Tyrant t-1 Page 2

  Kineas wondered for an instant if there had been a mistake in phrasing — if he, too, would be welcome to remain and conquer the rest of the world. And then Alexander’s eyes met his and he read his dismissal. The officers were to go home. Alexander spoke on, ringing phrases of praise rendered empty by the bags of gold at his feet. I’m done with you. Go. He lingered by the door of the king’s tent when the other allied officers filed out, hoping for a kind word, an exception, but Alexander rose without another glance and left by another door.

  So.

  Kineas wondered if Alexander knew how much political poison smouldered among his precious Macedonians, but he clutched his thoughts close. He kept his own counsel when his leman left him for a Macedonian cavalry officer — one of many Phillips — rather than travel home with him, and he was laconic when a deputation of his men came to him and asked him to remain and command them. Some suggested that they remain together and take service with Alexander’s regent in Macedon, Antipater.

  Kineas had no interest in serving Antipater. In a day he had realized that he had loved Alexander, not Macedon. He packed up his darics and his wreaths, sold most of his booty, retained some fine cups for friends in Athens and a wall hanging for his mother. He kept the sword, and the heavy grey horse, and his stained cavalry cloak, and prepared to be a rich farmer. He had been away for six years. He would return a wealthy man, take a wife.

  The Athenians went with him. Kleisthenes and Demetrios were rotting in the ground, or walking in the groves of Elysium, but Laertes and Agis and Gracus and Diodorus had survived battle and disease and misery and hardship. And Niceas. Nothing could kill Niceas. They rode towards home together, and no bandit dared ambush their convoy. When they reached Amphilopolis on the Greek mainland, none of the other young men were ready to press on. They lingered in the wineshops. Kineas hurried home.

  He found that he needn’t have hurried.

  In Attica, he found that his father was dead, and that he himself had been exiled for serving Alexander. He fled north, to Platea, where there was a community of Athenian exiles.

  He’d only been there a day when he was approached by an Athenian with a proposition. Of course, the man came from the same faction that had arranged his exile. But Kineas had grown up with Athenian politics, so he smiled, and negotiated, and that night he sent Diodorus a letter, and another to a friend of his father’s, another exile, on the Euxine.

  PART I

  THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

  ‘Therein fashioned he also two cities of mortal men exceeding fair. In the one there were marriages and feastings, and by the light of the blazing torches they were leading the brides from their bowers through the city, and loud rose the bridal song. And young men were whirling in the dance, and in their midst flutes and lyres sounded continually… But around the other city lay in leaguer two hosts of warriors gleaming in armour. And twofold plans found favour with them, either to lay waste the town or to divide in portions twain all the substance that the lovely city contained within.’

  Iliad, Book 18

  1

  The same squall that broached the pentekonter, knocking her flat against the waves and filling her sail with water, swamped the smaller trading ship to the south. The smaller trader’s cargo shifted and she sank, the screams of her crew carried clear on the wind. The pentekonter lay broached, the standing sail a testimony to the inexperience of her trierarch and the unshifting cargo a tribute to her sailing master’s skill. The ship should have gone down anyway, lost on the Euxine with all hands, except that the sailing master hurled himself over the side at the mast, taking a bronze knife from a sheath around his neck and sawing at the lashings that held the sail to the yard.

  Under the awning in the stern, the trierarch lay in horrified paralysis against the stem, unable to cope with the consequence of his disastrous decision to leave the mast stepped. The chaos on the rowing benches was as immediate a crisis as the sodden sail — the trierarch had ordered the rowers to set the sweeps just before the squall hit, vainly trying to use the oars to keep her head before the wind, and when the ship broached the wind-driven water had forced the long wooden shafts back in through the tholes, ripping them from the rowers’ hands and crushing heads and rib-cages. Two men were dead, one of them the oar master.

  The ship’s only passenger, a gentleman from Athens, had also lost his feet when the ship tipped, but not his head. He threw himself up, grabbing at the other side of the ship as it curved away from the stem above him, getting his feet under him. A glance showed him that the cargo had not shifted, another that the oarsmen were panicking.

  ‘Hard in, there,’ he bellowed. ‘Oarsmen! Larboard side!’ His voice carried over the wind of the dying squall with ease; the habit of command and the expectation of obedience as strong as the sound itself. Every man in the waist who had any command of himself obeyed, men scrambling over each other in the rising water to grasp the side that was still out of the water.

  The sailing master cut the sail free. The passenger could feel the weight change, felt the deck move through a tiny arc towards an even keel. He flung himself over the gunwale, hanging by his arms with his whole weight outboard, and a few of the oarsmen copied him, adding their weight to his. The water in the waist shifted, the starboard gunwale rose above the surface, and the sailing master kicked himself clear of the sail and swam to the bow.

  ‘He swims!’ shouted the sailors and the oarsmen, to whom the ship was a man. Every sign of success rallied more men amidships.

  ‘Bail!’ shouted the passenger.

  Two of the veteran oarsmen already had the olive-tree pump rigged, and water began to spurt over the side like arterial blood. Other men used helmets, pots, anything that came to their hands. By the time the passenger hauled himself inboard, the benches were no longer awash. The sailing master’s attention was on the sea beyond him.

  ‘Another gust and we’re dead. I have to get the bow up to the wind,’ he said with a murderous glance at the trierarch. He shouted orders at the oarsmen and the sailors, who began to cut the mast itself away. One of the seams in the larboard side had opened when the ship broached; water was coming in with every wave and a cross-wave with the impetus of the wind behind it flooded the waist again over the benches. The lack of an oar master told — the oarsmen hesitated, their hope destroyed by the second wave.

  The passenger flung himself into the waist, taking his own helmet from his baggage in the stern as he passed, and scooped water over the side. ‘Bail!’ he ordered. And then as men turned to the task, he started pushing men to their benches. He didn’t know their names, or where they belonged, but the force of his will was sufficient to move them. A long minute was wasted dragging unbroken oars from the larboard side across to the starboard and feeding them into the tholes and still the ship swam. At the first hesitant pull to the passenger’s ringing shout, the ship moved a fraction of its own length.

  ‘Pull!’ he bellowed again, taking his timing from a bandy-armed professional on the bench under his feet. Only six oars a side in the water, the ship full of water and her bottom filthy with weed, and again the ship barely moved. He sloshed to another bench, pushed two frightened men down on to it and put the oar in their hands. Opposite there was a corpse filling the bench. He lifted the corpse, heavy beyond anything he could remember, and another pair of hands helped him fling his burden clear of the side even as he called ‘Pull!’ again. The oar shaft, free of the corpse, moved like a live thing and struck him a glancing blow in the shoulder that knocked him on to the bench. The man who had helped him caught it, lifted it clear of the water, and sat on the bench in one continuous motion. The passenger caught it on the return stroke, added his strength, and called ‘Pull!’ as the oar reached the top of the stroke. Around the shaft went, and down, the blade biting the water firmly — the oar felt alive under his hands. He raised his head and saw the sailing master aft, standing by the steering oar. He caught his eye and the sailing master took up the call for the stroke, lea
ving the passenger to pull, his smooth wet hands already feeling the weight of the oar.

  ‘Pull!’ called the sailing master.

  The fourth stroke, or the fifth, and the man at the steering oar called, ‘He steers!’ and the sailing master gave him an order.

  Then came an hour of physical hell for the passenger, without the rush of overwhelming danger, just the pain in his shoulders and the sight of his hands turning to bloody pulp as he pulled on and on, water rising around his feet and then his thighs. Another squall hit them and then another. They made no distance; indeed, the sail was visible to starboard with every rise of the waves. All the oars could do was keep the head of the waterlogged vessel up to the wind so that no wave could poop her.

  They did all that men could do, and they prayed to the gods and just when the oarsmen were flagging and the heaves to keep her bow up to the wind were increasingly desperate, just when the second larboard oar caught a crab that threatened to endanger the stroke, the wind dropped, and before the passenger could look again at the ruin of his hands the sun appeared between clouds, and then the clouds themselves were rarer, and then they were rising and falling in the swell of a sunny day on the Euxine, and they were alive.

  It was only when the wind fell off that the passenger could hear the thin cries from starboard, over the rail, where some poor soul was struggling with the sea.

  ‘Rowed of all!’ shouted the sailing master, his voice as raw as the passenger’s hands. He was not used to calling the stroke for so long. The oars were tossed and pulled in, a ragged motion but an efficient one, so that they crossed the benches and tucked their handgrips under the opposite thwart, their blades held clear of the water. The passenger’s bench mate fell forward on the headrest thus provided, his arms over the oars, his cheek against their shafts. He breathed in and out.

  The passenger heard another cry from starboard. He pulled himself from under the crossed oar shafts, the residual salt water burning his hands like fire.

  His bench mate looked up at him and smiled. ‘Well pulled, mate.’

  ‘There’s a man in the water,’ the passenger replied, pulling himself up on an empty starboard bench. The hold beneath their feet was undecked, and there was water over most of the cargo. They were still barely afloat.

  The sailing master was seeing to it. He had the sailors, the deck crew, throwing bodies and anything else he deemed of no use over the side. Every minute lightened the ship, placed the thwarts a fraction higher out of the water.

  The passenger looked under his hand at the empty blue sea, the sun reflecting with blinding intensity from the wavelets, and listened for another cry. When he heard it, it was closer than he had expected; a man, swimming weakly but still afloat just a rope’s length from the bow. He dove before he thought the action through, and swam as best he could through the now smaller waves, the salt water chilling him and burning his hands all over again.

  He reached the survivor quickly, but the man tried to fight him, surprised at the touch and fearing, perhaps, that Poseidon had come for him at last. The passenger shouted at him, took his long hair in a fist and began to pull him towards the ship. The man’s struggles endangered them both, but he took in a lungful of water and his struggles ended. The passenger got him to the side. He was surprised at the hesitancy of the oarsmen to pull the man inboard, but they did.

  The man lay across an empty bench, alternating breathing and vomiting, for a long time. The passenger came aboard helped by more willing hands, to see the leather bag that held his armour and most of his tack being lifted towards the side. Slow from the sea’s grip, he was still fast enough to get himself between the ship’s side and his baggage.

  ‘Don’t,’ he gasped. ‘Everything — own.’

  The sailing master stripped the bag from his crewman’s hands and tossed it on the deck with a bronze clang. ‘We owe ye that much,’ he rasped. He pointed his chin at the long-haired man puking over a bench in the waist. ‘They don’t like him. Sailors don’t take the prey from Poseidon. Shipwrecked men…’ He left his thought unfinished, probably too superstitious to speak the belief aloud.

  The passenger was Athenian; he had different views on Poseidon, Lord of Horses, and his ‘prey’. ‘I’ll look after him. We’ll need every man on the benches to get this boat on to a beach.’

  The sailing master muttered something under his breath, a prayer or a curse. The passenger went back to his bench. It was only when he had wiped the long-haired man’s face clean of vomit and heard a gasp of Lakedaemian-accented thanks, that he realized that the trierarch was no longer aboard.

  They bailed and rowed all day until they were once again in sight of the land to starboard. This shore of the Euxine was notorious for its lack of beaches, just endless rock alternating with ugly low marsh. The sailing master didn’t try to force the men to get the ship ashore, despite the slow bleeding of seawater from the open seam. They ate dried fish, sodden with salt water, and felt better for it. They slept in watches, even the passenger, and pumped and bailed through the night, and the sun rose the next day to more of the same. Breakfast was skimpier than dinner. Small trading ships beached at night and carried little in the way of provisions. The amphorae of fresh water were point down in the sand of the hold and most of their waxed caps were open, showing their empty innards to the blue sky. The passenger had no idea of the distance to their next port, but he had the sense not to discuss it.

  By midday, the rescued man was better, bailing with a will. He was careful when he moved and quiet, obviously aware of his unwelcome status with the sailors and the oarsmen, clearly intent on earning a place by hard work. The fact that he was repeatedly seasick whenever the swell increased didn’t help him. He was a landsman, and he didn’t belong on the sea; he too had smooth hands and had never pulled an oar. And he had Spartan written on his head in every curling hair.

  The passenger arranged to take his turn at the pump with the stranger. He had to do most of the work; the Spartan was weak from seasickness and ordeal and nearing the point of allowing events to overwhelm him.

  ‘I’m Kineas,’ he said on the upstroke of the pump. ‘Of Athens.’ Honesty forced him to add, ‘Until recently.’

  The Spartan was silent on the downstroke, putting all of his strength into it. ‘Philokles,’ he gasped. ‘Of Mytilene. Gods, of nowhere.’ He gasped again as the pump handle went up.

  Kineas pushed down. ‘Save your strength,’ he said. ‘I can pump. Just move your arms.’

  The younger man’s blood rushed to his face. ‘I can pump,’ he retorted. ‘Do I look like a slave, not to honour my obligation to you?’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Kineas.

  They pumped while the sun burned down on them for more than an hour, and they didn’t exchange another word.

  By nightfall, the last of the food and water was served out, and there was no hiding that the sailing master was at his wit’s end. The mood of the oarsmen was ugly; they knew the way of things, and they knew that the trierarch was gone, and they didn’t approve, however much they might have paid for his error with the mast.

  Kineas had a lot of experience with men, men in danger, and he knew their mood too well. And he knew what the sailing master, who had already murdered the owner, would do to keep command. He took his bag to the bow early in the evening and sat on the bench there, ostentatiously cleaning the seawater from his cavalry breastplate and rubbing oil into his boots before putting an edge on his heavy cavalry sword and wiping the heads of his javelins. It was a display of deliberate intimidation. He was the best armed man on the ship and he had his weapons to hand, and he lost new friends in the crew by letting them know it.

  Oblivious to what was happening, the Spartan lay opposite him on the bow bench, his anger spent in pumping. ‘Cavalryman!’ he said, surprised, his first word in hours. He pointed at the heavy boots, so alien to Greeks who went barefoot or wore only sandals. ‘Where’s your horse?’ He gave a fraction of a smile.

  Kineas nodded,
his eyes on the men in the waist and the sailing master talking to two veteran oarsmen in the stern. ‘They intend to throw you overboard,’ he said quietly.

  The long-haired man rose to a sitting position. ‘Zeus,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘They need a scapegoat. The sailing master needs one, too, or he’ll be the sacrifice. He murdered the owner. Do you understand?’ The younger man’s face was still green, and his mouth looked pinched and thin. Kineas wondered if he was taking any of this in. He went on, more to think aloud than make conversation. ‘If I kill the sailing master, I doubt we’ll get this pig of a ship into a port. If I kill sailors, they’ll drag me down in the end.’ He stood up, balancing against the swell, and hung the baldric of his sword over his shoulder. He walked sternward, apparently unworried by having half the crew at his back, until he knew he had the sailing master’s attention.

  ‘How long until we make port, sailing master?’ he said.

  Silence fell all along the benches. The sailing master looked around, gauging the mood of the crew, clearly unready for the conflict, if there was to be one. ‘Passengers should mind their selves, not the working of the ship,’ he said.

  Kineas nodded as if he agreed. ‘I was silent when the trierarch raised the sail,’ he said pointedly. ‘Look where that got me.’ He shrugged, raised his hands to show the bloody welts — trying to win over some of the crew. He got a few chuckles, a thin sound. ‘I have to be in Tomis in a ten-day. Calchus of Athens expects me.’ He looked around, catching the eyes of men in front of him, worried about the men behind him because he knew from experience that frightened men were usually beyond persuasion. He couldn’t say it more clearly — If I don’t reach Tomis, important people will ask this crew hard questions. He saw it hit home with the sailing master and prayed, prayed that the man had some sense. Calchus of Athens owned half the cargo on this vessel.