Free The Gate of Fire by Thomas Harlan Page A

of planks faced with hides covered a fighting deck and, below them, three rowing galleries. Nicholas looked down, seeing the white eyes of hundreds of sailors, already seated at their benches, staring back up at him. The ship trembled a little as more and more men clattered over the gangway.
    The centurions were herding men aft, toward the rise of the rear cabin, making them file in two lines on either side of the artillery towers that rose from the center of the ship. Nicholas shed his woolen cloak, the sensation of cold having dropped from him like leaves in the Scandian fall, and rolled it up. He swung out along the edge of the bulwark and hooked an arm around a stanchion. Below him the sailors were gossiping and arguing among themselves. Warm air, heated by three hundred bodies in the gallery, billowed up through the opening. Nicholas began working his way forward along the narrow walkway.
    The gangplank was hauled back to the dock, and thick hawsers were pulled back aboard and coiled. A soft tapping sound echoed through the rowing gallery, and the sailors fell quiet. There was a rustle of men finding position on the benches and a creak as they tested the oars in the locks. A soft piping note came from the flautist at the head of the rowing gallery. The oarsmen took hold of the oars, making a rattle of great wooden shafts. Nicholas reached the cross walkway of the first artillery tower, where there was a break in the outer wall of the ship.
    Creaking, the galley moved, slowly at first, as two longboats filled with oars-men began towing it away from the dock, out into the harbor basin. The shore receded, becoming a blur of faint lights at the waterline, and then a vast unseen bulk of darkness that was the seawall of the city; high above, a glittering range of lights on the upper battlements. The massive towers studded along that long line were ablaze with pitch torches and lanterns. A sulfurous glow surrounded the summit of each tower; bonfires wrapped in mist and fog rising from the cold waters of the Golden Horn. Nicholas leaned out, smelling the sea and feeling cold fresh air on his face.
    In the darkness he smiled, his heart glad to be afloat, with the quiver of a deck under his feet, preparing to speed to war. The longboats released the tow-lines and broke away from the prow of the galley. The flute player sounded two sharp notes, and the sailors ran the long ashwood oars out of the locks. The great leaf-shaped blades dipped into the water, then, in one motion, stroked slowly backward. Nicholas felt the ship come fully alive under his feet, and now a feral grin split his features. The flautist called again, marking the beat of the oars, and the three hundred-legged beast slid forward across the dark waters, quiet as some great hunting cat.
    Around the dromon , in the predawn darkness, the dim, bobbing lights of a hundred other galleys of the Imperial fleet also crept forward. The wind out of the north picked up a little, luffing the sails as the ships turned out of the mouth of the Horn and into the wider body of Propontis itself. Dawn would come soon, creeping over the rim of the world.
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    It had been a small, mean room with only a single lantern to push back the shadows. Nicholas entered and sat down; his face half twisted into a grin. He thought it was funny that the men he worked for found it necessary to hide their doings in dolorous places. Most citizens of the Empire wouldn't have noticed if they had discussed their business in the Forum. They never appreciated the humor of it. Sergius certainly did not. The tribune was one of the efficient, vigorous ones. The Empire Is Our Duty. Our Duty Is the Empire.
    "You're better, then?"
    Nicholas nodded. He healed quickly, though he tended to scar. Parts of his back still felt like bubbled glass where lash marks had healed badly. The hold of a Dansk reaver was a poor place to convalesce. Sergius rubbed the end of his nose, considering some parchment sheets on the