King of the Bosphorus t-4

by Christian Cameron

  'Ready?' Satyrus called. His voice was going – too much shouting. 'On me – let's go!'

  It wasn't really a phalanx – it was more like a mob with some shared direction, a hundred men trotting down the beach with a thin front edge of bronze and iron. The sailors were contemptuous of formations, and they opened out as they ran. Men fell over bodies, driftwood – a whole file struck an upturned fishing smack in the dark and was lost, a human eddy of confusion – but the mass swept down the beach, Satyrus running at their head, past the other ship, past the fires, up to the top of the beach and almost into the town.

  And there they were – suddenly, there were men on the seaward edge of the agora, where most of the town's fishing boats had been pulled up clear of the storm line by careful men. In and among those hulls, the invaders were killing the townsmen and the farmers of the countryside around the town.

  'Kill them all!' the sing-song voice said.

  Satyrus saw him, standing on the upturned hull of a big fishing smack.

  'Falcons – charge!' Satyrus forced his lungs to fill and bellow the orders, and his men growled and cheered and fell on the raiders.

  Satyrus ran up and killed an unarmoured man with a spear-blow to the kidney, so that the man's blood burst forth and he fell, his eyes huge as he rolled on the wound like a man trying to put out a fire, and Satyrus was past him.

  His next opponent wore armour, and the man was turning when Satyrus came up and jammed his spear, the point guided by the hands of the gods, into the armpit of the man's shield arm – a miraculous blow, but the man was down, crumpled, and Satyrus had to stop his charge because he was deep in the enemy ranks. They were turning, and Satyrus planted his feet.

  'Falcons!' he roared. He thrust hard with his spear – it caught the top of a helmet and glanced off, but he snapped the man's head sharply and the man went down, unconscious, stunned or simply hurt. Satyrus didn't follow his fall – he whirled and stabbed in the other direction, and this man – an officer with a plume – caught the thrust on his shield and stabbed back, but Theron blocked the blow, stepped in and hammered away at the man with a sword, pounding the blade down again and again until the man fell.

  Now there were men all around Satyrus shouting 'Falcon!'. Satyrus pushed forward beside Theron. He thrust and thrust again, and blows came back, a rain of painful iron that banged on his shield and clanged against his bronze helmet, making his arm throb with pain under the shield. There was no blocking them – it was dark, and Satyrus couldn't see any more to parry – so he set his feet again and pushed with his shield. An enemy trapped his spear and it snapped between the shields. He pushed again, shouting mindlessly. There was an enormous blow to his head, and the taste of copper in his mouth. He sank to one knee, but he knew where that would lead. He pushed with his legs, got erect and lashed out with a flurry of blows from his butt-spike wielded as a club – roaring, shouting, his voice raw.

  The enemy broke. It wasn't the slow erosion of will that Satyrus had experienced at Gaza, but a sudden cracking, as if an irrigation dam had burst on a farm, the warm spring rain pouring down the hillside and ruining a spring planting. The raiders broke in a few heartbeats, and they were running off into the dark.

  The Falcons stopped. No one called an order – but all the men around Satyrus simply knelt in the blood-soaked dirt and panted like dogs.

  'Who in Hades are you people?' a voice from the darkness growled. 'By Pluton, giver of good gifts – I think we owe you our freedom.'

  Satyrus found that his right hand was still locked around his butt-spike. He let go and forced himself to his feet. His head was ringing and something was dripping down his beard. He licked it; it was blood.

  'By Herakles,' Satyrus said, 'I think we may owe you our lives.' He walked towards the other man, just visible with a crowd behind him at the far edge of the agora. When Satyrus got clear of his own men, he called, 'I'm Satyrus, son of Kineas,' and kept walking forward.

  'Ah! Guest-friend!' came the voice. An old man – too old to be wearing bronze – came forward from his own mob. His white beard stuck out of an old-style Attic helmet.

  'Calchus?' Satyrus asked.

  'By Zeus, protector of oaths, this is something to be remembered!' Calchus said, and Satyrus was swallowed in a metallic embrace. 'We heard you were in the countryside. It was too good to be true, but when the attack started in the harbour, I raised the hoplites – what's left of them.'

  'We heard you,' Theron said.

  'But they beat us,' Calchus said. 'Just the way they beat us the other day. Bah – we're not the men we were twenty years ago.'

  Satyrus was bleeding from his nose; he couldn't get it to stop and it distracted him. Suddenly his ankle hurt like blazes and his arm throbbed from stress on the old wound.

  'We ran,' Calchus said. 'Good thing, too. Because they followed us into the town and you came up behind them. They turned on you-'

  'Almost had us, too!' Theron said.

  'And I rallied the boys for one more try. Ares, it was close!'

  'Too close,' Satyrus said through the liquid in his nose. 'Mercenaries?'

  Calchus grunted. 'War whores,' he said. 'Ahh – I feel like a man tonight!' He laughed.

  'What of the men who ran?' Satyrus asked. He was looking at his own men now. There were gaps in the ranks.

  Calchus pointed his chin at the mob behind him. 'See? Not just hoplites – every slave in town. Bastards have raped and killed their fill. Every housewife's on the roof with a handful of tiles – every boy with a sling is in the streets.'

  'In that case, there'll be a lot of dead kids in the morning,' Theron said. He shrugged his great shoulders. 'They need our help, Satyrus. I assume that's why you landed us – to save the town?'

  Satyrus grunted.

  'You're a god-sent hero,' Calchus said. 'Athena Nike, you even look like your father.'

  It was hard to feel like a hero with blood running out of his nose and his arm on fire, much less face the idea that he should go into those dark and narrow streets and fight again.

  But he could hear the screams already – women and children and men, too.

  'All right,' Satyrus said. 'Marines only. Deck crew, get all the armour and shields lying around and follow us. Where's Kalos?'

  'Right here,' the man said, his satyr-face showing from under a battered Boeotian helmet.

  'Take all the oarsmen and help Diokles get the ships off the beach,' Satyrus managed. His brain seemed to be moving along without his body.

  Kalos nodded heavily. 'Can I take a nap first?'

  'T hose men fleeing might decide to make a fight for their boats,' Theron put in.

  'All right, all right.' Kalos shook his head. 'Anyone have a wineskin?' he called out to his men, who were already stripping the dead.

  'Apollodorus?' Satyrus called.

  'Took an arrow back by the boats,' Theron said. 'The longer we wait-'

  Satyrus had to force himself to move. 'Let's do the thing,' he croaked, and shambled off towards the town. Seeing a spear, he leaned down and picked it up – a marine's lonche without a butt-spike.

  Good enough.

  There was a house on fire a few streets inland, and the fire was catching. Calchus was bellowing orders to his own people, and the hoplites came and joined Satyrus's marines – just a dozen or so men in armour.

  'Where are all your men?' Theron asked.

  'Face down in the sand,' said a voice that rang with fatigue and anger. 'No quarter for these fuckers.'

  They moved cautiously into a broad street lined with warehouses and a pair of wine shops.

  'I'm Kletes,' one of the local hoplites said. 'I know this part of town. Follow me.'

  Just like that, Kletes was in charge, and under his direction they spread out to cover two parallel streets and swept inland. Twice they found bodies – once an invader, already stripped naked, the next time two young slave boys with spear wounds front and back. Then they heard fighting a street away – close to the source
of the burning.

  'Straight at 'em!' Kletes called, and Satyrus obeyed as naturally as Theron or any of the others. They jogged up the streets and into a crossroads – too small to be a square, but a small opening. A dozen invaders were locked with a crowd of locals – fishermen and their wives. A roof tile struck Satyrus's helmet, and his head roared again and he lost a step. The others crashed into the thin line of the invaders – desperate men now, with nowhere to run.

  Satyrus was out of the fight, and so he saw the trap. 'Ware!' he yelled. 'Our flanks!' Some canny bastard had used his own men as bait, holding half a dozen troopers in reserve in the shadow of a big house.

  Satyrus was alone against the rush. He shook his head to clear it and then, without much thought, cocked his arm back and threw the lonche overarm at the leading enemy, backlit by the house on fire.

  The throw was true and the man never tried to block or duck – a spear thrown in the dark is hard to see. He went down with a clatter – Ares, the raiders are well equipped, Satyrus thought as he ripped his sword from the scabbard under his arm and charged three steps into the second man, knocking the bastard flat on the earth. Satyrus pounded his right foot into the man's throat even as he put his shoulder and shield into the third man, the routines of pankration adapting to fighting with weapons by the light of a house-fire. The third man's spear came past his shoulder, slicing bare skin on his lower bicep, but Satyrus got his sword in close, cut at the man's hands and then around his helmet, smashing into the back of his head – once, twice and the man was down.

  The other three hesitated.

  'He's just one man!' that hated voice sang. 'All together!'

  Satyrus stepped back – they weren't eager to come to grips with him – and spat. It wasn't a gesture of contempt – his mouth was full of blood. He looked over his shield at the three of them, and they kept their distance, more than a spear's length away.

  'Why don't you come and try me yourself?' Satyrus heard himself say. Inside his helmet, he flashed a painful smile. It was the kind of line he dreamed of saying. A god had put it in his mouth. He felt his back straighten, he stood straighter and the bronze didn't weigh his limbs.

  None of the three men came forward. Behind Satyrus, he heard the roar of men fighting and dying and the screams of women, and he thought of Teax. 'Harder than killing women in the countryside, isn't it, you bastard?' he shouted.

  'Fuck you, kid,' the voice said. The middle warrior pushed forward. 'Let's get him and run for it,' the voice added. 'No fair fights in the dark, kid.'

  Satyrus waited one beat, crouched and then leaped to the right, engaging the man at the end of the enemy group. He landed, put his shield up over his head, leaned low and cut under the man's shield, but his sword rang on the man's greave. Nonetheless, the man stumbled back, and Satyrus pressed him, got his shield up and took a heavy blow on it from his left, then tripped over something on the ground – clang, and he was down in the dirt, his shield face up, arms spread wide.

  'Nice try,' the voice said, and Satyrus saw the man stomp on his shield – unbelievable pain in his already wounded arm, a white flare of pain. Satyrus screamed.

  Neither Satyrus nor his opponents saw Theron coming, but the athlete knocked clown-voice flat, turned on his partner and dispatched him with two quick spear-thrusts to the face.

  Quick as a cat, clown-voice was back on his feet, his spear licking at Theron in the orange light. The fire was starting to spread.

  Satyrus got the shield off his damaged arm, and screamed again. He couldn't help it. But he had endured years of pain – of fighting in the palaestra, broken bones and contusions galore – and he somehow stuffed the arm into his sword belt, unable to breathe with the pain, and for the third time that evening he rose to his feet like Atlas shouldering the weight of the heavens. He felt for the dagger that was strapped to the inside of his shield, got his good right hand around it, blood still flowing over his face, and slammed the knife into clown-voice's kidneys while the man had his whole being focused on Theron. The triangular blade punched right through the bronze and sank a hand's depth with the power of Satyrus's blow. Clown-voice stumbled, turned his head and got Theron's spear through the bridge of his nose.

  Satyrus sank to his haunches and then fell over, twisting to keep his broken arm off the ground and landing heavily.

  'How bad are you, boy?' Theron asked.

  Satyrus screamed. 'Arm – broken!' he said, and then crouched on the blood-soaked earth, wishing that he could faint but not quite able to do it. Instead, he vomited.

  He lost track of the actions around him, not quite unconscious and not quite able to register anything, floating on a tide of pain like a beached ship refloated on the highest tide. Theron said some things to him, and he found himself explaining that in Olympic pankration, he would never have double-teamed an opponent – he was explaining this to an offical wearing a long white robe and a chaplet of olive leaves, who looked at him with weary distaste.

  'We were fighting in the dark,' he said. 'Not the Olympics! The man refused single combat!'

  The old man shook his head, and then Theron said something about the ship.

  'What ship?' Satyrus asked.

  'We have poppy juice,' Calchus said clearly. 'I'll get him some.'

  Fire all around him, and then he was walking, hands guiding him, more pain as someone handled his arm and he screamed and fell and the pain almost – almost – knocked him out. Satyrus gasped, gulped air and voices told him to drink, and he drank a thin, milky liquid – bitter and somehow bright.

  Then he was cold, and then hot, and then the colour of the fire exploded around him, so that colour defined everything – war and love and missing friends, Amastris's kisses, Philokles' love, all had a colour – and he was swept away on a surge of these subtle shades, lifted and carried, and the pain roared its lavender disappointment and went far away.

  8

  Against Coenus's judgment, she didn't hide her identity.

  The first night, they stopped at a byre, a small stone cottage with fields that stretched away from the track. The people were Maeotae, dark-haired, cheerful, with a yard full of freckled girls in good wool smocks, and two young boys who were sword-fighting with sticks.

  Dinner was mutton, served with barley soup on fine Athenian plates. And good Greek wine.

  The farmer was Gardan, and his wife was Methene. They eyed the travellers with some suspicion, and spoke quietly at their own end of the great table that dominated the house's one big room.

  After dinner – delicious, and doubly so for the cold rain that blew against the door – Gardan moved to their end of the table, the end closest to the hearth, for he was a hospitable man. 'What news, then?' he asked. He was speaking to Coenus.

  'We come from Alexandria,' Melitta said.

  The farmer gave her a startled look, as if he hadn't expected her to speak. But he smiled. 'As far as that?' he said, but he wasn't very interested.

  Coenus sipped his wine. 'Do you care for news from the Inner Sea?' he asked.

  The farmer shook his head. 'Not really,' he said. 'Nothing to do with folks hereabouts.' He glanced at their bows, stowed snugly in a hutch by the door. 'Not so many Sakje folk on the roads any more,' he said. And let that sit.

  'That's what they said at the Temple of Herakles,' Melitta said.

  'Temple has no love for the tyrant,' the farmer said. He looked from under shaggy brows, and the comment was muttered out into the air, as if he could disclaim it, if he needed to.

  'Who is this tyrant?' Nihmu asked.

  Melitta was disturbed to realize that Nihmu's leg was pressed close to Coenus's under the table.

  'Eumeles of Pantecapaeum. He claims all these lands, but mostly, it's Upazan of the Sauromatae who sends his raiders to collect what they call "tax".' The farmer shrugged.

  'He's no proper tyrant,' Methene said. 'We used to have law.'

  'Tish, woman. Not the place.' The farmer gave his wife a mild look and turned back t
o his guests.

  'You will have law again,' Melitta said.

  The farmer nodded, as if this was a commonplace, but his wife looked at Melitta and then put her weaving back on the loom. 'Husband,' she said, standing, 'she's a Twin.'

  Coenus stood up. 'We don't want trouble.'

  Gardan went to his wife. Only when he stood between her and the strangers did he turn. Their children clustered around them, aware that something dangerous had just been said.

  'Is that true?' Gardan asked.

  'Yes,' Melitta said, ignoring Coenus. 'I am Srayanka's daughter, Melitta of Tanais.'

  'By the Ploughman,' Gardan said.

  'I knew you in the yard,' Methene said. She shrugged. 'But my eyes is old, and I thought again.' She looked at the three of them, all on their feet. 'You have nothing to worry about in this house,' she said. 'We've sheltered Temerix and his foreign lady many times, and their band, too.'

  'Temerix?' Coenus said. 'Temerix the smith?'

  Gardan relaxed a little. 'The same,' he said.

  'I thought he was dead,' Coenus said.

  'Not last summer, anyway,' Gardan said. 'You really a Twin, lady? You three going to raise the Sakje?'

  'Yes,' Melitta said.

  'Only we ain't seen a Sakje in four years,' he said. 'Word is that the Sauromatae have wiped them off the plains. Leastwise, round here.'

  Melitta looked at Coenus, and then at Nihmu.

  'If you make war on the tyrant…' Gardan said, and paused. 'He's a hard master, and no friend to the farmers,' Gardan said. He raised his cup. 'But we do well enough. Lady, if you plan to make a war in the Tanais, be sure. Be fucking sure. Because the farm folk will rise for your name alone.' He nodded, emphasizing his words. 'Name alone. I will myself. But if you fail – by the Ploughman, he'll make us slaves on our own farms. What he wants, the bastard. Sorry, wife.'

  But Methene nodded. 'Truth, guests. If you have some wild plan to raise us to make war – pass us by.'

  Melitta went to bed in a pallet of river rushes on the floor, having refused to move the farmer and his wife off their bed. She had much to think on. The issue of her identity arose again at the ferry over the Hypanis River the next day, where it flowed across the soggy autumn fields near the great cairn at Lahrys. Melitta could remember her first crossing here, with Upazan's horsemen behind her.