Destroyer of Cities

29

DAY NINETY AND FOLLOWING

The Rhodians spent the two truce days making and mending equipment, and keeping the enemy from seeing their preparations. Parties of enemy troops repeatedly attempted to climb the south walls under various pretences, and Satyrus quickly understood that this scouting function was the reason that the Antigonids had asked for a truce. When Satyrus set up a trophy in the blasted ground between the lines, Demetrios sent men to tear it down, and made a formal protest.

The herald, beautifully dressed in fine wool from India, a cloak of shimmering silk and a golden fillet on his brow, was brought before Satyrus where he sat with his hetairoi in the agora, mending sandals. Satyrus had his entire panoply laid out in the dusty grass, and while Helios buffed the bronze and silver, Satyrus was busy with a needle and heavy linen thread, sewing the long flaps that covered his lower belly and groin where sword cuts had all but severed two of them. Anaxagoras was watching Apollodorus work — the marine captain was an expert with leather, and he was refitting the musician’s military sandals, putting a leather sock inside, a trick the marines had developed to keep the grit of the siege out of their feet. Charmides was working with the intense concentration of the neophyte while his girl, Nike, mocked his efforts. Melitta was chewing sinew and spitting while explaining to Miriam the superiorities of sinew over linen thread. Across the agora, marines, ephebes and citizen soldiers, hoplites, mercenaries and Cretan archers had their kit laid out in the sun while they made the repairs that could mean life or death — a scale replaced, a bronze plate adjusted, a helmet strap tightened or loosened.

The herald stared at the activity as if he’d never seen soldiers at work before. ‘My king bids me say-’ he began.

He was addressing Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras raised his head from watching Apollodorus and winked at the herald. ‘I’m not the polemarch, boy,’ he said.

The word boy, with its implications of immaturity — and slavery — made the man flush. He whirled. His eyes found Menedemos, where he sat having the straps on his greaves reset by a bronzesmith.

‘Which one of you is the King of the Bosporus?’ he asked belligerently.

Satyrus bit off his thread amid the general laughter. ‘I am,’ he said.

The young man walked over to him. ‘My lord, the king demands that you remove the trophy that you have erected on the south wall.’

‘Or what?’ Satyrus asked. His men fell silent.

‘It is an effrontery that you have erected a trophy over such a small thing,’ the herald continued.

‘Your master asked us for a truce,’ Satyrus said. ‘He requested two days to bury his dead,’ he continued.

Apollodorus spoke up. ‘The law of arms lets us raise a trophy,’ he said. ‘Your master ought to know that, boy.’

Abraham laughed. ‘I’m a Jew, boy, and I know you get a trophy when your enemy asks for a truce.’

‘I am not a boy, and my king is not my master.’ The young man was obviously Macedonian.

Satyrus nodded. ‘Listen, lad. You go back to Demetrios and tell him that if he wants the trophy taken down, he should come and do it himself. When the truce is over. Until then, the trophy stands.’ He stood up. ‘Your audience is at an end. Blindfold him and take him back — west gate. Who has my wax?’

Apollodorus looked sheepish. ‘I thought it was my wax,’ he said. And more quietly, ‘Isn’t it a bit of. . hubris to have a trophy for so small an action?’

‘It’s a goad,’ Satyrus said. ‘We need him to attack that wall.’

Miriam released another arrow into the straw bale. It flew well, if a little short, and once again the string caught her forearm, which was already red — angry red.

‘Damn it,’ she said, in Hebrew.

Melitta shook her head. ‘Keep your wrist strong. Don’t relax it. Here — your left — hold the bow like this.’

Miriam took a drink from the canteen next to them. ‘So you keep saying. You must have wrists like a smith, Melitta — I can’t hold the bow like that and release the arrow.’

Melitta frowned. ‘A six-year-old Sakje child can do it, Miriam. Concentrate.’

Miriam, angered, lifted the bow, took a deep breath, relaxed, made herself move the bow a finger’s breadth with her wrist and released. Her shot was weak, and flew short — but the string did not bite her arm.

Melitta smiled. ‘There you go. You need to strengthen your arms and shoulders — I don’t have a bow light enough for you, so you’ll have to get stronger.’ She nodded. ‘Sakje maidens lift rocks and throw them. And shoot constantly.’

Miriam smiled. ‘I’d be delighted to have shoulders like yours,’ she said.

Melitta smiled back. ‘No — I’m all muscle. You have the beautiful curves. I look like a boy.’

Miriam laughed. ‘No. Not at all like a boy. But you do walk like a boy. Fierce — determined. And always ready to fight.’

Melitta nodded. ‘I am always ready to fight.’ She wiped her bow, retrieved her arrows.

‘You like him? Anaxagoras?’ Miriam asked.

‘He’s pretty and brave,’ Miriam said. ‘He looks at me the way I like to be looked at.’

Miriam nodded. The silence lengthened.

‘You can’t have both of them,’ Melitta said.

Miriam fiddled with her hair. She was blushing. ‘I can’t have either of them,’ she said.

Melitta frowned. ‘Why not?’ she asked.

Miriam met her eyes. ‘It’s fine for you — it always has been.’ She looked away, bit her lip and said no more.

‘What do you mean, Miriam? I’m no different to you. We grew up together!’ Melitta felt as if she were suddenly talking to a stranger.

‘You. . you don’t play by the rules. How many lovers have you had, Melitta?’ Miriam blushed when she asked.

Melitta laughed out loud. ‘Far fewer than you might think. Three. Just three. And the cost is. . high.’

Miriam’s hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh — I’m so sorry! I assumed-’ She blushed again.

Melitta laughed. ‘Honey, if I weren’t the Lady of the Assagetae, I’d no doubt run up the score you think I have.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’m not offended, Miriam. Everyone thinks it — I hear what men say. I have a baby. I live out in the field with men. But men are fools, and if I seek to lead them, I cannot go from bed to bed. The petty jealousies alone would destroy my people.’ She stretched.

‘Oh,’ Miriam said.

‘On the other hand,’ Melitta went on, ‘since everyone already thinks you’re sleeping with both of them — why don’t you? You’ll never convince people you’re an innocent widow. And,’ she smiled, the same smile she made when she licked her knife, ‘it’d be good for you. Your marriage was unhappy?’

Miriam looked away. ‘Nothing that’s worth a story.’

‘I’m not in a hurry,’ Melitta said. She sat back down on a sun-warmed stone.

Miriam stared out to sea. ‘Do you think we’ll win, Melitta? I mean, here. In the end.’

Melitta looked at the other woman. ‘Yes, of course. Why do you ask?’

Miriam smiled — a surprisingly bitter smile, for her. ‘If we were all going to die, I’d pick one. And love him every night and every day and to hell with what people say. Except that something tells me that if I choose one, the other will die, and I could not abide that. It must be easy to die out there — a moment’s inattention. And when they compete for me, am I insane, or does it help keep them alive — give them an edge?’

Melitta nodded. ‘I wondered if you were thinking that. And yes — oh, yes. I suppose someone might argue that they’ll be reckless — but I use my lovely eyes on warriors all the time. The aspiring lover is the deadliest of men. And has something to live for.’

Miriam hugged her. ‘I have never said that out loud — even to myself. I feel like such a trull. And then, at the symposium, I watched that red-haired girl and I thought — oh, I thought things. So I went to bed. Before-’

Melitta smiled, somewhere between a true smile and a sneer. ‘I tried to get Anaxagoras between my legs after you went to bed, but he isn’t there yet. Will you be angry when I win him?’

Miriam took a deep breath. ‘Do girls really talk like this?’ she asked.

Melitta shrugged. ‘I don’t usually have much time for women, aside from my spear-maidens,’ she said. ‘All the girls I know talk like this. Sakje girls wager on men.’

‘I want to be a Sakje,’ Miriam said.

Melitta nodded. ‘Fine. When your shoulders are stronger. But only if I can have the musician.’

Satyrus could hear his sister laughing with Miriam, and he assumed that no good would come of it. And it made him uncomfortable, so he finished his repairs, gathered an escort and walked down to the harbour.

The Rhodians had worked night and day since the truce was declared, and they had eighteen triemiolas ready for sea, stores and water aboard down in the sand by the keel — minimum stores, as the city had little food to spare. The oars and running tackle were aboard, and the waterfront was full of oarsmen — men who had been serving as light-armed troops for months. Only Satyrus’ oarsmen from the wrecked Arete had armour.

Menedemos meant to take the Rhodian ships to sea himself. The town was running short on leaders.

Satyrus walked among the Rhodian oarsmen, wishing them luck and Poseidon’s speed. They wouldn’t sail until the truce had expired. Satyrus kept glancing beyond the ruined harbour tower, looking for Demetrios to challenge the ships going to sea, but there wasn’t a sign.

Menedemos saw him looking. ‘I don’t think he cares,’ the Rhodian said. ‘I think he wants us gone — fewer troops to man the walls.’

Satyrus sighed. ‘And more cases of fever this morning — as if a moment’s relaxation makes more people fall sick. I worry you will take the contagion to Leon’s squadrons.’

Menedemos nodded. ‘I’ll go to Samos first and spend a day or two there,’ he said. ‘I’ll know who’s sick by then.’ He looked around. ‘I’m more worried that you won’t have enough men to hold the walls.’

Satyrus raised an eyebrow. ‘Diokles brought us more men than you are taking away — and none of the new troops is sick. Get out there and win, Menedemos. We can’t win here — we can only survive. Just make damn sure that you tell Leon, and Ptolemy. We’re out of space to give up. The new south wall — the “bow” — is the last. Now we have to fight every sortie, every assault.’ He turned and met the Rhodian’s eyes. ‘They don’t have to be skilful, just lucky. Or Demetrios can throw everything at us.’

Menedemos nodded. ‘I know. How long? Two weeks?’

Satyrus shrugged. He raised his hands as if praying. ‘By Herakles my ancestor, we might last months — or fall tomorrow. But my best guess? And you’ve heard this before: Demetrios will come at the third wall as soon as the truce lifts. We’ll move back and he’ll occupy the ground — four days. Then we unleash the trap and retake the third wall. For a day or a week. And he’ll have to spend time rebuilding — call it another week.’ Satyrus shrugged again. ‘And then? We live from hour to hour.’

‘We’d best get to sea, then,’ Menedemos said.

‘May Poseidon guard you,’ Satyrus said.

‘And Apollo withhold his contagion from you,’ Menedemos said.

The truce expired with the sounding of trumpets in both camps, and the Rhodian squadrons put to sea unopposed. The sea was rough, ideal for the better sailors, and Plistias, Demetrios’ admiral, seemed content to let them go.

But Demetrios’ army didn’t stir. There was no hail of stones, no grand assault into the third wall.

Satyrus stood with Jubal on the third wall, just at twilight.

‘He smell the rat?’ Satyrus asked.

Jubal’s eyes widened and he scratched the top of his head. ‘Who know?’ he asked. ‘God, maybe.’ He paused. ‘Duck,’ he said, and dropped flat on the top of the wall.

Satyrus had the sense to emulate him.

With a wicked hiss, a par of shafts whistled over them to shatter below.

‘Somethin’ new,’ Jubal said, hurrying down the inside of the wall. Small parties of Rhodians — the ephebes were on duty — were active in the trench behind the wall, and Cretan archers shot over the wall from time to time. It was vital to Satyrus that the enemy not know how eager he was to abandon the third wall.

Jubal picked up an arrow — the oddest arrow Satyrus had seen. It was solid, like the bolts thrown by ballistae, but short — much shorter than the engines on a ship threw, for instance.

Jubal walked back, poked his head up over the ramparts and fell back instantly, his face bleeding from a dozen cuts.

He lay on his back and screamed. Ephebes came running and got water on his face — he had two bad cuts where another bolt had hit a rock, inches from his face and split, the shattered shaft flaying his skin.

Satyrus helped other men carry him back to his tent, and Aspasia gave him poppy.

He found Melitta and gave her one of the bolts. ‘Tell your archers to beware,’ he said. ‘They have an engine — a small one, I assume. Very powerful.’

By the next day, one of her maiden archers was dead, shot through the head as she rose to shoot, and another had her bow hand broken by a tumbling shaft that had hit a stone. Others were hit, as well — two ephebes shot dead; a citizen hoplite screaming his guts out in the makeshift hospital.

Satyrus ordered a makeshift tower raised just south of the agora, on the foundations of the boule’s tholos. Idomeneus and Melitta used the tower to watch the enemy lines as soon as it went up.

Idomeneus came down almost immediately. ‘Troops massing behind their engines,’ he said.

Satyrus sounded the alarm and the town’s whole garrison stood to — manning every inch of wall, with the marines and town hoplites in reserve in the city’s agora. They stood to all night, men sleeping on their feet in their armour.

And nothing happened.

The next day, Jubal was back, the wounds on his face livid, giving him an angry look that ill suited his open nature. He climbed the tower, came back down and shook his head.

‘You know why I don’ buil’ no tower?’ he asked Satyrus.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘No — I guess I assumed that you hadn’t thought of it.’

His makeshift siege engineer spat. ‘Don’ wan’ them,’ Jubal pointed at Demetrios’ camp, ‘to buil’ no tower. Buil’ they a tower, see over our wall, see my lil’ surprise.’

Two stades away, Lucius looked under his hand at the distant city. ‘Arse-cunts built a tower,’ he said to Stratokles. ‘Now they can see everything Golden Boy does — so much for the surprise assault.’ He laughed. ‘Now, why didn’t we think of building a tower?’

Stratokles took a healthy swig of wine and spat it out after rinsing his mouth — just in case he had to fight.

‘Because so many of our slaves are sick with the fever that we can’t repair our engines and build a tower,’ he said. ‘Plistias wants a tower. So does King Demetrios. But we’re a little short on manpower right now.’

Lucius barked a laugh. ‘Make the useless phalangites do the work. They’re not worth a crap in an assault — they ought to dig.’

Stratokles cuffed his man. ‘Don’t let anyone hear you say that,’ he said.

Lucius was uncowed. ‘If I had half this number of Latins, I’d show them how to dig. And fight.’

Two more days of inaction. Tense, desperate inaction.

And the fevers began to creep into the ranks of the ephebes. First one, then ten men went down, puking their guts out, skin sallow.

Satyrus ran into Miriam and Aspasia at the northern edge of the agora, where the slaves lived, arms full of blankets. Miriam looked as if she was forty. Or fifty. Her eyes were hollow, red as if from weeping.

Satyrus hadn’t spent five minutes in her presence since he had kissed her. He went to salute her.

‘Stay away, polemarch!’ Aspasia commanded. She’d been a priestess and a physician all her life, and her voice carried commands as effectively as Satyrus’ own. He stepped back. He smiled at Miriam, eager to establish some contact, and she looked at him the way a veteran looks as a green stripling.

‘What do they need?’ Satyrus asked the two women. ‘More blankets? Greater food supplies?’

‘Hope,’ Miriam said.

‘I think Demetrios has the fever in his camp,’ Damophilus said. ‘It’s the only explanation Jubal and I can arrive at for his hesitation. His engines still aren’t firing — at least, fewer than half of them.’

‘I’m sure you can all see the irony,’ Satyrus said. ‘Demetrios is held back by the sickness of his slaves — and so our trap is going to fail.’ He shook his head. ‘Zeus Sator, we need a little luck.’

Neiron nodded. All the men of the boule — now meeting in the open air, as the stones of their elegant meeting place now formed the centre of the hidden wall, Jubal’s ‘bow’ — nodded. Their eyes were hollow, and their bellies, as well. The squadrons had sailed, and nothing had come back, and the granaries were reaching desperate levels.

‘We have to cut the grain ration,’ Hellenos said. He made a face and raised his hands. ‘Don’t kill the messenger!’

Memnon shook his head. ‘If we cut the grain ration, someone will surrender the city,’ he said. ‘That’s how I see it.’

Neiron grunted. ‘There’s more than one irony at work here. What you’re saying is that inaction allows people to think of how desperate they are.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘I saw that days ago, Old Neiron. Demetrios does us more damage waiting than striking.’

Damophilus raised an eyebrow. ‘Then what — attack him? Before all our hoplites are sick?’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘Suicide. His entrenchments are sound — in fact, in yet another irony, we’ve taught him to build better entrenchments by our constant raids.’

Jubal nodded. ‘An’ they heavy blows’s killin’ us.’

Two days of further observation showed that the enemy had a mechanical bow. Old soldiers like Draco knew them as soon as they saw them — Alexander had favoured the weapon for sieges — the gastraphetes. The crossbow.

‘It’s not that it outranges the Sakje, or even my lads,’ Idomeneus said. ‘It’s that they can shoot it from cover. No need to pull it — no need to kneel or stand. And once they cock it, they can watch for a whole cycle of the sun for a man to show his head.’

Satyrus looked around at his officers. ‘Anyone have a suggestion?’ he asked, looking at Jubal.

Jubal nodded. ‘Do. Do, do. Seen women making baskets — seen men fill ’em with earth, building walls.’

There was no news there. ‘So?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Weave big-arse baskets, an’ mount ’em on the walls at night,’ Jubal said. ‘Fill ’em with earth. Now archers can stan’ to shoot — behin’ the baskets.’

‘Until they concentrate engine fire on the baskets’ position,’ Satyrus said.

‘An’ so we need fifty,’ Jubal said. ‘Make that twice fifty. Best do the new wall at the same time, eh?’

Satyrus scratched his beard. He was pretty sure that he had lice. Everyone did, all of a sudden. ‘Let’s try it,’ he said.

‘And how exactly are we going to get the slaves to dig for us?’ Damophilus asked. ‘Most of them are either sick or faking it.’

Satyrus didn’t think many were shamming. It was a charge aristocrats had levelled since the first cases of fever. ‘I think it is time to free all of the slaves,’ he said.

Not a single voice was raised against him.

Satyrus found Korus with a line of women, all of them lifting rocks in the shade of the remaining olive trees at the western end of the agora. The women didn’t look away in maidenly modesty, but glared at him for interrupting their exercise.

‘I need you,’ Satyrus said to Korus.

‘You look strong enough to me,’ Korus said. Some of the women laughed.

‘I’m serious,’ Satyrus said.

‘So are we,’ Miriam offered, coming forward. The lines in her face were even more pronounced, today — she looked stern, more like a teacher or a head cook than a gentlewoman of leisure. ‘We’re learning to be archers. You sister says we need stronger arms.’

Satyrus bit back a number of retorts. His sister was behind this — and she was right. And these women were participating, which was good for morale. He took a deep breath — lately he’d begun to think that the art of command was in not saying things — and smiled gravely.

‘That’s excellent,’ he said. ‘Korus, when you are finished, I need you to be my spokesman.’

Korus nodded. ‘What do you want? The slaves, I assume?’

‘I’m going to free them. All.’ Satyrus looked at the former slave for a reaction.

Korus’ smile was small, but it was there. ‘Then what?’ he asked.

‘Then I’m going to ask every citizen to work. Tonight. On the south wall.’ Satyrus smiled.

Korus smiled back. ‘I think the new citizens might do that,’ he allowed.

A new moon, and darkness. Like a wave of spectres, the chosen work parties went up the third wall — still, despite Satyrus’ best efforts to give it up, the defensive position of the defenders — and planted enormous baskets all along the top. And then, like ants, the citizens of the town, with shovels and smaller baskets and metal buckets and every tool at their disposal, began to fill the giant baskets — fifty-two of them. With thirty or more citizens to every basket.

The enemy was taken by surprise. It took half a watch for them to get their engines manned, and the moon was down before the first rocks flew — and bolts from various ballistae, large and small.

Men died. Women died.

The defenders died. The survivors went on digging, carrying the fill up the wall and dumping it into the baskets. The lucky ones worked on the new wall — the ‘bow’. They were covered. The unlucky worked on the third wall.

Like a squall at sea, the first shower of missiles died away.

‘Shot away their reserve of arrows and stones,’ Satyrus said to Abraham. ‘Now they have to send to the rear for more.’

‘Where are you going?’ he asked. The King of the Bosporus was stripping out of his bronze cuirass.

‘You command the reserve,’ Satyrus said. ‘You used to be my best captain. You’re a citizen. I need you to take command.’

Abraham nodded. ‘I accept.’

‘Good,’ Satyrus said. ‘Because I’m going to dig.’

The sun was a smear on the horizon, and no one had the energy to comment on the rosy fingers of dawn. The diggers lay like the dead, except for Aspasia, Miriam, Nike and a dozen other women, who were carrying the wounded to the rear. Men rose to help them — but not many.

Anaxagoras stepped out of the ranks of the hoplites, and a dusty ex-slave put his hand on the musician’s chest.

‘Back in the ranks, brother,’ Satyrus said.

‘But-’

‘If there’s an attack right now, you and the ephebes are all we have,’ Satyrus said. ‘The citizen hoplites worked all night.’

Memnon, who looked as much like a slave as the king, stopped next to him and leaned on a heavy shovel. ‘We lost a prime lot of weight, though,’ he joked.

And the Sakje and the Cretans, who had been kept back from the digging, manned the new embrasures with the dawn. Satyrus took a wineskin and climbed the tower.

It took almost an hour for there to be enough light to see — or shoot. But Satyrus watched the crossbow teams move forward, saw them scratch their heads, literally — at the change in the Rhodian south wall.

Satyrus and Jubal mapped out the positions of the crossbow teams and sent the information to Idomeneus via Helios. A Sakje was caught moving and was shot through both hips, and he died screaming.

‘I need to teach you to read and write,’ Satyrus said to Jubal.

‘Heh,’ Jubal said. ‘Why you think I can’ read?’

‘You may be the best siege engineer in the world, just now,’ Satyrus said. ‘And I need you to learn the maths. For all of us.’

‘I know maths,’ Jubal said. ‘I read Pythagoras.’

A whistle sounded, and as one, the whole of Melitta’s Sakje force rose to their feet. Further east, the entire Cretan force did the same, standing up behind the great baskets. All together, they drew. Master archers called ranges and lofted their own bows, and the bone whistle sounded again, and all of them loosed — six hundred arrows.

Seconds later, they loosed again, and then again and again, until the arrow squall filled the air between the walls with a continuous flurry.

In the enemy forward positions, men were hit. The crossbow snipers suffered heavily, and the survivors of the first volley, shocked, hugged their cover.

Small groups of Sakje archers ran forward down the rubble wall and sprinted across no-man’s land, unopposed, as the fourth and fifth volleys ripped through the air.

The bone whistle sounded, and not a single arrow left a string. The last volley flew, whistling arrows shrieking to add to the terror, and the sprinters were across, clambering up through the stakes and sharpened tree branches of the enemy lines. The enemy snipers raised their heads too late: the Sakje were shooting point blank — and the enemy had no engines registered on their own lines.

Thyrsis returned in triumph, brandishing a captured gastraphetes.

Satyrus let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

Demetrios did not ponder long on the new development. Before the morning was old, the men on the tower could see his pikemen moving into assault positions.

‘Finally!’ Satyrus said.

There were thousands of them. They blackened the ground behind the enemy’s entrenchments — four taxeis and then a fifth stretched four deep across the rear.

‘Using his veterans to push the newer troops forward,’ Satyrus said. Abraham had joined him, and Hellenos, and they kept the younger men busy, up and down the ladders.

Jubal grinned. ‘Now — now he take the poison pill. Let he have it!’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘but if those men get onto the new wall, we’re done for. We have to make a fight of it, and then we have to withdraw in good order — without taking too many casualties.’ He spat. ‘Zeus Sator, stand by us. Herakles, guide my arm.’

He raced down the tower — now he feared the power of that assault — and Helios was waiting with his armour.

‘Every man,’ he said. ‘Every man into the ditch behind the bow.’

When they came, they came fast and hard. They knew that the defeat of their snipers meant that they would face massed archery, and they’d been coached.

They didn’t have their sarissas, either. They had javelins and light spears, or nothing but swords. They came forward at a dead run, screaming with fear, rage, battle spirit. Their officers came first, and the arrows reaped them first.

It was the first time that Demetrios had attacked a wall without massive bombardment. It was the first time he’d put ten thousand men in a single wave.

It was the toughest assault yet, and the Macedonians didn’t flinch at the arrows though they died in heaps on the wall. The last horse length of the climb was brutal — Jubal had deliberately built the walls at a changing pitch to lure infantry into believing that they could be climbed easily. Only when a man was halfway to the top did he see clearly how steep the last few feet were, and few men stopped to reason why every section had a sloped zone with easy climbing.

Into the heart of the archery.

The archers reaped phalangites like a woman cutting weeds in her garden, but they began to tire — even the Sakje — and their arrow supply ran short. And then, at the call of a bone whistle, they broke. The Sakje were fast, running to reform being a part of their core tactics. The Cretans were slower to break, and lost men to the triumphant Macedonians as finally they got over the wall.

Satyrus had the ephebes, the citizen hoplites and the oarsmen formed along the trench.

‘Stand up!’ he called.

The town garrison had their spears in their hands and they all but filled the wall. The Macedonians came over the crest of the rubble — the wall was fifty feet wide in places — and crashed headlong into the formed Rhodians. Spearless, spread out in no particular order, their feet punished by the sharp gravel of the walls, the Macedonians hesitated, and the Rhodians rolled them down off the wall in a single charge.

Satyrus was never in action — he was too busy calling commands. And as soon as his men cleared the wall top, he ordered them to face about. Already the enemy had missiles flying, heedless of hitting their own recoiling troops.

The Rhodians went back down their own wall and into the reserve trench behind it.

The Sakje came forward, rearmed with arrows, and filled in the strong places on the rubble wall top. The Cretans were slower to return.

Idomeneus was dead.

The second attack was half-hearted. The archers cleared off the wall, but the Antigonids had lost too many officers and the men hung back. The whole attack bogged down into desultory javelin-throwing, the Antigonids occupying the wall top but not pressing their advantage.

Satyrus waited as long as he felt that he could and then attacked them, clearing the wall top. This time, as soon as his men crested the wall, the enemy barrage struck, and he took casualties. But many of the enemy rounds dropped short or long, and his men got away with only twenty down — twenty armoured men he could not afford to lose.

The third attack failed to dislodge the Sakje. They shot and shot, some of them using their bows at arm’s reach, others drawing their long knives, and the Cretans held their ground too, and the enemy soldiers paid heavily for their timorousness in not pressing their attack. Caught in the open ground, they took casualties they needn’t have taken.

‘Demetrios is pushing new troops forward,’ came the message from the tower.

‘My boys and girls are down to five shafts each,’ Melitta said.

Two hours until sunset.

‘Give they the wall,’ Jubal said.

Abraham nodded. ‘You said to make it look like we wanted to hold it. We held it all day. Give it to them.’

Satyrus looked into the golden afternoon. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry, friends. We have to go hand to hand.’

Neiron started to say something. Satyrus glared at him. ‘This is my call, gentlemen. Archers out, Melitta, all the way back to the “bow”. Save your last shafts for — well, if we get broken.’ He held out his hand. ‘Give me that whistle,’ he said, and she handed it over.

‘Don’t get killed, stupid brother,’ she said. She kissed him. They grinned at each other.

The archers slipped away unseen, heading for the rear. Satyrus climbed the wall, took cover behind one of the filled baskets, which topped his head — just. It had been hit repeatedly, and the soft earth and gravel fill was a pincushion of bolts.

Now he could see the enemy forming. Stones slammed into the earthwork, but it held. A trickle of sand ran down the basket and onto his back. Another bolt thudded home.

Satyrus ran down the slope to his troops. ‘Officers!’ he roared.

He waited until they were all there. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘When the whistle sounds, you charge. Got it?’

Neiron looked up at the wall. ‘How will you know?’

‘I’ll be on the wall,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me there. We have to stop this one. No second place, gentlemen. No speeches. Get to the top and hold. Ready?’

They growled, and he sent them back to the phalanx. He turned and ran up the inner face of the third wall, Helios on his heels.

‘I didn’t tell you to come,’ he said.

‘You don’t tell me to get you juice every morning, either,’ Helios replied.

Bolts fell, and a shower of rocks, small rocks being launched in baskets. One pinged off his silver helmet, hard enough for him to smell blood. But he peered out.

The enemy was already in the middle ground — running silently. Men were falling — they were going too fast for safety. They were fast.

Satyrus blew the whistle. He had left it late. Just below him, his men had to get to their feet — had to get their shields on their arms. Had to start up the slope of rubble.

But the Antigonids were slowed — again — by Jubal’s cunning rubble wall and its apparently shallow slope, and they bunched up on the ramps-

— Apollodorus roared for the oarsmen to dress their line as they came up the wall-

— Abraham laid his spear sideways across a line of his fellow citizens-

— A Macedonian officer, resplendent in gold and silver, raised his shield at the top of the wall. ‘Come on!’ he roared, and men poured onto the wall top-

Satyrus stood straight — no missiles now — and set his shield on his shoulder.

The oarsmen came over the wall top formed like veterans, and their spears slammed into the forming Macedonians. The Macedonians were higher: they’d won the race to the wall.

But they were too far apart, still trying to form.

And that’s all Satyrus had time to see. He’d intended to fight the man in silver and gold, but just as the left files of the oarsmen closed around him, a crowd of Antigonid phalangites howled into his position. He took a shower of blows on his shield and he was pressed back against the men coming up behind him — and Helios went down next to him.

The whole fight seemed to crystallise, then, and time seemed to slow down. He sidestepped — right over Helios as the boy gave a great shudder — and put his spear through a man’s eye-slit, whipped the head back and rifled it forward at the next man’s helmet, the point scoring on the crown just under his horsehair crest and punching through the bronze to spill his brains inside his helmet, and he slumped down across his file-mate.

A blow caught Satyrus in the neck. It hurt, but he kept his feet. Now his oarsmen were on either side. The enemy’s rush was stemmed.

‘Push!’ Satyrus called, and the oarsmen leaned on their spears, put their shoulders into their shields and heaved. Now the tiny differences told — the leather socks inside their sandals allowed men a secure stance on gravel — scarves on necks stopped sweat, cloth pads in helmets allowed the men to see a little better.

But the Macedonians were better fed, and they had not lived in constant fear for six long months.

At the top of the wall, the fight balanced out. Men coming up behind couldn’t join the push — the fighting lines were higher than their supporting ranks in most places. But they could press in tighter, and the press became so close that men began to die in the crush, stabbed under their shields, jaws broken when someone rammed their own shield up into their mouth in the melee, or men were simply crushed off their feet.

The citizen hoplites with the old-fashioned aspis were at an advantage, now — bigger shields kept men alive in the closest press. The marines, too: Apollodorus, howling like a lion loose in a pen of sheep, killed two men. He demanded that the marines push, and they responded. Draco killed a man an arm’s length from Satyrus, and blood sprayed from his severed neck — the Antigonids around him flinched, and Draco was into them like a wolf into a flock of sheep, slaying to right and left, his spear ripping their shades from their mouths and sending them shrieking to Hades.

Draco died there, roaring into the ranks of the Antigonids alone, exposed, outpacing the rest of the marines, but he created a hole — a flaw like a tear in the fabric of the enemy formation right at the top of the wall, and it collapsed in. Satyrus knocked a man unconscious with the butt of his broken spear — no idea when it had broken — and stepped into the gap. Apollodorus downed his man and Abraham, armed only with a sword, roared at his citizen hoplites and jabbed so fast that Satyrus couldn’t follow his actions — brilliant — and his men shoved forward. And there, in those heartbeats, the attack was broken.

Satyrus looked down and realised that the man he had just smashed to the ground was the man in the gold and silver armour. He grabbed the man’s ankles and pulled. Other hands reached to help him.

He let go of the wounded officer, raised his head and saw the enemy rushing to their machines as the broken attack began to filter back. The enemy weren’t smashed — officers and phylarchs were reforming down in the rubble — but Satyrus suspected that they were done for the day.

‘Off the wall!’ he called.

Two marines were lifting Draco. Satyrus had seen him fall — known who he had to be.

Other men had Helios, and other wounded and dead men. Satyrus saw blue and white plumes — the anchor.

Neiron: his white Athenian armour covered in blood.

‘Back!’ Satyrus roared. ‘Off the wall!’

Slowly, stubbornly, the citizen hoplites and the ephebes and the oarsmen came down the back of the wall, and behind them, the enemy machines opened up.

‘All the way back!’ Satyrus called. He made himself look away — Neiron was looking at him. ‘All the way back!’ he yelled, and ran down the line. The ephebes were slow — too damned proud. He ran up to their leaders and demanded they run.

‘We have no need to run, polemarch!’ a phylarch called.

A stone from the enemy engines crushed him, showering his age-mates with blood and bone.

‘Run, damn you!’ Satyrus called.

He went up the face of the new wall — the last wall, the ‘bow’, and looked back.

The third wall was lost under a deluge of stone and shot. Some shots were going over — enough to kill more men in a few heartbeats than the whole desperate fight at the top of the wall had killed in minutes.

I had to, he told himself. Helios? Neiron? Draco? Idomeneus?

I had to. If I didn’t hold it as long as I could, Demetrios would smell a rat.

If he’s already smelled it, I have just lost those men for nothing.

The new wall had the revetments that they had spent the night building on the forward wall — heavy pylons like squat columns full of rubble and dirt, and the archers were already occupying them.

‘Well done,’ Melitta said. She had a graze across one cheek, but otherwise looked calm and clean. ‘Looked real enough to me.’

‘Helios is down,’ Satyrus said.

Melitta raised an eyebrow. ‘Helios is dead, brother. Neiron too. He asked for you. And you did what you had to do.’ She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Everyone lost somebody today. Don’t show it. You won. You must appear to have won. Philokles would say the same.’

Satyrus took a deep breath. Helios! he thought. But he schooled his face.

‘Reform!’ he called.

Demetrios didn’t move forward until just after nightfall. The night assault rolled over the rubble, sprinting across ground thick with corpses, and took the unoccupied wall in one rush — and shouted their triumph, and relief, into the night.

Jubal smiled. ‘Now he move his engines fo’wards.’

Satyrus awoke to pain. His body hurt, his legs hurt — one of his ankles was swollen, and he’d ripped his shield arm on the plates of his cuirass and that hurt. He sat up, cursed the darkness and managed to swing his legs over the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor.

He made noise, deliberately, so that Helios would know he was up.

Helios was dead.

He found a chiton and put it on, got to the door of the tent and found Jacob sitting on a chair.

‘Lord?’ he said, raising red eyes.

‘Jacob?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Master has the fever,’ Jacob said. ‘We’re all going to die here.’

Satyrus shot past the man into the adjoining tent.

‘Is that you, Jacob?’ Abraham said. Then he said something in another language — Hebrew or Aramaic. Satyrus shook his head.

‘I hear you are sick,’ he said.

‘Stay back, Satyrus. Stay out. Damn you!’ This last when Satyrus barged in. ‘It’s a fever, not some poisoned arrows of your strange god of light and disease.’

‘I know what disease is, brother. You seem very much yourself.’ Satyrus put a hand on Abraham’s forehead. He was burning hot, and his eyes were as bright as newly minted coins. ‘I take it all back. You are sick. Has Aspasia seen you?’

‘And my sister — at the break of day. I was told to sleep as much as I can. I’m already bored, and this takes a week.’ Abraham managed a smile.

‘If you are lucky,’ Satyrus said. ‘It could be months,’ he added.

‘I could die,’ Abraham said. He laughed. ‘I might as well have gone down yesterday, covered in glory, like Neiron or Helios.’

Satyrus poured himself some juice and poured more for Abraham, and brought it to him. ‘You are covered in glory. I saw you break their line. I will see to it that you receive a wreath of olive. And you’re young and strong,’ he said. ‘We lost too many men yesterday.’

Abraham nodded. ‘I assume you know what you are doing. I saw no reason for the third fight — but Jubal does.’

Satyrus managed a smile. ‘Jubal is, in effect, commanding the siege.’ He waved his hands. ‘Who knew that I had a genius as my sailing master?’

‘You’ll miss Neiron,’ Abraham said. ‘He wasn’t afraid to tell you what he thought.’

Satyrus swallowed heavily. ‘I miss them all. Go to sleep.’

‘If I die, I want to be burned,’ Abraham said, ‘in my armour. It’s not against my religion.’

‘Like a hero at Troy?’ Satyrus said.

‘Yes,’ Abraham answered.

Outside, Satyrus found Apollodorus waiting patiently at the entrance to his tent.

‘Looking for me?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Demeter, Lord.’ Apollodorus shook his head. ‘Helios is dead, and no one knows how to find you.’

‘I’ll need a new Helios.’ Satyrus winced at the callousness of it. But there it was — if he died, they’d need a new polemarch, too.

‘Hyperetes or hypaspist?’ Apollodorus asked. He looked in Abraham’s tent. ‘He sick? That’s not good. He’s one of the best.’

‘Both.’ Satyrus led the smaller man into his tent, found the amphora of pomegranate juice and poured two cups.

‘When this is gone, I have no idea where to find more.’ Satyrus looked at the amphora — Attic black work, a hundred years old. Probably from Abraham’s house.

‘I haven’t had juice in a month.’ Apollodorus drank down his cup. ‘You took a prisoner yesterday.’

‘I did, too.’ Satyrus nodded.

‘He’s one of Plistias’ officers. One of the siege engineers. He wanted to see our rubble walls first hand.’ Apollodorus scratched under his beard.

Satyrus made a face. ‘How are the oarsmen?’

‘I’m keeping them and the marines separate. The city hoplites have it bad — two out of three men are down. The ephebes are almost as bad. It’s as if yesterday fuelled it — suddenly men are down everywhere. And this officer — Lysander — has seen some of it. I think we should kill him. We certainly don’t want Demetrios to know how many sick we have.’

Satyrus drank his juice. ‘I know why you asked, but we won’t kill our prisoners, even if they storm us. We are better, Apollodorus — never forget that. To be better, one must consistently be better.’

Apollodorus managed a smile. ‘I knew I’d get the “better” lecture. Very well — what do we do with him?’

‘Give him an escort and let him wander about.’ Satyrus nodded. ‘Save your protests — I want to trick him, but first we must give a reasonably good facsimile of allowing him to go where he will. Is Demetrios moving his engines forward?’

‘About a third of them. The rest are on rollers, ready to move. Jubal thinks from what he’s seeing that the fever is as bad in the enemy camp as it is here, and that Demetrios has severe manpower problems.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Whatever happens, this Lysander must not escape tonight. Tomorrow night will be something else again.’

‘You have a plan?’ Apollodorus asked.

‘It will depend on a few things. Let’s meet under the olive trees at noon. All of the officers, and let’s have some Neodamodeis and some women, as well.’

Exercise — alone, without Helios. Anaxagoras came up while he was shadow-fighting with a sword.

‘Wrestle?’ he asked.

They stripped and fought, and even with so many sick, people gathered to watch, cheered and wagered.

‘You have recovered your muscle,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I cannot pin you.’

‘I have trained since I was a boy,’ Satyrus laughed. ‘It would be a strange thing if you could. Shall we play?’

In the shade of the olive trees, Anaxagoras was the master and Satyrus the merest pupil, but they played scales, up and down the lyre.

‘It is exactly like swordsmanship, or spear-fighting,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You must do everything until you can do it without any conscious thought. A good musician can play while talking, play while reciting poetry, play while drinking. Your sister is. . very different to Greek women.’

Satyrus laughed. ‘She is very different.’

‘I saw her in the trench — killing. Killing from the joy of battle, like a man. Is she really an Amazon?’

‘Alexander called our mother the Queen of the Amazons,’ Satyrus said. He tended to bite his tongue when he had to bridge his fingers in the scale.

‘You see? That was your best scale. You must not think — only play. Your sister is taking your part with Miriam, I think.’ Anaxagoras laughed. ‘Although I flatter myself that she likes me.’

‘I had a cat once in Alexandria. When she liked a visitor, she killed a dockside rat and brought it, all bloody, warm and damp, and dropped it on the person she fancied. Most people screamed.’ Satyrus smiled.

‘Point taken.’ Anaxagoras reached out. ‘No need for your elbows to stick out while you play. No need to force the strings. Relax.’

‘She thinks you the handsomest man in Rhodes,’ Satyrus said.

‘The competition’s not much, is it?’ Anaxagoras laughed. ‘She’s a beauty, your sister. I didn’t see it at first, mind you — I saw scars and barbarian clothes. It’s in her. . daemon. When she smiles; when she moves.’

‘Careful there,’ Satyrus said. ‘My sister. You know. Mind you, I’m not a protective brother. My sister does not require me to protect her.’

‘She certainly has a way with opposition.’ Anaxagoras shrugged. ‘You are probably the wrong one for me to discuss this with. But no woman has ever pursued me like this before. I find it. . disconcerting. I’m used to the kind of pursuit that Charmides disdains — all smiles and blushes and smouldering looks. Your sister is — not like that.’

Satyrus laughed aloud.

‘Nor am I ready to cede Miriam, although-’ Anaxagoras showed actual confusion, and his hands fell away from the strings.

‘As far as I’m concerned, to hesitate is to concede,’ Satyrus said. ‘I want to marry her. Make her queen.’

Anaxagoras smiled — a broad smile. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now we really are competitors. I’ve already offered.’

Satyrus was surprised. ‘Offered? To Abraham?’

‘Dowry stipulations, land, assets and everything.’ He shrugged. ‘I have not been answered. Nor does my. . curiosity about your sister end my suit. I think that the Lady of the Assagetae is a bit beyond me, to be honest.’

That’s what you think, Satyrus thought.

Leosthenes poured a libation to Poseidon and made a small sacrifice to Apollo — a ram, and a ram that no temple would ever have accepted in better times. But the animal died well, with its head up, and Leosthenes proclaimed its liver clear of inflammation or disease — in itself a good omen.

Panther had been the Rhodian high priest of Apollo, but he was dead. Nicanor had been the second priest, and Menedemos was the third. It had taken them an hour to decide to allow Leosthenes to perform the rituals on behalf of the city, and they had confirmed his citizenship and taken him to the ruined altar of Poseidon for some secret ceremony that left his forehead decorated with ashes.

There was one altar among the olive trees — initially an altar to Apollo, and now to every god, because the temples were either destroyed or dismantled, and the open-air altar was the lone sacred space left to the survivors. Satyrus stood in front of the altar once the sacrifice was made.

All of the officers were gathered under the olive trees. Melitta stood with Miriam and Aspasia, the only women present. They stood well clear of the altar: despite his plethora of daughters and female servants and wives, the sea god was not one for feminine participation in mystery. Apollodorus stood at Satyrus’ right hand, next to the altar, and Charmides, injured in the ankle by yesterday’s fighting, sat on a stool. Damophilus, Socrates and Memnon stood together in front of the altar on Satyrus’ left. Jubal stood farther back, with Philaeus, formerly Satyrus’ oar master and now, with Apollodorus, an officer in the phalanx.

The Neodamodeis were represented by Korus and by Kleitos, the red-haired barbarian who was Abraham’s helmsman: a freed slave himself, he was now commander of their taxeis.

Satyrus glanced at Jacob, who had brought with him a stack of wax tablets and a stylus. ‘Get all this down, eh?’ he asked.

Jacob nodded.

‘First, the numbers. Casualties from yesterday?’ Satyrus waited, apparently impassive.

Apollodorus indicated Anaxagoras, already acting as adjutant for the oarsmen.

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘For the oarsmen — four hundred and sixty-two fit for duty, and two hundred and twelve marines, for a total of six hundred and seventy-four. Thirty-six wounded from yesterday, eleven dead or expected to die. All front-rank men.’

‘Helios, Draco and Neiron,’ Satyrus said.

Damophilus nodded. ‘Three of the best. We will, of course, bury them as full citizens.’

Leosthenes sang the hymn to Ares.

Satyrus waited for him to finish, and turned to Kleitos.

‘Neodamodeis,’ Kleitos said. ‘Eight hundred and thirty fit for duty. More with fever than I can count — let’s say another six hundred. Only lost four dead yesterday and another nine wounded. All expected to recover. ’Less they get fever, of course.’

Men looked aside at the fever numbers. Freed slaves were now the bulk of the citizen manpower — and they were sick.

Melitta stepped forward into the circle of men, as was her right. ‘I speak here for the town mercenaries,’ she said. ‘Idomeneus died on the wall. He served me five years, and I will put up a statue to him in Tanais, if we live.’ She bowed her head. ‘Cretan archers, two hundred and six fit for duty. Over ninety sick with fever. Twenty-one dead, no wounded, from yesterday. They tried to get his corpse back. And succeeded.’

Satyrus nodded.

‘Idomeneus of Crete will receive full citizen honours,’ Damophilus said.

Melitta nodded. ‘Of other mercenaries, the city garrison can, this morning, muster three hundred and fourteen hoplites. Another hundred, at least, have the fever. Fifteen or more are already dead.’

Memnon nodded and stepped forward. ‘City hoplites — around six hundred. We lost seven dead and sixty wounded yesterday, but men have been falling like flies since sunrise, with fever. Maybe two hundred already sick.’ He looked around. ‘Abraham is sick. And my daughter, Nike.’

‘So is your number with sick, or without?’ Satyrus asked. He felt callous.

‘Without.’ Memnon nodded.

‘Ephebes,’ Satyrus said.

Socrates spoke up. ‘One hundred and sixteen fit for service,’ he said.

‘Apollo’s light!’ Memnon said. ‘What happened?’

‘Fever,’ Socrates said. ‘We lost but two men yesterday, and four wounded. All four of whom have the fever now.’

Satyrus looked around. ‘The oarsmen and my marines seem immune from this fever.’

Aspasia stepped into the circle of officers. ‘Miriam and I have discussed that. But your oarsmen camp right next to the Neodamodeis, who have the highest disease rate.’

Apollodorus asked, ‘Is it the same fever we had after Aegypt?’

Aspasia shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It seems to show an excess of bile — like your fever — but none of the men seems to turn yellow. And both of you did. As did many of the oarsmen.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘I remember.’

‘But the bile is much the same, and the sluggishness of the blood,’ Aspasia said. ‘I have cast horoscopes and I get no one answer. It is not the wrath of Apollo — that much I would feel bold to say.’

Apollodorus clearly questioned all this scientific talk. ‘We should fill in the latrines,’ he said, ‘and make people use new ones in the ruins, down by the port. Dug deep. I’ve seen this fighting in Syria — same fever, same conditions.’

Aspasia surprised them all by nodding. ‘I agree. I support the empirical approach to medicine. Hippocrates says many of the same things — simple observation has to augment our science. Let’s face it — the people closest to the latrines have the worst fever except the oarsmen.’

Satyrus rubbed his chin. ‘Fill the latrines? So people will have to walk to the port side to shit? That’s not going to make me popular.’

Apollodorus nodded. ‘And it won’t — pardon my crude speech — be worth a shit unless you enforce it so that the wide-arse who tries to use the agora gets caught and punished.’

Satyrus looked around. ‘Friends — this is the sort of thing that can destroy morale.’

Apollodorus was insistent. ‘It works.’

Jubal leaned in. ‘It do. Listen to he. Any sailor know it, too.’

Memnon shrugged. ‘I don’t, and I’ve been at sea all my life.’

Satyrus looked at Aspasia. ‘I trust Apollodorus with my life, but you are the priestess of Asclepius and the best doctor in Rhodes.’

Damophilus nodded. ‘And people will see that we are doing something about the fever.’

Satyrus glared at him. ‘Until it fails, and then comes the backlash. People are not fools, gentlemen. It’s a poor politician who makes bad laws merely to appear to take action.’

Memnon smiled. ‘You don’t know very many politicians,’ he said.

That got a laugh.

Into the lightened atmosphere, Aspasia spoke up. ‘I say do it,’ she said. ‘I will take some auguries and cast another horoscope — I will ask some friends for help. And I think we would do well to propitiate Apollo and Asclepius publicly. And then move the latrines.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Who is now Priest of Apollo?’ he asked.

Young Socrates stepped forward. ‘I am. And I would be delighted — devoted — to support Despoina Aspasia.’

Satyrus rubbed his chin. ‘Make it so. We move the latrines tomorrow night — every citizen must participate. There will be no exceptions.’

‘Lot of work,’ Memnon said.

‘We should have a few days off,’ Satyrus said.

That got a buzz of excitement. Satyrus shook his head. ‘No — I won’t say anything. But I want to see Aspasia and Miriam after this, and Jubal. Kleitos — all the sailors tonight, yes?’

Kleitos grinned.

Jubal grinned.

Damophilus stepped forward. ‘You must tell us, polemarch. People need to have hope. These men are grinning. Why?’

Satyrus kept his face impassive. ‘Damophilus, I value you and I hope that we are friends. But yesterday, I sacrificed men — good men. My friends. They are dead so that I could keep a certain secret, and by all the gods, that secret will be kept.’

Damophilus was angry. ‘We are the town council! What’s left of the boule!’

Satyrus shook his head.

‘Are you a tyrant?’ Damophilus said in sudden heat.

Memnon grabbed his arm. ‘Come, lad. Uncalled for.’

Satyrus crossed his arms. ‘You may remove me from command,’ he said. ‘That’s harder with a tyrant. But in this, I will not be moved.’

Damophilus submitted with an ill grace.

Satyrus looked around. ‘I’m sorry for my tone. But I will not speak of this. However, I have other military matters to discuss. I need all the armour in the town gathered. I’d like every taxeis to collect its own, paint a number inside the harness and on every other item and lay them out here in the olive groves — the cleanest air, in case the miasma is in the armour. I need this to be done immediately.’

Damophilus’ blood was up. ‘Armour is a man’s private property,’ he said.

‘So were the slaves. The rules are different, now.’ Satyrus looked around. No one else demurred. ‘I need that armour, as soon as can be.’

‘We’ll see,’ Damophilus said, belligerently.

Satyrus stared him down, waited for him to walk away and collected the women and Jubal, and they walked with Korus and Kleitos to the far end of the sacred precinct.

‘It is tonight?’ Kleitos asked.

Jubal nodded. ‘He is moving engines right now,’ he said.

‘Why are we here?’ Miriam asked. ‘Is it about the fever?’

‘No,’ Satyrus said. ‘I need every woman — at least, the biggest five hundred — to put on armour. Late this afternoon. And to stand in it all night — and to ask no questions.’

Jubal grinned. ‘I get it. You one sub-tile bastard.’

Satyrus punched the black man in the arm. ‘This, from you?’

Jubal thrust out his chin and laughed. ‘Take one to know one, eh?’

The shadows were long on the agora when the alarm sounded. Men moved with purpose — alarms were part of every day, and most citizens no longer even felt a rush of the daemon of war when they heard the trumpets.

Satyrus was in armour already. He’d had to lie down on the floor of the tent to get into his cuirass unaided, but he didn’t have a new hypaspist yet, and wasn’t sure where to find one in the middle of a siege.

He got to his feet, drank a cup of water which tasted fairly bad, and walked out with his shield on his shoulder and a spear in his hand.

Apollodorus was waiting, with the prisoner by his side. Lysander looked like a tough man, a veteran, in late middle age with grey at his temples and a major scar at the top of his left shoulder that ran in under his chiton.

He bowed to Satyrus. ‘My lord? I gather I have you to thank for my capture.’

Satyrus took his hand and clasped it. ‘I took you, yes.’

The man met him, eye to eye. ‘May I ask if I am to be ransomed? Or treated as a slave?’

Satyrus nodded to Apollodorus, who saluted and headed off towards the alarm.

‘You had a pleasant day?’ Satyrus asked.

Lysander made a face. ‘I was allowed to wander about. This scares me, lord. I do not wish to be a spy — or to be killed.’ He spread his hands. ‘I see that you have the fever here — not as bad as our camp, but bad enough. I offer this as proof that I am no spy. I cannot hide what I saw.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Come with me, Lysander. You are a Spartan, I think?’

Lysander nodded. ‘No true Spartan, sir. My father was a Spartiate and my mother a well-born Theban lady — but they were never married. I was refused entry to a mess, and I have served abroad ever since.’

Satyrus stopped at the base of the ladder to his tower. ‘You may know a man I loved well — Philokles of Tanais?’

‘If he was Philokles of Molyvos,’ Lysander said with a smile, ‘I knew him for a while. We fought together — Zeus Sator, back when Archippos was archon of Athens. I was a great deal younger then.’ He laughed.

‘He was my tutor,’ Satyrus said.

‘I know,’ Lysander said. He shrugged. ‘I know who you are, lord. But it ill suits a man who must beg for his life to claim acquaintance.’

‘You really are a Spartan,’ Satyrus said. ‘Come.’

‘Why?’ Lysander said.

‘Because I wish to show you why Demetrios has no hope of taking this city,’ Satyrus said. ‘Come. I will release you in the morning. Alive. To tell what you have seen.’

Satyrus led the way up the ladder.

The shadows were long — indeed, the sun had dropped to the rim of the world, and the handful of standing trees visible from the towers threw shadows many times their own height.

‘Demetrios has almost completed moving his engines forward,’ Satyrus said. ‘Thirty-one engines, by my count.’

Lysander turned to him. ‘You cannot expect me to confirm that, lord.’

Satyrus shrugged. ‘Worth a try. How’s your eyesight?’

Lysander raised an eyebrow. ‘Not what it was when I was twenty.’

‘Take a look, anyway.’

Lysander looked out into the edge of night. At his feet lay the fourth south wall — what the Rhodians called the ‘bow’. It ran in a broad curve from the ruins of the great sea tower back almost to the edge of the agora, and then out like the arm of a bow to the original corner with the west wall, where a heavy, squat tower full of ballistae had never fallen to Demetrios. The new wall was the tallest of all of Jubal’s rubble walls, and the most complicated, and most of the town had dug for a month and laid weirs made from every house timber in the town to build the cradles to hold the rubble to make the wall.

Beyond the ‘bow’ ran the shallower curve of the third wall, with a loose cordon of pickets on it — most of them archers and crossbow snipers in covered positions. Their posts were obvious to a child from the height of the tower.

‘By the gods — that’s how you killed our snipers!’ Lysander said.

‘Yes,’ Satyrus said. ‘I’m showing you all of our secrets.’

‘Whatever for, lord?’ the Spartan asked. His accent made Satyrus pine for Philokles.

‘Because Demetrios needs to offer us terms we can accept, or we will defeat him and his empire will be at an end. You know this as well as I do, Lysander. You are a professional soldier. How long did you expect us to hold?’

Lysander nodded. ‘Ten days.’

‘So we are on the two-hundredth day — or so.’ Satyrus pointed at Demetrios’ camp. ‘Will this army ever fight again?’

Lysander shrugged. ‘I take your point.’

‘Good.’ Satyrus looked over the edge of his platform where he could see, half a stade away, a lone man standing at the south-east limit of the ‘bow,’ in the earthworks built from the rubble of the sea tower. He raised his shield and flashed it — once, twice, a third time.

Jubal flashed his shield back.

Satyrus turned back to the Spartan officer. ‘Kiss your engines goodbye,’ he said.

Stratokles stood on the rampart of the third wall at sunset, safe behind one of the basketwork embrasures that the Rhodians had constructed. Lucius was looking it over.

‘Innovative bastards. Have to give them that. Of course a basket of rocks is a wall. Fuck me.’ Lucius cut a twist of the heavy basket loose.

Stratokles was watching the enemy respond to an alarm. ‘What’s got them excited?’ he asked. He watched carefully, sniffing the air.

Lucius shook his head.

‘Do you smell smoke?’ the Athenian asked.

‘I do,’ Lucius said.

Stratokles was looking behind the wall, at the ground that had been no-man’s land the day before. Thin curls of smoke were rising in two places.

‘Off the wall,’ Stratokles said. He ran down the wall to where two hundred of Nestor’s crack guards rested in open formation. ‘Off the wall. Now! Back! Back off the wall!’

He turned and grabbed Lucius. ‘They’ve mined the third wall. We were meant to take it — Ares, I can see it. Run, Lucius — all the way to Plistias. Get to Demetrios if you can. Tell him I’m getting the men out.’

‘He’ll spit you.’ Lucius was dumping his armour as he spoke.

‘Fuck him. These are good men — too good to die for nothing. Now run!’

Lucius dropped his breastplate with a crash of bronze, and ran.

Stratokles ran among the Heraklean marines. ‘On me. Now! Don’t bother forming by files — off the fucking wall, you wide-arses! Follow me!’

Crossbow-sniper teams could hear him, and they began to rise to their feet.

‘Ares, it’s their whole garrison,’ said a man. Stratokles grabbed him, slammed a hand against the fool’s helmeted head. ‘Run!’ he yelled.

Finally, the Herakleans were moving. So were the crossbowmen.

Stratokles ran across the former no-man’s land, behind almost the last of his men. The ground felt hot under his feet. ‘Athena protect,’ he panted.

Men were slowing as they entered the battery where the king’s machines had been parked by sweating slaves, many of whom were still heaving against the tackles or digging, or grading the ground smooth. Smoke rose here, too. The smell was in the air. And Stratokles suddenly noticed that right at the edge of the artillery park was an enormous stone, painted red.

‘Athena save us!’ he said. Then, to the phylarch nearest him, he said, ‘Run! All the way — right through the engines!’

The man looked at him as though he were mad. Perhaps he was. He was urging the entire garrison of the new salient to abandon it to the enemy.

Just to the right, on recently cleared ground, stood the reserve taxeis, two thousand men with pikes, waiting to face any attack thrown at the newly taken third wall — meant to support the men on the wall. Stratokles’ men.

‘What in the name of Tartarus and all the Titans are you doing, you Athenian coward?’ bellowed the Macedonian strategos.

‘Mines. Pre-registered engines. Massive attack. Run or die.’ Stratokles panted.

‘Your wits have deserted you,’ Cleitas said. He drew his sword.

‘Stupid fool,’ Stratokles panted. Now the man was between him and escape. ‘Feel the ground. Look at the smoke. Look at the enemy. Are you a child?’ he bellowed.

The Macedonian was more interested in his own sense of honour. ‘Child?’ he roared, and cut at Stratokles with his sword.

Stratokles took the blow on his shield rim and stepped past the man. ‘Arse-cunt!’ he said, and ran.

The mathematics of a siege is inexorable. There is mathematics in every form of war, but the limitations of a siege bring them to the fore. Ranges, for instance, are immutable. An engine of war has a maximum range, no matter how it is built. On a battlefield, a new weapon might surprise an enemy — but give that enemy two hundred days, and they will know the range of the weapon to the hand’s breadth.

And the mathematics of destruction are equally inexorable. It will take so many engines with so much of a throw-weight just so long to knock down a given length of wall. And if you have engines to employ, you will set them in certain very predictable positions — predictable because they have a certain range and a certain throw-weight, and because the enemy has a certain wall with a certain construction and height.

These things proceed as if divinely ordained. Perhaps they are. But because of them, when the third wall fell, there were only so many positions — at the right range, free of rubble and half-collapsed walls, covered — in which Demetrios, Plistias and their officers could crowd their thirty-one engines to batter the new wall. The new, tougher wall. In fact, by the new, inevitable physics of siege warfare, there were only two places. Large, red-painted stones marked both of them.

Satyrus drummed his fingers on the deck of the tower.

On the right and left arms of the ‘bow’, great swathes of painted linen were pulled down.

‘Ares!’ Lysander said. ‘Oh, gods.’

In orderly rows, like the toys of a well-mannered child, sat twenty-four engines — new engines. Jubal had not used an engine against Demetrios and his forces since the fall of the great tower.

Every engine was fully loaded, the throwing arms cranked right back against the frames, the slings hanging limply to the ground.

When the cloths were ripped away, Jubal raised a torch. It showed clearly in the twilight air. He lit the payload of the engine closest to him. A dozen more were lit afire. And then they began to shoot.

Most of them volleyed together. A few were late — at least one failed to function altogether. But a dozen flaming missiles and another dozen heavy rocks flew, carving streaks on the clear evening air.

‘Ares!’ Lysander said again. It was a sob.

The shots were exactly on target. It was unlikely any would miss — a month ago, when the Rhodians had owned the ground, they had ranged them in. A few fell short — ropes can change torsion in a month, even when loosened off — but most struck their targets within a few arm’s lengths of a bull’s eye, and fire blossomed.

The alarms started, trumpets blaring in all directions.

The Rhodian garrison stood to in a sudden movement, two thousand spears coming erect as the hoplites stood up from concealment behind the ‘bow’.

‘I have no shortage of soldiers,’ Satyrus said.

‘Ares!’ Lysander said. His face was as white as a suit of Athenian armour.

The second volley left the engines — no fire now, but just stones. Some engines threw baskets of loose stones, and some threw sacks that opened in the air, and some threw heavy rocks — one-mina and even ten-mina rocks, carefully hewn to shape by stone-cutters.

The storm of death fell all across the wall.

The whole corps of the town’s archers — all the Sakje and the Cretans — stood to on the ‘bow’. They lofted a volley onto the enemy wall — the third wall, captured just a day before — and then they lofted a second volley and a third and a fourth, a reckless display of a deep supply of arrows, and a fifth.

As the heavy arms of the engines cranked back for the third round, there was a low rumble from the earth near the second wall: the ruins of the second wall, well behind the enemy engines. Columns of dust and smoke rose into the air — some springing from the ground like a desert storm, and some rising lazily like smoke from a campfire when herdsmen kill a sheep and eat it on a feast night on the mountains.

‘That was our mine,’ Satyrus said.

‘But they are. . far from-’

‘Now your relief columns cannot reach the third wall. Not for a long time.’ The flames from the burning mines rose like the sacrifices of a pious army, or the huts of a defeated one — columns of thick, black smoke: every drop of olive oil in every warehouse in the richest city in the world.

The engines shot again — two dozen heavy missiles visible at the top of their parabolas before falling like the fists of an angry god on the terrified phalangites of the duty taxeis.

The archers got off the wall, and the phalanx, two thousand strong, went over the top. Perhaps it was a shambles on the ground, but from a height it appeared that every hoplite was animated by the same godlike hand, and the Rhodians crested the ‘bow’ and filed from the centre of their taxeis like the professional soldiers that the siege had made them. They filed down the ramps of the ‘bow’ that Jubal had designed, formed on the glacis at the foot of the ramps, men flowing into the rear ranks, and then they stepped off across the rubble, and not a single missile flew at them from the Antigonids.

Lysander’s knuckles were white on the tower railing.

A second line of hoplites appeared in the dead ground behind the ‘bow.’ They stood to, their spears wavering slightly in the last light, and the setting sun gilded their points and the iron and bronze points of the city hoplites and the oarsmen as they went up the third wall uncontested, over the top of the wall where Helios had died the day before, and down the ramps on the far side with perfect precision — they had, after all, practised for this moment fifty times. On the far side of the third wall they formed again — and gave a great cheer.

The arms of the engines were cranked all the way back. Satyrus felt his heart thudding against his chest. This was the part that he and Jubal had disagreed on — and Satyrus had conceded.

In the distance, two taxeis of Demetrios’ veterans had formed at the run and were now rolling forward. They had to hurry — the remaining sunlight could be counted in heartbeats. And Demetrios’ entire artillery train was about to be lost.

Stratokles ran to Plistias.

‘Stop!’ he called.

The Ionian looked at him curiously. The phalanx was formed — four thousand men.

‘You were the watch on the wall, you and your Herakleans,’ he said. Not accusingly — but very seriously.

‘I ordered them to run,’ Stratokles said. ‘The wall was mined — the wall and the engines. It is a trap.’

Plistias looked at his files as they moved forward. ‘What kind of trap can resist four thousand hoplites?’

Stratokles grabbed the Ionian commander. ‘Must I beg you? Listen to me! I have set a few traps in my time, and I know one when I see one. And this is a subtle man, Plistias. Satyrus is not some ignorant chieftain in a hill fort. He knows that you will counter-attack with overwhelming force.’

Plistias had heard enough. ‘Halt!’ he screamed in his quarter-deck-in-a-storm voice.

The lead files were pressed against the burning trenches as Stratokles and Lucius and Plistias of Cos and their officers tried to push the pikemen back.

It became easier as the first stones began to fall. They fell in silence — the pikemen were loud, and the roar of the fire close at hand was loud, and the first stone crushed three men and killed others with flying bone splinters and gravel, so great was its force. Then the front of the pike block heaved back.

Stratokles was still calling for them to get back when something hit his head, and he went-

‘You may return to your camp at any time,’ Satyrus said, rising to his feet.

The Rhodians had retaken the third wall and stopped — and the engines were now shooting over their heads, volleys of heavy stones whipped so hard that the slings cracked like lightning when the engines released — a low angle, and a new type of shooting. Satyrus hated it — he expected to see red ruin in the Rhodian ranks at every discharge — but Jubal was as good as his word.

Selected parties of pioneers and scouts — Sakje, Cretan and some from his marines — went forward into the inferno, to make sure that the enemy machines were afire.

There were screams — hideous screams — and shouts where the survivors of the baskets of rocks now attacked the third wall — outnumbered and with nothing but fire behind them.

It was slaughter. An entire taxeis was trapped between the fire and the Rhodian phalanx above them. No quarter was offered.

It should have made Satyrus smile. Unless he missed his guess, the siege was about to end.

Instead, it made him tired.

He watched another volley of heavy stones, and turned.

Lysander was holding himself steady, but his face was wet. ‘I hate sieges, my lord,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ said Satyrus. ‘And this is my first.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Take Demetrios my request that he find a way to end the siege. And my offer of a three-day truce. He’ll need it just to find his dead. Your dead.’

‘And you will erect another trophy,’ Lysander said.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘The trophy was a goad, sir. We’re beyond trophies, now.’

Satyrus felt curiously lonely as he wandered the celebration, having taken no part in the fighting, but Apollodorus would have none of it.

‘There was no fighting. Don’t be thick. Drink!’ He said, and pressed his horn cup into Satyrus’ hands.

Memnon embraced Jubal, and then embraced Satyrus. ‘Our agora will have statues to both of you,’ he said. ‘In the morning, we will see him slink away, his tail between his legs. By all the gods, Satyrus — that was a victory.’

Damophilus was cautious in his approach, wary that Satyrus would ridicule him, but Satyrus felt rancour towards none that night. He stepped into Damophilus’ cautious approach and embraced the man. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘We won.’

The democrat nodded. ‘We did. I didn’t trust you — should have trusted you.’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘Power corrupts.’

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that the cost had been too dear, and that the slaughter of a taxeis might not settle the matter. He missed Helios every time he turned around. It saddened him that he had become a man who missed his hypaspist more than he missed his helmsman, or a man who had followed him for ten years, or his boyhood friends: Xenophon had died near him, and Dionysus had gone down in a storm, and he scarcely thought of them at all.

He drank more wine and walked along the lines of fires, dissatisfied, uninterested in company. He walked the walls, alone, surprising delighted sentries in the towers of the west wall, greeting tired mercenaries along the ‘bow’ and along the near-deserted sea wall.

The walk made him feel better. He came up the street that had been Poseidon’s Way, when there had been a Temple of Poseidon, and found a group of Sakje crouched on the tile floor of the temple platform, where the Rhodian admiralty had once met — a tile floor laid down in the likeness of the eastern Mediterranean, with the islands picked out in white against a dark blue sea, among which Rhodes was marked in gold with a rose. The Sakje had swept the floor and made a small camp there — twenty or so young warriors, men and women. He could smell the smoke from their leather smoke tent — a strong scent like burning pine needles, but more pungent.

‘Kineas’ son!’ shouted one of the young men, and in a moment he was surrounded. And he laughed with them, and drank smoke in the tent because they dared him, and stumbled away while they roared with laughter. He laughed too.

‘You are not done yet,’ Philokles said. His Spartan tutor was seated comfortably on a ruined foundation, and he had the lion skin of Herakles draped over a shoulder.

‘Master!’ Satyrus said, and flung his arms around the man. ‘You are dead!’ Satyrus babbled.

I represent something that is very difficult to kill, Philokles said with a chuckle.

There was no one there.

Satyrus walked across the tiles to where the altar of Poseidon had stood. The heavy marble plinth was carefully buried now, protected from the wanton destruction of the siege — but the gods were close, and Satyrus could feel them. He threw his arms wide.

‘Lord Poseidon, Lord Herakles, and all the gods — one hundred and eighty days we have stood this siege with this town and all my friends. Deliver us, now. What town since Troy has stood such a great test? Need we be humbled? We are not so proud.’

‘More like a demand than a prayer,’ Miriam said, behind him.

He remained in an attitude of prayer for many heartbeats, craving an answer with his whole soul. And his soaring delight at the sound of her voice was parried like a sword blow against a good shield by his promise to Abraham and the presence of the gods, and his own lack of control — the smoke had put him on another plane entirely.

If the gods had an answer to make, they didn’t give it voice.

Satyrus lowered his arms. His neck hurt, and he rolled his head and turned to meet her eyes.

Miriam was still wearing armour — that of some slim ephebe who had given his life for his town, because the spear wound that had taken his life and stained the white leather and linen corselet dark brown was obvious. But it fitted her — the shoulder yoke sat firmly on her square shoulders and the base of the corselet sat on her hips as if it had been made for her. Her short military chiton showed her legs in the new moonlight — legs too long ever to have graced a man, no matter how athletic.

‘I’m glad you were in the rear rank,’ he said with a smile. ‘Any Macedonian who saw your legs would have smoked our ruse immediately.’

‘I loved it,’ Miriam said. ‘Oh — I could become Melitta. To be one with the phalanx-’

Satyrus laughed. ‘I hadn’t expected you to like it.’

She sat down. ‘That’s what Anaxagoras said. And he sounded just as disappointed in me. I thought that you would understand.’

Satyrus rolled his shoulders. ‘Of course I understand. But I think I may be forgiven for being surprised. I’m surprised that anyone likes it. I am surprised that Anaxagoras likes it.’

‘You like it,’ Miriam said.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘Not particularly.’

Miriam gave a sour giggle. ‘You sound like a girl trying to win more compliments.’

Satyrus sat next to her. ‘A subject on which I expect you have some experience.’

She shook her head. ‘I want to know. Are you just posturing? Do you really not like it — the struggle? The fight?’

Satyrus shrugged. ‘You want a real answer, and I’m not in the mood to give one, honey. I’m full of wine and old worries and smoke, and if your lips touch mine I’ll have you right here, armour and all. Is that honest enough for you?’

She looked at him. A level stare; in no way a come-hither.

Satyrus sat back, getting the scales of his cuirass comfortably seated against the stones behind him. ‘I love how good I am at fighting — in that, I am like your beautiful young girl, who loves to stare at her own reflection and basks in the admiration of every young man in the agora.’

Miriam chuckled. ‘You’ve met some girls.’

‘One or two. But honey, when the god-sent power falls away, I have a dead friend or two and I’m covered in other men’s blood, or unconscious from a wound. And sometimes, when the wine goes down the wrong way, I have to remember that every man I’ve sent to Hades had a life like mine — love and hate, wine and olives. And Achilles says:

Better a slave to a bad master

Than king among the dead

‘They’re dead when I kill them. And the next fight, or the fight after — I’ll be dead. And when I look at you, when I play music with Anaxagoras, I can’t help but see that there are better things.’ He took a deep breath, and all he breathed in was her — jasmine and a woman’s sweat. ‘It’s not a competition in the palaestra. What I mean-’

He was so close to her that he could see the pores of her skin, the smudge of dark oil under her right eye, the trace of cosmetics hastily rubbed out of her eyes.

Her lips filled his head, the way an opponent’s sword can fill your head. He saw nothing else, and wanted nothing else.

It was easy to fall into her, and it was easy to break his oath to Abraham-

Who was lying sick in a tent.

Satyrus stood up, his erection painful against his leg, ashamed of his weakness and his stupid moral qualms. He wanted her as he had never wanted a woman. The cold eye of light might tell him that she was a dirty, dishevelled waif, skinny from not enough food, dirty from battle, wearing a dead boy’s chiton and armour — but all he could see was the perfection of the lines of her lips, the spacing of her eyes, the swell of her breast when she reached up to touch her hair, her collarbones, her legs-

‘I promised your brother,’ he said miserably, backing away as if she had a dagger at his throat.

‘Me too,’ she said. She giggled. It was an incongruous sound. She covered her mouth, bent double with laughter. ‘Menander couldn’t write a better comedy, Satyrus.’

‘I imagine he’d make it funnier,’ Satyrus said. He sat down on a different stone.

She adjusted her hair, taking her time. ‘I once heard that this is the most aesthetic posture a woman can adopt,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Satyrus said. ‘At the moment, they’re all pretty much the same to me.’

She chuckled, her voice low. ‘You do pay the very best compliments.’

Satyrus smiled to himself. ‘Do you have any wine?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘I’ll get some,’ he said.

‘I’ll wait,’ she responded.

Satyrus walked back through the ruined temple to the Sakje youths. Two of them were copulating — some of the rest watched or called suggestions — but not loudly. Sakje were never loud in camp after dark.

‘Could you spare me a skin of wine?’ he asked, averting his eyes. The ecstatic face of the Sakje girl — on top at the moment — was not what he wanted to see.

‘Hah!’ Scopasis rose from the ground — he had been lying on an animal skin, and he rose with a chuckle. ‘Satyrus, son of Kineas — I have wine to share.’

Satyrus pointed off into the dark. ‘I have. . a girl.’

Scopasis smiled darkly. ‘As do I. I will give you half what I possess.’ He pulled out a skin — a skin that seemed to have a certain stench — and took a long drink, and then poured some into his cloak-mate’s mouth, and more into a cup. Then he tossed the skin. ‘Drink to me when I am dead, Satyrus son of Kineas.’

The Sakje girl was breathing hard, fast and rhythmically beyond the small fire. She raised her face and gazed unseeing on the autumn night, and shrieked softly.

Satyrus caught the skin. ‘Gods bless you, Scopasis,’ he said. He went back through the ruins, stumbling. The girl shrieked again and her man laughed, a low, happy sound.

Satyrus sat close to Miriam, who had loosened and removed her armour. She was as close to naked as a person might be, wearing a single layer of thin wool that covered her to the base of her thighs.

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Give me your cloak and sit close.’

He untied the laces of his shoulder yoke, lay down and rolled out of the harness, feeling lighter and younger. Then he sat next to her, shoulder to shoulder, and threw his chlamys over them both.

He handed her the wineskin and she wrinkled her nose.

‘The hide is untanned. The Sakje think it keeps the taste in the wine. There’s a sheep’s stomach inside, and the mouthpiece is horn — you’ll take nothing from it but wine. But the Sakje drink like this.’ He flipped the skin up expertly and a line of wine fell from the neck of the skin into his lips.

She reached for the skin, and he shook his head. ‘Let’s not spill it. Raise your mouth.’

She did, and he carefully poured wine into it.

She spluttered. ‘This is unwatered wine!’ she said. ‘Oh — and good wine, at that.’

‘The Sakje do not drink bad wine. But drink sparingly — this has something in it. Poppy or lotus or ground hemp seed. Coriander. Something else.’ He drank another mouthful. ‘The Sakje do not believe in moderation.’

Now the man was moaning, a campfire away.

‘I can tell,’ Miriam said. She took the skin and drank, leaving a line of drops spattered along the edge of his chlamys. They both laughed.

‘One of us should go,’ Satyrus said some time later, when they’d fallen asleep briefly with her head against his shoulder.

‘Why?’ Miriam said. ‘I will be true to my oath. But I would rather be true with you beside me.’

Satyrus smiled into her hair. ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

‘Ask me when the siege is over,’ she said. ‘We are living in a world of heroes and horrors, not in the real, waking world. When you awake, I will be a scrawny Jew with a big mouth, and you will be a godless Hellene who needs a dynastic marriage. But I will tell my granddaughters that I might have been a queen-’

Satyrus got a hand under the chlamys, and with all the practice of years of brotherhood and martial training, rammed his thumb in under her arm so that she leaped in the air and squealed.

‘You’re ticklish!’ he said, delighted.

‘Uh-oh,’ she said.

He fell asleep with her sprawled across him for warmth, held closer than any lover he’d ever slept with — oath unbroken. And woke to her eyes on his in the light of a new day. She rubbed the tip of her nose on his, and her fingers pressured his, and she touched her lips against his — and leaped to her feet.

‘It’s a new day,’ she said.