Free Avenger of Rome by Douglas Jackson

following, and a second later the young tribune’s shield locked into place beside his. Within moments they had been joined by the three cavalrymen and Serpentius was able to step back, his job done.
    Valerius’s wall of shields created an impassable barrier across the narrow breadth of the scout galley, anchored at the flank by the curve of the ship’s wooden sides. The pirates could only attack two at a time up the narrow passage in the centre of the ship, or over the crowded rowing benches, and that meant they would never be able to focus enough power, momentum or numbers to break through. But it wasn’t enough. Already Valerius could hear the sound of Aurelius’s men reaching the deck behind him. And those men needed room to work.
    ‘On me,’ he roared. ‘Now.’ As one, the five shields battered forward with the automatic twist of the wrist that opened a gap for the lunge of the
gladius
. At the same time, the five men stepped into the space before the first of the wooden benches that would hamper their further progress as much as it hampered the pirate attack. Valerius was on the left of the line where his left-handed sword would do most good, with Tiberius to his right. He could feel Serpentius’s comforting presence behind him, ready to aid the hardest pressed or fill any gap in the line. Now was the moment for the pirates to feel the scorpion’s sting of the
gladius
. In an instant three or four of them were writhing on the deck and only the cavalrymen in the centre remained face to face with their attackers.
    Chained to the bench in front of Valerius, a blackened husk of a man with shoulders whipped to raw meat by the overseer’s lash raised his hands and pleaded for release. But the chains were an inch across and the only way they could be removed was if the galley were to be captured. Valerius had always known that six men could never take the ship.
    ‘Two inches in the right place is better than six in the wrong one.’ He heard the words of his first instructor as the triangular point of his short sword punched through the breastbone of the captive oarsman and into his heart. The man’s eyes widened and his body slumped to the side, leaving just enough room for Valerius to take another step into the centre of the ship. If he could not kill all the pirates, the only way to save the
Golden Cygnet
and Domitia was to disable their vessel. The galley slaves had to die so that the general’s daughter might live.
    The slaughter had begun.
    Valerius had killed before, more times than he could count, but the men he had killed had either been trying to kill him or deserved to die. He had never done murder. He took another step forward, screaming at the pirates to come to him, and his sword flicked out again. More than anything else he wanted to take a life that deserved to be taken, as if that would cleanse him of the slaughter of innocent men. When he had landed on the pirate galley’s bow he had felt a terror that had never affected him on land. The lurching deck and the cramped confines of the fragile wooden hull tested his courage and his confidence. But now that the killing had begun, the battle calm settled over him.
    A hulking unshaven brute in a loincloth clambered between the slaves at the rowing benches and stabbed at his eyes above the shield with a short spear. Valerius used the curved rim of the
scutum
to force the point up and was rewarded by a howl as his
gladius
pierced the man’s unprotected belly, spilling blood and entrails on to the boards. To his right, Tiberius and the man beside him carved a path through the pirates in the central aisle. The water in the ship’s bilge swirled and slopped an awful slaughterhouse pink and Valerius’s nostrils filled with the stink of gore and oil, raw fear, ingrained sweat and the dried shit that painted the galley sides.
    An enormous figure, naked to the waist and with a shaggy pelt like a bear, burst from the pirate ranks and vaulted the rowing