Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  He raced down the tower – now he feared the power of that assault – and Helios was waiting with his armour.

  ‘Every man,’ he said. ‘Every man into the ditch behind the bow.’

  When they came, they came fast and hard. They knew that the defeat of their snipers meant that they would face massed archery, and they’d been coached.

  They didn’t have their sarissas, either. They had javelins and light spears, or nothing but swords. They came forward at a dead run, screaming with fear, rage, battle spirit. Their officers came first, and the arrows reaped them first.

  It was the first time that Demetrios had attacked a wall without massive bombardment. It was the first time he’d put ten thousand men in a single wave.

  It was the toughest assault yet, and the Macedonians didn’t flinch at the arrows though they died in heaps on the wall. The last horse length of the climb was brutal – Jubal had deliberately built the walls at a changing pitch to lure infantry into believing that they could be climbed easily. Only when a man was halfway to the top did he see clearly how steep the last few feet were, and few men stopped to reason why every section had a sloped zone with easy climbing.

  Into the heart of the archery.

  The archers reaped phalangites like a woman cutting weeds in her garden, but they began to tire – even the Sakje – and their arrow supply ran short. And then, at the call of a bone whistle, they broke. The Sakje were fast, running to reform being a part of their core tactics. The Cretans were slower to break, and lost men to the triumphant Macedonians as finally they got over the wall.

  Satyrus had the ephebes, the citizen hoplites and the oarsmen formed along the trench.

  ‘Stand up!’ he called.

  The town garrison had their spears in their hands and they all but filled the wall. The Macedonians came over the crest of the rubble – the wall was fifty feet wide in places – and crashed headlong into the formed Rhodians. Spearless, spread out in no particular order, their feet punished by the sharp gravel of the walls, the Macedonians hesitated, and the Rhodians rolled them down off the wall in a single charge.

  Satyrus was never in action – he was too busy calling commands. And as soon as his men cleared the wall top, he ordered them to face about. Already the enemy had missiles flying, heedless of hitting their own recoiling troops.

  The Rhodians went back down their own wall and into the reserve trench behind it.

  The Sakje came forward, rearmed with arrows, and filled in the strong places on the rubble wall top. The Cretans were slower to return.

  Idomeneus was dead.

  The second attack was half-hearted. The archers cleared off the wall, but the Antigonids had lost too many officers and the men hung back. The whole attack bogged down into desultory javelin-throwing, the Antigonids occupying the wall top but not pressing their advantage.

  Satyrus waited as long as he felt that he could and then attacked them, clearing the wall top. This time, as soon as his men crested the wall, the enemy barrage struck, and he took casualties. But many of the enemy rounds dropped short or long, and his men got away with only twenty down – twenty armoured men he could not afford to lose.

  The third attack failed to dislodge the Sakje. They shot and shot, some of them using their bows at arm’s reach, others drawing their long knives, and the Cretans held their ground too, and the enemy soldiers paid heavily for their timorousness in not pressing their attack. Caught in the open ground, they took casualties they needn’t have taken.

  ‘Demetrios is pushing new troops forward,’ came the message from the tower.

  ‘My boys and girls are down to five shafts each,’ Melitta said.

  Two hours until sunset.

  ‘Give they the wall,’ Jubal said.

  Abraham nodded. ‘You said to make it look like we wanted to hold it. We held it all day. Give it to them.’

  Satyrus looked into the golden afternoon. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry, friends. We have to go hand to hand.’

  Neiron started to say something. Satyrus glared at him. ‘This is my call, gentlemen. Archers out, Melitta, all the way back to the “bow”. Save your last shafts for – well, if we get broken.’ He held out his hand. ‘Give me that whistle,’ he said, and she handed it over.

  ‘Don’t get killed, stupid brother,’ she said. She kissed him. They grinned at each other.

  The archers slipped away unseen, heading for the rear. Satyrus climbed the wall, took cover behind one of the filled baskets, which topped his head – just. It had been hit repeatedly, and the soft earth and gravel fill was a pincushion of bolts.

  Now he could see the enemy forming. Stones slammed into the earthwork, but it held. A trickle of sand ran down the basket and onto his back. Another bolt thudded home.

  Satyrus ran down the slope to his troops. ‘Officers!’ he roared.

  He waited until they were all there. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘When the whistle sounds, you charge. Got it?’

  Neiron looked up at the wall. ‘How will you know?’

  ‘I’ll be on the wall,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me there. We have to stop this one. No second place, gentlemen. No speeches. Get to the top and hold. Ready?’

  They growled, and he sent them back to the phalanx. He turned and ran up the inner face of the third wall, Helios on his heels.

  ‘I didn’t tell you to come,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t tell me to get you juice every morning, either,’ Helios replied.

  Bolts fell, and a shower of rocks, small rocks being launched in baskets. One pinged off his silver helmet, hard enough for him to smell blood. But he peered out.

  The enemy was already in the middle ground – running silently. Men were falling – they were going too fast for safety. They were fast.

  Satyrus blew the whistle. He had left it late. Just below him, his men had to get to their feet – had to get their shields on their arms. Had to start up the slope of rubble.

  But the Antigonids were slowed – again – by Jubal’s cunning rubble wall and its apparently shallow slope, and they bunched up on the ramps—

  – Apollodorus roared for the oarsmen to dress their line as they came up the wall—

  – Abraham laid his spear sideways across a line of his fellow citizens—

  – A Macedonian officer, resplendent in gold and silver, raised his shield at the top of the wall. ‘Come on!’ he roared, and men poured onto the wall top—

  Satyrus stood straight – no missiles now – and set his shield on his shoulder.

  The oarsmen came over the wall top formed like veterans, and their spears slammed into the forming Macedonians. The Macedonians were higher: they’d won the race to the wall.

  But they were too far apart, still trying to form.

  And that’s all Satyrus had time to see. He’d intended to fight the man in silver and gold, but just as the left files of the oarsmen closed around him, a crowd of Antigonid phalangites howled into his position. He took a shower of blows on his shield and he was pressed back against the men coming up behind him – and Helios went down next to him.

  The whole fight seemed to crystallise, then, and time seemed to slow down. He sidestepped – right over Helios as the boy gave a great shudder – and put his spear through a man’s eye-slit, whipped the head back and rifled it forward at the next man’s helmet, the point scoring on the crown just under his horsehair crest and punching through the bronze to spill his brains inside his helmet, and he slumped down across his file-mate.

  A blow caught Satyrus in the neck. It hurt, but he kept his feet. Now his oarsmen were on either side. The enemy’s rush was stemmed.

  ‘Push!’ Satyrus called, and the oarsmen leaned on their spears, put their shoulders into their shields and heaved. Now the tiny differences told – the leather socks inside their sandals allowed men a secure stance on gravel – scarves on necks stopped sweat, cloth pads in helmets allowed the men to see a little better.

  But the Macedonians were better fed, an
d they had not lived in constant fear for six long months.

  At the top of the wall, the fight balanced out. Men coming up behind couldn’t join the push – the fighting lines were higher than their supporting ranks in most places. But they could press in tighter, and the press became so close that men began to die in the crush, stabbed under their shields, jaws broken when someone rammed their own shield up into their mouth in the melee, or men were simply crushed off their feet.

  The citizen hoplites with the old-fashioned aspis were at an advantage, now – bigger shields kept men alive in the closest press. The marines, too: Apollodorus, howling like a lion loose in a pen of sheep, killed two men. He demanded that the marines push, and they responded. Draco killed a man an arm’s length from Satyrus, and blood sprayed from his severed neck – the Antigonids around him flinched, and Draco was into them like a wolf into a flock of sheep, slaying to right and left, his spear ripping their shades from their mouths and sending them shrieking to Hades.

  Draco died there, roaring into the ranks of the Antigonids alone, exposed, outpacing the rest of the marines, but he created a hole – a flaw like a tear in the fabric of the enemy formation right at the top of the wall, and it collapsed in. Satyrus knocked a man unconscious with the butt of his broken spear – no idea when it had broken – and stepped into the gap. Apollodorus downed his man and Abraham, armed only with a sword, roared at his citizen hoplites and jabbed so fast that Satyrus couldn’t follow his actions – brilliant – and his men shoved forward. And there, in those heartbeats, the attack was broken.

  Satyrus looked down and realised that the man he had just smashed to the ground was the man in the gold and silver armour. He grabbed the man’s ankles and pulled. Other hands reached to help him.

  He let go of the wounded officer, raised his head and saw the enemy rushing to their machines as the broken attack began to filter back. The enemy weren’t smashed – officers and phylarchs were reforming down in the rubble – but Satyrus suspected that they were done for the day.

  ‘Off the wall!’ he called.

  Two marines were lifting Draco. Satyrus had seen him fall – known who he had to be.

  Other men had Helios, and other wounded and dead men. Satyrus saw blue and white plumes – the anchor.

  Neiron: his white Athenian armour covered in blood.

  ‘Back!’ Satyrus roared. ‘Off the wall!’

  Slowly, stubbornly, the citizen hoplites and the ephebes and the oarsmen came down the back of the wall, and behind them, the enemy machines opened up.

  ‘All the way back!’ Satyrus called. He made himself look away – Neiron was looking at him. ‘All the way back!’ he yelled, and ran down the line. The ephebes were slow – too damned proud. He ran up to their leaders and demanded they run.

  ‘We have no need to run, polemarch!’ a phylarch called.

  A stone from the enemy engines crushed him, showering his age-mates with blood and bone.

  ‘Run, damn you!’ Satyrus called.

  He went up the face of the new wall – the last wall, the ‘bow’, and looked back.

  The third wall was lost under a deluge of stone and shot. Some shots were going over – enough to kill more men in a few heartbeats than the whole desperate fight at the top of the wall had killed in minutes.

  I had to, he told himself. Helios? Neiron? Draco? Idomeneus?

  I had to. If I didn’t hold it as long as I could, Demetrios would smell a rat.

  If he’s already smelled it, I have just lost those men for nothing.

  The new wall had the revetments that they had spent the night building on the forward wall – heavy pylons like squat columns full of rubble and dirt, and the archers were already occupying them.

  ‘Well done,’ Melitta said. She had a graze across one cheek, but otherwise looked calm and clean. ‘Looked real enough to me.’

  ‘Helios is down,’ Satyrus said.

  Melitta raised an eyebrow. ‘Helios is dead, brother. Neiron too. He asked for you. And you did what you had to do.’ She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Everyone lost somebody today. Don’t show it. You won. You must appear to have won. Philokles would say the same.’

  Satyrus took a deep breath. Helios! he thought. But he schooled his face.

  ‘Reform!’ he called.

  Demetrios didn’t move forward until just after nightfall. The night assault rolled over the rubble, sprinting across ground thick with corpses, and took the unoccupied wall in one rush – and shouted their triumph, and relief, into the night.

  Jubal smiled. ‘Now he move his engines fo’wards.’

  Satyrus awoke to pain. His body hurt, his legs hurt – one of his ankles was swollen, and he’d ripped his shield arm on the plates of his cuirass and that hurt. He sat up, cursed the darkness and managed to swing his legs over the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor.

  He made noise, deliberately, so that Helios would know he was up.

  Helios was dead.

  He found a chiton and put it on, got to the door of the tent and found Jacob sitting on a chair.

  ‘Lord?’ he said, raising red eyes.

  ‘Jacob?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘Master has the fever,’ Jacob said. ‘We’re all going to die here.’

  Satyrus shot past the man into the adjoining tent.

  ‘Is that you, Jacob?’ Abraham said. Then he said something in another language – Hebrew or Aramaic. Satyrus shook his head.

  ‘I hear you are sick,’ he said.

  ‘Stay back, Satyrus. Stay out. Damn you!’ This last when Satyrus barged in. ‘It’s a fever, not some poisoned arrows of your strange god of light and disease.’

  ‘I know what disease is, brother. You seem very much yourself.’ Satyrus put a hand on Abraham’s forehead. He was burning hot, and his eyes were as bright as newly minted coins. ‘I take it all back. You are sick. Has Aspasia seen you?’

  ‘And my sister – at the break of day. I was told to sleep as much as I can. I’m already bored, and this takes a week.’ Abraham managed a smile.

  ‘If you are lucky,’ Satyrus said. ‘It could be months,’ he added.

  ‘I could die,’ Abraham said. He laughed. ‘I might as well have gone down yesterday, covered in glory, like Neiron or Helios.’

  Satyrus poured himself some juice and poured more for Abraham, and brought it to him. ‘You are covered in glory. I saw you break their line. I will see to it that you receive a wreath of olive. And you’re young and strong,’ he said. ‘We lost too many men yesterday.’

  Abraham nodded. ‘I assume you know what you are doing. I saw no reason for the third fight – but Jubal does.’

  Satyrus managed a smile. ‘Jubal is, in effect, commanding the siege.’ He waved his hands. ‘Who knew that I had a genius as my sailing master?’

  ‘You’ll miss Neiron,’ Abraham said. ‘He wasn’t afraid to tell you what he thought.’

  Satyrus swallowed heavily. ‘I miss them all. Go to sleep.’

  ‘If I die, I want to be burned,’ Abraham said, ‘in my armour. It’s not against my religion.’

  ‘Like a hero at Troy?’ Satyrus said.

  ‘Yes,’ Abraham answered.

  Outside, Satyrus found Apollodorus waiting patiently at the entrance to his tent.

  ‘Looking for me?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘Demeter, Lord.’ Apollodorus shook his head. ‘Helios is dead, and no one knows how to find you.’

  ‘I’ll need a new Helios.’ Satyrus winced at the callousness of it. But there it was – if he died, they’d need a new polemarch, too.

  ‘Hyperetes or hypaspist?’ Apollodorus asked. He looked in Abraham’s tent. ‘He sick? That’s not good. He’s one of the best.’

  ‘Both.’ Satyrus led the smaller man into his tent, found the amphora of pomegranate juice and poured two cups.

  ‘When this is gone, I have no idea where to find more.’ Satyrus looked at the amphora – Attic black work, a hundred years old. Probably from Abraham’s house.r />
  ‘I haven’t had juice in a month.’ Apollodorus drank down his cup. ‘You took a prisoner yesterday.’

  ‘I did, too.’ Satyrus nodded.

  ‘He’s one of Plistias’ officers. One of the siege engineers. He wanted to see our rubble walls first hand.’ Apollodorus scratched under his beard.

  Satyrus made a face. ‘How are the oarsmen?’

  ‘I’m keeping them and the marines separate. The city hoplites have it bad – two out of three men are down. The ephebes are almost as bad. It’s as if yesterday fuelled it – suddenly men are down everywhere. And this officer – Lysander – has seen some of it. I think we should kill him. We certainly don’t want Demetrios to know how many sick we have.’

  Satyrus drank his juice. ‘I know why you asked, but we won’t kill our prisoners, even if they storm us. We are better, Apollodorus – never forget that. To be better, one must consistently be better.’

  Apollodorus managed a smile. ‘I knew I’d get the “better” lecture. Very well – what do we do with him?’

  ‘Give him an escort and let him wander about.’ Satyrus nodded. ‘Save your protests – I want to trick him, but first we must give a reasonably good facsimile of allowing him to go where he will. Is Demetrios moving his engines forward?’

  ‘About a third of them. The rest are on rollers, ready to move. Jubal thinks from what he’s seeing that the fever is as bad in the enemy camp as it is here, and that Demetrios has severe manpower problems.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Whatever happens, this Lysander must not escape tonight. Tomorrow night will be something else again.’

  ‘You have a plan?’ Apollodorus asked.

  ‘It will depend on a few things. Let’s meet under the olive trees at noon. All of the officers, and let’s have some Neodamodeis and some women, as well.’

  Exercise – alone, without Helios. Anaxagoras came up while he was shadow-fighting with a sword.

  ‘Wrestle?’ he asked.

  They stripped and fought, and even with so many sick, people gathered to watch, cheered and wagered.