Destroyer of Cities

24

DAY TWENTY-SIX

There were some hard heads in the morning, and Abraham made men stand at his well and drink water until they vomited it. Satyrus felt better — much better — than he had in days, and he took exercise with Anaxagoras, Apollodorus and Helios in the agora while the men sat in the shade. He wrestled briefly with Helios — a boy who would not, a year ago, have offered him anything like a match — and he lifted jumping weights and rocks under Korus’ harsh eye until he’d sweated out the last of the wine.

The stones fell and fell. The men of the town had to watch the methodical destruction of their waterfront temples, which had been the city’s pride for a hundred years. They were dismembered stone by stone, and when the roof of the Temple of Poseidon crashed to the ground, the answering cheer from the Antigonids sounded just as loud.

Satyrus was chewing a dried apple. ‘That was our counter-attack route,’ he said to Neiron.

‘Best do something, then,’ Neiron said. And the day ended, and Abraham’s house still stood, by a miracle. Satyrus arranged through Panther for the town slaves to clear him six routes through the temple rubble.

The naval sortie wasn’t ready. So they all went to bed, and woke in the morning to a red sunrise and another promise of a storm on the eastern horizon. Satyrus woke and found Korus asleep in the courtyard.

‘Exercise me now,’ he said. ‘They will attack today.’

When Panther appeared, Satyrus briefed him on the use of the town slaves even as he exercised, and he asked Apollodorus to get the men into position and drill them at passing through the gaps built by the slaves and reforming the phalanx in the clear ground east of the destroyed temples. He wanted it done before the engines were in position, and quickly, while it was still barely light, unobserved by the enemy.

Another hour, and a breakfast the size of a dinner, and Satyrus donned his light armour with more ease than he had in weeks.

‘I might consider wearing bronze,’ he said.

Korus nodded. ‘You have some muscles, but I’m not finished yet,’ he said.

Then out to the agora, to their now accustomed places, and the fall of the shot, the rising columns of clay dust, and fires — the enemy was throwing fire into the rubble. Or into the ships in the harbour — what remained of the ships. A pang hit Satyrus again — that his beloved Arete was dead, her charred keel supporting the tunnel under the walls.

Messengers ran back and forth from Jubal’s tower, explaining the movement of the engine-ships. Sometimes Jubal lost sight of them for an hour at a time — a column of powdered masonry or woodsmoke could hide the whole harbour as effectively as a blanket over the eyes. But his reports were accurate and timely, and Satyrus depended on them.

By afternoon, the men were completely relaxed, and many were sound asleep when the stones ceased to fall.

‘Stand to,’ Satyrus ordered.

Before the last men had fallen into the ranks, a messenger from Jubal confirmed that lighter boats full of assault troops were coming into the harbour.

Satyrus sought out Idomeneus. ‘Archers forward,’ he said. ‘All the psiloi. Get into the buildings — whatever is left — and kill what you can.’

Idomeneus nodded warily.

‘I’m not asking you to fight them hand to hand,’ Satyrus said. ‘Just break them up and harass them.’

Idomeneus raised an eyebrow. ‘We’re mercenaries,” he said.

Satyrus nodded. ‘And you’ll be well paid.’

‘Man likes to live to collect,’ Idomeneus said.

Satyrus realised that the Cretan was serious, not making pre-battle small talk. ‘Idomeneus, I could talk to you about loyalty, about my sister’s esteem for you, or about how we’ve raised you from an archer to a captain.’ Satyrus paused. ‘But instead, I’ll talk to you as one professional to another. I’m not Ptolemy — I haven’t turned you out for the winter and rehired you in summer. I’ve paid a steady wage — a damned good steady wage — for three years of peace.’

Idomeneus bowed his head to the logic of the argument, but he made a face. ‘This is like suicide, lord.’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘Not at all. Brief your men, lead them into the rubble and stay alive. We’re less than five minutes behind you.’

Idomeneus looked desperate. ‘I’m doing this on behalf of my men. I can’t-’

Satyrus wasn’t angry. He liked Idomeneus — he was one of the best soldiers he’d ever known. And he knew the pressure that was on the man from his archers, who felt naked when not covered by armoured men. But time was being wasted — Satyrus could feel the water-clock of fate somewhere in his head, running fast. Drip, drip, drip.

‘Go now. Promise them a bonus, if you must. But get them into the rubble.’ Satyrus pitched his voice just so. The voice that meant the argument was at an end.

Idomeneus met his eye. ‘On your head be it,’ he said. In his glance was a straightforward accusation: his eyes accused Satyrus of sacrificing the archers.

But Idomeneus sprinted to his men, already spread wide along the cross-street where the gymnasium had stood, and he blew a long note on a bone whistle round his neck and they followed him into the rubble.

Satyrus went and walked along the front face of his formed phalanx. On the right, he set Apollodorus and the picked men of the marines and sailors in heavy armour — two hundred men of bronze. In the centre, with a thin front of marines, stood the bulk of his rowers and some Rhodian rowers and citizens as well, almost eight hundred. After the second rank, there was no armour. On the left were the Rhodian ephebes — all very young, but brilliantly armoured as the sons of the rich always are. The sailors were only six deep at the centre, whereas the flank units were deeper and heavier.

The received wisdom of this style of warfare was that more lightly armed troops would operate better in the rubble. If Satyrus had possessed peltasts — fighters with light shields and javelins and perhaps swords — he would have been expected to use them as shock troops.

Satyrus was not following the received wisdom. Instead, he’d posted his lightest troops in the densest phalanx formation he felt that they could maintain, and placed them where they could move over the flattest terrain with the least rubble, east of the temples. And his most heavily armed men — men virtually head-to-toe in bronze — he’d put out on the flanks in ridiculously open formations, almost as open as the ancient writers suggested men had fought before Marathon — six feet or more per man. His logic was simple: in the bad footing of the rubble, a man might easily face opponents from several directions, and only armour would keep him alive. Or so it seemed to him, and there was no one to tell him how bad an idea it might be.

Satyrus finished walking along the front of the phalanx. He nodded to men he knew, or smiled at them, and they returned it. He knew most of them now — even the Rhodians. He had old Memnon right there in the second rank, Aspasia’s husband. And one of his sons, Polyphemus, stood a stade away in beautiful bronze, in the front rank of the ephebes. Satyrus found his eyes meeting those of Apollodorus and Neiron, of Anaxagoras, of Charmides and Jubal, hurrying to join in from his observation post with his team of upper-deck sailors.

But no one spoke to him. He was alone. He smiled at them and they smiled back, but never the other way round.

He turned to find Helios close behind him.

‘Korus says I am not to let you fight in the front rank,’ Helios said.

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ Satyrus said with a smile. He looked up and down the ranks one last time, and his ears told him something — he could not have defined it, quite, but there was a quality to the enemy war cry that suggested men were being hit by arrows. He’d seen enough war to know the sound.

Now he had to fear that he’d waited too long, that his centre phalanx would take too long to file through the ruins of the three great temples into the clear ground to seaward. He reached up and tipped his helmet forward on his head and pulled the leather loop on the left cheek-plate against the pressure of the spring to hook over the right cheek-plate. An Italian design, men said. Very well made — much plainer than his magnificent silver helmet, taken years before from Demetrios.

Funny thing to think about, at that moment.

‘Forward,’ Satyrus said.

The sailors filed through the carefully cleared gaps in the smashed temples just as they’d practised. It was well enough done, and when men made mistakes, forgetting who they followed or what file went first, other men pushed them roughly but firmly. They flowed more than marched, but they crossed the deep rubble to the open ground by the harbour and reformed even as Satyrus, first across the rubble of the Temple of Poseidon, in the centre, watched the enemy forming his phalanx under a light hail of archery.

It was just short of noon, and the midsummer sun beat down like a fall of scorching sand, a second enemy to both sides.

Satyrus formed his phalanx with both flanks apparently empty. And then, when his whole body was formed — and it seemed to take for ever — he stepped out of his place in the second rank.

‘Friends!’ he roared.

Not much movement. Behind him, Idomeneus’ men shot a volley of arrows and ran — they had done their part, as they saw it, and now they made for the safety of the sailors’ phalanx.

‘You can defeat these men. You have beaten them before. When you lock your pikes with them, put your backs into the push and wait for my word. When I call, let’s hear your war cry — and not until then. Ready?’

There was the growl — the same growl with which, as oarsmen, they answered the call to ramming speed.

Not for the first time, Satyrus wondered if there was an aggregate creature in the head of every oarsman — if, when together, they formed some sort of thousand-headed monster with but one set of thoughts.

He slipped in behind Helios.

‘Forward!’ he called, and the centre bowed out as the phalanx went forward, but it was too late to worry about such things.

The oarsmen were wearing sandals — siege sandals, men called them, because they’d learned how nasty the rubble was on their feet, even the rock-hard feet of an upper-deck man, and they’d made light leather boots to wear under heavy-soled sandals, and the marines had pulled every hobnail from their ‘Isocrates’ sandals, because the lifesaving purchase on a wet wooden deck was a ticket to slipping and lost footing on crumbled rock and broken marble.

Satyrus was betting that the enemy would be barefoot. Greek soldiers — even Macedonians — often fought barefoot, for a surer footing. And if the men coming up the beach had never fought in a siege — and who had fought in a siege like this? — then they would probably be barefoot.

The flanks of the sailors’ phalanx hurried to keep up, and the front rippled.

The enemy was already close. They were deeper and formed loosely, and they had a curious mixture of weapons.

Pirates.

It took Satyrus precious seconds to see that Demetrios had not committed any of his precious Argyraspides or his Macedonian phalanxes this time. These were the pirates — the men who’d come only for plunder.

Good or bad?

There were heartbeats to impact. The pirates had the numbers by a factor of ten to one, but they were curiously hesitant. And barefoot.

Crash!

Satyrus’ men smashed into the front of the pirates like a battering ram into a gate, and men were knocked flat at the impact — men were actually impaled on the incoming pikes, as the pirates were so inexperienced, they hadn’t closed up or placed their shields to endure the storm of iron that was a pike phalanx oncoming, even with just six ranks of spearheads going home.

But there were blows in return — a torrent of blows, a staggering ocean wave of blows.

Satyrus had never been in the second rank before. It was terrifying. In the second rank, you could see. Men in the first rank crouched, tucked their eyes mostly under their shield rims and endured, parrying on instinct. In the second rank, a fighter could see the enemy. Could feel the press of his file behind him and translate it to the file leader — carefully, not allowing the file leader to be pushed to his death.

Like most of the second-rankers, Satyrus had a heavy spear, not a pike. He had all the time in the world — it was odd, but all the fighting was two critical feet away — to cock his arm back and strike, a simple strong blow just below the crest box of the pirate’s helmet.

The man dropped, and the spear returned to his hands and Helios stepped into the gap and cut — cut back — into the back of the helmet of the enemy pirate on his right, crushing the man’s skull instantly so that the man’s blood shot out of the faceplate of his helmet.

Satyrus was ready. He practised every day with Helios — he knew these routines cold. He stepped up behind his hypaspist, in the process stepping on the man he’d put down with his first thrust, and shot his spear across Helios’ back into an oncoming pirate, this time thrusting down onto the man’s outstretched thigh or knee — no way to know what he hit, but the man screamed and Helios all but beheaded him on his own back cut, and now they were deep into the pirates’ formation and Satyrus could see Anaxagoras’ blue and white plume just a horse length to the left, equally deep.

Satyrus had intended the attack of the sailors’ phalanx as a feint to lure the enemy into going for the flanks.

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy. The sailors’ phalanx was crushing the pirates against their ships.

Satyrus stood straight and took a deep breath — the pirates were cringing back — and roared ‘Arete!’ as loudly as he could.

He counted to three in his head.

‘Blood in the water!’ he yelled.

The answering roar was like surf on a windy day — like the thunder of Zeus, like the rumble of fate closing the scissors. The oarsmen had the measure of their opponents, and their war cry was so loud and so awful that the enemy froze like fawns before a raging lion, paralysed as the tide of bronze and iron swept them down the beach.

Satyrus set his feet, picked a pirate in a fine helmet and threw his spear as hard as he could. He didn’t pause to see the effect. He slapped Helios.

‘I’m out,’ he said, and turned. ‘Let me through!’ he called back, and he pushed against the flowing tide of his own phalanx, slipping back rank by rank — glanced back, and was delighted to see that the colourful side plumes of the pirate officer were gone. He punched out through the back of his own phalanx, paused and took a few deep breaths.

He felt good.

Rear-rankers looked at him.

He undid his cheek-plates and raised his helmet. ‘You!’ he said, pointing at one of Jubal’s deck men. ‘Go to Apollodorus and tell him to charge.’

‘Aye, lord!’ said the sailor.

‘And you,’ to the ephebes. ‘Tell them to forget the plan and get right down the beach on the widest possible front. Go now!’ Satyrus was shouting when he didn’t need to. He needed these men to understand — to carry his orders.

‘Aye, lord!’ the man cried, and dropping his spear, he ran off up the beach, headed north into the rubble.

Herakles, stand with me. Something is wrong. This is too easy.

Where are the Argyraspides?

One thing at a time.

‘Jubal!’

‘Aye, lord?’

‘The whole rear rank — on me, right now. Form up tight.’ Satyrus stood a few horse lengths behind the rear rank and more than a hundred men left the back rank and fell in. Satyrus picked up the spear dropped by the messenger and held it out so that they formed along it — they were sailors, not Spartiates.

‘Three deep! Three deep!’ he yelled.

Sailors and marines milled about, but in fifty heartbeats they were sorted — not pretty, by any means, but the advantage of sailors over phalangites was that sailors didn’t expect any kind of order in a fight. Chaos was natural to them.

‘As soon as the right man passes the end of our boys, we will wheel to the left!’ Satyrus yelled to them. ‘Look at me! Understood? We’ll link on our own left file and charge.’ He used the pike in his hands to illustrate.

Men nodded. Other men looked blank.

‘Listen! Look at me!’ A few feet away, the sailors gave a great cry and the phalanx of sailors pushed forward the length of a great ox — and stopped. ‘We link up on that file right there and wheel like this,’ and he waved the pike again. Now he saw more recognition than confusion.

He was out in front, with nowhere to go when the fighting started.

So be it.

‘Forward!’ he called.

His loose, thin line rolled forward, bowing like the amateurs they were.

‘To the right! Wheel!’ he roared in his best storm-caller voice, and most of the sailors wheeled, although at different speeds, and the whole front fell apart. Satyrus wanted to weep — this was the sort of manoeuvre his marines or his mercenary Macedonians could perform in their sleep.

There were pirates teeming around the left face of his main phalanx, and the right-most files of his tiny counter-attack swept them away — and then he was in combat.

His feet were on sand — they were actually on the beach. A man appeared in front of him out of the confusion of the fight, a small, wiry man with an earring and a bloody axe. Satyrus had lost the pike — where? — and he found that he had drawn his sword, and the little man cut overarm at him with the axe and Satyrus punched with his heavy shield, caught the haft of the axe on the rim of his shield and thrust, pushing with his legs to keep that axe pinned high in the air. The pirate tried to stumble backward, and when that failed he put his helmeted head down and attempted to headbutt Satyrus under the chin, but he got Satyrus’ sword through his neck and fell in a tangle. Satyrus pushed forward, feeling the daemon of combat for the first time in what seemed like months, caught a second man unawares with a clean cut to the neck that didn’t quite sever his head. Then Satyrus swung low against a third man, cutting the backs of his thighs under the rim of his shield, and then two blows hit his shield face solidly, rocking him back so that he stumbled, and a pair of impacts on his helmet staggered him again. He lashed out with his sword, a sweeping blow without skill, a stop-cut to buy himself a few heartbeats.

He fell to one knee, and now he was one man, alone, and he had a pair of men focused on him, and another in his peripheral vision, an opportunist looking for an easy kill.

Satyrus shot to his feet with a powerful push of his right leg, slammed his big aspis face into the two men in front of him, bounced off them and lunged — the full length of his reach — against the man to his side, the opportunist, who got the point of a xiphos through his collarbone and neck for his efforts. But as he fell, Satyrus’ sharp sword caught in bone, and the falling man tore the sword from Satyrus’ grip.

As if Herakles stood and coached him, Satyrus rolled his hips back to the left, reached out as if he’d practised the move a hundred times and caught the wrist of another pirate to his front, smashed his shield into the man’s unarmoured face and took his sword, stripping it from the man’s fingers. He felt that it was a kopis, a heavy chopping blade, and he turned back to his original opponents, pushed forward again with his supporting leg, raised his shield, saw his opponent raise his own shield in answer to the feint — an inexperienced man who was not going to live to learn. Satyrus chopped under the raised shield into hip and groin, and the man toppled like a small, straight ash cut by a strong woodsman and Satyrus viciously pushed the corpse — the man was already dead — into his file partner with his shield arm and followed it with a straight overarm chop and pivot on his left foot — so that the right foot passed the left, the whole weight of his body behind the blow, and the crooked blade of the kopis blew through the pirate’s light shield rim and the thin bronze of his helmet, too.

Now no one would face him, and the whole of the pirate front bowed back before him and he stood alone, breathing hard like a boar that has slain all the brave hunting dogs and now faces only the curs.

His own men were hanging back as well. Combat had those moments. Men could only stay locked breast to breast for so long — a hundred heartbeats, two hundred for the strongest and best, and then they had to step back and breathe.

‘The king!’ called a sailor at his back, and they took it up. ‘King!’ they called. ‘King!’

Satyrus raised the kopis, and blood from the blade ran down his arm, the warm lick of death on his skin. He inhaled, and he could smell the lion skin of his lord on the wind, and he could see, as if imprinted on his eyes, how he could kill every man facing him.

But his moment of divinity was stolen when Apollodorus and his marines charged headlong into the pirates at the south end of the beach. Satyrus heard the moment of impact, and it penetrated his battle-fogged head.

‘Let me through,’ he barked at the sailors nearest to him, and Jubal swatted a man out of his way.

Satyrus dashed back through the thin line of sailors — men who had thought themselves safe in the rear rank and had still managed to find the hero in themselves when asked.

Thank them later.

He ran up the beach to the soft sand, which ate his remaining energy the way a dog eats fresh meat. He turned, and looked over the beach.

It was not the battle he’d wanted — it was all being fought on the open beach west of the temples, not in the choked streets of the ruined town, out on the flanks where his well-armoured men could eat these ill-armed pirates in alleys at no cost to themselves.

So be it. You made plans, and they evaporated. His men were winning — despite that the pirates were still landing fresh men, farther out so that they had to wade ashore hip-deep. And men out there — really, only a quarter-stade away — were hesitating. He could see them waiting at the side of the light rowing boats, unsure whether to clamber over the side or stay aboard.

But while this attack was serious, all of Golden Boy’s real soldiers were somewhere else.

Satyrus took the time to watch carefully the scene at his feet.

Apollodorus was cutting through the loosely formed pirates like an iron chisel through hot bronze — slowly but inexorably, the drive of the marine’s legs like a great hammer pushing his spear point home. A few light pirate ships made to land men behind him on the beach, but Idomeneus and the archers had reacted without orders and the nearly naked pirates were being punished hard for their temerity.

No crisis there.

At the north of the beach, the ephebes advanced slowly and cautiously, but on a wide front, only four deep. They had doubled their width, confident in their armour, their training and their youth. They were not mistaken, and the pirates flinched and flinched away.

The fight on the beach was minutes from becoming pure slaughter.

To the south, though, there were ships trying to force the defences of the main harbour for the first time. They were taking heavy punishment from Panther’s carefully sighted engines. Satyrus watched for a long time — the time it took forty pirates to die — before he decided that he was watching a feint: Demetrios had sent ships to tie Panther down.

But why?

He had no idea what had gone wrong, but he could feel it as surely as if he’d taken a wound.

‘What’s happening?’ Abraham asked. He’d emerged from the rear face of the phalanx, breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows. He sank to his knees in the sand. ‘I’m out of shape.’

Satyrus continued to watch. The pirates were at the point of breaking — too many dead, and water licking at their ankles. Rearrank men were throwing their shields away and swimming.

Curiously, they weren’t shattered by Apollodorus or by the ephebes or even by the sailors pounding away at their front. What broke them, even as Satyrus watched, was the desertion of their boats — as suddenly as a school of silver fish attacked by a dolphin, the pentekonters and rowing boats that had brought the assault force ashore turned and ran, abandoning their comrades on the beach. Instantly their morale collapsed — a visible movement in the front ranks, and suddenly pirates were throwing down their arms in all directions and trying to swim, and they received no quarter. Satyrus’ oarsmen — many of whom had been slaves — reaped them like a farmer reaps the last crop of barley, hurrying against the winter wind and the rain, gaffing them with long pikes as they swam or punching daggers into men trying to surrender.

‘I need Apollodorus,’ Satyrus said.

‘I’ll go,’ Abraham offered.

‘Good — go fast. I need him, and as many men as he can extricate. I need them now.’ Satyrus gave Abraham a slap on his backplate, and noticed that blood was running out of Abraham’s helmet and over his back.

‘You’re wounded!’ he said.

‘Bah — it’s nothing.’ Abraham got his helmet off and dropped it on the beach. It had a hole in it, and his hair was a matted mass of blood.

Satyrus turned his attention back to the fight on the beach.

The ephebes had joined the slaughter with all the impetuosity of youth.

Satyrus kept backing up the beach, trying to get high enough to see what might be happening at the south end of the harbour — the inner harbour. Panther’s area.

Helios emerged from the slaughter and came up the beach.

‘Good lad,’ Satyrus said. ‘Breathe.’

Helios’ right hand was all blood, and his arm to the elbow, and his entire right side was spattered by the blood dripping from his spear. ‘I can’t get it out of my hand,’ he said in a strange voice.

The blood had dried, sticking the spear grip to his hand.

Satyrus poured his canteen over the younger man’s hand, and gradually the glue-like blood loosened, and then they shared the rest of the canteen.

Abraham returned, running well, with long strides. ‘Apollodorus is going to break off.’

Helios pulled his helmet off and dropped it to the sand.

‘I need you to run to Panther,’ Satyrus said to Helios, who nodded without speaking.

‘Get me a report. Fast as you can. Go, now.’ Satyrus knew he was using the boy up, but his options were limited and the feeling of doom was growing. And the only knucklebone he had was that the pirates had died fast, leaving him with a reserve and some options. Perhaps. Maybe.

Down in the slaughter, Anaxagoras was cutting a swathe through the pirates. His blue and white plume was unique, and Satyrus had no trouble watching him. His wrath was terrible, like something from the Iliad.

‘I do hope we don’t take any casualties wiping them out,’ Satyrus said, and his voice was like Ares’ voice — a thing of bronze, inhuman.

Abraham watched for a moment. ‘A moral man would say that they are men, like us,’ he said. He turned, and his eyes had no trouble meeting Satyrus’ eyes. ‘But they are not men like us, and their deaths give me nothing but pleasure.’

‘Kill them all,’ Satyrus said. By his estimate — he found it remarkable how clearly he was thinking — there were three or four thousand of the curs caught in the pocket, facing a quarter of their own number, and dying. He could never feed so many — he couldn’t even dare to accept their surrender, as they were men of no worth whose word could never be trusted. They would rise against him and slaughter his men if they ever understood the superiority of their numbers. Only Tyche — luck — and good planning had delivered them into his hands. He felt no mercy.

All this in three rapid beats of his heart.

‘Tell the phalanx to kill them all,’ Satyrus repeated to Abraham, and turned away when he heard his name being screamed from the ruined temples.

‘Satyrus!’

He looked right and left. Helmets made such searching difficult.

‘Satyrus!’ Closer.

It was Miriam. She had blood on her face and in her hair.

Satyrus caught her in his arms — not his intention — as if his body acted without him.

She went into his embrace, blood and sweat printed on her chiton, so that the outlines of his shoulder armour could be traced on her for the rest of the day.

But she murmured no endearments.

‘The enemy is in the town,’ she said, her voice controlled, her own panic carefully held back. ‘They are behind the agora, and a soldier I met says they are coming in through the west gates.’

Satyrus turned his head.

Apollodorus was coming up the beach, his two hundred intact.

Thanks, Lord Herakles, for the warning. May I be in time.

‘In the streets behind the agora?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I believe,’ she said. Her voice trembled. ‘I don’t know.’

He wanted to say something like, ‘Welcome to war’, but there wasn’t time. ‘Get every woman you can, get onto the rooftops and drop tiles on them,’ he said. ‘Every woman you can find in the agora — listen. I may be sending you to your death, Miriam, but if your women can’t slow them in the alleys, we’re dead.’

‘I understand,’ she said.

‘I love you,’ Satyrus said.

She shot him a look from under her eyebrows that suggested that, even in the grip of fear, she had the wits to question his choice of words. ‘I’ll try not to die, then,’ she said lightly. She pulled up her skirts and ran, her long legs flashing in the afternoon light, a rare sight on a battlefield.

Satyrus turned to Apollodorus. ‘Enemy in the town behind us,’ he said.

‘Zeus Sator! Apollo, Kineas, be with us,’ Apollodorus said.

‘Follow me.’ Satyrus led them up the beach, and his fears almost robbed him of the ability to run — had the town already fallen? Usually, once the enemy penetrated the walls, the defence collapsed although Rhodes was so big and so deep that both Satyrus and Panther had been using its depths as a defence.

He ran back across the rubble, ignoring the growing pain in his right ankle, through one of the tunnels and the fallen Temple of Poseidon and into the agora.

It was not a mass of enemy soldiers. It was a mass of panicked civilians, with Miriam trying desperately to motivate some of them to join her.

Even as Satyrus ran up, Panther’s wife Lydia, and Aspasia, and other town leaders — the priestesses and the healers — stepped out of the mob and began to harangue them, and the mob fell silent.

Through the silence, Satyrus could hear the screams from the west.

‘Form three columns — one on each main street. There must be some defenders — put heart into them.’ Satyrus barked his commands and Apollodorus picked his three commanders, and even as men emerged from the rubble tunnels they were numbered off into three groups.

‘I’ll take the right,’ Satyrus said.

‘I should stay with you,’ Apollodorus said.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘You’re no worse off if I die here — if the town holds,’ he said. ‘Besides, I have Draco and Amyntas,’ he said, catching their eyes. ‘They won’t let me die.’

Both men managed a grunt that might have been mistaken for a chuckle.

‘Ares’ golden balls, this sucks like a flute girl at an ephebe’s symposium,’ Amyntas said. ‘I hate sieges.’ He turned to his men. ‘Have I ever told you lads how I saved Alexander?’

‘Not above a thousand times,’ Draco grumbled. ‘Come on, or the young king will try and do all the fighting himself.’

Amyntas spat. ‘He’s just doing it to impress that girl,’ he said.

‘I can think of worse reasons,’ Draco retorted.

Even in fear of imminent death and loss of the city, Satyrus found that his cheeks could burn.

Into the streets west of the agora, new terrain for Satyrus and all the marines, they went slowly, well closed up, checking side streets as they came to them.

They went half a stade before they found men looting. A dozen men, all enemy soldiers, who had decided that the town was fallen and they could start the promised sack.

Their paralysis, their total surprise at his force gave Satyrus some hope.

‘Forget the side streets,’ Satyrus said. ‘Form close. At the double! Forward!’

Their feet pounding the stones, the marines moved fast, flowing along the gently curving street at the speed of a running boy or girl who hears the call of a distant parent — and they saw the enemy, a clump gathered around a small olive tree in a town square no more than two horse lengths on any side. The square was packed with Antigonids sacking a rich house, raping two women they had caught, drinking fine wine — all the delicious, evil spoils of war in one place — and Draco’s marines slammed into them without slowing, and the slaughter was fast and their was blood in the spilled wine and the fountain at the centre of the square was choked with dead men.

But behind the initial assault of plain pikemen had been a corps of veterans, a reserve, and now they reacted like professionals, coming up from the west and punching straight into Satyrus’ marines, and the pikes and spears were crossed, locked and the killing began in the square.

They were pushed out of the square, step by step. Amyntas died there, who had saved Alexander’s life in far-off India, who had killed men from Thebes to the Hindu Kush and beyond. Draco saw him fall, and he planted his feet over his fallen lover and his spear rose and fell as if he were Ares incarnate, and the Antigonids feared to face him — indeed, as the enemy was reinforced, some of them shouted his name because they were facing the old veterans now, the best of Demetrios’ force, and the men in the front ranks of the Argyraspides knew Draco by sight and they drew back in respect.

Another marine dragged Draco back, and Satyrus grabbed his ankles and pulled and they made it alive around a corner.

‘Rally!’ Satyrus said.

Draco was weeping, all rationality gone, like a beast that has lost its child. ‘Give him to me!’ he shouted at Satyrus, and would have struck him if Satyrus hadn’t been watching. He let the body fall, backed away as a man would back away from a dangerous predator, and only when he saw Draco crouch over Amyntas did he turn his back on the man.

‘On me!’ Satyrus bellowed. His voice was failing, and he felt fatigue sapping his will to fight, and the fact that they could not hold the square suggested that the town had fallen indeed.

‘Satyrus!’ Miriam shouted. She was above him — it hurt him to look that far up, with the neck plate on his back armour biting into his neck under his helmet as he craned to see her. But there she was, a roof tile in her hand.

‘On me!’ he roared, his spirit soaring. And the change in his tone was more convincing than the words, and suddenly the marines hardened around him even as the Argyraspides charged around the corner-

The corner took them by surprise, and the marines held the rush and thirty-year veterans died there, men who had climbed the banks of the Ipsus and the Jaxartes and stood their ground at Arabela. And Satyrus had no time to think: all he knew was the rush of blades, the hollow sound of his shield taking impact after impact, the endless roar of the battle cries and the screams and curses as men were hit and went down. He stood his ground, a front-ranker now, and the men on either side stood their ground, and that was all that could be said. He thrust with his spear as often as he dared, and had no idea if he was hitting or not — over his shoulder, men thrust, and there were screams — it seemed almost impossible to Satyrus that he could still be unwounded, and the fighting in the street seemed to have gone on for hours.

Then, almost as if an order had been given, the marines backed away three steps — all across the street — and the Argyraspides did not follow. And now that the front-line fighting stopped, the silver shields had time to realise how many of their men were down — how hideously they had been thinned by falling roof tiles and mud bricks from the houses on either side, which were reaping them with more efficiency than the tired marines.

Just as a young child, her knee skinned in a fall, may take long heartbeats to scream for her mother, so the Antigonid veterans stood for long seconds before realising how many dead they had.

But they were the best soldiers in the world. And they had not lived so many years in the hands of brutal Ares without learning all the hard lessons of the battle haze. When they found how badly hurt they were, how deep they were in the noose of the women on the roofs and in the alleys — they did not fail. Calling to each other, because so many of their file leaders were dead, calling out from man to man, they lapped their shields and charged.

Satyrus took the rush on his shield in a state of despair, because any other troops would have broken. All he could do was stand his ground, and die.

The man on his left died almost immediately, and Satyrus and his rank-mate to the right — he saw that it was Jubal the sailor, a man who had no business being here — were pinned to the street wall by the rush of Macedonian veterans. But Jubal grunted, struck out with his spear and put a man down — a man with a shield rich in ivory and silver, and instead of flinching, the Nubian pushed forward and Satyrus got his shield up, lapped it on the Nubian’s and pushed his legs against the house foundation at his back. Someone filled in from behind, pushing into Satyrus’ left and lapping his shield, and suddenly they were filling the street. They held like a smaller wrestler holds a larger when his slipping feet find a small rock, buried in sand, wide enough to catch the flat of the foot and give the fighter that heartbeat to gather his wits-

And then Apollodorus stormed into the side of the Argyraspides from the flanks of the square. The enemy commander had never understood that Satyrus’ counter-attack was in three columns. He’d committed everything in the centre. And in a street fight, ignorance is death.

Apollodorus’ column burst into the square, fifty paces behind the Argyraspides’ front rank, but their shock was translated instantly and that was too much for the veterans. And they still didn’t break. They knew that to break was death. Instead, they retreated through the streets, leaving dead men at every step, dead at the hands of Satyrus, Apollodorus, Charmides — but more dead from the endless rain of mud brick and roof tile.

They never broke.

They moved fast, and they killed even as they retreated, and when their Macedonian comrades broke and deserted them, they covered the younger men’s retreat at the gates and died there as well, and Satyrus thought that they were the most magnificent soldiers he’d ever seen.

And then they were outside the gates. And just beyond the gates, coming hard, was a fresh phalanx — a whole taxeis — two thousand men. Two thousand fresh men.

The gates were still there — a mystery to Satyrus. How in Tartarus did they get in? he thought.

‘Gates!’ he panted to Apollodorus.

A file of Argyraspides came to the same conclusion — and turned to stand in the gates. Half a dozen men — men in their forties and fifties, with silver beards over their silver shields.

The gates opened outwards. To close them, the Argyraspides had to go.

The enemy taxeis was close. Close enough that he could see the puffs of dust their sandals raised as they ran — ran at him.

Apollodorus didn’t hesitate. He ran forward, all mad recklessness. The Argyraspides braced, but he stopped just short, raised himself on his toes and thrust down into the back of one man’s helmet and nailed him to the ground. Satyrus was a half-step behind — he’d mistaken Apollodorus’ intention and he went hurtling over the smaller man, into the midst of the Argyraspides in a sprawl. He should have died, but he hit them like a missile and three of them went down — and suddenly they were all locked together on the ground, grappling desperately.

Satyrus ripped his arm out of the porpax on his shield, got the dagger from its sheath beneath the porpax and stabbed — as fast as the strokes of Zeus when he sends the lightning — at anything his dagger hand could reach, while his free right hand — he’d lost his sword — caught a man’s throat and he squeezed and stabbed with all the ferocity of a pankration fighter in his last hold. Someone was biting his bicep as hard as he could, and another blow landed between his legs, the shattering agony of a groin shot, but he rode it, stabbed again and felt his opponent’s carotid collapse under his thumb, felt the crack of the cartilage of the man’s neck. His hand moved — he felt the man’s face, and buried his thumb in the soft not-flesh of the man’s eye.

A blow caught him in the back and sent him rolling over, and the pain in his groin flooded over him like a wave. But he could see his marines cheering, all around him. He got to one knee and threw up, and then fell forward into his vomit.

And they were still cheering.

He rolled back and forth for an eternity, his knees locked tight, his back on fire. Gradually, it became merely pain. A sort of cold, evil ache that owned the whole lower half of his abdomen.

Apollodorus was leaning over him. He was grinning.

‘You’ll live,’ he said.

Lying on his back, Satyrus could see that what had hit him in the back was the gates as his men pulled them shut. And in the towers either side of the gates, Idomeneus’ men were pouring arrows down into the taxeis that lay helpless at their feet.

Miriam came out of the fog of pain. She looked like a fury — blood and dust and a look to her face that was far from beautiful — far, at least, from the kind of beauty poets and potters praised.

She studied him for a minute.

‘I think-’ She steadied her voice. ‘I think you’ve looked better, my lord.’

‘You-’ Satyrus said. And mercifully for everyone, he bit back what came to his tongue. ‘Well done,’ he said instead, like an officer to a well-disciplined spearman. ‘Well done, Miriam,’ he panted.

But their eyes were locked, and her eyes spoke louder than the shouts of pain in his guts and his groin.