Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

  That was the last arrow on his bow, and he shot it well. Instantly, he could tell that the boule was with him now. And Nicanor would look not just ungracious, but foolish to refuse. And he would still make a profit that would bring a smile to Gardan’s face. He locked eyes with Nicanor and made himself smile, and blink, and act the lesser man.

  Nicanor took his hand. ‘You have good manners, for a king,’ he said. But he didn’t smile, and Satyrus did not think that they were friends. ‘Order your grain unloaded.’

  Leon stepped up beside Satyrus. ‘It is customary to sign the contract first,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘And I happen to have a scribe right here.’

  Nicanor shrugged. ‘What a lot of fishwives you foreigners are,’ he said. ‘Panther can sign for Rhodes. I have friends to entertain.’ The man nodded — the least civility that was not a direct offence — and left with a flash of his magnificent cloak. Satyrus noted that half a dozen of the boule left with him.

  The richer half-dozen.

  Panther glanced after him with a look not far from pure hate. ‘And now it is my name on this contract. For the next time he wishes to cut down the budget of the navy, that protects him. What a worthless cur he is.’

  ‘Sadly,’ Leon said, a frown on his face, ‘my scribe has already written The lord Nicanor and the boule have agreed at the top of the document and we don’t have any more papyrus. So if you could simply sign “for the boule of Rhodes”, I think we might all’ — and here Leon smiled like the lion he really was — ‘rejoice quietly. And let our boys stand down and find themselves a wine shop.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘What about Dekas?’ he asked.

  ‘Too late now. Too much time spent haggling. First light.’ Leon smiled at Panther. ‘Ten ships, and we are certain of victory.’

  Panther shook his head. ‘I can’t spare one.’ Then he grinned. ‘Well — I can spare one. Mine.’

  ‘Long odds,’ Satyrus said.

  Leon nodded. ‘We must. Or Rhodes is off the board.’

  Satyrus did not soon forget his dinner that night at Abraham’s house. He was welcomed again, as if he had been gone for another pair of years — and he sat to a dinner of Numidian chicken and Athenian tuna, lobsters, subtle spice, subtle changes of texture and temperature, bowls of ice exchanged for soup that burned the tongue, and wines each more exquisite than the last. And dancers — not the usual erotic dancers, but fine young men and women dancing like temple dancers, and tumblers who performed prodigies of leaping and landing, and a pair of men in armour who started to fight as if to the death and then began to turn coward, the broadest and funniest mimes that Satyrus had seen since he left Alexandria. He laughed so much that tears started in his eyes and he had to wipe his nose, taken utterly by surprise.

  His eyes met Miriam’s, and she, too, was wiping her nose, and she laughed all over again. ‘You are a good guest,’ she said from her own couch. ‘Every hostess dreams of pleasing guests as much as you are so obviously pleased.’ She pointed at her steward. ‘This is Jacob, a cousin; he found many of these men and women.’

  Jacob bowed from where he was running the entertainment. ‘Delighted you are pleased,’ he murmured.

  Abraham came and lay next to Satyrus. ‘She chose them all herself,’ he said. ‘She has a wonderful head for it, and she did it without offending any of our laws. Jacob helps, of course. No lewdness, no Hellenistic religion. I could never have found the time, and already my dinners are renowned for being dull.’

  ‘Not after tonight,’ Satyrus said, and he raised a golden cup to Miriam. His eyes swung back to Abraham. He was a little the worse for wine, and needed a clear head to command his ships in the morning, but he couldn’t hold his tongue for ever. ‘You didn’t used to care a whit for such things, brother. You used to attend parties that could never, ever be called dull, for all that they might have ended in chaos.’

  Abraham nodded. ‘I must seem a hypocrite to you, Satyrus. But blood is thicker than water, and I have made my father a promise: to live according to the law for three years. It is not so bad, except when the man I love above all others offers me a fighting ship and a sword.’ Abraham lay back. ‘By God, I miss the sea.’

  Satyrus was drunk enough to think of pressing the argument. But respect for parents was a core belief for Satyrus — the more so as he had never known his own father, who was worshipped as a hero, and sometimes as a god, by many men.

  ‘A promise to your father is a sacred thing,’ Satyrus said, after the temptation to seize the moment had passed.

  Abraham hugged him. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  When Abraham slipped off the kline to see to Panther and Leon, locked in discussion of a sea fight, Satyrus looked around for Miriam — eager to praise her arrangements, he told himself. Perhaps just too eager to see her brown eyes, and the pleasure she seemed to take in his pleasure.

  But her couch was empty. Nor did she reappear.

  He had one more cup of wine, from which he poured a libation carefully couched to offend no one. He passed the cup among his captains, and Leon’s, and Abraham drank too, for a few moments one of them again.

  9

  South of Chios, a strong south wind lifting the sterns under full sail and no wine fumes in his head, Satyrus was as content as the rich blue sea, speckled with white wave tops spreading away from the sides of his ship like the most fabulous cloak ever imported from distant Qu’in.

  Twenty-two ships in three columns. Satyrus led the centre column in Arete, because she was the heaviest ship, and the slowest. To starboard, Leon led his own column and to port, Panther’s Amphytrite, the longest ship on the seas, a quadreme built with extra oars on length rather than breadth in a manner that only Rhodes, so far, had used to build a ship. Satyrus admired Amphytrite every time his eyes fell that way, rather in the way that even the politest of men may admire the breasts of a beautiful woman without meaning to stare.

  Ahead, Leon’s scout-pentekonter had warned them, lay Dekas with forty-four triremes and a pair of heavy penteres as big as Arete. Satyrus rubbed his beard and looked at Neiron, who was fiddling with the stern starboard war engine.

  Twice, they’d practised while under way — both times sending the faster hemiolas forward with floating targets, which they engaged — well, tried to engage — as they floated by. Satyrus didn’t think that they’d scored a single hit, but the value of a small farm had been shot away in iron-tipped bolts. Neiron continued to pronounce the weapons useless, but likewise he continued to tinker with them.

  ‘Hull up!’ came a call from forward.

  Satyrus gave up trying to attract Neiron’s attention. He walked forward from the helm — gone were the days when he needed to take the helm himself — to the midships command deck.

  Apollodorus saluted. ‘Bow reports enemy in sight,’ he said. With both the mainsail and foresail fully drawn and the wind astern, no one could see anything over the bow except the men in the forward marine towers. Satyrus had noted that the Rhodians — innovators, every one of them — now had little baskets like nests attached to their standing masts, and men in them — lookouts raised a little farther above the surface of the sea, giving their masters a little more warning of peril.

  Satyrus walked forward on the broad deck, ducked under the foresail and climbed the ladder to the forward fighting tower. It was very different from a trireme. Arete had never been in action, and Satyrus wondered if all this money was boyish folly. Big ships were no guarantee of victory, and could just be a slower, larger target.

  Up the ladder and into the forward tower — and there, already hull up along the horizon, Satyrus could see the enemy. He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched them for as long as his eyes could stand the sun dazzle, and then turned away.

  ‘They’re all there,’ he said to Apollodorus. Behind him Helios came up into the tower. Satyrus let him look for a moment.

  ‘Put on your armour,’ he said softly. ‘And get me mine.’

  They’d made their plans
on the beach at Tenedos, when the scouts brought them word of the enemy. They were outnumbered two to one, and they were going to attack in a most unorthodox manner. A manner that would put Arete at great risk.

  It was all a matter of timing, luck and the will of the gods, and Satyrus climbed down from the tower with a tension in his arms and legs that was not quite physical fear but perhaps fear of miscalculation, excitement, even joy, all communicated through his muscles.

  Helios and Charmides helped him into his armour. Today he wore it all: heavy bronze breastplate and back, a pair of heavily worked greaves, thigh guards and arm guards and shoulder pauldrons of heavily tooled bronze, and Demetrios’ silver-worked helmet on his head with a mixed crest of red, black and white. Before he took up his gold-plated aspis, he went to the rail with a heavy gold cup full of the best Chian wine, and he raised it high.

  ‘Poseidon, Lord of Horses and of all the deeps, lend us your strength, protect our frail bodies from filling our lungs with your salt water, protect our poor thin hulls from the dangers of sea and ram, and allow us to fly on the face of the sea with the speed of your own horses.’ Satyrus poured the good red wine into the sea and then flung the cup, the value of a small ship, into the water. ‘For you, Sea God.’

  His sailors murmured in appreciation. A rich sacrifice like that — a sacrifice that even a king would have to notice — was the best way to propitiate the touchy god of the waves. He heard Polycrates, the notoriously carping sea lawyer on number three oar, mutter ‘That’s right’ in his dreadful accent, and he knew he’d done the right thing — although the cup had been a gift from his sister, and was his favourite.

  Satyrus felt calmer in his gut and in his muscles after the libation, and he stood amidships, blind to the movements of the enemy and content to look unworried. Apollodorus would tell him if they manoeuvred, and messengers came aft from time to time, nodding or saluting and passing the word.

  ‘Enemy is forming line, lord,’ said the first messenger.

  ‘Enemy line is formed — two lines,’ said the second, a thousand heartbeats later.

  ‘Enemy lines formed and now a crescent, tips forward like a new moon,’ said the third messenger. His demeanour suggested to Satyrus that they were close.

  Satyrus had his own rules of conduct, and one was that he must not show his nerves to his men. So now that combat was close enough to make the messengers nervous, he walked forward with the dignity of a priest, climbed the ladder and looked out over the sea.

  In the time a man might run a six-stade race, everything had changed. As reported, the enemy was formed in a broad, deep crescent with the horns well forward, and their intent to envelop was as clear as the beautiful day.

  Satyrus looked across at Leon, still in the stern of his beautiful Golden Lotus, and he looked to port and saw Panther watching him from Amphytrite. He waited several long minutes there, standing on the forward tower, looking back and forth and willing the ships around him to keep their places and not show their hands.

  When the lead three ships were all but even with the far-flung horns of the enveloping crescent — and how prescient Leon seemed now, as the older Numidian had predicted that Dekas would use just this formation — Satyrus raised his aspis and waved it back and forth, so that the high sun caught the golden face and it shone like fire.

  The effect was almost instantaneous, and very like the result of a boy kicking a hornet’s nest that has fallen in the road. The rearwards ships of all three columns — every ship after the leaders, in fact, nineteen ships in all — turned like dancers, or greyhounds, and, crossing the wind, headed out to the flanks. It might have been chaos — in fact, Satyrus watched with his pulse blundering against his throat.

  Leon’s second ship shaved the stern of Black Falcon close enough to splinter an oar — but there were no other accidents, and the knucklebones of war were flung in the face of the gods.

  Satyrus realised that he was wearing a grin so ferocious that it split his face. ‘By the gods,’ he said to the air around him.

  He leaped over the rail from the fighting tower to the main deck, landed like an athlete in the pure joy of the moment and ran amidships, all pretence at dignity lost. He stood under the mainmast, caught his breath and made himself count to ten.

  ‘Sails down!’ He bellowed. His deck crew had been ready for ten minutes, and the sails shot down to the deck as if their ropes had been cut. He whirled, looking left and right — now he had a clear view of the enemy, already turning inward to close in on him, hunters who had set a trap and knew only one way to trip it. Leon’s plan depended on the pirates having no battle drills that would allow them to switch formation. It was all risk. But informed risk.

  As the last of the heavy linen canvas flopped to the deck and the way came noticeably off the ship, Satyrus nodded to his oar master.

  ‘Ramming speed, if you please,’ he said. He turned to Apollodorus. ‘Commence fire. Concentrate all your bolts on the ships to our flanks.’

  ‘Waste of money,’ Neiron carped. ‘No — god send I’m wrong.’

  ‘I need you at the helm,’ Satyrus said. ‘Pick a ship in the middle of their line and take him — bow to bow.’

  Neiron nodded grimly. ‘They’re going to be on us like pigs on shit,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s try to be a greased pig, then,’ Satyrus said.

  Forward the first heavy engine fired, the thud of the machine’s loosing communicating itself throughout the whole vessel, so violent was the vibration.

  The result, caught in Satyrus’ peripheral vision, was so spectacular that the starboard-side rowers lost the stroke for a moment and the ship shuddered.

  Directly to starboard, a stade distant and more, the leading enemy trireme was bow on to Arete and the bolt, guided by Apollo’s hand or Tyche’s, passed over the trireme’s bow and tipped over slightly to vanish into her unprotected oar decks. The body of a man flew up and out of the hull and a spray of blood was visible even at that distance, and the enemy ship suddenly turned sharply — too sharply — to her own port as her starboard-side rowers died as the heavy iron bolt thrashed around their deck. The ship’s unintended turn threw the wounded ship across the bow of a second oncoming pirate ship, and the crash as the one struck the other could be heard clearly over the screams of the trapped rowers.

  ‘Poseidon’s glory!’ Satyrus said, awed. His gunners hadn’t managed to hit a blessed thing in two days of practice.

  The sudden death of a trireme — apparently by a bolt from the heavens — affected the entire pirate fleet, and their ships could be seen to slow all along the starboard wing. The port wing, of course, could see nothing.

  All around him the other engines fired, the crash of their release now heartening the crew as the tale of the success of the first shot spread to the rowers who hadn’t seen it. The speed of the ship increased dramatically.

  Satyrus glanced around. None of the other bolts had hit a target, but the eddy caused by the first shot had all but paralysed the enemy’s left wing on his starboard side. Dead ahead, an enemy penteres declined to face his ship bow to bow and inclined away, leaving a smaller trireme to face his charge. A flight of arrows from the forward tower of the penteres fell on the deck of the Arete and not on unprotected rowers, and Satyrus held his aspis over Neiron and felt the heavy impacts of two Cretan shafts.

  Arete’s bow machine fired into the enemy penteres at a range of less than a stade and didn’t miss — Satyrus thought that the enemy ship must have filled their sights — and the iron bolt raised a shower of splinters where it shattered the rail of the enemy ship and then carried on into the command platform, wheeling through the air, and Satyrus watched as two men in splendid armour were cut in half by the shaft.

  Satyrus punched the sky.

  The enemy ship carried on, her command deck suddenly silent.

  Over the bow, the enemy trireme left to face Arete tried to manoeuvre. Her trierarch had either never fought in line before or he simply lost his h
ead, knowing that he couldn’t go bow to bow with a titan, but his last manoeuvre confused his oarsmen and placed him at an angle to the racing bronze bow of a comparative leviathan. His rowers were good — they followed orders and then ripped their long oars in through the oar ports, used to fighting smaller ships where the danger was the long rip of the beak down the side, snapping loose shafts, killing oarsmen as their oars were crushed.

  But his rowers were as wrong as their trierarch. Arete was never a fast ship, and she had her faults, but she was both nimble and heavy, and Neiron, backed by Helios, put all his weight on the steering oars just a horse length from the enemy’s side and their bow moved, perhaps the length of a man’s arm, but the inexorable mathematics of Pythagoras and Poseidon put their massive bronze beak squarely in under the enemy cathead. In a lighter ship, it would have been the perfect oar rake.

  Satyrus, with a clear view, was more appalled then elated. Their ram crushed the cathead as if it were made of thin clay and the way on Arete seemed undiminished as she crushed the slim pirate under her forefoot — the top of the ram caught the enemy rail, just as it was designed to do, but instead of tipping the enemy ship, the ram smashed through her, cutting the bow of the enemy craft off like a farmer’s wife snaps the neck of a chicken before a family feast.

  The enemy trireme filled with water in ten heartbeats, so fast that Satyrus’ sailors were almost as horrified as their drowning enemies. And then they were gone, sucked beneath the waves so that in later years, Satyrus’ sailors would say that they’d seen Poseidon come and suck the ship under, snatching with a massive hand.

  And Arete carried on, still moving faster than she would cruising under oars, as if the death of two hundred men was no great matter for Her Majesty.

  ‘Poseidon!’ roared Satyrus.