Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  In a city at the edge of extinction, the old rules don’t hold long.

  Nor did the Demos party have much patience with the law courts of the oligarchs. A jury of rich men found a poor man guilty of cowardice in a skirmish and the man was carried away on the arms of his compatriots, and the jurors were threatened with stoning.

  A pair of foreigners – Persian merchants – were killed by a mob.

  Men knifed each other over clean water.

  Satyrus tried to wall himself off from it. He concerned himself with the siege, day after day, drilling the Neodamodeis and raiding with his marines. Four times his men, unarmoured, crossed the open ground between the city and the enemy camp to massacre the sentries, until Demetrios had to build a wall to protect his wall.

  On the fiftieth day of the siege, the boule had to cut the ration. Men received two-thirds of the grain they’d received before, and women just half. The rich had other food, and they made no protest – they made the rules, after all. But the poorer classes and the newly enfranchised had no other food, and they were angry.

  Satyrus was angry, too. He walked from the boule to Abraham’s tent, sat heavily and accepted a cup of clean water from Miriam, who now did the table service. Abraham was proud that he had freed all of his slaves.

  ‘We cut the grain ration,’ Satyrus said. ‘Nicanor wanted it, of course.’

  ‘Why? Are we short of grain?’ Miriam asked.

  Satyrus smiled at her. He barely saw her any more – he all but lived in Jubal’s tower, preparing the southern defences for the expected assault. Nicanor had the harbour now. He’d demanded it in an early vote and been surprised when Satyrus exchanged it for the south and west without demur.

  ‘No. Not yet. It will come, of course. Mostly he wants the poor to be demoralised, so that they will desert – or better yet, open another gate to the enemy.’ Satyrus drank his water. ‘Nicanor is willing to risk a sack to get the siege over.’

  ‘He’s mad!’ Abraham said.

  ‘I think so, yes,’ Satyrus agreed. ‘I think that grief and pettiness have pretty much stolen his wits. Today I actually considered killing him.’

  Abraham shook his head. ‘They forget so soon!’

  Satyrus made a face. ‘Not really. It’s just that after we win a fight, everyone’s confidence goes up for what – three days? And then we crash again. I can’t blame them. I can’t see the end from here – I watched Demetrios land another five or six tonnes of grain today. I spent an hour trying to imagine how to get at it. We can’t – there’s no raid we could launch that would do any good.’

  Miriam smiled. ‘You need music, my lord. Come and play. Anaxagoras and I will teach you.’

  Satyrus smiled curtly. ‘I would only be the third wheel on your chariot, madam,’ he said, so sharply that Miriam turned away, her face red.

  Abraham shot to his feet. ‘What, exactly, did you mean by that?’

  Satyrus stood. ‘I should not have come here.’ He gathered his chlamys and walked out, leaving Abraham as angry as he’d ever seen him.

  So be it, thought Satyrus. He loved Abraham, but he couldn’t abide – couldn’t abide—

  There were some truths even brave men hide from.

  Luckily, such men often have friends.

  Later, in the courtyard of Jubal’s tower, when Anaxagoras approached him, Satyrus stared at him coldly.

  ‘You need to relax, have a glass of wine, listen to my song about Amyntas,’ Anaxagoras said.

  Draco smiled softly. ‘It is really very good, lord.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I believe, Anaxagoras, that you are the captain of the west gate – this very moment. But here you are, with a lyre under your arm.’

  ‘I exchanged with Apollodorus!’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I protest, Satyrus! I did not expect to be an officer. The poetry came upon me.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘You wish to be relieved of your command?’ he asked. Anaxagoras was now a captain of twenty crack marines.

  ‘No!’ Anaxagoras was stung.

  ‘Then go to your post and stop making excuses.’

  ‘You are jealous.’ Anaxagoras’s blood was up. ‘My time is my own. I exchanged with Apollodorus.’

  ‘I may be excused for not answering you, sir. I know my duty – do you know yours?’ Satyrus drew himself up. ‘I might wish that I had time to visit certain people, but I do not. You must make your own choices.’

  ‘I say you are an insolent hypocrite!’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You’re afraid of her, afraid of me and afraid of yourself since Amastris betrayed you, and you seek to hide from it with work. And now you shout at me in this cold public condemnation – fuck you, sir!’

  Satyrus turned. ‘Draco, please take Anaxagoras out of the courtyard. You are relieved—’

  Draco seemed to trip over a beam for a new machine, careened into the King of the Bosporus and knocked him flat.

  ‘Uh?’ Satyrus managed.

  ‘Stop being an arsehole,’ Draco whispered as loudly as a storm wind. And then he helped the king to his feet.

  ‘Come on, lad. Let’s go and have that cup of wine the king doesn’t want,’ Draco said, as Anaxagoras gave him a hand up.

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ Anaxagoras looked stricken.

  ‘Forget it,’ Satyrus managed. Now exposed to himself, he didn’t seem controlled and professional at all. He seemed like . . . a jealous arsehole.

  It made his stomach roil to find them together, but Satyrus made himself go – an hour later, last light, when he’d have been launching a raid if he thought he could get away with it.

  They were sitting on stools in the soft evening air, playing their lyres – Anaxagoras with a kithara, and Miriam with the brasher sound of a turtle shell. They looked up as he brushed under the bead curtain Miriam had hung to keep her tiny courtyard inviolate.

  Satyrus had done many brave things. It was years since he had seen himself as a coward. He knew himself to be brave – brave in the hardest way, the way of a man of intelligence and imagination who nonetheless faces his fears and gets things done. But facing her contempt and his pity was as hard a thing as he’d ever faced.

  ‘I’ve come to apologise,’ he said.

  They looked at him.

  He almost lost the will to go on. It was so easy to give way to anger – to allow himself to be the victim and not the aggressor. He could shout his betrayal and take refuge in violence. He could attack Anaxagoras. He could revile Miriam.

  But that would be cowardly.

  Excellence often exacts a terrible penalty.

  ‘I’ve come to apologise,’ he said again.

  Miriam shot off her stool and threw her arms around him, lyre and all. ‘You are an idiot,’ she said into his ear, and pressed herself against him.

  And Anaxagoras came and embraced him, too.

  Excellence often brings its own rewards.

  Later, he sat with both of them in the chill of the evening – they were all pressed together, sitting with their backs against a sun-warmed stone with a skin of wine none of them would ever have drunk two months before empty at their feet.

  ‘And I saw him die,’ Miriam finished. She was making a throwing motion, and she was crying.

  Anaxagoras shook his head. ‘I feel like I bathe in blood every day.’ He spat into the sand. ‘But the worst of it is that as long as I’m fighting, it is more intoxicating than wine, or sex.’

  ‘Oh, sex,’ Miriam said wistfully.

  Satyrus put his hands to his ears. ‘La, la, la,’ he sang, putting a brave face on his jealousy.

  ‘I haven’t had sex with either of you,’ Miriam said. ‘So you can both relax. I shan’t.’ She shrugged and lay back against them. ‘Unless you’d like to share me on alternate days?’

  Anaxagoras shot a mouthful of wine out through his nostrils and across the remnants of a street. His coughing went on for a long time, and did a fine job of covering Satyrus’ feelings.

  Miriam looked back and forth and laughed. ‘Men are so easy,’ sh
e said.

  Anaxagoras drank more wine.

  Miriam laughed – a dark laugh, the laugh of a maenad. ‘What woman wouldn’t envy me?’ she said to the darkness. ‘Two great heroes who love me. But when I choose one, I betray the other. Don’t bother with your denials, gentlemen – you are what you are. And who cares? Aphrodite? Who cares if I lie with you both – both at the same time, one each day, one each hour? I’m no virgin, and we will all be dead soon.’

  Miriam didn’t burst into tears. It might have been better if she had. She laughed again, her laughter like the surgeon’s scalpel – the sharp bite of truth. ‘Your Greek gods are so much more understanding of my predicament than my old patriarch,’ she sighed. She rose to her feet and kissed each of them on the lips, and then picked up her chiton skirts and ran off into the dark.

  Satyrus sat still for a moment, and then looked over at Anaxagoras.

  The musician shrugged. ‘You going to marry her?’ he asked.

  Satyrus rubbed his chin. ‘You?’

  ‘She kissed me first,’ Anaxagoras said.

  ‘Fuck you, you . . . wide-arsed musician.’ Satyrus laughed, and picked up the skin of wine.

  ‘Last one alive gets her?’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Don’t hog the wine.’

  ‘I’ll share the wine,’ Satyrus said. ‘And don’t think we get to decide the terms of the contest, either.’

  Her kiss burned on his lips like a wound.

  27

  Daedelus came out of the late-summer dawn mist like Poseidon’s chariot. His ships were at ramming speed, and Demetrios’ guard ships died under their rams. The distant screams of the trapped rowers were like the sound of gulls, and Satyrus might have slept through the whole thing, but Jubal caught the fighting with his sharp eyes and woke everyone in the tower.

  Satyrus knew the Labours of Herakles instantly. He whooped like a child watching a race, laughed aloud when the fire pots began to smash into Demetrios’ beached ships. And his smile was just as broad when the man himself stepped down from the deck of his ship onto the wharf.

  ‘You bastard!’ Satyrus said, embracing the mercenary. ‘Where have you been?’

  But he couldn’t maintain any kind of fiction of anger – less so, even, when the grain ships began to enter the harbour. Six of them.

  ‘These are Phoenician ships?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘Demetrios didn’t seem to need them,’ Daedelus laughed. ‘Have you no news?’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘None!’

  Daedelus nodded. ‘Leon is at Syme with six thousand men and forty ships. Demetrios has made two tries at him and failed both times – he can’t spare the ships. And your sister and Nikephorus are raising the Euxine cities – we hear they have another twenty ships and all your mercenaries.’

  Satyrus laughed. He felt ten years younger.

  ‘Wait – you haven’t heard the best. Diokles is in Alexandria, refitting.’ Daedelus smiled.

  Satyrus paused a long, long time – maybe twenty heartbeats. ‘Diokles?’ he asked softly.

  ‘All those sailors you sent to Poseidon?’ Daedelus shook his head. ‘Diokles has seven heavy ships.’

  ‘Dionysus?’ Satyrus asked, hope bursting from his chest.

  Daedelus shook his head. ‘Sorry lord, no. He was lost. And every man aboard. But Oinoe, Plataea, Atlantae, Ephesian Artemis, Tanais, Troy, Black Falcon and Marathon are refitting at Leon’s yard.’

  Satyrus breathed a prayer to Poseidon.

  ‘Let’s celebrate,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘I brought wine,’ Daedelus said, ‘but Leon hits the beach with his diversion in about an hour, and I have to be ready to sail. But from now on, you’ll know we’re out there. Demetrios doesn’t have it all his own way at sea. And we hear that the Greek cities are begging his father for aid – Cassander is hitting them hard, undoing five years of their work.’

  ‘I never imagined I’d be on the same side as Cassander,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘I never thought I’d help save Rhodes,’ Daedelus said.

  Satyrus took the news straight to the boule. The council was bitterly divided – many of the town’s leaders wanted to try to negotiate a surrender while they were still holding out, and it had become more and more obvious that the oligarchs intended to starve their own lower classes into forcing such a surrender – the most craven strategy Satyrus had ever seen. He wasn’t sure they were even doing it consciously.

  Nicanor seemed to fight Satyrus automatically, and he made no pretence of his contempt for the man he always referred to as ‘our young royal’.

  Despite which, news of six grain ships was received with universal acclaim. Nicanor rose and proposed that all the grain be placed in the central store immediately.

  Menedemos rose and argued that one-half of it be served out immediately as a donative, and to raise morale.

  Satyrus let them wrangle. The hardest part for him – aside from his desire simply to take command and issue orders for their own good – was that each side had excellent arguments which were perfectly sensible and yet, most of the men on each side made these arguments with a cynical lack of conviction and a devotion to their own faction that lowered them daily in his estimation. Even Menedemos – the best of them, to Satyrus’ jaundiced eye – was so devoted to his democrats that he could lose track of what was best for the survival of the city. Damophilus was a great man with a spear in his hand, but in the council he spoke only for party interests. The only man who cared solely for his city was Panther. And he was dead.

  Satyrus waited his turn to speak, and eventually he rose. ‘I neglected a point which may affect your deliberations,’ he said, and he did a poor job of hiding his contempt. ‘Daedelus and Leon will be back in two days, just after dawn, with a second load of grain and two hundred more soldiers. And they have landed a hundred more marines already.’

  ‘What time?’ Nicanor asked.

  ‘That will depend on wind and tide, I assume, Nicanor.’ Satyrus tried to sound pleasant.

  Celebrations were short-lived. Fresh grain put heart into the lower classes, and the presence of a friendly fleet – a fleet which had some of Rhodes’ own ships in it – raised everyone’s expectations.

  But two days later, they watched Daedelus’ squadron try and run a second convoy into the town, and get decisively beaten. Demetrios’ ships were waiting, manned, on the beach, and when the first trireme sail nicked the horizon, they launched, all together.

  To avoid be overwhelmed by the in-sweeping flanks, Leon had to back water, and he lost four triremes and did no damage – and all six grain ships were lost, within sight of the port.

  Morale plummeted.

  And Demetrios, as remorseless as death, or time, moved his heavy engines forward across the hard ground south of the south wall. They began to move on the sixty-fourth day, and by the sixty-seventh day, they were almost in range.

  Satyrus climbed the tower. The last light of day was shining on the besiegers, and their horde of slaves were dragging the final pair of heavy machines across the hard sand, raising a long column of dust.

  ‘Watch them,’ Jubal said.

  At the front edge of the enemy machines was a full taxeis of pikemen, fully armed, their weapons throwing long shadows. They were just three stades away, neatly formed, standing to protect the machines. Even as they stood there, Satyrus wondered how they would react if he emptied his garrison at them in one mad dash to take the engines. When they started to throw their great rocks, the town was doomed.

  Or at least, the suffering would begin again.

  Jubal had filled the top of the tower with engines, and raised canvas and wood screens to hide them. The two captured on the mole had been strengthened, lengthened and now allowed the nautical mathematician four shots in his battery. He refused to commit more engines to the tower, which he said wouldn’t last the day.

  ‘My job is to kill as many of his engines as I can,’ Jubal said. ‘You watch.’ He pointed. ‘You see they? They’s his engineers. Look.�
�

  Just beyond the engines themselves, the enemy engineers were examining something on the ground. It wasn’t a complex machine. It was a large rock, deeply embedded in the sandy soil, painted bright red.

  ‘They found your aiming rock,’ Satyrus said sadly.

  Jubal smiled, and he bore a striking resemblance to a wolf. ‘They foun’ it,’ he said. ‘But they don’ know what she be.’

  He did some calculations in the last light, based on the distance the enemy engines were parked from his rock.

  Jubal opened fire when the Pleiades were high in the sky. His first cast was a rock coated in tar and set alight – using a major portion of the town’s spare tar. But it landed with a crash in the darkness and flames roared from the tar, and based on its position, Jubal began to issue orders, glancing from time to time at his wax tablet.

  The canvas and hide sides dropped away from the tower.

  His engines began to fire. The first four rocks elicited screams and crashes, and then the night was full of pandemonium and fire, and Satyrus released his sortie – just twenty men. They ran out of the postern, crept as close as they dared and began to shoot arrows at any man who was silhouetted against the flames.

  After that, the tower engines fired as fast as they could, but they didn’t seem to add to the chaos in the dark.

  Satyrus went down out of the tower to Anaxagoras and Apollodorus, waiting with blackened faces and armour on in the open ground behind the postern gate. All his elite marines were there, reinforced by the men brought by Daedelus – almost three hundred ready to rescue the archers if they got into trouble.

  Idomeneus came back in through the postern, shouting the counter-sign.

  ‘The king?’ he asked.

  ‘Here,’ Satyrus answered.

  Idomeneus was panting so hard he couldn’t speak. ‘They’ve run – abandoned the engines.’