Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  And they had to be careful, because from the first, some of the climbing men were friends – swimmers from the burning Rhodian ship.

  Satyrus stood at the head of an iron ladder built into the breakwater, and his shield felt as if it was made of iron on his shoulder – he could not remember feeling so tired before a fight. Some enemy had made it up this ladder or another, and most were unarmed or poorly armed, but Tyche sent a rush at him – three men in armour, who had clambered straight from the dying trireme onto the wharf, and a dozen unarmed sailors behind them – and he was alone.

  He kicked another man on the ladder and the poor wretch retreated, and then Satyrus set his shoulder and the rush came in.

  There was nothing he could do but retreat – he could not have held the head of the ladder even in top shape. He managed two good blows, both of which struck home, but not with enough strength, and neither of his first opponents fell.

  Back and back and back again, cursing his weakness. A shape beside him in the dark, swinging wildly, and men fell back before them – and now a flicker of light, a burst of flame and Satyrus lunged, changing feet, and his point sank into a man’s eye-slit and he died.

  And then – suddenly – the breakwater was covered in men. Menedemos brought his ship in close on the inside of the breakwater and landed his marines and his deck crew, and they stemmed the rush. As soon as they pushed past Satyrus, he fell to his knees – a few seconds of wrestling with his helmet and he vomited from fatigue.

  Anaxagoras held his hair out of the vomit, and then passed him a rag, silent in the fitful light of the dying ships.

  Satyrus got to his feet. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I think you saved my life,’ he continued.

  Anaxagoras grinned. ‘I think you saved mine, back in the fight at Salamis.’ He shrugged. ‘Even?’

  Satyrus couldn’t raise his arms above his shoulders. ‘I can’t help myself,’ he said.

  Anaxagoras nodded. ‘Me neither.’

  The Rhodians cleared the mole, killing every enemy on it and offering no mercy. All of the Rhodian swimmers were rescued, including the three men supporting Panther, who was still in armour and had nonetheless made it across the harbour.

  ‘There’s a man more tired than I am myself,’ Satyrus said. He went and embraced the old navarch.

  ‘Now he’ll go away,’ Panther gasped.

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Now he’ll get serious,’ he said.

  21

  DAYS NINETEEN, TWENTY AND TWENTY-ONE

  The next morning, Demetrios stayed in his camp and the defenders slept. There were now two thousand people, free, slave, citizen and foreigner mixed, sleeping in the agora and on the open ground in front of the Temple of Poseidon, and families were building shacks from blankets, old sails, baskets – anything they could find. Wood was at a premium: Satyrus’ sailors had taken every bit of wood that could be spared, and men were cutting down the olive trees that grew in gardens.

  The sortie had destroyed three more engine-ships, leaving Demetrios with six. His engineers and slaves spent the nineteenth day of the siege hard at work, and thirty triremes escorted a dozen merchant ships away to the north.

  ‘What do you think he’s up to?’ Anaxagoras asked between bouts. Korus was leaning on his stick. They were in Abraham’s garden – there was no longer a gymnasium to visit.

  ‘Getting wood to build more engines,’ Satyrus said.

  Fighting in Abraham’s garden meant fighting where all the marines and sailors could watch. And Miriam, of course, who smiled at both men. And raised the intensity of the mock fighting enormously.

  Both of them were limping when they finished. Miriam had watched all of their bouts, and now, as Charmides went forward to fight Helios, she watched them, as well. Other marines were pairing up.

  ‘Have time for me?’ Abraham asked.

  He was wearing armour.

  Satyrus grinned. He took the practice sword from Anaxagoras’ hand.

  ‘Brother!’ he said, and they set to.

  Abraham was in good condition, but his technique was rusty and Satyrus drove him down the garden and then got a thrust to the abdomen.

  ‘I deserved that!’ Satyrus laughed.

  ‘I enjoyed it,’ Abraham said.

  He managed two more good bouts before fatigue crushed him, and he saw that Abraham was pulling his attacks, and raised his hand. ‘That’s it for me,’ he said, and the two embraced. ‘Good to see you in armour,’ he said. He went to stand with Apollodorus, watching the marines. He didn’t mean to stand where he could overhear Anaxagoras talk to Miriam. It just happened.

  ‘How odd men are,’ Miriam said to Anaxagoras. ‘My brother is here every day – but when he dons armour to be a killer, Satyrus loves him more.’

  Anaxagoras shook his head. ‘Nay, Despoina,’ he said. ‘It is far more complicated than that – as I think you know. War made them brothers. When Abraham is dressed as a Jew – I mean no offence – Satyrus doesn’t know what to make of him. But the king is courteous, and he loves your brother. But when your brother puts his armour on and shows his legs – why, that’s the man he knows; knows to the centre of his heart.’

  Miriam wasn’t visible to Satyrus. He wished he could see her face – she made an odd sound, almost like a moan. And he thought, Anaxagoras, you bastard – you’re right. And Abraham deserves better, however he’s dressed.

  And then they ate, and slept, and Demetrios launched his largest attack yet.

  Satyrus was caught by surprise – he’d expected Demetrios to be patient, get more wood from the mainland and continue his careful bombardment. It was, after all, a crushing strategy.

  Instead, at dawn on the twenty-first day, all six engine-ships came on, covered by a hundred triremes and two dozen penteres.

  The Rhodians scrambled for their defences. They got to their stations, and Satyrus had time, no matter how fast the enemy rowed, to alter his local dispositions. His was the responsibility for the centre of the sea wall. His work crews had laboured in secret for fifteen days. His sailors and marines manned some of the walls. His beloved Arete lay moored in front of the weakest wall section.

  ‘Apollodorus?’

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘All the marines into the reserve. The sailors have been training on the engines – let them take over. I want every armoured man ready to stem a breach – well back, all the way to the agora. I won’t lose one of you to bombardment – and my reading is that he’s going to bring the engines in close.’ Satyrus slapped him on his armoured shoulder. ‘Go.’

  ‘Yes, lord!’ Apollodorus saluted.

  Demetrios’ fleet formed off the small harbour and the large – and at a trumpet blast, a dozen triremes dashed into each harbour to be met by a hail of ballista bolts, fire arrows and spears.

  But it is difficult to sink a determined ship with bolts. The trireme’s oarsmen were brave, and they had been promised rich rewards for success. They drove their ships beak first into the moored defensive line – the wooden wall of ships defending the sea wall – and it burst into flame.

  ‘Shit,’ Satyrus said. One of the first ships to catch was Arete. And all he could do from his rooftop perch was to watch his beloved burn. It was like looking on at the death of a friend – a lover. A best-beloved. For three years of peace he had poured his desire for action, for a life outside the Euxine, into Arete. And she burned so fast – his dreams of freedom, his secret desire to sail away and leave Tanais to rot, never to attend a council of farmers, or count drachma when ordering statues – she burned, and he couldn’t tear his eyes from her, as she seemed to achieve some final perfection, as if the ship itself was summoned to Olympus and went through an apotheosis of fire.

  Demetrios had chosen his men well and planned carefully, and the whole line of the wooden wall caught fire and the sea wind pushed the smoke ashore, into the faces of the defenders. And while their eyes streamed and they choked on the smoke, the heavier ships entered the harbours, and the engine-ships be
hind them.

  Then their engines began to range the sea wall. They were shooting blind, into the smoke – but they had engineers who had been trained by philosophers and mathematicians, and they had the range from other forays into the harbour. The deadly hail crushed the sea wall in three places, opening breaches as wide as a small ship was long. Two hours into the action, as the waves lapped over the waterline of the blackened Arete and she sank in the shallow water, extinguishing the last fire in the harbour, and the air cleared, the whole force moved in, undeterred by the defender’s desperate counter-barrage. The harbour was filled with enemy ships. The two rooftop ballistae shot as fast as bolts could be provided – a few red hot from the kitchens, most cold and straight.

  In the harbour, enemy ships caught fire, enemy captains fell, enemy oarsmen died, but still the fleet pressed forward – and now the great engine-ships raised their aim points. Their big stones ceased to fall on the sea wall. They shot a hundred paces further inland, creating a line of destruction far behind the wall.

  ‘He’s cutting the beach off from the town,’ Satyrus said. He shook his head. ‘He’s good. I hadn’t thought of using the big engines to keep men away.’

  Anaxagoras ducked as a stone whistled past close by and crushed the rubble of the house behind Abraham’s – again.

  ‘Here they come,’ Satyrus said. ‘Now we see.’ He turned to Helios. ‘Get Abraham.’

  In moments, his friend was beside him in the street. Satyrus took him aside, into the courtyard. He motioned to Anaxagoras to join them.

  ‘Abraham,’ he said. ‘The town may fall in the next hour.’

  ‘I know,’ Abraham said.

  ‘If you agree, I will leave Helios here to kill . . . your sister.’ Satyrus shrugged. ‘Anaxagoras, am I wrong?’

  The musician shook his head. ‘No.’

  But Abraham shook his head. ‘It is taken care of,’ he said. ‘I thank you for your . . . thought. But she has her own way.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Good, then. Let’s be to work.’

  He saw Miriam at the window of her weaving room. He waved.

  She didn’t wave back.

  The streets were grim. The air was full of smoke and dust, and splinters and shards of rock had hurt many people, so that slaves and injured children drifted listlessly, or ran screaming.

  Satyrus moved forward through the rubble. The closer he got to the sea wall, the worse the destruction was. Many of the stones had missed, and fallen on the town. The worse for his plan.

  By the time he reached the sea wall – or the rubble of the sea wall; a continuous breach for four hundred paces, now – the enemy was beaching thirty light ships, all packed with soldiers. Two were already on fire – one had taken a ballista bolt right into the packed phalangites – but the others came on, and the men leaped into the shallow water and came up the beach screaming.

  Picked men, all volunteers. Veterans of fifty actions, hard Macedonians, Greeks and Asians who had faced cavalry and elephants and fire and sword for twenty years, they came up the beach into arrows so thick they seemed the embodiment of wind. Men fell, and more pressed behind them. Dozens died. Dozens fell wounded, and more than a few cowered in the bilges of their light assault boats and refused to press ashore – but two thousand men set foot on the beach and most of them crossed the shingle to the foot of the breach.

  It was darkly comic, like Menander’s best work, that Demetrios had forty thousand soldiers and yet his assaults were limited by the number of men he could fit into ships and cram through the small harbour entrance. If he’d been able to fill the beach with men – even four thousand men – the town would have fallen in minutes.

  Satyrus waited in his defences. Two weeks of work by his sailors and the town slaves. Was he right? Did Demetrios suspect?

  The town’s half-finished, badly mauled sea wall didn’t even slow the Macedonian professionals, and they were into the streets.

  ‘Stay together!’ an officer called. ‘No looting until the garrison’s dead!’

  They cheered like madmen. They were in the town, their ships dominating the harbour—

  Satyrus watched them come.

  The lead men were dying under renewed archery volleys – stronger, if anything, than before. And now the Macedonian officers began to raise their heads and see.

  A city block behind the sea wall was another wall, disguised among the houses. It was built of rubble and the stones of the Temple of Apollo and the gymnasium. It was only twice the height of a man, and instead of towers, the biggest houses had been crudely reinforced and loop-holed. Every archer in the town was in the houses, and they shot into the packed Macedonians like hunters killing a herd of netted deer.

  The Macedonians screamed in fear and in rage, and they didn’t break. They went up the narrow streets between the loop-holed houses. They were veterans. They took the casualties to get them to the wall, because they knew to a man that the only way out was forward.

  Satyrus had seen second-rate Macedonians at Gaza. But he had never seen the ferocity of the best of them: the old farmers of Pella, the men whose courage had made Alexander master of Asia. They roared like the lion roars when trapped in the barnyard by the herdsmen, trying to attack the cattle in the barn on a cold winter’s night and now, cornered, too angry to run. They bellowed, and they climbed their own dead to get over the walls.

  They gained the top of the wall in three places. In two, local counter-attacks cleared them – later, Satyrus learned that Idomeneus, the finest archer he knew aside from his sister, had led his unarmoured Cretans out of their houses into the flanks of a breakthrough.

  But that was later. Right in the centre, where they received some supporting fire from the engines on their ships, the Macedonians went up the wall three times, and on the third attempt, climbing a hundred corpses to reach with heavy hands for the lives of the defenders, they crossed the wall, gave a great cheer and roared into the town.

  Satyrus turned to Charmides. ‘Get Apollodorus,’ he said. ‘Don’t die on the way.’

  He had Anaxagoras and Helios, Abraham and a dozen half-armoured sailors.

  Neiron’s hand closed like a vice on his shoulder. ‘Not you, lord.’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Every man. I have armour.’

  Neiron shook his head. ‘You are rash.’

  Satyrus caught their eyes, tied his cheek-plates down and hefted his spear. His shield threatened to drag him down. He ignored his fatigue. ‘Ready?’

  The men around him growled. Sailors were pouring off the roof of Abraham’s house. The street was full: from side to side it wasn’t much wider than a chariot, and thirty men filled it six deep.

  Anaxagoras looked at him, huge and ferocious in a leering bronze helmet – a Thracian with a wicked faceplate. ‘At least stand in the second rank,’ he said.

  ‘Never,’ Satyrus said. He could see Miriam on the roof, watching. At some remove, he knew that he was a fool, a rash boy, but Miriam was standing right there and he was the King of the Bosporus, not some shirking second-ranker.

  The Macedonians paused at the edge of the street, cheered and charged.

  ‘Charge!’ Satyrus roared.

  They pounded down the street at the enemy, sandals slapping. A Macedonian caught his foot on rubble and fell – the enemy charge faltered, but the men were trained and they flowed around the fallen man and came on.

  Satyrus wished that he was stronger, and then the daemon came to him, and he ran—

  Both sides slowed as shields came together. Neither side had sarissas – the huge long pikes that Macedonians carried in open warfare. They were too long for siege work, and the enemy phalangites had javelins and longche, the sort of spear that Greek cavalrymen and hunters carried. They had the smaller round shields as well, and Satyrus and his companions had the advantage at contact. Satyrus put his shoulder down, and his shield face slammed into an enemy—

  And he was knocked flat, the man stepped on him and died, his blood all over Satyr
us’ face as he tried to rise, and a blow rang off his helmet and he was down again, something heavy on his legs. Another man stepped on his shield and his shoulder shrieked with pain. For a moment he was twelve years old, fighting in the dark beneath Philokles’ feet when assassins attacked their house in Heraklea. He let go of his spear, got the sword out of his scabbard under his armpit and hurt himself as someone kicked his out-thrust right elbow – lost the sword, took a blow to his helmet.

  It was tempting to give up and lie flat, but his city was dying. He got his shield arm out of the porpax of his shield, fought the wave of pain and put his left hand under himself, pulled at his legs and began to drag them free – there were dead men on his legs and hips – a shield slammed into his head and he went down again, and he was on his chest now, eyes full of stars and a forest of legs and hips above him, the star of Macedon on the shields. Satyrus found his sword hilt under his hand and he cut up with his xiphos and the blow had little strength, but the edge and point went into a man’s groin and the man screamed and folded, falling right onto Satyrus’ outstretched sword arm; he lost his grip on the sword. Another blow to his back and he was down, and the weight on his back was so great that he wondered if he was to be crushed alive. Men died above him, and now he was imprisoned, someone was screaming curses inside his helmet—

  Darkness.

  HERAKLEA, SPRING, 305 BC

  ‘Satyrus of the Bosporus is dead.’

  It was said in the agora and in the barracks, in the private houses where merchants lived, in bedchambers and in andron. Some said it with conviction, and some said it with hesitation.

  In the citadel of the city, high above all the other whispers, Stratokles of Athens sat on an ebony chair in his mistress’s presence, a bag of scrolls by his side. He lifted another scroll – his third of this stormy meeting – cracked the seal and read the long, florid salutation aloud.

  ‘To the Divine Amastris, light-bringer, herald of beauty, beloved of Aphrodite and Athena, this humble supplicant sends greetings, beseeching your Divine Majesty for your continued protection and favour.’ Stratokles looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m so glad we don’t pay by the word. However, Phiale is an old and trusted agent – ha, although the mere use of the word old will probably cause her pain from here. And there it is, Despoina – Satyrus is dead. Died of some sort of poisoned wound, or perhaps a fever, oh, a month ago or more.’