King of the Bosphorus t-4

by Christian Cameron

  Satyrus couldn't be gone too soon, once he was free of the poppy.

  The town and the crew of the Falcon shared the armour and weapons of the dead men, and the Falcon's crew – a little thin on the decks of the Golden Lotus – was probably the best-armoured crew in the Mediterranean, although it was all stored below in leather bags under each man's bench.

  The professional rowers from the enemy ships were mustered and sent to row in their original ships, but with every man stripped and a handful of heavily armed Falcons on every deck. Satyrus, Diokles, Theron and Kalos made difficult choices, promoting men to important positions just to get the captured ships off the beach.

  One of them was Kleitos. He'd failed once as an oar master – too young, and too afraid of his sudden promotion. This time, on a rain-swept beach on the Euxine, he pushed forward and asked for the job.

  'Let me try again,' he said to Satyrus. He stood square. 'You was right to put me back down – but I can do it. I thought and thought about it.'

  Theron didn't know the history, and raised an eyebrow. Diokles, the man who had taken over when Kleitos froze, surprised Satyrus by taking his side. 'He's ready now,' Diokles said.

  Satyrus nodded. 'Very well. Give him the Hornet.'

  'Oar master?' Kleitos asked.

  'Oar master, helmsman, navarch – call yourself what you will. It's going to be you and Master Theron taking the Hornet all the way to Rhodos. You up to it, mister?' Diokles raised an eyebrow.

  Kleitos stood straight. 'Aye!'

  Diokles cast Satyrus a look that suggested he had his doubts, but-

  'Thrassos of Rhodos,' Theron said, calling another man forward. He was often a boat master, and he'd been slated for command back in Alexandria.

  The big, red-haired man stepped forward. He looked like a barbarian, and he was, despite his Greek name. He wore a leather chiton like a farmer and had tattoos all over his arms. 'Aye?'

  'You'll have the deck with Master Satyrus,' Diokles said. 'Can you handle it?'

  Thrassos smiled. 'Nah,' he said. 'Nah. Serve good, eh?' His Greek had a guttural edge to it. Slaves washed up as free men at Rhodos, because their little fleet took so many pirates and freed their slaves. Thrassos was clearly a Dacae, or even more of a stranger, a German like Carlus in the Exiles.

  Satyrus clasped hands with him anyway. 'Keep me alive,' he said.

  Thrassos smiled. 'Me, too.'

  *

  Two weeks in Tomis and the weather broke, with two days of sun drying the hulls and more promised in Satyrus's broken bone. His hip was almost healed, and he found himself trapped in endless erotic dreams, as if, having come near death, he needed to mate. It made him feel as if he was still a boy, and at Calchus's symposia he struggled to hide his instant reaction to the man's slave girls and their admittedly pitiful dances. Satyrus's opinion of the man went down again at the sight of these girls – bruised, stone-faced and too young. His mother's commands about sex with slaves seemed perfectly tailored to them, despite the urges of his sleeping mind and Calchus's broadest urgings. 'Take one? Take two – they're small!' Every night, the same joke.

  'I need to get going,' Satyrus said to Theron. 'Help me! I'm too damned weak to get it done.'

  Theron clasped his shoulder softly and moved around, giving the necessary orders and placating Calchus with promises of future visits.

  On the beach, with a fair north wind blowing as cold as Tartarus, Satyrus embraced his host. 'T hanks for your hospitality,' he said. 'Aren't you worried about Eumeles? He'll need a reprisal.'

  'Not before spring,' Calchus said. 'And we're Lysimachos's men, here. We'll get him to send us a garrison. It may even mean war.'

  'How will you send him word?' Satyrus asked, chilled to the bone already.

  Calchus looked uncomfortable. 'Fishing smack to Amphipolis, perhaps,' he said. 'Or a rider overland.'

  'We'll take the news,' Satyrus said. Theron raised an eyebrow. Satyrus looked at his former coach. 'Actions have consequences,' he said, thinking of Penelope lying dead in a pool of her own blood, all her courage snuffed out by violence.

  Clown-voice killed Penelope, and I kill him to settle the score, and Eumeles sends a fleet to Tomis to settle that score. Or perhaps I sail to attack Eumeles, and he forces me to flee, and clown-voice pursues me, and thus kills Penelope – on and on, to the first principle of causality. Satyrus was lost in thought until Theron nudged him.

  'We'll pass the news to Lysimachos,' Satyrus said.

  'You have our eternal thanks already, benefactor!' Calchus said. 'Your father was the best of men and you follow him.'

  Satyrus was tempted to say that the best of men would not have caused Penelope's death, nor Teax's. But he held his opinions close.

  'Goodbye, guest-friend,' Satyrus said. He waved to the other towns-men on the beach – a thin crowd, because many of the freemen's ranks were empty.

  They ran the ships into the surf and got under way quickly, fearing a turn in the weather. The weather held for three days, and they sailed south and east without touching an oar. But just before beaching on the third evening, Theron's ship suddenly turned into the wind, the signal for trouble, and Satyrus got the Lotus alongside as fast as he could. Apollodorus led the marines aboard at a run, and then ran down the central deck, scattering mutineers. Ten men were killed, and Theron shook his head.

  'I tried to reason with them,' he said thickly. 'They knocked me on the head.'

  Kleitos had put the ship into the wind and held the stern for several long minutes, alone.

  Satyrus clasped his hand. 'Well done!'

  The man looked stunned. 'Didn't even know what I was doing!' he muttered. 'One against so many.'

  Apollodorus came back with a dozen oarsmen under guard. 'Taken in arms,' he said. 'No question. Kill 'em?'

  Satyrus shook his head. 'Exchange them for a dozen of our rowers in the Lotus.'

  They made a poor job of landing the ships for dinner, and the officers gathered in a worried knot by a fire.

  'My arm says we're in for a weather change,' Satyrus said. 'Nothing good there.'

  'Somebody's spreading the word that we're going to have 'em all killed,' Kleitos said. He looked bashful and surprised that he'd spoken out, but he stood his ground. 'I heard it when they were getting ready to rush me. They asked me to join 'em.'

  'You know them?' Satyrus asked.

  Diokles laughed bitterly. 'We all know somebody over there. Professional seamen and rowers? Small world, Navarch.'

  Satyrus rubbed his beard – he hadn't shaved since he took his wound. 'Seems to me we should talk to them,' he said.

  Theron snorted. 'My head still hurts,' he said.

  'Promise them wages and a fair landing at Rhodos,' Satyrus said.

  'Rhodos is death for some of 'em,' Diokles said. He handed Satyrus a cup of warm wine and honey. 'That's why they're antsy.'

  'Lysimachos could use them,' Satyrus said, considering the words even as he said them.

  'That'd turn some heads,' Theron said. 'T hose men are as good as pirates. Leon is the enemy of every pirate on the seas.'

  Satyrus shrugged. 'It isn't right to kill them, but it isn't right to release them where they'll serve pirates? Is that it, Master Theron? I hear Philokles in your voice, sir.'

  Theron shook his head. 'My head's too thick to argue moral philosophy, lad. And I see your point.'

  'I need Lysimachos,' Satyrus said. 'He's supposedly our ally – he's Ptolemy's ally, but Alexandria is far away and Lysimachos is close.'

  'Lysimachos might take these men – and the ships they crew – and tell us that we're lucky to be alive.' Theron looked around at the other men in the firelight, but the sailors were quiet. Most of them were lower-class freemen, and they weren't about to intrude on a political argument between two gentlemen.

  Satyrus looked pointedly at Diokles. The Tyrian nodded slowly. 'So? I mean, begging your pardon, but if he does that, he's no good ally, and we're still richer by the Golden Lotus and our lives
. And frankly, gents – you can't build a fleet on these hulls. We captured a few old triremes. Only Hornet is worth a crap. There's worm in the other two.'

  Theron nodded. He slapped Diokles on the shoulder. 'That'll teach me to talk about things I don't really know,' he said. 'In future, don't hold your tongue.'

  The dark-haired Tyrian's earrings twinkled in the firelight. 'So?'

  'So – let's muster the lot of them – our oarsmen too. We'll tell it to them straight.' Satyrus was nodding as he spoke. 'And, Apollodorus, marines, full armour. So they see the other choice.'

  Apollodorus nodded. 'Just for the poets, Navarch – I'd rather you executed a couple first. That's a message the rest will understand.'

  Theron looked away in distaste, but Diokles nodded. 'I agree. Kill a couple of the louts who were caught with weapons today.'

  'In cold blood?' Satyrus asked.

  'I wasn't planning to give 'em swords,' Apollodorus said. 'Don't worry, Navarch. I'll do it.'

  'No,' Satyrus said. He swallowed, feeling trapped. Feeling as if some thing was moving on the dark beach. Furies. Curses. His oath to avenge his mother. He shook his head. He thought of Teax. Of the consequences of being a king.

  'Muster the men,' he said.

  It took only minutes – the captured rowers had their own fires, watched by tired oarsmen in captured armour.

  'At least they're all fed,' Satyrus said to Diokles.

  'Your friend did us proud,' Diokles said. He was chewing on a pork bone.

  'Do these men have to die?' Satyrus asked.

  'Zeus Soter, Navarch! They rose in mutiny against you, tried to kill Theron and tried to take one of our ships.' Diokles looked at Satyrus from under his black eyebrows and spat gristle in the sand. 'You plan to be a king? I'm no tutor, like your Spartan, nor an athlete, like Theron. Bless 'em both – fine men. Good men. But – if you plan to be a king, people are going to die. And you are going to kill 'em. Get me? Maybe you need to lesson yourself on it. Or maybe…' The Tyrian didn't meet Satyrus's eye. 'Maybe you oughtn't to do it. At all.'

  Satyrus stopped walking and stared at his helmsman. 'Philokles told me once that he thought that good men – truly good men – neither made war nor took life.' He sighed. 'And then he said that it looked different from the front rank of the phalanx – both good and evil.'

  'Aye,' Diokles said, nodding. 'I hear that.' He gave a pained smile and took another bite of pork.

  'We'd have done the same to them,' Satyrus said. 'If we were taken, we'd do our best to fight back.'

  'And I'd not squirm when the sword bit my neck, eh, Navarch?' Diokles shrugged. The contempt in his voice wasn't strong, but it was there. 'Let Apollodorus do it, if you have to.'

  Satyrus shook his head, watching Theron, wondering how much of the man's good opinion he was going to forfeit. 'No,' he said. He loosened his sword in the scabbard and walked forward, where the marines had dragged the prisoner oarsmen to kneel in the sand.

  He felt as if his feet were loud on the sand. He could feel the Furies gather.

  Satyrus walked up their ranks. Several were boys. The rest were long-armed, hunch-backed rowing professionals, with massive necks and heavy muscle. A few raised their heads to look at him. None of them looked like evil come to earth, or like servants of dark gods, or any comforting, easy, evil thing he could name. They looked like beaten men, cold and empty of hope, kneeling on a beach, waiting to die.

  The whole beach was silent, as the fires crackled, dry oak and beech and birch driftwood from the north. Satyrus could smell the birch, the smell of his childhood fires.

  If it was not just one Penelope, but a generation of them? Not just one Teax, but a thousand?

  A few steps from the end of the line of prisoners, he drew and killed one like a sacrifice, an older man with a cut on his forearm, and then the younger man next to him, blade sweeping across his throat on the back stroke from the first cut so that the two dead men fell almost together. Satyrus stepped clear of the flow of blood. He cleaned his sword on a scrap of linen from his doros and continued to walk towards the crowd of enemy sailors.

  'Don't be fools,' he said. They were so quiet that he didn't need to raise his voice. 'I am taking these ships to Lysimachos, just around the horn of the Propontis – Amphipolis in Thrace. I'll leave you all ashore there. No Rhodian navy to try you. No one else has to die.'

  There was a buzz, and he raised his voice. 'The men at Tomis wanted to butcher the lot of you. I could still do it.' His voice was hard, as hard as a man who has just killed in cold blood – who might do it again, just for the pleasure of the power. 'Row me round to Lysimachos and I'll put you ashore with silver in your hands. Trifle with me again…' He paused, took a deep breath and raised his voice to a storm-roar, 'And I'll kill the lot of you and burn the bodies in the extra ships. Clear?'

  The utter silence that followed his last words was its own testament.

  'Excellent,' Satyrus said. He walked off into the darkness.

  Theron held his hair while he threw up. The big Corinthian didn't say anything. And Satyrus put it away, with Teax and Penelope and the dead girl by the Tanais River. Now he had a name for it.

  The price of kingship.

  That night, he took a dose of poppy juice in secret, and he felt better.

  *

  The next day, they raised the Thracian Bosporus with dark clouds gathering in the north. Far off, they saw the nick of a white sail on the horizon, and as the Golden Lotus entered the still waters of the Bosporus itself, they passed close to a fifty-oared pentekonter hull, turtled in the water and covered in weed – weeks old.

  'Pirates?' Satyrus asked.

  'Poseidon,' muttered the harsh voice of his helmsman.

  They swept south. Now the oarsmen had to labour, the wind veering around in minutes so that it pushed right in their faces and the sea rising behind them, even with the narrow channel and protected water.

  Lotus had a third of her benches empty and more only half-filled, and her crew had to struggle to keep the big ship head up to the growing wind and moving steadily down the channel.

  The other ships had captured oarsmen but nearly full crews, and whatever the men had taken from Satyrus's brutal display, they rowed well, so that the squadron moved in a crisp line-ahead, Lotus followed by Falcon followed by Hornet and then the two smaller triremes.

  Stades passed, and the oarsmen of the Lotus laboured on. Satyrus walked amidships.

  'Friends,' he called, 'we've a storm behind us and forty stades into Byzantium and safe harbour. I'll row with you, but row we must – all the way down the gullet.'

  He sat on a half-manned bench and took the oar as it came over the top. Thrassos sat opposite him and did the same.

  Good rowers – and Uncle Leon took only the best – have their own rhythm, and don't need a timoneer unless they lose the stroke. Satyrus rowed until his palms bled, and then he rowed further – penance, at the very least. But the men on the benches around smiled at him, and the great loom of the Golden Lotus's oars wove on and on and the stades flowed by. Above, the deck crew took every scrap of canvas off the masts – the wind was head-on. And then the deck crew joined the rowers.

  Satyrus's left arm throbbed, and then it burned, and then he sobbed with pain. He took a nip of the poppy juice from his little perfume flask and was instantly better. The pain still filled his head, but he floated on it instead of swimming in it. He wasn't actually doing much rowing any more; mostly his hands just went around with the oar. The three-week-old break was too raw, and the pain too much, for his muscles to have much purchase, but he kept the oar going.

  One of the deck-crewmen – Delos, a snub-nosed man who had a reputation for impudence – came and lifted him away from his oar. 'Need you to steer,' the man said. He gave Satyrus a tired smile that was worth all the courtly courtesy in the world. Then he sank on to the bench where Satyrus had been and took the oar at the top of its swing.

  Satyrus stood at the rail and heaved for some t
ime. When the red haze left his vision, he was looking at the walls of a city rising over the bow of his ship.

  'Herakles and Poseidon and all the gods,' he breathed. He picked up the wineskin that sat under the helmsman's bench in the stern and poured all the contents over the side into the sea.

  The oarsmen cheered, and even after thirty stades into the wind, their cheer carried and they came down the last of the channel in fine shape, the bow cutting into the wind as they began to round the harbour point.

  Satyrus turned the ship with the steering oar, his left arm throbbing so that he choked, and only then did he see that the beach was packed with ships – fifty warships, and ten more anchored out.

  'Poseidon,' he said. He slumped.

  But right at the edge of the beach, he could see Labours of Herakles drawn up, his bronze prow gleaming in the winter rain.

  He looked at the rest of the fleet for ten laboured breaths, and then his heart beat again. He didn't know them. Except for Herakles and a penteres that might be the Fennel Stalk, they were someone else's ships.

  He didn't know them. Whoever's fleet that was, it wasn't the fleet of Eumeles of Pantecapaeum.

  'Hard to find a place to drop our anchor,' Satyrus managed to quip. He hoped that he sounded confident.

  He needn't have worried. Sailors swarmed out of the town to help his men anchor out – there wasn't a spot on the beach, but the tavern emptied to help, and his ships were moored fore and aft, often moored right against the other ships, so that their anchors shared the load. It was only as the first gusts of hail-tipped storm wind bit into them that Satyrus raised his voice to ask where all these ships were from.

  'Hah!' laughed a big black sailor in a fancy chiton and wearing a one-hundred-drachma sword. 'We serve no man!'

  Satyrus sat down on his steering bench and laughed. He had moored to a pirate fleet. The first man to meet him ashore was Abraham, lean and bronzed, his long hair in wet ringlets. The man threw his arms around Satyrus and they embraced for a long time – long enough for sailors to call and make salacious comments.