Читать книгу Purple Pirate - Talbot Mundy - Страница 9

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During these years, it would be safe to say a thousand men—aye, more—have died obedient to me, devoting valor to a cause they did not understand. But do I understand? I doubt it, because understanding grows in endless progress, day after day revealing yesterday's mistakes.

Those men were slaves and prisoners of war whom I had freed. I gave them discipline, justice, livelihood and leadership. I gave masterless rogues a master. I compelled them to be proud of me and to oblige me to be proud of them.

Though they died, and I live; and though I live because they died obedient to me, my thought is, that they died well. They were men incapable of self-respect until I led them, out from grossness that they too well understood, into the service of an ideal.

I led them. The responsibility is mine. But, be the Lords of Life my witnesses, I led. We were comrades-in-arms. I did not send them leaderless to meet death that I dared not face.

—From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

In a tumult of waves and colliding hulls, amid a shriek of missiles, imprecations, shouted orders, trumpet blasts and the thunder of pirates' sails let go to wallow on the roaring wind, Tros guided his ship to the left of the pirate fleet until he had them all between him and the Romans. Then he swerved, took the wind on his counter and went headlong at them, with every stitch of canvas straining and every arrow-engine, every archer filling the air with a screaming hail of arrows. Passing between two vessels, smashing their oars to splinters, he struck a third one beam on as she tried to come about to face him.

Cries of crushed and lacerated pirate oarsmen pierced the uproar. The collision threw half of Tros's crew off their feet. Full sail, groaning spars and thrumming sheets, crowded the bucking trireme onward, over the smaller vessel, rolling her under the waves—careened, smashed, crimson wreckage. Leaden fire-balls, one from either bow, leaped from the four-manned slings and thumped into the reeling ships alongside. Their frantic, flogged rowers, at the unsmashed oars on the outer sides, labored to force their vessels inward against the trireme, in order to grapple and board. The fire-balls burst; the pirates' holds became infernos of stenching smoke and fire. They fell away, down-wind, crashing into other vessels.

Tros put the helm hard over. Ahiram's men let go all sheets and braces. Blocks thundered on the deck. There was a havoc of flogging sails aloft and cordage that whipped through the ranks. It slew men, hurled them overside. It wrenched one arrow-engine from its base. But the masts and spars held. There was even a chance that Ahiram's crew could save the sails; they volleyed like Great Jove's thunder as the pitching trireme came around and rolled beam to the wind, crashing into pirates to leeward. Bow-strings twanged. The air shrieked with arrows, thrummed with javelins. Conops, watching for Tros's signal, let go the anchor. The new flax hawser tightened like a bow-string. It held. The trireme came head to the wind within catapult range of the surf on the lee shore. Conops brought ten archers forward to protect the hawser and then made the huge spare anchor ready.

After that the quarter-deck was Ahiram's. It was Tros's job to fight his trireme. He fought her from the roof of the midship deckhouse, where his voice reached fore and aft and he could see all hands, all arrow-engines and all the moves of the enemy. The pirates' hail of arrows curved and quarreled in the gale; hurrying ship's boys wrenched them from the deck, and from the sides of superstructures, to replenish the arrow-baskets. Tros, in mail and gleaming helmet, was a fair mark for the pirates' bowmen. The Jews' shields caught showers of arrows, flicking them aside as their bronze tips struck the curving metal surface. Deflected arrows were a greater danger to the men near-by than straight shots.

There was no chance for the pirates to run, in the teeth of that Levanter. At least a third of them had grappled the three liburnians and were drifting, at death-grips, shoreward amid waves that ground and battered them together as the sea shoaled and waves grew steeper. Such survivors as there might be were awaited on the beach by Roman survivors from the grounded quinquireme that was already breaking up in the surf, and by villagers armed with clubs, and by ferocious dogs. Half Cyprus appeared to be lining the beach, to plunder drowned men's bodies and snatch salvage from the surf.

Ten pirate vessels came about magnificently, under oars—a miracle of seamanship. Three had chopped their masts adrift, but the remainder had managed to lower their curving yards and stow sails. Two of them, one from either side, made a drive at Tros's hawser; they were met by Conops's marksmen with a withering independent fire, aimed at the rowers, and by screaming volleys from two arrow-engines that swept their helmsmen overside.

The other wing of the pirate fleet, under their leader Anchises, had worked in under the slaughtering fire of the quinquireme's ballistae. They had grappled a quinquireme. The Romans were throwing fire into them. Three of the pirate ships burst into flame; their crews swarmed up the Roman's side to protect the grapnel chains and make good the bite of the spikes in the Roman's decks—a Roman's battle. The quinquireme caught fire from the burning pirate vessels.

Then Anchises, in his long red ship, rowed windward under locked shields, in a hail of javelins and arrows. He cut the quinquireme's cable. She rolled shoreward, beam-on, bearing down on the burning pirate vessels, her side in flames, her deck a shambles, doomed. Anchises signalled to his squadron to follow him to the assault on the other quinquireme, Ahenobarbus's flagship, that appeared to be having the best of a hot fight. The pirates scatted to avoid the ill-aimed rocks and clay pots full of iron darts from the quinquireme's ballistae, and then double-manned the oars to get inside the range and under the trajectory of arrow-engines. Tros spared them a dozen volleys, but he was too hotly engaged to observe what happened to Ahenobarbus.

To have slipped cable would have meant freedom to manoeuvre under oars, but the pirates gave him no time to man the upper oar-bank, even if he had dared to risk Greek fire being thrown through the opened hatch. The pirates crashed alongside to port and starboard like killer-sharks after a whale. They caught the leaden fire-balls in sail-cloth, cloaks, nets, anything whatever that served to dump them overside. They drove javelins and daggers into the ship's side to serve as scaling ladders, made a tortoise with shields, threw grapnels aboard, swarmed up by the grapnel-chains, knives in their teeth, protected by master-bowmen on the decks beneath them, gaining the deck in dozens.

Time and again Tros leaped to the port or starboard deck to hurl himself into a melee. He and his ten Jews, in a flying wedge, struck like a steel-shod avalanche wherever the pirates gained a foothold, until the swaying deck was a shambles, slippery with blood, littered with bodies of dead and dying that rolled and slid to and fro. The pirates, in broken groups, were hewn down or driven overside. A last charge, the full length of the deck from stern to bow, with thirty of Tros's armed oarsmen hard at the heels of the flying wedge, brought two or three score crowded Greeks and Syrians to bay with their backs to Conops and his archers. Merciless, grim, breath to breath dagger and sword work—and a yell from Ahiram's men "Ship a-fire"—a frantic clangor of cymbals and roar of the skidding sandcars—"Fire out!"—then the arrow-engines, raking the decks of the pirate vessels as they slipped grapnels and drifted downwind.

Forward by the capstan, sweating, with a dent in his helmet and blood on his armor, swaying to the plunge of the trireme, Tros grinned at Conops, who was wiping his knife on a rag he had torn from a dead man's clothing.

"Master, what we needed then was Northmen!"

Suddenly he gawked—stared.

Tros faced about. Arsinoe, fire-eyed, panting, with her sword gone and blood on her dagger, laughed at him from the midst of the wedge. She was blood-splashed, her helmet awry. She had thrown away her sandals. Beautiful feet she had—legs like Diana's.

Tros liked her better. He knew no reason why a girl, who claimed to rule a third of Alexander's realm, should avoid the ordeal of battle. But he made no comment. There were matters of more importance; he considered those. Ahiram's crew had wrought their miracle of brawn and discipline and seamanship. They had lowered the spars. They had stowed the sails, in the midst of all that tumult. They were stripping the dead and wounded pirates and pitching them overside.

Tros's steward brought wine in a silver jug and reported all well with the cabin archers. Tros drank from the jug, not listening intently to the steward's boast of having shot nine pirates through the starboard port. He gave the jug next to Conops. Then to the Jews. Last to Arsinoe. She could have the last swallow or leave it. She drank, and then tossed the jug overside:

"Lest a coward should ever use it!" she remarked. Young stuff. Tros like it. However, Cleopatra very likely would have done the same thing.

Ahiram shouted from the quarter-deck. He sent a messenger full-pelt for orders; he was gesturing with both arms, like a man rowing; he wanted the upper oar-bank double-manned, to come up on the anchor and gain sea-room to windward. But there was no time.

"Battle stations! All hands!"

Conops's golden trumpet blared its signal. Even the men who were dragging the wounded to the surgeon's tar-pot hurried back to their posts. The ship's boys scurried away with the goatskin wine-bags. There were eighty men short at the bulwarks. Tros left eight Jews under Conops's orders. With the other two he returned to the roof of the midship deckhouse, and Arsinoe followed with one shield-bearer; the other was dead.

There was a pause—a kind of supernatural hush. The howl of the storm and the thump of waves against the trireme's bow became unnatural silence, as if gods attended. Anchises, beaten away from the quinquireme, two of his ships burned and two sunk by the Roman's dolphins, with his choice between a lee shore and a last, desperate feat of arms, re-formed what was left of his squadron and signalled the vessels that Tros had beaten off. Some of them were trying to thrash to sea; others had anchored to ride the gale and rest exhausted rowers. They rallied to Anchises's summons, gathered astern of the trireme and approached, plunging in two lines ahead, rowing like titans, the leading ships protected by a barbette of locked shields.

Tros sent thirty more archers to the quarter-deck to be under Ahiram's orders. Only two of his arrow-engines could be brought to bear astern, and of those one had been wrecked by the flying rigging. Ahenobarbus's balistae could have raked the pirates' broadside. They were just within the Roman's range; a proportion of shots could hardly have failed to hit that sprawling target. But the Roman did nothing. If he awaited Tros's signal for help, he wasted guess-work.

Arsinoe laughed in Tros's ear: "After you have slain my friends the pirates, will you do me the favor to teach your Roman friend a lesson?"

He spared her a grin. He had seen smoke—no need to wish the Romans any worse luck! He watched his own midship arrow-engines taking instant advantage of any swerve in the pirates' line, strode to the men at the after-catapults and warned them to be frugal with the few remaining fire-balls, climbed to the quarter-deck and clapped Ahiram between the shoulder-blades.

"Good comrade!"

"We should have used the oars," said Ahiram.

Tros stared astern at the oncoming pirates. True, he might have made open sea and comparative safety under oars in the teeth of the gale. Might have. It was too late now. The pirates' archers on the leading ships already were getting the range; their arrows fell spent on the deck, but in another minute they would come in screaming dozens that would test helmets and armor. It was clear the pirates meant to grapple the trireme's stern. They would be slaughtered like rats, but some of them would man-handle the flukes of their anchors through the cabin ports. Then the plunging vessels could lie lashed together, to be abandoned, to smash one another and sink. Anchises meant to win the trireme or perish. Tros ordered the catapult crews to bring their slings and fire-balls to the quarter-deck; he put them, too, under Ahiram's orders.

Then, with the exception of the crews who manned the arrow-engines, and their guards, he divided his remaining men and sent a full third of them to the bow under Conops's command.

The remainder he formed up in a solid mass, all forward of the mainmast, leaving the space between them and the quarter-deck to tempt Anchises. Lacking his beloved Northmen, he had no hope of keeping the pirates off the trireme. Even now, after all their losses, they outnumbered him two, perhaps three to one.

They were desperate, well led, well armed, with certain death behind them, and with exhausted oarsmen they could not possibly escape into the storm. They had to win or perish. If they should anchor out of range, they would be catapulted out of existence as soon as the storm died. They were probably short of water, and of food too. If they should make for the shore they would be wrecked in the raging surf, and butchered on the beach if they could swim.

They probably had Greek fire; it was one of the pirates' secrets. If so, they would use it unless they should see a chance to seize the trireme. They appeared to have used it on Ahenobarbus's quinquireme; her lower deck was ablaze, but the Romans, with nothing else to occupy them, had got the fire in control and were smothering it with wet sand. To fight Greek fire and pirates simultaneously would be an almost hopeless feat of arms; but they would hardly be likely to try to burn what they believed they might capture and put to their own use.

So Tros had made the stern impregnable and left the ship's waist apparently unprotected. Most of the men crouched below the bulwarks. He and a group of archers were in full view on the midship deckhouse, and the bow was crowded, but the waist of the ship was the jaws of a trap. There was another anchor ready to let go, in case Anchises should struggle to windward and cut the hawser; but the pirates' rowers were spent; they were rowing to whip, slaves, some of them chained to the benches; they were bucketing, missing badly, laboring with the last of their strength against wind and sea. Anchises, leading on his long red slaver, saw the unprotected bulwarks, signalled his fleet and came on, flogging his floundered rowers until their oars smashed against the trireme and the heavy grapnel, swung by its chain from the slaver's spar, crashed override and bit the trireme's deck. It bit deep. It weighed a quarter of a ton; its chain was as thick as a man's wrist.

Fire-balls lobbed into the ships astern. A hail of arrows swept the pirates' decks; they hardly answered it, hauling along the counter under locked shields, two of them afire, their crews leaping from ship to ship; the burned ships, cut adrift to save the others, wallowed down-wind, their fettered, frantic rowers writhing in the smoke as they struggled to break free. Two vessels, caught by a mountainous wave as they changed helm, crashed and broke like egg-shells. Four fire-balls missed and fell harmless between colliding hulls, but a fifth found its mark down the hatch of the middle one of three vessels that were grappled together, made fast by one warp to the chain of Anchises's grapnel. All three crews abandoned ship, many of them drowning, some crushed between the crashing hulls, others shot down by the trireme's archers. About half of them reached Anchises's crowded deck. He blew a trumpet-blast. It was answered from the far side, and then came the assault, from both sides of the trireme simultaneously. On the starboard side Anchises led—a six-foot Hercules, in Roman armor, with a Parthian scimitar, protected by two Scythians with studded shields. The pirate leader on the port side was a Greek, who fell dead on the deck, shot as he turned to encourage his men.

Rain, and a tempest squall of wind—a heaving deck—thunder—lightning—hordes of well-armed pirates swarming overside—and then Tros's bull-lunged order:

"Charge! Clear the main deck!"

He beckoned Conops. The pirate vessels were fast alongside and astern; there was no need now to guard the ship's bow with more than an anchor-watch of a dozen men. Over the top of the superstructures, with the Jews behind him, and a third of the trireme's crew behind them, Conops came like the heart of the storm. Tros leaped into the melee, the Jews hard after him. He slipped, staggered, fell on the heaving wet deck, but the flying wedge split the pirate ranks and in a second he was roofed by ten shields, hedged by ten swords, hauled out backward and helped to his feet by Conops.

"All right, master?"

"Aye. Clear away their grapnel. Cut their ships adrift."

"Aye, aye, master!"

Tros sought Anchises. There was hardly room in the crowded waist to lunge and parry. He had seen Anchises try to storm the quarter-deck and fall back on the heads of his men. Then he vanished, but there was small doubt what he was trying to do. The sheer weight of his men behind him would be likely to burst the cabin door and overwhelm the steward and his fellow-archers. He would do all the possible damage he could before the now inevitable end. If he could fire the cabin he would do that.

There was an archer, up beside Arsinoe on the top of the midship deckhouse, sending arrow after arrow down the passage in front of the door. Tros sent a Jew to command him to cease fire. Then he charged at the head of the flying wedge, through a shambles, dead and dying cluttering the deck, the pirates slashing at their opponents' faces and Tros's men putting to use the less spectacular, more deadly swordsmanship that he had drilled into them as part of the ship's discipline, the day's work, the efficiency that gave them freedom of the sea.

Half of the pirates, under locked shields, climbing on each other, stormed the quarter-deck, but they were hurled back by Ahiram's men. On the port side, under a leader with gold the archers on the deckhouse. They clambered along outside the earrings and raven hair, some fifty of them tried to fight their way forward. They leaped to the shrouds and were shot down by bulwarks and were chopped by javelins. They charged along the blood-set deck and fell before Tros's veterans. Each decurion and ten was a unit, taught to fight as a unit, but the pirates relied on sheer ferocity and paid for it—four, five, six for the drilled men's one.

On the starboard deck seamen and rowers, bully-damned by Conops and protected by whoever could get near enough, were rigging a purchase on the pirates' grapnel. Presently, above the clash of arms, the thunder, the roar of the storm and the cries of wounded, came Conops's triumphant brass-lunged bellow:

"All clear! They're adrift!"

The weight of Anchises's long ship, loosed and careened to a beam sea, hurled by a mountainous wave against the ships astern, broke chains and tore their grapnels from the oaken woodwork. Ship crashed ship. Ahiram's men broke loose the port side grapnels. Swamping, colliding, foundering. Anchises's whole fleet rolled shoreward.

Then the pirates cried quarter, and Tros let them have it, being minded that some of them might make good replacements on the lower oar-bench; and he had seen another problem—a big one that brooked little delay. A few pirates, expecting to be crucified, jumped overboard in their armor, preferring to drown, but the others threw down their arms Tros glanced at the Roman quinquireme. He had to be quick.

However, first Anchises. Unwounded, unwearied, his scimitar unnicked, unbloodied, his gait a kind of bear-like crouch, he came forth from the shelter of the stewards' lean-to, glaring, his chin on the edge of his shield, his eyes like black opals. Every archer on the trireme drew bow at him, but Tros roared "Hold!" and the bow-strings eased. Anchises was a king by his own reckoning, a bold adventurer by any standard. He had his rights, or at least his privilege.

"Do you yield?" Tros asked.

Anchises spat. He surveyed the carnage. He eyed Tros. In an unexpectedly cultured voice he answered:

"Do I meet Lord Tros of Samothrace?"

"If you make haste yes, Anchises."

Arsinoe leaped to the deck and stood near Tros, unnoticed; she was pushed aside by seamen who were stripping pirates' bodies and heaving them overboard, dead or wounded. Conops, with his long knife flickering, came and shoved the Jews back in a line, to give Tros sword-room. He ordered corpses moved, yelled for a sand-box, spilled it and scattered the sand on the slippery deck. Ahiram shouted from the quarter-deck:

"The Roman's anchor drags, Lord Captain!"

Tros already knew that. Anchises had the privilege to die by duel before Ahenobarbus might claim any favors. The crew roared as Tros strode to the midst of the deck and rutched his sandals on the spread sand. Conops, bent-kneed, crouching behind him in front of the fascinated Jews, stuttered advice:

"He's all edge, master! Watch for his back-hand upper-cut! Give him the point, and keep your shield low! He'll slash at your face! When he does that, step in with a belly-ripper!"

"Keep away, little man! No interference!"

Suddenly Anchises moved. He approached like a bear, swaying, stalking toward the starboard hand to get the rain out of his eyes. There came a terrific roll of thunder—forked lightning—Anchises leaped at Tros as if he were the lightning's rider—down the rolling deck, up-slashing with the scimitar. It glanced off Tros's shield and he reeled backward with Tros's point at his mid-riff, splitting the chain mail.

"Blood! First blood!" yelled Conops.

Tros had to wait for the roll of the ship; it gave Anchises time to recover and resume his crouch. Conops yelled a warning as the deck hove down to starboard and Tros lunged with the whole of his strength and weight. The pirate side-stepped, toward Tros's right, turned the point on his shield and loosed a whistling slice back-handed, upward—by the half of a lightning-flash too late. It slid off Tros's armored shoulder—nicked his helmet. Tros faced the rain and went in after him, forcing him back on his heels toward the Jews, who had to be beaten back by Conops. They were yelling, frantic, gesturing the gladiator strokes that Tros should make. Sword and scimitar flashed, clashed, clangored like sledge on anvil. Tros's shield beat Anchises's face and sent him reeling down-deck, Tros after him—over him, timing his lunge to the trireme's roll. The pirate fell, slid, rolled into the scupper and, catching the roll again, scrambled free—on his feet in a second, but off-balance. Tros's point struck him between the throat and chin. He fell dead. The crew roared. The Jews danced and sang a song about a man named Jeshua who made the sun stand still and slew a hundred thousand. Conops pounced to strip Anchises's armor, as Tros's booty, before some thieving seaman would steal the gold from the buckles and clasps.

Ahiram shouted from the quarter-deck again:

"Good sword, Lord Captain! But the Roman drags! Two anchors down! He drags fast!"

Then Arsinoe: "Lord Captain Tros—"

"You may have your dead pirate," he answered. "Give him a grave in Salamis and carve there: 'he obeyed a royal summons!'"

She had to clutch Tros's arm to keep her balance on the swaying deck. Rain streamed from their helmets. Her drenched, flimsy himation clung to her naked legs, and her disheveled, wet hair blew against Tros's armor as he faced the rain and shouted. She could not have heard, had he spoken with less vehemence:

"Now, next, we deal with Ahenobarbus!"

"Let him wreck!" she answered.

He roared to Conops: "Bid the steward clear his crew out of the cabin!" Then, to Arsinoe: "I am a huckster, not a monarch!"

"You will sell me to Ahenobarbus?"

He laughed. He pointed to the cabin. She refused to enter it. Shivering from cold, bedraggled, but brave she let go his arm, dismissed him with a gesture and then followed him to the quarter-deck, where a seaman found her cloak and wrapped it around her.