So far recapturing Pertinax seemed too easy. I ought to have known. The Fate who controls my destiny has a sinister sense of fun.
The Sea Scorpion's skiff had rowed us half-way to its mother ship when a newcomer appeared in the lagoon. Gordianus glanced at me. It was a trireme from the Misenum fleet.
'Rufus!' I muttered. 'Trust him to turn up in his rosebud wreath when the banquet is already breaking up!'
The newcomer had glided up in silence but as soon as we spotted her they started the drum. On the side we could see, eighty oars dipped. As the rowers took their time from the drummer, sunlight flashed once off the shields and speartips of the squadron of marines who lined the trireme's fighting deck. She was steely-blue and grey, with a proud flash of scarlet round the horn on her nose. A vividly painted eye gave her a swordfish ferocity as she streamed forwards, lethally propelled by three huge banks of oars. Behind me I heard barrel-chested Bassus, the bosun of the Isis, utter a warning shout.
In our skiff the sailor who was rowing paused uncertainly. Though triremes are the navy's workhorses, and common enough in the Bay, to see one speeding at full thrust still stopped the breath. Nothing on water was so beautiful or dangerous.
Gordianus and I watched her come towards us. I realized she was passing dangerously close. We were terrified. We glimpsed her jaws-the heavy timbers cased in bronze that formed her ram; that ever-open, evilly serrated mouth just above the water line. She passed so near we heard the grumble of the thole pins and saw water streaming off the blades as her oars rose. Then our own rower flung himself prone and we all clung to the skiff as huge combers from the trireme's wake buffeted our tiny craft.
We waited, knowing a trireme can turn on her own length. We waited for her to impress her terror on the Crispus yacht then swirl to a halt, dominating the lagoon. Helpless in her path, like a highly decorated piece of flotsam, the Isis Africana waited too. But the trireme did not stop. Just before impact, Aufidius Crispus took his last whimsical decision. I recognized his red tunic as he dived.
With that fatal flaw in his character, he had made the wrong decision yet again.
He went straight under the trireme's starboard blades. Only the top tier of oarsmen, those on the outrigger who could see the blades, would have known he was there. I glimpsed his torso once, churning hideously. Oars locked. A couple snapped. The rest ruffled on without pause, like the fluted fin on some gigantic fish, as they drove the great ship's slender keel straight into the yacht. The ram took her in full snarl. There was no doubt it was deliberate. The trireme ran into the Isis with one fierce stroke, then straightway backed oars: the classic manoeuvre to hook out her victim's shattered timbers as the two ships wrenched apart. But the Isis was so small that instead of pulling free, the trireme hauled the yacht's rumpled carcass backwards too, impaled on its nose.
Everything went quiet.
I noticed that the trireme was called Pax. In the feckless hands of an incompetent, small-town magistrate, it was hardly apt.