Destroyer of Cities t-5

by Christian Cameron

‘I think Demetrios has the fever in his camp,’ Damophilus said. ‘It’s the only explanation Jubal and I can arrive at for his hesitation. His engines still aren’t firing — at least, fewer than half of them.’

  ‘I’m sure you can all see the irony,’ Satyrus said. ‘Demetrios is held back by the sickness of his slaves — and so our trap is going to fail.’ He shook his head. ‘Zeus Sator, we need a little luck.’

  Neiron nodded. All the men of the boule — now meeting in the open air, as the stones of their elegant meeting place now formed the centre of the hidden wall, Jubal’s ‘bow’ — nodded. Their eyes were hollow, and their bellies, as well. The squadrons had sailed, and nothing had come back, and the granaries were reaching desperate levels.

  ‘We have to cut the grain ration,’ Hellenos said. He made a face and raised his hands. ‘Don’t kill the messenger!’

  Memnon shook his head. ‘If we cut the grain ration, someone will surrender the city,’ he said. ‘That’s how I see it.’

  Neiron grunted. ‘There’s more than one irony at work here. What you’re saying is that inaction allows people to think of how desperate they are.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I saw that days ago, Old Neiron. Demetrios does us more damage waiting than striking.’

  Damophilus raised an eyebrow. ‘Then what — attack him? Before all our hoplites are sick?’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Suicide. His entrenchments are sound — in fact, in yet another irony, we’ve taught him to build better entrenchments by our constant raids.’

  Jubal nodded. ‘An’ they heavy blows’s killin’ us.’

  Two days of further observation showed that the enemy had a mechanical bow. Old soldiers like Draco knew them as soon as they saw them — Alexander had favoured the weapon for sieges — the gastraphetes. The crossbow.

  ‘It’s not that it outranges the Sakje, or even my lads,’ Idomeneus said. ‘It’s that they can shoot it from cover. No need to pull it — no need to kneel or stand. And once they cock it, they can watch for a whole cycle of the sun for a man to show his head.’

  Satyrus looked around at his officers. ‘Anyone have a suggestion?’ he asked, looking at Jubal.

  Jubal nodded. ‘Do. Do, do. Seen women making baskets — seen men fill ’em with earth, building walls.’

  There was no news there. ‘So?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘Weave big-arse baskets, an’ mount ’em on the walls at night,’ Jubal said. ‘Fill ’em with earth. Now archers can stan’ to shoot — behin’ the baskets.’

  ‘Until they concentrate engine fire on the baskets’ position,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘An’ so we need fifty,’ Jubal said. ‘Make that twice fifty. Best do the new wall at the same time, eh?’

  Satyrus scratched his beard. He was pretty sure that he had lice. Everyone did, all of a sudden. ‘Let’s try it,’ he said.

  ‘And how exactly are we going to get the slaves to dig for us?’ Damophilus asked. ‘Most of them are either sick or faking it.’

  Satyrus didn’t think many were shamming. It was a charge aristocrats had levelled since the first cases of fever. ‘I think it is time to free all of the slaves,’ he said.

  Not a single voice was raised against him.

  Satyrus found Korus with a line of women, all of them lifting rocks in the shade of the remaining olive trees at the western end of the agora. The women didn’t look away in maidenly modesty, but glared at him for interrupting their exercise.

  ‘I need you,’ Satyrus said to Korus.

  ‘You look strong enough to me,’ Korus said. Some of the women laughed.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘So are we,’ Miriam offered, coming forward. The lines in her face were even more pronounced, today — she looked stern, more like a teacher or a head cook than a gentlewoman of leisure. ‘We’re learning to be archers. You sister says we need stronger arms.’

  Satyrus bit back a number of retorts. His sister was behind this — and she was right. And these women were participating, which was good for morale. He took a deep breath — lately he’d begun to think that the art of command was in not saying things — and smiled gravely.

  ‘That’s excellent,’ he said. ‘Korus, when you are finished, I need you to be my spokesman.’

  Korus nodded. ‘What do you want? The slaves, I assume?’

  ‘I’m going to free them. All.’ Satyrus looked at the former slave for a reaction.

  Korus’ smile was small, but it was there. ‘Then what?’ he asked.

  ‘Then I’m going to ask every citizen to work. Tonight. On the south wall.’ Satyrus smiled.

  Korus smiled back. ‘I think the new citizens might do that,’ he allowed.

  A new moon, and darkness. Like a wave of spectres, the chosen work parties went up the third wall — still, despite Satyrus’ best efforts to give it up, the defensive position of the defenders — and planted enormous baskets all along the top. And then, like ants, the citizens of the town, with shovels and smaller baskets and metal buckets and every tool at their disposal, began to fill the giant baskets — fifty-two of them. With thirty or more citizens to every basket.

  The enemy was taken by surprise. It took half a watch for them to get their engines manned, and the moon was down before the first rocks flew — and bolts from various ballistae, large and small.

  Men died. Women died.

  The defenders died. The survivors went on digging, carrying the fill up the wall and dumping it into the baskets. The lucky ones worked on the new wall — the ‘bow’. They were covered. The unlucky worked on the third wall.

  Like a squall at sea, the first shower of missiles died away.

  ‘Shot away their reserve of arrows and stones,’ Satyrus said to Abraham. ‘Now they have to send to the rear for more.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. The King of the Bosporus was stripping out of his bronze cuirass.

  ‘You command the reserve,’ Satyrus said. ‘You used to be my best captain. You’re a citizen. I need you to take command.’

  Abraham nodded. ‘I accept.’

  ‘Good,’ Satyrus said. ‘Because I’m going to dig.’

  The sun was a smear on the horizon, and no one had the energy to comment on the rosy fingers of dawn. The diggers lay like the dead, except for Aspasia, Miriam, Nike and a dozen other women, who were carrying the wounded to the rear. Men rose to help them — but not many.

  Anaxagoras stepped out of the ranks of the hoplites, and a dusty ex-slave put his hand on the musician’s chest.

  ‘Back in the ranks, brother,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘But-’

  ‘If there’s an attack right now, you and the ephebes are all we have,’ Satyrus said. ‘The citizen hoplites worked all night.’

  Memnon, who looked as much like a slave as the king, stopped next to him and leaned on a heavy shovel. ‘We lost a prime lot of weight, though,’ he joked.

  And the Sakje and the Cretans, who had been kept back from the digging, manned the new embrasures with the dawn. Satyrus took a wineskin and climbed the tower.

  It took almost an hour for there to be enough light to see — or shoot. But Satyrus watched the crossbow teams move forward, saw them scratch their heads, literally — at the change in the Rhodian south wall.

  Satyrus and Jubal mapped out the positions of the crossbow teams and sent the information to Idomeneus via Helios. A Sakje was caught moving and was shot through both hips, and he died screaming.

  ‘I need to teach you to read and write,’ Satyrus said to Jubal.

  ‘Heh,’ Jubal said. ‘Why you think I can’ read?’

  ‘You may be the best siege engineer in the world, just now,’ Satyrus said. ‘And I need you to learn the maths. For all of us.’

  ‘I know maths,’ Jubal said. ‘I read Pythagoras.’

  A whistle sounded, and as one, the whole of Melitta’s Sakje force rose to their feet. Further east, the entire Cretan force did the same, standing up behind the great baskets. A
ll together, they drew. Master archers called ranges and lofted their own bows, and the bone whistle sounded again, and all of them loosed — six hundred arrows.

  Seconds later, they loosed again, and then again and again, until the arrow squall filled the air between the walls with a continuous flurry.

  In the enemy forward positions, men were hit. The crossbow snipers suffered heavily, and the survivors of the first volley, shocked, hugged their cover.

  Small groups of Sakje archers ran forward down the rubble wall and sprinted across no-man’s land, unopposed, as the fourth and fifth volleys ripped through the air.

  The bone whistle sounded, and not a single arrow left a string. The last volley flew, whistling arrows shrieking to add to the terror, and the sprinters were across, clambering up through the stakes and sharpened tree branches of the enemy lines. The enemy snipers raised their heads too late: the Sakje were shooting point blank — and the enemy had no engines registered on their own lines.

  Thyrsis returned in triumph, brandishing a captured gastraphetes.

  Satyrus let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

  Demetrios did not ponder long on the new development. Before the morning was old, the men on the tower could see his pikemen moving into assault positions.

  ‘Finally!’ Satyrus said.

  There were thousands of them. They blackened the ground behind the enemy’s entrenchments — four taxeis and then a fifth stretched four deep across the rear.

  ‘Using his veterans to push the newer troops forward,’ Satyrus said. Abraham had joined him, and Hellenos, and they kept the younger men busy, up and down the ladders.

  Jubal grinned. ‘Now — now he take the poison pill. Let he have it!’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘but if those men get onto the new wall, we’re done for. We have to make a fight of it, and then we have to withdraw in good order — without taking too many casualties.’ He spat. ‘Zeus Sator, stand by us. Herakles, guide my arm.’

  He raced down the tower — now he feared the power of that assault — and Helios was waiting with his armour.

  ‘Every man,’ he said. ‘Every man into the ditch behind the bow.’

  When they came, they came fast and hard. They knew that the defeat of their snipers meant that they would face massed archery, and they’d been coached.

  They didn’t have their sarissas, either. They had javelins and light spears, or nothing but swords. They came forward at a dead run, screaming with fear, rage, battle spirit. Their officers came first, and the arrows reaped them first.

  It was the first time that Demetrios had attacked a wall without massive bombardment. It was the first time he’d put ten thousand men in a single wave.

  It was the toughest assault yet, and the Macedonians didn’t flinch at the arrows though they died in heaps on the wall. The last horse length of the climb was brutal — Jubal had deliberately built the walls at a changing pitch to lure infantry into believing that they could be climbed easily. Only when a man was halfway to the top did he see clearly how steep the last few feet were, and few men stopped to reason why every section had a sloped zone with easy climbing.

  Into the heart of the archery.

  The archers reaped phalangites like a woman cutting weeds in her garden, but they began to tire — even the Sakje — and their arrow supply ran short. And then, at the call of a bone whistle, they broke. The Sakje were fast, running to reform being a part of their core tactics. The Cretans were slower to break, and lost men to the triumphant Macedonians as finally they got over the wall.

  Satyrus had the ephebes, the citizen hoplites and the oarsmen formed along the trench.

  ‘Stand up!’ he called.

  The town garrison had their spears in their hands and they all but filled the wall. The Macedonians came over the crest of the rubble — the wall was fifty feet wide in places — and crashed headlong into the formed Rhodians. Spearless, spread out in no particular order, their feet punished by the sharp gravel of the walls, the Macedonians hesitated, and the Rhodians rolled them down off the wall in a single charge.

  Satyrus was never in action — he was too busy calling commands. And as soon as his men cleared the wall top, he ordered them to face about. Already the enemy had missiles flying, heedless of hitting their own recoiling troops.

  The Rhodians went back down their own wall and into the reserve trench behind it.

  The Sakje came forward, rearmed with arrows, and filled in the strong places on the rubble wall top. The Cretans were slower to return.

  Idomeneus was dead.

  The second attack was half-hearted. The archers cleared off the wall, but the Antigonids had lost too many officers and the men hung back. The whole attack bogged down into desultory javelin-throwing, the Antigonids occupying the wall top but not pressing their advantage.

  Satyrus waited as long as he felt that he could and then attacked them, clearing the wall top. This time, as soon as his men crested the wall, the enemy barrage struck, and he took casualties. But many of the enemy rounds dropped short or long, and his men got away with only twenty down — twenty armoured men he could not afford to lose.

  The third attack failed to dislodge the Sakje. They shot and shot, some of them using their bows at arm’s reach, others drawing their long knives, and the Cretans held their ground too, and the enemy soldiers paid heavily for their timorousness in not pressing their attack. Caught in the open ground, they took casualties they needn’t have taken.

  ‘Demetrios is pushing new troops forward,’ came the message from the tower.

  ‘My boys and girls are down to five shafts each,’ Melitta said.

  Two hours until sunset.

  ‘Give they the wall,’ Jubal said.

  Abraham nodded. ‘You said to make it look like we wanted to hold it. We held it all day. Give it to them.’

  Satyrus looked into the golden afternoon. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry, friends. We have to go hand to hand.’

  Neiron started to say something. Satyrus glared at him. ‘This is my call, gentlemen. Archers out, Melitta, all the way back to the “bow”. Save your last shafts for — well, if we get broken.’ He held out his hand. ‘Give me that whistle,’ he said, and she handed it over.

  ‘Don’t get killed, stupid brother,’ she said. She kissed him. They grinned at each other.

  The archers slipped away unseen, heading for the rear. Satyrus climbed the wall, took cover behind one of the filled baskets, which topped his head — just. It had been hit repeatedly, and the soft earth and gravel fill was a pincushion of bolts.

  Now he could see the enemy forming. Stones slammed into the earthwork, but it held. A trickle of sand ran down the basket and onto his back. Another bolt thudded home.

  Satyrus ran down the slope to his troops. ‘Officers!’ he roared.

  He waited until they were all there. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘When the whistle sounds, you charge. Got it?’

  Neiron looked up at the wall. ‘How will you know?’

  ‘I’ll be on the wall,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me there. We have to stop this one. No second place, gentlemen. No speeches. Get to the top and hold. Ready?’

  They growled, and he sent them back to the phalanx. He turned and ran up the inner face of the third wall, Helios on his heels.

  ‘I didn’t tell you to come,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t tell me to get you juice every morning, either,’ Helios replied.

  Bolts fell, and a shower of rocks, small rocks being launched in baskets. One pinged off his silver helmet, hard enough for him to smell blood. But he peered out.

  The enemy was already in the middle ground — running silently. Men were falling — they were going too fast for safety. They were fast.

  Satyrus blew the whistle. He had left it late. Just below him, his men had to get to their feet — had to get their shields on their arms. Had to start up the slope of rubble.

  But the Antigonids were slowed
— again — by Jubal’s cunning rubble wall and its apparently shallow slope, and they bunched up on the ramps-

  — Apollodorus roared for the oarsmen to dress their line as they came up the wall-

  — Abraham laid his spear sideways across a line of his fellow citizens-

  — A Macedonian officer, resplendent in gold and silver, raised his shield at the top of the wall. ‘Come on!’ he roared, and men poured onto the wall top-

  Satyrus stood straight — no missiles now — and set his shield on his shoulder.

  The oarsmen came over the wall top formed like veterans, and their spears slammed into the forming Macedonians. The Macedonians were higher: they’d won the race to the wall.

  But they were too far apart, still trying to form.

  And that’s all Satyrus had time to see. He’d intended to fight the man in silver and gold, but just as the left files of the oarsmen closed around him, a crowd of Antigonid phalangites howled into his position. He took a shower of blows on his shield and he was pressed back against the men coming up behind him — and Helios went down next to him.

  The whole fight seemed to crystallise, then, and time seemed to slow down. He sidestepped — right over Helios as the boy gave a great shudder — and put his spear through a man’s eye-slit, whipped the head back and rifled it forward at the next man’s helmet, the point scoring on the crown just under his horsehair crest and punching through the bronze to spill his brains inside his helmet, and he slumped down across his file-mate.

  A blow caught Satyrus in the neck. It hurt, but he kept his feet. Now his oarsmen were on either side. The enemy’s rush was stemmed.

  ‘Push!’ Satyrus called, and the oarsmen leaned on their spears, put their shoulders into their shields and heaved. Now the tiny differences told — the leather socks inside their sandals allowed men a secure stance on gravel — scarves on necks stopped sweat, cloth pads in helmets allowed the men to see a little better.

  But the Macedonians were better fed, and they had not lived in constant fear for six long months.

  At the top of the wall, the fight balanced out. Men coming up behind couldn’t join the push — the fighting lines were higher than their supporting ranks in most places. But they could press in tighter, and the press became so close that men began to die in the crush, stabbed under their shields, jaws broken when someone rammed their own shield up into their mouth in the melee, or men were simply crushed off their feet.