Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  A stade from the shore, and there was shouting in the town. Men were running onto the beach, calling out in fear.

  ‘Rowed of all!’ called the oar master from amidships. Satyrus wasn’t commanding anything this night – or rather, he was commanding everything. He had his armour on, and a cloak, and once they were ashore he’d take command. But he was letting his beautiful ship have her first fight in the hands of other men, and he wanted to leap in and shout orders, ram an empty ship for the sheer joy of it—

  ‘Brace!’ Neiron called from the steering oars, and all the marines and deck crewmen caught hold of something.

  The ram clipped one of the beached warships, bow to bow, except that Arête’s ram towered over the smaller ship the way an elephant towers over a horse, and the beached pirate ship had her bow crushed as if she were made of paper. Then the bigger ship ground to a halt, cushioned by the shattering of the smaller ship’s frames and sewn planks.

  Satyrus rose from his brace, put his helmet on his head and toggled the cheekpieces under his chin.

  ‘Marines!’ he called, and Draco roared behind him, and then they were pouring over the bow into the stricken vessel and racing down her central catwalk, using the pirate vessel as a bridge between the gargantuan Arête and the land.

  Labours of Herakles, the penteres, did the same, coming to lie alongside a beached trireme and using her as a wharf, but the rest of his fleet beached themselves, except five triremes that stayed out in the dark, putting marines aboard the moored ships.

  ‘The wharves!’ Satyrus shouted as soon as his feet hit the beach. ‘Take the wharves!’ The marines had been told to offer no quarter, and they weren’t being too choosy about who they killed. It was ugly work, but the first resistance was quickly crushed and the wharves had to be seized at all costs. They were central to Satyrus’ plan.

  The King of the Bosporus was himself in the front lines, for no better reason than that he needed the wharf area taken fast, and there was no one better suited to the task than he. Or that’s what Satyrus told himself. He was one of the first men onto the wharves, and he could hear junior officers shouting to get the marines – most of whom were unused to working in groups larger than ten or fifteen men – to form a line across the cobbled square.

  But the pirates were not slow to react. The alleys west of the wharves were suddenly full of men and javelins, darts and arrows coming out of the darkness. Helios was hit on the helmet by a heavy tile thrown from the roof of one of the nearest warehouses.

  Then, before Satyrus and Draco and Apollodorus had the marines steady, the first counter-attack came. There were more than a hundred men, most with spears, some with axes, and they came at the marines like Thracians, yelling defiance.

  The marines were veterans, and most of them carried the small Macedonian aspis and a long spear. All of them had good armour. Armour that, even in the dark, made them confident. They locked their shields, the second and third ranks pressed forward on the front, and the pirates met with a volley of javelins at point-blank range. Their charge never reached the aspis wall. With little armour and few shields, the javelins knocked a fifth of the attackers flat and the rest ran.

  Satyrus led his own marines into the maze of alleys west of the wharves, following the broken men from the first counter-attack. Some men stopped to execute the wounded, and Satyrus did nothing to stop it.

  A javelin flew from the dark, and the shaft hit his helmet with a heavy clang and he had to drop to one knee, the pain was so intense.

  ‘On the roof!’ called Apollodorus, behind him. ‘Archers! On me!’

  The rush into the alleys had slowed when they reached the narrowest passages and the long back walls of the second street of warehouses, shops and residences. The air here smelled of smoke and blood.

  Helios pushed forward and held his aspis over Satyrus’ head. ‘Lord?’

  ‘Give me a moment,’ Satyrus grunted. He unfastened his cheek-plates and raised his helmet over his head, pulled off his arming cap and felt the spot on his skull. Blood – his hair was full of it. Then he put it all back on again. ‘Ouch,’ he said.

  Men around him laughed.

  More javelins were coming off the roofs around them, and no archers were to be seen.

  ‘We either have to back off and give them this street, or take it to them,’ Satyrus said.

  Apollodorus winced and Draco grunted.

  Satyrus looked around. The alley, and the cross alley behind him, had about forty marines in it.

  ‘Let’s take it to them,’ he said. ‘Right onto the roofs. No quarter. Try not to kill captives and slaves, but if in doubt, put your man down.’

  Draco’s golden Thracian helmet shone in the firelight of the buildings already aflame to the south. ‘Listen to the king!’ he said. ‘More men go down in a house-to-house fight than in a field battle. Stay with your file, and don’t let up the pressure once you start.’

  Satyrus looked around, down the alley and into the smoke. ‘We used to have a warehouse at the end of this street,’ Satyrus said. ‘On the other hand is a big cross street. No advance beyond that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Draco looked around. ‘Everyone got that?’

  Apollodorus laughed. ‘I get it that the taxiarch and the navarch are about to lead a reckless charge in the dark,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the king should sit this one out, eh?’

  Draco laughed. ‘Good times, lord. My sword has touched nothing but wood in three summers.’

  ‘By Ares and Herakles,’ Satyrus said. ‘I’m here.’ He was afraid and exalted at the same time.

  The marines pressed in around him, shields raised against a rain of missiles, huddled up together at the corners of two buildings and waiting for the next shower of javelins, which obligingly came down at them from just ahead.

  ‘Go! Go! Go!’ the officers shouted. As soon as the missiles rang against the roof of shields, the men were up and running, one file of six men for each of the first half-dozen houses and warehouses on the narrow alley. It wasn’t well planned or neat, and men fell, or tangled in their armour, but they made quite a lot of noise.

  Satyrus was in front, Draco running hard beside him, and their files were aiming farther up the street, well beyond where the javelins had come from.

  A woman screamed and a large tile shattered next to Satyrus’ foot. He almost fell from the pain, but he managed to keep his footing and he and Draco hit the gate of their chosen building together, and it burst inward. The yard was full of people. Satyrus narrowly avoided cutting a young woman in half. She saw him and screamed, and then the whole courtyard started screaming.

  Slaver’s yard, he thought.

  ‘On the ground and you won’t be killed!’ he roared. He pushed through the crowd and they fell to the ground as if dead. Then he was at the steps to the main house, while Draco took his file into the warehouse. There were shouts. Screams. All the sounds of despair and death.

  It occurred to Satyrus that his men were too thin on the ground already, the forward edge of the bloody bubble that might pop at any second. That’s why he needed the wharves clear – and without them, his men were going to start dying.

  There was a man in the stairwell with an axe. He took a cut at Satyrus, and Satyrus took the blow on his shield and felt it on the old break but shield and arm both held. Then Satyrus punched out with the rim of his shield, caught the axe head, pushed against it and stabbed under his shield until the man was down and dead.

  An arrow hit his shield.

  ‘Need some help, here!’ he called.

  There was no answer. Another arrow hit his shield, and this one punched through the bronze facing to gleam three fingers clear of the inner face of his aspis.

  ‘Herakles, Son of Zeus,’ he roared. Then he slammed his shield face into the wall next to him to break the arrows and ran at the stairs, holding his shield in front of him.

  Another arrow hit the shield when he was halfway up the stairs, and then he reached the top.

 
; There were three of them.

  One shot him, point blank. The man was partly behind him, and the shot should have been deadly, but in his excitement the man hurried, or simply missed, and the arrow vanished into the night.

  I have as long as it takes him to reload, Satyrus thought.

  Satyrus leaped forward, slammed his shield into the larger man and sliced hard to the right with his sword at the same time, at the other opponent. His blade touched home – high, somewhere on the man’s face or head – and then Satyrus was rolling to the left, keeping his shield pressed against his opponent.

  The man cut under his shield and Satyrus couldn’t do much about that, as his aspis was entangled and his sword elsewhere. His greaves took most of the blow, and his right shin suddenly exploded in agony and he stumbled back, placed his good foot and sank to one knee with his shield facing the archer.

  ‘Let me shoot!’ the man was screaming, but Satyrus’ first attacker had blocked the other man who was also screaming, and the three of them were uncoordinated. Satyrus backed up a step, and the closest man came at him – blocking the archer.

  Satyrus let him come, and then slammed his shield forward, his shoulder in the blow, stepped up close and cut at him overarm, and their swords rang together. The other man backed up a step and Satyrus cut at him again, another heavy overarm blow and the man flinched and parried, but his much lighter – and cheaper – sword had had enough, and the blade snapped and he lost fingers. He cried out and fell back, trying to get his shield up, back-pedalling across the roof and into the archer.

  Satyrus didn’t give them a moment to untangle, but cut at everything he could reach, blows too fast to count in the dark – and then he whirled, wondering where the third man had gone.

  He was kneeling with his head in his hands. ‘I’m blind!’ he screamed with the raw intensity of a woman in childbirth. Satyrus’ blade had cut through his ocular region and his nose. There was blood everywhere, shiny black on matt black in the fire-stabbed darkness.

  Satyrus decapitated him.

  The roof was still. Women were screaming in the courtyard, but the roof was clear, and against the fires back by the wharves, he could see the great grain ships landing.

  They weren’t full of grain.

  They were full of two thousand Macedonian veterans, who poured out onto the newly secured wharves, formed up in a rough approximation of their usual formation and proceeded to storm the town. They were ruthless, they were thorough, and the pirates had nothing with which to match them.

  There was more fighting, but Satyrus was out of it – his ankle burned, he had a nasty cut down his leg and his damaged greave needed to be pulled clear of the wound.

  He stumbled back off the roof, his right sandal squelching blood at every step. In the courtyard, the slaves lay prone amid so much blood that it appeared they might all have been butchered.

  A thin trickle of blood flowed out of the courtyard and into the street’s central gutter.

  His Macedonians were pouring up the street, bellowing, scenting victory and a town to rape. Satyrus had to flatten himself against the wall to avoid be trampled – or worse – as a taxeis fought its way through the skein of alleys towards the town’s agora and public buildings. Satyrus saw Draco emerge from the warehouse behind him. The Macedonian officer gave him a sketchy salute and plunged into the river of phalangites screaming orders, and vanished, leaving the King of the Bosporus to bleed in relative peace.

  Satyrus swayed, caught himself on a warehouse wall and limped back down the cobbled street towards the wharves. He was losing blood, but he could see where men had fallen – a marine with his face a red ruin from a paving stone, another with a javelin in the back. At the corner where they’d started their charge, Helios was lying on his aspis. There was a deep dent in his helmet.

  Satyrus bent and picked the boy up. Even in armour, he didn’t weigh much. Helios coughed and spat and cursed. Several steps later he gave something like a choked scream.

  Satyrus carried him down to the wharves where the iatroi, the healers, were gathering the wounded. They were a recent innovation – every ship had one – and Satyrus didn’t really know any one of them from the others. He stumbled over a bale of cloth and fell with his hypaspist on top of him. They both cried out.

  ‘My lord!’ called a man, and suddenly he was surrounded by men with torches.

  ‘You take the king, I’ll get the man he carried,’ said a voice, and then Satyrus was gone.

  He came back to life stretched across a pair of upturned barrels. After a long – and painful – moment of disorientation, he realised that he was in the courtyard of what had once been Abraham Ben Zion’s warehouse, having his shin bandaged tight in a whole length of superfine linen while around him, men screamed under the knife or murmured thanks to the men who tended them. The courtyard was bright with new sunlight and the air reeked of dirty smoke – burning buildings, charred meat.

  Diokles found him about an hour later, when the pain had started to build in his leg and in his shoulder. He didn’t even know why his shoulder hurt, and he’d had to decline the poppy juice that kept most of the other wounded men quiet.

  Helios was lying on the cobblestones on top of his cloak, deeply unconscious and with a line of sewing up his sword arm and a bruise on his head so deep that the iatros feared that his skull was broken. Satyrus was looking at him and contemplating his bold, rash, brilliant attack in the light of the cost.

  ‘I think we won,’ Diokles said.

  Satyrus was light-headed from blood loss and some related drunkenness. ‘Oh yes. Very glorious. Any idea of losses?’ He took a pull on the wineskin in his hand and shook his head. ‘Losses beyond those I can see here?’

  Draco stepped up out of the street and seized the wineskin. ‘Lost a dozen in the first fights, before we had the numbers,’ he said. He had blood dripping from under his helmet and his right arm was brown-red to the elbow. He took a long drink. ‘I haven’t taken a town in a long time. Makes the boys happy, it does.’ He grinned. ‘Once the rest of the boys were ashore, there wasn’t much fighting.’

  ‘Not that we took a lot of prisoners,’ Diokles said.

  Satyrus shrugged. Pirates were vermin. That some of them had once been his allies was – Moira. He fought with that thought to establish it in his head as what he really felt. Because otherwise he would vomit, and be unfit to command men. Or be a king.

  He sat up, forced himself to look away from Helios and nodded. ‘Light casualties and, I assume, some worthwhile loot.’

  Draco nodded. ‘A good start. We’ve been lax – and the boys have had three easy summers. This will get their blood up.’

  Satyrus considered a number of replies – their blood was all over the courtyard – but finally shook his head. ‘I want to be away before nightfall,’ he said.

  Diokles saluted with his fist and Draco grunted. ‘Easier to pull a drunk out of a brothel than a soldier out of a taken city,’ he said. ‘Brothel costs money.’

  Satyrus tried putting weight on his shin. That made it hurt more, which seemed to clear his head. ‘Nightfall,’ he said.

  Satyrus sacrificed to Apollo at the setting of the sun, and before the calf was split for butchering and burning Draco declared the town secure. The captured ships – those worth saving – were towed. The rest were burned. The town, save only the wharves and warehouses, was burned. The survivors were either herded aboard ships to be sold as slaves, or, if too old or useless, were pushed into the chora, the farms around the city, to make their own way. Many would be taken by Thracians and sold as slaves anyway. Others would starve, or succumb to disease, or simply be killed as useless mouths.

  Satyrus hardened his heart and reminded himself that these were pirates. Their fate was justice.

  Of course, he knew perfectly well that most of them were the pirates’ baggage – wives, whores, slaves, servants and the small craftsmen who were attracted to any community. They had chosen to come here to live. Most of the
m were innocent of any crime save poverty.

  Four days of no news – of an ever more restless grain fleet anchored off Heraklea. And then the warships returned.

  Stratokles watched Satyrus of Tanais sail up the coast. He had good eyes, and he could see at quite a distance that Satyrus’ warships had either bred like rabbits or met with friends.

  Or taken enemies. Stratokles shook his head. The boy was good. Stratokles hurried to his mistress.

  ‘He’s taken Timaea?’ Dionysus asked. He was quite calm, for a man who had just heard that a potential rival now owned the closest sea base.

  ‘That’s my guess, lord,’ Stratokles said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be here soon enough, ripe with his triumph, to explain.’

  Amastris was not amused. ‘He might have told us!’ she said.

  Dionysus watched the fleet now at anchor. ‘He might,’ Dionysus said slowly. ‘But he did not, nor did he allow his sailors to land. He didn’t trust us. This is the man you wish to marry, my dear?’ he asked Amastris.

  Amastris shrugged. ‘Yes. Although I am not happy with this turn of events. It’s your fault, Uncle! You’ve kept him dangling for so long – he will find another wife and come here—’

  ‘Silence,’ Dionysus said. He sat up on the kline, and it protested. ‘Let me think. Dekas has lost his base and a third of his fleet. And probably his treasure.’

  ‘Now he has no choice but to serve Antigonus,’ Stratokles put in.

  ‘And Satyrus of Tanais holds the entrance to the Dardanelles,’ Dionysus said. ‘He can control our grain.’

  ‘We won’t know until we hear what he has to say,’ Amastris said. ‘I will speak to him.’

  ‘He may just come and take you,’ Dionysus said. ‘I hadn’t considered the possibility that Demostrate was a better neighbour than Satyrus.’ He laughed without mirth. ‘And to think that I gave that boy his start.’

  Stratokles nodded, because he hadn’t considered the weakness of the pirate position at all, only its strength. I’m getting old, he thought.