Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

‘We’re going to ram,’ Satyrus said to Neiron. ‘Too late to back water.’

  Neiron watched as the foresail came down in a rush, and suddenly they could see the centre of Plistias’ line, a stade away, coming on like a cavalry charge.

  Ptolemy and Amyntas must have thought the same, because the king’s ship sped up to full ramming speed.

  Charmides got the top laces done up under Satyrus’ armpit, and Satyrus reached back for the yoke of the cuirass. ‘Get my greaves on!’ he said. He began to fumble with the ties of the breastplate. ‘Herakles, Lord and Ancestor, stand by me.’

  Close – very close. He felt the surge as Arete went to full speed. The ship might be heavy, but his men were in top form: well fed, well trained and confident.

  Apollodorus was tying the pauldrons to his waist ties. ‘You keep commanding,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ll keep you alive.’

  ‘Are the machines loaded?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘How stupid do I look, lord?’ Apollodorus asked. ‘Heh – don’t answer that.’

  Satyrus felt the greaves snapping onto his legs. Someone was buckling the silver buckles behind his knees and his ankles.

  ‘Arm plates?’ Apollodorus asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Satyrus didn’t turn his head. ‘Neiron – take the nearside one, the vessel closest to Poseidon.’

  ‘Aye, lord.’ Neiron flicked the oars. ‘Thrasos, here – I need your arms. You with the lungs – tell Poseidon I’m taking the wide-arse with the green awning.’

  The big sailor put his hands to cup his mouth. ‘Arete intends to ram the green awning!’ he roared.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ the man said to Neiron. ‘The helmsman waved.’

  ‘We won’t fuck that up, then.’ Neiron looked over at Satyrus. ‘I think we’re in trouble,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Punch through their centre and see where we are,’ Satyrus said. ‘I mean it, Neiron – diekplous and through into the second line.’

  Neiron nodded, all business.

  Satyrus felt the familiar weight of his harness, bent his arms, crouched.

  Behind him, Neiron and Thrasos together leaned against the steering oars.

  The men in the masthead shot their arrows.

  Apollodorus looked at Satyrus. Satyrus nodded.

  ‘Engines! Fire at will!’ he called.

  Only the bow engines had clear shots, and they went off together. The deep, ringing thrump of a bolt striking their fore hull showed that their opponents had heavy engines, too.

  Half a stade.

  Satyrus turned to Charmides. ‘No second chance now. Every armoured man to go with the marines. Apollodorus – if we board, do it like lightning, get the thing done and back aboard.’

  ‘Aye, lord.’

  Satyrus ran forward, the straps on his greaves a little too tight and cutting at his ankles. Too late now.

  Too late for a lot of things.

  ‘Marines! Brace!’ shouted Apollodorus, and the forward engines fired again, together, racing to be first.

  To port, the king’s ship was a ram’s length ahead, aimed at the largest ship in the enemy first line – an octeres that was, timber for timber, virtually identical to the king’s. They struck, bow to bow, in an explosion of timber, a storm of splinters and a hail of arrows. Then Satyrus put his own head down, caught his cheekpieces and pulled them together and fastened the toggle at his throat.

  The impact wasn’t the greatest he’d ever felt – in fact, while it pitched him into the back wall of the tower, it didn’t throw him off his feet. Above his head, the archer captain chanted orders as his men nocked and loosed and nocked and loosed again. Arete carried a much heavier contingent of archers than most ships: twenty men, most of them Sakje, with fluid recurved bows of horn and sinew and barbed arrows tipped with bronze. The Greeks were Alexandrians or Cretans, with heavy bows that shot long arrows capable of punching right through bronze.

  The return volley from the enemy tower was late, and weak.

  ‘His bow’s crushed!’ came the call from the tower.

  Satyrus, his blood up, ready to repel boarders, felt a sag.

  Neiron made the hand signal for the rowers to reverse benches, and the oar master gave a great cry.

  ‘She’s going to sink!’ called a marine, and then the enemy came at them in a rush – fifty marines, crossing in three places where the bow towers were locked together.

  Satyrus got to the starboard rail before the first enemy marine. Luck – good or ill – left him alone except for Charmides, as the enemy were trying to jump down into the waist behind the tower, where he was, instead of going to meet their peers; a tactic born of desperation.

  Satyrus speared the first man in the helmet – a clean thrust into the very front of the man’s horsehair crest – and his head snapped back, he lost his grip and he was gone over the side.

  ‘Cut the grapples!’ Satyrus roared at Charmides. Charmides ignored him, roared a war cry and threw his spear. It hit the second enemy marine just above the nose and the broad blade collapsed his face – and he took Charmides’ spear over the side with him.

  ‘The grapples!’ Satyrus bellowed, and now he was facing three men – he took a big risk and attacked the middle one, counting on the tendency of all men to want to be sure of their footing before making a lunge. His thrust went in over the man’s shield and just ticked the side of his unarmoured throat, and he went down. Satyrus was too close, now – no choice but to be wild. He roared, dropped his spear, grabbed the right-hand man’s shield in his right hand at the base, and shoved it up under the man’s helmet plates, breaking his jaw.

  The third man rammed his spear into Satyrus’ unprotected back and knocked him flat. The scales held the point, but the pain was intense – like a pankration opponent’s punch to the kidneys. The world went white, then red and Satyrus was dead.

  But in the time it took him to think that he was down and dead, he realised that he was still in control of his limbs and he rolled, got his back against the marine tower and pushed against the deck with his legs. A sword rang off his greave. Charmides threw himself across Satyrus and took the spear thrust from overhead meant for his king, and Satyrus sat heavily, his back against the marine tower, with Charmides’ weight on top of him.

  Apollodorus roared, and the Arete’s marines charged out of their tower. Charmides squirmed.

  An Antigonid marine stood over them, raised his spear and grinned from sheer lust of killing.

  Anaxagoras stabbed him from behind, a brutal, short spear jab, and then spun like a dancer, putting the butt of his spear into the next marine, using the power of his rotating body, and though his shaft snapped the enemy marine went down like a tree before a woodsman. Charmides screamed – there was blood flowing out of him – but Satyrus had no time for that, and he threw the boy off his legs and stumbled to his feet.

  Hand up under arm – sword hilt – draw – lunge!

  Satyrus put his point through an enemy marine’s eye. The man fell back over another marine, also dead.

  ‘Cut the grapples!’ Satyrus croaked.

  Anaxagoras was at the rail, watching his third victim fall away into the sea. He looked up. ‘The boy is right. This is wonderful.’

  Satyrus vomited over the side, and there was blood. ‘See to the boy,’ he said.

  Swords and axes were slashing at the grapples, and the enemy ship was sinking, his bow ripped away in the first contact – bad timbers, shipworm, bad design – it should never have happened, but the Arete’s ram was caught in the sinking ship and Satyrus could hear his own timbers popping.

  ‘Row!’ Philaeus called. ‘For your lives!’

  The last grapple rope parted with a crack like lightning and thunder on a stormy day, and the enemy ship slid – grudgingly – off their ram, and suddenly they were floating free, the oars moving them away.

  Satyrus was unengaged, still retching, and he could see an enemy trireme, low in the water from his vantage, coming around the wreckage to ram them broadside or bre
ak their oars.

  He spat and raised his head. ‘Oars in!’ he called. ‘Starboard side!’

  Philaeus heard him, with the help of the gods – and repeated the order. ‘Starboard-side oars in!’ he roared, and Anaxagoras sang it, and the oars came in as if the ship were a machine built by mighty Hephaestos – and the trireme’s bronze beak struck low into their unprotected side and the timbers held.

  Idomeneus raced his archers to the engaged side. ‘All together, now – loose!’ he called, and twenty arrows fell into the trireme’s unprotected rowers. Then all the starboard-side engines fired together – one, two, three, their bolts going downwards at point-blank range, down through men and benches and probably right through the bottom of the enemy ship.

  The enemy trireme tried desperately to back water, but he had twenty dead rowers or more, and his oar loom was in chaos, his oar master nearly cut in half by an iron bolt thicker than a man’s arm. The trireme wallowed in the swell, and Idomeneus ordered another volley right at Satyrus’ ear.

  ‘The king is finishing off his adversary,’ Apollodorus said.

  Satyrus felt his head clearing. ‘Get me water.’

  ‘Wine?’ Apollodorus asked, and thrust a canteen under his nose.

  Satyrus drank, spat and drank again. ‘Good wine,’ he said.

  ‘Why die with the taste of cheap wine on your lips?’ Apollodorus asked.

  Anaxagoras was bent over the Lesvian boy. Satyrus tottered over.

  ‘Alive?’ he asked.

  ‘He’ll dance again, if the gods will it,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I’ve seen this done – never done it myself. I need help.’

  Satyrus crouched by him, and Apollodorus, with two marines, took the boy’s shoulders and held him while Anaxagoras searched with slippery fingers. ‘Got it!’ he said. He had a loop of sinew in his fingers – a piece of bowstring. ‘Apollo, brace my fingers. Pull!’ he said to a marine, and the other man pulled on the sinew like a poacher pulling a snare – and shook his head.

  Blood spurted across the deck.

  Satyrus looked up. Neiron was calling – pointing.

  ‘Sailors, here!’ Satyrus called, and gave Charmides’ feet to two men. He loved the boy, but he had four hundred men to save.

  ‘It’s too slippery!’ grunted the marine.

  Two more low triremes were coming out of the enemy line. They were warier than the first, but they had the marines to board, at least between them.

  ‘Leave him!’ Satyrus called up to Idomeneus. He waved at the stricken trireme under his feet – a ship he could take if he could get ten marines into the hull, but for what?

  He glanced up, and saw both of the archers in the masthead shoot – they were methodical, and fast, for men shooting from a swaying basket. The one tapped the other and pointed at something out over the bow.

  Satyrus couldn’t watch any longer. ‘All engines, all archers – that one!’ he cried, and his voice broke from fatigue, already. He pointed a spear – whose spear? Where was it from? – at the nearest of the two new attackers, and almost as quickly as thought an iron bolt flashed out and struck the trireme’s bow a glancing blow and then it wheeled down the rowing deck. The enemy rowers lost the stroke and fell off to their starboard, and the other ship was coming on alone.

  He had time to note that the engines killed comparatively few men. But they killed them in a spectacular, horrifying fashion, so that they sapped an entire ship’s morale.

  Satyrus stumbled back to the helmsman’s position. Thrasos was screaming, down on his stomach, an arrow in his back low and deadly. Satyrus looked to port for the first time in what seemed like hours and saw a big penteres – a ship as big as his own – approaching broadside on. Their archers were shooting across at him. Even as he watched, an arrow screeched off the bronze facing of his aspis and vanished behind his shoulder.

  ‘You have to get Idomeneus to fire at their archers!’ Neiron screamed, while ducking under his aspis.

  Satyrus shook his head. Neiron couldn’t see, but the broadside-on penteres was not the greatest threat. The two triremes were. Amidships, the huddle of men over the body of Charmides gave a cry, and men pumped their fists. There was a heavy crash as the enemy trireme hit their starboard side, and then all of Idomeneus’ men leaned out over the side and shot straight down into the bow of the enemy ship.

  ‘We have to get clear!’ Neiron shouted. ‘They’re concentrating on us! Gods only know why!’

  At some level of his tactical thought, the notion that they were matched against five enemy ships pleased Satyrus extremely. But it couldn’t last, and the timbers of his strong new ship would not stand for many more ramming attempts, despite all the manoeuvring Neiron could manage and the puny size of the enemy rams. But he blessed the shipwrights, and every obol he’d paid them.

  Another volley of arrows came in, hitting his shield like wind hitting a man’s cloak in a storm at sea, and two hit his leg on the greave and a third his helmet, so that he staggered.

  Two marines appeared from amidships, bearing big shields. ‘Apollodorus says to let us protect the helm,’ Phillip of Tarsus said. He was an old friend, a veteran of all Satyrus’ battles, and allowed the king to feel that he was leaving Neiron in good hands.

  Overhead, his masthead archers had switched targets. They began to shoot into the penteres to port – and every other arrow seemed to mark a man down. Even as Satyrus ducked and moved aft, stepping over a shocking number of bodies – Polycrates, dead with a pair of javelins in him – and what was he even doing above decks? Satyrus saw, in his peripheral vision, as the enemy oar master went down, rose to his feet and took a second arrow in the top of his shoulder and fell like a sacrificial victim – and the enemy helm was empty.

  The port-side engines fired, point blank – everything was suddenly point blank. They were clearing their opposite numbers, firing into the enemy engines, an excellent strategy and one Satyrus wished he had thought of himself.

  He looked down and realised that he was losing blood – in a bad way, flowing out of his groin.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, and stumbled.

  ‘Hold hard there, Achilles!’ Anaxagoras said, getting a shoulder under his sword arm. ‘If you fall, we’ll all be too busy weeping to fight.’

  ‘I’m hurt – shit. Look at the blood.’ Satyrus couldn’t even work out where it was coming from, but his back hurt enough for five wounds. The sight of his own blood made him feel weak.

  Arrows hit his shield. Anaxagoras winced and looked down to where an arrow had passed right through his thigh. He opened his mouth and fell silently to the deck.

  Idomeneus had switched targets – high in the forward tower, his men had swept all three of the trireme’s command decks, and now he was firing volleys into the penteres to port.

  Satyrus shot a look over the starboard side. One of the triremes had fallen foul of the other’s oars, and they were no threat – at least, not for some long minutes.

  Satyrus made his way across his own ship to the port side, but the penteres had had enough. His rowers were untouched, but his top deck ran with blood – an easy thing for poets to sing about, but in this case, the archers and engines had massacred the sailors and enemy archers, and there was no armour to be seen. Someone was telling the rowers to row – but there was no command.

  Satyrus looked up at his masthead. ‘Where is the king?’ he called.

  ‘Moving south. Prize in tow.’ Came the reply.

  ‘Where’s that big ship? The huge wide-arse?’ Satyrus shouted.

  ‘Half a stade north!’ they called.

  Satyrus turned – and his back hurt. But he wasn’t dead yet, and it was time to do more than survive, noble as that seemed against the odds.

  Apollodorus. He had his marines formed under the loom of the tower – safe, for the moment.

  ‘Apollodorus – see the penteres? No crew on deck. Fine ship.’ Satyrus knew when a little acting was called for. ‘I rather fancy her. Let’s take her.’

&n
bsp; The men whooped.

  Satyrus ran aft. ‘I’m taking the penteres and turning her around. You go through the hole and head south.’

  ‘South?’ Neiron asked.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘If we’re winning, you and I will break their line. If we’re losing, we’re running downwind to our own ships. Either way, we go south. If you lose me, and we’re losing, go for Alexandria. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, lord!’ Neiron said. ‘Go with the gods!’

  ‘Stesagoras!’ Satyrus managed to attract his attention. Apollodorus had a dozen men throwing grapples, and Neiron already had the oars out. ‘Stesagoras – you and every sailor not required to manage the foresail. And a spare foresail and a yard. And right now.’

  Stesagoras nodded and ran down a ladder.

  Satyrus looked over at the penteres. Even as he watched, Neiron and Philaeus got the oars out – just the aft oars, a miracle of command and control – and laid the Arete’s ram gently alongside the enemy’s stern, making a path for Apollodorus’ marines. They rushed the handful of enemy marines left – one was shot down even as he rose from cover. Satyrus had meant to lead the rush aboard, and instead he was the last armoured man to cross, and there was nothing alive on the enemy deck, a deck remarkably like his own, but with only one engine a side, fixed forward, and now wrecked. All this he took in in a glance, and then he had the steering oars in his arms.

  Stesagoras crossed after him, and twenty sailors with a great bundle of canvas and a long yard.

  ‘Get the foremast up,’ Satyrus said. ‘And the sail and yard on it. I need you at the helm, here.’ He turned to Apollodorus. ‘Storm the oar galleys,’ he said. ‘Accept no resistance, and tell them that if they row, we’ll free them, and if they fight, we’ll sink them here.’

  Apollodorus grinned – the man was untouched amid the maelstrom, not a mark on him. ‘Aye, lord,’ he said. ‘Give me a moment to persuade them, and I wager they’ll row as well as any in Piraeus.’

  The man charged down the central ladder with all his marines.

  The Arete had blood running from her scuppers, and one of her port-side machines was a wreck – and from here he could see the damage to deck and rail, and shattered strakes in the hull that had to be leaking water – but Neiron had her under way and moving well, already half a boat length off, scattering the little triremes the way a shark scatters bream.