Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  The bow came around like a living thing. For a second, their whole port side was exposed to the gale, and the wall of wind took them and moved the ship the length of a house, sideways and rolled them so far that some starboard-side oarsmen got their hands wet in the ocean and their oars were almost straight up and down, or so it seemed. But they held their ground and pulled like they had held their ground in the phalanx and the port-side men pulled like heroes, and the ship shot about in her own length, her force keeping her out against the hawsers of the fulcrum – turned at racing speed.

  Jubal, armed with a great axe, chopped at his hawsers and they parted with the sound of close-in thunder.

  Like a great arrow from the god’s bow, Aphrodite’s Laughter shot out of the storm-lashed darkness at the mole. Satyrus ran forward from amidships to join the marines.

  ‘Ares!’ Satyrus could see forward now – over the marines, every man already soaked to the skin – and he saw now that Demetrios had not recalled the flanking ships. Half were sunk, their ruptured timbers showing above the water like spiky teeth, and the others were rolling into the mole with mighty crashes, pounding themselves to flinders. ‘Poseidon!’ Satyrus prayed, and ran aft.

  ‘The mole’s still full of ships!’ Satyrus yelled.

  ‘Then we don’t need to back water!’ Neiron roared in reply.

  ‘Brace!’ called the men in the bow. Satyrus threw himself flat and grabbed a stanchion.

  The bow hit something with a gentle tap, and then something else – Satyrus kept his helmeted head down, well clear of the stanchion, and felt impact after impact – four, five, a great shudder and a ripping noise, as if the veils that hid the world of the immortals from men had parted asunder, and then a crash forward.

  Satyrus was on his feet without actually thinking that the way was off the ship, and he ran forward – the foremast had snapped off cleanly and lay over the bow, right across the deck of a half-sunk trireme – and onto the mole.

  Satyrus ran down the deck, already knowing what he had to do. Because only a god could have delivered the foremast like a boarding plank, cutting across the half-sunk wreck the way that Herakles cut across most of the problems posed to him.

  At full charge, Satyrus leaped onto the butt of the fallen mast and ran – ran along the rounded, slippery bridge, eyes locked on the mole, blocking his fear – fear of heights, fear of slipping, fear that no man would follow him. He ran across the fallen mast and slipped – at the very end – and skidded on his knees at the edge of the mole to fall in a heap—

  —on the mole.

  Only his greaves kept him from ripping all the skin off his knees, and the salt-water spume hurt like a hundred avenging furies, but he was up on his feet in a heartbeat, his spear still in his hand, shield on his shoulder – he’d hurt that shoulder falling, hell to pay later – and he looked back to see Draco coming across the foremast, jumping effortlessly onto the surface of the mole.

  ‘Let’s kill every fucker here,’ he said, and ran off down the mole into the dark.

  The oarsmen were clambering off their benches, impeded by their armour, but the marines were coming across the mast. Satyrus didn’t wait for them.

  He turned, and ran down the mole after Draco.

  The whole length of the mole seemed deserted.

  And it seemed to stay that way until he heard a scream, and then a massive lightning flash lit up the scene.

  Draco was killing men. And the mole was packed – packed with men. All the men from all the ships.

  Zeus sent lightning from heaven to give them light, Poseidon blew wind and rain at the men on the mole, and Satyrus and his puny handful came out of the storm and started to kill.

  Satyrus ran shield first into a clump of men illuminated by the levin-bolts. The thunder seemed to roll on now in one continuous peel, and the rapid flashes of the storm strobed together in an almost continuous light that nonetheless had a terrifying quality to it.

  Most of the men closest to him were unarmed oarsmen. Satyrus killed them anyway, because a night assault in the heart of a storm is not a time when a man shows mercy. He was economical, fighting as only a veteran of dozens of hand-to-hand combats can fight – killing as only the veteran knows how to kill, shallow jabs to eye and throat and abdomen, no long thrusts – the needle-sharp point of his best short spear was a reaping scythe, into temples, through skull-fronts, into necks – any stroke that left the victim dead without risk to the attacker, risk of a wound or of his weapon binding in the wound.

  The storm roared. It gave the fight an Olympian quality, as no sound of mortal man could be heard.

  Men came up out of the storm, more marines and more and more again, and then Jubal and the deck crew – and the oarsmen, packed like herd animals died without response, their screams lost in the scream of the storm.

  But behind the living wall of oarsmen were good soldiers, professionals, men who knew how to shelter themselves on a stormy night, and knew when they were under attack, knew that their lives were forfeit if they failed. The oarsmen died to buy them time, and they awoke, took up their weapons and formed.

  Satyrus could see them forming, and he tried to cut his way through the last fringe of terrified oarsmen, who now pressed back into the forming ranks of the enemy soldiers – now the enemy soldiers were killing the oarsmen as ruthlessly as Satyrus’ men, defending the integrity of their formation. All in the lightning-lit roar that filled the senses.

  Satyrus broke through the last rank of oarsmen, face to face with an officer in a bedraggled double crest. He thrust – hard – and his spear point caught on the other man’s breastplate and knocked the man down, but failed to go through the heavy bronze. Satyrus stepped in, kicked the man in the groin and went for the kill—

  A spear caught his in the descent, parried him, swung up, inside his guard – Satyrus sprang back and the counter-thrust just touched the front of his helmet under the crest, a killing blow a finger’s width from its target.

  Satyrus planted his feet, caught the replacement blow on his shield and went in with the other man’s spear safe on his shield, and now the other man sprang back.

  Time to think this man is a brilliant spear-fighter and then a flurry of blows, blocking on instinct, and an overarm swing with his spear point to catch what he couldn’t see – pure luck, his bronze saurauter caught the man in the side of the helmet – just a tap, but it staggered him and they fell apart, and five flashes of lightning showed Satyrus that he was facing Lucius, who he’d seen before.

  Lucius must have recognised him. The Italian grinned, showing all his teeth. ‘Let’s dance,’ he said. And rifled his spear overarm, a beautiful throw.

  Perhaps Herakles or Athena lifted his shield. Perhaps it was just the wind. The spear, meant for his eye, sprang off the bronze of his aspis rim and leaped high in the air over his head.

  Lucius was right behind it, having quick-drawn his sword, and his swing blew chips out of the aspis. He was inside Satyrus’ spear.

  Satyrus dropped his spear and punched his open hand at Lucius’ face, a pankration blow – he only caught the man’s armoured forehead but he rocked his head back, powered forward on his leg change and knocked the Italian off his feet and went for his own sword, but the Italian’s legs came up and kicked him square in the chest and he was down, his aspis rolling away into the light-punctuated darkness.

  Satyrus had no idea which way the fight was oriented now, and he’d lost Lucius when he fell. He ripped his sopping chlamys over his head and rolled it on his left arm, shoulder burning – and took a pair of blows on his back, but neither was hard and he got to his feet, head swinging like a hawk’s, looking for the Italian, terror stealing his breath.

  And then he saw the Italian – the man had the officer he’d knocked down in his first rush by the heels, was dragging him clear.

  Satyrus pushed forward and found himself facing an enormous man with a spear that hit as hard as an axe, and Satyrus was forced to one knee to parry the spea
r with his cloak. He couldn’t take another such blow, so he powered forward, like a man tackling a goat, and cut behind the man’s knees as the man’s spear-butt crashed on his helmet – he smelled blood, saw a bright light and continued forward and the man fell back, cursing, fell to the ground, his hamstring cut, and Satyrus pinned his shield to his chest and thrust his sword point through the man’s eye—

  As he realised that he had just killed Nestor, the captain of his lover’s guard. His friend, from childhood. Guest friend, sworn friend—

  Satyrus screamed into the god-filled night, a cry of pain and rage as loud as his lord Herakles had ever bellowed, a cry so loud that it carried over the roar of the storm.

  Men flinched from that scream. Something died in Satyrus with that scream, which tore from him whatever shreds of youth still clung to him, so that the sound leaving his throat might have taken something of his soul with it out of the trap of his teeth and into the hateful night.

  Draco’s head snapped around – because a man who has just lost a friend of forty years knows exactly what is contained in that scream – and the Macedonian fought his way to Satyrus’ side and pulled him to his feet, heedless of the enemy, who had mostly fallen back to cower against the wall.

  Satyrus looked at the enemy, eyes blank with hate – not hate for the men who faced him, either.

  ‘Amastris!’ he roared at the night. Aphrodite’s Laughter, he thought. I hate the gods.

  Draco plunged back into the cold inferno of the fight. Satyrus stumbled back, watching his life burn before his eyes as surely as if a lightning bolt had hit him.

  Amastris was helping Demetrios. With her best. And Satyrus had just faced Stratokles, and Lucius, and . . . Nestor.

  He wrenched his helmet off his head, wiped the streaming water from his eyes and pulled the helmet back on.

  The storm was less severe, now, and men were pouring over the makeshift wall at the south end of the mole – Apollodorus and his marines.

  Satyrus watched a boat pull away from the mole into the teeth of the storm – three times its pair of oarsmen tried to leave, only to be smashed alongside, but the boat didn’t capsize and the oarsmen kept their nerve and then the boat was away, climbing a breaker into the storm.

  Lucius and Stratokles, of course.

  Satyrus’ face worked like that of a horrified child, and he ran to the edge of the mole, roared ‘Amastris’ at the storm and hurled his sword at them. It arched up into the storm and vanished into the huge waters.

  The boat slipped over the height of the wave and vanished into the darkness.

  And Satyrus began, like an adult, to work on controlling his fear, his anguish and his horror.

  Behind him, in between the flashes of lightning in the dwindling storm, columns of fire rose to the heavens. Even in driving rain, pitch-painted ships burn well.

  26

  DAYS THIRTY AND FOLLOWING

  Panther was dead. He had died in the lightning, killed by an unlucky spear thrust from an enemy marine as he led his boarders into the engine-ships. His ram had broken the boom, flashing out of the storm like a bolt of black lightning to strike the boom with the full force of the wind and sea, and it had smashed in the whole bow of his own ship. His men had followed him over the bows into Demetrios’ ships, taking a penteres and a trireme in exchange and bringing them safely through the shattered boom.

  Satyrus’ men cleared the mole, and before they had finished, they were so satiated with killing that they had two hundred prisoners, who included many of Amastris’ guardsmen. Satyrus sent them back to his former lover in exchange for Panther’s body – two hundred men for a corpse. No one in Rhodes questioned him.

  He walked out of the town with the dawn, the second day after the assault on the mole. His eyes were dry and his mind clear.

  He walked a stade from the town, as agreed by heralds, accompanied only by his hetairoi. He had Anaxagoras and Charmides, Neiron and Jubal, Helios, Apollodorus, Draco, Leosthenes the priest, Abraham and twenty others, all wearing their best armour. Ten marines carried Nestor on a bier made of his men’s shields.

  Demetrios met them on horseback – a magnificent golden horse with a saddlecloth of leopard skin, his own armour a yellow gold that caught the rising sun and made him glow like a god.

  Surely, thought Satyrus, the intended effect.

  Satyrus wore his best – his bronze armour, his silvered helmet. And when he approached the mounted man, he had the satisfaction of seeing the golden man’s blue eyes widen.

  Demetrios raised a leg over the saddlecloth and slipped from his horse as elegantly as a Sakje maiden.

  ‘Satyrus!’ he said.

  ‘Demetrios,’ Satyrus said, and saluted, as one priest salutes another.

  Demetrios, rarely brought up short, was breathless. ‘You – we understood that you were dead.’

  Satyrus looked away. ‘I live,’ he said.

  Demetrios embraced him. It was one of the strangest moments of his life to have this man, this implacable enemy, embrace him. ‘You give me life, brother!’ Demetrios said in his ear. ‘I am not held at bay by a council of old men, after all. I am in a contest with a worthy foe.’

  Satyrus started as if an adder had appeared between Demetrios’ lips. ‘This is no contest,’ he said.

  Demetrios’ grin might have split the heavens. ‘This is the contest of my life!’ he said. ‘Who could ask for more? We are not men, Satyrus! We are gods! And we contest for worthy things – glory, and honour! Not puny things like cities and women. This is the siege of Troy born again, and you, my love, are my Hektor.’

  Satyrus met his eyes. Sadly, they were not mad. Madness might have been some excuse. He spat, in contempt.

  ‘I am not Hektor,’ Satyrus said. ‘I return the corpse of a great man – a hero, who died for his queen when lesser men fled. I offer it free – although if she was worth an obol, she’d have craved his body as we craved that of Panther.’ Satyrus waved at the two hundred prisoners who were marching out of the city. ‘And these – I return. Where is the body of my friend?’

  ‘He’s just an old man!’ Demetrios said, as if something about the scene made no sense.

  ‘God or not, Demetrios, when you lack the sense to honour your own heroes, your men will leave you,’ Satyrus said. He knew it was foolish to offer advice to the enemy, but he couldn’t resist.

  ‘You return two hundred warriors for a dead man?’ asked one of Demetrios’ staff officers. ‘He is a fool, Lord King.’

  Demetrios turned and struck the man so hard that he fell on his back. ‘You are a fool, Phillip.’ He turned back to Satyrus. ‘You are winning, aren’t you?’

  Satyrus permitted himself to smile. ‘I am winning by so much that I can give you two hundred living men – good spearmen – for the corpse of a friend.’

  A movement passed through Demetrios’ staff like a wind through a stand of trees on a still day.

  ‘I will take this city,’ Demetrios said.

  ‘No,’ Satyrus said. He turned, and put his hand to Panther’s bier.

  ‘I will have you in ten days!’ Demetrios called.

  Satyrus kept walking.

  At his heels, Neiron grunted. ‘Best thrust of the siege,’ he said.

  ‘I thought so,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘Why?’ Helios asked.

  Apollodorus grunted. ‘Demetrios just felt a cold draught of doubt, lad.’

  The loss of all his machines cost Demetrios a month. His ships had to search the Asian shore for timber, and they did not make those forays without cost.

  But timber came, and Satyrus, who went every morning to the peak of Jubal’s tower to watch, saw the big machines take shape. New metal had to be forged for their parts, and new wood beams cut, in far-off Lebanon and closer in on the wooded slopes of Ida. Thirty days of labour, and Demetrios had again a battery of machines.

  The city was not idle during that time. The tent city in the agora was reorganised, and men set their hands to improving
their tents against late summer rains. Latrines were dug in the rubble of the former northern-harbour neighbourhoods. Makeshift taverns opened, and men looted the wine cellars of smashed homes to open a tent for one night that sold a little comfort against the hopelessness of the siege.

  The second month of the siege saw a collapse of normality in the city. It started with the emancipation of a third of the slaves, made citizens with citizen rights – three thousand men and women altogether. These Neodamodeis (newly enfranchised) were formed into their own regiment, given their own living areas, and older citizens adopted many of them – some in place of lost sons and daughters, and others simply because they had been favoured slaves, or as insurance. Menedemos took command of them and formed them into a phalanx.

  In their ranks marched Korus. Satyrus armed him, from top to toe, and Apollodorus provided his weapons. They invited him to serve with them – with the oarsmen, or the marines. But the trainer shook his head.

  ‘I’ll go with my own,’ he said. ‘They need me.’

  The emancipation had bitter enemies, and Panther’s death had re-empowered the oligarchs. Nicanor had returned to power. He openly advocated surrender on the best terms possible, and lampooned Satyrus for claiming that the siege could be won. But most painful, he held Satyrus up as war-mad, like a young man with his first woman might be love-mad. He made this allusion in every speech, every meeting, so that the men of the town began to look at Satyrus as not being one of them, but as an alien with different interests, like glory.

  ‘He has no daughters in this town,’ Nicanor proclaimed. ‘And when we fall, his friend Demetrios will take him to his tent and feed him wine – while we are crucified.’

  Satyrus admitted that there was truth to what the man said. There always was. He wasn’t evil – he was merely driven.

  Nicanor railed against the emancipation of the slaves, but it was done. Carried by Menedemos’ slim majority. And the same for Satyrus’ status as a commander. By one vote, Satyrus held onto his command.

  Other changes came, and they angered men so that the tensions inside the political class of the town escalated. Women – maiden daughters of citizens – were caught in the beds of young men. Indeed, Satyrus saw women going to the fountains who showed themselves quite deliberately to the ephebes. And other women flirted openly – with married men and unmarried. Nor were they the only ones to make advances.