the prow, Xin called out the distance to the approaching Carthaginian vessel. The fighting crew waited silent but for panting like dogs in their own personal battles to swallow their fear and remain at their posts.
Dwayne made it to the freeboard by the prow. He could see the spread sail of the warship racing on a collision course with the Lion. Two purple dolphins leaping beneath a symbol of a spreading palm tree grew larger and larger until they blocked all else from view.
Rows of shields formed a wall along the hull either side of the fierce wolf lunging from the prow. A hedge of spears thrust forward. A man in a conical helmet and chest covered in plate armor waved a long, bladed sword and was laughing like a madman. A bow wave swelled high before the prow and the ram, stylized but unmistakably meant to represent an erect penis, rose gleaming through the swell.
Xin called back, his face red and neck muscles standing in cords. It must have been a good insult because many of the men laughed. Or it was just a release of pre-battle jitters.
Ahinadab tossed the staff to the rowing boss and roared fresh orders with hands fisted before him. As if by the motion of a single hand, the oars were run inboard on either side. The Lion streamed over the water now propelled by inertia and the outgoing current. The captain stamped his nail-studded sandals on the deck boards and unsheathed his own sword while holding out a fist for a boy to slip the leather straps of a shield on his arm. It was a round shield with a snarling lion painted bright on its face and centered with a spiked boss of bronze.
Dwayne felt the men around him lock their knees and spread their feet to brace for impact. He gripped the freeboard hard and watched the fangs of the wolf and the massive prick looming toward them. Xin called out from above him. Dwayne heard a second call, Yada, from far astern. Xin clambered down and shoved at the first rank of shields, bawling orders and forcing the phalanx away from the head of the ship.
Under his bare feet, Dwayne felt the deck shift to starboard. The prow of the Lion was angling to the starboard to come along the oncoming warship’s towering port side.
But the Carthaginians still had their oars out and were pounding water for maximum ramming speed against the outgoing tide. The laughter of the armored bastard hugging the wolf’s head died as he saw, too late, the shift in the Lion’s course. He pounded the snout at the prow with the flat of his sword and cried out in deep dismay.
The Lion’s ram struck the extended oars down the port face of the wolf ship. The upper tier of oars were struck by the bronze lion breastwork as though caught in the jaws of the roaring cat. The combined momentum of the two ships provided force enough to shatter the ends of oars and drive others inboard to snap their shafts off at the oarlocks. Dwayne could hear piercing shrieks from within the hull of the Carthaginian vessel. He could imagine the horrific scene within as men were crushed by the sudden weight of oar handles slammed into ribs and spines and limbs. The hulls of the ships ground together momentarily, and the deck shuddered violently. But the Lion remained in motion, dragging a tangle of broken oar stems in its wake as it passed by the challenging vessel’s stern for open water.
A shower of splinters fell over the hunched backs of the Lion’s fighting crew. Ahinadab stood swiping with his shield to fend off flying timber shards and called the oarsmen back to their posts. Xin waved his ax aloft and led the men back to the prow where they locked shields and thrust spears forward. Dwayne rejoined them and could see over the heads of the men in the front rank.
The second Carthaginian warship had just entered the bowl of the volcano cove from the channel and was trying to execute a turn to avoid the fate that befell its sister ship. The port was backing oars while the starboard paddled furiously to bring the big ship about. All they managed to accomplish was position themselves athwart the gap: a big ugly sitting duck for the Lion’s claw rapidly closing amidships.
The new impact was jarring. Dwayne was crushed forward then thrown back. Hands fell to the deck. Others tumbled into one another. One poor bastard struck his face on the helmet of the man in front of him and dropped cold-cocked to the deck with his nose smeared across his face and white bone showing through a split cheek. Dwayne saw the long, broken shafts of oars flying end over end into the air.
The mast was rocking back and forth where Ahinadab hunched with his arms about it, howling orders to the oarsmen. The rowers responded and began backing the Lion from the hull of the wounded vessel with a deafening squeal of protesting iron and wood.
A gleaming spear point flashed down past Dwayne. A second pinned a naked ship’s boy to the deck. The kid, who couldn’t be older than eight, struggled like a fish impaled on a gaffe and wailed piteously. Dwayne raised his shield as more missiles flew from above. The crew of the enemy ship was recovered from their surprise. Men lined the gunwales above and threw spears down from the higher deck of the trireme. Boys leaned out to empty the pouches of slings toward the Lion’s crew exposed on the deck. The company of the Lion came together under Xin’s orders to lock shields as a bulwark their brothers could shelter behind. Spear points and lead pellets rained down, thudding on the thick wooden shields. Dwayne could feel the blunt force of each strike bruising his arms and shoulder even through the cedar surface. He ducked his head and dropped to one knee to make a smaller target. The noise was incredible. The shouting of both crews. The drumming of missiles on deck boards and shield faces. The animal cries of the wounded.
The Lion withdrew, backing off, beyond the reach of the spearmen and the effective lethal range of the slingers. Still, men were down where they were slashed or punctured by spear blades. Boys moved among the wounded, touching cauterizing iron brands to wounds to halt the bleeding. Dwayne saw a man lying sightless against a gunwale, an entry wound between his eyes that a bullet might have made. Beneath their feet, round lead pellets rolled across the deck like marbles. The slinger boys rushed to gather them for their own use.
Dwayne stood and looked forward. The Carthaginian ship was struggling to turn about, against a current striking it abeam. The middle section facing the torrent was missing the lower banks of oars midships where the prow of the Lion shattered them or drove them violently inboard. The reduced oars were backing to aid the rowers on the opposite hull who were working to bring the prow back into the current. It was a feeble effort but the bow, faced with the head of a screaming hawk, was turning to the attack. The hole rammed in the hull was invisible below the waterline. The damage was not enough to sink the trireme out-right.
Ahinadab walked the centerboards, speaking to the hands. Though he couldn’t understand the words, Dwayne understood the message. It was a locker-room speech at half-time. The captain touched men on their shoulders and tousled the hair of the boys he passed. They were ahead on points, but the game wasn’t over. Time to man up and protect their lead.
Looking back astern, Dwayne saw the wolf’s head vessel floundering helplessly toward the rocks at the base of the crater walls. The few remaining oars of the top tier along the damaged port side flailed at the water. The starboard oars were only serving to send the ship into a rotating spiral.
The Lion’s oars banked to slow their rearward progress and then shifted to power them forward again toward the holed ship now blocking the only escape route.
Xin stood in the shelter of the prow and urged the fighting men forward. On his orders they formed a barricade of shields before and above them, creating a roof and walls to resist the coming onslaught. Dwayne gripped his sword in one hand and held the shield up to overlap those of the men on either side of him. Pellets were beginning to strike the shield surfaces and ring off the iron bosses.
Through a narrow gap between the massed shields, he could see the deck of the trireme rising before them. A group of men were winding the handles of a ballista thrust against the freeboards. This was ancient artillery. They were seconds from getting hammered by a projectile that would crash through their shield wall like paper and the flesh behind it like grass.
The hull of
the trireme grew to fill his limited field of vision and Dwayne set one foot behind him to brace for the strike.
The Lion’s ram struck the enemy ship just where the hawk-beak prow curved back to join the main body of the hull. The combined force of the turning ship and the speeding ram created a collision that shook both vessels end to end. The bronze talon of the Lion ripped through the copper hull plates and punched a hole in the boards at the waterline.
The ballista aboard the Carthaginian, loosed its missile to fly harmlessly over the deck of the smaller vessel and raise a gout of green foam in the water beyond. Armored men crowded to the fore to throw spears down onto the mass of men huddled below them. Slingers, loosed pellets, to drive fist-sized dents in the shield faces. The Lion’s ram was stuck fast in the ragged fissure it had torn in the hull planks of the larger ship.
Ahinadab stood unheeding of the deadly lead balls tearing past him. He cursed the rowing boss and the oarsmen to pull harder to free them. A pellet took a slinger boy near him in the eye. The adolescent spun against him, spraying blood on the captain’s armor before dropping kicking to the boards. This only served to increase Ahinadab’s rage. He clambered below decks and set about the heaving rowers with the flat of his sword, hollering and red-faced. They dragged and raised, dragged and raised, but the Lion only shifted to stern a few degrees.
The hammer of spear points and pellets died away, Dwayne looked up over the top of his shield as a woeful cry rose from the men around him. Above them, scowling men were climbing down the hull of the trireme and sliding along the shafts of oars to reach the deck of the ship that had gored them. More were dropping down lines slung from cleats along the gunwales. These men wore no armor. They moved nimbly with the surety of seasoned sailors from the world’s most fearsome naval power. They held swords in their fists with wickedly curved blades that grew broader at the tip. A chopping blade. A killing blade.
They leapt fearlessly onto the fence of spears held out to them. Some were run through, and others dropped on the roof of shields to grab spear hafts and pull their bearers low. The effect was a collapse at the center of the phalanx. More sailors descended from the trireme’s hull, and Xin stood swinging his ax and calling on the men to reform the barrier. The wicked little bastard was covered in blood not his own and straddled a headless corpse while shrieking his defiance. That display backed off the press of boarders for one hot second.
“Hooah!”
Dwayne charged from the confused gaggle of fighting men to rush to Xin’s side and take advantage of that moment’s hesitation among the enemy. He waded into the Carthaginians. He drove the edge of his shield into a mouth, shattering the teeth and crushing the jaw in a bloody shower. His sword separated another man’s arm from the torso at the shoulder. A swipe of his shield bowled two men clean off the deck to cannon back into the sailors behind them. These were little guys, and the Ranger was probably the biggest man they’d ever seen. For Dwayne, it was like fighting children. To them, it was like battling a monster. His size and the violence of his attack backed them off even as more men dropped to the bow deck behind them. But these were mean little children made of piss and gristle, and they recovered quickly to close with him again.
Xin was sucking air and glaring pure hate by Dwayne’s side. He turned his head to roar back at the shifting rank of shields between him and the mast.
“We’re not here to lose!” Dwayne added his own to the battle cry. “Bring it, assholes!”
With a shout, the wall of shields rushed forward, and Dwayne could see the horsehair bristle atop Ahinadab’s helmet behind them. The captain was swinging a spear shaft to urge them forward. It reminded Dwayne of a jump instructor he had at Fort Bragg.
“Don’t be afraid of gravity, ladies. Be afraid of ME!”
Dwayne and Xin formed the point of the spear, and the shields of the Lion’s company joined either side of them in a wedge that drove into the clutch of un-armored swordsmen. Dwayne raised his blade and brought it down again and again as he plowed forward using his shield as a battering ram. The deck beneath his bare feet was slick with greasy blood. He nearly stumbled over the corpses that littered the boards but was pressed on by the shields at his back.
He risked a glance upward to see more men climbing down from the trireme. These men were in plate armor, gripping swords with long straight blades and shields slung on their backs. The A-team was coming. The fight was about to get hotter.
The slingers on the Carthaginian ship were mostly out of the fight. Both sides were locked in tight combat, and a pellet was just as likely to hit friend as foe. The boys on the Lion’s deck weren’t so limited in their options. The armored warriors making their way down the trireme hull made for a target rich environment.
The slings thrummed, and the boys whooped as round stones and recycled pellets struck home. A Carthaginian in a crested helmet plumed with peacock feathers took a shot to the head that dimpled his helmet with a bang and caused him to lose his grip on the line and glance off the head of the lion at the prow to drop into the churning water between the two entangled vessels.
More soldiers were pelted. A few simply roared in anger. Two more fell atop their own comrades, collapsing the men under their bulk on the Lion’s foredeck. The risk of being drowned by the weight of their own armor damped their ardor for battle. The rain of missiles succeeded in slowing the reinforcements.
Aboard the trireme, the Carthaginian slingers turned their attention to the boys on the Lion’s deck, and a duel erupted with stones and pellets arcing over the heads of the fighting men entangled at the stern. The fusillade lifted, and the armored men resumed lowering themselves down from the Carthaginian vessel to join their brother boarders in the fight.
Dwayne could feel the timbers beneath his feet shifting. Ahinadab set the oarsmen to the task of freeing the ram from the hull of the trireme. He leapt from port to starboard calling orders. The oars would dig in on one side and then the other, moving the ship to port then starboard and back again in an effort to release the ram.
The wedge of defenders flattened as the number of attackers grew. The Carthaginians pressed the Lion’s company amidships. Dwayne and Xin stood with their backs to their own shield wall in the middle of a wicket of clashing spears. The Ranger dodged a spear blade and grabbed at the haft to pull the soldier toward him. He plucked the spearman from the opposing fence of shields like the pit from a cherry. Xin brought his ax down to chop the man’s thigh to the bone. Blood geysered from the screaming man’s femoral, and he flopped to the deck. Xin blew the man’s blood from his lips as he brayed defiance.
Working together, Xin and Dwayne repeated this maneuver to bring down four more Carthaginians until they succumbed to the mounting pressure from the boarders and retreated behind the shields of the defenders. The conflict was moving, step by step, abaft toward the Lion’s mast. More and more boarders were dropping to the deck before them to apply pressure to the front rank.
“We’re losing this bitch!” Dwayne roared. He’d been in enough fights to sense when the balance was shifting. Never, was that more clear to him, than right now, eyeball to eyeball with both sides only the length of a spear shaft apart. The men on his side were tiring. They were brawlers at best; fierce in a short melee, but not up to the level of the professional soldiers crowding the foredeck. There was no room for tactics. The field of battle was only as wide as the beam of their ship. It was going to come down to who was meaner. Dwayne could feel the spirit fleeing from his new allies, and it was pissing him off.
If they were backed to the mast, it was over. Even if and when they pulled free, the force of the armed boarders would be too much for the Lion’s crew to overcome. They needed a game changer and they needed it now, or all aboard would die.
47
Below the Salt
CAROLINE STOOD, AGAINST the bulkhead of the tiller deck, her eyes locked on the horrors at the bow. She gripped the haft of the spear until her hands ached. Praxus was by her side, mewling
to himself in fear, his tiny dagger clutched to his chest.
At the back of the massed company of Lion hands, Ahinadab stormed from beam to beam calling orders to the rowers. His voice was growing hoarse even as his frustration and rage burned hotter.
The boys with slings stumbled back away from the deadly storm of pellets streaking down at them. They left a number of their own, lying still on the decking.
From her vantage point, Caroline could see the deck of the Carthaginian ship was canting toward them. The sail threw an inky shadow over the moonlit deck of the Lion as the tall mast leaned over their deck. The trireme was taking on water from the wounds to its hull. The combined weight of the incoming seawater and the heavy ram stuck fast beneath the water line would capsize the bigger ship and draw the prow of the Lion down with it. Both ships would broach and then flood if they were not freed of their deadly embrace, and soon.
Yada grumbled orders above her. The Nubian helms boy dropped down by her in a crouch. He gripped her by the arm and squawked at her. She could only shake her head, uncomprehending.
“Atem wants us to go with him,” Praxus said.
The Nubian ordered the frightened slinger boys to come with him as well. When they hesitated, he swatted at them. They followed along with Caroline and Praxus as Atem made his way below decks past the laboring banks of rowers and down into the hold.
Caroline felt her way through the dark with fingers brushing the ribs of the hull. The remaining sand that covered the keel was damp under her feet. Rats were racing sternwards away from the bow section. She followed Atem’s voice forward. The sand grew wetter until she was bent near double with sloshing water to her calves. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, taking in the moonlight shining through the gaps in the deck above. The other boys were crushed in with her where the hull curved to a point. Above them they could hear the thud of feet and the ringing clatter of arms over the voices of struggling men and the screams of the wounded.
