Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  The mercenary officer rose, pulled his chlamys tight around himself and came over. ‘Lady,’ he said with a nod to Melitta. She’d bested him in a skirmish, and she wasn’t sure he’d forgiven her for it. But Coenus obviously liked him. She was prepared to deal with him to make Coenus happy.

  ‘Lady is going east, looking for our raiders,’ Coenus said. ‘She has reason to believe they’re from east of the Hyrkanian Sea. I’d like to go with her. How do you feel about it?’

  Nikephorus looked at her, and then glanced up the hill at the wagon fort. ‘With our boys?’ he asked.

  Melitta nodded.

  ‘Lady, will you let my men settle these valleys?’ Nikephorus asked.

  Melitta shook her head. ‘I’m not going to hand you blanket control of the Tanais high ground,’ she said. ‘On the one hand, it’s all under the hooves of Thyrsis, Lord of Ataelus’ people. On the other hand, it is very much part of my brother’s kingdom.’ She raised her hand. ‘But I could see us negotiating one parcel of land at a time, as required. This, right here—’

  Coenus shook his head. ‘They’d like the ground north and west of the Temple of Artemis.’

  That was fifty stades downstream. ‘That’s good land,’ she said. ‘What does Gardan say?’

  ‘Haven’t asked him yet, or Satyrus, either,’ Nikephorus said. ‘I understand that it’s complicated. Some of those farms were recently burned. There may be survivors. But it’s good land, and my men could help hold it. For everyone.’

  ‘We’re talking about a fort above the temple,’ Coenus said.

  ‘We should include Thyrsis in this,’ Melitta said. ‘But it doesn’t sound too outlandish to me.’

  Nikephorus flashed her a smile. ‘Thanks, lady,’ he said. To Coenus, he raised an eyebrow. ‘So?’

  ‘I hate leaving Theron with everything.’ Coenus looked at Melitta. ‘A lot of things went to shit after you left. Demostrate’s dead.’

  Melitta understood immediately. ‘The grain fleet!’ she said.

  Coenus nodded. ‘Your brother has gone to sea with the fleet. He’s going to try something fairly risky. I don’t think any of us imagined that both of you would be at risk this summer.’

  Melitta nodded. ‘I understand – but I have to do this. How big is the threat to the grain fleet?’ All she could think of was that the grain income – the gold generated by what was, in effect, her direct tax on merchants buying the grain of her Dirt People – was ultimately what gave her power over the clans. There was sentiment and loyalty, but the money mattered. Loss of that income would limit her ability to deal with the likes of Kontarus and Saida.

  It was all so complicated.

  It was all as simple as breathing, if only people would behave like horses.

  She laughed aloud, and realised that Scopasis was sharing wine with Coenus, like friends. On the other hand, Nikephorus was watching her as if she were a dangerous animal. ‘I don’t bite,’ she said.

  Nikephorus raised both hands in mock surrender. ‘I think you just say that,’ he replied.

  Coenus laughed at something Scopasis had said, and slapped the younger man on the back. ‘Well, we should have plenty of time to work it out,’ he said.

  Melitta smiled. ‘So you’ll come?’

  Coenus nodded. ‘One more campaign,’ he said. ‘Who knows – perhaps just a good ride over the spring grass and a nice negotiation at the end.’

  Melitta nodded. ‘I’d rather it was like that.’

  Nikephorus pulled his cloak tighter. ‘We’ll need wagons and grain and some more ponies,’ he said. ‘You folks will move fast, no doubt.’

  ‘Two to three hundred stades a day,’ Coenus said, his eyes on the high ground rising away to the west. ‘I haven’t been this way in . . . twenty-five years. Niceas died out here. Kineas, too, for that matter.’ Coenus pointed west. ‘Thousands of stades west. But it wakes memories. Last time I lay in this camp, it was with Niceas – he’d been wounded – and some Sauromatae girls.’ Coenus shook his head. ‘And I swore I’d build a temple to Artemis if Niceas lived.’ He smiled into the distance. ‘I lived here when my wife was still alive. Xeno was born here.’

  They were all silent. Out in the darkness, a thousand horses cropped the new grass, farted and whickered to each other. Closer in, one of the mercenaries played an aulos flute, and a couple of other soldiers danced and a dozen Sakje watched them, smiling.

  Melitta felt tears come to her eyes, as they often did when her father was mentioned.

  ‘Who was Niceas?’ Scopasis asked.

  Coenus spread his cloak on the ground and patted it for the Queen of the Assagetae to join him. ‘Settle down,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you a story. You all know that the Queen’s father was Kineas? He was a Greek mercenary . . .’

  6

  Heraklea. One of the strongest cities on the Euxine Sea, with high walls and a servile populace of peasants conquered by Greeks and made into serfs, like the Spartan helots. Dionysus of Heraklea was tyrant.

  Satyrus’ grain fleet anchored without asking permission – twenty warships and more than forty grain ships that rose and fell on the late spring swell.

  ‘And we’re buggered if a storm comes up.’ Diokles shook his head. ‘Why not take the ships inside the mole?’

  ‘First, because Dionysus will be worried enough already,’ Satyrus said. ‘Second, because everyone is a spy, and I don’t want any of our sailors talking.’

  The arrival of the grain fleet was hardly a surprise to Stratokles, who had advised both Amastris and her uncle to keep their own merchants and warships home until it came. ‘Satyrus will come like the wind when he hears Demostrate is dead,’ Stratokles had predicted, and here was the fleet, making him look like exactly what he was – a first-rate intelligencer. It had sat off the entrance to the harbour for a full day.

  Their appearance outside the mole – and their inaction – had been cause enough for Stratokles to be summoned to the tyrant’s presence. The enormously fat man lay, as he usually did, on a stout couch with heavy rawhide cording under the mattress to support his bulk. His niece, Amastris, sat on the edge of the kline, as if her beauty could somehow help the tyrant’s ugliness. Stratokles had joked to his captain, Lucius, that he liked to work for the tyrant because the fat man made Stratokles seem handsome. Stratokles had never been graced with the looks that made men heroes – and a sword cut to his face a few years back had made it worse.

  Satyrus’ mother, that had been. Stratokles sighed. What an error her murder had been. Not his idea, of course.

  ‘So.’ Dionysus had a carefully trained voice, like an actor’s. Not what you expected from such a fat carcass, but then, Dionysus of Heraklea was never what anyone expected. ‘So, Stratokles of Athens. You predicted this. Now what happens?’

  Stratokles smiled at his mistress. She was without doubt the most beautiful woman he’d ever known – or at least, known well. And her beauty seemed new – or at least, subtly different – every time he saw her. She had considerable intellect, and she used a good deal of it on her looks.

  ‘My lord,’ Stratokles said, ‘Satyrus needs your fleet to support his own fleet. Together they will be strong enough to try to move our combined grain fleets across the Ionian to Athens.’

  ‘Satyrus generally sells his grain at Rhodes,’ Dionysus said.

  ‘I understand, my lord.’ I am, after all, somewhat famed as a spy. ‘But this year, my lord can call the tune. Satyrus cannot sail without your ships and your marines. You do not want to sell your grain at Rhodes, I take it?’

  Stratokles was playing a dangerous game. Of course it was his duty, as an Athenian, to get as much of the Euxine grain trans-shipped to Athens as was possible. A glut was fine. A glut would mean low prices and exports. But he couldn’t force events. He could only manipulate them.

  Dionysus shrugged, and his chins wobbled. ‘You know perfectly well that we sell our grain to Athens,’ he said. ‘You argued for the policy, and you pushed me to support Antigonu
s. Now he has all the warships. Surely my grain fleet can proceed as it would?’

  Stratokles shook his head. ‘If only it were so simple,’ he began.

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Athenian!’ Dionysus shot back. ‘Dekas can’t really control the pirates, is what you mean. Or he may not want to control them. So we need young Achilles out there to help us punch through the straits.’

  Stratokles nodded. ‘My lord, that is exactly what I mean.’

  Dionysus nodded, and the nod spread over the fat of his body like ripples spreading in a pool from a thrown rock. ‘So – if that’s the situation, where is young Satyrus?’

  At this question, Amastris looked up. ‘Exactly. Where is he?’

  Dionysus pointed out over the mole. ‘His ships have been there all night, but the boy has yet to come ashore. And Nestor says that some of the ships have slipped away.’

  Stratokles felt a touch of ice in his spine. ‘Slipped away?’ he asked. He walked to the edge of the balcony and looked out over the bay.

  His self-control was excellent, but it didn’t prevent a single, sharp curse.

  ‘Well?’ Dionysus asked.

  Stratokles didn’t need to count the ships riding at anchor in the strong spring sun. He had been guilty of seeing what he expected to see. He shook his head. ‘My lord, Satyrus has taken his warships and gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ Amastris asked. The whine in her voice boded ill for her maids – and for her intelligencer.

  Stratokles shook his head. ‘He didn’t ask for your fleet?’ he asked the tyrant.

  ‘Satyrus of Tanais hasn’t even been ashore,’ Nestor said from the door.

  Nine hundred stades to the south and west, Satyrus’ entire war fleet, minus just two triremes away at Olbia, rode under oars in the last light of the sun, their masts struck down on deck. Behind them were all six of the gargantuan Athenian-built grain ships.

  ‘Well,’ Diokles said, watching the sky, ‘the weather’s with us. Any last thoughts?’

  Satyrus looked around the deck of Arête at all of his other captains – Neiron himself, Sandakes and Akes and Gelon of Sicily. ‘Let’s sacrifice,’ Satyrus said. He went into the stern – still feeling as if he was walking across the agora, his flagship was so big – to where the altar of Poseidon was set into the rise of the stern boards that covered the head and back of the helmsman. Satyrus took the lead of a young kid, a black one, and looked into its eyes. The animal had perfect horns and bright eyes, and it looked at him—

  He drew and slashed its throat in one trained movement, then stepped slightly to the side to let the blood flow past him, and the priest of Poseidon, Leosthenes, caught the blood in a bowl. Then the priest used his own knife to open the animal.

  He looked at the entrails carefully, rubbing the liver back and forth between his hands. He put his nose down and smelled it – not something that Satyrus had seen before from a priest. Then he nodded.

  ‘Victory,’ he said. ‘Complete, entire and yours, lord.’

  Satyrus was not used to hearing such emphatic pronouncements. ‘May you be correct,’ Satyrus said.

  The priest cut the liver free from the animal and raised it, still dripping blood. He turned to the sailors, oarsmen and marines who waited a respectful distance down the deck. On an older ship, they couldn’t have approached even this close as there’d have been no deck to stand on, only a gangway over the rowers’ benches.

  ‘Victory!’ the priest shouted.

  The men roared, and on twenty other ships, they took up the cry.

  Night, and full darkness. Satyrus’ Arête led the way, with the tide running hard out of the Euxine and the current moving them briskly south and west towards Byzantium, which was stades away on the far bank.

  Satyrus and Diokles had fought an entire season in these waters. They knew the tides, which were shallow, and the Dardanelles, which were as treacherous as the pirates who infested them.

  ‘Regrets?’ Neiron asked Satyrus.

  ‘Pah,’ Satyrus answered. He wasn’t sure what he thought of the new priest and his confident assertion of victory. It seemed like hubris.

  An hour later, and the lookouts told him that Timaea was in sight. He climbed the foremast and peered into the gloom and saw lights, but they might have been any of the fishing villages, Thracian and Greek, or pirate havens that flourished along this coast.

  Was it really possible that Dekas had left twenty ships in Timaea and that they wouldn’t even keep a watch? Or was it a trap? It would have to have been a very elaborate trap, counting on his headstrong ways.

  Satyrus began to drum on the weather rail as he contemplated all the ways his risk – his rather colossal risk – might fail.

  ‘They’ll hear you in Timaea,’ Neiron called. ‘Relax, lord.’

  Another hour, and they were under oars, ghosting along a stade from the muddy banks of the strait, and it was obvious to every man aboard that the harbour of Timaea was crowded with ships. More than twenty ships, and at least fifteen more pulled up on the beach. There were merchant ships anchored out at the wharves, and beached so that they tipped to lie on their high, round sides.

  Satyrus blew on his cold hands and leaned over the fighting platform that sat above the huge ram of his Arête.

  ‘I count forty-four warships,’ said the lookout as quietly as he could manage.

  Neiron made a sound with his tongue behind Satyrus, who gave a low whistle.

  Satyrus was silent for fifty agonising heartbeats, during which he lived, and died, a dozen different ways. He made a decision, then another, and then another. Then he took a deep breath.

  Satyrus caught the glint of Neiron’s eye in the dark. ‘Do it,’ he said.

  Neiron’s eyes said that he agreed. He turned to Helios. ‘Light the rest of the lanterns,’ he said. ‘On my command – battle speed.’

  There was a growl from the oar deck. Satyrus rose from his position in the bow and stretched to counter the sudden pain in his legs – too long in one position, and insufficient exercise the last three days. A private smile came to his face. Plenty of exercise in the next hour, either way.

  He went aft to the base of the mainmast and dropped through the deck to the cramped oar deck below. He had to stoop to move, and the cross braces that supported the main deck made him crouch to pass under them. Even on a cool spring evening, the top oar deck was stuffy and warm. In high summer, in action, it would be unbearable. And it was the coolest and draughtiest of the three oar decks. The top deck was just leaning into the stroke, and men grunted or swore or chatted – a fair amount of noise, but nothing that would keep them from hearing the oar master or the rattle of the oar pace.

  ‘Evening, friends,’ Satyrus said. He walked down the central catwalk that passed between the benches. A sixer like Arête had three decks of rowers, with two men on every one of one hundred and seventy oars. The oarsmen in the top deck had a boxlike outrigger to give them more leverage and stability for their stroke, and to make more room for the lower-deck oarsmen, the zygites and the bottom-deck thalamites. Only the upper oar deck had room for a catwalk.

  The lower-deck rowers completed their pulls and their arms moved, hundreds of men rolling forward, sliding on their oiled leather cushions to get the most out of their muscles. These were highly trained oarsmen, just getting into top condition from a row down the Euxine. The top-deck oarsmen rested, their oars crossed in front of them so that Satyrus could barely see the end of the deck in the near darkness.

  He was answered with a murmur – almost a growl.

  ‘Dark out there,’ Satyrus said, enunciating like a trained orator. That’s why they train you, he thought. So that your voice carries in the assembly – or the oar decks. ‘We’re going after the pirate fleet in the dark,’ he said, slowly and carefully. ‘We’ll be landing our marines to take the town. If we win, every man here will share in the loot. Understand?’

  This time, the answering growl was loud, like that of an animal ready to leap. Some men s
aid, ‘Do the thing!’ and others merely grunted, ‘That’s right.’

  An older thranite at Satyrus’ left hand barked a laugh. ‘We heard the omen,’ he said. ‘Silver in our hands!’

  Satyrus slapped him on the back and climbed the short ladder to the main deck. It was brighter towards the stern – a triangle of oil lamps had been lit – fifteen lamps, carefully primed and maintained half the night for this moment. In less than a hundred heartbeats, similar lamps were kindled on all the rest of the ships, so that Satyrus’ small fleet seemed to glow.

  ‘Battle pace,’ Neiron said to the drummer who kept the oar beat. On a ship as big as the Arête, the oar master couldn’t keep the stroke by voice alone. Before he finished speaking, the ship seemed to cough – a short, sharp scrape as sixty-two upper-deck oars were run out of their oar ports together.

  The drum had been silent as they crept down the channel, but now, on all the ships, drums rolled.

  The oars slid out and bent as the full crew pulled on them.

  Even the Arête, easily the biggest ship in the squadron, leaped ahead.

  Satyrus went forward and leaned out over the ram, watching the water flow by, feeling the speed and power of his ship. His eyes flicked over the big ballistae, unmanned and encased in painted canvas. Too dark for shooting; but he longed to use them.

  Neiron was at the steering oars, and he took the big ship in first. The original intention had been to clear any opposition, but there wasn’t a single enemy ship manned, and now the Arête swept forward, the deepest hull and the most likely to run aground. They steered for the beach, passing just inshore of the moored warships, tied in long rows with heavy canvas thrown loosely over their rowing benches.

  ‘Pirates,’ Satyrus said, with contempt. ‘Bastards can’t even be bothered to maintain the ships they use to prey on others.’ But in his mind he saw men hiding under that loosely flung canvas.

  Helios choked something in the dark. The young man had been taken by pirates as a boy. Left to himself, he’d have killed every pirate on the sea. He, at least, was entirely in favour of his master’s choice of campaign.