Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  The loss of the harbour tower had crushed any spirit the Rhodians had. The officers of the paid troops – the professionals – had expected nothing else, but the boule were panicked. Even Panther shook his head. ‘Surrender is the best we can expect – and a garrison of his soldiers,’ the older man said. ‘Will you take me, at Tanais?’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘I’ll be happy to,’ he said. ‘But Demetrios will not accept your surrender. He doesn’t need to. Try to surrender just after you sting him with a victory. When he’s won one, what needs he to treat with you contemptible mortals?’

  Panther winced. ‘Avert,’ he said, making a peasant sign.

  Nicanor shot back. ‘Is that how you think, O great king?’

  Satyrus was a small, thin naked man among a dozen rich men in armour. He laughed. ‘Do I threaten you?’ he asked. And ran back to Abraham’s house, where his trainer made him lift weights until Helios called him to the roof.

  Korus handed him a basket. ‘Pork. Eat it. You need bulk.’ The slave frowned. ‘You are doing well,’ he said grudgingly.

  Satyrus sat on the roof, chewing pork and watching the sun walk across the ground between the camps. When it reached the enemy walls, he heard the murmur before he saw for himself.

  The ambassadors had been crucified.

  Satyrus scratched his beard and finished his pork, then licked his fingers. Sometimes, he had to wonder if he was, indeed, like other men. He’d known two of the ambassadors. Good men, with children. But seeing their corpses, he smiled. He thought of his father, and of Philokles, and even, a little, of Socrates.

  The enemy fleet came in fast. There was no counter-fire from the harbour batteries, so they burst into the entrance, forty big ships, quadremes and penteres mixed. They cleared the harbour entrance, and behind them came the great engine-ships, their double hulls gigantic in the morning light.

  They got into the harbour, and fired their first salvo at the sea wall. A single stone flew right over the wall, over Abraham’s house, to strike the roof of the next house and crush it flat, so that the two machines on the roof were masked in a thick cloud of powdered mud and concrete that rose from the collapsed building. Men who had survived major earthquakes said how much like one this was.

  But before they could reload, the town unleashed its first surprise. Engines, stripped from ships or purchased before the sailing season closed, had been placed on the roofs of the highest houses – and not on the unfinished towers of the sea wall. Now they fired, all together, when a red flag was raised by Helios.

  Most of the bolts used by the defenders were wood, with iron tips – nowhere near heavy enough to penetrate the thick hulls of the heavier ships, although they might have been deadly enough to a trireme.

  But Satyrus and his men were not the only innovative men in Rhodes, nor did Demetrios the Golden have the only engineers. His engines were carried in ships. That imposed limitations.

  The defender’s engines were higher. And every one was on a rooftop – the roof of stone buildings with kitchens and giant hearths. Their bolt-tips had been heated red hot.

  Some missed. They were wasted, sinking hissing into the blue water of the harbour.

  Others struck metal and screeched away. A few hit unlucky flesh, destroying a man – and every man around him – in a grim shock of heavy metal and wood.

  And the best of them struck the ships.

  The results were not immediately apparent. Red-hot metal will not straight away ignite wood – even carefully dried wood exposed to the Mediterranean sun and coated in black pitch.

  But just about the time the fastest of the great engines aboard the nine double-hulls were being readied to fire, ships began to burst into flame – as if Apollo had rained fire on them. The result was so sudden and so spectacular that it surprised the defenders as much as it surprised the attackers.

  The Golden King was no fool, and he had no intention of running risks or losing.

  He withdrew. In minutes, the harbour was clear, except for the burning wrecks – infernos now – of fifteen of the Golden King’s ships. The trapped oarsmen screamed, and the citizens of the town carried the smell of roast pork with them for a day. They burned to the waterline, and then sank.

  DAY TEN

  Satyrus never did his exercise on the tenth day. Before he was fully awake, Demetrios had his fleet on the water and the Rhodians, warned by their sentries, manned their machines and heated their missiles.

  Demetrios’ ships had wet hides across their bows and decks, and they came on boldly into a withering fire. Their boldness was misplaced. Three handspans of red-hot iron with a barbed tip cares nothing for a sodden bull’s hide. Sailors wrestled with the red-hot shafts, trying to prise them loose, and the town’s mercenary archers and all the archers from sixty Rhodian triremes – hundreds of men – shot shaft after shaft across the harbour into the sailors and the harbour began to fill with corpses, the way dead flies can litter the surface of a bucket of wine in the sun.

  After an hour, the engine-ships had fired three times, and found the range. A hail of stones fell on the sea wall, just two streets to the south from Abraham’s house, hammering the half-built wall down on its underpinnings. Dried mud bricks vanished in puffs of mud-smoke, and stones cracked under the onslaught, and the facing broke and broke again.

  At the centre of the maelstrom a breach was opened, fifty paces wide.

  But Demetrios’ ships could not stand the counter-battery of heated missiles, fire arrows, javelins – anything that could be thrown or shot across the harbour. Two thousand of his sailors died in that one hour, and ten more ships caught fire, and the other trierarchs, threatened with ruin, backed water against orders and fled. Because they fled without orders, they jammed the harbour entrance, and then the slaughter commenced.

  It was the most terrifying kind of war Satyrus had ever experienced, and he had stood his ground against a charge of elephants. But here, great rocks fell from the sky without warning and without mercy. A single stone might kill an entire family – might wipe out a bloodline two hundred years old, or a huddle of terrified slaves, or a family cat or dog – the stones were merciless and like some dark embodiment of Tyche, and veterans began to flinch every time the telltale hissing of the passage of one of the big stones was heard.

  A marine – a good man – screamed and threw himself face down on the roof.

  Apollodorus was there – not a terrifying disciplinarian, but a hero, who took the man by the shoulder and raised him, speaking into this ear until, red-faced, the man returned to his engine.

  ‘Imagine ten days of this,’ Neiron said, at Satyrus’ side.

  ‘Imagine a hundred days of this,’ Satyrus said.

  Miriam came up the ladder with a basket, followed by a dozen of her maids. She was smiling. If she was afraid, she was above it. Satyrus and Anaxagoras caught each other watching her. But with death falling like granite fists from the gods, Satyrus could only smile. And Anaxagoras could only smile back. When she reached the top of the ladder and lifted a long leg around to clamber onto the roof, every man at the machine smiled.

  Then Satyrus saw the enemy ships retreating – hard to see, with the smoke of burning ships, collapsed buildings.

  ‘Neiron!’ Satyrus said.

  Neiron was munching bread from Miriam’s basket. ‘Lord?’

  ‘Is that an engin-eship?’ Satyrus asked. He was looking clear across the harbour through the battle haze.

  ‘By Hephaestos!’ Neiron said. He ran to one of the engines, and

  Satyrus to the other.

  Down in the courtyard, the slave-women had heated a pair of bolts – too much heat, in one case, so that the barbed point was deformed.

  ‘No matter,’ Satyrus said. ‘Load!’

  Men got the thing into the firing channel – already charred in places where hurried men had made mistakes – and winched the heavy cord back. Men were standing straighter, taking their time, making fewer mistakes – there were no stones falling. An
d, of course, Miriam and her women were on the roof, passing out bread – no marine wanted to be seen by a woman to flinch.

  ‘Ready!’ Necho said. Satyrus waved – the marines had practised all winter while he had lain helpless, and he wasn’t taking charge of a weapon now when there were men better fitted to shoot, but it galled him. He wanted to participate.

  He leaned over the roof, caught the eyes of the head woman and waved. ‘More missiles – four more, red hot, as fast as you can!’

  The woman all but saluted. She was enormously fat, and as strong as an ox, and she had mastered the heating of the heads without crisping the heavy shafts better and faster than any other person.

  ‘Hit!’ roared Neiron, and he turned but couldn’t see a thing. Neiron wore an unaccustomed grin, and he waved his absurd Boeotian hat at the enemy.

  Necho’s machine fired, and then they were raising the next pair of red-hot shafts, hurrying to avoid the moment when the shaft caught fire from the head. Satyrus could no longer see the principal target. But Helios could, and he leaned over to help Necho.

  After a pause, both machines let fly together with a crash that shook the roof.

  Far off, across the harbour, a tongue of flame leaped to the sky like a sacrifice to the gods.

  Satyrus joined the cheer, and even as they whooped the vast double-hulled leviathan caught – a single sheet of fire, and then two.

  But that was not the end, because now the burning ships were acting as a barrier to the escape of their other ships. Satyrus’ crews could no longer see anything for the smoke, but other machines on the other side of the harbour could, and they shot and shot again into the helpless enemy ships. It was over an hour before a handful escaped.

  Nineteen enemy ships burned in the harbour mouth, and the engine-ship’s double hulls were visible just above the surface of the water at low tide. Eight engine-ships slunk away, and Satyrus doubted that there was celebration in Demetrios’ tent that night.

  He sank onto his own bed, exhausted. He slept the afternoon away, dreamed of his father again, rose and dressed without help – little things were becoming easy again, and he was to begin pankration and swordsmanship again the next day. The thought cheered him.

  He awoke clear-headed – and with the memory of a dream of Herakles and a firm notion of his next step. He leaped from his bed, put on yesterday’s chiton without repinning it, buckled on a belt and was pleased to see that it was tight. He was so excited, he almost forgot sandals.

  He found Miriam outside his door – each as surprised as the other – and she froze like a deer caught by a stealthy hunter who does not use dogs.

  ‘I was—’ she said.

  ‘I’m awake,’ he said. ‘I have to talk to the boule.’

  She flushed. ‘Of course,’ she breathed.

  She smiled, and walked away down the hall. ‘Don’t be late,’ she called over her shoulder.

  Satyrus shook his head and walked down the steps without feeling light-headed – a matter of some pride – and then into Abraham’s receiving room, now one of the command stations of the defence.

  There were a dozen messengers waiting, and Panther, in full armour, seemed to be in charge.

  Satyrus shook his hand. ‘I wanted a word,’ he said. ‘With the whole boule, if I can manage it. Even as he said the words, it struck him. What was she doing outside my room? Was she about to come in? And then?

  His heart beat as if he was in combat.

  Panther put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You doing all right, lad?’

  Satyrus smiled. ‘The boule?’ he managed.

  Panther nodded. He wrapped his salt-stained military cloak around his shoulders, summoned a pair of ephebes as bodyguards and messengers and led Satyrus out of Abraham’s house. Together they walked up the street to the row of statues outside the Temple of Poseidon, and then left up the steepest of the hills to the agora. Everywhere they walked, there were dead and wounded people – men, women and children – the dead laid out on the street, many already wrapped in linen according to the Ionian custom, the wounded screaming or silent. A small boy lay with both of his feet crushed and amputated, his eyes huge, his mouth open and flies everywhere about him. A woman lay on a bier, the side of her head crushed so that her hair and the shards of her skull were a single grotesque shape – but she was alive. Alive, and lying on her funeral bier.

  ‘If your people want to surrender,’ Satyrus said, ‘tonight is the night.’

  ‘What?’ Panther asked. ‘This, from you?’

  Satyrus followed the Rhodian navarch into the agora – already, slaves were stripping the facade from the gymnasium to get at the big stones underneath the marble. But the round tholos of the boule was untouched, and they walked into the cool, shaded interior, which cut off the sounds from outside – the sounds of people dying.

  Panther led him into the main chamber, where thirty men – most in armour – sat on benches or lay on kline. There were charts, chalk drawings of parts of the walls and baskets of scrolls – every book in the city on the art of war was being devoured at speed by the government.

  ‘Satyrus of the Euxine would speak to us on matters that affect the city.’ Panther looked around. ‘I move that we allow him to speak.’

  Nicanor rose, red-eyed, from his couch. ‘He is a king and a tyrant. I stand against your motion.’

  But when the men present were summoned to vote, Panther’s motion carried easily.

  Panther spoke quietly to Satyrus. ‘I should have told you on the way, but your thoughts put my head in a whirl. Nicanor’s sons – two of them – died in the collapse of the tower.’

  Satyrus nodded. Then he stood in the centre of the floor.

  ‘Demetrios will be as mad as Ares tonight, but he’s had his first taste of defeat. Look – this is my opinion, nothing more – but in some ways, Nicanor has a point. We do think much the same, Demetrios and I – we are kings, we are used to getting our way. And surrender – a surrender that keeps the city intact and your families alive – gentlemen, I’ll fight as long as it takes, but let’s not kid ourselves. You’ve seen what just half an hour of bombardment does. Just imagine – imagine that we survive the harbour attack. And I think that we will. Then – then he builds more of those engines, and goes after the land wall – and there’s nothing to sink. My mathematics says he can concentrate a hundred engines on fifty paces of wall. We won’t even be able to hit back. Every day he’ll clear another fifty paces of wall. A breach a day.’ Satyrus shrugged.

  ‘You are in favour of surrender?’ Nicanor asked. ‘Surely this is a sudden reversal?’

  Satyrus bit his lip. ‘No. First, I doubt he’ll accept. Second, he’s as likely to butcher us after we surrender as anything. He respects nothingbut his father’s will. But if the boule is still set on this course, the time will never be better.’

  Panther nodded. ‘I am still against it,’ he said.

  Nicanor made a face. ‘I have only one son left to me. People died today. We lost almost a twelfth of the total citizenship of military age in one day. I am surprised that Satyrus the Tyrant has come around to my way of thinking – but I move that we take his advice and send a deputation.’

  Satyrus gave the man a wry smile. ‘Who will lead this deputation? He has the bodies of your last ambassadors crucified on his camp walls.’

  Damophilus rose. ‘I think that Satyrus seeks only to show us all the possible paths. And I, for one, would not trust Demetrios to count the coins in a warehouse. I say we fight. I will go farther, gentlemen. I say we need a centralised command. I move that we appoint Panther as polemarch – as war archon. And three strategoi, as in former times, to command the city.’

  Nicanor rose. ‘This is the first breath of tyranny. Let this city be governed as she has always been governed – worthily governed by men of worth.’ Nicanor looked around. ‘And who are these strategoi? Yourself, Damophilus?’

  Panther rose and thumped the floor with a spear. ‘We are not barbarians. Vote the ite
ms as moved, one at a time. For the creation of an embassy of surrender?’

  Almost five hundred citizen soldiers had already perished. Many had been in the tower when it collapsed – the Rhodians had thought it impregnable. More were in their homes, or on the sea wall, or simply unlucky. And citizen women, children, slaves – the casualties from the initial bombardment were staggering.

  A twelfth of the citizen population was already dead. By the twists of bright Tyche, six of the dead were oligarchs – and members of the boule. And not one of the Demos party or the Navarch party had died yet.

  So, by luck, the domination of the boule by the oligarchs had been broken in the first hail of the besieger’s engines.

  The vote to surrender failed by three votes.

  Only then did Panther and his allies realise that they had the boule. Nicanor was a proud man – and a mournful one. He rose, pulled his himation about him and stared at them all.

  ‘Now you will order everything your own way – and you will fail. Democrats can never govern – the so-called people lack the arete to succeed. When the conquerors are riding your daughters like whores, do not look to me.’ He turned to go.

  Panther raised his arm. ‘Nicanor – you are grieving, and any mortal man would do the same. Stay, and help us choose our strategoi. It is in my mind that you should be one of them. Why not? You are a worthy man, a good spear-fighter and you lead a party that is of account. Let us not count every vote. Let us act together for the good of the city.’

  Nicanor paused in the doorway. ‘You seek only to catch me in the toils of your own failure.’

  Panther made a dismissive noise. ‘Nicanor, I am a sailor. When the storm blows, I do not ask the oarsmen for advice. Nor do drowning men criticise me if I’m wrong. If we fail, there will be no politics in this city, because we’ll all be dead.’