Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

  ‘I understand, my lord.’ I am, after all, somewhat famed as a spy. ‘But this year, my lord can call the tune. Satyrus cannot sail without your ships and your marines. You do not want to sell your grain at Rhodes, I take it?’

  Stratokles was playing a dangerous game. Of course it was his duty, as an Athenian, to get as much of the Euxine grain trans-shipped to Athens as was possible. A glut was fine. A glut would mean low prices and exports. But he couldn’t force events. He could only manipulate them.

  Dionysus shrugged, and his chins wobbled. ‘You know perfectly well that we sell our grain to Athens,’ he said. ‘You argued for the policy, and you pushed me to support Antigonus. Now he has all the warships. Surely my grain fleet can proceed as it would?’

  Stratokles shook his head. ‘If only it were so simple,’ he began.

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Athenian!’ Dionysus shot back. ‘Dekas can’t really control the pirates, is what you mean. Or he may not want to control them. So we need young Achilles out there to help us punch through the straits.’

  Stratokles nodded. ‘My lord, that is exactly what I mean.’

  Dionysus nodded, and the nod spread over the fat of his body like ripples spreading in a pool from a thrown rock. ‘So — if that’s the situation, where is young Satyrus?’

  At this question, Amastris looked up. ‘Exactly. Where is he?’

  Dionysus pointed out over the mole. ‘His ships have been there all night, but the boy has yet to come ashore. And Nestor says that some of the ships have slipped away.’

  Stratokles felt a touch of ice in his spine. ‘Slipped away?’ he asked. He walked to the edge of the balcony and looked out over the bay.

  His self-control was excellent, but it didn’t prevent a single, sharp curse.

  ‘Well?’ Dionysus asked.

  Stratokles didn’t need to count the ships riding at anchor in the strong spring sun. He had been guilty of seeing what he expected to see. He shook his head. ‘My lord, Satyrus has taken his warships and gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ Amastris asked. The whine in her voice boded ill for her maids — and for her intelligencer.

  Stratokles shook his head. ‘He didn’t ask for your fleet?’ he asked the tyrant.

  ‘Satyrus of Tanais hasn’t even been ashore,’ Nestor said from the door.

  Nine hundred stades to the south and west, Satyrus’ entire war fleet, minus just two triremes away at Olbia, rode under oars in the last light of the sun, their masts struck down on deck. Behind them were all six of the gargantuan Athenian-built grain ships.

  ‘Well,’ Diokles said, watching the sky, ‘the weather’s with us. Any last thoughts?’

  Satyrus looked around the deck of Arête at all of his other captains — Neiron himself, Sandakes and Akes and Gelon of Sicily. ‘Let’s sacrifice,’ Satyrus said. He went into the stern — still feeling as if he was walking across the agora, his flagship was so big — to where the altar of Poseidon was set into the rise of the stern boards that covered the head and back of the helmsman. Satyrus took the lead of a young kid, a black one, and looked into its eyes. The animal had perfect horns and bright eyes, and it looked at him-

  He drew and slashed its throat in one trained movement, then stepped slightly to the side to let the blood flow past him, and the priest of Poseidon, Leosthenes, caught the blood in a bowl. Then the priest used his own knife to open the animal.

  He looked at the entrails carefully, rubbing the liver back and forth between his hands. He put his nose down and smelled it — not something that Satyrus had seen before from a priest. Then he nodded.

  ‘Victory,’ he said. ‘Complete, entire and yours, lord.’

  Satyrus was not used to hearing such emphatic pronouncements. ‘May you be correct,’ Satyrus said.

  The priest cut the liver free from the animal and raised it, still dripping blood. He turned to the sailors, oarsmen and marines who waited a respectful distance down the deck. On an older ship, they couldn’t have approached even this close as there’d have been no deck to stand on, only a gangway over the rowers’ benches.

  ‘Victory!’ the priest shouted.

  The men roared, and on twenty other ships, they took up the cry.

  Night, and full darkness. Satyrus’ Arête led the way, with the tide running hard out of the Euxine and the current moving them briskly south and west towards Byzantium, which was stades away on the far bank.

  Satyrus and Diokles had fought an entire season in these waters. They knew the tides, which were shallow, and the Dardanelles, which were as treacherous as the pirates who infested them.

  ‘Regrets?’ Neiron asked Satyrus.

  ‘Pah,’ Satyrus answered. He wasn’t sure what he thought of the new priest and his confident assertion of victory. It seemed like hubris.

  An hour later, and the lookouts told him that Timaea was in sight. He climbed the foremast and peered into the gloom and saw lights, but they might have been any of the fishing villages, Thracian and Greek, or pirate havens that flourished along this coast.

  Was it really possible that Dekas had left twenty ships in Timaea and that they wouldn’t even keep a watch? Or was it a trap? It would have to have been a very elaborate trap, counting on his headstrong ways.

  Satyrus began to drum on the weather rail as he contemplated all the ways his risk — his rather colossal risk — might fail.

  ‘They’ll hear you in Timaea,’ Neiron called. ‘Relax, lord.’

  Another hour, and they were under oars, ghosting along a stade from the muddy banks of the strait, and it was obvious to every man aboard that the harbour of Timaea was crowded with ships. More than twenty ships, and at least fifteen more pulled up on the beach. There were merchant ships anchored out at the wharves, and beached so that they tipped to lie on their high, round sides.

  Satyrus blew on his cold hands and leaned over the fighting platform that sat above the huge ram of his Arête.

  ‘I count forty-four warships,’ said the lookout as quietly as he could manage.

  Neiron made a sound with his tongue behind Satyrus, who gave a low whistle.

  Satyrus was silent for fifty agonising heartbeats, during which he lived, and died, a dozen different ways. He made a decision, then another, and then another. Then he took a deep breath.

  Satyrus caught the glint of Neiron’s eye in the dark. ‘Do it,’ he said.

  Neiron’s eyes said that he agreed. He turned to Helios. ‘Light the rest of the lanterns,’ he said. ‘On my command — battle speed.’

  There was a growl from the oar deck. Satyrus rose from his position in the bow and stretched to counter the sudden pain in his legs — too long in one position, and insufficient exercise the last three days. A private smile came to his face. Plenty of exercise in the next hour, either way.

  He went aft to the base of the mainmast and dropped through the deck to the cramped oar deck below. He had to stoop to move, and the cross braces that supported the main deck made him crouch to pass under them. Even on a cool spring evening, the top oar deck was stuffy and warm. In high summer, in action, it would be unbearable. And it was the coolest and draughtiest of the three oar decks. The top deck was just leaning into the stroke, and men grunted or swore or chatted — a fair amount of noise, but nothing that would keep them from hearing the oar master or the rattle of the oar pace.

  ‘Evening, friends,’ Satyrus said. He walked down the central catwalk that passed between the benches. A sixer like Arête had three decks of rowers, with two men on every one of one hundred and seventy oars. The oarsmen in the top deck had a boxlike outrigger to give them more leverage and stability for their stroke, and to make more room for the lower-deck oarsmen, the zygites and the bottom-deck thalamites. Only the upper oar deck had room for a catwalk.

  The lower-deck rowers completed their pulls and their arms moved, hundreds of men rolling forward, sliding on their oiled leather cushions to get the most out of their muscles. These were highly trained oarsmen, just getting into top co
ndition from a row down the Euxine. The top-deck oarsmen rested, their oars crossed in front of them so that Satyrus could barely see the end of the deck in the near darkness.

  He was answered with a murmur — almost a growl.

  ‘Dark out there,’ Satyrus said, enunciating like a trained orator. That’s why they train you, he thought. So that your voice carries in the assembly — or the oar decks. ‘We’re going after the pirate fleet in the dark,’ he said, slowly and carefully. ‘We’ll be landing our marines to take the town. If we win, every man here will share in the loot. Understand?’

  This time, the answering growl was loud, like that of an animal ready to leap. Some men said, ‘Do the thing!’ and others merely grunted, ‘That’s right.’

  An older thranite at Satyrus’ left hand barked a laugh. ‘We heard the omen,’ he said. ‘Silver in our hands!’

  Satyrus slapped him on the back and climbed the short ladder to the main deck. It was brighter towards the stern — a triangle of oil lamps had been lit — fifteen lamps, carefully primed and maintained half the night for this moment. In less than a hundred heartbeats, similar lamps were kindled on all the rest of the ships, so that Satyrus’ small fleet seemed to glow.

  ‘Battle pace,’ Neiron said to the drummer who kept the oar beat. On a ship as big as the Arête, the oar master couldn’t keep the stroke by voice alone. Before he finished speaking, the ship seemed to cough — a short, sharp scrape as sixty-two upper-deck oars were run out of their oar ports together.

  The drum had been silent as they crept down the channel, but now, on all the ships, drums rolled.

  The oars slid out and bent as the full crew pulled on them.

  Even the Arête, easily the biggest ship in the squadron, leaped ahead.

  Satyrus went forward and leaned out over the ram, watching the water flow by, feeling the speed and power of his ship. His eyes flicked over the big ballistae, unmanned and encased in painted canvas. Too dark for shooting; but he longed to use them.

  Neiron was at the steering oars, and he took the big ship in first. The original intention had been to clear any opposition, but there wasn’t a single enemy ship manned, and now the Arête swept forward, the deepest hull and the most likely to run aground. They steered for the beach, passing just inshore of the moored warships, tied in long rows with heavy canvas thrown loosely over their rowing benches.

  ‘Pirates,’ Satyrus said, with contempt. ‘Bastards can’t even be bothered to maintain the ships they use to prey on others.’ But in his mind he saw men hiding under that loosely flung canvas.

  Helios choked something in the dark. The young man had been taken by pirates as a boy. Left to himself, he’d have killed every pirate on the sea. He, at least, was entirely in favour of his master’s choice of campaign.

  A stade from the shore, and there was shouting in the town. Men were running onto the beach, calling out in fear.

  ‘Rowed of all!’ called the oar master from amidships. Satyrus wasn’t commanding anything this night — or rather, he was commanding everything. He had his armour on, and a cloak, and once they were ashore he’d take command. But he was letting his beautiful ship have her first fight in the hands of other men, and he wanted to leap in and shout orders, ram an empty ship for the sheer joy of it-

  ‘Brace!’ Neiron called from the steering oars, and all the marines and deck crewmen caught hold of something.

  The ram clipped one of the beached warships, bow to bow, except that Arête’s ram towered over the smaller ship the way an elephant towers over a horse, and the beached pirate ship had her bow crushed as if she were made of paper. Then the bigger ship ground to a halt, cushioned by the shattering of the smaller ship’s frames and sewn planks.

  Satyrus rose from his brace, put his helmet on his head and toggled the cheekpieces under his chin.

  ‘Marines!’ he called, and Draco roared behind him, and then they were pouring over the bow into the stricken vessel and racing down her central catwalk, using the pirate vessel as a bridge between the gargantuan Arête and the land.

  Labours of Herakles, the penteres, did the same, coming to lie alongside a beached trireme and using her as a wharf, but the rest of his fleet beached themselves, except five triremes that stayed out in the dark, putting marines aboard the moored ships.

  ‘The wharves!’ Satyrus shouted as soon as his feet hit the beach. ‘Take the wharves!’ The marines had been told to offer no quarter, and they weren’t being too choosy about who they killed. It was ugly work, but the first resistance was quickly crushed and the wharves had to be seized at all costs. They were central to Satyrus’ plan.

  The King of the Bosporus was himself in the front lines, for no better reason than that he needed the wharf area taken fast, and there was no one better suited to the task than he. Or that’s what Satyrus told himself. He was one of the first men onto the wharves, and he could hear junior officers shouting to get the marines — most of whom were unused to working in groups larger than ten or fifteen men — to form a line across the cobbled square.

  But the pirates were not slow to react. The alleys west of the wharves were suddenly full of men and javelins, darts and arrows coming out of the darkness. Helios was hit on the helmet by a heavy tile thrown from the roof of one of the nearest warehouses.

  Then, before Satyrus and Draco and Apollodorus had the marines steady, the first counter-attack came. There were more than a hundred men, most with spears, some with axes, and they came at the marines like Thracians, yelling defiance.

  The marines were veterans, and most of them carried the small Macedonian aspis and a long spear. All of them had good armour. Armour that, even in the dark, made them confident. They locked their shields, the second and third ranks pressed forward on the front, and the pirates met with a volley of javelins at point-blank range. Their charge never reached the aspis wall. With little armour and few shields, the javelins knocked a fifth of the attackers flat and the rest ran.

  Satyrus led his own marines into the maze of alleys west of the wharves, following the broken men from the first counter-attack. Some men stopped to execute the wounded, and Satyrus did nothing to stop it.

  A javelin flew from the dark, and the shaft hit his helmet with a heavy clang and he had to drop to one knee, the pain was so intense.

  ‘On the roof!’ called Apollodorus, behind him. ‘Archers! On me!’

  The rush into the alleys had slowed when they reached the narrowest passages and the long back walls of the second street of warehouses, shops and residences. The air here smelled of smoke and blood.

  Helios pushed forward and held his aspis over Satyrus’ head. ‘Lord?’

  ‘Give me a moment,’ Satyrus grunted. He unfastened his cheek-plates and raised his helmet over his head, pulled off his arming cap and felt the spot on his skull. Blood — his hair was full of it. Then he put it all back on again. ‘Ouch,’ he said.

  Men around him laughed.

  More javelins were coming off the roofs around them, and no archers were to be seen.

  ‘We either have to back off and give them this street, or take it to them,’ Satyrus said.

  Apollodorus winced and Draco grunted.

  Satyrus looked around. The alley, and the cross alley behind him, had about forty marines in it.

  ‘Let’s take it to them,’ he said. ‘Right onto the roofs. No quarter. Try not to kill captives and slaves, but if in doubt, put your man down.’

  Draco’s golden Thracian helmet shone in the firelight of the buildings already aflame to the south. ‘Listen to the king!’ he said. ‘More men go down in a house-to-house fight than in a field battle. Stay with your file, and don’t let up the pressure once you start.’

  Satyrus looked around, down the alley and into the smoke. ‘We used to have a warehouse at the end of this street,’ Satyrus said. ‘On the other hand is a big cross street. No advance beyond that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Draco looked around. ‘Everyone got that?’

  Apollo
dorus laughed. ‘I get it that the taxiarch and the navarch are about to lead a reckless charge in the dark,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the king should sit this one out, eh?’

  Draco laughed. ‘Good times, lord. My sword has touched nothing but wood in three summers.’

  ‘By Ares and Herakles,’ Satyrus said. ‘I’m here.’ He was afraid and exalted at the same time.

  The marines pressed in around him, shields raised against a rain of missiles, huddled up together at the corners of two buildings and waiting for the next shower of javelins, which obligingly came down at them from just ahead.

  ‘Go! Go! Go!’ the officers shouted. As soon as the missiles rang against the roof of shields, the men were up and running, one file of six men for each of the first half-dozen houses and warehouses on the narrow alley. It wasn’t well planned or neat, and men fell, or tangled in their armour, but they made quite a lot of noise.

  Satyrus was in front, Draco running hard beside him, and their files were aiming farther up the street, well beyond where the javelins had come from.

  A woman screamed and a large tile shattered next to Satyrus’ foot. He almost fell from the pain, but he managed to keep his footing and he and Draco hit the gate of their chosen building together, and it burst inward. The yard was full of people. Satyrus narrowly avoided cutting a young woman in half. She saw him and screamed, and then the whole courtyard started screaming.

  Slaver’s yard, he thought.

  ‘On the ground and you won’t be killed!’ he roared. He pushed through the crowd and they fell to the ground as if dead. Then he was at the steps to the main house, while Draco took his file into the warehouse. There were shouts. Screams. All the sounds of despair and death.

  It occurred to Satyrus that his men were too thin on the ground already, the forward edge of the bloody bubble that might pop at any second. That’s why he needed the wharves clear — and without them, his men were going to start dying.

  There was a man in the stairwell with an axe. He took a cut at Satyrus, and Satyrus took the blow on his shield and felt it on the old break but shield and arm both held. Then Satyrus punched out with the rim of his shield, caught the axe head, pushed against it and stabbed under his shield until the man was down and dead.