Dark Horse

'Now is when it starts to get dangerous,' he said.

And here's me thinking it was a picnic. 'You mean oars and canvas will only work providing Azan doesn't follow suit?'

'I'm not looking to outrun him,' the Scythian said quietly. 'The Soskia's fast, but Azan's ships appear to have the edge.'

'Then what's the point of the sail?'

'These are your knives,' he said. 'Don't baulk at using them.'

'Oh, I won't.'

'I mean on yourself.' He pursed his lips. 'The only reason the crew haven't realized they're being chased by their own comrades is because I've kept them too busy to check. Since I told them they're Roman ships, they accept that they're Roman ships, but any second, someone is going to take a longer, closer look.'

'And?'

'Then I'm dead, so's Geta and, if you have any sense between those beautiful dark eyes of yours, so will you be.' He pressed the stiletto into her hand. 'May your gods give you the strength not to hesitate.'

There was a clattering sound in the cabin. Claudia had a suspicion it was her teeth. 'What's with the sails, then? Another distraction?'

'Sort of,' he said. 'Canvas with oars will destabilize the ship, certainly. More than sufficiently to keep the crew's minds off their pursuers. But also,' he jerked his thumb in the direction of the cliffs, 'there are those.'

She glanced at the pitiless white rocks flitting past in a blur. 'I can see why that might sustain a person's interest.'

'Geta's a crack helmsman,' Jason said. 'He won't hit any rocks before he's supposed to.'

Her blood ran cold. 'You-' Oh, come on. Even Jason wasn't insane enough to- 'You're not seriously going to wreck this ship?'

'Geta knows where to aim for, and with Targitaos to protect us there's a slim chance that you, me and Geta can make it out of this alive. When the time comes, do exactly what I tell you — and tosc.'

'How slim a chance?'

'Look at this coast. Hospitable it is not. But you said you can swim and that's an advantage these men don't have.'

The ship bucked again, pitching her straight into his chest. It was solid, like cannoning into a wall, and his white shirt smelled faintly of cinnamon. Like Roman men, Jason shaved off the hairs on his chest, but not out of fashion or vanity. He shaved to display every nuance of the curved horns, flaring nostrils and thick muscular haunches of his clan totem, the bull. Man and bull. Man and bull. The Minotaur. Half man, half beast, all bad. As Claudia disengaged herself from the solid warm wall, the ship slewed sideways, generating a collective groan from the oar deck. There were sixty men on the benches down there. Sixty rats trapped in a cage. And the rat catcher was locking the door.

'You have beautiful hair,' he said, hooking his little finger in one of her curls before letting it spring slowly back.

'Thank you.' But it's mine and you're not having it, chum.

'Beautiful skin, too.'

All the better to cover your quivers. And you're not having that, either.

'Remember what I said about the knife,' he murmured. 'If the time comes, hold on to your resolve, because I promise you, that time is fast approaching. Zlat. I almost forgot.' He crossed the cabin and hefted a sack out of the corner. The sack rattled. 'I shall be needing this.'

'Loot?'

'Better,' he said with a wink. 'Heads.'

There is a time to faint and a time not to faint, and the time not to faint is when the ship you're on hits the rocks running. Claudia had barely managed to dig out a shirt and pantaloons and a pair of black leather boots when the first screams rang out.

'Grab the mast line,' Jason yelled. 'Don't let go until I tell you!'

Her hands had no sooner clamped round the rope than fifteen starboard oars shattered to splinters. The suddenness of the impact gave the oarsmen on the port side no time to adjust. Flying at speed and with only one wing, the Moth spun a hundred and eighty degrees on her axis, her port oars splintering like firewood before being flung against a jagged white spur. Screams turned to moans as water rushed in. The scramble for the hatches turned the oar deck into a holocaust, as the rowers trampled their injured colleagues in a desperate bid for safety.

'Jump!' Jason told her, swinging a quiver of arrows over his shoulder. 'Make for that star-shaped rock.' He repeated the instructions in Scythian for Geta.

Pointless to protest that the star-shaped rock was due south. The same direction from which Azan's ships were fast approaching. The water was warm as Claudia dived. No longer calm, but swirling with anger, it was no less turquoise, no less clear, and shields which had been ripped off the ship by the impact gleamed like underwater torches on the seabed. The surface had become a dangerous labyrinth. Clothes, timbers, ratlines and casks threatened to entangle, suck under or render her unconscious, but Claudia could not resist looking back.

She wished she hadn't.

Men with no arms, men spurting blood, men holding their guts in with both hands were surging over the rails, their screams hideous in the glorious calm of midsummer as turquoise slowly turned to crimson. Several deck hands had climbed the mainmast in a bid to escape by leaping on to the headland, but the black sails were full. With a sickening rip, the mast cracked. Faltered. Then slowly, elegantly, toppled into the water causing a surge which sent the flotsam spiralling in dangerous, unpredictable swirls.

Five minutes. Five minutes was all it had taken to kill a fully manned warship.

The cries from the drowning crew grew fainter and more pitiful, but there was no time to dwell on their fate. As Geta's great paw hauled her out of the water, shouts from Azan's lead ship could be heard bearing down on them. It was only to be expected, she supposed. A head taller than his men, Jason was easy to spot. Easier still against a white backdrop and flanked by an ox of a helmsman and a girl with dripping wet curls!

'We don't have much time,' Jason said. 'He'll open fire any second. Head for cover.'

'That's not cover,' she puffed, scrambling behind him, 'that's scrub.'

The Amazon's son grinned over the sack strapped to his shoulder. 'When it's raining arrowheads, you won't be so cynical. Now stop wasting breath and vlodor well climb.'

It wasn't so bad. A toehold here, a clump of coarse grass there to hang on to, one yard gained for every two taken, but at least the shore was receding.

'These clothes,' she panted. Obviously not Jason's. The shirt was, if anything, tight over the chest. 'I presume they're a dead man's I'm wearing.'

They'd reached a crack in the rock four feet wide which to the men, was no obstacle. 'Oh, please,' Jason protested' swinging her effortlessly over the chasm. 'They most certainly are not dead men's clothes.'

'Sorry.'

'So you should be.' He winked as he released her. 'They're women's.'

Better and better. Having a good laugh up there on Olympus, are we?

Below, the Soskia's timbers lay strewn across the sea bed. The corpse of the bow officer lay pinioned beneath the upended cooking brazier, and the square mainsail, bogged down by water, had enveloped the wreckage like a black shroud. But it was the pennants — the red pennants, those ultimate symbols of aggression, which now bobbed so passively — that seemed to sum up the pathos.

Claudia heard a soft, hissing noise coming up from her right.

'DIVE!' Jason yelled.

The clatter was like pebbles being hurled round inside a copper cauldron. 'What the hell was that?' she asked, picking a juniper thorn out of her arm.