Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

  Messengers ran back and forth from Jubal’s tower, explaining the movement of the engine-ships. Sometimes Jubal lost sight of them for an hour at a time — a column of powdered masonry or woodsmoke could hide the whole harbour as effectively as a blanket over the eyes. But his reports were accurate and timely, and Satyrus depended on them.

  By afternoon, the men were completely relaxed, and many were sound asleep when the stones ceased to fall.

  ‘Stand to,’ Satyrus ordered.

  Before the last men had fallen into the ranks, a messenger from Jubal confirmed that lighter boats full of assault troops were coming into the harbour.

  Satyrus sought out Idomeneus. ‘Archers forward,’ he said. ‘All the psiloi. Get into the buildings — whatever is left — and kill what you can.’

  Idomeneus nodded warily.

  ‘I’m not asking you to fight them hand to hand,’ Satyrus said. ‘Just break them up and harass them.’

  Idomeneus raised an eyebrow. ‘We’re mercenaries,” he said.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘And you’ll be well paid.’

  ‘Man likes to live to collect,’ Idomeneus said.

  Satyrus realised that the Cretan was serious, not making pre-battle small talk. ‘Idomeneus, I could talk to you about loyalty, about my sister’s esteem for you, or about how we’ve raised you from an archer to a captain.’ Satyrus paused. ‘But instead, I’ll talk to you as one professional to another. I’m not Ptolemy — I haven’t turned you out for the winter and rehired you in summer. I’ve paid a steady wage — a damned good steady wage — for three years of peace.’

  Idomeneus bowed his head to the logic of the argument, but he made a face. ‘This is like suicide, lord.’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Not at all. Brief your men, lead them into the rubble and stay alive. We’re less than five minutes behind you.’

  Idomeneus looked desperate. ‘I’m doing this on behalf of my men. I can’t-’

  Satyrus wasn’t angry. He liked Idomeneus — he was one of the best soldiers he’d ever known. And he knew the pressure that was on the man from his archers, who felt naked when not covered by armoured men. But time was being wasted — Satyrus could feel the water-clock of fate somewhere in his head, running fast. Drip, drip, drip.

  ‘Go now. Promise them a bonus, if you must. But get them into the rubble.’ Satyrus pitched his voice just so. The voice that meant the argument was at an end.

  Idomeneus met his eye. ‘On your head be it,’ he said. In his glance was a straightforward accusation: his eyes accused Satyrus of sacrificing the archers.

  But Idomeneus sprinted to his men, already spread wide along the cross-street where the gymnasium had stood, and he blew a long note on a bone whistle round his neck and they followed him into the rubble.

  Satyrus went and walked along the front face of his formed phalanx. On the right, he set Apollodorus and the picked men of the marines and sailors in heavy armour — two hundred men of bronze. In the centre, with a thin front of marines, stood the bulk of his rowers and some Rhodian rowers and citizens as well, almost eight hundred. After the second rank, there was no armour. On the left were the Rhodian ephebes — all very young, but brilliantly armoured as the sons of the rich always are. The sailors were only six deep at the centre, whereas the flank units were deeper and heavier.

  The received wisdom of this style of warfare was that more lightly armed troops would operate better in the rubble. If Satyrus had possessed peltasts — fighters with light shields and javelins and perhaps swords — he would have been expected to use them as shock troops.

  Satyrus was not following the received wisdom. Instead, he’d posted his lightest troops in the densest phalanx formation he felt that they could maintain, and placed them where they could move over the flattest terrain with the least rubble, east of the temples. And his most heavily armed men — men virtually head-to-toe in bronze — he’d put out on the flanks in ridiculously open formations, almost as open as the ancient writers suggested men had fought before Marathon — six feet or more per man. His logic was simple: in the bad footing of the rubble, a man might easily face opponents from several directions, and only armour would keep him alive. Or so it seemed to him, and there was no one to tell him how bad an idea it might be.

  Satyrus finished walking along the front of the phalanx. He nodded to men he knew, or smiled at them, and they returned it. He knew most of them now — even the Rhodians. He had old Memnon right there in the second rank, Aspasia’s husband. And one of his sons, Polyphemus, stood a stade away in beautiful bronze, in the front rank of the ephebes. Satyrus found his eyes meeting those of Apollodorus and Neiron, of Anaxagoras, of Charmides and Jubal, hurrying to join in from his observation post with his team of upper-deck sailors.

  But no one spoke to him. He was alone. He smiled at them and they smiled back, but never the other way round.

  He turned to find Helios close behind him.

  ‘Korus says I am not to let you fight in the front rank,’ Helios said.

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ Satyrus said with a smile. He looked up and down the ranks one last time, and his ears told him something — he could not have defined it, quite, but there was a quality to the enemy war cry that suggested men were being hit by arrows. He’d seen enough war to know the sound.

  Now he had to fear that he’d waited too long, that his centre phalanx would take too long to file through the ruins of the three great temples into the clear ground to seaward. He reached up and tipped his helmet forward on his head and pulled the leather loop on the left cheek-plate against the pressure of the spring to hook over the right cheek-plate. An Italian design, men said. Very well made — much plainer than his magnificent silver helmet, taken years before from Demetrios.

  Funny thing to think about, at that moment.

  ‘Forward,’ Satyrus said.

  The sailors filed through the carefully cleared gaps in the smashed temples just as they’d practised. It was well enough done, and when men made mistakes, forgetting who they followed or what file went first, other men pushed them roughly but firmly. They flowed more than marched, but they crossed the deep rubble to the open ground by the harbour and reformed even as Satyrus, first across the rubble of the Temple of Poseidon, in the centre, watched the enemy forming his phalanx under a light hail of archery.

  It was just short of noon, and the midsummer sun beat down like a fall of scorching sand, a second enemy to both sides.

  Satyrus formed his phalanx with both flanks apparently empty. And then, when his whole body was formed — and it seemed to take for ever — he stepped out of his place in the second rank.

  ‘Friends!’ he roared.

  Not much movement. Behind him, Idomeneus’ men shot a volley of arrows and ran — they had done their part, as they saw it, and now they made for the safety of the sailors’ phalanx.

  ‘You can defeat these men. You have beaten them before. When you lock your pikes with them, put your backs into the push and wait for my word. When I call, let’s hear your war cry — and not until then. Ready?’

  There was the growl — the same growl with which, as oarsmen, they answered the call to ramming speed.

  Not for the first time, Satyrus wondered if there was an aggregate creature in the head of every oarsman — if, when together, they formed some sort of thousand-headed monster with but one set of thoughts.

  He slipped in behind Helios.

  ‘Forward!’ he called, and the centre bowed out as the phalanx went forward, but it was too late to worry about such things.

  The oarsmen were wearing sandals — siege sandals, men called them, because they’d learned how nasty the rubble was on their feet, even the rock-hard feet of an upper-deck man, and they’d made light leather boots to wear under heavy-soled sandals, and the marines had pulled every hobnail from their ‘Isocrates’ sandals, because the lifesaving purchase on a wet wooden deck was a ticket to slipping and lost footing on crumbled rock and broken marble.

&n
bsp; Satyrus was betting that the enemy would be barefoot. Greek soldiers — even Macedonians — often fought barefoot, for a surer footing. And if the men coming up the beach had never fought in a siege — and who had fought in a siege like this? — then they would probably be barefoot.

  The flanks of the sailors’ phalanx hurried to keep up, and the front rippled.

  The enemy was already close. They were deeper and formed loosely, and they had a curious mixture of weapons.

  Pirates.

  It took Satyrus precious seconds to see that Demetrios had not committed any of his precious Argyraspides or his Macedonian phalanxes this time. These were the pirates — the men who’d come only for plunder.

  Good or bad?

  There were heartbeats to impact. The pirates had the numbers by a factor of ten to one, but they were curiously hesitant. And barefoot.

  Crash!

  Satyrus’ men smashed into the front of the pirates like a battering ram into a gate, and men were knocked flat at the impact — men were actually impaled on the incoming pikes, as the pirates were so inexperienced, they hadn’t closed up or placed their shields to endure the storm of iron that was a pike phalanx oncoming, even with just six ranks of spearheads going home.

  But there were blows in return — a torrent of blows, a staggering ocean wave of blows.

  Satyrus had never been in the second rank before. It was terrifying. In the second rank, you could see. Men in the first rank crouched, tucked their eyes mostly under their shield rims and endured, parrying on instinct. In the second rank, a fighter could see the enemy. Could feel the press of his file behind him and translate it to the file leader — carefully, not allowing the file leader to be pushed to his death.

  Like most of the second-rankers, Satyrus had a heavy spear, not a pike. He had all the time in the world — it was odd, but all the fighting was two critical feet away — to cock his arm back and strike, a simple strong blow just below the crest box of the pirate’s helmet.

  The man dropped, and the spear returned to his hands and Helios stepped into the gap and cut — cut back — into the back of the helmet of the enemy pirate on his right, crushing the man’s skull instantly so that the man’s blood shot out of the faceplate of his helmet.

  Satyrus was ready. He practised every day with Helios — he knew these routines cold. He stepped up behind his hypaspist, in the process stepping on the man he’d put down with his first thrust, and shot his spear across Helios’ back into an oncoming pirate, this time thrusting down onto the man’s outstretched thigh or knee — no way to know what he hit, but the man screamed and Helios all but beheaded him on his own back cut, and now they were deep into the pirates’ formation and Satyrus could see Anaxagoras’ blue and white plume just a horse length to the left, equally deep.

  Satyrus had intended the attack of the sailors’ phalanx as a feint to lure the enemy into going for the flanks.

  No plan ever survives contact with the enemy. The sailors’ phalanx was crushing the pirates against their ships.

  Satyrus stood straight and took a deep breath — the pirates were cringing back — and roared ‘Arete!’ as loudly as he could.

  He counted to three in his head.

  ‘Blood in the water!’ he yelled.

  The answering roar was like surf on a windy day — like the thunder of Zeus, like the rumble of fate closing the scissors. The oarsmen had the measure of their opponents, and their war cry was so loud and so awful that the enemy froze like fawns before a raging lion, paralysed as the tide of bronze and iron swept them down the beach.

  Satyrus set his feet, picked a pirate in a fine helmet and threw his spear as hard as he could. He didn’t pause to see the effect. He slapped Helios.

  ‘I’m out,’ he said, and turned. ‘Let me through!’ he called back, and he pushed against the flowing tide of his own phalanx, slipping back rank by rank — glanced back, and was delighted to see that the colourful side plumes of the pirate officer were gone. He punched out through the back of his own phalanx, paused and took a few deep breaths.

  He felt good.

  Rear-rankers looked at him.

  He undid his cheek-plates and raised his helmet. ‘You!’ he said, pointing at one of Jubal’s deck men. ‘Go to Apollodorus and tell him to charge.’

  ‘Aye, lord!’ said the sailor.

  ‘And you,’ to the ephebes. ‘Tell them to forget the plan and get right down the beach on the widest possible front. Go now!’ Satyrus was shouting when he didn’t need to. He needed these men to understand — to carry his orders.

  ‘Aye, lord!’ the man cried, and dropping his spear, he ran off up the beach, headed north into the rubble.

  Herakles, stand with me. Something is wrong. This is too easy.

  Where are the Argyraspides?

  One thing at a time.

  ‘Jubal!’

  ‘Aye, lord?’

  ‘The whole rear rank — on me, right now. Form up tight.’ Satyrus stood a few horse lengths behind the rear rank and more than a hundred men left the back rank and fell in. Satyrus picked up the spear dropped by the messenger and held it out so that they formed along it — they were sailors, not Spartiates.

  ‘Three deep! Three deep!’ he yelled.

  Sailors and marines milled about, but in fifty heartbeats they were sorted — not pretty, by any means, but the advantage of sailors over phalangites was that sailors didn’t expect any kind of order in a fight. Chaos was natural to them.

  ‘As soon as the right man passes the end of our boys, we will wheel to the left!’ Satyrus yelled to them. ‘Look at me! Understood? We’ll link on our own left file and charge.’ He used the pike in his hands to illustrate.

  Men nodded. Other men looked blank.

  ‘Listen! Look at me!’ A few feet away, the sailors gave a great cry and the phalanx of sailors pushed forward the length of a great ox — and stopped. ‘We link up on that file right there and wheel like this,’ and he waved the pike again. Now he saw more recognition than confusion.

  He was out in front, with nowhere to go when the fighting started.

  So be it.

  ‘Forward!’ he called.

  His loose, thin line rolled forward, bowing like the amateurs they were.

  ‘To the right! Wheel!’ he roared in his best storm-caller voice, and most of the sailors wheeled, although at different speeds, and the whole front fell apart. Satyrus wanted to weep — this was the sort of manoeuvre his marines or his mercenary Macedonians could perform in their sleep.

  There were pirates teeming around the left face of his main phalanx, and the right-most files of his tiny counter-attack swept them away — and then he was in combat.

  His feet were on sand — they were actually on the beach. A man appeared in front of him out of the confusion of the fight, a small, wiry man with an earring and a bloody axe. Satyrus had lost the pike — where? — and he found that he had drawn his sword, and the little man cut overarm at him with the axe and Satyrus punched with his heavy shield, caught the haft of the axe on the rim of his shield and thrust, pushing with his legs to keep that axe pinned high in the air. The pirate tried to stumble backward, and when that failed he put his helmeted head down and attempted to headbutt Satyrus under the chin, but he got Satyrus’ sword through his neck and fell in a tangle. Satyrus pushed forward, feeling the daemon of combat for the first time in what seemed like months, caught a second man unawares with a clean cut to the neck that didn’t quite sever his head. Then Satyrus swung low against a third man, cutting the backs of his thighs under the rim of his shield, and then two blows hit his shield face solidly, rocking him back so that he stumbled, and a pair of impacts on his helmet staggered him again. He lashed out with his sword, a sweeping blow without skill, a stop-cut to buy himself a few heartbeats.

  He fell to one knee, and now he was one man, alone, and he had a pair of men focused on him, and another in his peripheral vision, an opportunist looking for an easy kill.

  Satyrus sh
ot to his feet with a powerful push of his right leg, slammed his big aspis face into the two men in front of him, bounced off them and lunged — the full length of his reach — against the man to his side, the opportunist, who got the point of a xiphos through his collarbone and neck for his efforts. But as he fell, Satyrus’ sharp sword caught in bone, and the falling man tore the sword from Satyrus’ grip.

  As if Herakles stood and coached him, Satyrus rolled his hips back to the left, reached out as if he’d practised the move a hundred times and caught the wrist of another pirate to his front, smashed his shield into the man’s unarmoured face and took his sword, stripping it from the man’s fingers. He felt that it was a kopis, a heavy chopping blade, and he turned back to his original opponents, pushed forward again with his supporting leg, raised his shield, saw his opponent raise his own shield in answer to the feint — an inexperienced man who was not going to live to learn. Satyrus chopped under the raised shield into hip and groin, and the man toppled like a small, straight ash cut by a strong woodsman and Satyrus viciously pushed the corpse — the man was already dead — into his file partner with his shield arm and followed it with a straight overarm chop and pivot on his left foot — so that the right foot passed the left, the whole weight of his body behind the blow, and the crooked blade of the kopis blew through the pirate’s light shield rim and the thin bronze of his helmet, too.

  Now no one would face him, and the whole of the pirate front bowed back before him and he stood alone, breathing hard like a boar that has slain all the brave hunting dogs and now faces only the curs.

  His own men were hanging back as well. Combat had those moments. Men could only stay locked breast to breast for so long — a hundred heartbeats, two hundred for the strongest and best, and then they had to step back and breathe.

  ‘The king!’ called a sailor at his back, and they took it up. ‘King!’ they called. ‘King!’