Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  Satyrus had his own rules of conduct, and one was that he must not show his nerves to his men. So now that combat was close enough to make the messengers nervous, he walked forward with the dignity of a priest, climbed the ladder and looked out over the sea.

  In the time a man might run a six-stade race, everything had changed. As reported, the enemy was formed in a broad, deep crescent with the horns well forward, and their intent to envelop was as clear as the beautiful day.

  Satyrus looked across at Leon, still in the stern of his beautiful Golden Lotus, and he looked to port and saw Panther watching him from Amphytrite. He waited several long minutes there, standing on the forward tower, looking back and forth and willing the ships around him to keep their places and not show their hands.

  When the lead three ships were all but even with the far-flung horns of the enveloping crescent – and how prescient Leon seemed now, as the older Numidian had predicted that Dekas would use just this formation – Satyrus raised his aspis and waved it back and forth, so that the high sun caught the golden face and it shone like fire.

  The effect was almost instantaneous, and very like the result of a boy kicking a hornet’s nest that has fallen in the road. The rearwards ships of all three columns – every ship after the leaders, in fact, nineteen ships in all – turned like dancers, or greyhounds, and, crossing the wind, headed out to the flanks. It might have been chaos – in fact, Satyrus watched with his pulse blundering against his throat.

  Leon’s second ship shaved the stern of Black Falcon close enough to splinter an oar – but there were no other accidents, and the knucklebones of war were flung in the face of the gods.

  Satyrus realised that he was wearing a grin so ferocious that it split his face. ‘By the gods,’ he said to the air around him.

  He leaped over the rail from the fighting tower to the main deck, landed like an athlete in the pure joy of the moment and ran amidships, all pretence at dignity lost. He stood under the mainmast, caught his breath and made himself count to ten.

  ‘Sails down!’ He bellowed. His deck crew had been ready for ten minutes, and the sails shot down to the deck as if their ropes had been cut. He whirled, looking left and right – now he had a clear view of the enemy, already turning inward to close in on him, hunters who had set a trap and knew only one way to trip it. Leon’s plan depended on the pirates having no battle drills that would allow them to switch formation. It was all risk. But informed risk.

  As the last of the heavy linen canvas flopped to the deck and the way came noticeably off the ship, Satyrus nodded to his oar master.

  ‘Ramming speed, if you please,’ he said. He turned to Apollodorus. ‘Commence fire. Concentrate all your bolts on the ships to our flanks.’

  ‘Waste of money,’ Neiron carped. ‘No – god send I’m wrong.’

  ‘I need you at the helm,’ Satyrus said. ‘Pick a ship in the middle of their line and take him – bow to bow.’

  Neiron nodded grimly. ‘They’re going to be on us like pigs on shit,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s try to be a greased pig, then,’ Satyrus said.

  Forward the first heavy engine fired, the thud of the machine’s loosing communicating itself throughout the whole vessel, so violent was the vibration.

  The result, caught in Satyrus’ peripheral vision, was so spectacular that the starboard-side rowers lost the stroke for a moment and the ship shuddered.

  Directly to starboard, a stade distant and more, the leading enemy trireme was bow on to Arete and the bolt, guided by Apollo’s hand or Tyche’s, passed over the trireme’s bow and tipped over slightly to vanish into her unprotected oar decks. The body of a man flew up and out of the hull and a spray of blood was visible even at that distance, and the enemy ship suddenly turned sharply – too sharply – to her own port as her starboard-side rowers died as the heavy iron bolt thrashed around their deck. The ship’s unintended turn threw the wounded ship across the bow of a second oncoming pirate ship, and the crash as the one struck the other could be heard clearly over the screams of the trapped rowers.

  ‘Poseidon’s glory!’ Satyrus said, awed. His gunners hadn’t managed to hit a blessed thing in two days of practice.

  The sudden death of a trireme – apparently by a bolt from the heavens – affected the entire pirate fleet, and their ships could be seen to slow all along the starboard wing. The port wing, of course, could see nothing.

  All around him the other engines fired, the crash of their release now heartening the crew as the tale of the success of the first shot spread to the rowers who hadn’t seen it. The speed of the ship increased dramatically.

  Satyrus glanced around. None of the other bolts had hit a target, but the eddy caused by the first shot had all but paralysed the enemy’s left wing on his starboard side. Dead ahead, an enemy penteres declined to face his ship bow to bow and inclined away, leaving a smaller trireme to face his charge. A flight of arrows from the forward tower of the penteres fell on the deck of the Arete and not on unprotected rowers, and Satyrus held his aspis over Neiron and felt the heavy impacts of two Cretan shafts.

  Arete’s bow machine fired into the enemy penteres at a range of less than a stade and didn’t miss – Satyrus thought that the enemy ship must have filled their sights – and the iron bolt raised a shower of splinters where it shattered the rail of the enemy ship and then carried on into the command platform, wheeling through the air, and Satyrus watched as two men in splendid armour were cut in half by the shaft.

  Satyrus punched the sky.

  The enemy ship carried on, her command deck suddenly silent.

  Over the bow, the enemy trireme left to face Arete tried to manoeuvre. Her trierarch had either never fought in line before or he simply lost his head, knowing that he couldn’t go bow to bow with a titan, but his last manoeuvre confused his oarsmen and placed him at an angle to the racing bronze bow of a comparative leviathan. His rowers were good – they followed orders and then ripped their long oars in through the oar ports, used to fighting smaller ships where the danger was the long rip of the beak down the side, snapping loose shafts, killing oarsmen as their oars were crushed.

  But his rowers were as wrong as their trierarch. Arete was never a fast ship, and she had her faults, but she was both nimble and heavy, and Neiron, backed by Helios, put all his weight on the steering oars just a horse length from the enemy’s side and their bow moved, perhaps the length of a man’s arm, but the inexorable mathematics of Pythagoras and Poseidon put their massive bronze beak squarely in under the enemy cathead. In a lighter ship, it would have been the perfect oar rake.

  Satyrus, with a clear view, was more appalled then elated. Their ram crushed the cathead as if it were made of thin clay and the way on Arete seemed undiminished as she crushed the slim pirate under her forefoot – the top of the ram caught the enemy rail, just as it was designed to do, but instead of tipping the enemy ship, the ram smashed through her, cutting the bow of the enemy craft off like a farmer’s wife snaps the neck of a chicken before a family feast.

  The enemy trireme filled with water in ten heartbeats, so fast that Satyrus’ sailors were almost as horrified as their drowning enemies. And then they were gone, sucked beneath the waves so that in later years, Satyrus’ sailors would say that they’d seen Poseidon come and suck the ship under, snatching with a massive hand.

  And Arete carried on, still moving faster than she would cruising under oars, as if the death of two hundred men was no great matter for Her Majesty.

  ‘Poseidon!’ roared Satyrus.

  The engines spoke again – doing no further harm, but sowing fear. To port, Panther’s long Amphytrite had rammed the leaderless penteres amidships while to starboard, Leon had chosen to race through the huge gap in the enemy line untouched – and now he would be first into the enemy second line.

  Except that the enemy second line had hung back, and rather than launching counter-rams they were breaking and running.

  It didn’t seem possible, and
Satyrus was too pious to curse success – but the enemy was broken by the daring rush of three heavy ships and didn’t abide the flying trap of the swift Rhodians, Bosporans and Alexandrians racing at their flanks. The sudden destruction of four of their ships shattered any courage they’d brought, and they fled.

  ‘Cowards!’ Neiron shouted. ‘Damn them! We had them!’

  Every man aboard, from the lowest thranite to the navarch, felt the same, but Satyrus restrained them. ‘Give only thanks for victory,’ Satyrus called, and he ran below to repeat his orders on the subject.

  To port and starboard, the fastest Rhodians and Alexandrians caught the slowest pirates. Their execution was swift – but so were the rest of the pirates, happy to buy life at the expense of their comrades.

  Satyrus’ ship was the slowest in the fleet, and the transition from sudden killer to helpless observer was painful. But there was one more thing he could do, and he did it. He climbed the forward tower and signalled a long-practised set of shield flashes.

  ‘General pursuit’, he sent.

  And then he ordered the Arete turned and the sails raised, in the hope that they could at least keep the fleeing enemy in sight.

  10

  Night, on a beach – an islet south of Cos. Satyrus had left his beloved Arete for the speed of the Black Falcon, and the fleet had scattered – Satyrus suspected that there were ships from Miletus to Rhodes now, as the pirates had run in every direction. But Black Falcon and Diokles’ Oinoe had stayed together.

  The taste of too much wine in his mouth, and the tension in his shoulders from three days and two nights in armour and no sleep, no rest – two sharp fights, against desperate men who knew they would have no mercy. And now, wrapped in his cloak under the stern of Black Falcon at the edge of sleep, something tingled in his head – some stray thought, some sound from the surf. He sat up in the cool night breeze.

  Running feet. Not a horde – just one man, or perhaps two. He leaped up, kicked Helios who lay to his left and slapped his left side to be sure that his sword was there.

  ‘The king! Take me to the king!’ said a man. There were torches.

  The sentries were awake and alert and the alarm was being called, and a squad of marines pounded down the sand at his back. Satyrus relaxed.

  Helios uncurled at his feet. ‘Lord?’ he asked.

  ‘A cup of water, if you would be so kind,’ Satyrus said.

  Apollodorus appeared at his shoulder, still – or already – in armour.

  ‘Fisherman came into the outer picket post down the bay. Says there’s three triremes laying across the channel on the Asian shore.’ Apollodorus shrugged. ‘Could be Panther or Leon, lord. But it could be the fucking pirates. And they’ll be gone with the sun.’

  Satyrus stood there, his shoulder aching, the promise of the fatigues of middle age already very real in his young body. His hands hurt. He rubbed his jaw and felt the stickiness of three days without washing, without oil, without—

  ‘Let’s do the thing,’ he said. One of his father’s expressions. It made Apollodorus smile in the fitful torchlight.

  Helios rose as gracefully as a temple dancer, fresh and handsome the moment he awoke. You lay down in your armour, lord!’ he said.

  ‘It seemed the quickest way to get some sleep,’ Satyrus said with a rueful smile.

  Someone put a hot cup of wine into his hands and he drank it down, followed by a full canteen of water, and then he put his shoulder against the sternpost and helped get Black Falcon off the beach and into the hissing surf. His feet were wet, and then his legs, and then the hull was afloat and alive. He wondered if he could find the strength to drag himself aboard.

  But he found the power to turn and sprint down the beach to where Diokles had his ship ready to launch. Satyrus stood under the stern in the blood-warm water.

  ‘Diokles!’

  ‘Here, lord.’ The navarch was at his own steering oar.

  ‘Let me decide if they are friend or foe. If I go in to the beach we all go, fast as thought. Land everyone. The Tanais way,’ he finished, with a smile.

  ‘I hear you. War cry?’ Diokles asked.

  ‘Tanais,’ Satyrus said. ‘If I’ve got it wrong and they’re friendly, Tanais ought to clear the whole thing up. Otherwise, I want prisoners.’

  Diokles was invisible even an arm’s length away – just a bearded shadow – but Satyrus had the impression of a frown. ‘We’ll try,’ Diokles said.

  ‘Stay under my stern until I make my move,’ Satyrus said. He slapped the hull of Oinoe, Diokles’ ship, and ran off down the beach to his own vessel.

  ‘King’s aboard,’ Neiron called as soon as Satyrus had his feet on the deck, and the sailors pushed the ship’s stern off the beach and the oar master sang the first words of the paean to start the men all together, and they were away.

  Fires were scattered across the beach like fallen embers from a fire pot. Too many fires – there were five hulls, not three, and the camp was too chaotic to be Leon’s.

  Easy to make the decision, but once he’d ordered the marines forward and the rowers armed, he had lots of time to worry that he’d been wrong and was launching a desperate attack against over-heavy odds, or attacking his uncle, and friends would be killed in the dark.

  He walked back to the helmsman’s bench, where Neiron had the oars himself.

  ‘Five ships,’ Satyrus said.

  Neiron spat. ‘Scum,’ he said. ‘They ran when they had us at long odds. They’ll panic now.’

  Satyrus was oddly reassured. ‘You think I am doing the right thing?’

  Neiron made an odd sound in the dark, which it took Satyrus a long and disorientating moment to discover was laughter, not choking. ‘How would I know?’ Neiron coughed out, and he laughed again. ‘You’re the king.’

  So much for reassurance. Satyrus went forward. Black Falcon had neither tower nor was she fully decked, and Satyrus crouched against the familiar bulk of the marine box over the bow. His left pauldron was badly padded and the bronze was cutting his skin where his aspis sat too heavily on it – and his left arm was too damned tired to hold the shield so that it wouldn’t cut his shoulder. And he could just have left the bastards to get away into the dawn.

  He pulled his cloak tighter and smelled the whiff of wet cat – and his heart raced, his eyes opened, his arms filled with power.

  The bow cut into the sand – softly. Neiron had put them ashore at a walking pace.

  Satyrus stood up. ‘Follow me,’ he said to the marines, and went over the side into the water – water only to his ankles, and he ran up the shingle in the dark. There were shouts from the fires. Satyrus was a quarter-stade from one of the enemy triremes, a beautiful shape silhouetted against the enemy campfires, long and low like a lethal snake: a Phoenician design, or perhaps Sicilian – but nothing from his own scratch fleet.

  ‘Praise to you, Lord Herakles,’ he said aloud. And ran up the sand.

  There were still men asleep. Satyrus disdained to kill them, but he left Charmides and Helios to watch a dozen, and led Apollodorus and Diokles’ marines across the beach. Twice they fell into knots of men in the dark – and Satyrus’ arm was warm from the spilled blood – but cutting down running men is no battle, and after the second group begged for mercy – for slavery, no pirate could expect aught else – the fight was over. Fear, surprise and daring had done all the fighting for them.

  The oarsmen and marines cheered him on the beach like a god.

  Diokles embraced him, and Neiron helped him drop his shield to the sand.

  ‘Don’t forget it,’ Neiron said. ‘It won’t always be the same, but when you win like this, men don’t forget. It’s the feeling of invincibility that they remember until they are old.’

  Satyrus had to hug him again, and then he ran into the sea to wash as the sun came up. Bathed in salt, he made sacrifice in the new dawn of three lambs, and Helios brought him his best chiton and sandals as if he were going to the temple to pray.

 
‘It’s a special day,’ Helios insisted.

  He could feel the exhaustion just at the edge of his awareness but he held it off, and he walked among his men, handing out portions of meat from the sacrifice and awarding anything he could think of to award. There was good plunder: twenty gold cups, themselves almost a sign from Poseidon for the one he’d thrown overboard off Chios. There was some silver in bars, and more in scrap, and a little gold. Satyrus distributed it all, on the spot – two months’ wages for the oarsmen and double that for the marines. The ship and marine officers – sixteen men, all told – received a gold cup each, and most of them were men who’d never so much as drunk from a gold cup. Apollodorus laughed, richer by a farm. Thrasos, the red-haired Kelt who had become Diokles’ helmsman, made so bold as to hug his king, and Stesagoras, Satyrus’ sailing master, filled his cup with wine from a captured skin, and then walked about filling all the cups.

  ‘We must all give a thanks-libation together,’ he said.

  Philaeus, the oar master from Arete, just kept smiling at everyone in the rosy light.

  They poured libations in captured wine to all the gods of Olympia and a few more – Asian gods of the sea and coast, a nymph or two and Nike, over and over. Finally, Satyrus insisted that they drink to Kineas, his father.

  Apollodorus shocked him by displaying an amulet. ‘I worship your father every day,’ the marine said. ‘Kineas, Protector of Soldiers.’

  So Apollodorus led the libation.

  When the frenetic quality of victory was calming, and they were drinking wine rather than pouring it on the sand, Diokles put his arm around Satyrus and pointed with his nose and jaw at four long lines of men kneeling on the beach.

  ‘Now what?’ Diokles asked, slurring his words. ‘All those shit-eating prisoners.’

  Helios, a patient shadow at his shoulder, pushed in. ‘Lord, there are things that you should hear. Charmides and I—’

  Diokles laughed. ‘We have the prettiest marines on the ocean sea, lord. Perhaps that’s why the gods love you so much. Look at the fine down on his jaw. And yet his hand is red – no light hand, your boy. A killer.’ Diokles laughed again.