King of the Bosphorus

4

Men – at least, the kind of men who kept their women in cloisters and forbade them education and company – might have been surprised by the speed with which Sappho, Nihmu and Melitta planned the overthrow of Eumeles.

Phiale's news was less than an hour old before they had the outlines of their plan made.

'The old gods of Chaos are waiting in the wings,' Sappho said, her lips smeared with ink. She was writing lists. 'We leave a great deal to chance.'

Nihmu was packing, quickly and quietly, slipping in and out of the room to stack bags against a wall. She paused, comparing two bows and choosing one. 'There is always something for chance,' she said.

Sappho chewed on her pen. 'Where will you land?' she asked.

Nihmu stopped as if this hadn't occurred to her before. 'Where we can get horses immediately,' she said.

Melitta was struggling with the idea that she was going to leave her precious baby with a wet-nurse and sail away. The indecision was like agony – the thrill of the adventure she had craved for so long, balanced exactly against the pain of leaving the small body that had grown to fill her life in just two months. 'We could land at the Temple of Herakles,' she said. 'Remember, Coenus?'

Coenus nodded. 'She's right, by all the gods, and the more fool I for forgetting. The old priestess – gods send she still holds sway, but I suspect she's gone across the river by now – she hates Eumeles. Gorgippia, for sure. We can buy a dozen horses and be gone into the Maeotae country before Eumeles has any word of us.'

Sappho wrote a note. 'I wish we had time to distract him with something on the west coast of the Euxine before you go,' she said.

'You truly think that the three of you can raise all the east?'

Nihmu nodded. 'Yes,' she said. 'Listen – it is simple. We find Ataelus, who is still up-country. We find him and we spread word to all the people.'

Sappho nodded, the nod of someone not quite convinced. 'Ataelus has been fighting the Sauromatae for ten years,' she said. 'What makes you think that in one summer he can raise all the Assagatje?'

Nihmu shrugged. 'When I was a prophet, I said that Marthax would hold sway on the plains until the eagles flew,' she said. 'Now is the time. Satyrus tried to go like a Greek – with a fleet to open the way for an army. Melitta will do this like a Sakje. She will raise the people, and the people will give her the sea of grass.' Nihmu leaned over and kissed the baby. 'But she must go in person. The Sakje will follow a person, not a name. If Melitta stays here, I cannot do it. Ataelus cannot. But you can, honey bee.'

Coenus bit his lip. 'You'll still need an army,' he said. 'Eumeles has four thousand foot and more peltasts and Thrake than he ought. He can hold a set of walls for ever, and much as I respect the Sakje, they can't take a city. And a city can support a fleet, and that fleet will still need to be beaten before we can land our army.'

Nihmu nodded. 'That is all Greek thinking,' she said. 'It is good. I am not so foolish that I spurn it. But I am Sakje. Melitta and I will go and put the grass under our hooves, and Eumeles will feel the thunder.' She smiled. 'When Melitta is queen of all the Assagatje, then it will be time to send for a fleet and an army.'

Sappho nodded. 'I agree. I am writing to Diodorus to tell him to stay in the field – with Leon gone, we'll need the income.' Diodorus had the hippeis of Tanais – a mercenary cavalry unit that men called the Exiles, and he also had a taxeis of Macedonian foot raised from the prisoners taken after the Battle of Gaza, where Ptolemy had smashed Demetrios the Golden's army.

Melitta leaned over Sappho's letter. 'Once we have the support of the Sakje,' she said, 'we can have any port we want. Perhaps the Sakje can't take Pantecapaeum, but Olbia will declare for us as soon as we have a force in the field.' Seeing Coenus's face, she shook her head. 'That's what Satyrus and Diodorus both said!'

'Clearly, Olbia did not rise,' Coenus said. 'And there are rumours of – murders. Of friends of ours, killed in public.'

'They had too few ships,' Sappho said. 'Leon was afraid of it before he sailed, but he was hurried. This has to be done while Antigonus is hurt, while his son licks his wounds, or Eumeles will have Macedonians manning his walls and we'll never take him.'

Coenus shook his head. 'Leon sent a boy to do a man's job,' he said. 'Either he took too many ships for a reconnaissance, or too few for an invasion.'

Melitta found them both frustrating. 'Uncle Leon did the best with what he had!' she said. 'Listen to me. Whatever the truth of Olbia may be, the Sakje can take any of the smaller ports. Once we have the sea of grass, Eumeles' days are numbered – he can scarcely lead an army on to the plains to relieve a port!'

Coenus put a hand on her shoulder. 'Beware the lesson of Sparta,' he said. 'As long as Eumeles holds the sea, he can send reinforcements to any town he likes. Leon knew this.'

Nihmu had never stopped readying her things. Now she stood up. 'Despite all that,' she said, 'when he hears our hooves in his chill dreams, he will know fear. And then he will make mistakes.'

Melitta hugged Nihmu. 'From your lips to the ears of the gods,' she said.

Coenus shrugged. 'Better than sitting here.' He looked at Nihmu. 'How do we rescue Leon? If we pressure Eumeles hard, he'll threaten the lad – or kill him.'

'When Eumeles hears our hooves, his blood will run like ice,' she said again. 'Scared men make errors. There will be a moment.'

'Are you a seeress again, Nihmu?' Coenus asked.

'I am a woman who has made war,' Nihmu replied. The pentekonter looked as if it would sink at its moorings, but Leon's chief factor insisted that it was seaworthy, and he'd filled the hull with the very best of Leon's rowers and crewed the deck with half a dozen officers from the successful Massalia fleet, so that the awful little boat had the air of a Rhodian naval vessel.

Most of the sailors were openly concerned at carrying women, especially women who had brought weapons aboard, but the officers knew she was their master's wife, a figure of legend, and all of them knew Coenus – one of Alexandria's most feared and revered warriors.

Cardias was the helmsman, a Rhodian sailor who had directed the entire squadron on the Massalia run and saw no demotion in commanding a fifty-oared scow on a cruise up the coast of Asia.

On the beach beneath her own bedroom window, Melitta hugged her aunt Sappho goodbye and held her son for a long time, all too conscious that she might never see either of them again, and conscious too, that for all her claims of being a Sakje, her youth – much of her life – was tied to the sweaty streets of Alexandria. She had intended to walk once more in the night market, but she hadn't had the time.

Idomeneus, the man who had commanded her unit of archers last year at Gaza, came up and put an arm around her waist. 'Little mother,' he said in his Cretan accent.

'You bastard,' she smiled. 'What are you doing here?'

Idomeneus jutted his chin at Coenus. 'He hired me to run the archers on this ship.' He smiled. 'I wanted to come – and the wages were incredible.' He whistled. 'Are there any archers on this fishing boat?'

Coenus came up. They had a fire on the beach and men were coming from all directions. The rendezvous had been made carefully, to prevent news of the sailing. 'Eight,' he said. 'And you're one of them. Cretans – what can I say?' Coenus clasped hands with the Cretan. 'Thanks for making it here.'

Idomeneus smiled. 'I would come far for this one,' he said. 'I was sorry to hear of your son. He was brave.'

Coenus didn't even show a strain in the firelight. 'He was,' Coenus agreed. 'May his son be as good as his father.' Coenus looked at the baby in Melitta's arms. 'My heart misgives me, honey bee. I think you should stay.'

Melitta drew herself up and carefully handed her son to Sappho, who handed him to Kallista. 'The tribes will not rise for you, Coenus,' she said.

Nihmu nodded agreement.

Idomeneus raised an eyebrow. 'So? We go on a mission, I suppose.'

Coenus nodded.

Idomeneus laughed. 'You don't have to tell me. Cretans grow up with these games.' He shrugged.

'At sea,' Coenus said. To Melitta, he said, 'Say your goodbyes.'

Nihmu hugged Sappho. 'We will win,' she said simply.

Sappho nodded. 'I know.'

Pounding footsteps on the sand, and Phiale came up, running in cork-soled sandals, attended by Alcaea. 'Melitta!' she called.

'Phiale!' Melitta answered, hugging the other woman. 'What are you doing here?'

'I caught a rumour that you were slipping away!' Phiale said. 'Where are you going?'

'Massalia,' Melitta said. 'To be safe.'

'Oh!' Phiale said. 'I suppose it is a secret. I'm sorry to be so thoughtless! But I worry so much about – about all of you!'

Kallista was still light on her feet despite her advanced pregnancy, and she interposed herself between Melitta and Phiale. 'Let me get you a cup of wine, since you've joined our beach party,' she said brightly.

Something sparked behind Melitta's eyes. She turned to Sappho. 'Don't let her leave for a day or two,' she said quietly.

Recognition glittered in Sappho's fire-lit face. 'Of course!' she said. 'How blind of me not to have seen it. Curse her.'

Melitta clasped her aunt more closely. 'We don't know. But why else is she here?' Then she choked on a sob. 'Take care of him for me!' she said, unwilling at the last to leave her son.

Before she left, she went and held him again, though she'd promised herself that she would not. While she held him, Hama emerged from the darkness behind Phiale. He had a whispered exchange with Sappho and vanished into the mansion.

'She won't leave us for a while,' Sappho said with satisfaction. 'With a little luck, she can shit her treason out.' She showed her niece a papyrus packet of orange powder.

'Awful if we're wrong,' Melitta said.

'Too bad,' Sappho said, her eyes hard. 'Goodbye, honey bee.'

And then they were aboard with a smell of verdigris and old fish, and the rowers picked up the beat, and they were away into the first colour of dawn. They made Rhodos in six days, having come up the south coast of Cyprus. Melitta had been to Rhodos with her brother, but the City of Roses remained a place of mystery and intrigue to her. The helmsman went to report at the Temple of Poseidon and Coenus accompanied him. The two men returned, scratching their beards.

'The pirates are worse,' Coenus announced to the table of officers in a comfortable wine shop on the waterfront. 'So bad that Rhodos can no longer suppress them, and her trade is being choked. The worst of the bastards are around the town of Byzantium – in the Propontis.'

'Where we are going,' Melitta added. 'Why do Greeks call everything the Propontis? Assagatje have real names – the Strait of Fast Water, the Strait of Horses.'

Cardias shrugged. 'The Thracian Bosporus divides the lands of the Thracians in Asia and Europe – and is the entrance to the Euxine. That's the Great Propontis. The Cimmerian Bosporus divides-'

'Lands that the Cimmerians don't hold any more and the Bay of Salmon!' she said impatiently.

'That's right.' Cardias shook his head and looked at his master's wife. 'Mistress, I'm against this. Such a small ship? They'll bottle us up in the narrows and we'll be fishbait – and you'll decorate a brothel.'

Nihmu shrugged. 'No. That will not happen.'

Coenus shook his head. 'Lady, I've seen you in action, and you are deadly sure with a bow – and so were your winged words. But you yourself said that you lost your gift of prophecy with your marriage.'

Nihmu shrugged. 'No pirate will touch this vessel,' she pronounced. 'I have seen it.'

'Poseidon's member – your pardon, ladies. Very well. Listen, the Rhodians have a convoy for the Euxine in ten days. Can we wait and sail with it?' Cardias was pleading.

'Of course!' Nihmu said. 'You think that because I am sure I am also foolish?'

Coenus shook his head. 'I remember you like this,' he said, 'but I haven't missed it.' The convoy was ready in just eight days, and they were away, up the coast of Asia. They touched at Chios and Mytilene and then they were rowing north, right into the wind to make the mouth of the Hellespont before dark. The whole convoy passed Troy in the last light of the sun, Melitta and Coenus saying the verses to one another as the rowers carried them past the tomb of Achilles. They made the fishing town at Sigeion after dark, and suffered through the perils of camping on an open beach, lighting fires from fire pots in the dark and collecting wood from the driftwood piles at the high-water mark by touch and feel.

Melitta sank into her sheepskins thankfully and dreamed that she had lost her son and that spirits brought her his swaddling clothes, covered in blood, and she awoke screaming with Nihmu's arms around her.

In the morning she arose, feeling as if she'd been beaten with a stick, to watch the men load all their kit back aboard the pentekonter. The Rhodian convoy was slow to form in a contrary breeze, and the pair of triemioliai provided by the Rhodian navy as guards tacked back and forth like worried dogs with a herd of recalcitrant sheep, but before the sun was high they were rowing again to the curses of the oarsmen for the contrary wind and the bad luck.

Early afternoon and they were in the Propontis, the little sea in the midst of the Hellespont, and Parium was clear on their bow as they crept up the north coast. They made Rhaidestos with a freshening breeze that quieted some of the grumbling of the crew, and ate crabs on the beach and drank a terrible local wine sold off two-wheeled wagons by local farmers.

'We're in luck,' Coenus said, looking at Nihmu. 'The local pirates – the whole fleet – is on the opposite coast, making a grab at one of the cities, if you can believe it. They are strong – fifty warships, or so the farmers assure me.' He drank wine and made a face. 'Gods – who would want to be a colonist?'

'So Auntie Nihmu was right,' Melitta said.

'I'll sacrifice a new lamb to Poseidon when we're through the strait,' Coenus said. 'But yes – I think she's right.'