Force of Kings

9

Ephesus

Dawn. Light the colour of fresh rose petals that rouged the river where it met the sea — wave tops that showed pink, not white. Gulls wheeled away into the sky, frightened by predators or merely playful. Off the river mouth, a school of dolphins leapt and leapt again, and further offshore, a line of sea haze veiled the islands like Poseidon’s coast, waiting for the heat of the sun to burn it off.

Up the coast, five big Athenian grain ships, close up against the beaches, had their sails turned from white to blinding pink by the sun.

Deep in the haze, a flash, and then another — a rhythmic flash.

Flash.

Flash.

A line of flashes, as the rising sun caught oars — many, many oars.

Ten sets of oars.

Flash-flash-flash.

Racing speed. Ramming speed. Into the dawn.

Apollodorus stood amidships, his helmet forgotten on the deck as his hair blew in the wind of his reckless race up the estuary. Ephesus lay before him, high on her ridge, and the Temple of Artemis, one of the wonders of the world, sparkled in Dawn’s embrace.

Closer to hand, fifty ships’ lengths ahead, lay Antigonus’s Asian fleet, moored in the gentle current or beached with their sterns pulled up high above the waterline, and the great camp of their oarsmen and marines stretched up the farm fields and around isolated stands of olive and oak and seemed to reach right up to the town.

Anaxagoras stood by him, and Charmides, and Coenus, and Theron, and Eumenes of Olbia.

There was nothing to be said — nothing but the rush of the wind, the sparkle of the sea, and the enormity of their risk.

And then they were through the chops of the estuary and into the river, still racing, the crews in top training. On the shore, sentries were shouting.

‘Sing the paean!’ Apollodorus called, and all through the fleet, the oarsmen took up the song. The daughters of Apollo were just being hymned on the mountainside of Delphi when the first rams crushed the first helpless ships at anchor.

Out in the estuary, the second Bosporon squadron came on, with Melitta standing in the bow of her penteres, and she heard the hymn rise to the gods, and she grinned.

‘Let them see who we are,’ she said to Herakles, Alexander’s son, who stood behind her, awestruck to be participating in such a mighty enterprise.

Forty warships — the entire fleet of her kingdom.

‘Sing!’ she commanded Herakles, and he caught the song from across the water and raised his clear young voice, and their rowers took it from him, so that forty crews — eight thousand throats — roared the paean into the dawn.

High on the hillside above Ephesus, six men heard the paean.

‘Got their beaks in,’ Stratokles said. He smacked his fist into his palm. ‘It’s a pleasure to work with such competent people,’ he added happily.

Thirty stades away, a minute column of smoke began to rise, and then another and another, like threads on the horizon.

The town garrison began to pour out of the gates, men tying their armour, tossing sword belts over their heads, shoving arms through porpakes.

‘Let’s do it,’ Satyrus said.

The six of them slipped forward, from one grove to the next, until they lost sight of the estuary and the river because they were so close to the wall.

‘Follow me!’ Stratokles said. He sprinted towards the wall; a sentry shouted, and an arrow flew.

Now close to the wall, which rose ten times the height of a man, course upon course of mud brick atop stone. Another arrow flew, and it stuck in the face of Satyrus’s shield.

Stratokles ran diagonally across the face of the nearest tower. The sentries were sounding the alarm but of course the city alarms were already ringing, and their local bell was ignored. As Stratokles had planned.

Around a corner of the wall, where a local farmer had planted his olives right up to the tower.

Up an olive tree, into the crotch, a long step up to the course where the stone met the mud brick — a ledge. Stratokles was panting, but he pointed up the wall; a long, diagonal, like a shallow set of steps hidden by the tops of the olives and by vines.

‘Smugglers,’ he panted.

Satyrus cut past him and ran up the secret steps in the wall.

His bodyguards protested, but he had to do this himself, and so he did. Right up the wall, six men against one of the mightiest cities in Asia.

The sentries were alert, but either they didn’t know of the secret steps or they couldn’t believe anyone would attack them there — there wasn’t a man at the top of the wall, and Satyrus was on the platform.

A man shouted from the nearest tower, and a fully-armed hoplite came running, full tilt, out of the door of the tower.

Achilles came up the wall behind Satyrus. ‘We have to clear the towers without more alarm.’ Satyrus said.

Achilles nodded, and went west.

Satyrus braced. The oncoming hoplite was a brave man. He ran like a god, and he carried a heavy spear.

His inexperience showed in everything from the way he wore his helmet to his overly ornate greaves. Satyrus tipped him off the wall with his shield and the man broke his back falling to the sheds below the wall. But he died quietly.

Satyrus ran for the open door of the tower.

The second Bosporon squadron had fire pots, and they used them, going right in on the beach and putting fire into ship after ship, but further east, on the beaches by the city, the crews were awake and moving, and they began to pour into their hulls. There were sixty ships there. Enough to overwhelm the twenty Bosporons, despite the damage they’d inflicted.

Somewhere in the chaos, Plistias of Cos was cursing the gods and rallying his men. He had five ships launched, and then ten; formed — more forming. He knew the penteres he was facing as soon as he saw it — he knew who he was going to fight.

Even at odds of three to one, he knew his men would have to keep their nerve or die here.

But they stayed steady, despite the shouting in the town, despite the ships burning on the beaches and the turtled wrecks in the estuary. He was proud of them. Then he had twenty ships formed, enough to make a fight of it, and he flashed his shield, and his squadron rowed forward to face bloody Melitta of Tanais.

Into the tower, up the steps, onto the fighting platform — two men, both half-asleep, both watching the disaster out in the anchorage and frankly unbelieving that the war was upon them. Satyrus considered offering them surrender, but he couldn’t afford to lose his surprise. He put his javelin through the nearest man and drew his sword.

‘Yield,’ he said.

The other man shook his head, and threw his javelin. It clattered off Satyrus’s shield, and then Memnon beheaded him. Satyrus never even saw the strike — just the poor lad’s head sailing over the tower wall, still helmeted, to land fifty pous below in the olive trees.

Satyrus sank to one knee and panted.

Then he dropped his aspis, pulled his leather bag over his shoulder, and dumped the makings of a particularly greasy fire onto the stones of the tower top.

Memnon took a swig of vinegar and water and handed it to him, and he had a swig himself.

Got his fire laid out: tinder, carefully kept dry, wrapped in bark, with tallow.

A small clay pot, full of coals. Hot as lava.

Satyrus emptied the coals into the bark tube.

Twenty heartbeats, and smoke began to billow out.

‘Get me the straw from their sleeping pallets,’ Satyrus called over his shoulder.

Four stades away, and Nikephorus watched the tower from under the shade of his hands. At his back, eight hundred men, his best, who’d come ashore from the captured Athenian grain ships and literally crawled across the countryside since midnight.

Draco saw the smoke first. Thumped his back and pointed.

Nikephorus grunted. Just for a moment, his throat closed with some emotion, and his eyes watered. Because if this worked, his name would live for ever.

‘Stand up, you bastards! Time for your morning run!’ he called, and the gods laughed with him.

Melitta stood on her tiptoes to release her third shaft. She was shooting to kill Plistias of Cos. So far she’d killed his helmsman.

Ahead of her, Oinoe oar-raked one of the enemy ships and it fell out of line.

The noise of the fight on the river was like the noise of every battle she’d ever heard, magnified and echoed by the enclosed space and the looming hillsides above them.

An arrow scored down her side, the broad point cutting her bicep and then punching into her side, but her scale shirt turned it. She shot the archer — caught the man leaning out to follow his shot. They were half a stade apart, both ships closing so fast that she would only have time for one more shot. She drew, nocked, searching for the red crest of the enemy navarch.

He’d vanished off his command deck.

He was almost completely hidden, the length of his heavy penteres from her, with boatsail mast and all its rigging between them, and he had his helmet off — and still she saw the flash of his cuirass. She leaped up on the rail and balanced there, on her bare toes, vaguely aware that every archer on the enemy ship was now shooting at her. And then it was just her bow and her hand and her eye and the infinitely distant glimpse of bronze — no conscious thought, the lift of her fine needle-headed arrow above her target, through a waving jungle of ropes and masts and timbers …

She loosed, and tumbled back aboard as two arrows struck her thorax. The scale held one. The other punched into her.

Plistias lined up his ship — bow to bow with the enemy navarch, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that whatever happened now, he’d done his best, and most of his ships would escape. Forty or fifty, anyway — enough that the enemy’s whole brilliant surprise would be wasted.

He never saw the arrow that hit him — a needlepoint that plunged through his wrist and into his thigh where he gripped the steering oars, and he screamed and stumbled, his weight changed, and his whole vessel trembled as if the ship and not the helmsman were wounded.

His Golden Demeter fell off, and he screamed in rage and frustration as he felt the crunch — her oars were fouling against the next ship in line, and with his wrist and leg pinned he couldn’t even make himself push the helm back.

The fire on the top of the tower was billowing smoke.

‘Gate,’ Satyrus said to Memnon and Stratokles.

They nodded — three men against a company of town militia. Then they raced along the walls, all three of them now carrying town shields. The gate was between the next two towers, and it was closed. There was fighting in the courtyard behind it — Achilles and Odysseus and Ajax, back to back to back, with twenty men around them in the yard, and four or five already down. The three mercenaries were careful, cautious — only the most over-exposed man was taken down.

Memnon didn’t say anything — he simply ran down the steps by the gate, and into the back of the press, screaming a war cry.

Stratokles ignored him. ‘Gate!’ he roared.

Satyrus looked at him. In the courtyard, Ajax fell.

‘All or nothing, Satyrus!’ Stratokles said.

Satyrus knew the man was, for once, telling the truth. But it was all he could do to turn his back on the four men — four thugs he’d come to love.

But he did.

He got a shoulder under the spokes of the main drum and Stratokles got under the other. It was a six-man job.

There was no time.

Someone shouted from the other tower. An alarm bell began to ring. And another.

The bars moved by a fraction of a finger’s width.

‘One — two — three!’ Satyrus croaked.

The bars moved — stopped — moved. The sound of a pawl in a gear. Click.

‘Clear the gate! There’s men opening the gate!’ shouted a new voice in the courtyard.

A burst of eudaimonia — the sound of Achilles’s roar of rage, the shouts of fear and pain …

Click click click

An arrow that hit his greave — pain translated to strength …

Click click

‘Get the gate closed!’ from close at hand. A panicked voice.

Click click click click clickclickclickclickclickclickclick!

Satyrus raised his head and an arrow clipped his helmet and there was blood in his nose.

He could see Nikephorus at a dead sprint — a stade away.

He whirled as he heard Stratokles shout. The Athenian was sword to sword with a man in full armour, and guards were pouring up both sets of steps to the gate platform.

Satyrus made it to the head of his steps one pace ahead of his adversary, and he risked everything — balance and life and battle — on putting his shoulder into the man’s aspis at full tilt, trusting to the man’s weight to slow him.

The man fell off the steps, and Satyrus bounced back — lost his footing — rolled over his hips and got his feet under him like a dancer, and came up facing the next man’s spear-strike — wide open.

But he missed, and Satyrus had his shield up, shield foot forward — shields locked, cut low — a deep cut into the man’s foot and he was down, fouling the steps. Satyrus gave half a step, and then another, and a second spearman came up — a third, bolder than the rest, vaulted to the platform from three steps down.

Stratokles was fighting brilliantly at the head of his steps — he had two men down, and his spear was licking down onto their heads.

Satyrus had two opponents, both off balance. He lunged — shield-foot first, a sliding advance that took him off line as his shield caught his opponent’s spearhead and brushed it aside, and Satyrus punched with his shield rim, caught the other man in the helmet, took a blow, accurate but weak, in his own side, felt the blood flowing, but he stepped across in a pass, and used the rotation of his hips to power the full weight of his back-cut into the man’s exposed right side where his partner’s shield no longer covered him. He cut neck and helmet together — so that blood exploded from the wound and the helmet’s base creased and the man fell back onto the steps.

The men on the steps were looking over their shoulders. And then they were running.

Satyrus heard the footsteps as clearly as if he were listening to the end of a footrace. He felt light-headed — his mouth tasted as if he’d drunk all night.

He stumbled down the steps after his beaten foes.

Achilles stood alone in the courtyard. Not, strictly speaking, alone. Memnon was across his lap, screaming in pain, his intestines all around him. Ajax was face first on top of a dozen other corpses in a little mound, and Odysseus was well off to the side, curled in a fetal ball.

The courtyard was full of dead men, a charnel house of the wreckage of brave young men who had died for their city.

Nikephorus ran through the barely open gate, and behind him, fifty phalangites put their shoulders to the doors and pushed, and the doors — giant edifices of wood, iron and bronze — hit their walls with a crash, and the city was theirs.

Plistias managed to get a new helmsman into the helm. He got a marine to cut the arrow, and he stayed conscious. He got his ship free of the enemy — two fights, a thousand flights of arrows. He was hit again, in the same thigh, and he couldn’t walk, and consciousness came and went.

His men were superb, and he had himself carried among the rowers and he gave them heart, and they got clear of the Bosporon second line. By now, the whole estuary was a single mêlée, and friends rammed friends in the smoke of forty burning ships.

He no longer hoped for the escape of fifty ships. Now he hoped for victory, although his losses would be appalling. It no longer mattered. This was the whole fleet of the Bosporons, and if he beat it here — even at the loss of every ship he had …

He felt the chop first, and he peered through the smoke and haze to seaward. His ship had passed all the way down the estuary.

‘Command deck,’ he told the two marines carrying him, and they lifted him up.

From the slightly greater vantage point, he saw the flash of oars.

He sighed. He didn’t have the heart — or the strength — to do more. In one flash, he knew what had happened — what the enemy strategy was, and how it had succeeded.

‘Have the bastards taken the town?’ he asked his trierarch.

‘Gods!’ said the man, and he was pale under his helmet. ‘Why?’

Plistias glanced over his shoulder. ‘Because that means that the hostages are lost,’ he said. ‘And that,’ he pointed with his free arm, ‘that there is the fleet of Rhodes.’

Herakles was standing alone when the enemy ships boarded them from both banks of oars, so that the deck was flooded with enemy marines as fast as a sinking ship fills with water.

Melitta — the Bitch Queen, as he thought of her, with no little admiration — had a heavy linen bandage wrapped around her slim torso. She’d stood naked on the deck while two of her barbarians wrapped her after one of them planted a heated axe-head on the wound. She didn’t even change her facial expression.

She was next to him when the enemy came, with two of her barbarian chiefs shooting over her. Herakles was young, inexperienced and terrified — but it was obvious even to him that there was nowhere to run.

So he pushed in front of them. He had an aspis — none of them even had a shield.

The enemy marines were fighting their marines amidships, and the oarsmen were coming off the benches — morale was good, and the rowers clearly thought that they were winning. Herakles had time to take all that in with enormous, god-sent clarity, before the first wave of screaming enemy marines hit him.

The three barbarians behind him accepted the shelter of his shield and kept shooting.

Only Lucius stood by him. ‘This is going to be bad, son,’ he said. He locked his shield into Herakles’ own, the gentle tap as they met almost reassuring.

His knees were trembling so hard he could scarcely stand.

An oarsman — some clod he’d never even recognised with a nod — leaped off his bench with a long Keltoi shield on his shoulder, and the touch of his hip against Herakles’ hip was … like love. Now they were a line of three.

And then the enemy hit.

Keep your shield up came Lucius’s voice in his head, and so he did, through his terror. Spearheads rained on his shield like the pelting of rocks by angry boys and he all but fell, except that Melitta herself was pushing on his back with all her strength. She shot — he felt the arrow go between his legs and his immediate adversary seemed to explode in pain and shrieking — shot in the groin.

As the wounded man went down, his file partner stepped forward. There was a delay — the dying man’s arms flailing, his razor-sharp spear threatening his own men — and into that infinite moment of hesitation, Herakles found that he had shot out his own blow, an overhand spear thrust at the file partner, and the spear point went in under the man’s helmet and licked out like a wet, red tongue and the man fell across his file partner.

And Herakles straightened his back.

That was not so difficult, he thought. I am the God of War’s son.

The guards had all fled.

Abraham was an old hand at sieges, and he knew the sounds — the enemy were inside the walls.

He grunted. Hardly the enemy — unless they came and killed all the hostages and raped his sister while they sacked the town.

He got the gates of their house locked. The other hostages were old men, but most of them found clubs or billets of wood.

Outside, in the alley behind the slave’s entrance, he heard a voice.

‘No … this house. I paid gold for that information, Satyrus. It must be this house.’ The voice was panting, like a man who had run fifty stades.

Satyrus.

‘Satyrus!’ Abraham shouted.

‘Abraham!’ he heard.

Abraham laughed until tears ran, and started to dismantle his defences.

‘Satyrus of Tanais!’ he shouted, and then willing hands helped him lower the bar.

Satyrus was covered in blood. Blood dripped off his sword, and down his sword arm from his elbow, and he had a wound under his right arm that seemed to be running down his right thigh from under his thorax.

Behind him were twenty soldiers, and Stratokles the informer, who Abraham usually thought of as an enemy.

Satyrus came and put an arm around his neck, blood and all.

But his eyes were elsewhere. ‘Abraham!’ he said.

Abraham laughed for the sheer joy of it.

He turned — all those men needed water and food, he could see — and saw his sister standing in the doorway of the garden, framed by the trellis that held the house roses. She had a sword in her hand, too — and she seemed to have been hit by an axe.

If Abraham had not already known, nothing could have kept him from reading the moment. Neither Satyrus nor Miriam had eyes for anyone else. And then, as if it was the most usual thing in the world, Satyrus handed his dripping, sticky sword to Abraham.

‘Hold this, if you would,’ he said.

Abraham took it.

Satyrus stepped forward and gathered Miriam into his arms. She raised her face, and the soldiers began to cheer — they were, after all, soldiers.

Stratokles produced a cloth and took Satyrus’s sword. He laughed. ‘So this is what we came for,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Poseidon’s balls.’ He laughed.

Ten stades out beyond the estuary, Plistias of Cos swam in and out of consciousness in a chair by the helmsman of his Golden Demeter. He had three wounds, and none of them were mortal, but the combination kept him in pain — too much pain to function.

But south and west, fourteen of his heaviest ships had cut their way through the disaster — fourteen ships saved from the Bosporons and the Rhodians. On them, he could rebuild his fleet. Demetrios still held Athens, and the Athenian fleet would yet tip the balance of power.