Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  ‘We could take the horses and ride away,’ he said.

  ‘We’re on an island,’ Melitta reminded them.

  ‘Bah. We are Assagetae. Put a horse between my legs and these Dirt People will never smell me.’ He laughed again.

  ‘I don’t know, Thyrsis. You smell pretty strong.’ Melitta got up as she heard the fighting start. ‘We have time now. Let’s move.’

  It was, as always, the waiting that was hardest. Demetrios’ men responded well – a taxeis marched within half a watch, carrying torches to light their way, and the night was full of psiloi and oarsmen mounting the earthworks.

  The taxeis marched out, moving fast, and were hit by a light shower of arrows. Men died.

  The commander of the taxeis stopped and sent for new orders and help.

  More arrows fell. Not many – a dozen at a time.

  The taxeis put out their torches.

  From the stricken entrenchments, the trumpets sounded again and again, urging the Antigonids on.

  Demetrios sent his cavalry out through the main gate, two hundred hippeis of his own guard, hastily mounted in the dark. They rode around for too long looking for the taxeis, found it, and arrows began to fall among them. Horses screamed in the dark.

  The trumpets from the doomed entrenchment pleaded for rescue.

  The taxeis marched out across the open ground the long way, safe behind their own entrenchments, a sensible decision by their commander based on the erroneous information available to him. Erroneous, in that he assumed the entrenchment was still held by his side.

  ‘I get better every time I blow the damned thing,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘No wonder I stuck with the lyre.’

  ‘They’re biting, though,’ Satyrus said. ‘It’s time to go.’

  Satyrus ran along the earthen wall, giving orders, and the marines scrambled down the outward face and dashed for their own gate. Anaxagoras sounded the trumpet once again, and jumped.

  Melitta smiled. Smells like death, she thought. She wished Anaxagoras was here so that she could show him how the Assagetae really fought.

  The taxeis crashing through the dark to the rescue of their doomed comrades was just a goat tethered for the lion. Bait. They passed along the broad road that Demetrios’ siege engineers had built – such fastidious men. So predictable. Melitta had watched it being built – she had the map of the siege as clear in her head as her internal map of the woods, gullies and plains around Tanais.

  The enemy cavalry would travel west and south of the road, riding across the open ground, sweeping to cover the flanks of the taxeis.

  She waited for the marching infantry to pass her. It is never so dark that a Sakje warrior cannot count his foes. She watched them go and counted to a hundred, slowly, in Greek.

  Then she rose to her feet, put an arrow to her bow and gave the shrill call of the owl.

  The owl call carried across the west wall, and Satyrus nudged Anaxagoras. ‘Here she goes,’ he said.

  ‘Poseidon protect her, and Apollo,’ Anaxagoras said.

  ‘Artemis is her god,’ Satyrus said.

  The Sakje rose from the grass and ran at the cavalry.

  They made almost no sound, but the horses heard them. Most were ambling along, deeply unhappy at crossing such rough ground at night, heads down, interested in the tufts of untouched grass. But now one head came up, and then another. A stallion stopped and pricked his ears, and gave a great cry.

  Even the riders could hear the sound of running feet.

  Melitta was almost close enough to touch the rider she was after – she ran up behind him, her dead run much faster than his horse’s rapid walk. When she shot him, her feet were still flying at a dead run. The man gulped, pawed the air and fell, and Melitta was in his place, her heels on the horse’s flanks, forcing the animal to a gallop, riding far to the flank – the south-west flank.

  As soon as her seat was secure, she began killing men. She would ride alongside and loose her arrow from an arm’s length away.

  The hippeis died so fast that their commander fell to the ground still unsure as to whether he was under attack. Scopasis cut his throat and took his gold-hilted sword and his scalp in three efficient motions.

  Thyrsis whooped and turned his mount in a tight circle. ‘Ay-yee!’ he screeched, and the rest of the warriors took up the keening cry, and the night was full of it.

  ‘They got the horses,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘Now what?’ Miriam asked.

  Anaxagoras was more worried than Satyrus had ever seen him.

  Satyrus wanted to tell the man how much his worry was misplaced. But he smiled instead. ‘Now a lot of people die,’ he said.

  The truth was that the taxeis of Macedonians and Greeks was well led and had excellent discipline. Their officers never lost their nerve.

  But not one of them ever forgot the terror of that hour at bay, waiting for the horse archers to come out of the dark. More than fifty of them died, despite their armour, the darkness and close-arrayed shields. The war cries seemed to last for ever, and when a man was hit, he fell among them and writhed and screamed, and they couldn’t move aside to let him die alone. And from time to time one of the barbarians would ride in close and throw a severed head at them, bouncing hollowly off shields, or falling with a hard, damp thump against a helmet.

  They stood like professionals, and their officers praised them every time the hoof beats died away. And when the sun rose, they found they had lost slightly fewer than a hundred men.

  Melitta cantered easily over the low walls, down the front face between the pilings where the marines had cleared the stakes and pits, and along the open ground to the west gate. She waited for Scopasis and Thyrsis, who whooped and raised trophies in salute, and the marines cheered her.

  She saw Anaxagoras on the wall above her, and she waved her bow. He hurried down the internal steps and hauled her off the horse by virtue of height and strength. She laughed.

  ‘What a beautiful horse,’ he said, after he’d kissed her.

  She laughed. He was big, and she like big men, and his beard was pleasant. ‘She’s an ugly plug,’ Melitta said. She wrapped her legs around his waist and kissed him, and her warriors whooped. Even Thyrsis, who had had hopes. Let him hope. She’d started this for her brother, but now she was finding the whole prospect remarkably attractive.

  So was he; she could tell.

  ‘Horse needs a name,’ Anaxagoras said, when she’d removed her mouth from his. He put her down. He slapped the mare on the rump. ‘I’m going to call this one “Sausage”.’

  Satyrus laughed. ‘Well done, sister.’

  ‘Sausage?’ she asked.

  ‘To go with “Horse meat”, “Steak” and “Meat Pie”.’ Satyrus jumped down off the inner wall. ‘We’ve been naming them as your folks brought them home.’

  Inside the gate, she could see half the population of Rhodes. The horses were already dead – all but a dozen, which were under the close guard of the marines.

  ‘Scopasis insisted we keep the best,’ Satyrus said.

  The roar of applause that greeted her appearance in the gate rose like an offering to the gods. She’d never been cheered by so many people. He face lit up, and one of her rare, full-face grins buried her scars.

  31

  DAY TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY AND FOLLOWING

  The horse meat lasted two days. It raised morale, and filled bellies. It probably saved lives.

  And then it was gone, and the winter wind blew from the north in cold gusts that mocked their hopes, every dawn, for a relief fleet.

  They ate the good cuts, and then they ate the rest: entrails, ligaments, hairless hides boiled into broth. The Sakje were used to hard winters – they knew how to get food out of the hooves.

  The ten horses saved against an emergency were eaten, one by one. Then they were gone.

  Satyrus cut the grain ration to one-quarter of what it had been at the start.

  No one had the energy to jeer, or to spit at him.
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  A crane appeared in the enemy camp – four ships’ masts lashed together as the base, and two more as uprights. It towered over their camp.

  Then they built another.

  And then another.

  They were on the two hundred and eighty-fifth day of the siege. Satyrus heard about the cranes, drank a cup of warm water and walked out into the agora with his heaviest cloak on his shoulders. He was still cold.

  ‘What do you think it means?’ he asked Jubal.

  Jubal frowned. It was rare for the Nubian to frown. He watched as the fourth crane was erected, chewing on a piece of rawhide, on and on. Long after Satyrus expected an answer and then gave up on getting one, the black engineer shook his head and turned away.

  ‘It means we fucked,’ he said quietly, and spat.

  The next morning dawned crisp and cold and windless. No sails marked the far horizon.

  In Demetrios’ camp, the four cranes were slowly linked with cross beams, so high in the air that men took a quarter of a watch to climb the ladders up to the cranes’ tops.

  Satyrus didn’t let himself watch too long. It was demoralising. Instead, with Lysander at his heels, and Charmides, who had taken over as his hypaspist, he walked down to the olive grove, entered the steps under the sanctuary of Demeter and inspected the pithoi of grain there – the city’s remaining stock.

  A pair of very lean cats sat by the guard’s brazier.

  ‘Out of rats?’ Satyrus asked, but the joke fell flat. The grain guards – his own marines – barely raised their heads. A quarter-ration of grain was enough to sustain life. Just. And no more.

  He walked along the ranks of the pithoi, and he opened them, and he and Lysander inspected them with the priestess, Hirene, and her assistant Lysistrada. Satyrus smiled to himself, but the smile was grim.

  Lysander marked his tablets carefully, and they bowed to the priestesses and went back above ground. Satyrus paused to pat the cats. And noted, with a cold surprise, that his hand was thin. Skeletal, in fact.

  ‘Puss, puss,’ he said. ‘Didn’t anyone give you some horse meat?’

  Hepius, a marine phylarch from Athens, squinted out of the dark. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Let’s fatten ’em up a bit before we eat ’em.’

  Hirene let out a squawk of outrage.

  Satyrus managed a smile. ‘Despoina, your cats are safe as long as the town stands.’

  But to Charmides, he said, ‘All officers. Right now.’

  ‘We have two weeks’ food at quarter-rations,’ Satyrus said.

  They just looked at him. All the surviving members of the boule; all the officers of his long-lost Arete. His sister’s people, and the captains of the ephebes. The surviving Cretans. They didn’t raise their voices, shout, or even murmur.

  They just watched him with flat eyes, waiting.

  Aspasia was as thin as a mainmast stripped of the yard. And Miriam – Miriam’s eyes filled her face, and her long legs were a mockery. Her hip bones showed through her chiton.

  Nor was Charmides much better. He was thin, and Nike’s death had left him bitter.

  Abraham looked like a living skull. But he was the one to speak. ‘I will go to Demetrios,’ he said. ‘Someone must try.’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘No. No, if anyone goes, it will be me. After all, he wanted this to be personal. Between us.’

  ‘What do we do?’ Apollodorus asked. ‘Sit and wait?’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘I wanted you to know. I believe in Diokles. He will come back. I think we should eat our sandals and hold on.’

  Memnon sighed. He looked at his wife. ‘I thought we’d won. Ten times, I thought we’d won. But,’ he looked around, ‘we’ve lost, haven’t we?’

  Satyrus nodded in agreement, but Miriam stepped forward.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, we have not lost. By God above, men are fools. We have struggled, and we have not surrendered.’ She looked around. ‘Three years ago, I sat at my loom in Alexandria and wished that, someday, I could have a real life where I could breathe free air and be a person, a human being, free of the Tyrant who ran my life. We have held – for almost a year. Spring is coming. We had a year.’ She stammered off at the end, and then gave a self-conscious laugh and was silent. But when no one mocked her, she said, ‘If I die tomorrow, I will not bow my head. My God will understand. We Jews are stiff-necked people. Let us talk no more of surrender.’

  She was embarrassed at her own words, but Memnon clasped her hand, and Damophilus and Apollodorus clapped her on the back.

  Melitta cleared her throat. ‘For the Sakje, there will be no surrender. And brother – I came to rescue you, not to die here.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Well, then. Thanks. All of you. Let’s quarter the ruins and search the cellars – especially the first houses to take hits – and see if we can dig up a few mythemnoi of grain.’

  Charmides managed a real laugh. ‘It’s always about the grain,’ he said.

  Dawn, and chanting from the enemy camp.

  The stick figures of Rhodian citizens lined the sea wall and the south wall closest to the enemy camp.

  Ropes – great hawsers, thick enough to be visible even at that distance – were rigged to the massive crane structure. And by early morning, they were taught.

  The monster that rose over the enemy camp was so tall that it reached above the towers, and in its last seconds as it was righted, it rocked twice – leaning so far that one of the crane arms was dashed to pieces, and a dozen men fell to their deaths. But righted it was.

  The tower was the height of twenty men. The wheels along its base were twice the height of a man. It was as wide as two houses and as deep again, tapering slightly from bottom to top like an immense pyramid, and through the open sides the Rhodians could see six floors.

  No sooner was it steady on its wheels than slaves and soldiers raised a great cry and began to roll it forward.

  It rolled well. The wheels worked.

  It was the largest moving thing made by the hand of man that Satyrus had ever seen.

  Demetrios watched his toy with the joy of the creator. His hands had shaped both wood and iron. He had marked the drawings, and his hands had pulled the hawsers to raise the recumbent tower from its building site. Its sheer size awed him, and he had helped design it. Ctesibius, the chief designer, couldn’t stop looking at it.

  ‘Now I am a god,’ Demetrios said.

  Ctesibius agreed. ‘A pyramid on wheels,’ he said, his voice low. ‘Full of engines. Fifty cubits on a side.’ The engineer giggled.

  ‘What shall we call it?’ Plistias asked.

  ‘Helepolis,’ Demetrios intoned like a priest. ‘The Destroyer of Cities.’

  The giant thing which towered over their tallest wall and made a mockery of their defences might have been the last straw.

  But the men and women of Rhodes had endured ten months of war, and their sense of awe was dulled. Had the great machine been brought against them in the first month –

  But no: it was the tenth month. For three days they watched as the smiths carried iron plates to the waiting leviathan. On the fourth day, artisans and slaves began bolting the iron to the frame – all nine storeys of it. More building was still going on at the top of the frame, and the whole edifice had been rolled clear of the abatises that surrounded the enemy camp onto a swathe two stades wide that six thousand slaves, the survivors of the fever, began to clear like a pathway for the gods from the machine right up to the south wall. They filled the deep places and levelled the smallest heights, long lines of them working all together so that they crept across the plain, too slow to watch, too fast for hope.

  A whole taxeis stood guard all night in front of the machine, with a hundred Cretan archers.

  Satyrus watched them with Jubal from his own, much lower tower. Watched them for most of a day.

  And watched the empty sea.

  One by one, Satyrus talked to his friends. He talked, alone, to Miriam. To Abraham. To Anaxagoras and Melitta, to Charm
ides and Lysander and Apollodorus, to Korus and Memnon, to Damophilus and Socrates.

  None of them was interested in taking the two surviving ships. None of them was interested in surrender.

  So at noon that day, the three hundred and third day of the siege, the one hundred and twenty-fifth day of the archonship of Pherecles of Athens, the one hundred and nineteenth Olympiad, Satyrus ordered his marines into the vaults of Demeter with the permission of the priestesses and removed the last eighteen pithoi. And he gathered the entire population in the agora and distributed the grain. All the grain.

  ‘Tomorrow is Anthesteria in Athens and Tanais,’ he said. ‘When men rope up the temples and let the spirits of the dead roam free. When Dionysus walks the earth. Feast. Eat it all.’

  Silently, orderly and disciplined, they took the grain – just exactly a double ration of grain for every man and woman.

  In Abraham’s tent, his friends were quiet. Satyrus took his turn with the two bronze cauldrons full of barley meal and coriander, and the whole of an unlucky migrant bird that had passed too close to Melitta’s bow. The smell alone was like lust and gluttony together.

  ‘So,’ Miriam said, approaching him cautiously, like a hunter. ‘We’re done for?’

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘I trust my gods,’ he said. ‘We Hellenes are also a stiff-necked people.’

  Apollodorus stuck a horn spoon into the porridge and tasted it, burning his tongue. ‘Ow!’ he said.

  ‘Serves you right,’ Satyrus shot back, smacking him with his wooden spoon.

  Apollodorus didn’t bother to look contrite. ‘You’re feeding us up,’ he said. ‘So we’re going to attack.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  Apollodorus embraced him. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s die standing up.’

  It turned out that people can get drunk on grain, if they’ve been hungry long enough.

  Anthesteria was not always the loudest of holidays – kept in late winter, a cry to the coming spring, usually celebrated indoors. But with a double ration of food in their bellies, the six thousand surviving Rhodians sang hymns to the night and all the gods, roaring away – hymn after hymn to Demeter and Kore, and then to Apollo, to Herakles, to Ares and Athena. Thankful only for food and one more day, they sang to every god. Hymn after hymn rose to the heavens, an endless paean from nightfall to midnight. Shivering sentries on the Antigonid entrenchments wondered how, how in all Tartarus the Rhodians had the strength to sing, or even to walk. They huddled in their cloaks and smelled the smell of warm food floating on the wind, and when the hymn to Dionysus came across no-man’s land, disgusted sentries spat in contempt for their own improvident commanders – or joined the song.