Satyrus slipped into the house virtually unseen, by the simple expedient of walking confidently through his own guards and in through the slave’s quarters. The andron was full of officers – Charmides, holding forth on pleasure as a good unto itself, and Diokles, quietly enjoying a cup of wine, Scopasis, his eyes heavy on Melitta, and the queen of the Sakje herself, apparently unaware of how her presence in the andron might affect others, holding forth on naval tactics. At a glance, Satyrus took in that she was a little drunk, and bored – hectoring her audience rather than informing.
He kept going.
He didn’t know the house, but all Hellenic houses had a logic of their own, and somewhere behind the andron and near the kitchen would be a broad set of stairs going up to the women’s quarters. There was a stone tower, visible from outside – remnant of a pre-Hellenic past, perhaps.
The slaves in the kitchen were surprised at his arrival, but unlike the people in the andron, had no real idea who he was. They were, in the main, off duty. A tall, balding man rose from a cup of wine to bow.
‘Lord?’ he said, in Syriac-Greek. His accent wasn’t heavy, sounded educated.
Satyrus raised a hand in benison and managed a smile. ‘I think that the party in the andron needs more wine. Send a man, not a woman, eh?’ He smiled to show he was on their side.
The balding man nodded seriously. ‘There is a woman there, lord. I do not think she is lewd.’
Satyrus didn’t have to push the laugh that came to his throat. ‘Not lewd at all, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s the queen of the Assagetae.’ He laughed at the picture of what his sister would do to a man who thought she was a flute girl.
‘May I have a cup of wine?’ he asked; a young girl sprang to fetch one for him. Of course, he’d interrupted their late dinner – and the looks on every slave’s face showed him what a day they’d had. The city taken; for slaves, that could be a horror beyond the worst imaginings of a free person. The fact that horror hadn’t come to their house had yet to be … proven.
Satyrus took the time to sit with the balding man, who he had picked out as the major domo. ‘You are in charge of the house, I think,’ he said.
‘Yes, lord.’ He inclined his head. ‘I am Phoibos.’
‘Phoibos, I am Satyrus of Tanais. I will see to it that your oikia suffers no harm.’ He accepted a wooden cup of wine.
Phoibos eyed him hesitantly. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said, but his words suggested anything but certainty.
‘Whose house is this, Phoibos?’ he asked.
‘We serve the great Demetrios, son of Antigonus,’ Phoibos said with a certain pride.
Satyrus grinned. ‘Tell him, when you next see him, that I insisted that all his possessions be preserved. If anyone offends against you or any of your people, please inform me yourself. Demetrios and I …’ Satyrus struggled to name their relationship. ‘We are … hetairoi.’
Phoibos gave a sharp nod. ‘Of course, lord.’ He sounded as if he didn’t believe a word.
Satyrus got up. ‘Do you know where the Lady Miriam is?’ he asked. There was no keeping things from slaves, at any time.
Phoibos nodded. ‘She is in her room. Ash, is the Lady Miriam asleep?’
Another young woman came in. She shook her head. ‘Packing,’ she said. ‘In the middle of the sodding night— Oh … your pardon, lord.’ She bobbed a hasty bow.
Satyrus smiled as agreeably as he could manage to the room at large. ‘Please – eat your food. I have a few words to say to Lady Miriam.’
Carrying his wooden cup and led up the stairs by young Ash – Ashniburnipal? Ashlar? Ashnabul? It was a common enough Syria name-prefix – he sipped his wine and went to stand outside her door. His hands were shaking.
‘Thank you,’ he said to the maid, who bowed and hurried back to her dinner.
Satyrus didn’t know whether to knock or simply enter. So he paused, took three deep breaths, and rattled the beads that hung with the door curtain.
‘Come,’ Miriam said, more imperiously than he’d heard her speak to him.
Satyrus went in.
She was standing between two hampers; large wicker baskets – good, solid local work, available for a few obols in the market. One hamper was full.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
‘I came here with nothing,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘I don’t know where all this came from.’
Satyrus smiled. ‘I don’t think of you as acquisitive,’ he said.
She smiled back. ‘You don’t know me at all,’ she said, and then her smile vanished. ‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Miriam,’ he said, and stopped. The silence between them went on and on … uncomfortable, almost unanswerable.
Where is my love of the siege?
he asked. In his head.
‘You are leaving,’ he said, perhaps more harshly than he intended.
‘You might at least have brought me a cup of wine, too,’ she said. She took a deep breath. ‘Yes – yes, I am leaving. Before we do each other a mischief.’
‘I love you,’ Satyrus said. There it was: the wrong thing, said the wrong way, at the wrong time.
She threw a length of linen cloth into a hamper – somewhat at random, he thought. ‘And I love you,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘It is not … material … to the problem.’
Satyrus sighed. ‘The problem that you are a Jew and I a gentile?’
‘You are a king and I am a foreign merchant’s daughter. You are a Hellene and I am not. You are a warrior – I have no time for war. Our … feelings are nothing but the products of a year of siege.’ She sighed. ‘I meant to slip away and spare us both this scene.’
Satyrus sat on her bed. ‘Perhaps I don’t want to be spared,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Satyrus. I have had time to think and …’
She had come close enough that all he had to do was stand and gather her in his arms.
So he did.
‘No!’ she said.
‘Really?’ he said. He let her go, so that they were standing, body to body, but he with his arms relaxed at his sides. ‘Really, no?’
She turned her head away, but her weight continued to rest against his hip.
He sighed. ‘Not only do I love you too much to allow you to slip away, but in addition, I will not allow you to pretend that this is my doing. If you say no again, I will walk away. And when I walk away – it will be away.’
‘Stop!’ she said.
‘No. I have come to say my piece, and I will say it. I, too, have had time to think. What I think is that in my kingdom, there are so many flavours of alien and barbarian that you can be whatever you like. Found a synagogue. Make me a Jew. So I say to you – stop making excuses. If you want me, you should have me. If you don’t want me – I will endure it. I will, almost without fail, find someone else to love – that is the way with men and women, as old Nestor says in the
Iliad
. But please don’t fool yourself with false piety. The gods do not expect us to sacrifice our transitory happiness for some artificial rule – I cannot believe it. What kind of god would make such a demand? I am sorry your father is dead, because alive, I might have brought him round, but dead, he is an insurmountable obstacle.’
Miriam nodded. She reached out and took the wine cup from his hand, and drank most of it. ‘When I left my husband,’ she said. Then she paused. ‘You know I had a husband,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I hated him. Not for some major sin – oh, he was older, and full of himself, but he didn’t beat me. He didn’t sleep with my handmaidens. He gave me money.’ She laughed. ‘He was handsome enough,’ she said. ‘But the thought of spending my life with him chilled my blood. I felt as if I was growing …
smaller
… every day. Less of a person. I wasn’t a person to him – I was a chattel, like his best bronze lamp and his largest warehouse. He only spoke of me as a conduit to my father. He would introduce me as “Ben Israel’s daughter” as if that was a title. He treated me with a dismissive condescension.’ She was shaking, and Satyrus stepped forward again and took her hands.
She stepped away and withdrew her hands.
‘I left him and fled to my father’s house. Remarkably, my mother would have none of me. But my father: he was … not understanding, but yet … on my side.’ She turned away. ‘My father, whose law I was breaking. My mother, who had probably suffered the same at the hands of my father.’
She drank off the rest of the wine.
‘I prayed for him to die. He came to the house and took me back – with the same condescension, as if I had left because I had some female brain fever.’ She couldn’t meet Satyrus’s eyes. ‘I prayed for him to die. And he died.’
Satyrus wished that there was more wine. He couldn’t say anything – that much he knew. Neither to comfort nor remonstrate.
There was turmoil elsewhere in the house. He heard a voice calling his name – it sounded as if it was Apollodorus.
Satyrus.
Satyrus stood. ‘I must be briefer than I intended. Miriam, I am going to make war – to an end. The end. I intend to go to Lysimachos this morning and make him an offer of alliance – and then to back him and Ptolemy until the Antigonids are broken. I have asked your brother to serve. I would ask you to consider either going with your brother, or going to Olbia or Tanais to await the outcome.’
She raised her face. ‘I will never wait again,’ she said. ‘I will be an actor, not the audience.’ She stared at her hands. ‘That much I have learned.’
In her words, Satyrus heard reason to hope. ‘I am a bad man, asking you to come with me to an army camp …’
She shrugged. ‘I will consider it, Satyrus. Go. And if I run to Alexandria … not everyone lives in a play by Menander. If I choose you … Oh, Satyrus, I must give up my whole life to have you. Or I can run back to Alexandria, and all I lose is you. Do you understand?’
Satyrus!
‘All too well, my dear,’ he said. He took her in his arms. ‘Cowardice is easy, is it not? I, too, think,
let her go
. The Euxine is full of beautiful young women who will lie in my bed and give me children and not force me to think about my religion – who will bring me land, cities, even. Dowry, soldiers, horses, grain, perhaps even fame. That is
easy
. But you … you are the thing that is excellent. You are not easy. Merely … better.’
She smiled. ‘Your flattery, sir, is going to be my undoing. And such a very Greek concept.’
Satyrus!
‘I think—’ Satyrus had another argument to make.
‘I think you should shut up,’ Miriam said. She put her mouth on his and breathed his breath, twice, a kiss that sent peals of Zeus-sent lightning through his body, and then she was gone. She pushed him sharply away, and was back at her hampers.
‘Take the cup,’ she said. Her eyes were bright. ‘Wine is
not
what I need.’
He walked into the kitchen to find Phoibos remonstrating with Charmides. Curious: the man had protected him, on no real information.
‘Here I am, Charmides,’ he said.
‘Stratokles needs you,’ the young man said.
Satyrus hurried down the main hall and past the andron. On the porch, Stratokles and his Latin lieutenant, Lucius, stood with a third man.
‘Sorry to wake you, lord,’ Stratokles said. He sounded so smug that Satyrus knew that he was not sorry, nor did he think that Satyrus had been asleep.
‘It is nothing. What’s happening?’ he asked.
‘I have the citadel. I need your say-so to put Apollodorus and your marines in it. Time is of the essence.’ Stratokles looked at Apollodorus, who emerged from the lighted corridor to the dark of the portico, his hair shining under the temple lamp that hung in the arch.
Satyrus nodded. ‘Apollodorus?’ he asked.
‘Ready,’ he said. He had drunk too much – that was obvious.
‘Charmides, go with Apollodorus. Help him.’ He put a hand on the marine’s shoulder.
Apollodorus shrugged. ‘I’m not drunk. Just pissed off. Thought we were
done
.’
Satyrus stayed close to him. ‘Last time pays for all, Apollodorus. We need to see this through – to finish.’
Apollodorus met his glance, and his eyes were hard – they sparkled in the lamplight, remarkably like Miriam’s a few minutes before. ‘A lot of good men will lie face down in the sand – for ever – so that this can finish.’ He belched, and the smell of fish sauce floated across the portico. ‘If we sail away to the Bosporus, these busy gentlemen will just have their war without us. Someone will win, and someone will lose. But we – this pretty boy here, you, me, Anaxagoras, Abraham, Diokles – we’ll all be
alive
. Draco will father some sons. Your Olbians and your men of Tanais – what do they care? And if the winner decides to come after us? So what?’ He looked at Satyrus, and his gaze was as heavy as a branch full of leaves falling in a forest. ‘Your sister? What if she dies? Will it be worth that?’
Satyrus didn’t have an answer. ‘Apollodorus,’ he began.
‘Girl turn you down?’ Apollodorus asked. ‘Nice war to make it all better, eh?’
Satyrus had held his temper a long time, and under a variety of situations, and all of Philokles’ instructions on the subject were starting to wear thin.
‘You are—’ he began.
He had pushed forward into his friend’s face, and the smaller marine didn’t budge by the width of a finger. ‘An arse? You bet,
lord
. I’m not a mutineer. I’ll go. I’ll fight. I might even die. But by all the gods and heroes, and especially by the memory of your father, I have the right to tell you when you are wrong.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t
know
you are wrong. But I think we’re going a campaign too far.’ He stepped back. ‘Had my say. I’ll go to the citadel. Don’t fall in love with this bastard,’ he jerked his thumb at Stratokles, ‘just because you’ve lost the girl.’
He turned to Charmides. ‘Go down to the beach and find the quarter guard. Get them up here – right here in the street, and then wake the next watch and tell them to suck it up. You take command of that watch – understand?’
Charmides snapped a salute.
Apollodorus went back inside.
Lucius laughed. ‘Damn, I like him.’
Satyrus smiled. ‘Me, too. And I reckon I might have had that coming.’
Lucius pushed past. ‘Well, I know the details – I’ll go and brief him.’ He looked pointedly at Stratokles, as if to say ‘see what I do for you?’