Force of Kings

Part II
5

‘Plistias of Cos,’ Diokles said, peering into the sun under both hands. ‘See the funny little break above the beak of his penteres? That’s for ripping oars. He had it cast for his flagship.’

‘Anyone could cast one,’ Melitta muttered, also shading her eyes with her hands.

Diokles just shrugged. It was an eloquent shrug — it suggested that while anyone could, only one man would.

It was a hazy summer day in the Dardanelles, and Diokles’ flagship led a line of twenty-four warships. Down the channel, mostly hidden by the Point of Winds, lay the northern fleet of Demetrios and Antigonus, sixty warships.

Diokles turned to his helmsman, an older Italiote, Leonidas of Tarentum. ‘Steady. I want to come within easy hail of him.’

‘Easy hail it is,’ Leonidas answered.

Melitta turned back to her navarch. ‘Should we be getting into armour?’ she asked.

Diokles pursed his lips. ‘Despoina, I don’t know. That’s for you to answer. It’s all about what signal you want you want to send. Peace? War?’

Melitta admired his calm. ‘We will fight if he does not move,’ she said.

Diokles nodded. ‘I know.’

She nodded, twisted her mouth — very like her brother, really.

She vanished under the tent-like awning she’d installed amidships — like having a Sakje yurt on a ship — and re-emerged wearing a coat of pale caribou with blue elk-hair work and golden plaques and bells. She pulled it on and belted it, hung her akinakes from her hip, and went to the stern.

Diokles smiled, but he didn’t do it where the Lady of the Assagetae could see him.

Plistias stood his ground, his ship well out in the current with two triremes on station behind him, well warned that there was another squadron in the channel.

Diokles had not matched his force — he came forward alone, confident that the high state of training and the superior construction of his ship would see him clear if Plistias behaved badly.

He chewed the ends of his moustache. Confident wasn’t the right word. His crew and his ship would give him a chance-

‘How did it come to this?’ Melitta asked. ‘I hate not knowing.’

Diokles shrugged. ‘If Demetrios really has taken your brother or killed him, he is counting on the “not knowing” to slow us.’

Coenus and Theron emerged from the tent amidships, wearing simple chitons like farmers.

Coenus looked under his hand at Plistias’s flagship. Shook his head. ‘I wish the odds were better,’ he said.

Theron snorted. ‘I was brought up to understand that in narrow waters, the smaller fleet has no disadvantage,’ he said. ‘Look at Salamis.’

Diokles and Coenus both shrugged simultaneously.

Coenus smiled. ‘I’d rather test that theory from the position of a massive advantage of force,’ he said. ‘And as I think Diokles will agree, in early spring we had a massive advantage in rowers — ours work year-round, and theirs do not. But now? We have an advantage in spirit, perhaps. But his fleet is worked up, now. Look at his oars work. It’s not beautiful, but it is well enough done.’

Diokles grinned. ‘I thought that you were a cavalryman.’

Coenus raised an eyebrow. ‘What part of Greece is more than a day’s walk from the sea? Certainly not Megara.’

‘Nor Corinth,’ Theron said.

A stade away, and Plistias’s oarsmen only pulled to hold their station.

‘He’s waiting for something,’ Coenus muttered.

Diokles didn’t like the waiting, the not knowing. Especially as there were warships launching past the headland and masts coming down, readying for a fight — or that’s what it appeared to him.

Melitta turned to him. ‘If he attacks us, I will shoot him dead. Let my arrow be the signal for the ballistas to let fly.’

‘You may already be dead,’ Diokles said with brutal honesty.

Melitta shrugged. ‘Then my mother’s line will have ended, and what happens will be of little moment to gods or men.’

‘I may still be alive,’ joked Theron, amused by her view of the world. ‘Diokles, here, might care to live.’

She rolled her shoulders in irritation. It was easy to forget how young she really was, until she showed irritation, or beamed with happiness. Not much of the latter, lately.

A quarter stade, and they could hear the oar beat on the other ship as clear as if their oar master was on Diokles’ ship.

‘What ship?’ asked one of Plistias’s men in a brightly burnished bronze thorax.

‘Atlantae,’ Diokles called, his voice like a trumpet. ‘Of Tanais and Pantecapaeaum.’

Half a hundred pous, now — point-blank shot for the ballistae. The archers on the Atlantae were armed and had arrows to their bows, but they stood amidships, well clear of the rails. But the ballistae were loaded, and Jubal’s new invention, the crank-repeaters, were fully tensioned.

Plistias of Cos’s ship, Golden Demeter, was also fully ready. His two forward ballistae were cranking even as the two ships sailed on, closer and closer, not quite nose to nose.

‘Oars in,’ Diokles said in a calm, clear voice, and the oar master, Milos, repeated the order quietly.

Melitta found the quiet more dangerous than the noise. Quiet, to her steppe-trained ears, meant ambush. She stood, fully exposed in white caribou, on the stern platform, and she could hear the sound of almost two hundred oars being dragged into oar ports and crossed between benches — a manoeuvre endlessly practised, but never quiet.

By bringing in their oars, they signalled that they were not going to fight. The time it would take to get their oars in the water would be critical, in a fight.

Twenty pous or less separated the ships — almost close enough to jump. Melitta smiled.

‘Closer,’ she said quietly to the helmsman.

He tapped the steering oars with the flats of his hands, and the bow twitched to port.

Before she could change her mind, or her councillors could dissuade her, Melitta stepped up onto the rail, a long leg flashing in the summer sun, and leapt for Plistias’s ship.

She landed easily, a little shorter than she had intended, balanced, and stepped down off the rail onto the helmsman’s deck of the Golden Demeter. Half a dozen marines looked at her as if she’d grown wings and flown.

While they gaped, she glided forward. ‘Plistias of Cos?’ she asked.

He nodded, his mouth still a little open.

‘Melitta, Lady of the Assagetae. My brother is King of the Bosporons.’

‘Despoina,’ he said politely. The man’s marines were just reacting.

‘Your master, Demetrios, has taken my brother against the provisions of the Truce of Rhodes — ’

‘What?’ Plistias shook his head. ‘Despoina, I have-’

She put a hand in his face. ‘Please, be silent.’

Another man on the deck inclined his head. ‘Despoina, we have heard nothing to suggest … that is, King Demetrios has the highest opinion-’

The sharp movement of her hand would have beheaded the man, had she held a sword. She took a deep breath. ‘You will take your fleet out of the straits and retire to the Aegean, or we fight. No room for negotiation. If your king has not taken my brother, I will allow you back into the straits when I know this. If your king has him, he can have access to the straits by restoring my brother to me.’

Plistias shrugged. ‘Despoina, you have too few ships to make good your threats.’

Melitta shrugged right back. ‘I’ll give you until tomorrow to retire. You have been warned.’ She smiled her killer of the steppe smile, the smile that had earned her the name Smells Like Death. ‘If I had had my way, we would simply have attacked you this morning. But my brother’s people believe in talk. So I have spoken.’

She stepped between two of the marines as if they weren’t there, vaulted onto the rail, and was across to her own ship in another breath.

‘Oars out,’ Diokles said.

‘We do not respond to threats!’ Plistias called.

‘Back water,’ Diokles said to the oar master as soon as the oars were out. Across the water, he could see men with bows at full stretch. It didn’t require an order to start the war — just a mistake.

Four strokes, five strokes, and the distance started to open. Already, only the bow-mounted heavy weapons would bear.

‘That was … not what we agreed to,’ Coenus said carefully.

‘I changed my mind,’ Melitta said cheerfully. ‘Now that man, at least, knows who I am.’

‘He will think you are a barbarian,’ Theron said gently.

Melitta shrugged a shoulder out of the caribou coat. ‘But, my dear teacher, I am a barbarian.’

Dawn. Smoke rising on the far horizon, probably Imbros. Well beyond the straits — five parasanges or more. Melitta watched it with satisfaction.

‘Apollodorus?’ Coenus and Nikephorus stood beside her.

She nodded. ‘Unless someone has captured our signal book or one of our messengers.’

‘Plistias will have seen it too,’ Nikephorus said.

Melitta laughed. ‘I hope that Lysimachos and Cassander and Antigonus see it, as well. What we are doing is sending a threat, and we need that threat to be seen and understood in every camp.’

She put on a light thorax of iron scales on heavy deer hide; no yoke, in the Sakje way, and a light helmet that allowed her free vision. Today she wore her gorytos openly.

Nikephorus was armed in bronze from head to toe. So were Coenus and Theron. Diokles wore a bronze thorax and a leather Boeotian cap.

They shared a kylix of wine, poured libations to Poseidon and Herakles and all the gods, and went to their ships.

The sun was well above the horizon when they rowed carefully up to Kynossema and lowered their main masts, prepared to fight.

On the other side of the point, around the difficult corner where fleets had waited since the siege of Troy, Plistias’s ships manoeuvred into their fighting formations — two lines of heavy ships and a third of lighter ships, well over to the European shore, backs to their beach. It was a surprisingly cautious formation. For one thing, it allowed Melitta’s fleet to turn the corner in the channel at Kynossema without opposition.

The Bosporons had twenty-eight ships and they formed two lines, with fifteen in the first line and only thirteen in the second, and then the lines passed the point one at a time, wheeling in unison on the barbed rocks on the European shore like so many hoplites drilling in the agora.

‘That was well done,’ Diokles commented.

‘Because we’re past?’ Melitta asked.

‘Because Plistias just got to see how good we are. See the centre ships in his line still jockeying for position? He has some very green crews.’ Diokles nodded.

‘See how he waits with his back to the camp?’ Coenus said. ‘He doesn’t want to fight.’

The Bosporon fleet moved slowly down the Hellespont, keeping a crisp formation, until it faced the Antigonid fleet.

A little late, but not unduly so, the first division of Apollodorus’s squadrons appeared from the south, headed up the Hellespont.

Diokles grinned.

Apollodorus had twenty-one warships, almost half of them penteres of the new designs — Glory of Demeter and Nile Lilly and Oinoe and all the rest of the ships that had gone to Athens a few weeks before.

‘He’s raising his boat masts,’ Diokles said. ‘You going to let him run downstream, or kill him now?’

Melitta looked at Coenus.

Coenus raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not the king,’ he said.

Melitta looked at Theron. Theron winked.

‘Let him go,’ she said.

‘Good girl,’ Coenus breathed, a little too loudly.

That night, the combined squadrons camped on the same beach where Plistias of Cos had camped the night before. It was a strategic spot. Melitta liked it for its history: in one walk along the muddy beach, she’d found a Sakje arrowhead — a style more than a hundred years old — and an Athenian obol older yet.

Leon and Apollodorus had Stratokles the Informer with them. She had to think about that. The man had been her adversary too often to let him inside her guard — but she could see his utility in this instance, and the Euxine was afire with reports of Amastris’s betrayal of him at her wedding to Lysimachos.

Unless the bastard had done it on purpose, spread the reports to gain their confidence.

She shook her head, the way she’d shake it if she had taken a blow in combat. Thinking like this never ended well, in her experience. She turned back towards her camp, eyes still on the beach.

Head clear, she walked up to the circle of men awaiting her.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Is our message sent?’

Stratokles nodded. ‘And well sent, despoina. You can close the Hellespont. Demetrios will have to take notice.’

Leon nodded. ‘I worry about Ptolemy,’ he admitted. ‘To the suspicious mind, we are equivocating. Or even changing sides.’

Apollodorus shook his head. ‘If we had ejected Lysimachos, Ptolemy might think as much. But Leon, we have ejected Plistias.’

Leon shook his head. ‘We have changed the playing board, and that will threaten everyone.’

Stratokles nodded. ‘I think you must threaten everyone. I don’t think that we have enough information to guess who took him. It might seem that Demetrios has him, but that would suit Lysimachos or Cassander, too.’

Melitta glared at him. ‘You make my head hurt, Athenian. And who is this boy? I remember him — Hyrkania.’

‘This is my ward, Herakles.’ Stratokles stood back to allow the younger man his place in the ring of commanders.

Old Draco, now captain of marines on the Atlantae, did a double-take. ‘Herakles of who?’

Melitta nodded at Stratokles. ‘Son of Alexander, I think.’

Stratokles nodded.

Draco whistled. ‘A pleasure to meet you, my lord. I served your father.’

Herakles flushed, straightened his shoulders. ‘Despoina — I have known more than twenty-five winters, and I am no boy.’

Melitta nodded. ‘We’re of an age, are we not, Herakles?’ She looked at Leon. ‘Are this wily Athenian and this Macedonian-Hyrkanian using us, Leon?’

Leon took a deep breath. ‘By the gods, I hope not. I allowed Stratokles to convince me that the young man’s presence with us would serve as much point in threatening both Antigonus and Cassander as our seizure of the Hellespont. Word will spread.’

Melitta looked at Apollodorus. ‘And this met with your approval?’

Apollodorus looked around. ‘Satyrus gave me the command, and I used it to get his ships to here. With your permission, despoina, I’ll lay down my command now and go back to being a marine.’ He looked at Stratokles. ‘I … am more hesitant than Leon.’

Melitta nodded. ‘My thanks, Apollodorus. And my brother’s.’

‘He did a good job,’ Leon said.

‘He wants to tuck into Demetrios’s forces and kill,’ Stratokles said. ‘And he doesn’t love me. I return the feeling.’

Melitta looked around. ‘So. And so. Here we are. We have a fleet, an army, and a potential King of Macedon. What is our next step?’

Leon crossed his arms. ‘Now we wait.’

Stratokles shook his head. ‘Not I. With your permission, Anaxagoras and I … we will go to Athens. All I ask is that you allow anyone who comes to your camp to see my young scapegrace, and that you don’t let him wander off or die.’

Herakles looked, if not frightened, then at least deeply hesitant. ‘You will leave me, Stratokles?’

Stratokles was growing to like the young man, despite his temper and his uneasy sense of his own importance. And he had always found it difficult to dislike those who liked him. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

When the junior officers — the ship trierarchs and the centarchs from the taxeis — had returned to their duties, Melitta summoned Stratokles to her with a gesture. He thought of Banugul’s comments about her. She was more imposing than he remembered, and her eyes were darker, and a little wilder. Her muscles were impressive, too.

‘I don’t like you,’ she said.

Stratokles crossed his arms. He smiled. He always smiled when he was fighting. ‘I admire you,’ he answered.

That stopped her.

‘I don’t trust you,’ she said. ‘You killed my mother.’

He shook his head. ‘No, despoina. We’ve been over this ground before. I did not kill your mother. In fact, she gave me this cut to my nose.’

‘You helped to have her killed,’ Melitta hissed.

Stratokles glanced around for Lucius. ‘Yes,’ he said. He liked this new tactic — just tell the truth. It was easy to remember and saved a great deal of energy. ‘I acted under orders from the man who was my master at the time, and on behalf of my city.’ He shrugged.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘I can kill you,’ she said.

He had the most ridiculous impulse to smile again. ‘Despoina,’ he said, ‘you don’t relish me as an ally. But really, if I may? You risk nothing by sending me to Athens. If I am secretly in league with Demetrios, what do I gain? I leave you the most valuable hostage in the world today. And if I return with your brother, then I will expect something by way of apology.’

She watched him, the way a cat watches a mouse. It was fascinating, considering that he was a man, and eight inches taller, how very imposing she was. She allowed the slightest smile to touch her eyes, just the corners of her mouth. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You bring me my brother, and I’ll call us even.’

Stratokles cursed his fickle heart, because he was attracted to this unsheathed knife of a woman even while he could feel her hate like the warmth of a flame against his face. Now he let himself smile. ‘I will settle for even,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘No, you won’t. You will play some game, some very clever game. And then I will kill you.’

Stratokles shook his head. ‘No games,’ he said.

Now it was her turn to smile. ‘Stratokles, do I know you better than you know yourself?’ She nodded. ‘In truth — if you bring me back my brother, I might forgive a game or two.’

He liked this play. Melitta of Tanais was far more interesting in her way than Amastris. It occurred to him — in an oblique, revenge-bound way — that serving Melitta would be a revenge of its own. They had been friends, once, Melitta and Amastris — until Amastris’s jealousy of Melitta’s freedom parted them. Or something like that.

‘Let’s see what I bring back,’ he said mischievously.

He felt alive.