Destroyer of Cities

30

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY AND FOLLOWING

The sag in morale when it became clear that Demetrios had no intention of abandoning the siege was so great that Satyrus thought the city might fall to any determined assault.

The weather grew colder, and it was too late to expect relief from the sea — and starvation began to stalk the garrison. There was no more oil to be found; wine was a drachma a sip, and the grain ration was cut — three-quarters of a measure, and then half, for all citizens.

Two weeks after the battle at the third wall, women cursed him in the street.

Miriam lost weight. He could see it in her neck and then, after a month on half-rations, he could see it in her face.

His sister lost weight. Anaxagoras lost weight. Men who survived the fever — like Abraham, gods be praised — had no meat to replace the muscle they lost, and they hobbled about like incarnations of Death.

The beautiful Nike died of fever, and Charmides was inconsolable.

And yet, unaccountably, after the lone ship tried to raid the harbour, the enemy didn’t stir. Demetrios sat tight behind his earthworks. The ring of hammer on anvil carried clearly, though, and the sound was more ominous than any war hymn.

Lysander the Spartan was a useful and professional addition. He kept tablets, counted things, men, arrows — and stones. Satyrus took him at face value for the sake of Philokles. He couldn’t imagine a dishonest Spartan.

Even the marines began to grow thin. Satyrus didn’t see it happen — he just noticed, all of a sudden one morning, that Apollodorus’ armour hung from him like a stripling wearing his father’s corselet, and that Anaxagoras was thin: Charmides, practising with a bated spear against the Spartan, had thin legs.

‘We’re starving,’ he said aloud.

Korus shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘We’re a long way from starving.’ He shrugged. ‘But we’ll be weaker, and then weaker still.’

Satyrus took to walking the streets constantly — from fire to fire, from guard post to guard post. Miriam was often with him, or Aspasia, Anaxagoras with a lyre, Lysander with a wax tablet, Jubal with papyrus and a plumb line or a tambourine. The first time he carried a tambourine, Satyrus teased him that he was trying to ape Anaxagoras. ‘Or perhaps you will accompany him,’ Satyrus said.

‘Needs a pair of flute girls,’ Lysander said, hesitantly. He wasn’t one of them, yet. He wasn’t sure if his humour would be accepted.

Jubal laughed. ‘Funny, eh?’ He shook the instrument, laid it carefully on the ground, pressed his ear against it and listened. ‘Mines,’ he said.

Anaxagoras got it. ‘The drum skin passes the vibration, of course.’

Kleitos the helmsman was stripping the sails from the remaining ships in the harbour and rigging them as warmer tents for the poor. The Sakje, ever practical, had hollowed out cellars of collapsed houses and made warrens and tunnels there, where they lived in the warm — and where they could light a brazier and smoke out the whole warren.

Melitta almost always walked with him. The people of Rhodes saw her as a deliverer no matter how desperate they became, and many an angry word at her brother she deflected. And the weeks stretched on without relief.

The feast of Apollo came and went, and the fever came back to haunt former slaves and free alike — a quarter of them died in a single week, and the charnel smell of their burning corpses, like a vast burned offering of pig and goat, made every hungry stomach churn in desperation. More than once, Satyrus retched bile.

But after the second round of fever, the sickness seemed to abate. Leosthenes had nothing left to sacrifice but birds. He prayed unceasingly.

Gangs of children roamed the ruined city, poking into houses with sticks, finding half-rotted corpses of dogs which they cooked and ate, or miraculous treasures — buried pithoi of oats and barley. The luckiest treasure-finders brought their goods to the agora and sold them, but by the two hundred and thirtieth day, there was no coinage that could buy food — all anyone wanted was food, and a jewelled brooch worth a small ship wouldn’t buy a cup of olive oil.

Twice, sentries sent out to catch people defecating in public areas actually caught people roasting a corpse. And Satyrus knew they weren’t catching all the attempts. Among the Sakje, it was not even a taboo act.

And still, Demetrios did not attack.

At night, Satyrus sat with Abraham, whose intellect was unharmed but whose body was wrecked. ‘He’s determined to starve us to death,’ Abraham said. Jubal poured some warm water, just tinged with wine — the greatest luxury they had — and some honey.

Melitta agreed. ‘He’s had it with being a god. He has the men to surround us, and the means. Look at the boom across the harbour — six stades of wood, all spiked and chained together. Look at the new trenches on the west wall — not even close enough for arrows to be exchanged. We are contained,’ she said, as if the word were an insult.

Satyrus looked up at the sound of Miriam entering the tent — with Anaxagoras at her back. Hunger had given her the edgy coltishness of a very young woman, until you looked at her face. She had the stern lines of a forty-five-year-old grandmother engraved on her skin. Her nose had grown hawkish.

Satyrus thought her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

She sank down next to him as if she were twice her age, and Anaxagoras groaned just the same way as he rested his back against Satyrus’.

‘I feel as if I’m being punished for hubris,’ Satyrus said. He smiled. ‘I know how selfish that sounds. But I wanted to beat him. So I did. Look where it got us.’

Abraham laughed weakly. ‘I wish I’d seen it, though. How long did it take to plan?’

Satyrus smiled at Jubal, and Jubal grinned his big, friendly, apparently not-so-smart grin. ‘Long time,’ he said. ‘Eh? Long time.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Jubal had the idea the night we lost the great tower. We started our mines — by Hephaestos, we started them before we had the plan to go with them. I wanted a bolt hole. That proved foolish. I had a dream — sent by Apollo, I think — of the tunnels, and we dug them. But it was only when the great tower fell to his engines that we saw how to use our tunnels.’

Miriam waved her hands. ‘And then — oh, my brother — just when you got sick, you remember that Demetrios wouldn’t take the third wall. And his men started a mine,’ she giggled.

‘And we had to storm the mine before it broke through into one of ours.’ Anaxagoras said, suddenly understanding. ‘That’s why you were alone in the dark.’

‘Not alone,’ Jubal said. ‘He was there with me.’ He roared with laughter.

Abraham shuddered when he laughed.

Apollodorus came in, drank some warm water with honey and wine, and sat heavily. Charmides came in with Lysander, and they sat back to back against the tent pole.

Anaxagoras chuckled. ‘You know how I can tell that the gods are kind?’ he asked.

Melitta raised an eyebrow. ‘This will be good.’

‘The hungrier and thinner I am, the easier I get drunk,’ Anaxagoras proclaimed. ‘I may write a song about it. Anacreon never had such a subject. As we run short of wine, why, the gods give me the power to be drunk on less!’

He raised the cup, drank a polite sip and smacked his lips like a connoisseur. ‘Ahh. . looted from a cellar yesterday, I believe.’

Melitta laughed and smacked her leather-clad knee with her hand.

Satyrus couldn’t help but notice how firm her flesh seemed to be.

He looked around. ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said. Anaxagoras was right — he was light-headed on half a cup of watered wine.

‘Silence for the polemarch,’ Abraham said.

Satyrus got unsteadily to his feet. ‘Melitta, we have hundreds of Sakje warriors,’ he began.

‘I knew you’d notice, brother, given time,’ she said teasingly.

‘Demetrios has a horse herd,’ Satyrus said. ‘We have the best horse thieves in the girdle of the world here inside these walls. I propose that we sneak over there, lift his horses, ride them back — and eat them.’

Melitta laughed and slapped her knees again. ‘He must expect us to attack,’ she said.

‘Arrogance is its own reward,’ Lysander said. ‘I would be happy to lead.’

Melitta put a hand on his knee. ‘If you are anything like our Philokles, you can’t ride and you make more noise than a lion in a sheepfold,’ she said. ‘But if you want to lay out for us how the horses are hobbled, we’ll try it.’

‘When?’ Satyrus asked.

Melitta laughed. ‘The moon’s dark. Now’s fine.’

The horse raid rolled along with an inevitability that seemed fated — the Sakje gathered in the dark of the west gate as if summoned, and the Greeks had no idea how it had been done. Melitta spoke to them in the liquid tongue of the Assagetae.

They laughed. She drew pictures in the dirt by torchlight, and they laughed again.

Satyrus and Apollodorus took the marines out of the sally ports and across the empty ground towards the new enemy entrenchments — the contravallation that enclosed the town in a cordon of earth, sand and rock.

There were sentries. They were alert. They sounded the alarm.

The marines stormed the wall anyway — the sentries were badly outnumbered, and Plistias had not stationed a quarter-guard to reinforce the most distant section, so that Satyrus was on top of the earthen rampart fifty heartbeats after his sword had cleared its scabbard.

‘Prisoners,’ he shouted.

The enemy phalangites had the same notion. Fifty of them surrendered. But only after they had sounded the alarm.

The trumpet notes rang out into the night, and trumpets responded from the camp.

Anaxagoras came up next to Satyrus. ‘I wish that I was with your sister,’ he blurted out.

‘Me too,’ Satyrus said.

It was pure joy to be out of the city. Melitta hated the damned city, the rubble, the perpetual smell of shit, the corpses and rotting crap, the brown stink of her hands. It was like a special hell for Sakje. Her brother had no idea how much it hurt the Sakje to be penned inside the foolish walls.

Out here in the open ground west of the city, she took deep breaths. To her right, Scopasis did the same, and Thyrsis laughed aloud.

‘We could take the horses and ride away,’ he said.

‘We’re on an island,’ Melitta reminded them.

‘Bah. We are Assagetae. Put a horse between my legs and these Dirt People will never smell me.’ He laughed again.

‘I don’t know, Thyrsis. You smell pretty strong.’ Melitta got up as she heard the fighting start. ‘We have time now. Let’s move.’

It was, as always, the waiting that was hardest. Demetrios’ men responded well — a taxeis marched within half a watch, carrying torches to light their way, and the night was full of psiloi and oarsmen mounting the earthworks.

The taxeis marched out, moving fast, and were hit by a light shower of arrows. Men died.

The commander of the taxeis stopped and sent for new orders and help.

More arrows fell. Not many — a dozen at a time.

The taxeis put out their torches.

From the stricken entrenchments, the trumpets sounded again and again, urging the Antigonids on.

Demetrios sent his cavalry out through the main gate, two hundred hippeis of his own guard, hastily mounted in the dark. They rode around for too long looking for the taxeis, found it, and arrows began to fall among them. Horses screamed in the dark.

The trumpets from the doomed entrenchment pleaded for rescue.

The taxeis marched out across the open ground the long way, safe behind their own entrenchments, a sensible decision by their commander based on the erroneous information available to him. Erroneous, in that he assumed the entrenchment was still held by his side.

‘I get better every time I blow the damned thing,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘No wonder I stuck with the lyre.’

‘They’re biting, though,’ Satyrus said. ‘It’s time to go.’

Satyrus ran along the earthen wall, giving orders, and the marines scrambled down the outward face and dashed for their own gate. Anaxagoras sounded the trumpet once again, and jumped.

Melitta smiled. Smells like death, she thought. She wished Anaxagoras was here so that she could show him how the Assagetae really fought.

The taxeis crashing through the dark to the rescue of their doomed comrades was just a goat tethered for the lion. Bait. They passed along the broad road that Demetrios’ siege engineers had built — such fastidious men. So predictable. Melitta had watched it being built — she had the map of the siege as clear in her head as her internal map of the woods, gullies and plains around Tanais.

The enemy cavalry would travel west and south of the road, riding across the open ground, sweeping to cover the flanks of the taxeis.

She waited for the marching infantry to pass her. It is never so dark that a Sakje warrior cannot count his foes. She watched them go and counted to a hundred, slowly, in Greek.

Then she rose to her feet, put an arrow to her bow and gave the shrill call of the owl.

The owl call carried across the west wall, and Satyrus nudged Anaxagoras. ‘Here she goes,’ he said.

‘Poseidon protect her, and Apollo,’ Anaxagoras said.

‘Artemis is her god,’ Satyrus said.

The Sakje rose from the grass and ran at the cavalry.

They made almost no sound, but the horses heard them. Most were ambling along, deeply unhappy at crossing such rough ground at night, heads down, interested in the tufts of untouched grass. But now one head came up, and then another. A stallion stopped and pricked his ears, and gave a great cry.

Even the riders could hear the sound of running feet.

Melitta was almost close enough to touch the rider she was after — she ran up behind him, her dead run much faster than his horse’s rapid walk. When she shot him, her feet were still flying at a dead run. The man gulped, pawed the air and fell, and Melitta was in his place, her heels on the horse’s flanks, forcing the animal to a gallop, riding far to the flank — the south-west flank.

As soon as her seat was secure, she began killing men. She would ride alongside and loose her arrow from an arm’s length away.

The hippeis died so fast that their commander fell to the ground still unsure as to whether he was under attack. Scopasis cut his throat and took his gold-hilted sword and his scalp in three efficient motions.

Thyrsis whooped and turned his mount in a tight circle. ‘Ay-yee!’ he screeched, and the rest of the warriors took up the keening cry, and the night was full of it.

‘They got the horses,’ Satyrus said.

‘Now what?’ Miriam asked.

Anaxagoras was more worried than Satyrus had ever seen him.

Satyrus wanted to tell the man how much his worry was misplaced. But he smiled instead. ‘Now a lot of people die,’ he said.

The truth was that the taxeis of Macedonians and Greeks was well led and had excellent discipline. Their officers never lost their nerve.

But not one of them ever forgot the terror of that hour at bay, waiting for the horse archers to come out of the dark. More than fifty of them died, despite their armour, the darkness and close-arrayed shields. The war cries seemed to last for ever, and when a man was hit, he fell among them and writhed and screamed, and they couldn’t move aside to let him die alone. And from time to time one of the barbarians would ride in close and throw a severed head at them, bouncing hollowly off shields, or falling with a hard, damp thump against a helmet.

They stood like professionals, and their officers praised them every time the hoof beats died away. And when the sun rose, they found they had lost slightly fewer than a hundred men.

Melitta cantered easily over the low walls, down the front face between the pilings where the marines had cleared the stakes and pits, and along the open ground to the west gate. She waited for Scopasis and Thyrsis, who whooped and raised trophies in salute, and the marines cheered her.

She saw Anaxagoras on the wall above her, and she waved her bow. He hurried down the internal steps and hauled her off the horse by virtue of height and strength. She laughed.

‘What a beautiful horse,’ he said, after he’d kissed her.

She laughed. He was big, and she like big men, and his beard was pleasant. ‘She’s an ugly plug,’ Melitta said. She wrapped her legs around his waist and kissed him, and her warriors whooped. Even Thyrsis, who had had hopes. Let him hope. She’d started this for her brother, but now she was finding the whole prospect remarkably attractive.

So was he; she could tell.

‘Horse needs a name,’ Anaxagoras said, when she’d removed her mouth from his. He put her down. He slapped the mare on the rump. ‘I’m going to call this one “Sausage”.’

Satyrus laughed. ‘Well done, sister.’

‘Sausage?’ she asked.

‘To go with “Horse meat”, “Steak” and “Meat Pie”.’ Satyrus jumped down off the inner wall. ‘We’ve been naming them as your folks brought them home.’

Inside the gate, she could see half the population of Rhodes. The horses were already dead — all but a dozen, which were under the close guard of the marines.

‘Scopasis insisted we keep the best,’ Satyrus said.

The roar of applause that greeted her appearance in the gate rose like an offering to the gods. She’d never been cheered by so many people. He face lit up, and one of her rare, full-face grins buried her scars.