Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

  ‘You sound more like a spy than an ambassador,’ Satyrus said. He was bored, annoyed that he was missing the installation of his artillery and even more annoyed that Antigonus’ ambassador continued to make all these demands. ‘I declare your embassage over. This instant. Begone.’ Satyrus rolled off his couch. Helios stepped to his side and handed him his sword, and he put it on over his head, donned his chlamys of royal purple and turned back. ‘If he’s not on his ship in an hour, kill him,’ Satyrus said to Hama. Hama nodded.

  ‘You’re insane!’ Niocles said. ‘Lord, I meant no — that is — ambassadors!’

  Whatever he was going to say was lost as Satyrus walked in through the doors of his private apartments.

  He changed into a plain natural wool chiton and a fine dark red chlamys with plain silver pins and a hat to hide his face. He put on boots.

  Theron came in as he got the left boot laced.

  ‘That was a little precipitate,’ Theron said.

  ‘Was it really?’ Satyrus asked. ‘He’s a fool. And he doesn’t seem to care whether he offends me or not.’

  Theron nodded. ‘Well, you have a point. And I suppose it can’t hurt. After yesterday. As you said this morning, either you are mad, or very strong, and either way it should give his master some hesitation.’ Theron had been Satyrus’ athletic coach and tutor. He had special rights in terms of criticism. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘now you have a free hour to look at your ships.’

  Satyrus laughed. ‘Am I so transparent?’ he asked.

  The sun pounded down on the wharf, and on the naked backs of the work party that was installing the artillery aboard Satyrus’ new-built flagship. Arete was going to be the most powerful ship in the Euxine — a Rhodian-built penteres with a hemiolas deck.

  Satyrus walked down the wharf with Helios at his back, doing his best to be a private gentleman and not the king, but sailors and oarsmen stopped whatever they were doing to smile, wave, bow, or simply stare.

  ‘She’s huge!’ Helios said.

  Satyrus knew there were bigger ships on the seas, but Arete towered over the rest of his small fleet — taller and broader than his triremes and slightly longer as well, like a warhorse in a stable of racehorses.

  ‘Permission to come aboard?’ Satyrus called up the companionway.

  The marine on duty nodded.

  Neiron, his helmsman — technically the trierarch of the Arete — met him on the central command deck. Unlike a small trireme, the mighty penteres had a deck that went from gunwale to gunwale the whole length of the deck — armouring the rowers against archery but condemning them to airless sweat wherever they rowed. However, with the after half-deck for the sailors to work the permanent mainmast, the ship had the deck space to carry a huge marine complement — thirty or forty men, if he wished it. More important, the deck had room to support outboard sponsons — small decks — with the new artillery pieces. Arete was built to hold six ballistae — three to each side — and a seventh over the ram.

  It was the weapon over the ram that Draco was installing as Satyrus came up the companionway, and he seemed to ignore the king, lying full length and squinting at the deck. The frame of the ballista lay across the bow, and there was a hole bored through the deck and into the main timber that supported the top of the ram — a timber of Euxine oak as big around as Satyrus’ leg. Two shipwrights stood by, one with a brace and bit, and the other with a saw.

  Satyrus crouched by the Macedonian. ‘You’ve done this before,’ he said.

  ‘Nope,’ Draco said. ‘Diokles! You asleep?’

  ‘Didn’t go through the beam,’ came a voice from below.

  Draco shook his head. ‘Needs some kind of collar, I think. Look — we put a pin in the base of the main frame, so the piece can rotate.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Satyrus said, celebrating his freedom from the finances of his polis.

  The ballista over the bow was the heaviest piece on the ship — in fact, in the whole fleet. It could shoot an iron bar out over two stades. Allowing the piece to rotate would more than double its effectiveness.

  ‘The pin goes deep into the oak of the frame — and deep into the beam below.’ Draco shook his head. ‘But the thing weighs fifty talents. When it looses it could kick like a mule. Shear the pin — crack the beam — break the frame.’ He shrugged.

  ‘We won’t know until we try,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘I’d prefer bronze. A nice bronze base — cast. And a matching piece on the frame, to hold the pin.’ Neiron shrugged.

  ‘What’s to stop it from rotating?’ Satyrus asked suddenly.

  ‘What?’ asked Draco. His tone indicated that he was taking the criticism personally.

  ‘When there’s a sea running, won’t it just swing around like a mad thing, useless as tits on a boar?’ Neiron asked, his eyes on Satyrus. He shrugged. ‘I’m just an old man. I don’t like all this innovation. What next — we’ll all forget how to ram, and just sit back and pound our opponents to flinders with these things? Not exactly glorious, if you ask me.’

  Satyrus slapped his helmsman on the back. ‘I’ll remind you of that sometime. But Draco — he’s got a point, eh?’

  ‘More reason for a bronze base plate. With stops, or catches, or releases. I’m not a sodding engineer, am I? Just a Macedonian who’s actually loosed one of these.’ Draco knelt back down by the hole bored in the deck, still mumbling to himself.

  Satyrus expected someone to step forward, but they were all deferring to him. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  Neiron raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Do we have a bronzesmith who can cast a base plate?’ Satyrus asked. But he knew the answer, and he was suddenly back in the realms of finance.

  ‘Not really,’ Neiron admitted. ‘We need one!’

  ‘Take a note,’ Satyrus said to Helios, who took a tablet from his leather sack and scribbled. Then he turned back to Draco. ‘Well? Rig the tackle and put it in. Let’s shoot it and see.’

  Draco smiled. ‘Yes, lord.’

  In a matter of moments, a dozen sailors swarmed up the mainmast, rerigged the yard to run fore and aft, belayed the aft end with a heavy rope and put a sling over the bow end with a system of hitches. Then they attached the frame of the forward ballista and used the contraption to raise the frame off the deck and lower it — swaying slightly in the very gentle motion of the Bay of Salmon — until the pin slid home into the deck and the beam below.

  ‘Needs a cross brace,’ Neiron said, getting into the spirit of the thing. ‘Look here — something that comes out of the base and pins into the deck.’

  In fact, the whole weapon rotated slowly back and forth on its pin — a two-fingers-thick rod of iron — swaying with the motion of the waves.

  ‘Never thought of the waves,’ Draco said.

  Neiron made a sound of derision.

  Satyrus moved the weapon back and forth with his hand. It was heavy, but well balanced. Then he got down on his hands and knees and looked at the place where the pin entered the deck.

  ‘Wearing against the deck boards already,’ he said. ‘Draco’s right. It has to have a bronze mounting plate. But let’s shoot it anyway.’

  He walked over and looked at the port-side forward weapon, which was fixed in place. It could only be moved if a dozen men lifted the entire frame. Out beyond the mole, he could see a ship putting to sea — the Macedonian ambassador.

  He walked back to see Diokles, his former helmsman and now captain of Oinoe, a heavy teteres, or ‘fourer’, emerge from below decks with a heavy iron spear.

  ‘Shooting away a couple of drachma every round,’ he said as he came up. ‘Like throwing money at the enemy.’

  ‘I’ll just have the new weapons stripped off Oinoe, then,’ Satyrus responded.

  ‘Not my money!’ Diokles laughed. ‘It’s yours!’ He gave Draco the spear.

  Between them Draco and Neiron spun the winding handles on the weapon’s torsion mechanism. The gears made a curious noise, almost musical, as the handles turn
ed. Satyrus and Helios took a turn.

  ‘Not exactly fast,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘That’s tight enough. Never overwind — that’s how you break a rope, and then you’re done for.’ He put a hand carefully on the string of the giant bow. Satyrus did the same.

  The bowstring was as thick as rope, woven of horsehair. It was as hard as a tree branch under his hand.

  ‘Load!’ Draco called, and Neiron and Helios swung the iron spear up and onto the weapon’s loading trough. The nock slid effortlessly onto the string. ‘Ready!’

  ‘You want to do it, lord?’ Draco asked.

  Satyrus didn’t pretend. ‘Yes!’ he said, and placed himself behind the frame, his hand on the releasing handle.

  ‘Stand a little clear, like this. Sometimes a string breaks, or the winches give way. Either way, you don’t want to be right behind her, the bitch.’ Draco nodded.

  Satyrus ignored him, to line up his shot. ‘Ready to shoot,’ he said.

  Draco stood back.

  Satyrus pulled the handle and the spear flashed away, so fast that none of them could trace its flight. The frame shook and twisted on its pin, and the deck groaned, and the arms of the heavy bow made a curious thwack as they hit the limit of their travel.

  The spear vanished. It went far enough that none of them saw the fall of the shot, and they all stood around, disappointed.

  Neiron shook his head. ‘Look at that,’ he said. He pushed against the weapon’s frame, and it tilted.

  One shot had bent the pin on which it rotated.

  ‘Thetis’ glittering breasts!’ Draco said.

  ‘Best put it on a fixed frame until we can get ourselves a bronzesmith,’ Satyrus said. He was watching the ambassador’s ship. ‘How many men do we have who can use these things accurately?’

  Neiron snorted.

  ‘Looks to me as if we need to have trained crews,’ Satyrus said. ‘And targets on the shore. And contests and prizes. We go to sea in two weeks. I’d like us to be able to hit something.’

  Neiron nodded. ‘And what will one of these here spears do to a ship?’ he asked. ‘Anything?’

  Draco nodded. ‘Marines?’

  Satyrus and Neiron nodded. Diokles shook his head. ‘Better train some sailors, too.’

  Satyrus left them debating where they should hold the drills. He was in a much better mood, although as usual, these days, part of his mind was calculating the cost of exercising the new weapons, with the spears at two and a half drachma each (a day’s wage for an oarsman).

  He consoled himself that the price was far lower than the value of the loss of a merchant ship. And then he went back to worrying about warehouse space and which towns needed better water supplies.

  Two weeks and I’ll be at sea, and will leave all this behind me, he thought.

  3

  Melitta sat on a stool covered in furs, wearing her best silvered-bronze scale and her favourite white caribou-hide boots and her mother’s caribou coat over her armour. Despite the stool, she sat with her back straight. Her right hand was supported by her mother’s sword, which, according to Assagetae tradition, had been taken as spoils from Cyrus the Great after a battle in the distant past.

  Behind her stood — or sat — her bodyguard, twenty young knights of her own household led by her lover, Scopasis, who stood at her side like a heavily muscled statue.

  Arrayed in front of her were ten days of heavy work — the men and women of the Assagetae who had brought their cases to her to plead. It was the spring gathering of the Assagetae in their ‘city’ of dykes and temporary walls, hidden in the upper reaches of the Borysthenes River where most Greeks had never travelled.

  Merchants had been arriving for days. Hundreds of them: swordsmiths and goldsmiths and fine potters and leatherworkers from as far away as Athens and Alexandria, lured by the promise of rich profits and a sense of adventure. The Tanja of the Assagetae was like a combination of law court, agora and religious festival, with a trade fair thrown in for entertainment. There were twenty thousand tribesmen and women in the dykes, their great herds penned, tribe by tribe, with two hundred thousand horses and twice as many sheep spread over hundreds of stades. Cattle wandered from encampment to encampment, lowing loudly, eating whatever grass was already available, watched by children whose attention was more on the wonder of the Aegyptian priest and his wagon than on their charges. Horses trumpeted to each other — uncut stallions roared with irritation at the smell of so many other strange stallions, and mares rolled their lips back in scent-inspired appreciation of all the possibilities. Adolescent warriors of both sexes did approximately the same as their horses.

  Melitta could remember coming to the Tanja with her mother: the adulation of the adults, the praise for her six-year-old accomplishments, the wonder of the trade fair, the fine horses and the beautiful clothes. But mostly she could remember her mother’s disgust that her people could behave so often like fools, and her annoyance at dealing with their failings in the giving of law. Adultery, drunkenness, child abandonment, horse-thieving, witchcraft, murder — she heard them all.

  Are you children? her mother would often ask of the men and women brought before her.

  Her attention snapped down to a pair of her own tribesmen — Cruel Hands — veterans of her summer campaigns of three years before, and men who had ridden to raid the Sauromatae these last two years. Impatient with a grain trader, they had killed him and taken his mules and his goods.

  ‘He was trying to cheat us!’ the shorter one said, as if this made it all right.

  ‘You murdered a foreign merchant in cold blood,’ answered Kairax. He was their immediate lord and was acting for the merchants.

  ‘Wasn’t cold blood!’ shouted the bigger of the two. ‘I was mad as fuck!’

  ‘Are you two children?’ Melitta snapped. For a moment she paused because she heard her mother’s voice emerge from her own lips. ‘He made you angry, so you killed him?’

  ‘He was cheating us,’ the smaller man said again.

  Melitta took a deep breath. She looked at Kairax. ‘What do the merchants want?’

  ‘Restitution,’ Kairax said. ‘Fifty horses for the life of the man, twenty more for his goods.’

  ‘By the Heavenly Archer!’ the smaller man said.

  ‘That fuck wasn’t worth no fifty horses,’ said the bigger man.

  Melitta’s eyes strayed around the enclosure. Carpets — fine carpets — hung on three sides of her, blocking the chill spring wind, separating her deliberations from the riot of the market on the far side of the barrier, although all Sakje were welcome and several hundred of them crowded around, more than a few on horseback.

  Her wandering eyes crossed with Scopasis’, and she smiled at him — an automatic smile, as she was beginning to doubt the wisdom of taking him as a lover. He was brave — loyal — and deeply in love with her.

  She sighed inwardly, and thought about how easy it would be to be a bad queen; to ignore these petty cases, give quick judgements and be free to roam the booths, spending her riches on golden cones to hang tinkling at the edge of her caribou coat, or fine saddles-

  Drakas. That was the short one’s name. He’d been with her in the last charge at Tanais River when all the tribes became intermixed. But she could remember his ugly nose under his helmet, and his grin.

  ‘Drakas,’ she said.

  He stiffened. ‘Lady?’

  ‘Drakas, how many horses do you own?’ She leaned forward and pointed her mother’s sword at him. ‘How many?’

  ‘More than a hundred,’ he admitted.

  ‘And this lout?’ she asked. She didn’t really know his companion.

  The big man shrugged. ‘A dozen,’ he admitted.

  She shook her head. Drakas had enough horses to be treated as a nobleman, but his friend did not. She suspected that this apparent inequality had something to do with the killing — and she further suspected that Drakas’ success as a hunter and raider had something to do with the fact that Kair
ax was willing to see him punished. Rivalry? Jealousy?

  You’re like children.

  ‘Who struck the killing blow?’ she asked.

  Drakas shrugged. ‘I did,’ he admitted, pursing his lips. He spat. Among Sakje, that wasn’t a gesture of disrespect — she needed to remember that. Among Sakje, he was being contemplative and polite.

  ‘What was the actual value of the man’s goods?’ she asked Kairax.

  Kairax shrugged. ‘They say twenty horses,’ he said, and shook his head. He and Drakas exchanged a glance that suggested their relationship was even more complicated than she had guessed.

  ‘Bring me a merchant who knew this man,’ she said. She raised her head to Scopasis. ‘Who’s next?’

  He raised an eyebrow — an expression she loved. ‘Astis daughter of Laxan of the eastern Dirt People.’ He made a face. ‘Her father and brothers were murdered.’

  ‘Sauromatae?’ Melitta asked, suddenly interested.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Scopasis said. ‘A matter for your attention, anyway. I have heard her story and believe it.’

  ‘Have her brought,’ Melitta said.

  An eddy in the crowd announced the arrival of a pair of long-robed merchants — Syrians. They bowed to her.

  ‘They ask if we will use their interpreter,’ Kairax asked. He grinned.

  ‘Tell them I would be happy to use their interpreter,’ Melitta said. She grinned too.

  Their interpreter stepped forward. He looked sheepish, and they spoke among themselves for a moment.

  ‘How big was the dead man’s family?’ Melitta asked in Sakje, and the translator put the question to the two merchants in Greek.

  ‘No doubt she’ll use the size of his family to assess the total value of the judgement,’ muttered one merchant. Greek was not his first language, either.

  ‘So make it big. Eight children,’ said the other merchant.

  ‘Lady, the merchant says eight children,’ the interpreter said. ‘That’s what he told me to say, lady,’ the man added.

  ‘Ask him if he knows the family well,’ Melitta said.

  ‘Now what do I say?’ asked the second merchant. His Greek was better. ‘If I say I don’t know them-’