Dark Horse (26 page)

'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.

'Arrows,' Jason said. 'But then his archers always were crap. He won't waste time or ammunition with that ploy again.'

Good. We can slow down. Claudia adjusted her pace accordingly, but she had barely grabbed hold of the next tuft of grass when a vicelike paw swooped out of nowhere.
'Patoviki,' 
Geta growled, hauling her up by her wrist.
"Bastarvac Azan gabanja i patoviki
.'

'Shrapnel,' Jason translated. 'He said Azan's loading his ballista.'

'Didn't you miss a word out there?'

'Not one I could repeat to a lady.' To Geta, he pointed at a stand of stunted pines. It seemed a long, long, long way up. 'Two, maybe three volleys,' he told Claudia, 'before we're safe.'

'Tell this flat-faced oaf I've got the message about hurrying, he can let go now,' she shouted.

'I already have,' he said, laughing.

Bumping against Geta's ironclad side, she felt strangely protected when the first shoosh of iron bolts came scything through nothingness. With an unceremonious thud, he slammed her down behind a diminutive cypress and threw his body on top of hers.

'Wide,' Jason yelled, scrambling to his feet. 'Keep climbing, but when I give the word, scrabble as fast as you can to your left.'

'Why not right?' she panted, groping for a handhold.

'Because that's where the volley went wide. Azan will expect us to either continue straight up in a bid to get out of range, or hook right in the hope that his artillery master won't make the same mistake twice.'

'Won't he?'

'He'll broaden his shot to encompass both possibilities. Which means our best tactic is waiting until he's taken aim - then run like blazes.'

Her toe found a slender root to balance on. 'What if the artillery master reckons the same way that you do?'

'You talk too much,' Jason said. 'Now . . .
Left!'

Claudia didn't need any prompting with the second whistle of iron bolts. She was behind a twisted stump before you could blink, but this time the bounce of metal against rock was considerably closer, slamming chunks out of the stone just six feet away. Also, the bolts were much larger. Fifteen inches long, maybe more. The further the range, the heavier the missiles to cover the distance. And thus, of course, the more deadly.

One more. Only one more volley and we're safe.

'This time,' Jason shouted, 'no zigzags. You just keep running.' He hadn't glanced back once, she reflected. He'd just counted, knowing exactly how long it would take to load, take aim and fire.

'Mountain goats will have nothing on me,' she called back, but her limbs betrayed her confidence. Clammy hands made the rocks greasy. Jellified legs could not get a foothold. She

was losing more ground than she was gaining, slithering sliding, slipping inexorably downwards. Come on, come on' don't do this to me, she told her body. But her body refused to listen and, like a teardrop, Claudia Seferius continued to slip down the rockface.

'Kluv,' a gruff voice muttered softly and, looping a bearlike arm round her waist, Geta swung her on to his hip.

'NOW!' Jason called, but Geta, too, had been counting, even as he came back for Claudia. Before his captain had opened his mouth, the big ox scuttled across the rocks like a crab, but his burden was hindering him. With Claudia under his arm, he had only one free hand to find a grip on the slippery rocks.

'I can manage,' she said, but he refused to let go, even when the whistling began.

At first it was faint. Faint and oddly comforting. Like a mother's shush when her baby is crying. Then it grew louder. More strident. Geta had barely found a small outcrop of scrub than the ballista's load exploded into the stone. Azan's weapons master had predicted Jason's move. He had fired higher, straight up. Direct hit.

Claudia's breath was expelled as Geta fell on her, and she heard a squeal, as some small, furry mammal caught the blast of a bolt and was sent spinning down the hillside. Metal and rocks rained down over them until finally, mercifully, the last bolt clanged harmlessly down the slope.

'You all right?' Jason called down.

'Da,' Geta grunted, hauling himself on to his knees.

'Absolutely bloody
da!
'
Claudia shouted.

The pines might be pathetic specimens, stunted and twisted and rooted in gravel, but she had never seen a more beautiful stand. Just as no flat-faced, slant-eyed Scythian ox had ever looked more handsome!

Say what you like, however much blood this Scythian sun god demanded, the offerings worked. Targitaos certainly protected his own! Dirty, thirsty, white as ghosts from the dust, but by Croesus, the three of them were alive. ALIVE. Claudia felt strangely light-headed as she threw herself into the welcome umbrella of shade. Having survived shipwreck

and shrapnel, how hard could it be to make it a hat-trick and escape from this pair of scalpmongering pirates?

Geta puffed up behind her.
'Litja ba kula!'
He snorted, lumbering on to the soft cushioned floor.
'Vlodor bastarvac Azan.'

'I'll drink to that,' Claudia told him, 'but look on the bright side. We're out of range now.'

'Who told you that?' Jason asked, raising one eyebrow.

'You.' Don't pines smell heavenly? That little murmuring sound they make. So comforting. And the way the branches creak. Really softly. Like rocking a cradle. 'You said once we reached this stand of trees we'd be safe.'

'That's not the same as out of range,' Jason said dryly, clearing the ground of pine needles with the back of his hand. 'The ballista has a range of over three hundred yards and, as you can see, we're barely a hundred and fifty.'

'Janus! How big will the bolts be at that range?'

'Up to a yard.' He didn't seem remotely fazed by the enormous gap he measured out between his hands. 'Lethal stuff, huh?'

'So what's the plan? Remain here till dark then make a break for it?'

'That's what Azan will be wondering, even as he musters a
mulun.
Er, posse.'

Posse? Claudia flapped the dust off her trousers. 'Call me thick, but am I right in saying we can't stay because we'll be hunted down like stags, but then again we can't go because we'd never make it through another five volleys of shrapnel?'

'A fair assessment.' (And this is what he considers safe.) 'I warned you our chances were slim.'

'Not prone to exaggeration, are you?'

'Ah!' Under the soft layer of leaf litter, Jason seemed to find something of interest. 'Perfect.'

It was, of course, a stone, and Claudia found herself gripped by a sudden urge to hurl herself down the slope and take her chances with Azan.

'You see, it all depends on how accurate an eye his ballistics master has,' Jason said, loading the stone into a small pouch

on a string attached to his belt. 'Or not,' he added cheerfully 'Once I've taken it out with the slingshot.'

The shade was welcome and no mistake. Them pine needles made a comfy soft nest to park his butt and Geta found himself drifting. Aye, and why not? He'd not slept for two moons and he were fair shattered. Especially after rowing all the way to Cressia last night. He wriggled to get comfortable. Worth the effort, though, fetching a woman from the Villa Arcadia for his captain, like what Jason had wanted. And although the tight-lipped bugger didn't say owt, Geta reckoned he'd have been right pleased with that little present! As nice a way of saying thank you for bringing him on this expedition as Geta could think of, particularly after the last bloody fiasco. Kind of balanced things up, like.