Destroyer of Cities

9

South of Chios, a strong south wind lifting the sterns under full sail and no wine fumes in his head, Satyrus was as content as the rich blue sea, speckled with white wave tops spreading away from the sides of his ship like the most fabulous cloak ever imported from distant Qu’in.

Twenty-two ships in three columns. Satyrus led the centre column in Arete, because she was the heaviest ship, and the slowest. To starboard, Leon led his own column and to port, Panther’s Amphytrite, the longest ship on the seas, a quadreme built with extra oars on length rather than breadth in a manner that only Rhodes, so far, had used to build a ship. Satyrus admired Amphytrite every time his eyes fell that way, rather in the way that even the politest of men may admire the breasts of a beautiful woman without meaning to stare.

Ahead, Leon’s scout-pentekonter had warned them, lay Dekas with forty-four triremes and a pair of heavy penteres as big as Arete. Satyrus rubbed his beard and looked at Neiron, who was fiddling with the stern starboard war engine.

Twice, they’d practised while under way — both times sending the faster hemiolas forward with floating targets, which they engaged — well, tried to engage — as they floated by. Satyrus didn’t think that they’d scored a single hit, but the value of a small farm had been shot away in iron-tipped bolts. Neiron continued to pronounce the weapons useless, but likewise he continued to tinker with them.

‘Hull up!’ came a call from forward.

Satyrus gave up trying to attract Neiron’s attention. He walked forward from the helm — gone were the days when he needed to take the helm himself — to the midships command deck.

Apollodorus saluted. ‘Bow reports enemy in sight,’ he said. With both the mainsail and foresail fully drawn and the wind astern, no one could see anything over the bow except the men in the forward marine towers. Satyrus had noted that the Rhodians — innovators, every one of them — now had little baskets like nests attached to their standing masts, and men in them — lookouts raised a little farther above the surface of the sea, giving their masters a little more warning of peril.

Satyrus walked forward on the broad deck, ducked under the foresail and climbed the ladder to the forward fighting tower. It was very different from a trireme. Arete had never been in action, and Satyrus wondered if all this money was boyish folly. Big ships were no guarantee of victory, and could just be a slower, larger target.

Up the ladder and into the forward tower — and there, already hull up along the horizon, Satyrus could see the enemy. He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched them for as long as his eyes could stand the sun dazzle, and then turned away.

‘They’re all there,’ he said to Apollodorus. Behind him Helios came up into the tower. Satyrus let him look for a moment.

‘Put on your armour,’ he said softly. ‘And get me mine.’

They’d made their plans on the beach at Tenedos, when the scouts brought them word of the enemy. They were outnumbered two to one, and they were going to attack in a most unorthodox manner. A manner that would put Arete at great risk.

It was all a matter of timing, luck and the will of the gods, and Satyrus climbed down from the tower with a tension in his arms and legs that was not quite physical fear but perhaps fear of miscalculation, excitement, even joy, all communicated through his muscles.

Helios and Charmides helped him into his armour. Today he wore it all: heavy bronze breastplate and back, a pair of heavily worked greaves, thigh guards and arm guards and shoulder pauldrons of heavily tooled bronze, and Demetrios’ silver-worked helmet on his head with a mixed crest of red, black and white. Before he took up his gold-plated aspis, he went to the rail with a heavy gold cup full of the best Chian wine, and he raised it high.

‘Poseidon, Lord of Horses and of all the deeps, lend us your strength, protect our frail bodies from filling our lungs with your salt water, protect our poor thin hulls from the dangers of sea and ram, and allow us to fly on the face of the sea with the speed of your own horses.’ Satyrus poured the good red wine into the sea and then flung the cup, the value of a small ship, into the water. ‘For you, Sea God.’

His sailors murmured in appreciation. A rich sacrifice like that — a sacrifice that even a king would have to notice — was the best way to propitiate the touchy god of the waves. He heard Polycrates, the notoriously carping sea lawyer on number three oar, mutter ‘That’s right’ in his dreadful accent, and he knew he’d done the right thing — although the cup had been a gift from his sister, and was his favourite.

Satyrus felt calmer in his gut and in his muscles after the libation, and he stood amidships, blind to the movements of the enemy and content to look unworried. Apollodorus would tell him if they manoeuvred, and messengers came aft from time to time, nodding or saluting and passing the word.

‘Enemy is forming line, lord,’ said the first messenger.

‘Enemy line is formed — two lines,’ said the second, a thousand heartbeats later.

‘Enemy lines formed and now a crescent, tips forward like a new moon,’ said the third messenger. His demeanour suggested to Satyrus that they were close.

Satyrus had his own rules of conduct, and one was that he must not show his nerves to his men. So now that combat was close enough to make the messengers nervous, he walked forward with the dignity of a priest, climbed the ladder and looked out over the sea.

In the time a man might run a six-stade race, everything had changed. As reported, the enemy was formed in a broad, deep crescent with the horns well forward, and their intent to envelop was as clear as the beautiful day.

Satyrus looked across at Leon, still in the stern of his beautiful Golden Lotus, and he looked to port and saw Panther watching him from Amphytrite. He waited several long minutes there, standing on the forward tower, looking back and forth and willing the ships around him to keep their places and not show their hands.

When the lead three ships were all but even with the far-flung horns of the enveloping crescent — and how prescient Leon seemed now, as the older Numidian had predicted that Dekas would use just this formation — Satyrus raised his aspis and waved it back and forth, so that the high sun caught the golden face and it shone like fire.

The effect was almost instantaneous, and very like the result of a boy kicking a hornet’s nest that has fallen in the road. The rearwards ships of all three columns — every ship after the leaders, in fact, nineteen ships in all — turned like dancers, or greyhounds, and, crossing the wind, headed out to the flanks. It might have been chaos — in fact, Satyrus watched with his pulse blundering against his throat.

Leon’s second ship shaved the stern of Black Falcon close enough to splinter an oar — but there were no other accidents, and the knucklebones of war were flung in the face of the gods.

Satyrus realised that he was wearing a grin so ferocious that it split his face. ‘By the gods,’ he said to the air around him.

He leaped over the rail from the fighting tower to the main deck, landed like an athlete in the pure joy of the moment and ran amidships, all pretence at dignity lost. He stood under the mainmast, caught his breath and made himself count to ten.

‘Sails down!’ He bellowed. His deck crew had been ready for ten minutes, and the sails shot down to the deck as if their ropes had been cut. He whirled, looking left and right — now he had a clear view of the enemy, already turning inward to close in on him, hunters who had set a trap and knew only one way to trip it. Leon’s plan depended on the pirates having no battle drills that would allow them to switch formation. It was all risk. But informed risk.

As the last of the heavy linen canvas flopped to the deck and the way came noticeably off the ship, Satyrus nodded to his oar master.

‘Ramming speed, if you please,’ he said. He turned to Apollodorus. ‘Commence fire. Concentrate all your bolts on the ships to our flanks.’

‘Waste of money,’ Neiron carped. ‘No — god send I’m wrong.’

‘I need you at the helm,’ Satyrus said. ‘Pick a ship in the middle of their line and take him — bow to bow.’

Neiron nodded grimly. ‘They’re going to be on us like pigs on shit,’ he said.

‘Let’s try to be a greased pig, then,’ Satyrus said.

Forward the first heavy engine fired, the thud of the machine’s loosing communicating itself throughout the whole vessel, so violent was the vibration.

The result, caught in Satyrus’ peripheral vision, was so spectacular that the starboard-side rowers lost the stroke for a moment and the ship shuddered.

Directly to starboard, a stade distant and more, the leading enemy trireme was bow on to Arete and the bolt, guided by Apollo’s hand or Tyche’s, passed over the trireme’s bow and tipped over slightly to vanish into her unprotected oar decks. The body of a man flew up and out of the hull and a spray of blood was visible even at that distance, and the enemy ship suddenly turned sharply — too sharply — to her own port as her starboard-side rowers died as the heavy iron bolt thrashed around their deck. The ship’s unintended turn threw the wounded ship across the bow of a second oncoming pirate ship, and the crash as the one struck the other could be heard clearly over the screams of the trapped rowers.

‘Poseidon’s glory!’ Satyrus said, awed. His gunners hadn’t managed to hit a blessed thing in two days of practice.

The sudden death of a trireme — apparently by a bolt from the heavens — affected the entire pirate fleet, and their ships could be seen to slow all along the starboard wing. The port wing, of course, could see nothing.

All around him the other engines fired, the crash of their release now heartening the crew as the tale of the success of the first shot spread to the rowers who hadn’t seen it. The speed of the ship increased dramatically.

Satyrus glanced around. None of the other bolts had hit a target, but the eddy caused by the first shot had all but paralysed the enemy’s left wing on his starboard side. Dead ahead, an enemy penteres declined to face his ship bow to bow and inclined away, leaving a smaller trireme to face his charge. A flight of arrows from the forward tower of the penteres fell on the deck of the Arete and not on unprotected rowers, and Satyrus held his aspis over Neiron and felt the heavy impacts of two Cretan shafts.

Arete’s bow machine fired into the enemy penteres at a range of less than a stade and didn’t miss — Satyrus thought that the enemy ship must have filled their sights — and the iron bolt raised a shower of splinters where it shattered the rail of the enemy ship and then carried on into the command platform, wheeling through the air, and Satyrus watched as two men in splendid armour were cut in half by the shaft.

Satyrus punched the sky.

The enemy ship carried on, her command deck suddenly silent.

Over the bow, the enemy trireme left to face Arete tried to manoeuvre. Her trierarch had either never fought in line before or he simply lost his head, knowing that he couldn’t go bow to bow with a titan, but his last manoeuvre confused his oarsmen and placed him at an angle to the racing bronze bow of a comparative leviathan. His rowers were good — they followed orders and then ripped their long oars in through the oar ports, used to fighting smaller ships where the danger was the long rip of the beak down the side, snapping loose shafts, killing oarsmen as their oars were crushed.

But his rowers were as wrong as their trierarch. Arete was never a fast ship, and she had her faults, but she was both nimble and heavy, and Neiron, backed by Helios, put all his weight on the steering oars just a horse length from the enemy’s side and their bow moved, perhaps the length of a man’s arm, but the inexorable mathematics of Pythagoras and Poseidon put their massive bronze beak squarely in under the enemy cathead. In a lighter ship, it would have been the perfect oar rake.

Satyrus, with a clear view, was more appalled then elated. Their ram crushed the cathead as if it were made of thin clay and the way on Arete seemed undiminished as she crushed the slim pirate under her forefoot — the top of the ram caught the enemy rail, just as it was designed to do, but instead of tipping the enemy ship, the ram smashed through her, cutting the bow of the enemy craft off like a farmer’s wife snaps the neck of a chicken before a family feast.

The enemy trireme filled with water in ten heartbeats, so fast that Satyrus’ sailors were almost as horrified as their drowning enemies. And then they were gone, sucked beneath the waves so that in later years, Satyrus’ sailors would say that they’d seen Poseidon come and suck the ship under, snatching with a massive hand.

And Arete carried on, still moving faster than she would cruising under oars, as if the death of two hundred men was no great matter for Her Majesty.

‘Poseidon!’ roared Satyrus.

The engines spoke again — doing no further harm, but sowing fear. To port, Panther’s long Amphytrite had rammed the leaderless penteres amidships while to starboard, Leon had chosen to race through the huge gap in the enemy line untouched — and now he would be first into the enemy second line.

Except that the enemy second line had hung back, and rather than launching counter-rams they were breaking and running.

It didn’t seem possible, and Satyrus was too pious to curse success — but the enemy was broken by the daring rush of three heavy ships and didn’t abide the flying trap of the swift Rhodians, Bosporans and Alexandrians racing at their flanks. The sudden destruction of four of their ships shattered any courage they’d brought, and they fled.

‘Cowards!’ Neiron shouted. ‘Damn them! We had them!’

Every man aboard, from the lowest thranite to the navarch, felt the same, but Satyrus restrained them. ‘Give only thanks for victory,’ Satyrus called, and he ran below to repeat his orders on the subject.

To port and starboard, the fastest Rhodians and Alexandrians caught the slowest pirates. Their execution was swift — but so were the rest of the pirates, happy to buy life at the expense of their comrades.

Satyrus’ ship was the slowest in the fleet, and the transition from sudden killer to helpless observer was painful. But there was one more thing he could do, and he did it. He climbed the forward tower and signalled a long-practised set of shield flashes.

‘General pursuit’, he sent.

And then he ordered the Arete turned and the sails raised, in the hope that they could at least keep the fleeing enemy in sight.