Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

by Christian Cameron

  Eumenes was next to Melitta. ‘I feel it,’ he said.

  Coenus embraced him. ‘I feel it,’ he said. ‘If only Diodorus were here.’

  ‘Crax,’ Ataelus said. ‘Sitalkes.’

  ‘They will come,’ Eumenes said.

  Parshtaevalt nodded. ‘All of us will come,’ he said to Melitta. ‘All of your father’s men, and all of your mother’s. And we will show these newcomers how war is made.’

  13

  Lemnos, Lesvos – a night in Methymna, and fresh lamb – and down the sea to Chios, past Samos to a day of fevered trading in Miletus while his arm throbbed as if his wound was new, and then down the Sporades to Rhodos. The wind didn’t always serve, but they were in the most protected parts of the sea, and they could make a good anchorage and a town every night.

  Satyrus needed a town every night – his arm was so bad that he began to wonder if it would have to be rebroken and reset, and he had a fever, which didn’t seem possible from such an old wound. At Miletus, he went to the old Temple of Apollo and made a sacrifice, and only willpower kept them at sea past the sanctuary of Asclepius on Cos.

  Byzantium had left other scars as well, and Satyrus could neither sleep nor rest without his mind running off along his various choices, the paths of his own choosing and the choices thrust upon him. He felt himself grow sullen. He regretted the lack of Theron, or even Diokles. Neiron was older, cautious, proud of his new rank and determined not to lose it. Where Diokles might have censured his acerbic comments, Neiron bore them with a patience that simply stung Satyrus to further annoyance.

  The entrance to the harbour at Rhodos was framing the bow when he boiled over.

  ‘Oars! Stand by, all tiers.’ The oar master was Neiron’s replacement. His voice didn’t carry authority, and his sense of timing was poor. He was a master rower, and had sat the stroke bench in two triremes, and yet he wasn’t good enough to make the next step. Satyrus was sorry for him – he was a good man, and a loyal one – Messus was his name, and he was Tyrian, like Diokles, although older and greyer.

  ‘That man has no authority,’ he said.

  Neiron’s eyes were on his landfall and the harbour entrance.

  ‘I’m speaking to you,’ he barked.

  Neiron’s eyes never moved. ‘Sorry, sir. I’m conning the ship.’

  That stung Satyrus. Feeling foolish – hurt, angry, off centre and foolish – he sat on the helmsman’s bench and watched the Temple of Poseidon grow larger.

  ‘All benches! Oars – in!’ Messus called. His rhythm was no better than it had been in the other harbours, and the starboard oars were slow coming in, turning the ship slightly, so that Neiron had to compensate.

  Messus hung his head. He turned red in the face and looked anywhere but the stern.

  The Lotus was coasting, losing speed against the water but still moving quickly enough, and the beach under the Temple of Poseidon was crowded.

  ‘We’re going too fast,’ Satyrus said.

  Neiron was watching the beach.

  Satyrus knew that he was angry, that his decision-making wasn’t its best, but he was also an experienced trierarch now, and he knew when Lotus was going too fast. ‘Reverse your benches!’ he called. He ran forward, heedless of his arm. ‘Reverse your benches!’

  Messus shrank against the mast, clearly unsure what to do next.

  Satyrus ignored him. He looked down at the thranitai, the upper-deck oarsmen, and the stroke oar nodded.

  ‘Give way, all!’ Satyrus called. The oars went up to the catch and down, and the blades bit the water. ‘Mind your helm, Neiron. We’ll birth between the two warships.’

  Neiron’s face grew dark, but he obeyed. The flush was still in his cheeks when Satyrus returned to the stern.

  ‘I was intending a different landing,’ Neiron said carefully. ‘Among the merchants.’

  Satyrus saw, suddenly, that Neiron had seen a berth – a distant berth that needed more momentum.

  Neiron continued: ‘I didn’t know that we had the right to put in among their warships.’ He was angry, but his anger showed only in the careful enunciation of his Greek.

  Satyrus clutched his arm. ‘My – apologies, helmsman. I see it now.’

  Neiron shrugged. ‘No matter,’ he said.

  ‘I feel like an idiot. I’ll apologize in front of the men if you like.’ Satyrus was miserable.

  ‘No matter, I said.’ Neiron slapped his oars to get the bow to move – threading the needle of the narrow space between a pair of Rhodian triemioliai, the same burthen and design as the Lotus, just as Messus called for the oars to come in, his voice tremulous.

  Satyrus went ashore in the ship’s boat, the throbbing in his arm just an echo of the throbbing in his head. He shook it to clear it. Rhodos was a beautiful town, cleaner and better tended than Alexandria, old in a way that lent dignity rather than squalor. Neiron followed him up the steps to the temple. Satyrus wanted to say something – wanted to clear the air – but Neiron’s rebuff to his apology left him nowhere to go.

  At the top of the steps, Timaeus of Rhodos waited, his broad hands tucked into a girdle made of hemp rope. At his side stood the other navarch for the year, Panther, son of Diomedes, a man who had killed more pirates than any other.

  ‘There are few men in the circle of the world who would dare to sail direct from Demostrate to Rhodos and then berth in my harbour among my ships,’ Timaeus said.

  Satyrus was winded just from climbing the steps of the temple. He made himself stand straight.

  Satyrus let himself breathe. ‘I need a favour,’ he said.

  ‘You need a doctor, lad,’ Panther said.

  That was the last thing Satyrus remembered.

  When he returned to consciousness, he had no idea of the passage of time and felt panic until a stranger – a woman – came into the room and took his hand.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  She ignored him and put a cool hand on his, then turned it over and placed a thumb on his wrist. ‘Lie down,’ she said, in the same tone that Diokles used on drunken sailors, if quieter.

  ‘How long have I been out?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘How long have you been taking poppy juice for pain?’ she asked him.

  He tried to think. ‘A week’s sailing to reach Rhodos – sparingly the two weeks before that, and then perhaps two more weeks before that.’

  ‘You took poppy for five weeks for a broken arm and a fevered wound?’ she asked. ‘What fool advised that?’

  Satyrus felt too weak to argue.

  ‘Your body now craves the poppy as much as it craves healing,’ she said. ‘Your arm is so badly hurt that it must be rebroken – which will be excruciatingly painful. For which I will have to give you poppy.’ She shrugged. ‘I recommend that you find a proper physician – preferably one with the same training I have – and let him take the poppy from your body.’

  Satyrus sighed. ‘I have a great deal to accomplish this winter.’

  ‘You may find things harder if you are dead. Or permanently enslaved to the poppy. But – that is not my business. I have said my piece.’ She poured a spoon of clear liquid that smelt of sugar and almonds. ‘Drink this.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, and then he was gone.

  Colours – an endless language of colours and shapes, smells, and an explosion, even in his dreams, of meanings so intense that he experienced an endless, fractal emotion, as if he was creating and destroying everything in the universe – gods, ships, monsters – and he swam inside his own body, which was itself as great as all the cosmos – what would Heraklitus say?

  And then he sat in a meadow that rolled to every horizon, with a clear blue sky above and flowers like a carpet under him. He rose to his dream feet and looked around.

  ‘You are nearer death than your physician seems to know,’ the big man next to him said. Indeed, he was too big to be a man – Satyrus’s head came only to the man’s pectoral muscles, which were enormous. He had a lion skin on his sh
oulder and a wreath of laurel in his hair and he smelled like a farmer.

  Satyrus bowed his head. ‘Lord Herakles!’ he said.

  ‘Do I look like a lord?’ the man in the lion skin asked. ‘Are you mindful of my city?’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I am. I intend to ask the tyrant—’

  ‘Ask nothing. As the city will never give you the prize you desire, so you must not give it aught.’ He yawned. ‘Let us fight a fall. On your guard!’

  Satyrus was suddenly naked, facing this giant on the sands of an eternal palaestra. He took his guard position and the moment that both of them acknowledged the contest, Satyrus shot in, powered by his legs, reaching for a lock on his opponent’s knee.

  He got his right arm behind those mighty thews and pulled, and then his left arm was caught in a stronger grip.

  ‘Well fought,’ his opponent said, and he felt all the bones in his arm shatter . . .

  And he awoke to sunshine on his face. His left arm was hurting.

  ‘He’s back with us,’ a male voice said. ‘Get the lady.’

  Time passed – a minute, a day? – and again he felt the cool hand on his wrist and then on his forehead. ‘Hmm. Less fever. Hard to tell, with so much poppy. How do you feel?’

  ‘Herakles broke my arm,’ Satyrus said, before he realized what he was saying.

  ‘Really?’ she asked. She turned away, outside his line of vision, and came back with a five-page wax tablet, on which she wrote furiously, her stylus moving like the shuttle on a loom. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Fighting the pankration,’ Satyrus said. He felt silly now.

  ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘I do not need to consult a professional astrologer to say that this bodes well for your healing.’ She reached for something. ‘Drink this,’ she said.

  Time went away again.

  Neiron came and went, and Panther, and he bathed every night in the colours and the gardens of the gods. Time flowed away from him – sometimes, he could see time itself, the stream that Heraklitus had described, flowing by him, and every drop was itself a sea of human deeds and choices, and yet once it flowed by, none of it could be caught.

  Rhodos – a perfect landfall.

  He killed the Sauromatae girl in the meadow, over and over again, and the two men on the beach. He watched Teax being raped, and he heard Penelope killed. Over, and over. And he wrestled with a god. He saw Eumeles kill his mother. He watched Philokles die. He imagined the Sauromatae chief, Upazan, killing his father, who he had never seen.

  After a time, none of them were events of horror, but simply drops in the stream that ran through the field where Herakles stood in his lion skin.

  And then he was awake, and the field and the wrestling and all the life and death flowed away and became dreams.

  *

  ‘Two weeks?’ he asked. ‘Despoina, I don’t even know your name!’

  ‘You may call me Aspasia,’ she said. ‘I am a doctor. Indeed, I am the only Asclepius-trained physician in Rhodos. And you may leave my house whenever you like, but if you want that arm to hold a shield again, you will remain here, taking only light exercise, eating the diet I prescribe, and perhaps reading, for two weeks.’ She was tall – as tall as a man, and well formed, but her air of authority and the grey in her hair put her a little above his level, as if she was an officer and he was an oarsman.

  On his third day of wakefulness, during the hours that were mostly normal, before he was dosed with poppy, he met her husband, a Rhodian captain and amateur scholar. He was dark-skinned, tall and broad, named Memnon.

  ‘My father had a friend who was Memnon of Rhodos!’ Satyrus said.

  ‘It is a common name here, especially among those of us of Libyan and Ethiopian blood,’ Memnon said. ‘But surely you mean Memnon, the polemarch of Olbia?’

  ‘Is he yet?’ Satyrus was lying on a couch, his head propped on pillows. ‘He must be quite old.’

  ‘Is fifty old?’ Aspasia asked. ‘In Aegypt, a peasant would be ten years in his grave – but among Greeks, it is no great age.’

  Satyrus was determined to show that he, too, had an education. ‘Not too old to serve in the phalanx, at least in Sparta,’ he said. ‘I stand corrected.’ And then he looked at Memnon the captain. ‘Do you know Memnon of Olbia?’ he asked.

  ‘I do. It is a small world – and really, Rhodos is but a small town. He is my cousin. He has just written to me.’

  ‘Will you write back?’ Satyrus asked. ‘May I include a note?’

  ‘Of course!’ Memnon said.

  The relationship established, Memnon was quickly a friend, whereas Aspasia kept her distance. She was always courteous but never friendly. She would spend an hour by Satyrus’s side, mixing drugs, and yet communicate only on medical matters. At first he took her distance for disapproval. Only with time did he see it for what it was – the mask of authority. She was a woman who gave orders to men. She was not a friend to them.

  When he finally understood, he nodded in appreciation. Lying on a couch for two weeks, awake and mostly in command of his mind, left him with too much time to think, and much of it was spent considering the manner in which he commanded.

  That evening, he brought it up with Memnon as they shared a game of shells and ships – a game that, at least symbolically, represented a naval battle. Memnon’s board was carved of lapis and marble, so that it looked like squares of the sea, deeper and shallower, and a master had carved his ebony and ivory triremes. Each ship was different, so that some were twenty-oared boats and others were pirate hemioliai, biremes, triremes.

  ‘Do you befriend your officers?’ Satyrus asked.

  Memnon laughed. ‘Not as often as I’d like. It can be lonely on a long voyage – as you well know. I’m not used to a twenty-year-old trierarch. Anyway, I like to be friends with my helmsman, but it isn’t always that way.’

  ‘Ever try too hard?’ Satyrus asked.

  Memnon laughed. ‘Maybe you should be talking to my wife – or a priest. Certainly, Satyrus, I have tried too hard. When you are my age, though, it all seems less important. I have my friends – I am who I am. Some men like me and others cross the street to avoid me, and that’s as it is.’ Memnon shrugged. ‘I care less and less as I grow older.’

  Satyrus shook his head ruefully. ‘I seek humility, not further advice towards insularity.’

  ‘Or arrogance?’ Memnon asked. He laughed. He was a man who laughed easily, even at himself. ‘You aren’t arrogant. You are just used to being obeyed. It’s a good thing in an officer. Perhaps a little difficult in a friend, eh?’ He sat back, made his move and drank some wine. ‘So, you really stared Manes down and called him a coward?’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I did.’

  Silence lay between them, and then Satyrus made his move. He was going to lose – and knowledge that he had lost made him play better, so that his ivory fleet might minimize its losses.

  ‘Most boys – men – your age would have quite a tale to tell,’ Memnon said.

  Aspasia entered with his dose. She mixed the poppy and the almond juice by his bed, and Satyrus felt the craving rise in him as he smelled it.

  Satyrus tried to push the desire down, wondering at the same time how he would ever stop using the stuff. He thought about his dose twenty times a day. More. ‘I arranged an ambush, and it didn’t go as well as I had expected. This happens to me – I make plans, and they never carry quite as well as I expect.’ He shrugged. ‘I tried to make him fight me. In effect, he ran away. That made him the victor and me the defeated. I was not . . . careful enough.’

  Memnon smiled into his wine cup. ‘You would have taken Manes all by yourself?’ he asked.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘To get what I want from the pirates, I will have to kill Manes,’ he said. ‘All by myself. Or die trying.’

  Memnon smiled at that and poured a libation. ‘To Apollo, and all the gods. Here’s to living to tell our stories, even if we add a little to them with the passage of years.’

  ‘If
you will pour libations on my new floor, you can fetch a slave to clean it up,’ Aspasia said. But she smiled at her husband. He smiled back, and Satyrus was – jealous? Not jealous, precisely. He felt that they had something that he was missing. Something he really only shared with his sister. He took his dose and drifted off, thinking of Melitta.

  The next day, Timaeus and Panther came with Neiron. Memnon came in, too, although Satyrus knew he had a ship in lading. They crowded around Satyrus’s bed while cold winter rain lashed the pebbles of the beach outside.

  Timaeus took a cup of wine from a slave, saluted his hostess and nodded to Satyrus. ‘Only the man who called Manes a coward could get me out on a day like this, lad,’ he said.

  Panther went straight to the point. ‘Neiron here says that you have a proposition for us.’

  Satyrus gave his helmsman a brief look. He couldn’t imagine Neiron approaching the Rhodians. The man didn’t have that much initiative – unless Satyrus had badly misjudged him.

  Neiron shrugged. ‘If I was out of line, I beg your forgiveness, lord. But these men have your trust, and they asked a hundred questions about Byzantium. It seemed easiest just to tell them.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘No apology required. Timaeus, I have come in hopes that Rhodos will loan me a powerful squadron – in exchange for my clearing the Bosporus and the Propontis of pirates.’

  Panther leaned forward. ‘And how, exactly, will you do that?’

  Satyrus met Panther’s eye. ‘I’ll lead them into the Euxine and use them against Eumeles of Pantecapaeum.’

  Timaeus laughed. He was heavily bearded, and men said that he was the avatar of Poseidon, and today, with rain in his curly hair and the summer tan gone from his skin, he looked the part. He laughed like a god as well – a heavy laugh that shook the rafters. ‘You are bold!’ he said.

  Satyrus laughed with him. ‘Laugh all you like,’ he said when they were done. ‘My way will not fail. If I win, the pirates are gone – employed by me. If I lose, they are still gone – to the bottom of the Euxine.’