Tyrant: Force of Kings

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Good looks and good birth will not overcome a single enemy,’ Lucius said to the angry young man, ‘and if you burst into tears in front of your Macedonians, you can count on their deserting you. There’s no amount of gold darics that will make a Macedonian stand for a cry-baby. In that, at least, they are like Romans.’

  If he wept, he did it in secret.

  And after ten days on the road, his back was straighter, and he had ceased to whine.

  On the eleventh day, he was almost killed. He was bursting to try his newly learned combat arts, and when a wrangler spat on him – haughty airs win no friends on the Royal Road – he whirled, drew his sword, and cut at the man. Lucius had to admit later that he had drawn and cut with skill.

  But Herakles had the bad luck to choose a Persian nobleman fallen on hard times – an older man who had been fighting for thirty years – who sprang back, his whip shooting out and disarming the eager prince, and then his sword was free.

  Herakles froze.

  Luckily, Lucius had seen the whole thing coming. He was behind the Persian – armlock, disarm, trip – and he had his sword against the other man’s neck.

  Stratokles stood aloof, shaking his head. He’d come within a few heartbeats of losing his new master. And the boy tried to hide it, but he wept in mortification at being disarmed. They were a quiet party as they rode away.

  East of Sardis, Stratokles heard a rumour that Antigonus was marching, and that Demetrios was at the point of taking Corinth.

  He shook his head that night, over the camp fire. ‘If Ptolemy and Seleucus don’t act soon, Cassander’s going to be caught between the hammer and anvil.’

  Lucius laughed. ‘You sound unhappy. You want Cassander dead.’

  Stratokles frowned. ‘I’d like him punished, but only at my own hand. I’ve miscalculated – I thought that after the failure of the siege of Rhodos, Demetrios would fold like a house of cards, but he’s rebuilt himself.’

  ‘Lysimachos?’ asked Lucius.

  ‘The best of the lot, even if he’s the one who sold me down the river – or demanded my head. I should have seen that coming. He’s wily and he’s a good diplomat, but he hasn’t the generalship to stop Antigonus – nor does he have the troops. He’ll be besieged in Heraklea before the year is out. Trapped, unless something can end the truce Demetrios has with Rhodes and bring the Rhodians back into the war.’

  ‘So what are we doing?’ asked Herakles. He had recovered – the best thing you could say about him is that he didn’t stay beaten long.

  Stratokles shook his head and rubbed his nose. ‘I don’t know yet. Ask me at Sardis.’

  Sardis – and all memory of the comforts of Banugul’s bed were lost in the dust of twenty-five days on the road.

  ‘Swordsmith in the agora says Satyrus of Tanais was murdered in Athens by Demetrios,’ Lucius reported after a scouting trip inside the gates. They’d been on the road long enough now that Stratokles was taking every precaution – including watching his young prince’s bodyguards for defection.

  ‘Satyrus has been reported dead more times than a porne plays flutes at a symposium,’ Stratokles quipped, pushing a sausage down on a stick. ‘But if Demetrios attacked him – kidnapped him? Whichever – he’s made a bad mistake.’ He hunkered down and started to cook the sausage, and Lucius handed him a wineskin full of drinkable wine. ‘I hate it when the big players make stupid mistakes,’ Stratokles complained. ‘I can’t plan for other men to behave like children.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Herakles said. He didn’t whine when he said it, though.

  ‘Nor should you, lad. Satyrus of Tanais helped break the siege of Rhodos. He’s part of the truce that came out of the end of the siege – he swore to the gods not to attack Demetrios. And he has a powerful fleet. If Demetrios killed him, he’s voided the truce, and Melitta will go for his jugular.’ Stratokles shook his head. ‘If she acts quickly, she’ll retake the Bosporus, or simply allow Lysimachos and Cassander to move freely. Why on earth would Demetrios do such a fool thing?’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  Herakles pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps,’ he said slowly, clearly afraid to be ridiculed, ‘perhaps it wasn’t Demetrios who did it?’

  He flushed with pleasure – his fair skin showed the flush even by firelight – when Lucius and Stratokles both looked at him with new attention.

  ‘Ahh!’ said Stratokles. He sat back on his haunches, and took a bite of sausage. Then a drink of wine. He passed the wineskin to Herakles, who took it with pleasure. ‘Not bad, young man.’

  Lucius smiled. ‘The wine, or the notion?’

  Stratokles nodded. ‘Either. Both. If Cassander arranged it – ah, master-stroke. Revenge for an old failure, all suspicion on Demetrios, and Melitta coming over to his side even though my Amastris just jilted her brother.’ He rubbed his nose, belched, and held out a hand for the wineskin. ‘I wonder if a word of it is true, though.’

  Five days to the coast. They came down to Miletus, no longer a major port since her roadstead began to silt up, but the citadel was still strong, and the commander, an Antigonid captain of forty years’ experience, was an old friend – or at least, an occasional ally. Miletus was the third largest entrepôt for the hiring of mercenaries. Antigonus allowed it because it was better than having them go somewhere else.

  Stratokles was preparing to introduce his charge when the older man, yet another Philip (Philip, son of Alexander), raised an eyebrow. ‘You planning to stay long?’

  ‘I was planning to see what I could hire here,’ Stratokles said vaguely.

  ‘Not much right now. You heard that Satyrus of Tanais was taken by Demetrios?’ Philip asked.

  ‘I heard he was dead,’ Stratokles said.

  ‘Aye, taken or dead, or soon to be dead.’ Philip shrugged. ‘Odd – I thought young Demetrios and Satyrus were friends – they looked it last year, believe me. But his navarch has the young king’s fleet right across the water – Lesbos. Mytilene. He’s hiring all the men. Above my pay grade, but if Golden Boy did this, he’ll rue it. That Apollodorus is no fool. With a few thousand of the best and twenty ships, he can make a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Why don’t you stop him?’ Stratokles asked. ‘You are one of One-Eye’s men, aren’t you?’

  The older Macedonian gave him a level stare. ‘Antigonus won’t last the winter. You know it as well as I. And his son – well, he’s brave. But he’s not much for the likes of me. There’s a rumour that Lysimachos is across the Euxine with some men – not many – but that he’s marching this way.’ He let the rest dangle.

  It was almost comic. Two months before, Stratokles would have bought this man’s loyalty on the spot – for Lysimachos. You fool, he thought. But he hadn’t suspected how rotten the inside of Antigonus’s system really was.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If the mercenaries are all in Mytilene, I guess that’s where I’m bound.’

  Mytilene was the same small city he remembered – a pleasant town with beautiful women, handsome men, and good wine. Superb olives. ‘I could retire here,’ Stratokles said.

  ‘You’ll retire with two feet of steel in your thorax,’ Lucius said.

  ‘Hah! Too true,’ Stratokles said. ‘But until then, I can daydream.’

  Herakles looked at Mytilene as if he’d arrived in paradise. Miletus had been too big for a man who’d grown to adulthood in a town with four thousand inhabitants including slaves. But Mytilene was ideal.

  Besides, Stratokles was allowing him to ride abroad, well dressed. If they were going to make this work, it was going to start here.

  They brought horses across – always a good investment, taking horses to Lesbos, especially big, well-bred warhorses from Persia. So they rode up from the port, looking like a prince and his retinue.

  Herakles was in his element, and he positively sparkled – like his mother – when it became cl
ear to all of them that the mercenaries could see a resemblance. Heads turned, all the way from the beach.

  Stratokles arranged lodgings with a guest friend – the Athenian proxenos, in fact. But before he could try the wine or the olives, much less the women, he received a summons, from a source he chose not to ignore.

  ‘So,’ Apollodorus said. ‘Are you a raven come to pick the bones, or an ally?’

  Stratokles rolled the wine around in his cup. ‘We’ve been adversaries more times than allies,’ he said.

  Apollodorus nodded. ‘True enough.’

  Stratokles took a deep breath. ‘I came to hire men for another purpose,’ he said. ‘But …’

  ‘But you could be tempted to help me?’ Apollodorus said.

  ‘If you’ll help me,’ Stratokles answered. ‘And I have to warn you that Leon and I have never been friends.’

  The Numidian came in from behind a tapestry. ‘Well shot, snake. I told him as much. But I’m the one who sent to bring you here.’

  ‘Sent?’ Stratokles asked. ‘Where?’

  ‘Why, Heraklea, of course. Although I wondered at first if you had done this yourself.’ Leon shook his head. His hair was almost all white. It made Stratokles feel old.

  Stratokles shook his head. ‘Amastris—’

  Leon smiled. ‘Cut you loose.’

  ‘Tried to have me killed, actually.’ He shrugged.

  Leon smiled again. ‘I understand the feeling,’ he said.

  ‘She failed. I went east for a while.’ He raised an eyebrow.

  Leon took a deep breath. ‘You mean you are not here at my invitation?’ he asked.

  Stratokles shook his head. ‘I gather that’s the wrong answer,’ he said. ‘Too bad, because I think I’m willing to help.’ He looked around. ‘Surely the Lady Melitta is here, as well?’

  ‘She’s got the rest of the fleet,’ Leon said. Apollodorus was shaking his head. Leon drank some wine, leaned forward, and said, ‘I think he can help. So do you. Why not tell him?’

  ‘Because everything we say to him will go straight to Demetrios,’ Apollodorus said. ‘Now that he’s sitting here, I remember how much I hate the bastard.’

  Stratokles laid both of his hands on the table. ‘Apollodorus, if Leon and I can do business, I don’t think you have any right to pretend your rivalry is older and deeper. I don’t think we’ve even crossed blades. In fact, I think we’ve been comrades – at Tanais.’

  ‘I almost gutted you at Rhodos,’ Apollodorus said.

  ‘Bah – we’re all professionals. Leon, tell me what you want from me. I swear to you – by any gods you wish – that I have no employer just now and that I won’t sell what you tell me for one month from today.’ He stood up.

  Leon took him at his word. ‘Bring the image of Herakles,’ he said. ‘Swear on Lord Herakles and the heroic dead of Marathon, where Athens proved her greatness, may their shades come to haunt you if you break your oath, that you will keep anything we tell you here to yourself for one full lunar month from today.’

  Stratokles met Leon’s eye. ‘I swear on Lord Herakles and the heroic dead of Marathon, where Athens proved her greatness, may their shades come to haunt me if I break my oath, that I will keep anything you tell me here to myself and my lieutenant Lucius, who will be bound by the same oath, for one full lunar month from today.’

  Apollodorus leapt from his chair. ‘You heard him change the oath!’ he said.

  Leon nodded. ‘He meant us to hear that he’s a truthful man. If he helps us, he has to explain to his henchmen.’ He nodded.

  Stratokles thought it was unfair how handsome Leon remained. It lent him a dignity that Stratokles was never likely to have.

  ‘So?’ he said. ‘I’ve sworn.’

  Leon passed him a cup of wine. ‘Here. It’s a long story.’

  Later, the two men shocked each other by clasping hands.

  That night, Stratokles wrote a long letter to Hyrkania, and sent two of Herakles’ Macedonians and six recently hired mercenaries to carry it over land. And then he sat down to a symposium with Lucius and all of Satyrus’s captains and, odd as it felt, he enjoyed himself.

  Part II

  5

  ‘Plistias of Cos,’ Diokles said, peering into the sun under both hands. ‘See the funny little break above the beak of his penteres? That’s for ripping oars. He had it cast for his flagship.’

  ‘Anyone could cast one,’ Melitta muttered, also shading her eyes with her hands.

  Diokles just shrugged. It was an eloquent shrug – it suggested that while anyone could, only one man would.

  It was a hazy summer day in the Dardanelles, and Diokles’ flagship led a line of twenty-four warships. Down the channel, mostly hidden by the Point of Winds, lay the northern fleet of Demetrios and Antigonus, sixty warships.

  Diokles turned to his helmsman, an older Italiote, Leonidas of Tarentum. ‘Steady. I want to come within easy hail of him.’

  ‘Easy hail it is,’ Leonidas answered.

  Melitta turned back to her navarch. ‘Should we be getting into armour?’ she asked.

  Diokles pursed his lips. ‘Despoina, I don’t know. That’s for you to answer. It’s all about what signal you want you want to send. Peace? War?’

  Melitta admired his calm. ‘We will fight if he does not move,’ she said.

  Diokles nodded. ‘I know.’

  She nodded, twisted her mouth – very like her brother, really.

  She vanished under the tent-like awning she’d installed amidships – like having a Sakje yurt on a ship – and re-emerged wearing a coat of pale caribou with blue elk-hair work and golden plaques and bells. She pulled it on and belted it, hung her akinakes from her hip, and went to the stern.

  Diokles smiled, but he didn’t do it where the Lady of the Assagetae could see him.

  Plistias stood his ground, his ship well out in the current with two triremes on station behind him, well warned that there was another squadron in the channel.

  Diokles had not matched his force – he came forward alone, confident that the high state of training and the superior construction of his ship would see him clear if Plistias behaved badly.

  He chewed the ends of his moustache. Confident wasn’t the right word. His crew and his ship would give him a chance—

  ‘How did it come to this?’ Melitta asked. ‘I hate not knowing.’

  Diokles shrugged. ‘If Demetrios really has taken your brother or killed him, he is counting on the “not knowing” to slow us.’

  Coenus and Theron emerged from the tent amidships, wearing simple chitons like farmers.

  Coenus looked under his hand at Plistias’s flagship. Shook his head. ‘I wish the odds were better,’ he said.

  Theron snorted. ‘I was brought up to understand that in narrow waters, the smaller fleet has no disadvantage,’ he said. ‘Look at Salamis.’

  Diokles and Coenus both shrugged simultaneously.

  Coenus smiled. ‘I’d rather test that theory from the position of a massive advantage of force,’ he said. ‘And as I think Diokles will agree, in early spring we had a massive advantage in rowers – ours work year-round, and theirs do not. But now? We have an advantage in spirit, perhaps. But his fleet is worked up, now. Look at his oars work. It’s not beautiful, but it is well enough done.’

  Diokles grinned. ‘I thought that you were a cavalryman.’

  Coenus raised an eyebrow. ‘What part of Greece is more than a day’s walk from the sea? Certainly not Megara.’

  ‘Nor Corinth,’ Theron said.

  A stade away, and Plistias’s oarsmen only pulled to hold their station.

  ‘He’s waiting for something,’ Coenus muttered.

  Diokles didn’t like the waiting, the not knowing. Especially as there were warships launching past the headland and masts coming down, readying
for a fight – or that’s what it appeared to him.

  Melitta turned to him. ‘If he attacks us, I will shoot him dead. Let my arrow be the signal for the ballistas to let fly.’

  ‘You may already be dead,’ Diokles said with brutal honesty.

  Melitta shrugged. ‘Then my mother’s line will have ended, and what happens will be of little moment to gods or men.’

  ‘I may still be alive,’ joked Theron, amused by her view of the world. ‘Diokles, here, might care to live.’

  She rolled her shoulders in irritation. It was easy to forget how young she really was, until she showed irritation, or beamed with happiness. Not much of the latter, lately.

  A quarter stade, and they could hear the oar beat on the other ship as clear as if their oar master was on Diokles’ ship.

  ‘What ship?’ asked one of Plistias’s men in a brightly burnished bronze thorax.

  ‘Atlantae,’ Diokles called, his voice like a trumpet. ‘Of Tanais and Pantecapaeaum.’

  Half a hundred pous, now – point-blank shot for the ballistae. The archers on the Atlantae were armed and had arrows to their bows, but they stood amidships, well clear of the rails. But the ballistae were loaded, and Jubal’s new invention, the crank-repeaters, were fully tensioned.

  Plistias of Cos’s ship, Golden Demeter, was also fully ready. His two forward ballistae were cranking even as the two ships sailed on, closer and closer, not quite nose to nose.

  ‘Oars in,’ Diokles said in a calm, clear voice, and the oar master, Milos, repeated the order quietly.

  Melitta found the quiet more dangerous than the noise. Quiet, to her steppe-trained ears, meant ambush. She stood, fully exposed in white caribou, on the stern platform, and she could hear the sound of almost two hundred oars being dragged into oar ports and crossed between benches – a manoeuvre endlessly practised, but never quiet.

  By bringing in their oars, they signalled that they were not going to fight. The time it would take to get their oars in the water would be critical, in a fight.