Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities (68 page)

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 control – 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.’

Miriam chuckled. ‘You’ve met some girls.’

‘One or two. But honey, when the god-sent power falls away, I have a dead friend or two and I’m covered in other men’s blood, or unconscious from a wound. And sometimes, when the wine goes down the wrong way, I have to remember that every man I’ve sent to Hades had a life like mine – love and hate, wine and olives. And Achilles says:

Better a slave to a bad master

Than king among the dead

‘They’re dead when I kill them. And the next fight, or the fight after – I’ll be dead. And when I look at you, when I play music with Anaxagoras, I can’t help but see that there are
better things
.’ He took a deep breath, and all he breathed in was her – jasmine and a woman’s sweat. ‘It’s not a competition in the palaestra. What I mean—’

He was so close to her that he could see the pores of her skin, the smudge of dark oil under her right eye, the trace of cosmetics hastily rubbed out of her eyes.

Her lips filled his head, the way an opponent’s sword can fill your head. He saw nothing else, and wanted nothing else.

It was easy to fall into her, and it was easy to break his oath to Abraham—

Who was lying sick in a tent.

Satyrus stood up, his erection painful against his leg, ashamed of his weakness and his
stupid
moral qualms. He wanted her as he had
never
wanted a woman. The cold eye of light might tell him that she was a dirty, dishevelled waif, skinny from not enough food, dirty from battle, wearing a dead boy’s chiton and armour – but all he could see was the perfection of the lines of her lips, the spacing of her eyes, the swell of her breast when she reached up to touch her hair, her collarbones, her legs—

‘I promised your brother,’ he said miserably, backing away as if she had a dagger at his throat.

‘Me too,’ she said. She giggled. It was an incongruous sound. She covered her mouth, bent double with laughter. ‘Menander couldn’t write a better comedy, Satyrus.’

‘I imagine he’d make it funnier,’ Satyrus said. He sat down on a different stone.

She adjusted her hair, taking her time. ‘I once heard that this is the most aesthetic posture a woman can adopt,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Satyrus said. ‘At the moment, they’re all pretty much the same to me.’

She chuckled, her voice low. ‘You do pay the very best compliments.’

Satyrus smiled to himself. ‘Do you have any wine?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘I’ll get some,’ he said.

‘I’ll wait,’ she responded.

Satyrus walked back through the ruined temple to the Sakje youths. Two of them were copulating – some of the rest watched or called suggestions – but not loudly. Sakje were never loud in camp after dark.

‘Could you spare me a skin of wine?’ he asked, averting his eyes. The ecstatic face of the Sakje girl – on top at the moment – was not what he wanted to see.

‘Hah!’ Scopasis rose from the ground – he had been lying on an animal skin, and he rose with a chuckle. ‘Satyrus, son of Kineas – I have wine to share.’

Satyrus pointed off into the dark. ‘I have … a girl.’

Scopasis smiled darkly. ‘As do I. I will give you half what I possess.’ He pulled out a skin – a skin that seemed to have a certain stench – and took a long drink, and then poured some into his cloak-mate’s mouth, and more into a cup. Then he tossed the skin. ‘Drink to me when I am dead, Satyrus son of Kineas.’

The Sakje girl was breathing hard, fast and rhythmically beyond the small fire. She raised her face and gazed unseeing on the autumn night, and shrieked softly.

Satyrus caught the skin. ‘Gods bless you, Scopasis,’ he said. He went back through the ruins, stumbling. The girl shrieked again and her man laughed, a low, happy sound.

Satyrus sat close to Miriam, who had loosened and removed her armour. She was as close to naked as a person might be, wearing a single layer of thin wool that covered her to the base of her thighs.

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Give me your cloak and sit close.’

He untied the laces of his shoulder yoke, lay down and rolled out of the harness, feeling lighter and younger. Then he sat next to her, shoulder to shoulder, and threw his chlamys over them both.

He handed her the wineskin and she wrinkled her nose.

‘The hide is untanned. The Sakje think it keeps the taste in the wine. There’s a sheep’s stomach inside, and the mouthpiece is horn – you’ll take nothing from it but wine. But the Sakje drink like this.’ He flipped the skin up expertly and a line of wine fell from the neck of the skin into his lips.

She reached for the skin, and he shook his head. ‘Let’s not spill it. Raise your mouth.’

She did, and he carefully poured wine into it.

She spluttered. ‘This is unwatered wine!’ she said. ‘Oh – and good wine, at that.’

‘The Sakje do not drink bad wine. But drink sparingly – this has something in it. Poppy or lotus or ground hemp seed. Coriander. Something else.’ He drank another mouthful. ‘The Sakje do not believe in moderation.’

Now the man was moaning, a campfire away.

‘I can tell,’ Miriam said. She took the skin and drank, leaving a line of drops spattered along the edge of his chlamys. They both laughed.

‘One of us should go,’ Satyrus said some time later, when they’d fallen asleep briefly with her head against his shoulder.

‘Why?’ Miriam said. ‘I will be true to my oath. But I would rather be true with you beside me.’

Satyrus smiled into her hair. ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

‘Ask me when the siege is over,’ she said. ‘We are living in a world of heroes and horrors, not in the real, waking world. When you awake, I will be a scrawny Jew with a big mouth, and you will be a godless Hellene who needs a dynastic marriage. But I will tell my granddaughters that I might have been a queen—’

Satyrus got a hand under the chlamys, and with all the practice of years of brotherhood and martial training, rammed his thumb in under her arm so that she leaped in the air and squealed.

‘You’re ticklish!’ he said, delighted.

‘Uh-oh,’ she said.

He fell asleep with her sprawled across him for warmth, held closer than any lover he’d ever slept with – oath unbroken. And woke to her eyes on his in the light of a new day. She rubbed the tip of her nose on his, and her fingers pressured his, and she touched her lips against his – and leaped to her feet.

‘It’s a new day,’ she said.

PART V

THE DESTROYER OF CITIES

T
he Athenian delegation might have been chosen specifically to argue
against
their own best interests, or so it seemed to Stratokles.

‘You must explain to the king how hard pressed Athens is,’ Stratokles said. Again.

‘We don’t want to seem like beggars,’ Democrates said. ‘No, that would never do.’

‘We represent one of the most powerful states within the girdle of the ocean,’ said Miltiades the Younger. ‘It would not do to appear as supplicants.’

‘No, no,’ said a chorus of elderly aristocrats.

Stratokles all but tore his beard. ‘Do you think that King Demetrios the Golden will come to
you
to
ask
if he can send troops to relieve your city?’

Miltiades nodded. ‘Well put. That is exactly what we should do.’

‘That would preserve the dignity of our city,’ Democrates said.

‘There is no dignity in a city sacked by a conqueror!’ Stratokles said. These men appalled him – they were the scrapings of the
areopagitika
, the worst sort of orators. They had told him themselves that Cassander’s forces were at the gates. That the olive groves of Attica were on fire.