Destroyer of Cities

16

‘Sails! Sails to the east! Ten square. . fifty triangles!’ The man sounded as if panic had taken the lower registers of his voice.

Satyrus sprang up the steps into the marine tower without feeling a twinge in his back. Away to the north and east was a great fleet — all their sails up, running east and south on the wild west wind.

Running for the coast of Asia.

Satyrus kept himself still for several long breaths, counting sails. The closest squadron was hull up — big ships, and in a crisp formation, and he guessed that these were the squadron of penteres that had faced down Menelaeus. Beyond were two more squadrons of triangles, hull down, and perhaps another further. And at least twenty merchant ships — and more away to the north.

Satyrus looked away to the west, away from the enemy. A line of squalls all the way to the horizon.

Helios climbed up the ladder. ‘Neiron asks, how many and what are we doing?’

Satyrus managed a smile. ‘I’m sure he put it in a more direct way than that.’

Anaxagoras came up the tower, the kithara still in his hand. ‘Sex acts were mentioned,’ the musician laughed.

Helios handed his master an apple. ‘You haven’t eaten, lord.’

Satyrus took the apple and ripped at it with his teeth. He looked at the enemy fleet, which now filled the horizon. Then he looked back at the squalls.

‘Let’s take this aft,’ he said, and by the time he reached Neiron at the helm, he’d made up his mind.

‘We’re going to fight in the storm,’ Satyrus said.

Everyone nodded — even Neiron.

Despite the fact that no one demurred, Satyrus felt he had to explain. ‘We’re going to get caught in the wind, anyway,’ he said. ‘The crews are as good as they’ll ever be. And if we can hit them this afternoon, any ship we even damage is dead in the night.’

Neiron nodded. ‘But no ramming, and no boarding,’ he said.

‘That’s it,’ Satyrus said. ‘Oar rakes, archers, the engines if we can get them to work. And fear. Don’t forget fear.’ He looked around, and they seemed confident. He was proposing to fight a galley action in a storm and they looked like they agreed.

He nodded, chewed the last bite of his apple and threw the core over the side. ‘Line ahead. We’ll row another half an hour, get the foresails up and run free — oar ports closed. Arete in the lead. If we do it well, we should come in behind the penteres and right into the grain ships.’ He smiled at them; he felt few of his usual pre-battle fears. He grinned. ‘Because, my friends, this is about grain. Burn the grain, and Antigonus can’t invade Aegypt.’

‘For grain!’ Anaxagoras shouted. Despite his obvious irony, the other men answered.

An hour later, under foresail alone, and still it took two men to keep Arete to her course, one on each steering oar, so great was the pressure of the speed. Oinoe was just astern, and now the rest were lost in the spray, and the storm line was so near astern that it would be a close race whether Satyrus came up with the grain ships ahead before the storm, with all the rain it seemed to hold, came crashing up behind.

All the ships were running the same way — east, towards the coast of Asia. But the enemy’s supply ships were slower, even under sail and with the wind dead astern, than the slim warships, most of which had raised their mainsails and raced ahead. To the south, a pair of penteres loomed like sea monsters in the grey light. Beyond them were other ships, south and west.

Satyrus’ hulls were smooth from the yards and dry, and for once it was he who had the speed advantage — an advantage that was as clear as the waning day as Arete caught up with the trailing grain ship like an Olympic runner overtaking a fat man.

‘Light the fire pots,’ Satyrus ordered. He was literally playing with fire. ‘Poseidon, forgive me the use of this foreign flame on your sea — my need is desperate.’ He had nothing to hand to offer as a personal sacrifice.

The grain ship was a merchant — probably Tyrian — with rounded sides like a wooden soap bubble, virtually storm-proof. She had two tall masts, with only a scrap of linen set on the foremast. The captain gave Satyrus a wave as he drew alongside assuming, as so many others had, that Satyrus was from his escort.

Neiron barked an order, and the Arete’s bow swung a few degrees. The oars were in, and the big penteres’ marine tower matched the grain ship’s side for height. The best athletes — Anaxagoras, Charmides, Necho — threw fire pots across the few feet of water, and then they were past, their port-side engines and all their archers firing into the helpless ship. The wicked west wind whipped the coals to flames that seemed to explode from the wounded ship’s bow as her captain sank to the deck with one of Idomeneus’ barbed shafts in his throat.

Every ship in the squadron fired into the hapless grain ship, but the damage was done — she broached, cutting across the wind, her helm empty.

Two more ships fell in quick succession, and then the enemy began to respond the way fish respond to a pod of dolphins — the grain ships began to scatter, throwing their helms wildly to port or starboard, choosing the perils of crossing the wind against the immediate and definite threat of the ships coming up so fast from astern, but the wind had risen to a gale behind them and the edge of the storm was a palpable thing, somewhere just aft of Wasp.

Satyrus watched a grain ship roll — too much canvas, too wild a turn. She rolled to port, her rail went under the water and Poseidon took her — just like that. Gone.

He turned to Neiron. ‘Done. And worth it: if we all go to the bottom now, Aegypt is safe.’

Neiron made a face. ‘That makes it worth it?’

And then the storm hit.

As men told the story in later years, it wasn’t much of a battle, as battles went. None of Satyrus’ ships received as much as a single arrow. It was more like the storming of a city — ugly work, a massacre of the almost innocent.

But war is an ugly tyrant, and the tactics of terror and death were the only tactics that Satyrus had left. His ships pounced out of the storm like sharks on whitefish, like furies avenging an insult to the gods, and every ship they forced to turn out of the wind died.

As battles went, it was more like a massacre.

But as a storm, it was quite a storm. Men talked about the storm for the rest of their lives, those that lived.

No one on Wasp lived. A freak cross wave caught Wasp before night fell, rolled her too far and the ruthless wind served her and her two hundred rowers as the Athenian grain ships had been served — with death, no reprieve, for Sarpax and all his crew. Satyrus saw them go, and something harsher than rage — something like fault choked him. Losing men he liked to Ares was the stuff of war, but the sea was cleaner and worse — two hundred men in between breaths.

No one on Ramses lived. Ramses was just astern of Oinoe when the light failed, riding west under a scrap of sail, and they died so close astern that the men at Arete’s helm heard them scream as a wave filled them, or as some plank failed, or the bow split against wreckage or a floating log. Poseidon had a thousand ways to take a man down, and Dionysus went to the bottom with his men.

And when the sun rose somewhere over Asia, too close under their bows, so that they could see the surf in the first light, the others were gone. Arete ran west until there was no more water, and the sea behind her wake was empty of life. Neiron conned the ship close to the beach, stripped the last scrap of canvas at the edge of the surf and ran the great vessel ashore ram first, taking his chances with the sea god to keep his men alive, ignoring the king’s protests in his ear. And under the lash of Neiron’s anger, Satyrus leaped into the water with his deck crew and his marines and oarsmen and hauled and hauled again until the penteres was clear.

Not every ship had been so lucky. There were wrecks on the beach, ships which had run ashore in the dark and died there. Satyrus counted four wrecks on this beach alone. He had to visit them. He walked, alone, from wreck to wreck. None was his.

Men started fires.

Men cooked food.

The sea was empty. By noon the sun emerged and the wind, the killer west wind that had sent a thousand men and more to crawl the sea bottom with Amphitrite, lungs full of water, finally died away, and the sea was the deep blue of innocence: it was as empty as a drunkard’s purse.

Satyrus walked off by himself, sat on a rock and wept.

Neiron came up.

Satyrus looked up, uncertain.

‘Well?’ Neiron asked. ‘Was it worth it? Because you lost them all.’

The older man turned on his heel and walked away.

GAZA, PALESTINE

Antigonus One-Eye didn’t need an ivory stool to look important. He was sitting on an iron stool with a pair of fleeces on it, and his shoulders were as square as those of a man of fifty. Or thirty. He was eighty.

His son came in. He did not look himself: his hair was pale and dry, not the flame of gold it usually seemed. He had circles under his eyes like bruises, and his skin looked more like a waxen image than the skin of an active man.

‘A chair for the King of Aegypt,’ Antigonus said to a slave.

Demetrios laughed. ‘Ptolemy is the King of Aegypt, Pater.’ A slave put a cup of wine in his hand and he drank the whole cup.

‘May the gods curse him!’ Antigonus shouted. ‘What have I done to be treated so by Tyche?’ He looked like an outraged falcon, and Demetrios rose and embraced his father.

‘Pater — it’s the will of the gods.’ He wrapped his arms around the old man.

‘I spit on the gods!’ Antigonus shouted. ‘Whores and bastards! Two years of work lost in a storm! A storm! Aegypt was lying naked, waiting for me to plough her!’

Demetrios wondered if his pater was losing his wits. He hugged the old man harder. ‘Pater — Pater. No hubris.’

‘This, from you? Who claims to be a god incarnate?’ The old man hadn’t lost his wits. He managed a laugh. He stroked his son’s hair, then pushed him away. ‘A curse on the lot of them, then. We must start again. If I don’t order the retreat tonight, I’ll lose good men — Macedonians — in a few days. The swamp here is putrid — the miasma is from Tartarus, and men are sickening already. Wait until you’ve spent a night here — the mosquitoes are worse than Parthians. Worse than the cursed Sakje.’

Demetrios drank a second cup of wine. ‘No reproof? It was me, Pater, who said I could supply you from the sea.’

‘Bah,’ Antigonus said. ‘You gathered the ships you promised. Even that harlot, Athens, did her part. And you beat Ptolemy at Cyprus — I gather Menelaeus surrendered, that arse-cunt.’

‘As soon as his brother’s ships were over the horizon,’ Demetrios said. ‘My only success of the summer, I fear.’

‘How many ships have we left?’ Antigonus asked.

‘At least one hundred. All the big ones — they weathered the storms best. Perhaps more — in truth, the biggest mistake I made was to give a different rendezvous from Plistias. I don’t really know what I have left. Neither does he. They will be spread from Syracuse to Tyre now.’

‘And Ptolemy?’ Antigonus asked.

‘Fewer.’ Demetrios lay back on the bed. ‘You know who actually worked to defeat us, Pater?’

‘Poseidon?’ Antigonus asked.

‘Satyrus of Tanais. He almost had me at Cyprus.’ Demetrios grinned. ‘I like him. I want to kill him in single combat.’

‘Son, sometimes when men tell me that you are mad, I’m tempted to believe them. We do not fight in single combat. We win empires.’ Antigonus snapped his fingers for more wine. ‘I’d wish I could trade Satyrus for one of our useless allies, though. Why do we get Heraklea when Ptolemy gets Tanais? Eh? I can’t trust Dionysus of Heraklea as far as I can throw him. And as he’s fatter than Milos, that’s not far.’ The old man spat.

‘We’ll have the winter to rally the fleet,’ Demetrios said. He was staring at the silk tapestry hanging from the ceiling of the tent.

‘If you can keep the fucking Rhodians from putting more troops into Alexandria, we can be right back here in spring,’ the old man said. ‘A curse on all the gods. Fuck their mothers. I was right up into the forts on the river, you know that? And he’s all but lined the bank with artillery. One of his engines killed an elephant. If the storm hadn’t come up, you could have turned his flank at sea-’

‘If wishes were bread, beggars would never go hungry. Pater — let me take the fleet and go for Rhodes.’ Demetrios shot off the bed, suddenly filled with energy. ‘Rhodes is the key. Aegypt will stand or fall with Rhodes — and Rhodes is the easier nut to crack.’

‘Rhodes is a boil on our behind. Aegypt is the key to the world.’ Antigonus stared into his son’s blue eyes and wondered how he had ever fathered such a handsome boy.

‘Lance the boil,’ Demetrios said. ‘Lance the boil, and you’ll have the key.’

Antigonus puffed up his cheeks and then blew out suddenly. ‘My gut aches and my insides turn to water,’ he said. ‘My legs hurt all the fucking time. Half my nights, my little Persian girl can’t get my rod stiff with a barrel of olive oil and the best breasts in the Eastern Ocean. I hate being old, and the only good thing about my age is that it is better than death.’ Antigonus looked at his golden, marvellous son. ‘You know what keeps me alive?’

‘Love for the gods?’ Demetrios asked.

‘You, and dominion. And gods-cursed Ptolemy. I hated him when he was Alexander’s butt-boy and I want him under my heel now. Before I’m dead. I want Aegypt.’

‘The road to Aegypt is through Rhodes,’ Demetrios said.

Antigonus wrapped his son in his still strong arms. ‘Do it, then. Lance the boil. Get me the key, whatever image appeals to you, boy, but get it soon.’

Demetrios smiled over his father’s shoulder, and in his head, the cogs and wheels that drove his planning began to whirl.

‘It will be incredible,’ he said.