Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

by Christian Cameron

  ‘You were my father’s admiral!’ Satyrus said. His smile filled his face as he saw the possibilities – and the dangers. For this was a truly dangerous man – a man who’d refused alliance with any of the parties in the struggle of the Diadochoi, who preyed on all comers.

  He sat down, his right hand automatically loosening his sword in its sheath, and rested his shoulders against the wall. His right hand cradled his injured left arm.

  ‘Not really.’ The old man shrugged. ‘Nah. Nothing so fancy. I covered the coast for him one summer while he made war on the Macedonians. And the next year I guarded his merchantmen while they moved his army. To be honest, lad, it was dull, dull work for a sailorman, and damn little plunder.’ He shrugged, and the gold beads in his locks winked. He had heavy amber earrings. ‘So – how’d you come to get beaten?’

  Satyrus was suddenly struck by the fitness of it – that Demostrate was talking to him – his father’s ally. Who hated Eumeles for his exile. Of course, Leon would never stomach alliance with the man who controlled the entrance to the Propontis and preyed on every merchant who didn’t buy his favour.

  Clearly time to start thinking like a king.

  ‘Sheer folly,’ Satyrus said. As he spoke, Diokles shouldered a man aside and sat heavily next to Satyrus on the bench. ‘And bad intelligence.’

  ‘Tell it,’ Demostrate said. He motioned for a man to bring wine. ‘The lads like a good sea-fight story. What do you drink?’

  ‘Wine,’ Satyrus said, and got a ripple of chuckles and smiles from the hard men packed around him. ‘I’ve had a long eight weeks.’ He looked around. ‘Where should I start? We heard that Eumeles had two dozen ships, and we headed north with twenty – not to fight him, but simply to land at Olbia.’

  ‘Aye, where yer father was archon. Olbia would be yours just by landing there. I understand that.’ Demostrate nodded.

  ‘Eumeles knew we were coming,’ Satyrus said. ‘He was in the mouth of the Borysthenes with eighty ships. When we retreated, he followed and forced us to battle against the coast, eighty ships to twenty.’

  Mutters, whispers and a catcall from the men around him. Demostrate merely turned his head and the silence returned. ‘The battle story I’ve heard – from Daedalus of Halicarnassus. He says you fought well. Care to tell it?’

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘Not well enough to win, or to rescue my uncle.’

  Demostrate nodded. A boy came up with a heavy bronze wine krater and cups. He put them on the table and served the wine. Demostrate poured a full cup on the floor. ‘Not in the sea!’ he said as he poured his libation.

  Dozens of voices echoed his prayer.

  Satyrus took a cup and drank, and it was good Chian wine – as good as anything on a dandy’s table in Alexandria. ‘Welcome to my town, Satyrus son of Kineas,’ Demostrate said, still standing.

  ‘Care to buy a pair of small triremes?’ Satyrus asked. ‘They have a little worm, but nothing a pirate king can’t fix with his arsenal.’

  Men laughed, but Demostrate sat and laughed louder. ‘They’re mine now, don’t you think?’

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘By that logic, your life is mine now, don’t you think?’ Without shifting his weight, his right hand, which had been cradling his left arm, reached over it and he drew the short sword from under his arm in the motion practised a thousand times – the blade out, the tip precisely at the bridge of the pirate’s nose.

  Demostrate didn’t move. ‘Now that’s a point of what people call philosophy, don’t you think? I can possess myself of your ships, but you can only take my life. You can’t keep it.’ The old man grinned. ‘And thankless as these scum are, I don’t think you’d live long to brag of it.’

  Satyrus was proud that, despite the last eight weeks and everything he’d been through, the point of his sword wavered less than a finger’s width. ‘The thing is that if you take my ships, I have absolutely nothing to lose.’

  ‘You’d be killing the young Jew here and your helmsman, too. Maybe every man in your crews.’ Demostrate still didn’t move.

  ‘That’s a risk I’m willing to take,’ Satyrus said. ‘The last eight weeks have taught me quite a bit about the price of kingship.’

  ‘So you’d sacrifice your own friends and your whole life for the gratification of instant revenge,’ the pirate said.

  Satyrus shrugged but his sword point did not. ‘No. I’d wager my own life and that of my friends that you are a reasonable man. With the full knowledge that if my bluff was called, I’d have to pay the wager. Revenge,’ and here, Satyrus shrugged again, and his point twitched as his hand tired, ‘is a luxury I can’t yet afford.’

  ‘I won’t bargain while you threaten me, lad. It’ll look bad for the scum.’ Demostrate met his eye and winked.

  Satyrus sheathed his sword with the same economy of movement he’d used to draw it. ‘Replace the ram on my Black Falcon and you can have both ships and all the men that rowed them,’ Satyrus said. There it was. The knuckle bones were rolled.

  The silence was as thick as the smell. Satyrus had time to think of how much his arm hurt, and to wonder if he was about to be relieved of the pain – for ever.

  ‘Find us a base in the Euxine and we’ll rip Eumeles a new arsehole together,’ Demostrate said. ‘Every city on the Euxine is closed to me.’ He shrugged, rose to his feet. ‘I like him. What of you lot?’

  The two hundred laughed and muttered – no roars of acclaim, but few hoots of derision, either.

  The old man leaned down. ‘Finish the wine and my compliments, lad. You’ve all winter to get a new ram – and I’m quite happy to have a new pair of light triremes, although I have the better of the deal. But I have thirty ships that can stand in the line of battle with you, and maybe I know where there’s more. Right now, you need to sleep.’

  Satyrus nodded heavily. ‘T hanks,’ he said.

  Most of the two hundred men followed Demostrate out of the arched door, and Satyrus was left in a dockside tavern with Diokles, Abraham and Theron, who had lurked at the edge of the door.

  ‘Leon hates him,’ Theron said.

  Satyrus gulped wine. What he needed was water, and the wine went straight to his head.

  ‘Where are our men?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘Drunk as lords, somewhere dry,’ Diokles said. ‘I promised a muster for pay tomorrow. Do you have coin?’

  ‘Not a silver owl,’ Satyrus said. ‘However much Leon hates this man, I suspect his credit is good here.’

  Abraham leaned forward. ‘I’m made of money. I have silver to hand and I can get more.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Even though you just wagered my life.’

  Diokles shook his head. ‘Demostrate! I thought we’d all be gutted on the spot.’

  ‘We may yet,’ Satyrus said. ‘I liked him.’

  Theron sighed. ‘He’s a hard man, Satyrus. You think you’re hard?’

  ‘I suspect he’ll keep a deal when he makes one,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘He left Lysimachos high and dry two years back, you’ll recall,’ Theron shot back. ‘Bought and paid for, he deserted – and took this town. From Lysimachos. Who hates him. Whose alliance you crave. And Amastris? Her father Dionysius, whose alliance you desire, hates this pirate for closing his trade.’

  Satyrus nodded. He was drunk on two cups of wine. His arm throbbed, and he was high on the adrenaline of having drawn on the greatest pirate in the world – and lived. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Abraham, do you have a bed for me?’

  Abraham put an arm around his shoulders. ‘You poor bastard. I didn’t think he’d come the moment you landed.’

  Theron finished his wine. ‘He wanted to find you weak. To see what you are made of. Satyrus, it’s the law of the wild, here. It’s like living with lions. If you bind yourself to these men, you are outside the laws of men.’

  Satyrus waved his hand. ‘Tell me tomorrow,’ he said. He stumbled out into the dark with Abraham’s arms around his shoulders.

  ‘You look like shit,’ Ab
raham said as they walked through the rain.

  ‘I’m drunk,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘No, worse than that,’ Abraham said.

  ‘I’m drunk, and I got some people killed, and then I killed some more people all by myself,’ Satyrus said. ‘Other than that, I’m fine.’ Then he stopped against a building and threw up all the wine and everything else he’d eaten for a day.

  Abraham held his head and said nothing.

  Abraham had made his father’s factor’s house into a headquarters for his crew, and he had cleared the warehouse for his wounded when he came in. What Isaac Ben Zion would make of the loss of profits was another matter.

  It was a two-storey house with an enclosed yard and an attached warehouse, common across the Hellenic world, but it was comfortable in a way that Calchus’s house never had been. The slaves were sleek and well fed, and the yard was full of sailors and oarsmen at all hours – noisy, singing, sometimes vicious but never dull. The house itself held all the officers of two ships, and with Satyrus’s arrival, it held the officers of four ships.

  On his first morning there, Satyrus awoke to hot, heavily spiced wine and barley gruel, which on later days he would eat while listening to reports from his officers in the biggest room on the ground floor, a room utterly devoid of the decorations that Greeks preferred – scenes of the gods, heroes, slaughter. Instead, there were carefully painted designs along the borders, and blank walls in bright colours.

  On the first morning, Satyrus sat drinking hot wine and looking at the blue wall. ‘You need a scene painter.’

  ‘I’m a Jew,’ Abraham said. ‘Remember? No nymphs will be raped on my walls.’

  ‘Can’t you have Jahveh – I don’t know – smiting his enemies?’ Satyrus wasn’t trying to mock, but it sounded that way.

  Abraham made a peasant sign to avert ill-luck. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No, we don’t.’ Then he grinned. ‘Listen – with blank walls, you can imagine any scene you want!’

  Satyrus watched the walls and sipped more wine, and he felt the mirth drain out of him. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘When I stare at these walls, right now I just see people being killed. Killed by me – one way or another.’

  ‘You’re the one ready to make an alliance with a pirate,’ Theron said, coming in. He had fresh oil on his skin. ‘Mind you, the pirate has a gymnasium and a palaestra.’

  Satyrus looked up in irritation. ‘I was speaking to Abraham.’

  Theron sat and poured himself hot wine. ‘Exercise cleared my head. I have things I want to say to you.’

  Abraham rose. ‘I’ll leave the two of you.’

  Satyrus frowned. ‘No.’

  Theron shrugged, and Abraham sat.

  ‘I was appalled when you killed those men,’ Theron said. ‘But I was appalled when you marched the phalanx away and left Philokles bleeding on the sand.’

  Abraham looked from one to the other. ‘Killed what men?’ he asked.

  ‘I executed two mutineers,’ Satyrus said. ‘Myself.’

  Abraham nodded, his face closed.

  ‘I think you are what you have been trained to be. I think that I helped to train you.’ Theron shrugged.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Hardly a day passes when I don’t think of it,’ he said. He leaned back on the armrest of his kline and put his feet up. ‘The day my world changed. I still wonder about Phiale, too.’

  ‘You let the doctor live,’ Theron continued. ‘And he repaid you badly.’

  ‘Yes,’ Satyrus said.

  Theron said, ‘I love you. I hope that when I have a son, he’s like you. I remain yours, and I’ll stay by your side, if you’ll have me. But – Satyrus, please listen.’

  Satyrus was staring at the fire on the hearth. ‘I’m basking in the first compliments you’ve ever paid me, pighead. I’m listening!’ He turned and smiled at Theron.

  Theron smiled back. But after a moment, his smile faded. ‘But I want you to ask yourself if this is really the path you want. Kingship? Will you really wade in blood all the way to the ivory stool? And who will you be when you get there?’

  Satyrus felt the tears well up in his eyes. He rolled over to hide them. ‘Abraham, do you think you could find me a physician to reset this arm?’ he asked.

  Abraham rose, looked at both of them silently and left the room.

  When he was gone, Satyrus sat up. ‘You were right, Theron. This is between us. He is a different kind of confidant.’ He looked at his right hand, as if searching it for bloodstains. Was there blood under the nails? Did it show?

  ‘Your father refused the stool and the diadem,’ Theron said. ‘I didn’t know him – but I know that of him. He refused.’

  Satyrus sat looking at his hand, and then he raised his face. ‘I’m sorry, Teacher. But that die is cast. I made that decision on the beach, two nights back. Or perhaps when I watched a house burn at Tomis. My world is changed. It is not the world my father lived in.’ He spoke slowly, as if he was a magistrate reading a sentence. ‘Philokles told me to examine myself. It’s like a curse. Does Demostrate ever examine himself? I doubt it.’

  Theron shook his head. ‘I don’t judge other men,’ he said. ‘Not that way.’

  Satyrus raised an eyebrow. ‘You judge me,’ he said. ‘Because I’m young, and you helped shape me. And right now, I think you’d like me either to give up my desire to be king, or to tell you why I should be king. But I can’t. I can’t even be sure that I will be a better king than Eumeles.’ He leaned forward, and put his good right hand on Theron’s. ‘But what I can tell you, Teacher, is that I will examine myself, day by day, and judge myself by the standards Philokles taught. And Eumeles will not examine himself. He will simply act, and act. As empty of worth as an actor pretending to be a hero.’

  Theron took a deep breath. ‘Who gave you so much wisdom?’ he asked.

  ‘You,’ Satyrus said. ‘You and Philokles. And Sappho and Diodorus and Leon and Nihmu and Coenus and Hama. And perhaps Abraham, as well.’

  Theron drank the rest of his wine, clearly overcome by emotion. ‘So – the end justifies the means?’

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think about it every hour. Are all lives of equal worth? I doubt it. Did those two men deserve to die in the sand under my blade? Yes – and no. Would it change your view if I said that they did not die in vain?’

  ‘Would it change their view?’ Theron asked. ‘They’re the ones who are dead.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I know. Remember the girl by the Tanais? The one I gut-shot?’

  Theron shook his head. ‘Can’t say I do – but you’ve spoken of her before.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I put her down, like a wounded horse. Except that she wasn’t a horse.’ He shuddered. ‘I think the road to kingship started there, in that meadow. The beach the other night was merely a signpost.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘Fine. I’m ready. If I have to wade in blood, as you said, then I must simply work harder to put something on the other side of the balance.’

  ‘And Demostrate? The end justifies him?’ Theron leaned forward. ‘You feel guilt for killing two men – two criminals.’ He shook his head. ‘A complex act – but hardly a vicious one. But if you get into bed with this pirate, you share the responsibility for every slave he takes, every home he burns, every merchant he ruins, every man he kills.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do.’ He stared off into space, reviewing his dead. ‘So be it.’

  ‘Bah – your youth is speaking!’ Theron made a motion of disgust.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Satyrus didn’t feel particularly young. His arm hurt, his whole body ached and he wanted to sleep for a day or two. But other things pressed on him. He sipped hot wine. ‘Listen, Theron – my sister must think me dead. Sappho – Diodorus – all of them.’

  Theron rubbed his chin, his anger deflated. ‘You’re right, of course.’

  ‘I should sail down to Alexandria as soon as I make my bargain with Demostrate. If I can get him to agree.’

  Abr
aham came back in. ‘Am I welcome back?’ he asked from the beaded doorway.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are you two still friends?’ Abraham asked, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Yes,’ Theron said. A small smile started at his lips, and spread like the rise of the sun to his face and eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we are.’

  ‘Good,’ Abraham said. ‘Because if our moral philosophy hour is over, there are officers waiting for instructions and an invitation from Demostrate to the public dinner. Work to be done.’

  Satyrus turned to his friend. ‘Care to travel home?’

  Abraham raised an eyebrow, and his dark-brown eyes sparkled. ‘No, thanks.’ He smiled. ‘Once home, I may never actually be allowed to leave again.’ He shrugged, a particularly Hellenic gesture. ‘I like it here.’

  Satyrus nodded, seeing his friend in a different light. Abraham was suddenly not the conservative Hebrew businessman of his adolescence. War had changed him. Satyrus noted that Abraham had earrings and a thumb ring and was wearing a sword – in his own house.

  Eventually, that might merit comment. For the moment, Satyrus confined himself to saying ‘I understand’ with a quick smile. He turned to his former coach. ‘Theron?’

  Theron rubbed his chin. ‘I’m of a mind to be your envoy to Lysimachos,’ he said. ‘If you’ll have me.’ He looked up and met Satyrus’s eye. ‘But we need to rescue Leon,’ he said. ‘Much as I want to go to Lysimachos, I’m the man you can spare to effect a rescue.’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘No, Theron. You are not a spy or a scout. You are a famous athlete and a known associate of Lord Ptolemy.’

  Theron looked away. ‘You know that we are – sworn?’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I know that all of you are Pythagoreans,’ he said.

  Theron took a deep breath. ‘Do you know what the first principle of Pythagoras is?’ he asked.

  ‘I feel as if I’m back in school. Yes, Theron. I know. You swear friendship – and the first principle is that each will lay down his life for his friend.’ Satyrus leaned forward, speaking forcefully. ‘I’m telling you that this is not the moment and that Leon would not expect you, his most famous friend, to attempt to rescue him single-handedly.’