Tyrant: Force of Kings

by Christian Cameron

  ‘That’s news. How bad are the tolls?’ Menedemos asked.

  Satyrus made a face. ‘Since half my grain was for Athens, I was excused. Which was probably best for everyone concerned. But watch out for your own, Menedemos. Demetrios can squeeze you without breaking the truce.’

  ‘He can squeeze,’ Menedemos said, ‘but he needs to sell his products from Asia, too. He needs us. Hades, if Antigonus would see sense, he’d see that he needs Alexandria, too. We could all make money – no need for this endless squabble.’

  Satyrus smiled. ‘I think that Demetrios has other interests besides a healthy trade balance,’ he said.

  The last time he’d been at Abraham’s house, the tile floor of the andron had been naked to the stars. Now the walls were back up, and the whole house smelled of fresh clay and fresh plaster – an earthy smell with a hint of lime and acid under it.

  Jacob, Abraham’s steward, let him inside the courtyard. ‘My lord!’ he said, and took Satyrus’s hand.

  ‘Jacob,’ Satyrus said. He embraced the older man. ‘I sent a letter.’

  ‘We had it, lord. The plaster is still wet, but everything is to order. I have hardly any slaves, lord – Abraham freed most of them during the siege. But I have enough staff to move furniture and make food.’ Jacob bowed to Menedemos. ‘May I fetch you gentlemen a cup of wine?’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘And something for Anaxagoras and Apollodorus, as well, Jacob. They’ll be along shortly. Do you have a shortage of slaves, then?’

  Menedemos nodded. ‘The city – that’s me – we’re buying almost every load that comes into town. We need them just to rebuild the walls – and level the besiegers’ camp.’

  Satyrus grimaced. ‘I’d hoped to get myself a new hypaspist. Or at least a body slave.’

  Jacob shook his head while an older woman served wine. ‘Perhaps at Delos, lord. Not here.’

  Later, Satyrus walked out of the house alone – a rare moment for a king – and along the newly restored back streets towards the back of the temple of Poseidon, where the agora was.

  It was late in the day. Down at the piers, his ships were disgorging grain as fast as slaves and oarsmen could empty the holds, and his marines and sailors were already filling the wine ships and taverns on the waterfront. Anaxagoras was sound asleep in the heavy heat of late summer.

  Satyrus had a hard time moving on the streets, because everyone in the town knew him, and men would stop to embrace his arm, or bow. Women raised their eyes to him, and men smiled and pointed him out to their children.

  He wondered if he were better known in Rhodes than in Pantecapaeaum. Theron had told him that this was going to be his last adventure – that it was time for him to stay home and act like a king.

  Satyrus had every intention of acting like a king – when he had Miriam by his side. He was cruising the Mediterranean to honour his commitments to Demetrios – grain for Athens – and to get his hostages back. When his duty was done, and when Miriam was free, Satyrus was ready to go back to his kingdom and never, ever leave. He smiled at the thought.

  Even this trip … Tanais had never looked finer, and his new ships being built at the new slips had been a sight he wanted to stay and enjoy. He’d come to enjoy giving justice, and walking in the agora, and having men listen to his opinions.

  He smiled at another veteran of the siege, and bowed a little to a trio of women – widows – by the wall of the temple, where he and Miriam had curled side by side in the first light of morning, preparing for another day of siege. He felt close to her here – illogical, as she was in Athens, but he felt as if she might step out of the back streets, or emerge with her women behind her from the market.

  Then he walked across the agora, where his own statue stood near those of Demetrios and Antigonus and Lysimachos. The Rhodians were great ones for dedicating statues, and even at the height of the siege they hadn’t destroyed the statues of the men laying the siege. And now he had his own. He stood looking at it.

  There was no echo in it, and he felt an obscure disappointment. What had he expected? A conversation with himself ?

  Past the statues. Small boys were trailing him, more than a dozen of them, some begging and more just shouting his name.

  At the far western end of the market there was a small grove of olives, just six or eight trees, and the entrance to an underground temple of vast antiquity, where the city’s reserve grain supply had been stored during the siege. Now there was a new altar atop the underground temple, a large, ornate marble with a deeply indented top and scrolled sides. In front of the altar were placed a dozen stele, markers for the dead of the siege.

  Jubal, his oar master and sometime siege engineer, sat on his haunches by one of them. He had some teeth missing, and his face had the deep brown of old, salt-stained leather. His dusty cheeks were marked by the tracks of tears.

  Satyrus ignored the boys and squatted by Jubal.

  ‘Neiron,’ Jubal said.

  ‘Helios,’ Satyrus added.

  One by one, they traced the names of their own dead on the newly cut stele. Even the boys were silent.

  When they were done, they paid the priestess to sacrifice a young ox, and gave most of the meat away. Before the smoke from the fat and bones began to rise to the gods, Anaxagoras came, and Apollodorus. They, too, looked at the stones. They, too, wept.

  Other men came forward – some drawn by the free meat, and others by the observance, and hours passed before they were free to walk, arm in arm, back to Abraham’s house.

  Menedemos was with them by then, and the five of them held a small symposium under the stars in the restored garden.

  Apollodorus grew drunk quickly, and he cried and cried – a fountain of tears. Anaxagoras watched him cry like a man watched a dangerous stranger.

  ‘I have never seen him cry,’ he said.

  Satyrus took another drink. ‘I doubt he cries while the enemy are still on his deck,’ he said.

  ‘Men don’t cry for lost friends, they cry for themselves,’ Anaxagoras said.

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Easy to say, philos. But when I think of Helios, I don’t think just of what I lost – good hot wine every morning. Clothes ready when I wanted them. A spear at my shoulder I could trust. By the gods – if that were all, I’d be a pitiful specimen. Apollodorus, too. What does Achilles say? Better a slave to a bad master than a king in Hades? Helios is gone to the land of shades. I’ll be there soon enough, myself.’

  ‘Maudlin, too.’ Anaxagoras held out his cup for more wine and flopped on his stomach.

  ‘What do you do when you aren’t criticising me?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘I criticise myself. The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Anaxagoras laughed. ‘Where is young Charmides?’

  ‘Out in a brothel putting all that youth and beauty to good use, I suspect. Or perhaps wooing under some lucky maiden’s balcony.’ Satyrus spilled wine. ‘Here’s to him.’

  ‘Ares, you sound like some forty-year-old with a paunch and no hair,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You are, what, five years older than Charmides?’

  Across the couches, Jubal had managed to stand. He embraced Jacob, or perhaps just fell against him, and went off to bed. Satyrus rose, and so did Anaxagoras, and they left Apollodorus, face down on his kline, weeping as if he would never cease.

  2

  ‘This is all taking too long,’ Satyrus muttered. He hoped that he was keeping his thoughts to himself – his ships were lading and unlading as fast as the well-bribed slaves could work, and he’d already received payment, and still it seemed to him that every jar of grain was taking an age to move.

  Anaxagoras, standing next to him on the great stone pier, his ruddy skin almost white in the full glare of the sun, made an expression with his mouth – wry, deprecating, knowing, amused, all in a single pull of the lips.

  Satyrus caught the expressi
on and knew that he was transparent.

  ‘You know perfectly well that she’s capable of entertaining herself,’ Anaxagoras said. Unforgivably accurate, damningly exact and on the topic of his thoughts. ‘She’s not some foolish dancing girl who will pine for you a day or two and then spread herself for the next pretty young king who wanders by.’

  ‘You’re not as funny as you think you are,’ Satyrus said. He tried to keep his tone light.

  Both of them had been in love with Miriam – at the same time. To some remarkable degree, their friendship was based on that rivalry, and how they had risen above it. But Satyrus still avoided discussing Miriam with his friend, sometimes from a sense of propriety, and sometimes because he feared ridicule. Anaxagoras had – apparently – transferred his attentions to Satyrus’s own sister, Melitta.

  ‘I am,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You’re just not in the mood to laugh. I can turn the knife on myself – your sister is out on the plains right now, with at least one former lover and ten men who want her to wife – every one of whom can ride a horse like the wind and shoot a bow.’

  ‘If my sister had wanted a Sakje, she’d have had one,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘That was rather my point,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I know that I have nothing to fear.’ He looked at Satyrus. His tone, his expression, admitted that the exact opposite was the case, and he laughed ruefully.

  ‘At least you’ll see Miriam in Athens,’ Anaxagoras said.

  ‘If we ever get there,’ Satyrus allowed.

  It was cooler on the palaestra, the sand beautiful between his toes, the sea breeze curling through the colonnade to cool his sweat-slicked skin.

  He and Anaxagoras had wrestled, boxed, fought two throws of pankration, and were now facing each other with short swords made of wood and their chlamyses wrapped around their shield arms. Satyrus had the feeling one gets from heavy exercise, a few bruises, a body in the peak of condition.

  Anaxagoras had had a year-long siege to make a swordsman of himself, and he was excellent – taught by the same tutor who had helped Satyrus to restore his muscles after a wasting disease. So they circled each other warily, and Anaxagoras, once an aggressive but clumsy swordsman, now bided his time, aware that, as the inferior fighter – although not by much – he needed to launch counter-strikes rather than trying to move in on Satyrus’s longer arms and greater experience.

  Satyrus knew this as well, and he was tired – pleasantly tired, but with enough fatigue in his muscles to restrain him. He circled; sidestepped, and subsided again. For several long moments, both men were perfectly still.

  ‘This is the last touch. I want a massage,’ Satyrus said. It could be hard to be the king, all the time. Even Anaxagoras, who had the artist’s ability to be any man’s equal, deferred to him in matters of training. Anaxagoras would spar until he dropped of exhaustion – it was always left to Satyrus to call quits.

  Anaxagoras nodded slightly.

  He stepped to the left again, as Satyrus expected him to, and Satyrus launched a slow attack – so slow as to be almost languorous. His wrapped cloak flew off his arm like a live thing, fluttering out to snap, the cloak weight dragging the heavy cloth out flat for a fraction of a heartbeat.

  Anaxagoras pivoted on both feet, rotating his hips to avoid the weight with his face, and his own cloaked arm snapped out to bat the incoming sword, but found no weapon, and dropped lower, seeking it.

  Satyrus’s blow was so slow that Anaxagoras’s parry, blinded by the swirl of cloak, missed it entirely, and the wooden blade smacked him in the side of the neck – a trifle too hard. He dropped to one knee, his hand to his neck.

  Satyrus was at his side, sword dropped. ‘Apollo! A thousand apologies, Anaxagoras!’

  The musician shook his head. ‘It’s nothing. Or rather, it is a fitting accompaniment to my sense of humiliation. How, exactly, did you land that blow?’

  Assured of his friend’s health, Satyrus was suffused with pride. ‘It is a timing blow. It would never work without the cloak – it simply baffles the opponent’s notions of the speed of the fight.’

  ‘Devastating!’ Anaxagoras said.

  ‘Not if your opponent strikes fast – expects the blow, cuts at the sword arm,’ Apollodorus commented from the colonnade.

  ‘Look who’s recovered from his wine!’ Anaxagoras said, clearly piqued that the other man had seen him hit so easily.

  Satyrus smiled inwardly at the ease with which men – men who were friends and comrades – could nonetheless cause each other offence. Satyrus was almost never offended by Apollodorus and his abrasive commentary on all fields of martial endeavour – the man was a professional, and his comments were meant only as professional criticism, no more. But the small, sharp-featured man had never mastered the art of giving criticism.

  ‘Let’s fight a bout and see,’ Apollodorus said, coming onto the sand. He pulled his chlamys off and wrapped it around his arm, disclosing a body laced with scars the way barbarians wore tattoos. Satyrus had never counted them, but he expected that his captain of marines had at least a hundred scars, most of them on his forearms and lower legs, a few on his back, and one that indented his neck, where his heavy shoulder muscle met his collarbone, and ran, red, shiny and deep, across his chest to his hip.

  Apollodorus was a small man, but neatly built, heavily muscled, and fast. Satyrus tossed him his practice sword, and he and Anaxagoras began to circle.

  Anaxagoras remained cautious and defensive, which Satyrus read as a sign of anger. In combat, Anaxagoras was dangerously aggressive, almost as if he knew the hour of his fate and had little care until that time. Apollodorus was usually the cautious fighter – a man only survives as much combat as Apollodorus had seen by virtue of some caution. But today he was the one committed to attack.

  ‘We are at the end of our workout,’ Satyrus said. ‘Wine-bibbers have to take the consequences of their excess.’

  ‘You’re next,’ Apollodorus said. As he spoke, his chlamys-arm snapped out in a feint, and his sword followed, a fraction of a heartbeat behind.

  As fast as thought, Anaxagoras parried, the two swords clicking together hard.

  But Apollodorus didn’t maintain the pressure. Instead, he dropped his weapon, stepped in, and grappled, his now free sword-hand seizing Anaxagoras’s wrist expertly, his cloak over the musician’s head.

  Anaxagoras raised his left hand, indicating he’d lost, and Apollodorus unwrapped him from the folds of his cloak. ‘I needed last night,’ he said. The words held no apology, but the tone did.

  ‘I have been thoroughly put in my place,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I’ll go back to the lyre and leave the sword to you two.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Apollodorus said. ‘If you could beat me, I’d be a pretty poor specimen. I’ve fought for twenty years – and practised ten years before that.’ He nodded to Satyrus. ‘Your turn.’

  Satyrus caught the sword that Anaxagoras tossed him – and found that Apollodorus was on him immediately, sword and cloak weaving like a pair of dancers. He reacted without thought, ducking, backing – got his cloak on the other man’s sword and tried for a seizure and missed, tried snapping a kick to the other man’s shin and connected – a glancing blow, but it put him in the pattern and Apollodorus fell back, and Satyrus snapped his chlamys, his sword hidden behind it, and stepped back himself to breathe – and Apollodorus’s sword hit his wrist hard enough to cause him to drop his own sword.

  Anaxagoras clapped his hands together. There were other men standing under the colonnade and they applauded as well. ‘Splendid!’ called a younger man – Satyrus couldn’t remember his name, but the man had been an Ephebe during the siege. He was still thin. Satyrus wondered if any of them would return to their full weight after a year on starvation rations.

  He rubbed his wrist and smiled at Apollodorus. ‘You are still the master,’ he said.

  Apollodorus rubbed his s
hin. ‘If you had kicked for real, I might never have launched that blow,’ he said.

  Satyrus found his hands were shaking – muscle fatigue and the daimon of combat together. ‘I’m done,’ he said, showing his shaking hands.

  Other men went out onto the sands, wrestling or boxing, and Satyrus realised that they had all been waiting for him – giving him the sand, as men said of someone they respected. He smiled around, trying to catch every eye – thanking them for their good opinion of him.

  It was good to be a hero.

  He went in to get a massage and a bath.

  Later, after a review of his accounts with Abraham’s steward, he met Anaxagoras in the courtyard, his lyre tucked under his arm as a much younger man would.

  ‘Revenge is sweet,’ Anaxagoras said with an evil smile.

  Indeed, Anaxagoras was the very best of teachers – endlessly patient, his voice carefully modulated, slow to praise and slow to anger – so that when he did praise, a student knew he had done well indeed, and when his cheeks did mottle red, a student knew he’d been very foolish indeed.

  Nor was this in any way a reversal of their bouts on the palaestra. Anaxagoras was a competent wrestler, an excellent boxer, a quick study at pankration, and now a brilliant swordsman. Satyrus was, at best, an indifferent musician. He loved to play – enjoyed any music, was constantly and pleasantly surprised that he could play anything at all – but seldom practised hard, so that simple fingerings were still the limit of his powers, and it was rare that duties – and pleasures – allowed him the time or the inclination to take a complete lesson.

  ‘Play the scale again. This time, every other note,’ Anaxagoras said.

  Satyrus did as he was told.

  ‘Now again, with regard to the tempo. Every note exactly the same length,’ Anaxagoras said.

  The control of his face suggested he was hiding a smile. Satyrus tended to play all the notes in a tune, but without the strict adherence to time essential to make the music correctly.