Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Talk to her as if she were a young man,’ Satyrus said. ‘And get her a tutor. A good one.’

  ‘Other Jews would be scandalised,’ Abraham said. But he laughed. ‘I should have thought of that myself.’ He looked around. ‘How big a ship?’

  Satyrus tried to hide a smile. ‘If I gave you my own penteres, would you come?’

  Abraham hesitated.

  ‘You know the offer is open,’ Satyrus said. Despite the rush of the last hour, and the deep disappointment over the grain, he felt a huge surge of affection for Abraham; his heart pounded as if he was in action. ‘Come with me!’

  Abraham evaded the closest part of the embrace and stepped clumsily backwards. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, my place is here.’

  And then Satyrus was out of the gate, surrounded by his own marines and moving fast, almost at a trot.

  What has happened to my Abraham? he thought, and then buried that with all the other disappointments – a habit that was getting too easy, the rapid compartmentalising of anger, social failure, anything that got in the way of the next task. He wondered if the Rhodians would use force, or do something foolish to prevent them from leaving. That was the immediate peril. Abraham would have to wait.

  There were people in the streets – lots of lower-class men, a few women. But they offered only a few cheers, and did nothing to slow Satyrus’ passage, and he was in sight of the pier in the time it would take a man to run two stades. A fast man.

  On the big wharf, he found that Abraham had sent supplies – a warehouse full of wine, oil and cheese. Diokles was standing under a pole crane, watching hampers of oil jars being swung aboard the Bosporan ships.

  ‘We’ll be ready for sea in an hour,’ he said. ‘Got your message. Helios ran his lungs out.’ Diokles grinned. ‘I’ve ordered the ships to go over to the headland and shoot practice bolts as soon as they are loaded.’

  ‘You’re a prince,’ Satyrus said. He was back aboard his ship, and the last few hours seemed like a dream. ‘But they’ll have to stay at their moorings unless we all leave together.’

  ‘We’ll need water,’ Neiron said as soon as he’d stowed his armour again.

  ‘On the beach tonight – some place Leon knows.’ Satyrus was lost in thought. ‘If we leave.’

  ‘We going to fight?’ Neiron asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Satyrus said. ‘Maybe right here in the harbour.’

  ‘Heavy odds?’ Neiron asked.

  ‘Two to one. Pirates.’ Satyrus answered. ‘Or six to one against the Rhodian navy.’

  ‘I won’t fight Rhodes, and neither will Diokles,’ Neiron said.

  ‘Not even if they plan to steal our grain?’ Satyrus asked.

  Neiron sat heavily on the helmsman’s bench. ‘That bad?’

  ‘That bad. It’s as if all the spine’s gone out of these men,’ Satyrus said. He slammed his hand down on the rail. ‘Shit! I was so close to selling our grain and being done with this.’

  Neiron stared at him.

  ‘What?’ Satyrus said. ‘I’m tired of fools and ambushes and greed!’ He shrugged at Neiron. ‘I’m tired of—’ he began, and clamped down on the words. He had been about to say that he was tired of being king, and being alone, with no peers and no friends, merely subordinates, followers and critics.

  Neiron looked away, discomfited. ‘Someone coming,’ he said, sounding relieved. ‘Someone important.’

  Satyrus looked past his trierarch and saw Nicanor coming down the wharf, a purple cloak flashing behind him, and in his train a dozen more cloaks each worth the price of a small ship. The boule.

  ‘Time to get off my high horse,’ Satyrus said. ‘No attendants. Helios – give me your plain cloak from under the bench. Hold mine. Look friendly.’ Satyrus put a plain dun-coloured military cloak over his finest chiton and leaped straight onto the wharf and strode towards the councillors, obviously alone and unarmed.

  Panther was there, and Herion, and another couple of men that Satyrus could remember from former visits to Rhodes.

  Before Nicanor could speak, Satyrus raised his right hand like an orator, and forced a smile. ‘Youth often causes hot words,’ he said, ‘and I beg you gentlemen to forgive my desire to be a good king to my people and a smart merchant on these docks. I will offer you one half of my grain for six drachma, not seven. Five thousand mythemnoi at six drachma will make it the cheapest grain in Rhodes. And perhaps will settle any ill feeling.’

  Nicanor raised an eyebrow. ‘You are less truculent than I expected.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I do not seek conflict here. Like you, I am not in open war with Antigonus – but I am at war with your pirates. And any fracture between us will only cause our enemies to celebrate.’

  Nicanor nodded at the rest of the councillors as if to say, See, is it not as I have foretold? He crossed his arms. ‘As you seem willing to negotiate, perhaps you will meet our price. Which remains four drachma for the entirety of your cargo.’

  Satyrus did not lose his smile. He felt like he did when he took on a new opponent at pankration. ‘At that price, I sail away. Or fight your navy in your harbour, and do you every damage I can do. This is not boyishness. It would be the result of your treating my offer with contempt – with hubris. My grain does not come from ten stades away across the straits. My grain comes from thousands of stades away, and requires a fleet to defend it, and at four drachma my farmers are losing money. Losing money after four years of war.’ Satyrus tried to catch the eyes of the other men – tried to move them with his sincerity.

  Nicanor tucked his thumbs in his girdle and smiled. ‘You won’t fight,’ he said.

  Satyrus looked past him at the other merchants, the admirals of the fleet, the countryside aristocrats. ‘This man is risking your future and mine on an amount of money that is essential to my small kingdom and, quite frankly, nothing much to your city. I put it to you that he does so for his own purposes—’

  Nicanor spat. ‘Put the fleet to sea and take these barbarians,’ he said to Panther.

  Satyrus felt a whirl of rage – frustration and rage together – that this one man should baulk him, for no other reason apart from his own greed and power. The temptation to take the man and break his neck was so powerful that he shook, and Nicanor stepped back suddenly.

  Panther shook his head. ‘Nicanor, I beg you,’ he began, and Leon appeared, running along the wharf like a much younger man.

  ‘Nicanor,’ Leon said.

  Nicanor was too angry to respond. ‘I demand,’ he began.

  ‘Nicanor, Demetrios is at sea. He may be after you, or after Menelaeus and Ptolemy. But the war is on, Nicanor. And if you do this to Satyrus – by all the gods, I promise you that no independent merchant will ever sail here again. You’ve already lost Athens. Would you lose Alexandria and the Euxine, too? And the rest of you – I am only another rich metic, but by Poseidon’s mighty horses, has Zeus stolen your wits? Do you think that you can dictate your will like this? I am no boy, Nicanor – I have years on you – and I tell you that you are threatening the foundations of your city more thoroughly than Demetrios and his three hundred ships!’

  The men of the boule shifted uncomfortably, and Nicanor’s face grew so red as to be almost purple. He spat. ‘You, too! You betray us, too, in our hour of need!’

  ‘What betrayal?’ Leon shook his head. ‘Nicanor, you act like Agamemnon on the beach, trying to seize Achilles’ bride. Consider the result, Agamemnon. And relent.’

  Nicanor stood, breathing heavily.

  Satyrus extended his hand to Nicanor. ‘Five drachma six obols, and half my grain. I cannot make a better offer. Please, sir – as the younger man, I make apologies for my intemperance. Let us not make this personal, but do what is best for our city.’

  That was the last arrow on his bow, and he shot it well. Instantly, he could tell that the boule was with him now. And Nicanor would look not just ungracious, but foolish to refuse. And he would still make a profit that would bring a smile to Gardan’s face. He lo
cked eyes with Nicanor and made himself smile, and blink, and act the lesser man.

  Nicanor took his hand. ‘You have good manners, for a king,’ he said. But he didn’t smile, and Satyrus did not think that they were friends. ‘Order your grain unloaded.’

  Leon stepped up beside Satyrus. ‘It is customary to sign the contract first,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘And I happen to have a scribe right here.’

  Nicanor shrugged. ‘What a lot of fishwives you foreigners are,’ he said. ‘Panther can sign for Rhodes. I have friends to entertain.’ The man nodded – the least civility that was not a direct offence – and left with a flash of his magnificent cloak. Satyrus noted that half a dozen of the boule left with him.

  The richer half-dozen.

  Panther glanced after him with a look not far from pure hate. ‘And now it is my name on this contract. For the next time he wishes to cut down the budget of the navy, that protects him. What a worthless cur he is.’

  ‘Sadly,’ Leon said, a frown on his face, ‘my scribe has already written The lord Nicanor and the boule have agreed at the top of the document and we don’t have any more papyrus. So if you could simply sign “for the boule of Rhodes”, I think we might all’ – and here Leon smiled like the lion he really was – ‘rejoice quietly. And let our boys stand down and find themselves a wine shop.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘What about Dekas?’ he asked.

  ‘Too late now. Too much time spent haggling. First light.’ Leon smiled at Panther. ‘Ten ships, and we are certain of victory.’

  Panther shook his head. ‘I can’t spare one.’ Then he grinned. ‘Well – I can spare one. Mine.’

  ‘Long odds,’ Satyrus said.

  Leon nodded. ‘We must. Or Rhodes is off the board.’

  Satyrus did not soon forget his dinner that night at Abraham’s house. He was welcomed again, as if he had been gone for another pair of years – and he sat to a dinner of Numidian chicken and Athenian tuna, lobsters, subtle spice, subtle changes of texture and temperature, bowls of ice exchanged for soup that burned the tongue, and wines each more exquisite than the last. And dancers – not the usual erotic dancers, but fine young men and women dancing like temple dancers, and tumblers who performed prodigies of leaping and landing, and a pair of men in armour who started to fight as if to the death and then began to turn coward, the broadest and funniest mimes that Satyrus had seen since he left Alexandria. He laughed so much that tears started in his eyes and he had to wipe his nose, taken utterly by surprise.

  His eyes met Miriam’s, and she, too, was wiping her nose, and she laughed all over again. ‘You are a good guest,’ she said from her own couch. ‘Every hostess dreams of pleasing guests as much as you are so obviously pleased.’ She pointed at her steward. ‘This is Jacob, a cousin; he found many of these men and women.’

  Jacob bowed from where he was running the entertainment. ‘Delighted you are pleased,’ he murmured.

  Abraham came and lay next to Satyrus. ‘She chose them all herself,’ he said. ‘She has a wonderful head for it, and she did it without offending any of our laws. Jacob helps, of course. No lewdness, no Hellenistic religion. I could never have found the time, and already my dinners are renowned for being dull.’

  ‘Not after tonight,’ Satyrus said, and he raised a golden cup to Miriam. His eyes swung back to Abraham. He was a little the worse for wine, and needed a clear head to command his ships in the morning, but he couldn’t hold his tongue for ever. ‘You didn’t used to care a whit for such things, brother. You used to attend parties that could never, ever be called dull, for all that they might have ended in chaos.’

  Abraham nodded. ‘I must seem a hypocrite to you, Satyrus. But blood is thicker than water, and I have made my father a promise: to live according to the law for three years. It is not so bad, except when the man I love above all others offers me a fighting ship and a sword.’ Abraham lay back. ‘By God, I miss the sea.’

  Satyrus was drunk enough to think of pressing the argument. But respect for parents was a core belief for Satyrus – the more so as he had never known his own father, who was worshipped as a hero, and sometimes as a god, by many men.

  ‘A promise to your father is a sacred thing,’ Satyrus said, after the temptation to seize the moment had passed.

  Abraham hugged him. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  When Abraham slipped off the kline to see to Panther and Leon, locked in discussion of a sea fight, Satyrus looked around for Miriam – eager to praise her arrangements, he told himself. Perhaps just too eager to see her brown eyes, and the pleasure she seemed to take in his pleasure.

  But her couch was empty. Nor did she reappear.

  He had one more cup of wine, from which he poured a libation carefully couched to offend no one. He passed the cup among his captains, and Leon’s, and Abraham drank too, for a few moments one of them again.

  9

  South of Chios, a strong south wind lifting the sterns under full sail and no wine fumes in his head, Satyrus was as content as the rich blue sea, speckled with white wave tops spreading away from the sides of his ship like the most fabulous cloak ever imported from distant Qu’in.

  Twenty-two ships in three columns. Satyrus led the centre column in Arete, because she was the heaviest ship, and the slowest. To starboard, Leon led his own column and to port, Panther’s Amphytrite, the longest ship on the seas, a quadreme built with extra oars on length rather than breadth in a manner that only Rhodes, so far, had used to build a ship. Satyrus admired Amphytrite every time his eyes fell that way, rather in the way that even the politest of men may admire the breasts of a beautiful woman without meaning to stare.

  Ahead, Leon’s scout-pentekonter had warned them, lay Dekas with forty-four triremes and a pair of heavy penteres as big as Arete. Satyrus rubbed his beard and looked at Neiron, who was fiddling with the stern starboard war engine.

  Twice, they’d practised while under way – both times sending the faster hemiolas forward with floating targets, which they engaged – well, tried to engage – as they floated by. Satyrus didn’t think that they’d scored a single hit, but the value of a small farm had been shot away in iron-tipped bolts. Neiron continued to pronounce the weapons useless, but likewise he continued to tinker with them.

  ‘Hull up!’ came a call from forward.

  Satyrus gave up trying to attract Neiron’s attention. He walked forward from the helm – gone were the days when he needed to take the helm himself – to the midships command deck.

  Apollodorus saluted. ‘Bow reports enemy in sight,’ he said. With both the mainsail and foresail fully drawn and the wind astern, no one could see anything over the bow except the men in the forward marine towers. Satyrus had noted that the Rhodians – innovators, every one of them – now had little baskets like nests attached to their standing masts, and men in them – lookouts raised a little farther above the surface of the sea, giving their masters a little more warning of peril.

  Satyrus walked forward on the broad deck, ducked under the foresail and climbed the ladder to the forward fighting tower. It was very different from a trireme. Arete had never been in action, and Satyrus wondered if all this money was boyish folly. Big ships were no guarantee of victory, and could just be a slower, larger target.

  Up the ladder and into the forward tower – and there, already hull up along the horizon, Satyrus could see the enemy. He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched them for as long as his eyes could stand the sun dazzle, and then turned away.

  ‘They’re all there,’ he said to Apollodorus. Behind him Helios came up into the tower. Satyrus let him look for a moment.

  ‘Put on your armour,’ he said softly. ‘And get me mine.’

  They’d made their plans on the beach at Tenedos, when the scouts brought them word of the enemy. They were outnumbered two to one, and they were going to attack in a most unorthodox manner. A manner that would put Arete at great risk.

  It was all a matter of timing, luck and the will of th
e gods, and Satyrus climbed down from the tower with a tension in his arms and legs that was not quite physical fear but perhaps fear of miscalculation, excitement, even joy, all communicated through his muscles.

  Helios and Charmides helped him into his armour. Today he wore it all: heavy bronze breastplate and back, a pair of heavily worked greaves, thigh guards and arm guards and shoulder pauldrons of heavily tooled bronze, and Demetrios’ silver-worked helmet on his head with a mixed crest of red, black and white. Before he took up his gold-plated aspis, he went to the rail with a heavy gold cup full of the best Chian wine, and he raised it high.

  ‘Poseidon, Lord of Horses and of all the deeps, lend us your strength, protect our frail bodies from filling our lungs with your salt water, protect our poor thin hulls from the dangers of sea and ram, and allow us to fly on the face of the sea with the speed of your own horses.’ Satyrus poured the good red wine into the sea and then flung the cup, the value of a small ship, into the water. ‘For you, Sea God.’

  His sailors murmured in appreciation. A rich sacrifice like that – a sacrifice that even a king would have to notice – was the best way to propitiate the touchy god of the waves. He heard Polycrates, the notoriously carping sea lawyer on number three oar, mutter ‘That’s right’ in his dreadful accent, and he knew he’d done the right thing – although the cup had been a gift from his sister, and was his favourite.

  Satyrus felt calmer in his gut and in his muscles after the libation, and he stood amidships, blind to the movements of the enemy and content to look unworried. Apollodorus would tell him if they manoeuvred, and messengers came aft from time to time, nodding or saluting and passing the word.

  ‘Enemy is forming line, lord,’ said the first messenger.

  ‘Enemy line is formed – two lines,’ said the second, a thousand heartbeats later.

  ‘Enemy lines formed and now a crescent, tips forward like a new moon,’ said the third messenger. His demeanour suggested to Satyrus that they were close.