Tyrant: Force of Kings

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Lord?’ the hypaspist captain asked him. ‘Will you stand to the right of the king, and your man in the rank behind you?’

  ‘Breeze is perfect,’ Demetrios said.

  Satyrus turned to look at him. ‘Perfect how?’ he asked.

  ‘A little something my engineers have come up with since Rhodes. I like to fancy that if we’d had it, I’ve have taken the city.’ He turned to a slave and took what appeared to be a scarf.

  The sun was just getting a rim above the edge of the sea, and it was already hot. Satyrus was perspiring inside his armour. He had no interest in a scarf.

  ‘Best take one,’ the king said.

  Satyrus smelled smoke. He stepped out of the ranks and looked around, and there they were – thousands of bundles of green brush, the fires under them just licking at the foliage. Satyrus had taken the pile for another entrenchment.

  ‘The smoke will cover us all the way in,’ Demetrios said. ‘Wear a scarf.’

  Satyrus took one from the slave. He noted that most of the rank and file hypaspists had them on already, making them look like a regiment of hill bandits. Most of them had magnificent Thracian-style helmets with elaborate cheek-plates fitted like faces, some with heavy beards and moustaches in black paint, enamel, or blackened silver – or even bright gold. The scarves vanished as they buckled the cheek-plates down.

  Satyrus pulled down his own cheek-plates. He had a simple Attic helmet, a light thing of tinned bronze with an ordinary plume of red and white horsehair – nothing like the elaborate horsehair coifs worn by the veterans around him.

  Sealed in his helmet, Satyrus’s vision was limited to a few degrees off the centreline – his peripheral vision was almost completely lost. And the damp scarf was stifling his breath. The cuirass he had chosen was slightly too small, and now it seemed like a torture device, constricting his lungs even as he tried to wrench air through the damned scarf – and the smell of smoke was everywhere.

  Why am I doing this? he asked himself. There was no easy answer.

  The ramp stretched away, apparently to the edge of the heavens. It was almost a stade long, and rose ten times the height of a man. The first two-thirds were well surfaced in carefully laid turf, but the last third looked like loose dirt.

  And then the breeze took the smoke and tossed it forward, and he couldn’t see anything.

  Arrows were beginning to come down from the battlements on the suburbs, and bigger, more deadly projectiles came from higher on the Acrocorinth; bolts and stones from engines.

  Demetrios stepped out of the ranks. ‘I am your king,’ he said, ‘and my eye is on you. Stand with me and be my brothers, or prove craven and go be less than men.’ His eyes met Satyrus’s, and he raised his spear in salute.

  Satyrus returned the salute.

  ‘Smoke is good,’ coughed the hypaspist commander. ‘Thick.’

  ‘Let the engines fire again,’ Demetrios said.

  Satyrus stood and sweated and shook.

  ‘Remind me why I said we should do this?’ Achilles muttered.

  One of the hypaspists laughed. ‘This is work for men,’ he said. ‘You foreigners should probably sit this out.’

  Achilles grunted. ‘Foreigner? Where were you born, Asia man?’

  ‘Silence in the ranks!’ a phylarch called, and Satyrus smiled to think that he was going into combat as a hoplite, not a king.

  ‘Ready, there!’ the commander called.

  The phylarchs answered, and Satyrus realised that as he was at the head of an eight-man file, he had best answer. ‘Ready,’ he coughed, through the smoke.

  ‘Ever been in a fight before?’ asked the man next to him.

  ‘Once or twice,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘He fought us at Rhodes!’ said the phylarch on his left. He laughed. ‘Watch him, Philip! He’ll do his part.’

  Satyrus was oddly pleased at the compliment.

  ‘Up we go, then,’ said the commander.

  Demetrios stepped into the middle of the front rank at the last moment, and raised his shield. The arrows were falling faster – they were walking right into the thick of them.

  ‘Shields up!’ yelled the commander. ‘Right up – don’t be lazy fucks!’

  Satyrus wished for an aspis as he raised the smaller Macedonian bowl over his head. Arrows began to strike the surface, and something bit his shin.

  The smoke was debilitating, and Satyrus was not sure, as a sometime commander, that he thought it was worth the cover. The arrows seemed to fall with wicked minds of their own, and the smoke got in his lungs and made him want to puke – he had the burning sensation in his guts that a man gets when he eats too much fat.

  Up and up – his feet were still on sod, so they hadn’t gone very far yet, but Satyrus could feel the burn in his thighs, and the arrows were coming faster, and suddenly a ballista bolt swept away the phylarch next to him and the man behind, a ringing, screaming chaos of death, and the whole front bent as men fell, wounded or only struck by pieces of the corpses – the headless phylarch fell back into his file—

  ‘Halt!’ screamed the commander. ‘Close up!’

  The smoke was thinning. The range was almost point-blank, and the enemy engines were firing down with more force and more accuracy, and a second direct hit cleared the rear half of another file in a wave of screams and ringing armour.

  ‘Are you ready to be a hero?’ Demetrios asked. The two of them were nose to nose. ‘Did I mention that the breach is only eight men wide? We go first, whatever Philip tries to do. He wants to protect me. I want to be first on the wall.’ Under his ornate cheek-plates, Satyrus could see the white rims around his eyes, the slightly mad grin.

  ‘I’ll be right beside you, lord,’ Satyrus said. Then he allowed himself a smile. ‘Or ahead of you, if you stumble.’

  Demetrios smacked his shield face with his spear. ‘I love this moment. May it last for ever in memory.’

  ‘Forward!’ Philip, the hypaspist commander, sounded panicked. His losses were already more than he’d expected, and Satyrus was, frankly, surprised that they weren’t retreating. With a tenth of his men down and the breach so narrow – it looked like foolishness.

  Foolishness that Demetrios was committing because he had to impress the King of the Bosporons?

  Sling stones began to hit them – first a punch against his shield, and then a blow like a giant fist to the crest on his helmet. Satyrus adjusted his shield, crouched, and began to go faster. So did the new phylarch to his left.

  Suddenly the ground was gone beneath his feet, and he was on loose dirt and sand, grateful for his boots. He went faster, and the sling stones were like a storm of deadly bees – zipping through the air, ringing when they hit armour, thudding when they hit flesh.

  This breach is not prepared. Demetrios has made a mistake.

  Self-preservation said that if he couldn’t turn tail, he could run at the breach, and Satyrus did. He was suddenly conscious of how narrow the ramp really was, and how far he still had to go. He was out of the smoke, the breach was full of men, and he was … in front. If he slipped to the right or left, he would fall – probably to his death on the rocks at the base of the ramp.

  And then all the worry, all the thought, all the strategy fell away, and he was running up a steep slope at men who intended to kill him, and it no longer mattered whether Cassander had tried to kill him or was really his ally, because there was only right here and right now, and a tall man in a yellow horsehair crest who seemed to fill the breach.

  Satyrus paused, perhaps ten paces from the wall – shifted his weight, slowed, and threw his dory, twice the height of a man, a long thrusting spear, not a throwing spear.

  Yellow Plume took it right through his shield, gave a scream, and went down.

  Satyrus drew his sword, stepped on Yellow Plume, still squirming with the spear in his side, a
nd put his shield into the next three men, who all attempted to spear him together. He caught two of the spears and the third hammered into his helmet, caught for a moment on his crest-box and skidded away, snapping his head back painfully against his chin-strap.

  He got his feet under him and stepped in, passing his right foot forward to get under the spearheads and stay there. Behind the men in front was another rank, and their spearheads thundered on his shield and one ripped his thigh, a hard overhand thrust that he never saw. Another glanced off his bronze thorax.

  Then he was shield to shield with the front rank, and he stabbed at their thighs and feet, ruthlessly sweeping the razor edges of his new sword across their tendons while his aspis went high. He collected their spears and pressed in like a lover against their chests.

  Men began to fall.

  The daimon took him, and he moved, spun, and cut as if guided by an invisible hand, or as if he was a dancer in a carefully practised routine. He stopped sensing time as a linear thing and moved through his opponents, seeing them as fractional images of the action – a descending back-cut through a man’s nose guard, a wrist-roll thrust with an off-axis left foot advance that penetrated through a man’s leather cuirass and his belly, a ripping blow from a heavy spearhead that chopped a piece from his shield rim – the spearman’s second attack, using the spear like a long-handled axe, and his response – deflection, avoidance, inside the spear’s reach, the man’s terrified eyes as Satyrus cut him down …

  He saw the blow. The stop-start universe of instant to instant life and death showed him the little man’s spear as it came in from his unprotected right side – he was trying to withdraw his sword from his last victim, and the fine edge was stuck in bone – the realisation in less than half a heartbeat that he could never block the blow – the enemy spear – another spear driving into it, and Satyrus was alive, his sword ripped from his last victim, and over his shoulder Demetrios was glowing with triumph as he pulled his own spear out of the little man.

  ‘Saved your life,’ he said with real satisfaction.

  Satyrus didn’t pause, as there were three men trying to kill him.

  The beautiful sword stuck in the ribs of another victim, a few heartbeats later, and Satyrus was all but driven from his feet by a powerful blow to his shield – a man tripping and falling to his shield side, but the man was ideally positioned to topple him, and Satyrus went to one knee – spear thrusts clattered on his shield and one rang on his helmet, and his searching sword-hand found nothing in the gravel and rubble of the breach.

  Achilles stabbed over his head, fast as the sting of a wasp – one, two, three – and the rapidity and force of his blows was godlike – the third blow sank the width of a man’s hand through an enemy shield, and the man screamed as his shield arm was ripped open by the needle point on the spear.

  Baulked of a weapon, even a broken spear shaft, Satyrus rose, grabbed the injured man’s shield with his free hand, and spun the rim, breaking the man’s already injured arm and dislocating his shoulder. Stepping through him, Satyrus slammed the edge of his shield into the next man in the breach, catching his shield and driving it back into the man’s unprotected mouth, spraying teeth, and Satyrus took his spear as the man screamed and sank to his knees.

  Now Satyrus was the point of a wedge, with Demetrios at one shoulder and Achilles at the other, and the defenders of the breach were hesitant, because the best men had been at the front and now the survivors were brittle.

  The pause gave Satyrus time to realise that he’d been wounded twice, that his imperfectly-healed ribs were burning as if on fire and that the fight for the breach was almost won. One of his adversaries, bolder than the others, lunged overarm at his outstretched left leg where it projected from under his shield. He dropped the head of his spear and swept the weapon sideways as he passed his right foot forward – collected his opponent’s spear on his shaft, rotated his own and thrust with his sarauter, taking his opponent off line and in the throat, killing him instantly. And he heard Demetrios grunt in admiration. He hefted his spear, pivoted, and threw it at a man who was looking elsewhere, and who paid with his life for his inattention, and then Satyrus let his aspis fall off his arm, collected a big rock – formerly part of the wall – and threw it into the enemy rank – just a little above the upper rim of a front-ranker’s shield. The man raised his shield and was knocked flat as the weight of the rock took him.

  Demetrios was there, and ten other men – into the gap, widening it like workmen with chisels working marble, and in the time it took Satyrus to stoop and recover his shield, the defenders were pushed back out of the breach.

  ‘Take my sword,’ Achilles said.

  Satyrus turned his head, saw the offered hilt, and took it. He spat. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘But I think this is done.’ Nonetheless, he picked up his shield and took his time fitting it correctly on his arm.

  Hypaspists pushed past them, desperate to get to their king, who was now three horse lengths ahead, and Satyrus was carried forward by the rush. Someone’s spear point opened the back of his calf like a line of fire on his skin – careless bastard.

  Satyrus moved to his right, and again to his right, pushed forward by the relentless pressure of the hypaspists but controlling his approach. The enemy were falling back and back, trying to rally, trying not to run.

  Satyrus saw the flashes of new crests and well-made helmets over the beaten defenders – reinforcements.

  ‘Form up, there!’ he bellowed, but his accent was Greek, not Macedonian, and the eager men around him ignored him. The hypaspists pressed forward in a mob, their spears upright or pinned against them by the press.

  The enemy – the beaten enemy – turned their heads, almost as one, like a flock of birds changing direction in the air. And then they opened their ranks – not well, but well enough – and let the newcomers through. The exchange of ranks took fifty heartbeats, and during that time the new enemy were vulnerable, but the hypaspists weren’t in order to make a cohesive attack, and mostly they gathered around their king and walled him off from the fighting.

  And then the enemy attacked. They were mercenaries – most of them political exiles with a burning hate for Demetrios and his pseudo-democratic ways, and they crashed into the disorganised hypaspists and drove them back ten paces, killing as they came, and in the time it takes an Olympian to run the stade, Satyrus was in the front rank.

  His opponent had a magnificent crest on one of the new helmets – a small, fitted Attic helmet with engraving on every surface. He had a thick blond beard under the cheek-plates, and he slammed his spear into Satyrus’s aspis with the confidence of the larger man.

  Satyrus shuffled back to absorb the impact of the man’s spear, and then stepped forward – push with the back, right thigh, lead left, collect balance, and he was under Blond Beard’s spear, pressing shield to shield – Blond Beard trying to stab almost straight down over the locked shields. Satyrus stooped to get the pushing face of his aspis under the other man’s rim, and as the man responded to that threat, sliced the edge of his sword across the other man’s instep – flicked it back into the man’s unprotected ankle under his greaves, and then powered forward against him, making him stumble back and fall into his own line …

  Now Achilles was next to him, and he put his spear point through a man’s face, and the enemy line paused.

  But Demetrios’s hypaspists were not Alexander’s hypaspists, and they were still not in fighting order. A dozen or more – twenty, perhaps – were clustered around Satyrus and Achilles, but the rest had surrounded the king and forced him down the ramp.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ Achilles said.

  Satyrus spat. He’d been wounded again, and the futility of the whole fight was overweighing the daimon.

  He backed a step, and Achilles matched him.

  He backed three more steps, and he was in the breach. The hypaspist on his left
locked up, their aspides touching, and Achilles’ rank partner did the same, and they almost filled the breach.

  Satyrus risked a look over his shoulder.

  Demetrios was screaming at someone, his voice rough with strain, but his men were forcing him out of the breach. The rest were clearly intent on retreat, except the handful already committed to standing with Satyrus and Achilles.

  The enemy mercenaries were hesitating.

  ‘Back,’ Satyrus ordered. He stepped back, and the man at his back gave ground as well.

  ‘We had them, gods curse on them!’ said the man on Satyrus’s left.

  Now the mercenaries were preparing for a charge.

  Satyrus stepped back again, and again, and now his head and shoulders were level with the outside of the breach, and he had the gritty dirt of the ramp under his sandals and between his toes. A bad position from which to fight.

  But the mercenaries hesitated again.

  ‘Back,’ Satyrus said. The danger of falling off the ramp was very real.

  Down below, a ballista fired, its bolt crashing into the right side of the breach and ricocheting crazily until it struck the front rank of enemy hoplites. It didn’t kill anyone, but in its tumble it broke a man’s ankle and knocked another unconscious.

  ‘Give that man a bag of darics,’ Achilles grunted.

  Satyrus shared his view – the first ballista shot stopped the enemy at the back edge of the breach, and Satyrus and his little band were able to skid down the ramp unmolested – not even by javelins or arrows.

  Satyrus reached the base of the ramp, and men hastened to hand him water, wine; they were chastened by their defeat, and aware that the last men off the ramp had taken greater risks and were the better men.

  They weren’t his men – it wasn’t his place to berate them or demand explanations. Besides, he was bleeding in three places and the damned thorax he was wearing had cut into his waist to the extent that he could barely keep his feet. He opened the cheek-plates on his borrowed helmet, ripped it off his head, and drank air, his sides heaving.