Destroyer of Cities

17

Kineas of Athens, rendered in bronze, the whites of his eyes pure gold, the pupils lapis, stood in the dressing room of the gymnasium, a slim staff of vine in his hand. When he spoke, his teeth shone in shining silver inside his mouth against his bronze tongue.

Satyrus was mesmerised by the effect. But the words his father spoke were clear and businesslike, heavy with import. Satyrus leaned forward, trying to listen, but the play of light on his father’s metal face distracted him again, and filled his eyes so that he soared away like a child avoiding his lessons, daydreaming of flight, of the sky, of clouds-

Satyrus! Pay attention! Philokles’ voice: the sharp ‘I mean it’ voice of a sober, angry tutor. Satyrus cringed in expectation of the teacher’s rod across his shoulders and he sat straighter.

He turned his head, and Philokles was standing behind him, also rendered in precious metals — the very statue that had just been delivered in Tanais, now animated. And sitting behind him, where Xenophon had always sat for lessons in Alexandria, was Stratokles the Informer, who looked every bit as terrified of Philokles as Xenophon had.

There were other boys: he saw Demetrios the Golden off to his left, and could the round-headed boy be Panther of Rhodes? But now the stick struck him with all of Philokles’ accustomed force; pain leaped through his body, not from the back but from the lungs, and he had blood on his chest.

Satyrus! Pay attention!

Is he going to die? Srayanka asked. His mother was beautiful — her hair was carved from a black stone and it hung free, beautifully combed, as it did when he was a boy, on the rare occasions when she dressed as a Greek woman.

I guarantee it! Philokles said with a snort. He’s mortal, is he not? And death is the required condition of all mortals, is it not? The tutor’s rod struck his back again, and more blood fountained from his mouth across his chest.

Do you spend so much time with your father that you can ignore him when he speaks? Philokles asked.

Satyrus looked at his father, and was fascinated by the play of light on his father’s golden eyes. He forced himself to listen to the lecture, ignoring the host of questions that beat at the doors to his mind-

How can my dead father be speaking in the gymnasium of Alexandria?

How can a statue speak?

Who has allowed my mother, a woman, into the gymnasium? Is she, too, not dead?

Why is Stratokles here? Where is Xenophon? He is dead. He should be here. But I am here — am I dead?

Is this death?

The rod struck him again, forcing him forward, coughing and coughing, and with every cough more blood flowed out of his mouth — gouts of it. Finally, exhausted, he fell backwards.

Xenophon caught him, as he had so often done at lessons.

You should listen, Satyrus!

Satyrus lay back with his head on his friend’s legs and watched his father, the statue.

His father looked down at him and smiled.

So glad I finally have your attention, lad.

It was as if he could see himself. Zeus Sator, he looked bad — blood all over his bedclothes, eyes rolling — Apollo! His eyes were as yellow as the golden eyes of the statues!

He was in a room that looked familiar, and the room was full of people who looked familiar, but just at that moment, Satyrus couldn’t put names to the actors or to the place, and he just floated, watching as the dark-haired woman washed the blood off his chest, as the old woman forced something down his throat, as two young men stood by, watching with the helpless eagerness of men who don’t know how to do anything useful.

The old woman completed her task and shook her head.

‘He’s going,’ she said. The woman paused and rolled her head, flexed the muscles in her shoulders. ‘I said he’s going, child. Let him go. Leave the washing of the body for the corpse-cleaners.’

The dark-haired woman kept washing, her hands moving with a fierce determination. Satyrus, even from so far away, could read that this woman intended to wash him clean — clean of death, if only she could.

Satyrus winced to see his body, which was so thin — where was his muscle? Where was his strength? His arms were like sticks, his legs like a woman’s legs. He wished his eyes would close and hide the hideous yellow.

‘He is not dead yet,’ said the younger woman.

The old woman looked at the men. ‘Get us some water — as cold and fresh as may be.’ They hurried from the room, and the young woman’s eyes widened.

‘You have thought of something?’ she asked. To say that her eyes glimmered with hope would be to suggest too much. Perhaps, thought Satyrus, this is what the hope of a hope looked like.

He wished that he could remember this woman’s name, as she was very devoted to him, and he wished that he could reward that devotion. For himself, he wouldn’t have touched that body with a sword.

I am a ruin, he thought. Let me die — I would never wish to live like that.

The old woman shrugged. ‘No, dear. I just wanted them out of the room. I am going to give him poppy juice.’

‘But-’ The younger woman shook her head. ‘You said-’

And the older woman managed a smile. ‘You are a good girl. Two months ago, when we were fighting the disease with a strong body, I feared to take him back to — to his addiction. Now, I seek only to let him die easy. There will be no addiction for him where he is going.’

The girl turned on the old woman, and Satyrus could see that she was not a girl, but a grown woman. And not his sister. He had rather hoped that she was his sister. He loved his sister — and that feeling, that love, the loss of Melitta, wherever she was, rolled over him like a wave and snuffed him out like a lamp.

The siege is the deadliest form of war for both the soldier and the citizen. The siege is the only battle where women and slaves are soldiers; the only battlefield where men, not the gods, create the terrain; only in the siege can a man be forced to fight all day, sleep, rise and fight again. Armies that undertake long sieges are often ruined and never useful as an army again. Cities that survive a siege may die of exhaustion; cities that are taken in a siege are sacked — the laws of war that protect the captive and the ransomed are as nothing because an army that lays siege to a city must take risks, gambles and hideous casualties to accomplish their goal, and as a consequence, when that army is victorious, they take their revenge. Every man is killed — free or slave, noble or thetis. Temples are looted and burned, and it is reckoned no impiety. Women are raped — not once, but again until their minds are broken, and then they are sold as slaves, to work another’s loom and another’s bed until they die.

And yet, by the same remorseless laws that dictate that the victorious besiegers will act like animals and sack the town, the town itself will use any device, any stratagem, any tactic no matter how reckless to avoid the sack. They will bribe, coerce, seduce; squander their citizens in sorties to burn the enemy camp, turn the slaves from the town and watch them starve beneath the walls, old family retainers and all. They will sacrifice citizens like the priests sacrifice goats, and count the cost light. Because defeat means extinction, degradation, horror and death.

And this contest is conducted with every science that men have ever developed, with all the passion that the gods gave to men for better things, with the ruthlessness that men ought to save to fight beasts. Well might old Plato say that to see the worst that men might make of themselves, you need only watch the siege of a city.

But today we will discuss how it is best to take a city, and how it is best to defend a city. I have done both. And to aid you in this consideration, I will use what Philokles has taught you of the body, and I will ask you to use the body as a model of the city — I am hardly original in this, as Plato and Aristotle are both there before me.

How does illness attack the body? I will argue that it can attack in two ways, just like a besieger. It can come forward by stealth. After carefully scouting the body, it can attempt to seize the body by a sudden assault on the gates — taking a side gate of a postern, perhaps, in a brilliant rush at the break of dawn while the body’s sentries are asleep. And in rushes the contagion, and the body’s defences never have a chance to respond before the healer can pray to the gods or administer the least medicine; before a bath can be prepared to wash, the citadel has fallen to the deadly swift disease and the man is a cooling corpse. Have we not seen this?

But the swift onset of the secret force will seldom triumph in the taking of a city. As a besieger, it must be tried — even at the cost of losing the picked men of your army, the savings in blood and gold of such an attempt is almost incalculable. Never, when you are commanders, allow yourself to count the loss of such a picked group against the possibility of success. If a city must fall — if that is the objective of your campaign — there is no personal price you should not be willing to pay short of impiety or immorality in the taking of the city.

I lost my hyperetes — my oldest friend, as well — in the taking of a citadel. I mourned him but I counted the cost as light.

Likewise, if you find yourself defending a city, you must be prepared from the outset for a swift assault on your gates by secret forces. You must assume that every suggestion of parley cloaks an attack. From the first suggestion that a siege may be undertaken, you must change the guards on the gates regularly, and also change the officers who hold towers, assuming, always, that every man can be bribed. This is a caustic way to deal with your fellow citizens, but everything about a siege is caustic. Many will die, and many things and ideas will die that we hold dear — love dies of hunger as much as of disease, and honour is all too frequently sacrificed or lost, because the siege is not a one-day battle that shows the best in the best men, but an endless contest that gives every mind the opportunity to show its darkest excess.

But let us consider what happens when the secret force has failed. In an attack on the body, the disease now settles down to a siege of the citadel. Already, the disease has a lodgement — has hold of some part of the body. A wound, perhaps, that becomes enflamed, or the fever that sprouts from bad air or miasma. This sort of disease cannot win the citadel in a single attack — the human is much too strong, unless already eroded by bad food, little sleep, no exercise, age, infirmity, or other diseases — just like a city that survives the initial assault will last a long time, unless already weakened by internal strife, military defeat, weak governance, starvation and the like. So the disease must work carefully. It must undermine the walls of health by wrecking the body’s sleep; by fatiguing the muscles while stifling exercise; by raising and lowering the temperature of the body to simulate an adverse climate, stimulating dreams that wreck the moral fibre and destroy the will of the body to resist, exactly as the besieger will seek to send spies and spread false reports.

And when the body is sufficiently weak, it will fall. Or it should fall. Sometimes the body comes with an exceptional defender — the will. And the will can command the defences like a tyrant commands his bodyguard. Tyrants are poor rulers, in many cases, but they are often the toughest nut to crack in a siege because they have the will to resist to the very end. If the mind has this singleness of purpose, it may resist the disease to the point where the disease itself dies. Likewise, a city that does not lose its wits, that remembers the cost of failure, that has the will of a tyrant even if the city is a democracy, may endure, and break the besieger.

Another day I will speak more on tactics — on how to reinforce a gate, on how to construct a tower, on how to use hot sand or molten lead, on how to construct a secret tunnel. But I have spoken enough for today — there are some among you who are ready to sleep.

Satyrus, I say this to you. If you wish to live, then live.

With those words ringing in his ears, Satyrus awoke.

Perhaps it was wrong to say that Satyrus awoke. He emerged from the dream of his father — a dream built with colours more vivid than the waking world, with statues that talked and the souls of dead men — to a world much more like the world he inhabited every day, with the exception that he saw it from a distance, as if for the first time. There, in the bed, lay his emaciated body.

Helios — he knew the boy immediately — dozed in a chair. The bossy woman with the iron-grey hair was asleep on a kline under a grand window. Outside, the sun shone brilliantly over the harbour of the town, and the work on the walls continued unabated. Across the harbour, tied to the new wharf, Arete rode at her moorings, the tallest ship in the harbour of Rhodes.

So I am at Rhodes, Satyrus said to himself.

The long-legged woman of his earlier dream came into the room with a small lekythos, from which she poured white milk into a cup. Satyrus could smell the poppy juice as soon as she poured it, and he longed for it as soon as he smelled it.

She took a small bone spoon and put some in his mouth. He wondered that she could bear even to touch him — he looked like a corpse. His head seemed to have grown out of all proportion to his body, and his shoulders — once heavy with muscle — were all bones.

‘What shall I tell you today?’ she began, and something in her voice told him that this was a habit — an old habit. How long has she been talking to me? A week? A month? Two months?

‘Demetrios has two hundred and twenty ships gathered at Miletus, or so Panther says. He comes here often, he and Memnon. No one here has forgotten what you did for us, Satyrus.’ Her voice was gentle, and she took his hand and ran one of her fingers up the middle of his palm. ‘They say he is bound here, on the first good wind of spring — with forty thousand men in transport ships. So the whole city makes preparations for the siege, and oh, how my brother wishes for your recovery!’

She bent down and kissed his brow. ‘Everyone asks after you, King Satyrus.’ Then she rose, and walked quietly across the tiled room, edging carefully around Helios. At the door she spoke, and her tone was different — Satyrus saw that she was speaking to a scroll hanging on the wall.

‘Would it be so much, O high and lonely god, to let this man live?’ she said, addressing the scroll.

Never take that tone with the gods, Satyrus wanted to admonish her, for she sounded bitter, angry and reproachful, like a young child who has discovered the fallibility of her parents.

Helios awoke with a start. ‘Mistress Miriam?’ he asked.

Miriam.

She stepped back into the room. ‘I’m sorry, Helios.’

‘Gods, Despoina, it is I who should be sorry. I should be awake.’ Helios rubbed his eyes. ‘He was calling out last night — calling to his father and to Philokles, and coughing blood again.’ Helios looked over at the old woman lying on the kline. ‘Aspasia no longer believes that he will live. Am I. . right?’

Miriam made a face. She was not old enough to act the matron, but she tried, controlling her emotions as best she could. ‘You are right. She may also. . be right.’ Miriam sagged against the door jamb and rubbed her eyes. ‘No man should be able to live so long without food. But I am giving him poppy, and so is Aspasia. It will ease his end. . or allow him to eat.’

‘He has a strong will,’ Helios said with the careful deliberation of the young who have come to great knowledge. ‘He will not die easily. And yet. . Oh, Despoina. He blamed himself for all the ones lost in the storm. Anaxagoras says that, not the miasma, brought this on.’

‘Anaxagoras believes that he can be healed with music,’ Miriam replied. She sighed. ‘And yet Anaxagoras is full of wisdom, too. Why are we all so wise, and none of us can save him?’

Lost in the storm echoed in his mind. Yes. Diokles, Sarpax, Akes, Dionysus. How many ships lost? Seven? And all their crews? Fifteen hundred men lost because he felt that he had to-

It had to be done. Am I just defending myself from the charge of rashness? Or do I actually believe it had to be done?

I lost my hyperetes — my oldest friend, as well — in the taking of a citadel. I mourned him but I counted the cost as light. His father had said that. In a dream.

The body on the bed twitched and started, and Satyrus fell from above into the corpse’s eyes — down long tunnels-

Philokles sat between two men that Satyrus knew only from statues — Socrates and Arminestos, the family hero. The Plataean who had saved Greece. All three were immortal in bronze and gold, wearing chitons of marble. Behind them stood the chryselephantine statue of Athena Nike.

Philokles leaned over the table in front of him. Satyrus didn’t dare turn his head, but he thought that they must be in Athens, of a sudden — in the Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis. No idea why.

‘You charge yourself with the loss of fifteen hundred men,’ Philokles said. ‘Do you really wish a full examination? Or will you merely wallow in guilt for a time, and then wall that guilt away?’

‘An unexamined life is not worth living,’ Socrates said. ‘Let the trial be a fair one.’

‘Any commander who wastes his time counting the corpses of his friends isn’t worth a shit,’ Arimnestos said. ‘All this sentimentality will only make you weak.’ He, in turn, leaned over the table. ‘Unless you just squandered them, eh? That’s shameful. Men have lives — even slaves. Even oarsmen. Perhaps not as worthy as ours, but they aren’t there to be squandered.’

‘Let the boy speak,’ Socrates said gently. ‘Listen, boy. Once we start down this path, you will try yourself, and if you find yourself wanting, it will be far worse than the fools who ordered me to drink hemlock.’ He snorted. ‘No man can run from himself. Nor does any man need to account himself wise for knowing that the worst furies are one’s own.’

Philokles had a pair of dividers in his hand. ‘Come,’ he said, just as he had when he had summoned a much younger Satyrus to give him an answer in geometry. ‘Come — will you try the case?’

Satyrus sat up. ‘I will.’

Arimnestos laughed. ‘Then I am ready with my verdict.’

Socrates nodded. ‘Yes, boy. I, too, am ready.’

Satyrus felt as if he’d been struck by a storm. ‘But — the evidence!’

Philokles nodded. ‘Is complete. Listen, boy — it’s all in your head.’ He gave one of his rare grins to Arimnestos. ‘I would hate to have to tell his father that he was found guilty.’

Arimnestos nodded respectfully to Philokles and then turned to Satyrus. ‘You, lad, are rash.’

Socrates nodded. ‘Over-bold. Foolish. Given to taking risks because you believe that you can overcome them with luck and planning.’

Philokles nodded. ‘In fact, it is this very talent — the ability to take an enemy at a rush, to make a plan on the fly, calculate the risk and overcome it in your head — that is at risk in this tribunal. Having lost fifteen hundred men, will you ever trust yourself again?’

Socrates nodded. ‘Exactly.’ He glanced at Philokles. ‘You say you are from Sparta?’

Philokles shrugged. ‘It’s true.’

‘Hmm,’ Socrates said. ‘An educated Spartan. Still, the world is wide and no man in it has the knowledge of the gods, or even of other men.’ He ran his fingers through his beard. ‘Listen, boy. When I made my stand at Delium — when young Alcibiades rescued me — I lost my two closest friends, because when I stood, they stood. And later, men all but worshipped me as a living hero — and I believed the men. And yet, I knew that I killed my Nikeas and my Cassander as surely as if I’d taken my kopis to their necks. And yet I was sure — with all the surety of the young — that I was doing the right thing. The moral thing. The thing that Achilles would have done.’ Socrates shrugged. ‘They haunted me all my days, of course. Even while I remained sure. In fact, I could say that their ghosts made me Socrates the Sophist. I had to search for answers.’

Arimnestos looked at Socrates and smiled — not a very nice smile. ‘I’m sure that all that sophistry does you honour,’ the warrior said. ‘I lost friends the way children lose toys. What of it? Always for me the place to fight was wherever the fight was thickest — gods, how I loved it. And if my friends would follow me there — follow me to where Ares danced — then they would die, many of them. Was it my fault? I’m no madman, Satyrus. I worried about it like any commander worth two farts. But I didn’t worry too much. When the bronze rings and the iron shines, you kill or you are killed. And afterwards, you make what peace with yourself you can, or you go’ — the warrior looked at the sophist — ‘goat-fucking mad.’ He shrugged. ‘Or you lose your touch of the divine and become an animal.’

Philokles made a face. ‘Satyrus, I sit between these two for a reason, as you, who were always a bright boy, can easily guess. Now — please. What is your verdict?’

Satyrus looked out of the temple — and he saw the shades of thousands of men. There was Ataelus and there was Samahe, and Philokles himself, and the Sarmatian girl he’d shot, the first person he’d knowingly killed, and there was a Macedonian he’d put in the dust at Gaza — Ares, there were thousands. Was that Diokles, at the back? Shades — wisps, and yet they seemed to stretch away down the Panathenaic Way. They murmured. He couldn’t hear them, and yet they made him profoundly afraid.

The three statues were immovable in front of him, and behind the three was Nike, slim and beautiful and remarkably like Miriam, holding a sword. She was made of marble, gilded and painted, and she smiled at him.

‘Who are they?’ Satyrus asked, annoyed by the fear in his voice. He jerked a thumb at the shades.

‘The jury,’ Nike answered. ‘Don’t even try to bribe them. They’re dead!’ and she laughed, a fluid sound like a brook in spring, easy and light.

Back to hovering above the room, and watching Aspasia — that was her name. She’d healed him before, discovered his addiction to the poppy juice and set him on the road to recovery.

She moved around the room with purpose, like a trierarch on the deck of warship under oars. She stepped quietly and confidently, preparing a tisane of herbs and drugs, adding warm water, feeding it to him with a spoon.

Satyrus, watching himself, wondered why they bothered. His skin was transparent like the most expensive parchment, and the tone of the parchment was yellow — a hideous colour. Even as he flinched at the colour, the stick figure on the bed rolled and cried out.

Aspasia murmured endearments, tenderly wiping the hair from his face. At some point while pushing the straggling curls away, she stopped, muttered something inaudible and laid the back of her hand against his forehead, and then against his cheek. And then she peeled back the bedclothes and thrust her hand into his groin.

‘Alas,’ she said. And folded the bedclothes over his face.

Troy — the siege of Troy — endless. Satyrus fought and fought, day after day — he was Menelaeus, he was Achilles, he was Hektor, and Aeneas. Diomedes. .

She returned with Abraham, already weeping, and Miriam, Helios, Anaxagoras and Neiron — Neiron was dressed in a full chiton, a man of property going to the assembly.

She had a silver mirror in her hand, and she buffed it against her chest until it shone.

‘Any news of his sister?’ she asked.

‘None,’ Neiron replied. ‘And now — her son is king, I assume. A raven’s feast if the Herakleans-’

‘Are you gentiles so heartless?’ Miriam asked. ‘Was this not a man? Not your friend? And all you want to talk about is his inheritance?’

Neiron shrugged. ‘Despoina, he was a king. If he had lived, he would want his kingdom to live, and not be cut up like a pig is cut by a butcher.’

Zeus Sator! Too right, old man.

Miriam sat on the edge of the bed and put the silver mirror in front of his lips. ‘It never hurts to be sure,’ she said, matter-of-factly.

‘He’s cold,’ Miriam said, and took a shuddering breath. ‘Neiron, I’m sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry about, Despoina. I liked him. More, I fear, than I let him know, but I’m old enough not to want the world to see everything that crosses the bridge of my thoughts.’

Abraham shook his head. He raised his fists towards the ceiling. Then he composed himself. Miriam took his arm, and he embraced her.

Helios wept.

Anaxagoras sat in the chair, lifted a small lyre and began to play.

Aspasia shot him a look.

‘Worked for Orpheus,’ he said with a smile.

‘To Hades with your blasphemy,’ the doctor-priestess said.

But the simple tune he played was like a dirge, like a march, like a hymn — his hands seemed to flow over the strings of the lyre and it rang, louder than might have been expected, the notes slowing until they fell one by one like drops of water falling on a desert, and then Anaxagoras moved his right hand across all the strings like a man wiping a slate clean, and he began to tap his sandal on the floor, a rhythm so compelling that Miriam, clutched in her brother’s arms, found herself patting her brother’s back in time, and Helios through his tears was slapping the chair arm in time and Neiron’s chin moved fractionally up and down.

‘Come and take your stand, Satyrus,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Achilles said,’ and here his rhythm beat harder, ‘Achilles said that it was better to be the slave of the worst master among the living than to be a king among the dead.’

And then his right hand moved and the notes began to fall and then flow, faster and more insistent-

Anaxagoras began to sing, and Neiron’s harsh croak joined in instantly, and Aspasia, her eyes shining, and Helios, hesitant-

Daughters of the muses, who walk the slopes of well-wooded Olympus! rang the paean to Apollo, the song that maidens sang to the newborn god and that men roared in defiance when preparing to sell their lives dearly.

Notes fell like a waterfall of sound and glory, and Satyrus found that he might make the choice, if he willed it, and he chose to fall down the waterfall of music back into the deep pool of his body-

And the music rolled on, man’s most potent magic against the dark, the oarsman’s salvation, the aid of the warrior, the light of the dancing maiden until his head was more full of the notes than of the fever.

And when the music ended, there was silence, and dark.

Far, far away, he heard the healer say, ‘Look, there. I’m wrong, and all that fuss for nothing, dear. See where his breath mists the silver? Always best to be sure.’ But her breath caught and there was the hint of a sob, and behind her, Helios and Anaxagoras finished the hymn.