‘I need an oar master,’ Satyrus said. ‘Stesagoras – who do I take?’
Stesagoras shook his head. ‘Laertes is my best, and he’s putting up that mast. Patrocles was the big voice when we were coming up to fight.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘Well, he’s loud. Get him amidships.’ He stooped at the stern and spat blood into the water and his eyes caught the ship’s name, done in Asiatic Greek letters of gold under the stern planks – Atlantae; the huntress, beloved of Artemis, his sister’s heroine. Satyrus decided to take this as a good omen, although when he raised his head he saw stars, and he had to spit blood again to clear his mouth of the bitter copper taste.
He decided to let himself believe that there was less blood flowing out of his back – in reality, if it was as bad as he’d feared, he should have passed out. As he was still standing, the odds were he’d live, unless the god of Contagion and Infection struck him with a poisoned arrow. He offered a prayer to Apollo, and another to Poseidon, and yet a third to Hephaestos for the fine construction of his ship – and then Apollodorus was up, breathing like a bellows but grinning.
‘Slaves!’ he said. ‘It’s a miracle from Ares, lord!’ He embraced his king – under the circumstances, it was an embrace that Satyrus was happy to return.
Slave rowers meant men who would be free if their new side won the battle; men with no loyalty whatsoever to their dead masters.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Go below – get this right. We’re going to back oars for two ship lengths – and then we’re going to turn hard to port, port oars reversed. Forty strokes back, port side reverse benches, fifteen strokes all ahead.’
‘Forty back, port reverse, fifteen, port reverse, all ahead,’ Apollodorus said. ‘Ares – I’m a marine, not a sailor.’ And he was gone.
The new oar master had a spear. He broke it between his hands to be rid of the saurauter, and thumped time on the deck.
‘Row!’ Satyrus called. ‘All benches back!’
Fear, or passion, or courage – it scarcely mattered, but the rowers were motivated and the ship moved – heavily for five strokes, and then like a bolt from an engine, so that Satyrus realised that his estimate of forty strokes was far too high. But he also knew what changing orders on a raw crew would mean. The stern shot ‘ahead’, and the ship began to turn to port – simply because his steering oars couldn’t correct from the temporary ‘bow’. But he was turning in the direction he’d wanted. He was just plunging much deeper into the enemy second line than he’d intended.
It was empty here. To the south, he could see the giant tenner crushing one of Ptolemy’s penteres, and turning to engage a pair of quadremes – ships that were otherwise considered heavy, but in this case, hopelessly outmatched. And to the north – ruin. Ptolemy was not winning.
But Satyrus had time: the enemy’s centre was all but empty, stripped by the ships detached to face Menelaeus and by the failure of the smaller ships to engage Arete successfully.
Arete was close – twenty horse lengths to port, just turning to go south. But the gap between them was widening because of the speed of Satyrus’ retreat.
Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, ‘Reverse your benches!’ Satyrus called. ‘Still have your wine?’ he asked Apollodorus.
Wordlessly, the man put his canteen into Satyrus’ hands.
The bow began to swing – too fast.
‘All benched for rowing ahead!’ Satyrus called. Trying to fight the overswing with his steering oars made his back hurt like ice and fire on bare skin. He’d miscalculated by many degrees of turn – their current course took them right into the side of the distant leviathan, the enemy flagship, which towered above the battle like an elephant over infantry.
The new oar master was on top of it. ‘Starboard side – trail your oars!’ he roared – no missing that voice. ‘Now row, you bastards!’
And now they were moving. He was clear of the enemy line and he was moving – right along the sterns of the enemy ships, far too close for comfort. He could do devastating damage – once – with his own ship, but it looked to Satyrus as if the battle had been lost. Upwind, Ptolemy was backing out of the action, covered by the heavy ships of his bodyguard – Poseidon was backing water slowly, her engines still firing away into the triremes that Arete had crippled. But elsewhere, there was little cheer for the Ptolemy side. Menelaeus had either never come out or been bested, and so the Aegyptian centre had collapsed from shoreward – always the weakest part of Amyntas’ plan. To the south, the enemy flag was trying to close the gap to take Ptolemy’s flagship, itself desperately backing oars to get clear of the trap.
But as he watched, the foremast in the bow of his new capture began to rise, stayed by four lines running aft. The marines were pulling like sailors – not the time, apparently, for old grudges – and the foremast came up and was belayed as smoothly as if it had been done in a yard.
Neiron was lagging, holding the Arete at a walking pace. He was waiting for his king – when Satyrus ranged alongside, his hands white-knuckling on his oars, afraid he’d slip and send his oar loom into Arete’s oar loom – Neiron called out across the water.
‘Fight, lord? Or run?’ he called.
Satyrus leaned on his oars again. ‘Give me space!’ he called. ‘I want to get clear of their sterns!’ The enemy was far too close. ‘Run!’ he called.
Neiron waved.
The Arete turned to port and Satyrus tried to do the same, getting his vulnerable starboard side clear of the enemy, but the port-side steering oar snapped under his hand – probably victim to the original collision and the boarding action. Then chaos ensued, his marines trying to find a spare oar in a strange ship, and their new oarsmen afraid – afraid of massacre, of defeat. Neiron fell in to port, keeping station just a quarter-stade distant. Both had their foresails up now, and with the wind in them they began to move well, even for heavy ships.
Satyrus spared time for a glance around. He could see trouble to the south – either there were new ships there, or someone had worked out that he was not on their side. But the rear of Demetrios’ fleet was all confusion – the confusion of victory, but no ship challenged them as they began to pull away. Laertes was trying to compensate for the lack of steering oars by trailing the ship’s oars, first one side and then the other, but the result slowed the ship and sent them in a lazy curve back under the sterns of the enemy. No ship responded – no ship seemed to notice them.
No ship except the great tenner, the mighty deceres that had started the battle behind the centre. Satyrus assumed that the ship was Plistias’ command ship, and he had no intention of engaging. Through no choice of his own, he had to pass close under the stern of the leviathan, and just as he began his pass, wincing to be so close to so much danger, the enemy flagship began to back away from the pair of quadremes that she had engaged – grappling both and boarding them simultaneously, so large was his marine contingent compared to theirs – a hundred men massacring perhaps fifteen on each quadreme, leaving them adrift, with blood running in trickles from the deck edges like a child’s attempt to write on parchment where the rowers had been murdered to save time. And the vast weight of the enemy ship backed under control, her oars sweeping like the legs of some ungainly millipede.
Neiron saw the enemy flagship begin to move at the same moment that Satyrus saw it begin to back, and both of them shouted orders at their oar masters. The same orders.
‘Ramming speed! All oars!’ Satyrus shouted, and Neiron gave the same command.
Satyrus felt the surge of power through the soles of his feet, but the huge enemy vessel was already moving and her stern towered over their side, and the enemy crew was now aware of them – shouting at them, assuming they were friendly – and then realising their error.
Satyrus stood tall at the starboard oar, testing his weight against them. ‘I intend to sheer off!’ he shouted at his temporary oar master across the length of the deck.
Laertes nodded and shouted down through the amidships hatch
at the rowers. Satyrus shook his head. His hands were clenched on the red-painted steering oars like a pankration fighter in the last grappling of the bout, and his brow was covered in sweat. There was blood down his right side and back, and he was cold.
Apollodorus stood by him, covering him with his aspis. The enormous enemy ship had archers, and they were firing down at him.
‘Thanks,’ Satyrus said.
‘Why not turn?’ Apollodorus asked, grasping the rail.
‘Too close,’ Satyrus said. ‘If I turn to port, our stern is no farther from them. If I turn to starboard, I’m running right down their side – look at those war engines!’
The tenner loomed over them like an adult over a child. Her sides rose like cliffs, and she had the same advantage over Atlantae that Arete had had over the light triremes. Neiron, a quarter-stade astern, had one advantage, however: all of his starboard engines could bear, and none of the enemy’s engines could – yet.
Satyrus caught at the shoulder of Apollodorus’ chiton. ‘Get the forward engine firing,’ he said.
Apollodorus nodded. ‘I’ll have a go,’ he said.
So close.
Satyrus jerked the remaining oar as another marine came up the main ladder dragging an oar. Satyrus managed to nudge the bow off to port and then straighten again – port, and back straight – trying to cheat away from the enemy stern and yet maintain all his speed. And the marine – not anyone Satyrus really knew – had a head on his shoulders. Now he was lashing the new steering oar home against the side with quick, professional knots.
But the new oar was just too late.
‘Oars in! Now!’ Satyrus roared, and Laertes repeated it instantly. They were too close – there was no way to avoid the collision, and Satyrus could already see – as if it were a maths lesson – that if the enemy ship hit his stern, the two ships would come to rest broadside to broadside, each pivoting on the collision at the stern, crushing their oars between them.
Grapples were flying, now. The deceres wanted them. One thumped home into the stern rail just an arm’s length from Satyrus’ shoulder, and another into the deck just forward, and then the enemy stern tapped into their stern – the angle was too acute for the enemy ship to damage them, but momentum and the grapples spun them to starboard, so that as the mammoth ship coasted, her rowers desperately trying to get their oars in, the smaller Atlantae crashed alongside like a tethered foal against a fence, splintering oars and making a mess of the magnificent enemy ship’s paintwork.
Atlantae’s oarsmen got their port-side oars in and home before they were rubbing alongside.
A flight of arrows struck all around Satyrus, but by luck or the will of the gods none of them struck him.
Satyrus wanted to curse. He felt a tide of despair, the spiritual kin to the feeling in his back and the cold in his spine, but he shook his head. We were that close to escape, he thought. Even as he watched, his newly raised foremast collapsed, splintering, and the sail obscured the whole foredeck. There was a pause.
Surrender?
But there was no surrender in a sea fight. If he’d considered it, the gouts of blood painting the sides of the pair of derelict quadremes just to the east told of what lay in store for him.
Forward, Apollodorus got the one heavy engine on the port side to fire. The whole ship moved when the great bow released, and the bolt went right in through an oar port and appeared to vanish into the hide of a great beast, like a barbed arrow into an elephant.
Just aft, the Arete fired all three of her engines together, and the bolts slammed into the deceres. But they had no more effect than a child’s sling does against a mad bull.
Satyrus let go of the oars and slipped his aspis onto his shoulder. He felt perversely annoyed to have to die here, in a lost battle for a monarch who didn’t deserve his sacrifice. Nothing about the situation was remotely heroic – he was only in this position because he’d mistimed his turn as he backed away from the battle, and it was his own hubris in seizing the stricken Atlantae that had brought him to his death.
He got his helmet strap in his right hand and pulled it tight. ‘No one’s fault but my own,’ he said. ‘Herakles, stand with me.’
The smell of wet fur was sharp, heady, pungent. The smell heartened him – meant he was still in touch with the other world, the world of the heroes. But it touched him in another way; he’d never smelled the cat so clearly, and he suspected that the veils between his world and the world of the heroes were stretched thin.
I’m going to die, he thought. It was not a new thought, but it had never been so immediate, and he had a frisson of hesitation as he thought of fifty inconsequential things he would like to have done. He thought, among a hundred other foolish thoughts, of Miriam’s hips under her chiton. It made him smile.
‘Not dead yet,’ he said aloud – so loud that the marine at his elbow grinned back.
‘No, we ain’t, lord.’ The man stood taller for a moment, and then settled his apsis on his shoulder and raised his spear.
‘Here they come,’ he said.
Satyrus wished he could remember the man’s name. He’d got a new oar from below, lashed it in place and then got his aspis between Satyrus and the enemy arrows. None of it was the stuff of the Iliad, but it was all done fast, and well – the sort of things that could tip a battle one way or another, as completely as a commander’s decisions.
There were fifty enemy marines in the first rush – fifty professional soldiers. Apollodorus had his twenty all formed up, and Satyrus and his companion – he’s called Necho. Satyrus suddenly found the man’s name against a welter of recollections. Together they raced forward, abandoning the helmsman’s station and apparently fleeing. Enemy marines, clambering over the stern, mocked them.
As they came up to Apollodorus amidships, the marine captain was stating his orders – calmly and quietly so as not to be heard by the enemy.
‘Look scared. Hang back. Look unwilling – and when I give the word, charge. Any man who shirks is a dead man.’ He paused. ‘Look like the crap you aren’t!’ he said. He pointed aft, past the enemy. ‘Arete is on the way. Show some yourselves.’
This speech seemed to put heart into the marines, who were, of course, used to Apollodorus and his acerbic commentary. No man who followed him would expect a salutation to the gods or a flowery speech.
The enemy marines came over the stern, and Apollodorus let them get aboard – most of them. He played that he was terrified – that his men were hanging back.
He flicked a look at Satyrus, who nodded. Apollodorus was a marine for a living, and Satyrus was merely a king. The nod permitted Apollodorus to keep the command.
‘Cowards!’ Apollodorus shouted. An arrow from the enemy stern hit his helmet and danced away. ‘Stand your ground, stay with me – NOW!’ he bellowed, all play-acting gone, and he raced down the deck for the mass of enemy marines.
Satyrus would have said that it was impossible to surprise men in open warfare, on an open deck in the midst of a battle – but the enemy marines were plainly shocked when the whole of his marine contingent rushed them as one man. Perhaps they had been counting on negotiation, surrender, massacre—
Satyrus slammed his aspis into his first man, an officer in an ornate blue and gilt Attic helmet with a pair of feather crests, and the man went down hard, flying back into his file partner and he, too, went down, and Satyrus put his butt-spike into the second man’s eye slot, ripped it free and plunged the fighting point, the sharp steel, into the neck of a third man. Then blows rained on his shield like storm-driven waves on a ship’s bow – three, four, five and he was rocked back as one blow almost cost him his balance. He thrust his spear out, stabbing blind, his eyes under his shield rim in a storm of pain, and he felt his needle-sharp point cut – slide – plunge like a knife into roast meat, and then the shaft was snapped by a blow from the right, and he had nothing but a bronze butt-spike and a few feet of ash. He blocked an overarm blow from an axe with his shattered shaft –
the axe cut away part of his own crest in a shower of blue and white horsehair – and he threw the butt-spike at an unarmoured giant to his front and made the man flinch back, and then Apollodorus was into the man, under his guard, stabbing as quickly as thought, once, twice, and the big enemy marine folded and vanished from Satyrus’ limited line of sight. What felt like an armoured fist struck Satyrus’ helmeted head and he rocked, tottered but did not fall because he was hemmed in so close by other fighters – he stumbled, recovered his balance, blessing long days on the sand of the palaestra. Without conscious thought he got his right hand under his armpit and pulled out his sword, stepped forward and cut overarm at the first man to come under his hand, and hit the man on top of his helmet crest so that he fell, unconscious.
The enemy was roaring, shouting, and marines were pouring onto the deck, but Satyrus and Apollodorus has cleared the deck around them, and the first batch of enemy marines were penned into the stern, terrified and yet shouting for aid – for something – Save the king! they called to each other and came in again.
Satyrus looked down between his legs and realised that he was straddling the enemy commander, who he had felled with his shield rush in the first seconds of the melee. He only had to look at the man for a second to know him.
‘Demetrios!’ he said.
‘Satyrus the Euxine,’ said the man lying under him. Demetrios the Golden grabbed his ankle and threw him in one practised move, and then Satyrus was on the deck, his left arm encumbered by his shield – a wonderful implement in a sea fight, but an impediment in grappling – and Demetrios reached out for his windpipe but Satyrus drove his sword hilt into the golden man’s faceplate and the silvered bronze buckled under the blow and Demetrios grunted. Blood fountained. Still, Demetrios landed a heavy blow to Satyrus’ throat just as Satyrus got his feet under him and he was rocked back, blackness encroaching on his vision and his breathing ruined, just as the second group of enemy marines charged.
Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities Page 20
