The men on the steps were looking over their shoulders. And then they were running.
Satyrus heard the footsteps as clearly as if he were listening to the end of a footrace. He felt light-headed – his mouth tasted as if he’d drunk all night.
He stumbled down the steps after his beaten foes.
Achilles stood alone in the courtyard. Not, strictly speaking, alone. Memnon was across his lap, screaming in pain, his intestines all around him. Ajax was face first on top of a dozen other corpses in a little mound, and Odysseus was well off to the side, curled in a fetal ball.
The courtyard was full of dead men, a charnel house of the wreckage of brave young men who had died for their city.
Nikephorus ran through the barely open gate, and behind him, fifty phalangites put their shoulders to the doors and pushed, and the doors – giant edifices of wood, iron and bronze – hit their walls with a crash, and the city was theirs.
Plistias managed to get a new helmsman into the helm. He got a marine to cut the arrow, and he stayed conscious. He got his ship free of the enemy – two fights, a thousand flights of arrows. He was hit again, in the same thigh, and he couldn’t walk, and consciousness came and went.
His men were superb, and he had himself carried among the rowers and he gave them heart, and they got clear of the Bosporon second line. By now, the whole estuary was a single mêlée, and friends rammed friends in the smoke of forty burning ships.
He no longer hoped for the escape of fifty ships. Now he hoped for victory, although his losses would be appalling. It no longer mattered. This was the whole fleet of the Bosporons, and if he beat it here – even at the loss of every ship he had …
He felt the chop first, and he peered through the smoke and haze to seaward. His ship had passed all the way down the estuary.
‘Command deck,’ he told the two marines carrying him, and they lifted him up.
From the slightly greater vantage point, he saw the flash of oars.
He sighed. He didn’t have the heart – or the strength – to do more. In one flash, he knew what had happened – what the enemy strategy was, and how it had succeeded.
‘Have the bastards taken the town?’ he asked his trierarch.
‘Gods!’ said the man, and he was pale under his helmet. ‘Why?’
Plistias glanced over his shoulder. ‘Because that means that the hostages are lost,’ he said. ‘And that,’ he pointed with his free arm, ‘that there is the fleet of Rhodes.’
Herakles was standing alone when the enemy ships boarded them from both banks of oars, so that the deck was flooded with enemy marines as fast as a sinking ship fills with water.
Melitta – the Bitch Queen, as he thought of her, with no little admiration – had a heavy linen bandage wrapped around her slim torso. She’d stood naked on the deck while two of her barbarians wrapped her after one of them planted a heated axe-head on the wound. She didn’t even change her facial expression.
She was next to him when the enemy came, with two of her barbarian chiefs shooting over her. Herakles was young, inexperienced and terrified – but it was obvious even to him that there was nowhere to run.
So he pushed in front of them. He had an aspis – none of them even had a shield.
The enemy marines were fighting their marines amidships, and the oarsmen were coming off the benches – morale was good, and the rowers clearly thought that they were winning. Herakles had time to take all that in with enormous, god-sent clarity, before the first wave of screaming enemy marines hit him.
The three barbarians behind him accepted the shelter of his shield and kept shooting.
Only Lucius stood by him. ‘This is going to be bad, son,’ he said. He locked his shield into Herakles’ own, the gentle tap as they met
almost
reassuring.
His knees were trembling so hard he could scarcely stand.
An oarsman – some clod he’d never even recognised with a nod – leaped off his bench with a long Keltoi shield on his shoulder, and the touch of his hip against Herakles’ hip was … like love. Now they were a line of three.
And then the enemy hit.
Keep your shield up
came Lucius’s voice in his head, and so he did, through his terror. Spearheads rained on his shield like the pelting of rocks by angry boys and he all but fell, except that Melitta herself was pushing on his back with all her strength. She shot – he felt the arrow go between his legs and his immediate adversary seemed to explode in pain and shrieking – shot in the groin.
As the wounded man went down, his file partner stepped forward. There was a delay – the dying man’s arms flailing, his razor-sharp spear threatening his own men – and into that infinite moment of hesitation, Herakles found that he had shot out his own blow, an overhand spear thrust at the file partner, and the spear point went in under the man’s helmet and licked out like a wet, red tongue and the man fell across his file partner.
And Herakles straightened his back.
That was not so difficult
, he thought.
I am the God of War’s son.
The guards had all fled.
Abraham was an old hand at sieges, and he knew the sounds – the enemy were inside the walls.
He grunted. Hardly the enemy – unless they came and killed all the hostages and raped his sister while they sacked the town.
He got the gates of their house locked. The other hostages were old men, but most of them found clubs or billets of wood.
Outside, in the alley behind the slave’s entrance, he heard a voice.
‘No … this house. I paid gold for that information, Satyrus. It must be this house.’ The voice was panting, like a man who had run fifty stades.
Satyrus.
‘Satyrus!’ Abraham shouted.
‘Abraham!’ he heard.
Abraham laughed until tears ran, and started to dismantle his defences.
‘Satyrus of Tanais!’ he shouted, and then willing hands helped him lower the bar.
Satyrus was covered in blood. Blood dripped off his sword, and down his sword arm from his elbow, and he had a wound under his right arm that seemed to be running down his right thigh from under his thorax.
Behind him were twenty soldiers, and Stratokles the informer, who Abraham usually thought of as an enemy.
Satyrus came and put an arm around his neck, blood and all.
But his eyes were elsewhere. ‘Abraham!’ he said.
Abraham laughed for the sheer joy of it.
He turned – all those men needed water and food, he could see – and saw his sister standing in the doorway of the garden, framed by the trellis that held the house roses. She had a sword in her hand, too – and she seemed to have been hit by an axe.
If Abraham had not already known, nothing could have kept him from reading the moment. Neither Satyrus nor Miriam had eyes for anyone else. And then, as if it was the most usual thing in the world, Satyrus handed his dripping, sticky sword to Abraham.
‘Hold this, if you would,’ he said.
Abraham took it.
Satyrus stepped forward and gathered Miriam into his arms. She raised her face, and the soldiers began to cheer – they were, after all, soldiers.
Stratokles produced a cloth and took Satyrus’s sword. He laughed. ‘So this is what we came for,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Poseidon’s balls.’ He laughed.
Ten stades out beyond the estuary, Plistias of Cos swam in and out of consciousness in a chair by the helmsman of his
Golden Demeter
. He had three wounds, and none of them were mortal, but the combination kept him in pain – too much pain to function.
But south and west, fourteen of his heaviest ships had cut their way through the disaster – fourteen ships saved from the Bosporons and the Rhodians. On them, he could rebuild his fleet. Demetrios still held Athens, and the Athenian fleet would yet tip the balance of power.
Satyrus would have liked to have swept Miriam away – directly away, to a private bower with a couch, if the gods were in the mood to grant his wishes.
But command seldom functions to the satisfaction of the commander, and having seized Ephesus – the whole of the town except the citadel, and Antigonus’s commander had offered to surrender the citadel for a large enough bribe – Satyrus had time to kiss Miriam, apologise for getting blood on her chiton, share some babbled inanities, and then Charmides was peeling his thorax off his torso while Miriam and Stratokles – of all people – poured warm water on the chiton where, blood-soaked, it stuck to his body. The wound under his arm was less than a fingertip deep, but the pain was intense and the bleeding periodic.
Even while he stood, almost naked, on the tiled floor of the bathing room of the villa where the Rhodians had been held, officers came to him. First Nikephorus, reporting on the willingness of the citadel to surrender, and then a report from his sister via Coenus, and hard on his heels a delegation of Rhodian officers eager to see with their own eyes that their hostages were free.
About the time that the chiton came free of his skin, Satyrus received the surrender of the citadel and a scouting report from one of Stratokles’ hirelings, a Lesbian mercenary who had taken a party up the road to Magnesia the day before when Nikephorus landed his soldiers. The Lesbian’s mission had been to scout towards Antigonus to prevent surprise – coastal rumour placed One Eye close enough that Satyrus and his commanders wanted to be sure.
Satyrus stared at the man – covered in dust, and with circles under his eyes as if he, not Satyrus, had been fighting – and tried to remember his name. Lykeles? Polycrates? Named after some orator – Isokles?
‘Pericles,’ he said.
The Lesbian bowed – bowed again to Stratokles. ‘My lords,’ he said.
Stratokles was sitting on a stool, carefully washing Satyrus’s wound while Charmides poured wine over his washcloths and Miriam fetched honey. Stratokles looked up from his task.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be a hundred stades away and moving fast? I could swear you promised me that you and your men were the fastest riders in Asia.’ Stratokles raised an eyebrow.
‘Lords, we were sent to find Antigonus – what we found was the wreck of Lysimachos. He’s on the Magnesia road; he’s been defeated by Antigonus and his forces are in rout. He … begs you to receive him.’ Pericles shrugged. ‘His words, lord.’
‘How far behind is Antigonus?’ Satyrus asked.
‘His cavalry is right on Lysimachos,’ Pericles said. ‘I didn’t linger to see the truth of it, lord. I left my second with most of my men up the pass.’
Stratokles nodded. ‘You’ve done well,’ he said. ‘But now I need to know what you gave away.’
Pericles looked stricken. ‘Gave away?’
‘If Lysimachos is begging us for protection, you told him we were here, eh?’ Stratokles asked.
The man flushed. ‘I was picked up by a cavalry patrol,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘My own fault. All I said was that your fleet,’ he inclined his head to Satyrus, ‘was at Lesbos and might come to the coast of Asia.’
Stratokles nodded. ‘Well said. Very well, rest yourself.’ He pointed and Miriam ushered the man out.
‘Lysimachos?’ Satyrus asked. ‘Shouldn’t he be five hundred stades away?’
Stratokles shrugged. ‘He’s a damn good general, despite his behaviour to me. He saw what we saw – that Plistias’s fleet was the key. Hit the Asian cities from the landward side and draw the teeth of the Antigonids – I’ll wager that was his intention. But down here? He’s hopelessly over-committed.’
Satyrus turned, caught Anaxagoras’s eye. ‘I need you to run – run to Melitta. And bring her back. Bring Theron, get any other senior officer you can find. Charmides … Menedemos just passed through to see the hostages. My compliments, and would he please attend me within the hour. My
best
compliments, mind – we’re allies, not overlords.’ He turned to Miriam. ‘Despoina, some rough words are about to be exchanged.’
‘I’ve heard rough words,’ she said, and looked at him carefully, her eyes largely hidden under her brows.
‘Good, I would value your counsel. Right – Stratokles, if you have been in Lysimachos’s pay all along, now’s the time to tell me.’ Satyrus met the Athenian’s gaze, and their eyes locked.
Neither flinched.
Stratokles didn’t look away. ‘He tried to kill me.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘Perhaps. But just by chance, Melitta and I and all our ships and all our troops are here, on the coast of Asia, at just the right moment to save Lysimachos. You’ve served him for two years and you sold him Amastris. See a pattern?’
Stratokles shrugged. ‘I agree. I’ve served him well. But not by intention – by all the gods I swear it.’
‘Listen, Stratokles, in a moment my sister will arrive. Then it will be too late. If you made this happen, tell me. I won’t let anything happen to you.’ Satyrus noticed that he was standing with one arm raised, and this man he didn’t really trust was carefully wrapping a linen bandage around his torso. He felt very vulnerable.
‘Not guilty,’ Stratokles said quietly.
‘I’m having a hard time believing you,’ Satyrus said.
Miriam laughed. ‘How does it matter?’ she asked.
Satyrus looked at her and smiled. ‘Ahh,’ he said. ‘I knew you were more than a pretty face.’
Stratokles took a deep breath. ‘But—’
Miriam put a hand on his arm. ‘I happen to believe you, but in this case, I think your “true” allegiance is meaningless in solving the problem of Lysimachos – at least from Satyrus and Melitta’s point of view.’
‘You believe him?’ Satyrus asked.
‘If he served Lysimachos, he’d have made an excuse to ride with these scouts – and you’d have let him.’ Miriam crossed her arms, suddenly aware as soldiers began to enter that she was the only woman present, dressed in a single layer of linen, with no wrapping under it.
Satyrus examined Stratokles. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘So, give me your views.’
Stratokles nodded. ‘Let me ask – what do you want?’
Satyrus shrugged. ‘Miriam,’ he said. ‘My kingdom of the Bosporus, untrammelled by war.’