Tyrant: King of the Bosporus Read online

  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.’

  GRACCUS’S STELE, EUXINE SEA, 311 BC

  ‘what we need is wood,’ Satyrus said.

  It had taken a day to build a camp on the bluff behind the stone farmhouse, out of sight of the shore and well watered by the creek. Another day had been filled in cutting the boatsail mast free, floating the Falcon, jury-rigging a bow and pulling the hull up the creek to the new camp, so that he could receive the care he deserved, out of sight of cruising ships in the great bay.

  By the third day, Satyrus was standing in Alexander’s largest stone barn, eyeing the curved joists that held the main beams. ‘What we need is wood,’ he said again.

  ‘I don’t think that Alexander, however well disposed to us, would fancy our stripping his barns of their innards to rebuild the bow.’ Theron was still tired, and still moved stiffly. Six men had died of their wounds, and Satyrus was beginning to wonder if he would ever run well again himself – his hip was not knitting well, and he had trouble sleeping because of the pain in his arm, but Theron was recovering his sense of humour, and Satyrus had begun to feel that he might yet survive this.

  ‘T hose beams and joists came from somewhere,’ Satyrus insisted.

  ‘We could just ask him,’ Theron said.

  So Satyrus did.

  ‘Sakje brought them – dragged them overland from up-country on sledges,’ Alexander said. ‘I traded them for wine – forty amphorae, good stuff from Mytilene.’

  Satyrus thought about that while he looked at the bow of his ship, now protruding from the water at a gentle angle, pulled up by the might of two hundred men and four oxen until the whole hull was clear of the creek. The wrecked bow stuck up over his head the height of a man. He walked back and forth. ‘Even if we get timber,’ he said to Diokles, ‘we need a ram.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ Diokles said. ‘I say we rebuild the bow without a ram and sail him home – as fast as we can. New ram in Alexandria is just a matter of money.’ He looked at Satyrus and Satyrus was afraid he saw pity in the man. ‘You think you can fit him for war and rescue your uncle – that ship sailed four days ago, lord. He’s taken, or dead. It’s us as needs to get free – and no ram bow will save us in these waters.’

  Satyrus drank herb tea and walked back and forth, looking at his ship and at Diokles. After an hour, he nodded.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Wooden bow. We’ll have to rebuild him – move the masts. Without the ram, he’s a pig – we know that. Have to rebalance the whole hull.’

  Diokles nodded slowly.

  Theron came up, his dark chlamys thrown back because the weather was fine. ‘I have some talent for mathematics,’ Theron said. ‘So does Satyrus. Let’s design him while Alexander summons the Sakje, and perhaps we’ll have wood by the time we’re ready to build.’

  The Sakje appeared within a day of the beacon being lit, as Alexander had predicted, thirty horsemen with two hundred horses who arrived at twilight. Alexander greeted them in his orchard, where all Satyrus could see was a flash of gold and a whirl of horseflesh that made his eyes fill with the hominess of it. Without meaning to, he ran out into the orchard, no longer the staid lord and navarch, but a boy coming home to his mother’s people.

  A tall man on a tall horse covered in red paint clasped hands with Alexander and they spoke rapidly, like old friends too long separated. Satyrus knew the man immediately from his boyhood hearth.

  ‘Kairax!’ he called. His mother’s tanist in the west, now ruler in his own right of the western gate of the Assagatje confederacy. He had grey in his beard where it had been all dark, and furrows in his cheeks, but the hand tattoo of his clan was still bold and dark on his bicep, and his arms were still heavy with muscle.

  Kairax turned at his shout and whooped. In a moment, Satyrus was enveloped in the Sakje’s heavy arms, and it was all he could do to fight back tears. ‘I didn’t know it was you!’ he said. His Sakje came out haltingly.

  ‘Nor I you, little cousin! And not so little!’ Kairax nodded approvingly. ‘You are a man. And yet you came here by ship and not by horse? How is that?’

  Satyrus spoke – for too long, he suspected – of the adventures of exile, and Kairax bowed his head when Satyrus spoke of the murder of his mother.

  ‘Too long have we born with this Eumeles,’ Kairax said. ‘Marthax always counsels patience – but he hated your mother, and he is old, and my young men grow restless.’ He looked at Satyrus from under his bushy brows. ‘What kind of cousin are you, that you came with ships before you asked your relatives for help? I think that perhaps you have spent too many summers on the sea of water, and not enough summers on the sea of grass.’

  Satyrus bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘Elder Uncle, I stand corrected,’ he said, the Sakje coming back to him like a memory of youth.

  Kairax grinned. ‘Bah – you’re too big to get a beating,’ he said. ‘Alexander of the Stone House says that you need wood.’

  ‘Big wood – big trees. Like the ones in his barn,’ Satyrus said.

  Kairax nodded. ‘If I bring them, then what?’

  Satyrus didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Listen, lad,’ Kairax said. ‘The Assagatje are like dry grass on a summer’s day, and you could be the lightning in the sky. Come with me and light the grass.’

  Satyrus was tempted – so tempted that he had to remember everything that his uncle Leon and his uncle Diodorus had said about sea power to refuse the offer. ‘Eumeles must be beaten at sea,’ he said. ‘Until then, he can use his ships to fight the Sakje.’

  Kairax laughed. ‘Ships against the Sakje? I would like to see that!’

  ‘Every town closed against you?’ Satyrus said. ‘Garrisons of men who could arrive and leave by sea and never come within bow-shot?’ Satyrus remembered something. ‘And some of the Sakje must be loyal to Eumeles, Kairax. There were Sakje archers on every ship – good ones, who shot well, like men who have given their word.’

  Now it was Kairax’s turn to hang his head. ‘It is as you say,’ he said. ‘Marthax sends young men to serve Eumeles and they go willingly, for the treasure.’

  Satyrus took his arm and squeezed it. ‘I am back to stay,’ he said. ‘I intend to kill Eumeles and make a kingdom of the Euxine.’

  Kairax shook his head. ‘That is not a Sakje thing,’ he said.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘No – a Greek thing. But it will make the Sakje and the farmers free. And it will rid you of Marthax and me of Eumeles.’

  Kairax made a Sakje gesture with his nose, like a man smelling somethi
ng interesting – a sign of approval, if you knew the ways of the people. ‘It is a big dream,’ he said.

  ‘I need wood to make it happen. I need to repair this ship, slip away past Eumeles’ fleet and find my friends.’ He didn’t add that he needed to find a fleet of his own. ‘I’ll come back with ships.’

  Kairax was no longer alone. While the two of them had spoken, his trumpeter and several of his principal warriors had got the drift of their conversation, and now they gathered around.

  ‘Srayanka’s son!’ they called. A tall young woman reached out and touched his cheek. ‘For luck!’ she said in Greek.

  He was reminded of Ataelus, and again tears filled his eyes.

  Twice, warships passed along the coast, but neither chose to land.

  ‘They fear the Sakje,’ Alexander said with satisfaction. ‘Taxing sons of bitches. I pay my tenth to Kairax, and he is worth every penny. I don’t pay an obol to that bastard in Pantecapaeum. His writ don’t run here, and those sailors know it.’

  ‘But they’re still looking for us,’ Satyrus said.

  On the third day after Kairax came down from the hills, twenty Getae men and two women came with forty mules and twenty oak trees dragged between them. Satyrus paid gold – almost the last of his ready money – and before the sun set that night, his men were at work with the farmer’s ample tools, cutting new timbers for the bow.

  ‘T hree days,’ he told Diokles and Theron.

  ‘And you’re coming with us?’ Theron asked. His glance slid over Satyrus to the Sakje girl, Lithra, who hadn’t left Satyrus’s side for two days – and nights.

  Satyrus knew he was being mocked, but he shrugged. ‘We need a fleet. I can’t get that here.’

  ‘She’s not going to be happy,’ Diokles said.

  Satyrus shrugged again. ‘She is not a Greek girl, who needs me to wed her. She’s a spear-maiden of the Cruel Hands, and we’ve already had that little talk. Gentlemen, if you’ve completed your inquest into my personal life, we can get this ship built and be away.’

  ‘He’s just like his father,’ Alexander said into the silence.

  Despite a growing irritation with the older men around him, Satyrus couldn’t find anything in ‘he’s just like his father’ to earn anger, so he smiled at them and walked off to find Lithra.

  ‘You are for leaving soon,’ she said. They were curled together in the hay – the air had a bite in it – and something awkward was making him want to scratch, but post-coital dignity demanded that he lie as if unconcerned.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I for understanding Greek better,’ she said. ‘So?’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said. It sounded pitiful, even to him.

  ‘I know!’ she said. She rolled him over. She was a tall girl with small breasts and a waist so small, chest muscles so hard, that passing his hand over her stomach made him hard. Her body was wonderful, and despite the partial barrier of two not-quite-shared languages, he knew her well enough to find more to like than just her body. Already.

  She reached down and ran a practised finger up the base of his penis. ‘Greek girls do this?’ she asked.

  Satyrus thought of Amastris. There was a mixture of guilt and something else – something hard to describe – in thinking of Amastris with another woman’s hands on his hoplon. ‘No,’ he said.

  Lithra leaned over. ‘For you losing if not coming back, Satrax. Lithra rides ten days and never tires, five arrows in the mark before turning, ten men killing in the hills.’ She leaned down, her face lit by the late sunset. ‘Come back. I for liking you.’

  Satyrus loved it when she called him Satrax. He caught her hands, rolled her under him and their mock struggle filled the air with straw, the dust rising in a cloud like smoke in the setting sun until they were coughing and laughing, despite the pus on his arm wound and the now permanent ache in his thigh.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Satyrus said, wondering if he was lying or telling the truth.

  She smiled and stayed in his blankets one more night, but in the morning she was mounted with her warriors, and they rode away. She waved once, and was gone over the first range of hills, and Satyrus couldn’t decide which of his actions deserved the biggest share of the guilt he felt. Guilt from inside and shame from the taunting of his elders, until he shunned them to work on the bow himself, adzing the timbers with the best of the sailors and the farmer’s grandsons, who had more experience of woodworking than any of the sailors.

  He worked until he slept, and slept only to rise and work again, and on the fifth day the last plank was fitted into its mate, the long pieces carefully edged and fitted to each other with wafers of flexible poplar between them to keep them together, and the bow was rebuilt heavily in stacked oak beams. The mainmast was fixed back into the deck a little farther aft, and so was the boatsail mast, so that the Falcon had something of the look of a triemiolia, and they gave him a broader central deck, a cataphract that would add weight and make him stiffer under sail – or so they hoped. And protect the rowers, in a fight.

  Theron had all the men not engaged in work out in the countryside all day, hunting or practising with their weapons, so that by the time the bow was ready to ship, they were, to quote Theron, the most dangerous crew of oarsmen in the Euxine. ‘Some of them can even throw a javelin,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘You look better, master,’ Satyrus said. ‘Perhaps we could fight a fall or two.’

  Theron shook his head. ‘Your hip is still bad, and I can smell that arm from here. You need to get that looked at. It’s still weeping pus. And I’m not willing to be the target of your anger,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ Satyrus said. But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than he knew that he was.

  Diokles came up with a pair of spears over his shoulder. ‘Well, if we have to, we could board,’ he said. ‘No one expects the oar benches to clear in the first moments of a fight.’

  He was probably joking, but Satyrus nodded. ‘We should practise,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, while we take him out in the bay with the deck crew, you should see how fast we can get them off the benches.’

  ‘By Ares, he’s serious,’ Theron said.

  ‘He’s a serious man,’ Diokles said, ‘when his dick’s dry.’

  Satyrus decided it would be bad for discipline if he said what was on his mind, so he forced a false smile and walked away to supervise the final fitting of the bow timbers and the new rails. He understood in his head that he’d done a bad thing by taking a lover – that he’d had something that the other men didn’t have, which made him the target of a lot of teasing. He knew this in his head, but in his gut he was angry at them for being so petty.

  In the first of the sun, they were afloat off the creek, the lower hull full of rocks from the beach to stand him up. He wasn’t the Falcon – or rather, he was the Falcon some moments, and then, in a heartbeat, he was another ship altogether – stiffer, better under sail, harder to row and down by the stern, sloppy in a turn. The bow leaked. Satyrus spent much of the day crouched over the new bow timbers, feeling the water and worrying.

  ‘You need to relax,’ Diokles said. ‘They’ll swell.’

  ‘You need to shut up and do your work by yourself,’ Satyrus spat. ‘You’re a good helmsman – but I can replace you. I promoted you from the oar bench. My personal life is not part of your deck, and neither is my head. Walk away.’

  Diokles turned on his heel and headed to the stern.

  Satyrus cursed his temper and his foolish words – but he did not retract them.

  They didn’t exchange a word while they loaded, making every effort to bring his bow down in the water. They stood well apart while Satyrus was embracing Alexander and all his sons at the edge of the beach.

  ‘Your father’s friend – the hero. He’s brought me nothing but luck. Glad I could help you.’ Alexander had given them a farewell dinner, a big fish from the bay and wine for all hands that must have cost the man a small fortune.

>   ‘When I am king, you will never pay a day’s tax,’ Satyrus promised.

  ‘That’s right, I won’t!’ the farmer responded. ‘Don’t now, neither. Good luck, lad. You’re the image of your dad – a little longer, I think, but a good man. Go and put the bronze to that bastard in Pantecapaeum for all the other farmers.’

  The old man embraced Theron, who had spent time with his grandsons, and Diokles, who bore it stiffly, and then they were away, tearing up the bay on a fresh breeze.

  ‘If the wind holds, there’s no cruiser in the Euxine can take him on this reach,’ Diokles said, to no one in particular. He nodded to Theron. ‘Quit wrestling and become a shipwright.’

  Theron gave a half-smile. ‘I suppose something of my father rubbed off on me,’ he said, watching Satyrus.

  Satyrus knew that Diokles meant his little speech as a peace offering, but he couldn’t bring himself to answer, or apologize, and that made him feel like a fool. His arm was becoming heavy and swollen and he felt light-headed.

  If there was an enemy ship off the bay, they never saw him, flying along with the wind astern as soon as they turned south, so that the farm seemed a dream. Satyrus spent the morning watching his precious bow like a mother cat with her first kittens, but the leakage was no more than any dry ship gives in his first hours at sea, and by noon he was dry, as the wood swelled to close the gaps in the new construction. Satyrus wiped his hand against the fresh-cut timbers, smiled in satisfaction and walked up the new cataphract deck to the stern.

  ‘Straight on for the Great Bosporus?’ Diokles asked. It was the closest to direct communication that the two of them had tried in two days. ‘We might make it if we sailed the deep green. Tomorrow night, with a good landfall and the will of the gods.’