That which each could do, he would or die.
The ships advanced in column to their assembly marks, then formed in line abreast, twenty-five across and four deep, with a squadron of ten in reserve. Pandora's place was in the first rank, sixth from the left, the division under Demosthenes. The enemy's wall of ships lay east, a mile and a half. We could not see them, even their lamps, with the dark and the mist.
The waiting began. That interminable interval as the line dressed and all vessels were brought on station. Corvettes shuttled, completing count and relaying instructions. It is always cold on the water; men's teeth chattered in the dark. At their benches the sailors choked down a meal of bread, oil, and barley. Topside marines huddled in their cloaks, packed against the sidescreens saying nothing. For the twentieth time their orders were repeated.
No grub for us; it had been forgotten.
At last, at the cloaked lantern, the line moved off. There was no sound, no orders, nothing at all save the squeal of oar looms against their pins and leathers, the choonk of their blades as they bit, and the gliss of the surface spooling past along the hull. You could hear the tap of the cadence stones, light and clear, and the unisoned expulsion of breath as the oarsmen set their blades and pulled.
Pandora drove forward by surges.
The sky began to lighten. Our ships could be made out now. The spectacle they presented could not have appeared in more inglorious contrast to that golden aspect with which they had set off from home, so few seasons past and with such expectations.
Paintless and unadorned, displaying ensigns only to differentiate themselves from the foe, the warships ploughed low in the water as scows, burdened above decks with such a load of men-at-arms that they looked less like warcraft than ferries. Hides and skins bedecked their carapaces, topside to deflect incendiary bolts and along the waterline to shield the hold oarsmen at their banks.
Cloaked in this motley, the vessels appeared as some species of derelict, limping ragged upon the foe.
Like the others, Pandora's masts had been unstepped and left ashore. Prow- and sternpeaks had been cut down, replaced by platforms defended by sidescreens, with drop-planks at intervals as boarding ramps. The helmsman worked behind a bunker of timber and hides. “Make her ugly!” Pandora's captain Boros, her sixth since Athens, had urged his crew, laboring alongside them through the night. “Pandora must be a box of evil for the foe.”
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-the res.” 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.