King of the Bosphorus t-4

by Christian Cameron

  Nihmu had never stopped readying her things. Now she stood up. 'Despite all that,' she said, 'when he hears our hooves in his chill dreams, he will know fear. And then he will make mistakes.'

  Melitta hugged Nihmu. 'From your lips to the ears of the gods,' she said.

  Coenus shrugged. 'Better than sitting here.' He looked at Nihmu. 'How do we rescue Leon? If we pressure Eumeles hard, he'll threaten the lad – or kill him.'

  'When Eumeles hears our hooves, his blood will run like ice,' she said again. 'Scared men make errors. There will be a moment.'

  'Are you a seeress again, Nihmu?' Coenus asked.

  'I am a woman who has made war,' Nihmu replied. The pentekonter looked as if it would sink at its moorings, but Leon's chief factor insisted that it was seaworthy, and he'd filled the hull with the very best of Leon's rowers and crewed the deck with half a dozen officers from the successful Massalia fleet, so that the awful little boat had the air of a Rhodian naval vessel.

  Most of the sailors were openly concerned at carrying women, especially women who had brought weapons aboard, but the officers knew she was their master's wife, a figure of legend, and all of them knew Coenus – one of Alexandria's most feared and revered warriors.

  Cardias was the helmsman, a Rhodian sailor who had directed the entire squadron on the Massalia run and saw no demotion in commanding a fifty-oared scow on a cruise up the coast of Asia.

  On the beach beneath her own bedroom window, Melitta hugged her aunt Sappho goodbye and held her son for a long time, all too conscious that she might never see either of them again, and conscious too, that for all her claims of being a Sakje, her youth – much of her life – was tied to the sweaty streets of Alexandria. She had intended to walk once more in the night market, but she hadn't had the time.

  Idomeneus, the man who had commanded her unit of archers last year at Gaza, came up and put an arm around her waist. 'Little mother,' he said in his Cretan accent.

  'You bastard,' she smiled. 'What are you doing here?'

  Idomeneus jutted his chin at Coenus. 'He hired me to run the archers on this ship.' He smiled. 'I wanted to come – and the wages were incredible.' He whistled. 'Are there any archers on this fishing boat?'

  Coenus came up. They had a fire on the beach and men were coming from all directions. The rendezvous had been made carefully, to prevent news of the sailing. 'Eight,' he said. 'And you're one of them. Cretans – what can I say?' Coenus clasped hands with the Cretan. 'Thanks for making it here.'

  Idomeneus smiled. 'I would come far for this one,' he said. 'I was sorry to hear of your son. He was brave.'

  Coenus didn't even show a strain in the firelight. 'He was,' Coenus agreed. 'May his son be as good as his father.' Coenus looked at the baby in Melitta's arms. 'My heart misgives me, honey bee. I think you should stay.'

  Melitta drew herself up and carefully handed her son to Sappho, who handed him to Kallista. 'The tribes will not rise for you, Coenus,' she said.

  Nihmu nodded agreement.

  Idomeneus raised an eyebrow. 'So? We go on a mission, I suppose.'

  Coenus nodded.

  Idomeneus laughed. 'You don't have to tell me. Cretans grow up with these games.' He shrugged.

  'At sea,' Coenus said. To Melitta, he said, 'Say your goodbyes.'

  Nihmu hugged Sappho. 'We will win,' she said simply.

  Sappho nodded. 'I know.'

  Pounding footsteps on the sand, and Phiale came up, running in cork-soled sandals, attended by Alcaea. 'Melitta!' she called.

  'Phiale!' Melitta answered, hugging the other woman. 'What are you doing here?'

  'I caught a rumour that you were slipping away!' Phiale said. 'Where are you going?'

  'Massalia,' Melitta said. 'To be safe.'

  'Oh!' Phiale said. 'I suppose it is a secret. I'm sorry to be so thoughtless! But I worry so much about – about all of you!'

  Kallista was still light on her feet despite her advanced pregnancy, and she interposed herself between Melitta and Phiale. 'Let me get you a cup of wine, since you've joined our beach party,' she said brightly.

  Something sparked behind Melitta's eyes. She turned to Sappho. 'Don't let her leave for a day or two,' she said quietly.

  Recognition glittered in Sappho's fire-lit face. 'Of course!' she said. 'How blind of me not to have seen it. Curse her.'

  Melitta clasped her aunt more closely. 'We don't know. But why else is she here?' Then she choked on a sob. 'Take care of him for me!' she said, unwilling at the last to leave her son.

  Before she left, she went and held him again, though she'd promised herself that she would not. While she held him, Hama emerged from the darkness behind Phiale. He had a whispered exchange with Sappho and vanished into the mansion.

  'She won't leave us for a while,' Sappho said with satisfaction. 'With a little luck, she can shit her treason out.' She showed her niece a papyrus packet of orange powder.

  'Awful if we're wrong,' Melitta said.

  'Too bad,' Sappho said, her eyes hard. 'Goodbye, honey bee.'

  And then they were aboard with a smell of verdigris and old fish, and the rowers picked up the beat, and they were away into the first colour of dawn. They made Rhodos in six days, having come up the south coast of Cyprus. Melitta had been to Rhodos with her brother, but the City of Roses remained a place of mystery and intrigue to her. The helmsman went to report at the Temple of Poseidon and Coenus accompanied him. The two men returned, scratching their beards.

  'The pirates are worse,' Coenus announced to the table of officers in a comfortable wine shop on the waterfront. 'So bad that Rhodos can no longer suppress them, and her trade is being choked. The worst of the bastards are around the town of Byzantium – in the Propontis.'

  'Where we are going,' Melitta added. 'Why do Greeks call everything the Propontis? Assagatje have real names – the Strait of Fast Water, the Strait of Horses.'

  Cardias shrugged. 'The Thracian Bosporus divides the lands of the Thracians in Asia and Europe – and is the entrance to the Euxine. That's the Great Propontis. The Cimmerian Bosporus divides-'

  'Lands that the Cimmerians don't hold any more and the Bay of Salmon!' she said impatiently.

  'That's right.' Cardias shook his head and looked at his master's wife. 'Mistress, I'm against this. Such a small ship? They'll bottle us up in the narrows and we'll be fishbait – and you'll decorate a brothel.'

  Nihmu shrugged. 'No. That will not happen.'

  Coenus shook his head. 'Lady, I've seen you in action, and you are deadly sure with a bow – and so were your winged words. But you yourself said that you lost your gift of prophecy with your marriage.'

  Nihmu shrugged. 'No pirate will touch this vessel,' she pronounced. 'I have seen it.'

  'Poseidon's member – your pardon, ladies. Very well. Listen, the Rhodians have a convoy for the Euxine in ten days. Can we wait and sail with it?' Cardias was pleading.

  'Of course!' Nihmu said. 'You think that because I am sure I am also foolish?'

  Coenus shook his head. 'I remember you like this,' he said, 'but I haven't missed it.' The convoy was ready in just eight days, and they were away, up the coast of Asia. They touched at Chios and Mytilene and then they were rowing north, right into the wind to make the mouth of the Hellespont before dark. The whole convoy passed Troy in the last light of the sun, Melitta and Coenus saying the verses to one another as the rowers carried them past the tomb of Achilles. They made the fishing town at Sigeion after dark, and suffered through the perils of camping on an open beach, lighting fires from fire pots in the dark and collecting wood from the driftwood piles at the high-water mark by touch and feel.

  Melitta sank into her sheepskins thankfully and dreamed that she had lost her son and that spirits brought her his swaddling clothes, covered in blood, and she awoke screaming with Nihmu's arms around her.

  In the morning she arose, feeling as if she'd been beaten with a stick, to watch the men load all their kit back aboard the pentekonter. The Rhodian conv
oy was slow to form in a contrary breeze, and the pair of triemioliai provided by the Rhodian navy as guards tacked back and forth like worried dogs with a herd of recalcitrant sheep, but before the sun was high they were rowing again to the curses of the oarsmen for the contrary wind and the bad luck.

  Early afternoon and they were in the Propontis, the little sea in the midst of the Hellespont, and Parium was clear on their bow as they crept up the north coast. They made Rhaidestos with a freshening breeze that quieted some of the grumbling of the crew, and ate crabs on the beach and drank a terrible local wine sold off two-wheeled wagons by local farmers.

  'We're in luck,' Coenus said, looking at Nihmu. 'The local pirates – the whole fleet – is on the opposite coast, making a grab at one of the cities, if you can believe it. They are strong – fifty warships, or so the farmers assure me.' He drank wine and made a face. 'Gods – who would want to be a colonist?'

  'So Auntie Nihmu was right,' Melitta said.

  'I'll sacrifice a new lamb to Poseidon when we're through the strait,' Coenus said. 'But yes – I think she's right.'

  5

  GRACCUS'S STELE, EUXINE SEA, 311 BC

  'what we need is wood,' Satyrus said.

  It had taken a day to build a camp on the bluff behind the stone farmhouse, out of sight of the shore and well watered by the creek. Another day had been filled in cutting the boatsail mast free, floating the Falcon, jury-rigging a bow and pulling the hull up the creek to the new camp, so that he could receive the care he deserved, out of sight of cruising ships in the great bay.

  By the third day, Satyrus was standing in Alexander's largest stone barn, eyeing the curved joists that held the main beams. 'What we need is wood,' he said again.

  'I don't think that Alexander, however well disposed to us, would fancy our stripping his barns of their innards to rebuild the bow.' Theron was still tired, and still moved stiffly. Six men had died of their wounds, and Satyrus was beginning to wonder if he would ever run well again himself – his hip was not knitting well, and he had trouble sleeping because of the pain in his arm, but Theron was recovering his sense of humour, and Satyrus had begun to feel that he might yet survive this.

  'T hose beams and joists came from somewhere,' Satyrus insisted.

  'We could just ask him,' Theron said.

  So Satyrus did.

  'Sakje brought them – dragged them overland from up-country on sledges,' Alexander said. 'I traded them for wine – forty amphorae, good stuff from Mytilene.'

  Satyrus thought about that while he looked at the bow of his ship, now protruding from the water at a gentle angle, pulled up by the might of two hundred men and four oxen until the whole hull was clear of the creek. The wrecked bow stuck up over his head the height of a man. He walked back and forth. 'Even if we get timber,' he said to Diokles, 'we need a ram.'

  'One thing at a time,' Diokles said. 'I say we rebuild the bow without a ram and sail him home – as fast as we can. New ram in Alexandria is just a matter of money.' He looked at Satyrus and Satyrus was afraid he saw pity in the man. 'You think you can fit him for war and rescue your uncle – that ship sailed four days ago, lord. He's taken, or dead. It's us as needs to get free – and no ram bow will save us in these waters.'

  Satyrus drank herb tea and walked back and forth, looking at his ship and at Diokles. After an hour, he nodded.

  'Right,' he said. 'You're right. Wooden bow. We'll have to rebuild him – move the masts. Without the ram, he's a pig – we know that. Have to rebalance the whole hull.'

  Diokles nodded slowly.

  Theron came up, his dark chlamys thrown back because the weather was fine. 'I have some talent for mathematics,' Theron said. 'So does Satyrus. Let's design him while Alexander summons the Sakje, and perhaps we'll have wood by the time we're ready to build.' The Sakje appeared within a day of the beacon being lit, as Alexander had predicted, thirty horsemen with two hundred horses who arrived at twilight. Alexander greeted them in his orchard, where all Satyrus could see was a flash of gold and a whirl of horseflesh that made his eyes fill with the hominess of it. Without meaning to, he ran out into the orchard, no longer the staid lord and navarch, but a boy coming home to his mother's people.

  A tall man on a tall horse covered in red paint clasped hands with Alexander and they spoke rapidly, like old friends too long separated. Satyrus knew the man immediately from his boyhood hearth.

  'Kairax!' he called. His mother's tanist in the west, now ruler in his own right of the western gate of the Assagatje confederacy. He had grey in his beard where it had been all dark, and furrows in his cheeks, but the hand tattoo of his clan was still bold and dark on his bicep, and his arms were still heavy with muscle.

  Kairax turned at his shout and whooped. In a moment, Satyrus was enveloped in the Sakje's heavy arms, and it was all he could do to fight back tears. 'I didn't know it was you!' he said. His Sakje came out haltingly.

  'Nor I you, little cousin! And not so little!' Kairax nodded approvingly. 'You are a man. And yet you came here by ship and not by horse? How is that?'

  Satyrus spoke – for too long, he suspected – of the adventures of exile, and Kairax bowed his head when Satyrus spoke of the murder of his mother.

  'Too long have we born with this Eumeles,' Kairax said. 'Marthax always counsels patience – but he hated your mother, and he is old, and my young men grow restless.' He looked at Satyrus from under his bushy brows. 'What kind of cousin are you, that you came with ships before you asked your relatives for help? I think that perhaps you have spent too many summers on the sea of water, and not enough summers on the sea of grass.'

  Satyrus bowed his head in acknowledgement. 'Elder Uncle, I stand corrected,' he said, the Sakje coming back to him like a memory of youth.

  Kairax grinned. 'Bah – you're too big to get a beating,' he said. 'Alexander of the Stone House says that you need wood.'

  'Big wood – big trees. Like the ones in his barn,' Satyrus said.

  Kairax nodded. 'If I bring them, then what?'

  Satyrus didn't know what to say.

  'Listen, lad,' Kairax said. 'The Assagatje are like dry grass on a summer's day, and you could be the lightning in the sky. Come with me and light the grass.'

  Satyrus was tempted – so tempted that he had to remember everything that his uncle Leon and his uncle Diodorus had said about sea power to refuse the offer. 'Eumeles must be beaten at sea,' he said. 'Until then, he can use his ships to fight the Sakje.'

  Kairax laughed. 'Ships against the Sakje? I would like to see that!'

  'Every town closed against you?' Satyrus said. 'Garrisons of men who could arrive and leave by sea and never come within bow-shot?' Satyrus remembered something. 'And some of the Sakje must be loyal to Eumeles, Kairax. There were Sakje archers on every ship – good ones, who shot well, like men who have given their word.'

  Now it was Kairax's turn to hang his head. 'It is as you say,' he said. 'Marthax sends young men to serve Eumeles and they go willingly, for the treasure.'

  Satyrus took his arm and squeezed it. 'I am back to stay,' he said. 'I intend to kill Eumeles and make a kingdom of the Euxine.'

  Kairax shook his head. 'That is not a Sakje thing,' he said.

  Satyrus nodded. 'No – a Greek thing. But it will make the Sakje and the farmers free. And it will rid you of Marthax and me of Eumeles.'

  Kairax made a Sakje gesture with his nose, like a man smelling something interesting – a sign of approval, if you knew the ways of the people. 'It is a big dream,' he said.

  'I need wood to make it happen. I need to repair this ship, slip away past Eumeles' fleet and find my friends.' He didn't add that he needed to find a fleet of his own. 'I'll come back with ships.'

  Kairax was no longer alone. While the two of them had spoken, his trumpeter and several of his principal warriors had got the drift of their conversation, and now they gathered around.

  'Srayanka's son!' they called. A tall young woman reached out and touched his cheek. 'For luc
k!' she said in Greek.

  He was reminded of Ataelus, and again tears filled his eyes. Twice, warships passed along the coast, but neither chose to land.

  'They fear the Sakje,' Alexander said with satisfaction. 'Taxing sons of bitches. I pay my tenth to Kairax, and he is worth every penny. I don't pay an obol to that bastard in Pantecapaeum. His writ don't run here, and those sailors know it.'

  'But they're still looking for us,' Satyrus said.

  On the third day after Kairax came down from the hills, twenty Getae men and two women came with forty mules and twenty oak trees dragged between them. Satyrus paid gold – almost the last of his ready money – and before the sun set that night, his men were at work with the farmer's ample tools, cutting new timbers for the bow.

  'T hree days,' he told Diokles and Theron.

  'And you're coming with us?' Theron asked. His glance slid over Satyrus to the Sakje girl, Lithra, who hadn't left Satyrus's side for two days – and nights.

  Satyrus knew he was being mocked, but he shrugged. 'We need a fleet. I can't get that here.'

  'She's not going to be happy,' Diokles said.

  Satyrus shrugged again. 'She is not a Greek girl, who needs me to wed her. She's a spear-maiden of the Cruel Hands, and we've already had that little talk. Gentlemen, if you've completed your inquest into my personal life, we can get this ship built and be away.'

  'He's just like his father,' Alexander said into the silence.

  Despite a growing irritation with the older men around him, Satyrus couldn't find anything in 'he's just like his father' to earn anger, so he smiled at them and walked off to find Lithra. 'You are for leaving soon,' she said. They were curled together in the hay – the air had a bite in it – and something awkward was making him want to scratch, but post-coital dignity demanded that he lie as if unconcerned.

  'Yes,' he said.

  'I for understanding Greek better,' she said. 'So?'

  'I'll be back,' he said. It sounded pitiful, even to him.

  'I know!' she said. She rolled him over. She was a tall girl with small breasts and a waist so small, chest muscles so hard, that passing his hand over her stomach made him hard. Her body was wonderful, and despite the partial barrier of two not-quite-shared languages, he knew her well enough to find more to like than just her body. Already.