Tyrant: Force of Kings

by Christian Cameron

The doctor nodded. ‘I heard. And whatever reports you received, it’s worse than they told you.’

  Cassander raised a weary eyebrow and toyed with his sandals.

  ‘I was there – off the flank of Demetrios’s cavalry when the rout began. I couldn’t help it – there’s only so many ways out of Achaea. Your cavalry deserted, he broke your infantry, and now most of them have gone over – Demetrios must have doubled his numbers.’

  Cassander’s eyes were bloodshot. He snarled. ‘You’re right. No one told me it was that bad.’

  The doctor pretended to finish his wine. In fact, he hadn’t tasted it – he’d poured the whole cup into a chamber pot while Cassander was looking at his sandals. But he appeared to appreciate it. ‘Prepalaus has ceased to exist as a fighting force. Demetrios will either come after you or go to the aid of his father. Either way, he’s won here. What will you do?’

  He ducked as the heavy gold cup that Cassander had been using flew by his head.

  The doctor smiled, picked up his heavy satchel, and withdrew.

  ‘Everyone blames the messenger,’ he said.

  Phiale emerged from the antechamber tent. ‘That’s that evil bastard done with,’ she said with savage satisfaction.

  ‘Done with?’ Cassander asked.

  ‘I poisoned his wine,’ Phiale said. ‘He killed Satyrus, and I killed him. It seems … balanced.’

  ‘I’m not done with him!’ Cassander said. ‘I need … an act of the gods. I need Demetrios to die. Or Antigonus.’ He took a deep breath, and he was an old man – a pale, shaken old man. ‘I need some luck.’

  ‘Touch me for luck,’ Phiale said, curling an arm around his head. ‘And I’ll see if I can take care of Demetrios.’

  ‘He was in armour! Serving against Cassander! With bloody Demetrios as his butt-boy!’ Ptolemy raged. ‘My spymaster says that they spent days and nights together at Corinth!’

  Leon sighed. His own spies said the same. Said that Satyrus of Tanais had taken a wound in Demetrios’s service, and was recuperating in the palace tent.

  ‘What am I to think?’ Ptolemy raged. ‘Cassander is falling apart and Satyrus is helping it happen! Zeus Soter, Leon!’ The lord of Aegypt was also in armour – sitting on the edge of a hard bench in his sleeping tent. Outside, the long, Syrian twilight was giving way to true night, and the sound of insects competed with the steady, rhythmic chomping of thousands of horses eating the good grass of the Bekaa Valley.

  The Nubian merchant had come cross-country from Tyre, where his own ships waited with Ptolemy’s fleet, guarding its flank from the increasingly confident and aggressive squadrons of Antigonus and Demetrios, up the coast at Ephesus.

  ‘As far as we can tell; Cassander tried to have him killed,’ Leon said. He ran his fingers though his beard. ‘If he knows that then he may, indeed, have elected to serve Demetrios.’ He shook his head. ‘But I doubt it.’

  Ptolemy sounded bone weary. His cautious invasion of Palestine and lower Syria was a war of careful manoeuvre and local siege, with Antigonus’s local forces responding with vigour. Just three months before, they had seemed on the verge of collapse, but now – now Antigonus seemed to have found his youth.

  ‘How could he be so stupid?’ Ptolemy asked.

  ‘Satyrus?’ Leon asked.

  ‘Cassander. The useless fucker. He tried to kill me, remember? And now Satyrus. What for?’ Ptolemy shook his head. ‘If we had his fleet, we’d still be in the game.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’ Leon asked. ‘I’ve been at sea.’

  Ptolemy shrugged. ‘To be honest, no. It’s not that bad. It’s never been as bad as when Perdiccas had Alexander’s own army at the Nile forts and I had nothing but a handful of mercenaries to stop them. Nor as bad as when Golden Boy came at us at Gaza. We’re in Syria. Lots of room to retreat.’

  ‘And this looks like a good army,’ Leon offered.

  ‘All the quality money can buy,’ Ptolemy said with a touch of his old humour. ‘But if Cassander folds – and the bastard will fold – then they’ll all come after me.’

  ‘Lysimachos?’ Leon asked.

  ‘Won’t hold long enough for Seleucus to reach him – because there’s nothing to stop Demetrios from taking his soldiers to Asia. Faster than Lysimachos can move.’ Ptolemy shook his head again. ‘It’s not cast in bronze. But I’m not going to save them. I can’t beat Antigonus – and you and I both know it. If I had Eumenes … if I had any number of the boys from the old days. But I don’t, and I don’t think I could trust this army to face old One-Eye.’

  Leon sighed. ‘I should get back. If you are right, we will have to cover your retreat.’

  Ptolemy laughed. ‘Yes, if we’re really lucky, we’ll have to fight them after all.’ His sarcasm was evident. ‘I’m too old for this shit.’

  Leon nodded. ‘Think of One-Eye. He must be eighty.’

  Ptolemy nodded. ‘I think of it all the time. I think if he were to die, we’d be saved.’

  The last winds of the storm were still blowing hard enough that a phalangite would have a hard time holding his sarissa upright. Most of the army’s tents were blown flat, and the slaves had stopped trying to get them back up.

  Lysimachos was on the beach, stripped, trying with every other soldier in his army to rescue men from the sea. The corpses were so thick in the sea wrack that the waves seemed to be made of dead men.

  Half his army, gone in an afternoon squall on the Euxine. Five thousand veterans, gone to the bottom. The beaches from Heraklea to Sinope were littered with corpses, and more were sinking beneath the waves or floating, bloated and stinking and black, like soft logs in the wake of the squall. His fleet wrecked.

  Lysimachos continued to search the corpse-wrack, looking for men who were alive. And after hours – the hideous work seemed eternal – he found Amastris and her women beside his men. His wife – he hardly thought of her these days – was swimming about, grabbing men by the hair and pulling them to shore.

  Until then, she had never been more than a tool for his desires – the desire to conquest, the desire to have a child by her, to hold her city as a port into Asia.

  But watching her dare the undertow to pull a Macedonian peasant out of the clutches of Poseidon, despite the complete disaster that had just overtaken him, he smiled.

  Kalias, his principal strategos, was shaking his head.

  ‘We’re done,’ he said. ‘First Cassander and now this.’

  Lysimachos watched his wife for another minute. She was beautiful – and brave. Worthy, in fact.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘I’m not done yet.’ He stripped his chiton over his head. ‘See those women out in the water? Are they better than we?’ He ran through the corpses and dived headlong, racing for a man he’d seen to move a hand.

  All along the beach, weary, waterlogged soldiers rose to their feet, stripped their gear, and went into the surf.

  Lysimachos made it to his man. He couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead, but he did what he’d seen Amastris do – he got a hand into the man’s hair, put his buttocks under the man’s back, and swam for shore.

  He was further off the beach than he’d thought. He raised his head and saw that he was a surprising distance offshore, and despite his swimming, he seemed to be getting further and further away. He swam harder. He started to panic and he fought it with the long experience of the veteran warrior who knows panic like a man knows his lover’s body.

  At some point it occurred to Lysimachos to let go of the body. But he was sure there was spirit still in it – and in some way, some inexpressible sending of the gods, Lysimachos had decided that if he could save this one man, if the man lived, then his army would live, his cause would live, and he would save his honour. And if he could not save this one man, it seemed fair that he die here, choking water, Poseidon’s victim.

  It was a simple contest: L
ysimachos against the sea. Lysimachos was strong, and his will was as great as his body. He was not a great swimmer. But he would not surrender to the waves, or let go the man whose hair he had.

  He fought a long fight.

  The land slipped further and further away – first a stade, and then another.

  He kept swimming. Fighting.

  He got a throat full of seawater, his nose closed, his larynx burning from the salt, and he fought panic off one more time, pushed himself up in the water. Changed grip on the body on his back – almost certainly a corpse by now.

  A swirl in the water by his head.

  He closed his eyes. He opened them to find a mermaid.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ Amastris said. She was as calm and fit as a goddess, and as beautiful. ‘Here, give him to me.’ She took the man’s hair and had the energy to swim up under his head, stick her fingers in his mouth, and pull him up to her shoulder.

  ‘Still alive,’ she said cheerily.

  Side by side, they swam for the beach.

  Antigonus read the dispatches from his son with unconcealed delight, his one eye roving over the careful scribal writing like a lookout watching for ships on a threatened coast.

  ‘He doesn’t even know that Lysimachos is wrecked!’ Antigonus laughed. ‘By all the gods. By all the gods, gentlemen! Ptolemy is alone! Cassander’s defeated, Lysimachos wrecked by a storm, Seleucus too far away, Satyrus dead!’ He laughed again. ‘And I was at the point of despair.’

  ‘Ptolemy still has a mighty army,’ suggested his spymaster, Kreon – a Siciliote.

  ‘We will buy him. Offer him a generous truce, crush the rest of them, and take him next spring. Ares, I haven’t felt this young in years. Get me a girl.’

  Kreon laughed. ‘Don’t hurt yourself, lord,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Damn it, Kreon – I’m old, not dead.’ Antigonus laughed aloud. ‘By the gods. We’ve won. I never thought I’d say those words.’

  Kreon flinched. ‘Not done yet. They still have life in them. Lysimachos still has troops – about half his army, and all of Heraklea’s resources. I understand he’s marching.’ He looked at his master. ‘Seleucus is mighty.’

  ‘That pup? What can he do?’ Antigonus said. ‘His army is a quarter of mine and he has no fleet.’

  ‘Join hands with Lysimachos or Ptolemy?’ Kreon said.

  ‘It would take a miracle,’ Antigonus said, and chuckled.

  Miriam was doing exercises when she heard her brother’s angry roar. She finished her dance steps – her brother had a temper and it was best not to feed it – and then pulled a chiton over her head and emerged from her room into the central garden.

  They were not slaves. Far from it – they had returned to comfortable captivity, but with the threat of slavery or death hanging over them every day. They were held in a spacious private home right against the walls of the city, and there were fifty soldiers watching the forty Rhodian prisoners in the houses around them.

  Abraham, when she found him, was weeping.

  Miriam came and sat by him on the bench.

  ‘Our father is dead,’ Abraham said, and ripped hair out of his beard.

  Miriam felt the tears well up in her eyes – painful tears. She had never made peace with the old man. And now she never would. But to say she didn’t love him would have been a lie. She began to sob, but it was as if someone else was doing the crying, because her mind ran on, calm and clear, even as she heard her own rather shocking exclamation.

  Abraham took both of her hands.

  ‘And Satyrus may be dead,’ he said. ‘Demetrios has won a great victory in Greece, and Cassander is destroyed. Demetrios and Antigonus have … won.’ He took a long time, and she found that she cared nothing – nothing – for the defeat of her side.

  ‘Satyrus is not dead,’ she said through her sobs. She would know, she thought. Even though she had determined to tell him that she would not go with him to Tanais – even though Ephesus had clarified for her that she was a Jew and not a Hellene. She would be neither his mistress nor his wife.

  She had decided. But she would feel it in her body if he died.

  If Abraham heard her, he ignored her.

  ‘Demetrios had him killed,’ Abraham said, and his voice cracked.

  Miriam raised her head. ‘Satyrus is alive,’ she said.

  Abraham looked shocked. And in a moment – in her eyes, in her posture – he understood.

  Abraham understood, and he searched for rage – rage at his sister’s betrayal of her … widowhood?

  There was nothing there but his own sorrow for his father. ‘You love Satyrus?’ he asked.

  Miriam hung her head. ‘I will not wed him.’

  Abraham understood in those words, and he put his arms around her. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, my dear.’

  9

  Ephesus

  Dawn. Light the colour of fresh rose petals that rouged the river where it met the sea – wave tops that showed pink, not white. Gulls wheeled away into the sky, frightened by predators or merely playful. Off the river mouth, a school of dolphins leapt and leapt again, and further offshore, a line of sea haze veiled the islands like Poseidon’s coast, waiting for the heat of the sun to burn it off.

  Up the coast, five big Athenian grain ships, close up against the beaches, had their sails turned from white to blinding pink by the sun.

  Deep in the haze, a flash, and then another – a rhythmic flash.

  Flash.

  Flash.

  A line of flashes, as the rising sun caught oars – many, many oars.

  Ten sets of oars.

  Flash-flash-flash.

  Racing speed. Ramming speed. Into the dawn.

  Apollodorus stood amidships, his helmet forgotten on the deck as his hair blew in the wind of his reckless race up the estuary. Ephesus lay before him, high on her ridge, and the Temple of Artemis, one of the wonders of the world, sparkled in Dawn’s embrace.

  Closer to hand, fifty ships’ lengths ahead, lay Antigonus’s Asian fleet, moored in the gentle current or beached with their sterns pulled up high above the waterline, and the great camp of their oarsmen and marines stretched up the farm fields and around isolated stands of olive and oak and seemed to reach right up to the town.

  Anaxagoras stood by him, and Charmides, and Coenus, and Theron, and Eumenes of Olbia.

  There was nothing to be said – nothing but the rush of the wind, the sparkle of the sea, and the enormity of their risk.

  And then they were through the chops of the estuary and into the river, still racing, the crews in top training. On the shore, sentries were shouting.

  ‘Sing the paean!’ Apollodorus called, and all through the fleet, the oarsmen took up the song. The daughters of Apollo were just being hymned on the mountainside of Delphi when the first rams crushed the first helpless ships at anchor.

  Out in the estuary, the second Bosporon squadron came on, with Melitta standing in the bow of her penteres, and she heard the hymn rise to the gods, and she grinned.

  ‘Let them see who we are,’ she said to Herakles, Alexander’s son, who stood behind her, awestruck to be participating in such a mighty enterprise.

  Forty warships – the entire fleet of her kingdom.

  ‘Sing!’ she commanded Herakles, and he caught the song from across the water and raised his clear young voice, and their rowers took it from him, so that forty crews – eight thousand throats – roared the paean into the dawn.

  High on the hillside above Ephesus, six men heard the paean.

  ‘Got their beaks in,’ Stratokles said. He smacked his fist into his palm. ‘It’s a pleasure to work with such competent people,’ he added happily.

  Thirty stades away, a minute column of smoke began to rise, and then another and another, like threads on the horizon.

 
The town garrison began to pour out of the gates, men tying their armour, tossing sword belts over their heads, shoving arms through porpakes.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Satyrus said.

  The six of them slipped forward, from one grove to the next, until they lost sight of the estuary and the river because they were so close to the wall.

  ‘Follow me!’ Stratokles said. He sprinted towards the wall; a sentry shouted, and an arrow flew.

  Now close to the wall, which rose ten times the height of a man, course upon course of mud brick atop stone. Another arrow flew, and it stuck in the face of Satyrus’s shield.

  Stratokles ran diagonally across the face of the nearest tower. The sentries were sounding the alarm but of course the city alarms were already ringing, and their local bell was ignored. As Stratokles had planned.

  Around a corner of the wall, where a local farmer had planted his olives right up to the tower.

  Up an olive tree, into the crotch, a long step up to the course where the stone met the mud brick – a ledge. Stratokles was panting, but he pointed up the wall; a long, diagonal, like a shallow set of steps hidden by the tops of the olives and by vines.

  ‘Smugglers,’ he panted.

  Satyrus cut past him and ran up the secret steps in the wall.

  His bodyguards protested, but he had to do this himself, and so he did. Right up the wall, six men against one of the mightiest cities in Asia.

  The sentries were alert, but either they didn’t know of the secret steps or they couldn’t believe anyone would attack them there – there wasn’t a man at the top of the wall, and Satyrus was on the platform.

  A man shouted from the nearest tower, and a fully-armed hoplite came running, full tilt, out of the door of the tower.

  Achilles came up the wall behind Satyrus. ‘We have to clear the towers without more alarm.’ Satyrus said.

  Achilles nodded, and went west.

  Satyrus braced. The oncoming hoplite was a brave man. He ran like a god, and he carried a heavy spear.