King of the Bosphorus t-4

by Christian Cameron

  'Mistress says bring him to t'house,' Teax said from the near darkness. 'Say he guest-friend.'

  The walk to the house was tense, at best, and Satyrus felt as if Talkes' spear was never far from his throat. They climbed the rest of the hill and went down the other side. The house was dark, but up close, Satyrus could see that the shutters were tight on every window.

  'Spear and sword, young master,' Talkes said at the door.

  Satyrus considered refusing, but it seemed pointless. He handed over his weapons and was ushered inside. 'My rabbit is a guest gift,' he said.

  'I'll send her to cook, then,' the Bastarnae man said. 'Mistress is this way.'

  The house wasn't big enough to be lost in, but Satyrus followed Talkes as if he was in Ptolemy's palace in Alexandria, and soon he was standing before a heavily draped woman in a chair, sitting with a drop spindle in her hand and three oil lamps. She smelled a little of roses, and a little of stale wine. Satyrus couldn't help but notice how bare the house was – all the furnishings he could see were home-made.

  'You are really Kineas's son?' she asked without raising her head.

  Satyrus nodded. 'I am,' he said.

  The lady choked a sob. 'They killed my father two days ago,' she said. 'He would have loved to have seen you.' She raised her head and mastered herself. 'How may I serve you?' she asked.

  'I would like to claim guest-friendship of your house,' Satyrus said.

  'My house has fallen on hard times,' she answered. 'Rumour says you are a great captain in the army of the lord of Aegypt? How do you come to my door with a rabbit on your spear? Eumeles' captains are searching for you.'

  Satyrus decided he would not lie to this gentle, grey-eyed woman, despite her faint smell of old wine. 'I tried to take my father's kingdom back from Eumeles of Pantecapaeum. I failed and nearly lost my life and my ship.'

  She rose, placing her spindles – carved ivory, better than most of the other objects in the room – in an ash basket full of wool. 'They know all about you, Satyrus. You will not survive staying here. They killed my father for being your friend, and Calchus is next, if they catch him. If I keep you, they'll come here and kill us.' She shrugged. 'But I am an obedient daughter and I will not refuse you. Perhaps it would be better for me to end that way.'

  'Hide me overnight, and I will avenge your father at nightfall,' Satyrus said. 'I will not be your death.'

  She came out of an unlit corner with a cup in her hand. 'I am Penelope,' she said. 'Here is the cup of welcome. No one here will betray you. I welcome you for the sake of your father, the first man I ever looked on with a woman's eyes. He might have wed me.'

  'He wed my mother, the queen of the Sakje,' Satyrus said. He drank from the cup. There was cheese in it, and barley, and it went down well. He could smell the rabbit cooking.

  'It is better to have a queen as a rival than another woman, I suppose,' Penelope said. 'At any rate, your father never promised, and he never returned.'

  'And did you marry?' Satyrus asked, after a pause.

  'Do I look like a maiden?' she laughed, and her laugh was angry. 'I married Calchus's youngest son.' Her bitterness was obvious. 'No queen for a rival there!' she said, and snorted.

  Satyrus lacked the experience to know how to pass the subject over. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

  She raised her head and glared at him. 'Spare me your pity, boy.' Then she shook her head. 'How do you plan to avenge us? And what makes you think that more killing will make this better?'

  Satyrus drank his wine to cover his confusion. Finally, he shrugged. 'I have a ship,' he said. 'I will clear them out of the town.'

  She nodded. 'The satrap will be here any day, and then Eumeles will find himself in a war. Best stay clear of it, Satyrus son of Kineas.'

  Satyrus shook his head. 'Who commands them?'

  Penelope shook her head. 'I could find out, I suppose.' She smiled, then raised her eyes and gave an odd smile that seemed to catch only half her face. 'When you let yourself die, it is often hard to bring yourself back to life,' she said. And then, 'Never mind. Pay me no heed. I'm a bitter old woman, and might have been your mother.'

  'You aren't old,' Satyrus said, gallantly. Indeed, under the heavy folds of her drapery, she was no less attractive than Auntie Sappho – and that was saying something.

  'Hmm,' she said softly. 'I had forgotten the taste of flattery.'

  'Dinner, mistress,' Talkes said from the doorway. Dinner was simple. His rabbit vanished into a stew made of barley and some late-season tubers, with good, plain bread and a harsh local wine. The slaves – or servants, he couldn't tell – ate at the same table as their mistress, a big, dark table worn to a finish like the black glaze of the Athens potters.

  He ate and ate. The stew grew on him; he'd been eating whatever his mess cooked up on various beaches for weeks. The wine was acidic, but hardy. The bread was excellent.

  'My compliments to your cook,' Satyrus said.

  The four Bastarnae girls all tittered among themselves.

  'You will stay the night?' Penelope asked.

  'Yes, despoina,' Satyrus answered.

  'Do not, on any account, try to have sex with my girls. Teax is young enough, and silly enough, to warm your bed – but I can't afford to lose her or feed her baby. Understand, young sir?' Penelope's hard voice was a far cry from her apparent weakness earlier. Satyrus concluded she was a different woman in front of her staff. A commander.

  'Yes, despoina,' Satyrus said.

  Penelope raised an eyebrow. 'You are a most courteous guest, to obey the whims of an old woman.'

  Satyrus went back to eating his soup. Talkes, the overseer, watched every move he made.

  Satyrus was just reaching for a third helping of stew when there was a rattle at the gate of the yard.

  'Open up in there.' The voice was sing-song, as if a clown or a mime was demanding entry.

  Talkes looked at his mistress.

  Penelope stood up and looked at Satyrus. 'I'll hide you,' she said. It was a simple statement of fact. She took his hand and led him up into the exedra. She opened a heavy wooden chest and pulled out a quilted wool mattress, which she shook out and placed on her bed. She had his sword, and she handed it to him.

  'Get in,' she said.

  'I could-' he began.

  'You could get us all killed. Now get in.' She held the lid and he climbed in, clutching his sword between his hands. He just fitted, with his ankles pulled almost under his head. The position hurt, and it hurt even more a few minutes later, when the screams in the courtyard began. The next hour was the longest, and worst, of Satyrus's life. His curse was that he could hear everything. He heard the men in the courtyard, the mime's voice mocking Penelope, the soldiers spreading out to search, the sounds of breaking crockery. He heard himself betrayed by the old slave up the road, and by the blood and offal he'd left cleaning the rabbit.

  He heard the clown voice threaten Talkes, and he heard the same voice threaten to sell Penelope into slavery.

  'Or I could give you what your father got, stupid woman. Where is he? Where is he?' The man sounded honestly angry.

  'Do as you will,' Penelope said. 'When Lysimachos comes, you are a dead man.'

  'All you dirt farmers sound the same sad song. Look, slut, your precious satrap is not coming. I'm lord here now. Eumeles is king of the Euxine and I'll be archon here. Want me to burn the house? Tell me where this man is.' The sing-song voice sounded unnatural, like a priest or an oracle.

  'Nothing in the barns!' shouted another man, deeper voiced.

  'Search the upstairs – the exedra. Slash every mattress and dump the loom. Everything!' clown-voice said.

  'Two slave girls in the cellar. No men.' Another deep voice, this with the accent of the Getae.

  'Let's see 'em!' came a shout, and then there were hoots, catcalls. More broken crockery and the sound of screams, and two men were in the exedra with him, searching. He could hear them poking around, he could smell the results as they broke a pe
rfume jar. And below, he could hear Teax being raped – catcalls, sobs.

  'May all of you rot from inside! May pigs eat your eyes!' Penelope screamed.

  'Shut up, bitch, or you'll be next.' A laugh, and more laughing.

  'I want a piece of that,' said a voice near his box.

  His knees burned like fire and his sense of his own cowardice rose like the fumes of wine to fill his head. If I were worth a shit, I would rise from this box and kill my way through these men or die trying, he thought. He clutched his borrowed sword, prepared to kill the man who opened the chest.

  'Athena's curse on you, man with the voice of a woman!' Penelope's voice, strained with rage and terror, carried clearly. 'May your innards rot. May you never know the love of a woman. May jackals root in your innards while you still have eyes to see. May worms eat your eyes. May all your children die before you.'

  Teax screamed again.

  'Why are we up here? The fucker's long gone – if he was ever here.' The deeper voice kicked the box where Satyrus lay.

  Penelope screamed.

  'Burn it,' clown-voice said in the courtyard. 'Kill them all. Stupid fucking peasants.'

  They lit the roof, but the beams never caught, and Satyrus crept from his box and dragged himself, his legs unusable, down the stairs to the courtyard, heedless of the danger. But poor as they were at arson, they were skilled at killing. Penelope lay in a black pool of blood, so fresh that it glittered in the fitful light of the burning roof, and Teax lay naked. The look on her face – the horror, the terror, the loss of hope – burned itself into his brain. He closed her eyes, fouling his legs with her blood, and he threw his good wool chlamys over her.

  Talkes was still alive. Someone had rammed a spear right through his guts, but he was alive when Satyrus found him.

  'Killed!' Talkes said. 'All killed!' His eyes met Satyrus. 'You lived.'

  Satyrus nodded. 'I did,' he said, feeling wretched.

  Talkes nodded. 'I – want to live, too.' He nodded again, and died.

  Satyrus thought of burying them all, or putting their bodies in the farmhouse and burning it. Both were gestures he couldn't afford. When his legs would function, he gathered his spear from the entry way and ran off across the orchards towards the coast. Inside his head, he was walling himself off from the image of Teax. He'd done it before, with the girl he'd killed by the Tanais River, with the feeling that he'd abandoned Philokles to die at Gaza. He knew just how to push that image down to concentrate his fear and his hate on one end.

  Revenge.

  6

  PROPONTIS, EARLY WINTER, 311 BC

  Two cold camps, because Sarpax, the navarch, didn't fancy showing fires. They rowed up the Propontis into the teeth of a strong autumn wind and passed Byzantium at first light, rowing hard, so that the oarsmen grumbled. They parted with their convoy there and continued north.

  Melitta could only think of how much she missed her son. Her breasts were heavy with milk, and they alone served to keep Kineas on her mind all the time – milk so plentiful that it hurt her, and every time she considered donning her armour she flinched from the thought. The lightest brush of fabric on her nipples started the flow again, so that she lived in a perpetual state of embarrassment and her chitons were all stained with milk and the biting wind froze her nipples.

  So much for the great adventure of her life. She missed her son, and she played no role at all in the ship, except to watch the horizon and worry.

  And miss her son.

  Nihmu was little help. She stood in the bow, watching the sea, smelling the air like a dog, scrutinizing every ship they passed as if Leon might be aboard.

  It was Nihmu who spotted the patrol ship, just as the water changed colour and the high banks of the Propontis fell away on either side. She came back, her leather boots scuffing the deck.

  'Trireme,' she said. 'Just on the horizon.'

  Coenus went forward with the navarch and came back shaking his head. 'He's got the wind,' Coenus said. 'And he's coming for a closer look.'

  Sarpax joined him. 'Ladies, into the tabernacle, if you please. Serve out weapons. Gentlemen,' he said, as the ship's officers gathered, 'we will act as if we're willing to be boarded until I give the word. The word is "attack". If I give the word, do your best to kill them. The truth is – once they're alongside us, we have more marines. Eh? But if ever they break away, we are all dead men. Eh?' Sarpax's oiled moustache gleamed like the pearl he wore in his right ear.

  'I can shoot,' Nihmu said. She grinned at Idomeneus. 'Better than him.'

  'Me, too!' Melitta blurted.

  'Take your bows to the tabernacle, then,' Sarpax said. 'No archery before I say. Quickly now! If they want a quick peek below decks, we all look as innocent as lambs.'

  Melitta opened the hatch cover in the forward bulkhead of the tabernacle – the small, enclosed space just under the bow, the only closed space on a ship as small as a trade pentekonter. Through that narrow aperture, she saw the other ship closing on the opposite tack, her great square sail drawing with all the wind that had forced curses from the rowers for five days.

  'Heave to!' the other ship called. 'What ship?'

  'Who says?' Sarpax roared. 'Tunny, fifteen days out of Rhodos.'

  'Heave to!' the other commander called. 'I'm coming under your lee.'

  The trireme got her mainsail down neatly enough, although they made a hash of closing the last few boat-lengths to come alongside.

  'Throw me a grapple!' the other man called.

  Melitta could hear Sarpax mutter something as he ordered a grapple thrown across. Then he ordered another.

  'Who are you?' Sarpax roared.

  'Wasp, of Pantecapaeum. In service to the king of the Bosporus. Now stand clear – I'm coming across!'

  Melitta couldn't see a thing, but the pentekonter was so small that she could feel as six men crossed, the smaller boat rolling and shaking as each new weight came aboard.

  'What cargo?' the commander asked.

  'Wine for Tomis, copper ore for Gorgippia,' Sarpax replied.

  'Twenty silver owls,' the other man demanded. 'Tax.'

  'Tax on the open sea?' Sarpax sounded outraged.

  'Tax for our suppression of piracy,' the other returned. 'Pay, or I'll sink you.'

  Playing the injured merchant, Sarpax cursed. 'You're the only pirate I see here!'

  The other man laughed. 'Pay up, little cock.' Melitta heard his feet moving. 'We're looking for a man – twenty to twenty-five years old, tall, dark-haired. Goes by the name of Satyrus. Seen him?'

  Sarpax laughed. 'What, walking on the sea?'

  The other man did not laugh. 'Satyrus of Alexandria. Know the name?'

  'Of course I do. What of it?'

  'Seen him?' the other man pressed.

  His tone had changed. Melitta felt something stir in her chest, something as profound as the urges of her body. They were looking for her brother. That meant they didn't have him!

  'Last year at Rhodos. Listen, Trierarch – I'm a poor man with my way to make. Here's your tax. Can we go?'

  Melitta could hear his booted feet on the narrow plank that ran between the oar benches. 'Where's this cargo? Gods, this is a smelly scow you have here.'

  'Wine's in the ballast. Copper pigs are the ballast.' Sarpax sounded too confident, as far as Melitta was concerned.

  'What's in the bow, then?' the other man asked, and Melitta could hear his steps coming closer.

  'Barley and cheese for the lads,' Sarpax said.

  'And whatever you put aboard for your private trade, you sly-minded Tyrian. A little purple dye? Some ostrich eggs?' He laughed. 'Open it!'

  Melitta put an arrow on her bow. By the light of the scuttle, she saw Nihmu do the same.

  'I'd rather not,' Sarpax said. 'It won't be good for you, either.'

  'Was that a threat, you dirty fucker? Get it open, right now, and I won't put my boot up your arse.' The other man put his hand on the hatch. Melitta could see it move.


  'I'm just so worried about an – attack!' Sarpax said, and the door opened.

  Melitta shot the boarder from the length of her forearm, and her shaft went in under his arm where he'd pushed on the hatch. Nihmu's slipped into his right eye.

  Before she had her second arrow on the string, all the marines were dead or pushed over the side, and Idomeneus was up on the rail, shooting down into the Wasp's cockpit, the command centre of the enemy ship. Unlike Auntie Nihmu, Melitta had been in a sea fight and she knew Idomeneus. She ran along the deck, avoided slipping in all the blood and stepped past the rowers – the benches were clearing as they all surged up, swords and javelins ready for action, over the rail. Tunny lay lower in the water than her opponent, but the difference wasn't enough to deter boarding.

  'Just like old times!' Idomeneus said. He shot again.

  Melitta couldn't pick a target – the enemy deck was full of men, and most of them were bare-backed oarsmen – her own.

  'We're done here,' Idomeneus agreed. He looked at Nihmu, who drew to her ear and lofted a long shot at a man on the stern – an enemy archer. He fell into the sea.

  'Nice shot!' Idomeneus said.

  It was the last blow of the action. The enemy rowers were paid men – perhaps pressed, perhaps slaves – and they didn't rise from their benches. The Tunny's men cleared the cockpit in no time.

  Coenus came back aboard, his sword dry, but a big smile on his face. 'Master Sarpax, you are now owner of that trireme.'

  Sarpax was standing on the rail next to Melitta. 'What the fuck do we do with him?' he asked. 'I'm a fucking Rhodian – I can't bear to kill the rowers and sink him.'

  Melitta felt the milk starting. As the daimon of combat fled her body, she felt all the irritations flood back, but she still had room for a smile. 'I have an idea,' she said. Inside her head, she was rejoicing, because Satyrus was alive. Two days later, a military trireme slipped on to the beach south of Gorgippia near the Temple of Herakles. It caused a certain consternation at the temple until Melitta jumped over the side and ran all the way up the beach and up the steps. The same old priestess greeted her with open arms. The cataracts in her eyes showed her to be quite blind, but she smiled and embraced Melitta tightly. 'The god told me you would come,' she said. 'Eumeles hunts your brother everywhere since the battle.'