Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Innovative bastards. Have to give them that. Of course a basket of rocks is a wall. Fuck me.’ Lucius cut a twist of the heavy basket loose.

  Stratokles was watching the enemy respond to an alarm. ‘What’s got them excited?’ he asked. He watched carefully, sniffing the air.

  Lucius shook his head.

  ‘Do you smell smoke?’ the Athenian asked.

  ‘I do,’ Lucius said.

  Stratokles was looking behind the wall, at the ground that had been no-man’s land the day before. Thin curls of smoke were rising in two places.

  ‘Off the wall,’ Stratokles said. He ran down the wall to where two hundred of Nestor’s crack guards rested in open formation. ‘Off the wall. Now! Back! Back off the wall!’

  He turned and grabbed Lucius. ‘They’ve mined the third wall. We were meant to take it – Ares, I can see it. Run, Lucius – all the way to Plistias. Get to Demetrios if you can. Tell him I’m getting the men out.’

  ‘He’ll spit you.’ Lucius was dumping his armour as he spoke.

  ‘Fuck him. These are good men – too good to die for nothing. Now run!’

  Lucius dropped his breastplate with a crash of bronze, and ran.

  Stratokles ran among the Heraklean marines. ‘On me. Now! Don’t bother forming by files – off the fucking wall, you wide-arses! Follow me!’

  Crossbow-sniper teams could hear him, and they began to rise to their feet.

  ‘Ares, it’s their whole garrison,’ said a man. Stratokles grabbed him, slammed a hand against the fool’s helmeted head. ‘Run!’ he yelled.

  Finally, the Herakleans were moving. So were the crossbowmen.

  Stratokles ran across the former no-man’s land, behind almost the last of his men. The ground felt hot under his feet. ‘Athena protect,’ he panted.

  Men were slowing as they entered the battery where the king’s machines had been parked by sweating slaves, many of whom were still heaving against the tackles or digging, or grading the ground smooth. Smoke rose here, too. The smell was in the air. And Stratokles suddenly noticed that right at the edge of the artillery park was an enormous stone, painted red.

  ‘Athena save us!’ he said. Then, to the phylarch nearest him, he said, ‘Run! All the way – right through the engines!’

  The man looked at him as though he were mad. Perhaps he was. He was urging the entire garrison of the new salient to abandon it to the enemy.

  Just to the right, on recently cleared ground, stood the reserve taxeis, two thousand men with pikes, waiting to face any attack thrown at the newly taken third wall – meant to support the men on the wall. Stratokles’ men.

  ‘What in the name of Tartarus and all the Titans are you doing, you Athenian coward?’ bellowed the Macedonian strategos.

  ‘Mines. Pre-registered engines. Massive attack. Run or die.’ Stratokles panted.

  ‘Your wits have deserted you,’ Cleitas said. He drew his sword.

  ‘Stupid fool,’ Stratokles panted. Now the man was between him and escape. ‘Feel the ground. Look at the smoke. Look at the enemy. Are you a child?’ he bellowed.

  The Macedonian was more interested in his own sense of honour. ‘Child?’ he roared, and cut at Stratokles with his sword.

  Stratokles took the blow on his shield rim and stepped past the man. ‘Arse-cunt!’ he said, and ran.

  The mathematics of a siege is inexorable. There is mathematics in every form of war, but the limitations of a siege bring them to the fore. Ranges, for instance, are immutable. An engine of war has a maximum range, no matter how it is built. On a battlefield, a new weapon might surprise an enemy – but give that enemy two hundred days, and they will know the range of the weapon to the hand’s breadth.

  And the mathematics of destruction are equally inexorable. It will take so many engines with so much of a throw-weight just so long to knock down a given length of wall. And if you have engines to employ, you will set them in certain very predictable positions – predictable because they have a certain range and a certain throw-weight, and because the enemy has a certain wall with a certain construction and height.

  These things proceed as if divinely ordained. Perhaps they are. But because of them, when the third wall fell, there were only so many positions – at the right range, free of rubble and half-collapsed walls, covered – in which Demetrios, Plistias and their officers could crowd their thirty-one engines to batter the new wall. The new, tougher wall. In fact, by the new, inevitable physics of siege warfare, there were only two places. Large, red-painted stones marked both of them.

  Satyrus drummed his fingers on the deck of the tower.

  On the right and left arms of the ‘bow’, great swathes of painted linen were pulled down.

  ‘Ares!’ Lysander said. ‘Oh, gods.’

  In orderly rows, like the toys of a well-mannered child, sat twenty-four engines – new engines. Jubal had not used an engine against Demetrios and his forces since the fall of the great tower.

  Every engine was fully loaded, the throwing arms cranked right back against the frames, the slings hanging limply to the ground.

  When the cloths were ripped away, Jubal raised a torch. It showed clearly in the twilight air. He lit the payload of the engine closest to him. A dozen more were lit afire. And then they began to shoot.

  Most of them volleyed together. A few were late – at least one failed to function altogether. But a dozen flaming missiles and another dozen heavy rocks flew, carving streaks on the clear evening air.

  ‘Ares!’ Lysander said again. It was a sob.

  The shots were exactly on target. It was unlikely any would miss – a month ago, when the Rhodians had owned the ground, they had ranged them in. A few fell short – ropes can change torsion in a month, even when loosened off – but most struck their targets within a few arm’s lengths of a bull’s eye, and fire blossomed.

  The alarms started, trumpets blaring in all directions.

  The Rhodian garrison stood to in a sudden movement, two thousand spears coming erect as the hoplites stood up from concealment behind the ‘bow’.

  ‘I have no shortage of soldiers,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘Ares!’ Lysander said. His face was as white as a suit of Athenian armour.

  The second volley left the engines – no fire now, but just stones. Some engines threw baskets of loose stones, and some threw sacks that opened in the air, and some threw heavy rocks – one-mina and even ten-mina rocks, carefully hewn to shape by stone-cutters.

  The storm of death fell all across the wall.

  The whole corps of the town’s archers – all the Sakje and the Cretans – stood to on the ‘bow’. They lofted a volley onto the enemy wall – the third wall, captured just a day before – and then they lofted a second volley and a third and a fourth, a reckless display of a deep supply of arrows, and a fifth.

  As the heavy arms of the engines cranked back for the third round, there was a low rumble from the earth near the second wall: the ruins of the second wall, well behind the enemy engines. Columns of dust and smoke rose into the air – some springing from the ground like a desert storm, and some rising lazily like smoke from a campfire when herdsmen kill a sheep and eat it on a feast night on the mountains.

  ‘That was our mine,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘But they are . . . far from—’

  ‘Now your relief columns cannot reach the third wall. Not for a long time.’ The flames from the burning mines rose like the sacrifices of a pious army, or the huts of a defeated one – columns of thick, black smoke: every drop of olive oil in every warehouse in the richest city in the world.

  The engines shot again – two dozen heavy missiles visible at the top of their parabolas before falling like the fists of an angry god on the terrified phalangites of the duty taxeis.

  The archers got off the wall, and the phalanx, two thousand strong, went over the top. Perhaps it was a shambles on the ground, but from a height it appeared that every hoplite was animated by the same godlike hand, and
the Rhodians crested the ‘bow’ and filed from the centre of their taxeis like the professional soldiers that the siege had made them. They filed down the ramps of the ‘bow’ that Jubal had designed, formed on the glacis at the foot of the ramps, men flowing into the rear ranks, and then they stepped off across the rubble, and not a single missile flew at them from the Antigonids.

  Lysander’s knuckles were white on the tower railing.

  A second line of hoplites appeared in the dead ground behind the ‘bow.’ They stood to, their spears wavering slightly in the last light, and the setting sun gilded their points and the iron and bronze points of the city hoplites and the oarsmen as they went up the third wall uncontested, over the top of the wall where Helios had died the day before, and down the ramps on the far side with perfect precision – they had, after all, practised for this moment fifty times. On the far side of the third wall they formed again – and gave a great cheer.

  The arms of the engines were cranked all the way back. Satyrus felt his heart thudding against his chest. This was the part that he and Jubal had disagreed on – and Satyrus had conceded.

  In the distance, two taxeis of Demetrios’ veterans had formed at the run and were now rolling forward. They had to hurry – the remaining sunlight could be counted in heartbeats. And Demetrios’ entire artillery train was about to be lost.

  Stratokles ran to Plistias.

  ‘Stop!’ he called.

  The Ionian looked at him curiously. The phalanx was formed – four thousand men.

  ‘You were the watch on the wall, you and your Herakleans,’ he said. Not accusingly – but very seriously.

  ‘I ordered them to run,’ Stratokles said. ‘The wall was mined – the wall and the engines. It is a trap.’

  Plistias looked at his files as they moved forward. ‘What kind of trap can resist four thousand hoplites?’

  Stratokles grabbed the Ionian commander. ‘Must I beg you? Listen to me! I have set a few traps in my time, and I know one when I see one. And this is a subtle man, Plistias. Satyrus is not some ignorant chieftain in a hill fort. He knows that you will counter-attack with overwhelming force.’

  Plistias had heard enough. ‘Halt!’ he screamed in his quarter-deck-in-a-storm voice.

  The lead files were pressed against the burning trenches as Stratokles and Lucius and Plistias of Cos and their officers tried to push the pikemen back.

  It became easier as the first stones began to fall. They fell in silence – the pikemen were loud, and the roar of the fire close at hand was loud, and the first stone crushed three men and killed others with flying bone splinters and gravel, so great was its force. Then the front of the pike block heaved back.

  Stratokles was still calling for them to get back when something hit his head, and he went—

  ‘You may return to your camp at any time,’ Satyrus said, rising to his feet.

  The Rhodians had retaken the third wall and stopped – and the engines were now shooting over their heads, volleys of heavy stones whipped so hard that the slings cracked like lightning when the engines released – a low angle, and a new type of shooting. Satyrus hated it – he expected to see red ruin in the Rhodian ranks at every discharge – but Jubal was as good as his word.

  Selected parties of pioneers and scouts – Sakje, Cretan and some from his marines – went forward into the inferno, to make sure that the enemy machines were afire.

  There were screams – hideous screams – and shouts where the survivors of the baskets of rocks now attacked the third wall – outnumbered and with nothing but fire behind them.

  It was slaughter. An entire taxeis was trapped between the fire and the Rhodian phalanx above them. No quarter was offered.

  It should have made Satyrus smile. Unless he missed his guess, the siege was about to end.

  Instead, it made him tired.

  He watched another volley of heavy stones, and turned.

  Lysander was holding himself steady, but his face was wet. ‘I hate sieges, my lord,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Satyrus. ‘And this is my first.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Take Demetrios my request that he find a way to end the siege. And my offer of a three-day truce. He’ll need it just to find his dead. Your dead.’

  ‘And you will erect another trophy,’ Lysander said.

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘The trophy was a goad, sir. We’re beyond trophies, now.’

  Satyrus felt curiously lonely as he wandered the celebration, having taken no part in the fighting, but Apollodorus would have none of it.

  ‘There was no fighting. Don’t be thick. Drink!’ He said, and pressed his horn cup into Satyrus’ hands.

  Memnon embraced Jubal, and then embraced Satyrus. ‘Our agora will have statues to both of you,’ he said. ‘In the morning, we will see him slink away, his tail between his legs. By all the gods, Satyrus – that was a victory.’

  Damophilus was cautious in his approach, wary that Satyrus would ridicule him, but Satyrus felt rancour towards none that night. He stepped into Damophilus’ cautious approach and embraced the man. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘We won.’

  The democrat nodded. ‘We did. I didn’t trust you – should have trusted you.’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Power corrupts.’

  But he couldn’t shake the feeling that the cost had been too dear, and that the slaughter of a taxeis might not settle the matter. He missed Helios every time he turned around. It saddened him that he had become a man who missed his hypaspist more than he missed his helmsman, or a man who had followed him for ten years, or his boyhood friends: Xenophon had died near him, and Dionysus had gone down in a storm, and he scarcely thought of them at all.

  He drank more wine and walked along the lines of fires, dissatisfied, uninterested in company. He walked the walls, alone, surprising delighted sentries in the towers of the west wall, greeting tired mercenaries along the ‘bow’ and along the near-deserted sea wall.

  The walk made him feel better. He came up the street that had been Poseidon’s Way, when there had been a Temple of Poseidon, and found a group of Sakje crouched on the tile floor of the temple platform, where the Rhodian admiralty had once met – a tile floor laid down in the likeness of the eastern Mediterranean, with the islands picked out in white against a dark blue sea, among which Rhodes was marked in gold with a rose. The Sakje had swept the floor and made a small camp there – twenty or so young warriors, men and women. He could smell the smoke from their leather smoke tent – a strong scent like burning pine needles, but more pungent.

  ‘Kineas’ son!’ shouted one of the young men, and in a moment he was surrounded. And he laughed with them, and drank smoke in the tent because they dared him, and stumbled away while they roared with laughter. He laughed too.

  ‘You are not done yet,’ Philokles said. His Spartan tutor was seated comfortably on a ruined foundation, and he had the lion skin of Herakles draped over a shoulder.

  ‘Master!’ Satyrus said, and flung his arms around the man. ‘You are dead!’ Satyrus babbled.

  I represent something that is very difficult to kill, Philokles said with a chuckle.

  There was no one there.

  Satyrus walked across the tiles to where the altar of Poseidon had stood. The heavy marble plinth was carefully buried now, protected from the wanton destruction of the siege – but the gods were close, and Satyrus could feel them. He threw his arms wide.

  ‘Lord Poseidon, Lord Herakles, and all the gods – one hundred and eighty days we have stood this siege with this town and all my friends. Deliver us, now. What town since Troy has stood such a great test? Need we be humbled? We are not so proud.’

  ‘More like a demand than a prayer,’ Miriam said, behind him.

  He remained in an attitude of prayer for many heartbeats, craving an answer with his whole soul. And his soaring delight at the sound of her voice was parried like a sword blow against a good shield by his promise to Abraham and the presence of the gods, and his own lack of contr
ol – the smoke had put him on another plane entirely.

  If the gods had an answer to make, they didn’t give it voice.

  Satyrus lowered his arms. His neck hurt, and he rolled his head and turned to meet her eyes.

  Miriam was still wearing armour – that of some slim ephebe who had given his life for his town, because the spear wound that had taken his life and stained the white leather and linen corselet dark brown was obvious. But it fitted her – the shoulder yoke sat firmly on her square shoulders and the base of the corselet sat on her hips as if it had been made for her. Her short military chiton showed her legs in the new moonlight – legs too long ever to have graced a man, no matter how athletic.

  ‘I’m glad you were in the rear rank,’ he said with a smile. ‘Any Macedonian who saw your legs would have smoked our ruse immediately.’

  ‘I loved it,’ Miriam said. ‘Oh – I could become Melitta. To be one with the phalanx—’

  Satyrus laughed. ‘I hadn’t expected you to like it.’

  She sat down. ‘That’s what Anaxagoras said. And he sounded just as disappointed in me. I thought that you would understand.’

  Satyrus rolled his shoulders. ‘Of course I understand. But I think I may be forgiven for being surprised. I’m surprised that anyone likes it. I am surprised that Anaxagoras likes it.’

  ‘You like it,’ Miriam said.

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Not particularly.’

  Miriam gave a sour giggle. ‘You sound like a girl trying to win more compliments.’

  Satyrus sat next to her. ‘A subject on which I expect you have some experience.’

  She shook her head. ‘I want to know. Are you just posturing? Do you really not like it – the struggle? The fight?’

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘You want a real answer, and I’m not in the mood to give one, honey. I’m full of wine and old worries and smoke, and if your lips touch mine I’ll have you right here, armour and all. Is that honest enough for you?’

  She looked at him. A level stare; in no way a come-hither.

  Satyrus sat back, getting the scales of his cuirass comfortably seated against the stones behind him. ‘I love how good I am at fighting – in that, I am like your beautiful young girl, who loves to stare at her own reflection and basks in the admiration of every young man in the agora.’