Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Splendid!’ Melitta said. ‘What a very good job you are making of living up to Mater’s desires. And Philokles’! And Leon’s! We said we would not have slaves. How are you doing with that, brother? I seem to see more agricultural slaves arrive every day.’

  ‘Some of them on Leon’s ships!’ he shot back. ‘This is the real world, sister! You go and ride the plains and pretend to be a nomad princess. I have a kingdom to manage. We need agricultural labour.”

  ‘In our beds? Get me one, brother. A nice one with a big cock.’ She rolled her hips. ‘How’s that!’

  ‘Ares! You are the limit! It is not your business who’s in my bed!’ The King of the Bosporus realised that he had shouted the last, and that even on the Field of Ares outside the city people were watching them.

  Melitta shrugged. ‘Handsome boy like you ought to be doing better than agricultural labour,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps I could sleep with the captain of my bodyguard?’ Satyrus asked his sister.

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ she hissed.

  ‘Of course, he’s twice my age – but surely Coenus is still a good-looking man,’ Satyrus finished, satisfied that he’d punched through his sister’s air of superiority. He had long suspected that she slept with her guard captain, Scopasis, a former outlaw.

  They stood and glared at each other for ten heartbeats.

  ‘At least he’s not a slave,’ she said – and she meant to hurt.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he shot back. ‘Go out on the plains and leave your son with me to raise.’

  In fact, she wasn’t the most devoted mother, and that shot hit its target squarely so that she turned bright crimson from the roots of her black hair to the tops of her breasts, just visible under her slightly open Persian coat.

  ‘You owe me a horse,’ she said, and walked away. She walked ten steps and turned, unable to stop herself. ‘You need to stop pretending that Amastris will marry you. Find yourself a girl. Fuck her and make some children, and then you can talk to me—’ She was choking up, getting angry, threatened with tears and hating herself for it. ‘Then you can talk to me about children.’ She walked to her horse, leaped into the saddle and dashed away.

  ‘That is the king?’ asked a foreign voice. The man sounded puzzled.

  ‘The king’s not available just now.’ Satyrus turned his head, anger still pounding away in his bloodstream and saw his hypaspist, Helios, standing with a powerfully built man – Satyrus had seen him arrive – Antigonus’ ambassador Niocles, son of Laertes of Macedon. Or so his morning report had said.

  Helios hurried to his side, and Satyrus handed him his bow and gorytos to carry. ‘What’s next?’ he asked, walking to his horse.

  ‘The new plough, lord,’ Helios said.

  ‘I’ll skip that,’ Satyrus said. Anger was still heavy inside him, so big that it seemed to fill his breast and choke him. How dare she tax him with his slave-girl. He took a deep breath. How disgusting it was of him to hit back at her motherhood.

  The problem of being twins was that you were born able to hurt the person you loved the most.

  ‘Lord, you said you had to see the plough today or it would be too late—’ Helios sounded contrite, but he knew his master and he knew his duty.

  ‘Then I shall.’ Satyrus cut short a lecture on duty by jumping onto his charger’s back and putting his heels to the animal’s sides, and he was gone as fast as his sister.

  Satyrus owned a number of farms around the perimeter of Tanais, the city that he made his capital. It was the city founded by his father – posthumously, it is true. The bronze statue of his father still loomed over the agora, although other statues were joining it.

  Thinking about his father – heroised, and almost deified – didn’t help him dismiss his bad behaviour. Nor, as he rode along the escarpment and looked down into the valley of the Tanais River, did thoughts of Philokles, his tutor, with whom he had often galloped these same stades.

  He rode down the near cliff at a reckless pace and his horse carried him in great bounds, his four feet seeming to skim the earth. Satyrus kept his seat at the base of the ridge only by leaning well back and clamping his knees like the vice in a bootmaker’s shop. And when he felt his charger’s pace ease, he righted himself, leaned low over the stallion’s neck and galloped along the road – the road where he’d killed his first man.

  And his first woman.

  Right here, he’d shot her. She’d been lying wounded, and he’d leaned over and put an arrow in her and watched her die. Just his age, at the time; thirteen or fourteen. He still saw the look on her face. He still wondered where she went when she left her body – and what awaited him.

  He flew along the road, past the stream where the salmon went to breed and up the next hill to where he kept his own farm. It was a wealthy farm, with stone barns and a good house, and he rode into the yard, his stallion throwing clods of earth from the wet road.

  He’d left his attendants far behind, except for Helios who was hard on his heels. His farm manager, Lekthes, was waiting by the ox shed.

  ‘You came, lord!’ he laughed.

  ‘Am I so unreliable?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘Reckon there ain’t many kings in the circle of the world who till their own fields,’ Lekthes said. He spat. ‘Plough’s hitched. How do your courtiers say it? He awaits your pleasure.’ Lekthes was a freedman, a former slave who’d been purchased by Leon to run farms and train new farmers. He didn’t have the habits of a slave, though. In some ways, he was the most arrogant man Satyrus had ever met. He had the arrogance of a craftsman.

  ‘I’ll get started,’ Satyrus said. ‘All my people are close behind, and I can’t avoid the Macedonian ambassador for ever.’

  Helios allowed a grim chuckle to escape his lips.

  Satyrus stripped his chiton over his head so that he was almost naked, tossed the garment to Helios and clucked to the oxen.

  They were well trained, and very strong. As soon as he made the noise, they started forward, and the blade – the hynis of the new plough – bit immediately, penetrating the winter sod and cutting deep, more than a handspan deep. After a single furrow, less than a stade, Satyrus could feel the strain in his wrists and lower back. He clucked again and the beasts snorted and rumbled to a stop, and he leaned over the handles of the plough to examine his furrow. Straight enough. And deep. The black soil was turned in neat mounds on either side of the furrow. The sexual imagery of ploughing was obvious; even the smell—

  The king shook himself. Sex was very much on his mind, and he forced himself back to the matter at hand. He clucked again, and his two beasts pushed forward against their yokes – the zygotes that gave the hoplite class their name.

  Up and down, and up and down. After three full furrows, Satyrus understood all over again why farming was the best training for war. He motioned to Helios, had a drink of wine from his flask and ignored the arrival of the Macedonian delegation and got back to work.

  He lost himself in it for a while. Ploughing – which he had only begun to practise the autumn before – required his full concentration, body and mind. The management of the oxen, the depth of the plough blade, the shifting of the machine under his hands and the pain in the small of his back—

  The oxen shambled to a stop, the offside beast shying at a fly. Satyrus considered that there was something poetic, even oracular about a beast the weight of three horses shying from the furrow because of a fly the weight of a grain of wheat. While he indulged in this bit of petty philosophy, he had to use the full breadth of his shoulders to keep the plough on course.

  The erring ox stopped, flicked its tail and lowered its head.

  Satyrus let the handles of the plough down, easing the weight of the machine onto the turned soil. Then he rolled his shoulders, stretched his back and stood straight for the first time in five long furrows.

  Satyrus the Second, King of the Bosporus, was naked like a slave – or a farmer – toiling in the hot spring sun of the Euxine. He
stood a full six feet, with shoulders that seemed as wide as he was tall. Men likened him to Herakles, which made him laugh. He was twenty-four years old, and he had been king for three years, and those three years seemed to him to have aged him more than all the years before, as if time were not a constant, whatever Aristotle and Heraklitus might have to say on the subject.

  Helios came running from the trees with a chlamys, a strigil and a linen towel – and the canteen of wine. Satyrus took the wine first, drinking a long draught of thrice-watered red before he used the strigil, wiped himself down with the towel and pulled the purple-edged white chlamys over his head. Satyrus gave the younger man a smile and walked across the field towards the foreigners.

  ‘You don’t have to see them until tonight,’ Helios muttered.

  ‘I’m all right now,’ Satyrus said.

  Many of the Macedonians were mounted, and there wasn’t much to tell them apart. They had the same dun-coloured cloaks and the same look of arrogance. Satyrus laughed because the thought came, unbidden, that Lekthes might have been the Macedonian ambassador’s brother.

  Satyrus walked across the furrows to greet the ambassadors of the world’s most powerful man, Antigonus One-Eye, naked except for his short cloak. He paused, just short of the range at which men begin social interaction, to note the workmanlike nature of his furrows with pleasure.

  ‘Crax?’ he called.

  ‘My lord?’ Crax responded, pushing through the crowd of sycophants and courtiers. Crax was Satyrus’ Master of the Household. He was tall and red-bearded, and his voice still had a hint of the Bastarnae brogue that he had been born to – before slavery, freedom and war made him a powerful officer in the Kingdom of the Bosporus.

  ‘The new plough is a fine machine. Order ten for our farms, and suggest to Gardan that a meeting of the farmers be held on one of our farms so that they can see the benefits.’ As he spoke, he noted Coenus – one of his father’s most trusted men – standing at his ease, surrounded by soldiers of the bodyguard. He winked, and Coenus responded with a wry smile. Satyrus turned to Helios. ‘Make a note for me. Meet with Gardan. He’s been requesting it.’

  Helios wrote some notes on a wax tablet. Crax wrote something as well, on his own tablet. The sight of a tattooed Bastarnae writing on a wax tablet might well have been mocked, in other company.

  ‘And these gentlemen?’ Satyrus asked with elaborate unconcern. As if the last day hadn’t been spent preparing to receive them.

  ‘An ambassador, my lord,’ Crax said. ‘Niocles son of Laertes of Macedon from Antigonus, Regent of Macedon,’ Crax said, indicating a middle-aged man – strong, of middling height, who looked more used to wearing armour than the long robes of officialdom.

  The man so named came forward, his white chiton held carefully out of the newly turned furrows by a pair of slaves. ‘My lord,’ he said. His voice was gruff, and his face said that he was none too pleased with the morning’s proceedings.

  ‘A pleasure to receive you,’ Satyrus said. He clasped hands with the older Macedonian, and if he was discomfited to be greeted by a nearly naked Herakles, he didn’t show it.

  ‘A pleasure to meet such a famous soldier,’ the Macedonian said.

  ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of the Bosporus,’ Satyrus said. ‘I expect that you have come wanting something?’

  Niocles might have made a face, but he was made of sterner stuff. ‘Aye, lord. It pleases you to receive us in a muddy field – and to go straight to the point.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ Satyrus said. ‘It’s ploughing season.’

  ‘As if a king needs to plough his own land,’ commented a man in the delegation. The sneer was almost audible.

  ‘I’m sure you came here with business to transact,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘I have come on behalf of Lord Antigonus, who men call “One-Eye”, Niocles said. ‘To demand reparations.’

  ‘Are you sure this isn’t your speech for Ptolemy of Aegypt?’ Satyrus asked, and many of his men laughed. The Macedonian flushed and there might have been violence, except that Coenus’ men of the bodyguard appeared as if from the grass and stood in neat array between their king and the ambassador’s men – every bodyguard in the somewhat archaic uniform of bronze breastplates, greaves, attic helmets and long, indigo-blue cloaks. They carried the heavy round aspis of old Greece and short, heavy-bladed spears.

  Niocles waited, calming himself. Satyrus wished him luck.

  ‘We understand that you are not so close with Lord Ptolemy as might formerly have been the case?’ he asked.

  Satyrus smiled. ‘Am I not?’ he asked. ‘How may I help you, and your lord?’

  Niocles shrugged. ‘Why, with a treaty making us allies in war and peace, of course, lord. But for the moment, I am here to resent the behaviour of your merchants at my master’s port of Smyrna.’

  Here it comes, Satyrus thought. ‘Yes?’ he asked, all innocence.

  ‘My lord must know that two of your ships attacked my master’s ships in the port of Smyrna. Men were killed. We demand the captains.’ Niocles smiled, and now his tone hardened as well. ‘This is not negotiable. It might have been better for you if you had given them of your own free will.’

  ‘Better how?’ Satyrus asked. He stepped forward, so that he was quite close to the Macedonian. ‘Let me see . . . I have heard of this incident, of course. Two of my ships are riding at anchor in Smyrna, your master’s port. Hmm? And they are attacked. Yes?’

  ‘Men were sent to demand the taxes,’ Niocles said. He shrugged. ‘Violence only ensued when they were refused.’

  ‘Taxes that included the seizure of the ships?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘My master may make any law he pleases within his own dominion,’ Niocles said. Now he all but purred with pleasure. ‘And unlike some lords,’ he said with a glance at Satyrus’ guards, ‘my master has the power to enforce his demands.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Satyrus said. His hypaspist handed him a golden cup of wine, which he drank without offering any to the Macedonian beside him. ‘Your master set a ridiculous “tax” in the port of Smyrna as a pretext to allow a band of pirates to attack my ships. They were roundly defeated. Now I am to hand over my captains, and what? Pay an indemnity? For my presumption in resisting the tax?’

  Niocles nodded. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And our crime in this matter is . . .?’ Satyrus asked, and took a sip of wine.

  ‘Trading with Ptolemy,’ Niocles said. ‘Your ships had traded with Ptolemy.’

  Satyrus laughed. ‘That’s a crime?’ he asked.

  ‘In Smyrna,’ Niocles said.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘So,’ he said. ‘A lord has the right to make any law he pleases, if only he can enforce it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Niocles said.

  Satyrus handed his wine cup back to Helios. ‘Ploughing is excellent exercise for war,’ he said, ‘as my ancestors, who defeated the Persians when Macedon was an ally of Persia, could attest. The pretence’ – and here Satyrus’ voice took on a tone he had not possessed just a few years before, the sharp tone of a king dealing with a fool – ‘the pretence that your master has the power to inflict his will on me, here, on the shores of the Euxine, is sheer folly.’ Satyrus smiled. ‘But as you have yourself noted the precedent, I’ll be happy to free all the slaves that you so obviously have in your tail, there.’ At this, Satyrus began to walk across the furrows towards the Macedonian embassage.

  ‘What – what?’ asked Niocles.

  ‘You – are you a slave? All of you who are slaves, step away from the others. Good. Yes. Coenus? See to it.’ Satyrus rounded on Niocles, who had followed him across the ploughed ground and up onto the grass. ‘Slavery is a carefully controlled institution in my kingdom,’ he said. ‘Such is my whim, and the whim of my sister. And since I have the power to enforce my will,’ he said, ‘you can go home to your master and tell him that the next time he attacks a couple of my ships, I’ll have my fleet begin to burn cities on his seaboard. I hope that’
s clear enough.’ Satyrus waved. ‘Get you gone. And leave your slaves. I suspect they’ll be happier here, anyway.’

  Niocles stood his ground. ‘You are declaring war?’ he asked.

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just playing this foolish game the way you people play it.’

  ‘What game, lord?’ Niocles asked.

  ‘The game of diplomacy,’ Satyrus answered. ‘Where you pretend to be powerful and I pretend to be powerful and we posture like boys around the Palaestra. I don’t want war. Understand? My little realm has had too much war. But neither will I play. At all. Your master has neither the time nor the inclination to come into the Euxine, any more than Ptolemy does. Come back when you want to speak my language.’

  Niocles made a face and then shook his head. ‘You’re more a Macedonian than most Greeks,’ he said.

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘I assume you meant that as flattery,’ he said. ‘But your flattery won’t get you your slaves back.’

  ‘When Antigonus is Great King – King over Kings – you will be sorry you indulged in this petty insubordination.’ Niocles stepped closer to Satyrus, and men among the bodyguard shifted. Hands went to spears.

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘You may judge my views on the subject,’ he said, ‘by my willingness to behave as I do.’

  Tanais was a new city, so new that the smell of linseed oil and fresh-cut pine seemed to fill every room in every house, rivalled only by the dusty-dry smell of fresh-cut marble and limestone. It was less than fifteen years since the city had been burned flat by Eumeles of Pantecapaeaum, and less than three years since serious rebuilding began.

  Once again, there was a bronze equestrian statue of Kineas, Hipparch of Olbia, in the agora. Once again there was a golden statue of Nike in a temple to Nike at the east end of the agora, and this time the temple was built of Parian marble, shipped block by block from far-off Sounion on the coast of Attica. The ‘palace’, a small citadel with six tall towers, was small but built entirely of stone, and its central hall was great enough to entertain the whole of the city’s thousand citizens, crammed tight as sardines in a barrel, on feast days when it rained.