Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

  ‘What do you think it means?’ he asked Jubal.

  Jubal frowned. It was rare for the Nubian to frown. He watched as the fourth crane was erected, chewing on a piece of rawhide, on and on. Long after Satyrus expected an answer and then gave up on getting one, the black engineer shook his head and turned away.

  ‘It means we fucked,’ he said quietly, and spat.

  The next morning dawned crisp and cold and windless. No sails marked the far horizon.

  In Demetrios’ camp, the four cranes were slowly linked with cross beams, so high in the air that men took a quarter of a watch to climb the ladders up to the cranes’ tops.

  Satyrus didn’t let himself watch too long. It was demoralising. Instead, with Lysander at his heels, and Charmides, who had taken over as his hypaspist, he walked down to the olive grove, entered the steps under the sanctuary of Demeter and inspected the pithoi of grain there — the city’s remaining stock.

  A pair of very lean cats sat by the guard’s brazier.

  ‘Out of rats?’ Satyrus asked, but the joke fell flat. The grain guards — his own marines — barely raised their heads. A quarter-ration of grain was enough to sustain life. Just. And no more.

  He walked along the ranks of the pithoi, and he opened them, and he and Lysander inspected them with the priestess, Hirene, and her assistant Lysistrada. Satyrus smiled to himself, but the smile was grim.

  Lysander marked his tablets carefully, and they bowed to the priestesses and went back above ground. Satyrus paused to pat the cats. And noted, with a cold surprise, that his hand was thin. Skeletal, in fact.

  ‘Puss, puss,’ he said. ‘Didn’t anyone give you some horse meat?’

  Hepius, a marine phylarch from Athens, squinted out of the dark. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Let’s fatten ’em up a bit before we eat ’em.’

  Hirene let out a squawk of outrage.

  Satyrus managed a smile. ‘Despoina, your cats are safe as long as the town stands.’

  But to Charmides, he said, ‘All officers. Right now.’

  ‘We have two weeks’ food at quarter-rations,’ Satyrus said.

  They just looked at him. All the surviving members of the boule; all the officers of his long-lost Arete. His sister’s people, and the captains of the ephebes. The surviving Cretans. They didn’t raise their voices, shout, or even murmur.

  They just watched him with flat eyes, waiting.

  Aspasia was as thin as a mainmast stripped of the yard. And Miriam — Miriam’s eyes filled her face, and her long legs were a mockery. Her hip bones showed through her chiton.

  Nor was Charmides much better. He was thin, and Nike’s death had left him bitter.

  Abraham looked like a living skull. But he was the one to speak. ‘I will go to Demetrios,’ he said. ‘Someone must try.’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘No. No, if anyone goes, it will be me. After all, he wanted this to be personal. Between us.’

  ‘What do we do?’ Apollodorus asked. ‘Sit and wait?’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘I wanted you to know. I believe in Diokles. He will come back. I think we should eat our sandals and hold on.’

  Memnon sighed. He looked at his wife. ‘I thought we’d won. Ten times, I thought we’d won. But,’ he looked around, ‘we’ve lost, haven’t we?’

  Satyrus nodded in agreement, but Miriam stepped forward.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, we have not lost. By God above, men are fools. We have struggled, and we have not surrendered.’ She looked around. ‘Three years ago, I sat at my loom in Alexandria and wished that, someday, I could have a real life where I could breathe free air and be a person, a human being, free of the Tyrant who ran my life. We have held — for almost a year. Spring is coming. We had a year.’ She stammered off at the end, and then gave a self-conscious laugh and was silent. But when no one mocked her, she said, ‘If I die tomorrow, I will not bow my head. My God will understand. We Jews are stiff-necked people. Let us talk no more of surrender.’

  She was embarrassed at her own words, but Memnon clasped her hand, and Damophilus and Apollodorus clapped her on the back.

  Melitta cleared her throat. ‘For the Sakje, there will be no surrender. And brother — I came to rescue you, not to die here.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Well, then. Thanks. All of you. Let’s quarter the ruins and search the cellars — especially the first houses to take hits — and see if we can dig up a few mythemnoi of grain.’

  Charmides managed a real laugh. ‘It’s always about the grain,’ he said.

  Dawn, and chanting from the enemy camp.

  The stick figures of Rhodian citizens lined the sea wall and the south wall closest to the enemy camp.

  Ropes — great hawsers, thick enough to be visible even at that distance — were rigged to the massive crane structure. And by early morning, they were taught.

  The monster that rose over the enemy camp was so tall that it reached above the towers, and in its last seconds as it was righted, it rocked twice — leaning so far that one of the crane arms was dashed to pieces, and a dozen men fell to their deaths. But righted it was.

  The tower was the height of twenty men. The wheels along its base were twice the height of a man. It was as wide as two houses and as deep again, tapering slightly from bottom to top like an immense pyramid, and through the open sides the Rhodians could see six floors.

  No sooner was it steady on its wheels than slaves and soldiers raised a great cry and began to roll it forward.

  It rolled well. The wheels worked.

  It was the largest moving thing made by the hand of man that Satyrus had ever seen.

  Demetrios watched his toy with the joy of the creator. His hands had shaped both wood and iron. He had marked the drawings, and his hands had pulled the hawsers to raise the recumbent tower from its building site. Its sheer size awed him, and he had helped design it. Ctesibius, the chief designer, couldn’t stop looking at it.

  ‘Now I am a god,’ Demetrios said.

  Ctesibius agreed. ‘A pyramid on wheels,’ he said, his voice low. ‘Full of engines. Fifty cubits on a side.’ The engineer giggled.

  ‘What shall we call it?’ Plistias asked.

  ‘Helepolis,’ Demetrios intoned like a priest. ‘The Destroyer of Cities.’

  The giant thing which towered over their tallest wall and made a mockery of their defences might have been the last straw.

  But the men and women of Rhodes had endured ten months of war, and their sense of awe was dulled. Had the great machine been brought against them in the first month -

  But no: it was the tenth month. For three days they watched as the smiths carried iron plates to the waiting leviathan. On the fourth day, artisans and slaves began bolting the iron to the frame — all nine storeys of it. More building was still going on at the top of the frame, and the whole edifice had been rolled clear of the abatises that surrounded the enemy camp onto a swathe two stades wide that six thousand slaves, the survivors of the fever, began to clear like a pathway for the gods from the machine right up to the south wall. They filled the deep places and levelled the smallest heights, long lines of them working all together so that they crept across the plain, too slow to watch, too fast for hope.

  A whole taxeis stood guard all night in front of the machine, with a hundred Cretan archers.

  Satyrus watched them with Jubal from his own, much lower tower. Watched them for most of a day.

  And watched the empty sea.

  One by one, Satyrus talked to his friends. He talked, alone, to Miriam. To Abraham. To Anaxagoras and Melitta, to Charmides and Lysander and Apollodorus, to Korus and Memnon, to Damophilus and Socrates.

  None of them was interested in taking the two surviving ships. None of them was interested in surrender.

  So at noon that day, the three hundred and third day of the siege, the one hundred and twenty-fifth day of the archonship of Pherecles of Athens, the one hundred and nineteenth Olympiad, Satyrus ordered his marines into the vaults of Demeter wi
th the permission of the priestesses and removed the last eighteen pithoi. And he gathered the entire population in the agora and distributed the grain. All the grain.

  ‘Tomorrow is Anthesteria in Athens and Tanais,’ he said. ‘When men rope up the temples and let the spirits of the dead roam free. When Dionysus walks the earth. Feast. Eat it all.’

  Silently, orderly and disciplined, they took the grain — just exactly a double ration of grain for every man and woman.

  In Abraham’s tent, his friends were quiet. Satyrus took his turn with the two bronze cauldrons full of barley meal and coriander, and the whole of an unlucky migrant bird that had passed too close to Melitta’s bow. The smell alone was like lust and gluttony together.

  ‘So,’ Miriam said, approaching him cautiously, like a hunter. ‘We’re done for?’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘I trust my gods,’ he said. ‘We Hellenes are also a stiff-necked people.’

  Apollodorus stuck a horn spoon into the porridge and tasted it, burning his tongue. ‘Ow!’ he said.

  ‘Serves you right,’ Satyrus shot back, smacking him with his wooden spoon.

  Apollodorus didn’t bother to look contrite. ‘You’re feeding us up,’ he said. ‘So we’re going to attack.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  Apollodorus embraced him. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s die standing up.’

  It turned out that people can get drunk on grain, if they’ve been hungry long enough.

  Anthesteria was not always the loudest of holidays — kept in late winter, a cry to the coming spring, usually celebrated indoors. But with a double ration of food in their bellies, the six thousand surviving Rhodians sang hymns to the night and all the gods, roaring away — hymn after hymn to Demeter and Kore, and then to Apollo, to Herakles, to Ares and Athena. Thankful only for food and one more day, they sang to every god. Hymn after hymn rose to the heavens, an endless paean from nightfall to midnight. Shivering sentries on the Antigonid entrenchments wondered how, how in all Tartarus the Rhodians had the strength to sing, or even to walk. They huddled in their cloaks and smelled the smell of warm food floating on the wind, and when the hymn to Dionysus came across no-man’s land, disgusted sentries spat in contempt for their own improvident commanders — or joined the song.

  Satyrus looked around the fire. The stars had wheeled away past the middle watch, and every man who could walk was in armour — and some of the women as well. Every officer was here, in the middle of the agora, at the biggest bonfire they could build — not really all that big. Carrying wood was hard work, and starving men are easily tired. And the wood was mostly gone with the grain and the oil. The beached ships were already consumed.

  Satyrus looked at them in the firelight. It was a kind, ruddy light, and it gave Charmides and Miriam back their beauty, three months gone; gave Melitta back her youth, lost in the valleys of the Tanais, and Anaxagoras looked like a god.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Lysander barked, long before Satyrus was ready to stop drinking them in. One last time.

  They were instantly silent. It took a year’s siege to turn Greeks into disciplined men and women — but they were. The only sound was the hymn-singing, led by Leosthenes, out along the south wall.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘So,’ he said. He smiled. Looked from face to face. It was almost funny, the way they expected him to provide a magical spell of victory. ‘So. Friends.’ He hung his head, embarrassed by their trust in him. And then he raised his head. ‘Listen. There is no trick to save us, now. I don’t have a fancy plan. When we raise the paean to Athena, we go over the south wall and go for the monster.’ He shrugged. ‘First man there is King of Misrule.’

  Anaxagoras sighed. ‘That’s it?’ he asked.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Kill everyone who gets in your way. It’ll be dark. That can’t hurt us.’

  Abraham raised an eyebrow — for a moment, his old self. ‘And when the sun rises?’ he asked.

  Satyrus locked eyes with Miriam. ‘Die well,’ he said. Then he walked from man to man and embraced them all. He hugged Aspasia. He hugged his sister, and she shook her head.

  ‘This is not what I came for,’ she said.

  ‘Then escape!’ he murmured into her hair.

  ‘No. No — I couldn’t face Mother in the spirit world, if I left you.’ She hugged him closer. ‘You kill a thousand, I kill a thousand — Abraham’s good for five hundred, Charmides looks capable — and we wipe them out.’

  And last, he embraced Miriam. ‘I would have married you,’ he said.

  ‘I would have accepted,’ she said. She kissed him.

  And then he led them to the foot of the wall, and the morning star rose, and four thousand voices started on the hymn to Athena.

  Once, visiting Athens, Satyrus had watched a desperate older man beat a much better younger man at pankration, on the palaestra of the Lyceum outside the walls of the city. Hundreds of men had watched as the older fellow — a plain-spoken country man, trained well enough but no champion, stubbornly refuse to raise a hand in surrender, for the simple reason that the young champion had been rude in his challenge. And when he was groggy from blows to the head, the younger man mocked him as a drunkard, a satyr, a shepherd.

  Satyrus had watched the older man’s face absorb the insult. Watched as the man stopped, readied himself and threw everything he had left into a stupid roundhouse blow, the sort of big, long, easy-to-dodge blow that untrained men use. The younger man saw it coming. But somehow — through indecision or poor training, or, as Satyrus saw it, the punishment of the gods — the champion stood as if rooted to the spot in amazement as the other man’s twinned fists slammed into the side of his head, and he slumped to the ground, completely unconscious.

  On that night, the remnants of the Rhodian garrison swept over the south wall like a black sea and rolled over the remnants of the second wall and the first wall, crushing the sentries and the reserve, and raced across the plain like a well-ordered tide across a salt flat when the moon is full.

  Like the young champion, the Macedonian taxeis awaited the garrison with confidence.

  Satyrus kept the oarsmen to an easy jog once they made the good ground. They were keeping up with the ephebes and the town mercenaries, but the city hoplites were lagging behind and there was nothing Satyrus could do about it. So he led them at a jog across the open ground, and saw the enemy phalanx form with plenty of time to achieve close order.

  Satyrus slowed his oarsmen three hundred paces from the glittering enemy line. Dawn was already a pale line in the east, and there were trumpets everywhere.

  He smiled. It was too late. For these men.

  ‘Files!’ he called, and the oarsmen doubled to the front, a Spartan manoeuvre that left every front-rank shield firmly overlapped — the synaspis.

  His men hadn’t stopped moving. A year of continuous action allows a unit to achieve a degree of drill that borders on beyond human. Half-files merely slowed a half a pace, waited while the new file leaders marched into the intervals at a jog, and then, as the shields locked, gave a low shout — just the file leaders.

  ‘Spears!’ Satyrus called. Two hundred paces. And the Macedonians weren’t moving. It was getting late for them to start forward — he could see their spears moving — but it was hard to read them in the dark, and Satyrus didn’t really care very much what they did.

  Behind and alongside him, the front three ranks levelled their spears, and the back seven ranks pressed forward tighter, still at a fast walk.

  ‘Paean!’ Satyrus called.

  Apollodorus raised his head.

  A wall of sound leaped out from the oarsmen, and the Macedonians reacted as if they’d been hit by arrows — they recoiled, and into their confusion came the marines, and the moment of impact was like a thousand bronzesmiths beating on a thousand cauldrons across the sky, and the Macedonian phalanx burst asunder at the impact, and was destroyed.

  It shouldn’t have happened.

 
; Because it did, the first relief taxeis on the road was caught in the disaster, with routers and tent-mates bursting through their ranks, and the ephebes and the slightly late city hoplites crashed into the disordered second phalanx and drove it back.

  And then the fighting lost any kind of order. The attack of the city hoplites was the last moment in the action when Satyrus could see anything, or tell his friends from his foes — or claim to be in command.

  The marines were cheering all around him, and the women in the rear ranks ran forward with fire pots and in heartbeats the timbers of the leviathan were aflame. Assembled war engines around the great wheels were shoved together, and the flames began to light the sky, and Satyrus tasted victory.

  But he knew the taste was false. He had two thousand men, and Demetrios, however surprised, had thirty thousand.

  Demetrios’ counter-attack fell like a hammer on the victorious Rhodians.

  The marines were still together — Charmides was close to his back and Apollodorus was on one side and Anaxagoras on his other, with Abraham’s skeletal figure at his back, when the counter-attack smashed into them. Satyrus took a shield against his own shield, abandoned any thought of command and was a hoplite — shield to shield, his spear sliding off his enemy’s shield as his enemy’s spear probed for his eyes and rang against his helmet, pressed so close that he could smell the cardamom on the other man’s breath. So close that he hooked the man’s shield with his own and punched with his rim — larger shield, stronger arm — and the man went down, and Satyrus was in his place. ‘On me, marines!’ Satyrus called, as if it was a ship fight.

  Charmides got his next opponent, through luck or precision; the man was down before he could set his hips, a spear point in his eye. The enemy phalangites were silhouetted against the burning machines, and they paid.

  Apollodorus downed his man and stepped forward and fouled a spear — Anaxagoras pushed with his shoulder, and the man facing Satyrus flinched, fear rising in his eyes as he saw the whole rank in front of him die, and he backed away. Satyrus pushed into him, slamming shield to shield and stabbing under the shield rush — sword into something soft, and he pushed, and a blow rang off his helmet. He managed a guard with his sword, stepped forward — right in front of left, rotated his hips and swung his sword like a meat cleaver into the next aspis rim and split the badly made shield clear through, breaking the owner’s arm with a shriek that Charmides ended. Not just luck, then — the boy was a master spearman.