Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

  Even on the rooftop overlooking the harbour of Rhodes, the enemy camp was less than six stades away — close enough to hear the sudden hum of activity, hear the screams — and see the tongue of fire that shot out of the dead ground invisible to them.

  And then nothing: except that they could see Demetrios’ army stand to. Men poured from tents, not even ants at this distance, more of an impression of men than palpable men, and they mounted the new walls and poured into the fields.

  Ships were launching, all along the beach.

  In the enemy camp, something went up with a whoosh, as if a god had taken a deep breath and coughed. A column of flame reached to the clouds.

  Nothing. Just waiting.

  More waiting, except that men were shouting all along the enemy camp. The enemy cavalry emerged, and cantered out into the scrub to the south.

  ‘Gods send that they are not already tracking Charmides,’ Satyrus said.

  Now the camp seemed to descend into chaos, and more ships were launching — indeed, it seemed as if the entire enemy line of ships was moving, and then Arete emerged from the smoke, the flames and the dead ground, still moving at a racing pace right along the beach, and she was suddenly close, less than two stades distant, and even as they watched, all her port-side machines fired together and a hail of lethal iron flew into a half-formed infantry unit standing by the beach, and their screams carried the most clearly of all as they were flayed off the beach the way fat is flayed off a stretched hide when the tanner starts his work.

  Now there were Rhodians on every wall and tower, and they were cheering the way people cheer for a great runner as he nears the finish, and Arete passed the sea tower at speed, already dragging his oars on the port side, and suddenly the great ship turned like a dancer turns as the music doubles the tempo — turned and darted into the harbour.

  ‘That wasn’t the plan,’ Helios said, with the inexperience of youth.

  Anaxagoras caught Satyrus’ eye — no longer a rival, just a staff officer. ‘Shall I go, lord?’ he asked.

  Satyrus shook his head.

  ‘I can only expect he saw something too important to leave to

  Charmides,’ he said. ‘Let’s run — he’ll want to be away.’

  They ran to the port — even Miriam, running on her long legs like a maiden runs in the Artemisian Games — but it was too late. By the time they reached the port, there were fifty triremes just outside, and two floating upside down where they had dared to test the range of the sea tower’s artillery and been destroyed.

  Arete entered the harbour at racing speed and slowed on his oars, the men putting their backs into holding the water, and the great ship slowed, Neiron piloting him brilliantly — he made the turn under the Temple of Poseidon and brought the great ship close in to the beach, almost at Satyrus’ feet.

  He jumped straight from the helm to the wharf. ‘Too important to leave to Charmides,’ he said.

  Panther came running up, with Memnon, Damophilus and thirty other leading Rhodians. Nicanor was there, already proclaiming that they were provoking Demetrios.

  ‘Wait — tell us all at once,’ Satyrus said. Miriam was leaning against him — very slightly, but the pressure was real. Anaxagoras was already aboard Arete.

  Satyrus smiled.

  When most of the boule was assembled, Neiron looked out of the harbour. ‘He’s built a dozen double ships,’ he said. ‘Two big hulls — they look like penteres to me, lord, as big as our Arete. Decked between the hulls, with massive engines — Zeus, I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  ‘How big are the bolts, do you think?’ Memnon asked.

  ‘No bolts,’ Charmides said. ‘Baskets. They aren’t bolt-throwers like ours. Different design entirely. Here, I drew it.’ He handed round a sketch, and the waiting men shook their heads.

  Anaxagoras was back. He looked over Charmides’ shoulder. ‘Counter-weight.’

  Sandakes agreed. ‘Lord, you’ve never been to Sicily. The old tyrant there loved the things. They can throw a stone — a thirty-mina stone. Even a talent. Even five talents, although not very far.’

  ‘By Hephaestos!’ Panther declared. ‘Ten double hulls, each the size of a penteres, carrying one of these great engines?’

  Charmides shook his head, curls flying in all directions. ‘Five engines on every platform.’ He grinned. ‘But only nine platforms.’

  Neiron allowed himself a satisfied smile. ‘We put fire into one. And there was something on their wharf — they have built a wharf.’ His smile widened. ‘They won’t store oil there any more.’ He grinned. ‘And the wharf itself is gone.’

  Panther raised his arms. ‘That was a great deed — under the eyes of every man in the city.’

  ‘A deed which will only provoke King Demetrios further,’ Nicanor said.

  Ignoring him, Panther went on, ‘But despite your best efforts, you tell us that he has forty-five engines that can throw a talent each — on ships.’

  That silenced everyone.

  ‘They’re coming for the sea wall,’ Satyrus said. ‘Short and sweet — bombardment, and then a rush. Demetrios means to take the city in one attack. As befits a god.’

  20

  DAY EIGHT

  Arete floated as the day she was launched, below Satyrus’ window. Every ship in the harbour was empty. Forewarned, the Rhodians knew that the attack and the great engine-ships were coming at the harbour defences, and they had stripped every ship remaining in port of all engines, all oars, oil, drinking water, amphorae — anything that might give comfort to the enemy. And the ships were moored together with heavy ropes, all across the front of the beach wall, so that there was a wooden wall in front of the unfinished land wall.

  The sea wall was not so much as a span higher — Satyrus hadn’t bothered to argue with the oligarchs, who still attempted, every day, to negotiate with Demetrios. He had spent his own money, and that of Abraham, and a legion of slaves had laboured behind the wall.

  Four days they had worked like slaves, and the fifth dawned clear and pink, and as soon as the light was strong, Demetrios put his great fleet to sea. Not the pirates. Not the riff-raff. Only his own magnificent fleet, escorting the ten great platforms, each as big as a herd of elephants.

  Satyrus, still pained in every joint from yesterday’s exercise, stood on the roof of Abraham’s house. The roof had changed — flying buttresses now reinforced the front walls and the corners of the main towers, and the reinforced roof now held a pair of Arete’s ballistae behind stone curtains. Four days can be a long time, if you have enough men to work.

  The Theatre of Dionysus was no more. The Temple of Poseidon had lost its east face and its retaining wall. A decree stood in the agora that promised every god so affected a ten-fold return should the city survive. The decree — and the permission to tear down public monuments — had been passed by the boule by a single vote.

  ‘Ready to try, lord?’ Helios said by his side. His hypaspist had his armour laid out on the roof. Satyrus had not worn armour since before his sickness. He had muscles, now — he could see them on his arms — but they were nothing like the muscles he had carried a year ago. Abraham’s armourer had taken his breastplate in, and made him plain greaves for his legs. His old greaves were merely a painful reminder of the body he once had.

  But when the breastplate was buckled securely onto his thorax, he bore it only as long as it took the enemy fleet to silence the battery of engines on top of the harbour tower with their dozens of ballistae, sweeping the crews right off the tower — minutes — before he was breathing hard, and stooped under its weight.

  Humiliated, he allowed Helios to take it off him. Satyrus felt better immediately, and he watched the unfolding action as his sweat cooled.

  Demetrios was in no hurry. In fact, he was making a demonstration. The great engines worked — but the crews were untrained, and it took them hours to get the range. Stones the size of a man’s head fell harmlessly into the harbour a stade or more from the
target. Rhodians jested that Demetrios meant to fill the harbour with stone.

  By afternoon, the jests had fallen away. All at once, all of the great machines, which fired about four times an hour, found their range. Three great stones in a row reached the top of the tower, and then, with a rumble, the fourth drove in the top of the tower the way a big man can be driven to his knees by a strong man — and then six or seven more stones hit, all low, and the tower vanished in a cloud of dust and a roar of shattered timber and cracked stone, as if the fist of a god had smashed it flat.

  A hundred Rhodian citizens perished in five heartbeats.

  ‘Lord?’ Helios asked. Miriam was behind him. She had something in her arms.

  ‘I had this made for you,’ she said. ‘Because you are stubborn and rash. And weak.’ Her smile belied the harsh words.

  She looked like Thetis on the old vase paintings, holding a man’s breastplate — of leather. Beautiful, Athenian leather, tanned and then coloured with alum, the edges bound in bronze, with an iron belt over the kidneys.

  It weighed very little. It was plain — as plain as something a marine might wear, but it fitted, and he could bear the weight. She closed it around his waist with her own hands, and Satyrus kissed her — a decorous kiss, in thanks, but their lips touched for too long, and when Satyrus turned back to his men, her brother looked at him, his brow furrowed.

  The loss of the harbour tower signalled the end of the day. Demetrios’ fleet withdrew, jeering at the defenders.

  Rhodians wept.

  Satyrus went down to his room, ate and exercised. In the agora, the assembly met and voted to offer complete submission to Demetrios, and ambassadors were dispatched immediately.

  Satyrus went to sleep.

  DAY NINE

  In the first grey of dawn, Helios woke him and together they ate dry bread soaked in wine. Korus came and made him exercise — before dawn’s rosy fingers extended over the harbour, Satyrus had run half the circuit of the walls, and he walked back to the house, greeting the other men of the city. Rhodes was a true democracy — it did not appoint a single commander, even in war. The boule commanded. The oligarchs feared a unified command — feared, with some reason, to create a tyrant worse than Demetrios who could never be ejected. Satyrus was wise enough to know that he, as a king, was dangerous to the oligarchs, more even than to the commons, and he went running through the town naked on purpose, as much to show his essential vulnerability as anything.

  The loss of the harbour tower had crushed any spirit the Rhodians had. The officers of the paid troops — the professionals — had expected nothing else, but the boule were panicked. Even Panther shook his head. ‘Surrender is the best we can expect — and a garrison of his soldiers,’ the older man said. ‘Will you take me, at Tanais?’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I’ll be happy to,’ he said. ‘But Demetrios will not accept your surrender. He doesn’t need to. Try to surrender just after you sting him with a victory. When he’s won one, what needs he to treat with you contemptible mortals?’

  Panther winced. ‘Avert,’ he said, making a peasant sign.

  Nicanor shot back. ‘Is that how you think, O great king?’

  Satyrus was a small, thin naked man among a dozen rich men in armour. He laughed. ‘Do I threaten you?’ he asked. And ran back to Abraham’s house, where his trainer made him lift weights until Helios called him to the roof.

  Korus handed him a basket. ‘Pork. Eat it. You need bulk.’ The slave frowned. ‘You are doing well,’ he said grudgingly.

  Satyrus sat on the roof, chewing pork and watching the sun walk across the ground between the camps. When it reached the enemy walls, he heard the murmur before he saw for himself.

  The ambassadors had been crucified.

  Satyrus scratched his beard and finished his pork, then licked his fingers. Sometimes, he had to wonder if he was, indeed, like other men. He’d known two of the ambassadors. Good men, with children. But seeing their corpses, he smiled. He thought of his father, and of Philokles, and even, a little, of Socrates.

  The enemy fleet came in fast. There was no counter-fire from the harbour batteries, so they burst into the entrance, forty big ships, quadremes and penteres mixed. They cleared the harbour entrance, and behind them came the great engine-ships, their double hulls gigantic in the morning light.

  They got into the harbour, and fired their first salvo at the sea wall. A single stone flew right over the wall, over Abraham’s house, to strike the roof of the next house and crush it flat, so that the two machines on the roof were masked in a thick cloud of powdered mud and concrete that rose from the collapsed building. Men who had survived major earthquakes said how much like one this was.

  But before they could reload, the town unleashed its first surprise. Engines, stripped from ships or purchased before the sailing season closed, had been placed on the roofs of the highest houses — and not on the unfinished towers of the sea wall. Now they fired, all together, when a red flag was raised by Helios.

  Most of the bolts used by the defenders were wood, with iron tips — nowhere near heavy enough to penetrate the thick hulls of the heavier ships, although they might have been deadly enough to a trireme.

  But Satyrus and his men were not the only innovative men in Rhodes, nor did Demetrios the Golden have the only engineers. His engines were carried in ships. That imposed limitations.

  The defender’s engines were higher. And every one was on a rooftop — the roof of stone buildings with kitchens and giant hearths. Their bolt-tips had been heated red hot.

  Some missed. They were wasted, sinking hissing into the blue water of the harbour.

  Others struck metal and screeched away. A few hit unlucky flesh, destroying a man — and every man around him — in a grim shock of heavy metal and wood.

  And the best of them struck the ships.

  The results were not immediately apparent. Red-hot metal will not straight away ignite wood — even carefully dried wood exposed to the Mediterranean sun and coated in black pitch.

  But just about the time the fastest of the great engines aboard the nine double-hulls were being readied to fire, ships began to burst into flame — as if Apollo had rained fire on them. The result was so sudden and so spectacular that it surprised the defenders as much as it surprised the attackers.

  The Golden King was no fool, and he had no intention of running risks or losing.

  He withdrew. In minutes, the harbour was clear, except for the burning wrecks — infernos now — of fifteen of the Golden King’s ships. The trapped oarsmen screamed, and the citizens of the town carried the smell of roast pork with them for a day. They burned to the waterline, and then sank.

  DAY TEN

  Satyrus never did his exercise on the tenth day. Before he was fully awake, Demetrios had his fleet on the water and the Rhodians, warned by their sentries, manned their machines and heated their missiles.

  Demetrios’ ships had wet hides across their bows and decks, and they came on boldly into a withering fire. Their boldness was misplaced. Three handspans of red-hot iron with a barbed tip cares nothing for a sodden bull’s hide. Sailors wrestled with the red-hot shafts, trying to prise them loose, and the town’s mercenary archers and all the archers from sixty Rhodian triremes — hundreds of men — shot shaft after shaft across the harbour into the sailors and the harbour began to fill with corpses, the way dead flies can litter the surface of a bucket of wine in the sun.

  After an hour, the engine-ships had fired three times, and found the range. A hail of stones fell on the sea wall, just two streets to the south from Abraham’s house, hammering the half-built wall down on its underpinnings. Dried mud bricks vanished in puffs of mud-smoke, and stones cracked under the onslaught, and the facing broke and broke again.

  At the centre of the maelstrom a breach was opened, fifty paces wide.

  But Demetrios’ ships could not stand the counter-battery of heated missiles, fire arrows, javelins — anything that could be thrown or shot
across the harbour. Two thousand of his sailors died in that one hour, and ten more ships caught fire, and the other trierarchs, threatened with ruin, backed water against orders and fled. Because they fled without orders, they jammed the harbour entrance, and then the slaughter commenced.

  It was the most terrifying kind of war Satyrus had ever experienced, and he had stood his ground against a charge of elephants. But here, great rocks fell from the sky without warning and without mercy. A single stone might kill an entire family — might wipe out a bloodline two hundred years old, or a huddle of terrified slaves, or a family cat or dog — the stones were merciless and like some dark embodiment of Tyche, and veterans began to flinch every time the telltale hissing of the passage of one of the big stones was heard.

  A marine — a good man — screamed and threw himself face down on the roof.

  Apollodorus was there — not a terrifying disciplinarian, but a hero, who took the man by the shoulder and raised him, speaking into this ear until, red-faced, the man returned to his engine.

  ‘Imagine ten days of this,’ Neiron said, at Satyrus’ side.

  ‘Imagine a hundred days of this,’ Satyrus said.

  Miriam came up the ladder with a basket, followed by a dozen of her maids. She was smiling. If she was afraid, she was above it. Satyrus and Anaxagoras caught each other watching her. But with death falling like granite fists from the gods, Satyrus could only smile. And Anaxagoras could only smile back. When she reached the top of the ladder and lifted a long leg around to clamber onto the roof, every man at the machine smiled.

  Then Satyrus saw the enemy ships retreating — hard to see, with the smoke of burning ships, collapsed buildings.

  ‘Neiron!’ Satyrus said.

  Neiron was munching bread from Miriam’s basket. ‘Lord?’

  ‘Is that an engin-eship?’ Satyrus asked. He was looking clear across the harbour through the battle haze.