Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

by Christian Cameron

‘Pull!’

  Sakje bows.

  He glanced south as he took a breath to call the stroke and almost lost his timing. There was Theron’s Herakles at ramming speed, bowon to the same target – going ram to ram with a ship of twice his burthen. ‘Pull!’ he called.

  Diokles saw Theron too. ‘He’ll foul us!’ the Phoenician roared. ‘Sheer off, Corinthian!’

  ‘All you have, now!’ Satyrus roared at the rowers. Falcon moved under his feet. ‘Pull!’ The great loom of the oars moved, the oars, the length of a Macedonian sarissa, all pulling together like the legs of a water-bug or the wings of a bird. ‘Pull!’

  Diokles made a sharp adjustment and Satyrus struggled to keep his feet. ‘Pull!’ he roared. Herakles was not turning – he was in his final attack run, moving as fast as a running horse.

  ‘Pull!’

  The green enemy turned to put his bow on to the Herakles – a terrible decision, possibly a misheard order, so that at the last the great ship showed his naked and vulnerable flank to the Falcon’s ram.

  ‘Pull!’

  Herakles, faster because he’d had a longer start, rammed her just aft of the bow – a single thunderclap – and his bow was forced around.

  ‘Pull!’

  Diokles slapped his steering oars with precision, aiming for the gap at the edge of possibility where the stern of the enemy ship would not be in a few heartbeats.

  ‘Pull!’

  The green ship shuddered and his stern came at them, swinging sideways through the water with all the transmitted energy of Herakles’ attack.

  ‘Pull!’ Satyrus roared.

  ‘Brace!’ Abraham yelled from over the ram – and they struck, the ram catching the enemy stern just below the helmsman with a hollow boom, and then Satyrus was on his face on the deck.

  ‘Switch your benches!’ Satyrus managed from his prone position. ‘Do you hear me, there? Switch benches!’ he called, trying to rise. There was a sailor on top of him, a deckhand – a dead deckhand. Satyrus got him off, rolled over – his neck awash in pain, his eyes hazed red. The big green ship was above them, and arrows were pouring into the waist of the Falcon. ‘Switch your benches!’ Satyrus called again. He felt as if he was very far away. Just below his feet, men were getting under their oars.

  An arrow hit him in the top of the shoulder. It hurt, and its force knocked him back a step. ‘Backstroke!’ he shouted, his voice sounding thin and very far away. ‘Now!’

  The ship gave a shudder like a wounded animal.

  ‘Ram’s stuck!’ Abraham called. ‘’Ware boarding!’

  Sure enough, there were men coming down the side of the green – leaping aboard Falcon. Satyrus was three steps from his aspis, the huge round shield of the Greek soldiers and marines. It stood in the rack at the edge of the command platform.

  Satyrus had an odd moment of hesitation – he almost didn’t move. It seemed too far. He just wanted to fall on the deck and bleed.

  A javelin, slightly miscast, struck him shaft first and skittered off along the deck.

  There was a pair of enemy marines on the command platform. He noticed this with professional interest. How had they come there?

  He turned his back on them and grabbed for his aspis. It came to him in stages that were prolonged by the nakedness of his posture to their weapons – his hand on the bronze-shod edge, his right hand lifting it clear of the rack, his left arm pushing into the porpax, his shoulder taking the curved weight as he turned—

  Thrunk – as the lead marine crashed shield to shield and the harmonic bronze sounded.

  Satyrus set his feet and reached out with his empty right hand to grab the rim of his opponent’s shield. One-handed, he ripped the shield round a half-circle to the right, breaking the man’s shield arm, and then he slammed the enemy’s shield rim into his nose. The man went down and Satyrus leaped at his partner, drawing his father’s heavy kopis from under his own shield arm even as he put his head down and rushed his new opponent. Movement from the stern. Satyrus struck his enemy shield to shield and cut hard around the lower edge of the aspis. His blade went deep into the man’s thigh and he was over the side. Satyrus whirled, but the man coming from the stern was an armed deck-crewman with a spear – one of his own.

  ‘Pull!’ he called. The oars bit the water – the stroke was lost and had to be restored.

  As the oars came up, he saw more men coming from the bow. Was Abraham dead? ‘Pull!’ he called as the top of the stroke was reached. ‘Neiron! I need you to call the stroke. Pull!’

  Neiron was sitting against the mast, his eyes unfocused.

  There were three more enemy marines, and they were cautious. On the leader’s command, they all threw their javelins together, and Satyrus took them on his shield and charged, shouting ‘Pull!’ as his war cry. He got his shield into the middle one, took a light cut on his greaves from the one to his front right and punched the hilt of the Aegyptian sword into the man’s face over his shield rim – all feint for the backhand cut that Greeks called the ‘Harmodius blow’. Satyrus stepped forward with his sword foot, changing his weight with the feint and pushing his shield into the other two, and then cut back at the man who had wounded him, the weight of his blow sheering through the man’s helmet.

  Satyrus ripped the Aegyptian weapon free of the man’s head and the blade snapped – and Satyrus fell back a step. My father’s sword! he thought.

  The deck-crewman behind him saved his life, plunging his spear past Satyrus’s shoulder into the centre man’s face. The blow skidded off the man’s chin and through his cheek and he went down, fouling his file-partner, whose feet had been grabbed by an alert oarsman on the oar deck below. He fell into the rowers and died at their hands.

  ‘Pull!’ Neiron called.

  With a shriek like a wounded woman, Falcon pulled free of the green vessel, trapping the enemy marines on his decks. Many elected to jump – men in light armour could swim long enough to be rescued – but the officers in heavy bronze were trapped. Satyrus watched sailors pull one down and throw him to his death in the water. Abraham accepted the surrender of another – Abraham was the only man Satyrus had ever seen accept surrender in a sea fight.

  ‘Oh, Ares!’ Satyrus said. He could just walk.

  ‘Pull!’ Neiron called, and the Falcon was a ship’s length clear of their enemy.

  ‘Switch your benches!’ Satyrus called. He looked aft. Diokles had an arrow through his thigh and was using the oars to keep himself erect.

  Their ram had, in fact, ripped the stern right off the green ship, and he was settling fast, his rowers in chaos. But the enemy was trying to take Theron’s ship over the bow as a stolen life-raft. Satyrus could see Theron with his marines fighting in the bow. He was the biggest man in the fight.

  North and west, the whole enemy fleet was bearing down on their fight. The rest of their squadrons were gone. Just a stade away, a pair of golden-yellow triremes had bow waves – full ramming speed.

  ‘Diokles!’ Satyrus yelled, pointing at the new enemy.

  Diokles was already leaning on his oars, using the momentum of the backed oars to turn the bow south.

  Satyrus saw it as if a god had stepped up next to him and put the whole idea in his mind – he saw the fight and what he had to do.

  As the bow swung south, he saw more and more enemy sailors and marines flooding aboard Herakles.

  ‘Lay me alongside Herakles,’ Satyrus said.

  Diokles bit his lip and said nothing.

  Satyrus accepted his unspoken criticism and ran forward, collecting deck-crewmen with weapons as he went.

  ‘Abraham!’ he called.

  Neiron called the first stroke of the new motion. His voice was weak, but he had to hold on. Satyrus was running out of options, and he was not going to abandon Theron.

  Abraham was kneeling by a dying marine. The man was bleeding out and Abraham was holding his hand.

  Satyrus waited until the man’s eyes fluttered closed. Then he seized the dead man’s jave
lin and his sword. ‘We’re going aboard Herakles,’ he said.

  Abraham shook his head. ‘You’re insane,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I’m not letting Theron die when I can save him,’ Satyrus bit back.

  ‘What about the rest of us?’ Abraham asked. ‘Punch straight through! Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?’

  Satyrus shook his head to clear it. It seemed so obvious to him. ‘We put the green ship between us and those two,’ he said, pointing at the nearest new enemies, now just half a stade away. ‘We rescue Theron and we’re gone.’

  Abraham shrugged. He had blood leaking out of an eye – or perhaps just out of his helmet. ‘Whatever you say, prince.’

  The rest of the marines looked tired but hardly done in. Most of them had fought at Gaza.

  ‘On to the deck of the Herakles,’ Satyrus said. ‘Clear it and we’re gone. A gold rose of Rhodos to every man who follows me on to that deck.’

  Even as Satyrus spoke, Diokles had the speed to turn them back east, so that the oarsmen pulled in their oars and Falcon coasted alongside his stricken brother.

  Satyrus leaped on to the rail. ‘Clear the deck,’ he called, his voice breaking, but then he was over the rail of the Herakles and his javelin took an enemy marine in the side of the head, knocking him unconscious inside his helmet. Satyrus went straight into the next man, shield up, so that the rim of his own aspis crashed into the man’s armoured jaw and he smelled the sweat on his enemy as the man tried to turn and got a spear in his teeth from a sailor. Satyrus bore him down and pushed on into the flank of the enemy boarding force, into the unarmoured sailors who didn’t have shields and died like sacrificial animals under his borrowed blade. And when they broke, he kept killing them, cutting them down as they fled into the bow, killing them even as they jumped over the side, as if by killing these men who served his enemy he could regain his lost kingdom.

  Theron was by the mast, his back against it. He was covered in blood and wounded several times – his left thigh was lacerated with shallow wounds so that blood ran down his legs like lava from a new volcano. He held up a hand, the same way he would when he’d been fighting the pankration on the sands of the palaestra in Alexandria and he took a fall. He managed a smile. ‘Still in the fight, eh?’ he said.

  Satyrus took his hand and hauled him to his feet. He looked fore and aft along the deck. The marines from the heavy green quadrireme were rallying in the bows of their own ship, and a shower of arrows swept the decks of Herakles.

  ‘We could board him,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘If you want to die gloriously, that would be your path,’ Abraham said by his elbow. He was wrapping his shield arm in linen stripped from a corpse. ‘Look!’

  The two golden-hulled triremes from Pantecapaeum were almost aboard them, rowing hard – but their speed had fallen off, because they’d started their sprint too early and their crews were under-trained. In the press of ships, they couldn’t see what was friend and what was foe. Behind them were a dozen more triremes.

  ‘We could take him,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘You are possessed by a bad spirit,’ Abraham said. ‘Do not succumb to these blandishments.’ He leaned in. ‘You must live, or all this is for nothing. Get your head out of your arse and think like a commander.’

  Satyrus felt the heat in his own face – felt rage boiling up in his limbs. But he also saw the faces of the men around him. He saw Theron’s nod of agreement. The marines’ studied blankness.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, more harshly than he wanted. He looked across to the Falcon. ‘Abraham, keep us from getting boarded again. When I have Herakles clear of that green bastard, take command and row clear. Understand? Theron – someone get Theron looked after. No, better – sling him across to Falcon.’

  His head was clear – tired, but clear. It was like waking from a fever. Now he could see, and what he saw was the last few moments of a disaster. As soon as the pair of golden triremes figured out which side was which, he’d be dead.

  He leaped for his own ship and landed with a clash of bronze on the deck. ‘Diokles!’ he roared.

  ‘Aye!’ his helmsman called. The arrow was gone from his thigh and a loop of wool was tied in its place.

  ‘Port-side oars! Pole off! Pole off the Herakles!’ Satyrus ran to Neiron, who was lying at the foot of his mast, mouthing orders to Thron, one of the Aegyptian boys who served the sailors. The boy shrilled the orders down into the rowing decks.

  ‘Still with me?’ Satyrus asked Neiron, who raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Must be nice . . . young.’ He croaked. ‘Poseidon, I hurt. Hermes who watches the sailormen, watch over me. Arggh!’ he shouted, and his back arched.

  Along the deck, a handful of deck-crewmen pulled Theron aboard and dropped him unceremoniously to the deck so that they could return to using pikes to pole off the Herakles. Satyrus loosed the ties on Neiron’s cuirass and then, without warning, pulled the arrowhead from the wound. It had gone in only the depth of a finger end, or even less – enough to bleed like a spring, but not necessarily mortal.

  Satyrus stood in his place. ‘Port side, push!’ he shouted. Rowers used the blades of their oars to push against the hull of the Herakles. ‘Push!’

  ‘We’re away!’ Diokles called from the stern. The gap between the two ships was growing. Falcon was light – fifty strong men could pole him off very quickly.

  Quick glance aft – the golden hulls were changing direction, the early sun catching the bronze of their rams and turning them to fire. He wasn’t going to make it.

  He wasn’t going to stop trying, either.

  ‘Switch your benches!’ he roared, the full stretch of his voice, as if a restraint had burst in his chest and now he could use all of his lungs.

  A thin cheer from the green quadrireme. The enemy crews were shouting for rescue – shouting to the golden ships.

  His archer-captain shot into the enemy, and an enemy archer fell – a man in robes. A Sakje. Satyrus cursed that Eumeles had suborned his own people. There were many things that he and Leon had taken for granted.

  The greens cheered again and the golden triremes turned harder, now certain of their prey.

  ‘Oars out! Backstroke! Give way, all!’ Satyrus called as soon as the majority of his rowers had switched their benches. He considered everything he had learned of war – that men responded so much better when they understood what was needed. His teachers had insisted on it.

  He leaned down into the oar deck. ‘Listen, friends. Three strokes back and switch your benches – two strokes forward – switch again. Got it? It will come fast and furious after that. Ready?’

  Hardly a cheer – but a growl of response.

  ‘Pull!’ he called.

  ‘Athena and strong arms!’ a veteran cried.

  ‘Athena and strong arms!’ the whole oar deck shouted, all together, and the ship shot back his own length.

  ‘Athena and strong arms!’ they repeated, and again Falcon moved, gliding free.

  ‘Switch your benches!’ Satyrus called, but many men were already moving with the top of the stroke, switching benches with a fluidity he hadn’t seen before.

  He ran along the deck to Diokles. He wanted to stop and pant. No time.

  The nearest golden hull was just three ship’s lengths away.

  ‘Into the starboard bow of the green!’ Satyrus shouted. ‘We have to ram the green clear of Herakles.’

  Diokles turned and looked at the onrushing golden ship in the lead.

  ‘Yes!’ Satyrus shouted. He read Diokles’ thoughts just as the helmsman read his. With luck – Tyche – the lead golden hull would foul his partner.

  There were a dozen more triremes behind that pair, strung out over two stades of water.

  The rowers had switched benches. ‘Pull!’ he bellowed into the oar deck.

  The hull changed direction. The oars came up together, rolled over the top of their path.

  ‘Pull!’ he roared. The hull groaned and Falcon
leaped forward – already turning under steering oars alone.

  ‘Pull!’ he called as the oars crested their movement. He waited for the splintering crash as the lead golden ship rammed their stern, but he didn’t look. His eyes were fixed on his oarsmen.

  ‘Pull!’

  ‘BRACE!’ yelled a sailor in the bow.

  Falcon hit the enemy quadrireme just where his marine box towered over his ram – just where men were rallying for another rush at the Herakles. It was a glancing blow, delivered from too close, but the results were spectacular. Something in the enemy bow gave with a sharp crack – some timber strained to breaking by the Herakles snapped. The marines’ tower tilted sharply and the whole green hull began to roll over, filling rapidly with water.

  ‘Switch your benches!’ Satyrus called. Now was the moment. But the Herakles was saved – he was rocking in the water like a fishing boat after pulling a shark aboard, his trapped ram released from the stricken green.

  The lead golden trireme shaved past their stern, having missed his ram by the length of a rowing boat. He was still turning and his oarsmen paid for his careless steering as they began to get tangled in the wreckage of the green as the stricken ship turtled.

  Just to the port side, beyond Herakles, the second golden hull swooped in to beak the Herakles amidships – the second ship had been more careful, biding his time, waiting for the two damaged Alexandrian ships to commit to a reverse course.

  The oarsmen were reversed, their faces to the bow. ‘Back water! Pull!’ Satyrus called. Had to try.

  Had to try.

  Diokles shook his head and braced himself against the side. When the golden ship struck the Herakles, his hull might be pushed right into them.

  Abraham was shouting at his rowers, trying to get them to pull together. They had been locked in a boarding action for too long and many men had left their benches to fight. Herakles was dead in the water.

  Why was Herakles cheering? Satyrus stood on his toes, then jumped up on the rail, grabbing for a stay.

  Leon’s Golden Lotus swept past the sinking stern of the green like an avenging sea monster and took the second golden hull right in the stern quarter, his bow ripping the enemy ship like a shark ripping a dolphin, spilling men into the water and goring his side so that he sank still rowing forward, gone in ten heartbeats, and Lotus swept on.