Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

  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 o
f 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.

  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 i
ntelligence 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.