Tyrant: Force of Kings (4 page)

Stratokles nodded. ‘So he is. Isn’t that my line – when I plead for my life? I tell you that you’re next? You do it anyway? Let me make a different suggestion. Take the money for killing me and run. Babylon – no one there has ever heard of you. Live out your life.’

Now the doctor smiled. ‘Would you? What would you do if I let you walk away?’

Stratokles shrugged. ‘You are a cruel bastard, Sophokles. You haven’t the least intention of letting me walk away.’

‘I’m giving you another minute of life, ingrate. Humour me.’ The doctor gestured with his sword.

‘Remember Banugul?’ Stratokles said.

‘I’ve heard of her.’ Sophokles shrugged, looked around at some fancied noise.

‘I have her. Or rather, I know where she is, and her son. Her son by Alexander.’ He laughed.

‘This sounds like a way of buying your life, doesn’t it?’ Sophokles nodded. ‘I know this tune. You offer me something of great value. And I confess: a son of Alexander, even a bastard, is of great value.’

‘Well, he’s not for you. The management that would be required to propel that young man into the arena – to bring him to the moment where he could unseat Cassander – I don’t know if it could be done.’ Stratokles shrugged. ‘I’m not even sure that I want to do it. He and his mother live far away – off the stage, out of the game. For all I know, the boy’s dead, or deformed.’

‘He must be, what, twenty-three? Twenty-four?’ Sophokles looked over his shoulder. ‘Are you by any chance double-dealing me, Stratokles?’

Stratokles frowned. ‘I’m standing here ready to die, you’re the one talking – and you think I’m betraying you?’

‘Laertes?’ the doctor asked.

‘Dead as a fucking sacrificial lamb,’ Lucius said, emerging from the trees. His sword was red in his left hand, and he had a javelin in his right hand, cocked and ready on the throwing cord. His gaze flicked over Stratokles. ‘Thanks for saving my life. But I don’t run. I ran once – that was enough for my whole life.’

‘You killed my whole group?’ the doctor asked. ‘I’m very impressed.’

Lucius spat. ‘Don’t be. They weren’t worth sheep-shit.’

The doctor nodded. ‘They were more for colour than for muscle, anyway.’

Stratokles felt the tension draining from his shoulders.

‘Walk away, Sophokles,’ he said. The doctor was getting ready to spring; his feet were angled oddly, his limbs formed in a crouch. ‘If you come for me, we all fight. People die – most likely you and me both.’

The doctor didn’t slacken his physical stance. ‘I’m listening.’

‘We all back away. A step at a time.’ Sophokles risked a look at Lucius.

‘He has a distance weapon and I do not,’ the doctor said. ‘Distance only aids you, and taking you as a hostage is my only viable response.’

Stratokles took a deep breath. ‘You didn’t want to kill me anyway, Sophokles. I guarantee your life. You have my oath on it before the furies. Walk away, and consider this a fair return for my error of judgment in Alexandria.’

No one could call Sophokles of Athens indecisive. ‘I accept,’ he said, and stood up straight. He turned his back and walked away. He took a dozen steps, then sheathed his sword after a small flourish at Lucius, who spat again. He bowed to Stratokles. Then he turned and sprinted away.

Stratokles watched him until he was out of sight.

‘Well,’ said Stratokles. He turned away and struggled with the urge to vomit. It was all he could do to speak.

Lucius waited for him and held out a canteen of wine. ‘I thought I was too late,’ he said.

‘He didn’t want to do it. He’s a strange man.’ Stratokles shook his head.

‘You offered your life to save me,’ Lucius said. ‘I
never
would have expected that.’

‘I’m getting old,’ Stratokles said.

‘Where to?’ Lucius said. ‘I have a pair of horses – and we should get moving.’

Stratokles spat the sour wine. ‘Hyrkania. We can be there in ten days.’

Lucius raised an eyebrow.

Stratokles shrugged. ‘I’m going to throw another piece on the game board. If I accomplish nothing but to give fucking Cassander some bad nights – that will be enough for me.’

The blade rested, cool as a stone in her father’s cellar, against Miriam’s throat.

‘Not a word, now,’ the marine said. His voice was steady, almost apologetic. ‘Trierarch says, if you say anything, I’m to off the pair of you. Sorry, despoina. Orders.’

Abraham lay perfectly still, and Miriam lay next to him. Over the silence, they could hear gulls, the rush of feet on the catwalk of the main oar deck, and the helmsman over their heads. The steering oars creaked, and then creaked again. The navarch spoke – the decking muffled his words.

‘… right there,’ the helmsman said.

‘Like they own the whole world,’ the navarch said. ‘Wave like we’re friends.’

Miriam tried to keep from shaking – tried to keep her mind from racing off into the abyss.

‘Ten days out of Athens!’ roared the helmsman over their heads. He was shouting to another ship – that much penetrated her terror and her anger.

‘Where bound?’ carried to her from the other ship, clear as a new day. The sound of the voice went through her like hot soup on a cold day. She felt her brother’s hand close on hers like a vice, saw the marine’s eyes glitter.

‘Ephesus!’ the helmsman replied.

‘Safe voyage, then!’ called Satyrus of Tanais from his own command deck.

And helpless in their cage, Abraham and Miriam held each other and lay in silence as they were rowed further and further away.

Part I

1

‘By Herakles! This little worthless instrument will not defeat me!’ Satyrus growled.

‘Put your fingers on the strings again, and stop trying to be perfect,’ Anaxagoras insisted.

‘I promised Miriam that I would learn to play this before I saw her,’ Satyrus said. He was sitting on a folding stool just forward of the helmsman’s station, and Anaxagoras was sitting with his back to the light aft-mast that they had mounted to catch the light airs of late summer. They were an hour off their breakfast beach, cruising south of Lesbos en route to Rhodos.

‘Your promise won’t be worth the spit you put in it if you don’t allow yourself to be human,’ Anaxagoras said. He played the first measures flawlessly. ‘It comes with practice. Like fighting with the sword, or pankration.’

Satyrus’s eyes went back to the Antigonid penteres, now just a nick on the horizon.

‘I thought that they behaved oddly. Too damned cheerful. There ought to have been catcalls and curses.’

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘Perhaps. But you have thirty merchant ships and half as many warships in your tail, brother, and I dare say they were daunted by the sight.’

Satyrus laughed. ‘I’ll keep the truce – they have half my friends as hostages.’

Anaxagoras raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m sure that the Antigonid navarch knew that in his intellect, my friend, but I suspect that your line of battle made his arse pucker nonetheless. Give the poor man his due. He was polite, and so were you, and now we’re done.’

Satyrus shifted his seat on the deck. The weather was already hot, humid as only the surface of the sea can be humid, and the salt in the air burned in every minute laceration on his shoulders and back from practising in armour. He was thoroughly dissatisfied.

‘I want to be away for Athens,’ he said.

Anaxagoras laughed. ‘I want to be back in Tanais, or perhaps Pantecapaeaum.’

Now Satyrus had to laugh. ‘She won’t be in either. She’s off to the high plains – she was away from her people three-quarters of a year and she needs to be seen.’ He was speaking of his sister, who was, by birth and inclination, Queen of the Assagetae, the western clans of the Sakje, the Scythian tribes of the Western Door of the Sea of Grass.

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘I should be riding with her.’

Satyrus smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You should be right here with me. Selling grain like merchants, playing our lyres, having adventures. Tonight we can beach on the south of Chios. I know an islet that can take the whole fleet. Besides, you can barely ride.’

Anaxagoras bowed his head to acknowledge the truth of that. ‘If only I’d known as a child that my future happiness depended on my ability to ride,’ he said.

‘You can be such a sophist,’ Satyrus said.

‘I was only speaking the truth,’ Anaxagoras returned.

‘No, you are implying that riding is a worthless accomplishment,’ Satyrus said.

‘No more than you imply to me every day that playing the lyre is the action of a dilettante and not a proper gentleman,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You will not tame the lyre by force, brother.’

Silence reigned for as long as it took the oarsmen to pull ten times.

‘When you take that superior tone, you sound just exactly like Philokles, minus the Lacedaemonian accent.’ Satyrus clambered to his feet.

‘I shall take that as a compliment, since I know you loved him. Perhaps he, too, used logic to debate you, instead of raw emotions from the gut?’ Anaxagoras raised an eyebrow.

‘Sometimes he simply hit me,’ Satyrus agreed. ‘Which had its own logic. I do not enjoy being as bad at anything as I am at playing the lyre.’

‘I can’t imagine you were born to your skills at pankration?’ Anaxagoras asked wickedly.

‘Xenophon says all men are born natural swordsmen. Old Socrates used to say that men are born to natural wisdom.’ Satyrus grinned. ‘But no. Your point is fair and well taken. I came to my skill in pankration down a long, hard road. And as you saw in Pantecapaeaum, I’m still hard-pressed to tumble Theron, even when he’s past forty and I’m in my prime.’

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘That was something to see. I could have watched all day – every man present felt the same. Like watching lions fight.’

Satyrus stuck out a discoloured shin. ‘My bruises haven’t healed yet.’ He looked up at the masthead, and back at his helmsman, Thrassos, a red-haired barbarian and now a citizen of Rhodos. ‘Wind is backing, Thrassos,’ Satyrus said.

‘Aye,’ the Keltoi said. He wasn’t a big man, but his tattoos, the scars around his eyes and his red hair made him a fearsome sight, and despite holding citizenship in three cities, no one would ever have mistaken him for a Greek.

‘Planning to do anything about it?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Ain’t steady yet,’ Thrassos said.

As if to prove his weather-sense, a gust from the west tossed the bow and almost cost the rowers their stroke.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘I feel as if the god tried to tell me something this morning and I ignored it,’ he said. ‘But for my life, I’ve no idea what. Did I commit impiety? Oh, forgive me, Anaxagoras. I’m in a foul mood.’

His friend used the mast to push to his feet. ‘No apology required between friends, philos. You’ll feel better when we’re clear of Rhodes and headed towards Athens and Miriam.’

Rhodes was not the same as he had left it, just four months earlier. The Rhodians were pouring treasure into the restoration of their city, and the whole north end of the port, pounded nearly flat by siege engines, had begun to grow roofs and walls like a particularly colourful crop of forest mushrooms; new whitewashed houses with red and brown tiled roofs, and here and there a daring man had a yellow roof or a blue one, made from the new coloured ceramic tiles that were all the rage from Sicily to Asia.

The temple of Poseidon was almost fully restored, all his columns standing tall, and the new roof almost half complete – a better roof than it had had before the siege, with the tiles and beams of solid marble, like the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. The harbour was clear of hulks, and forty warships lay, warped alongside a pair of stone piers, ready for sea in a few moments, while another twenty were in ship-sheds up the beach – all new construction that included a rebuilt harbour wall with a dozen strong towers.

Satyrus took in the harbour in a single glance, and smiled despite the remnants of yesterday’s foul mood. Rhodes had survived the mightiest siege since the Achaeans went to Troy. And he’d done his part to see them victorious.

When his ship dropped its anchor stone off the beach, the pilot tried to insist that as a hero of the town, Satyrus could lie alongside the stone piers, but Satyrus didn’t need the space, and he waited while his oar master and his helmsman made the ship fast and then watched as his grain ships – those designated for Rhodes – came into the inner harbour and made for the great pier, one after another.

Menedemos, the serving archon, came down from his offices in the harbour tower to greet him when he waded ashore.

‘A great man like you could keep his feet dry,’ he said.

‘Not if it would slow the unloading by a heartbeat,’ Satyrus laughed. ‘I’m away on the wind for Athens with the balance of my grain.’

Menedemos raised an eyebrow.

Satyrus shrugged. ‘All right, I admit I’ll be lucky to be out of here in two days, and even then I’ll leave rowers in your brothels.’

Menedemos laughed and clasped his hand. ‘It is good to have you back. You’ll have no trouble getting lodgings – in fact, I’d be delighted to host you.’

‘I promised Abraham I’d see how his house was coming along,’ Satyrus said.

‘I assumed as much, but the offer is there. Any problems on the way?’ Menedemos asked.

‘None. I’m assuming that, as a signatory to the truce, I’m safe – besides, having guaranteed half my grain to Athens, it is rather in Demetrios’s best interest for me to be well treated. We came across one of his penteres off Chios, sailing on the wind, bound for Ephesus. The navarch was perfectly polite.’

‘Pirates?’ asked Menedemos.

‘Menedemos, we must have killed half the pirates on the ocean, this last year.’ Satyrus laughed. ‘There’s not a pirate in the Bosporus, nor the Pontus. Word in the Pontus is that the survivors went west, to Sicily and Corsica.’ He looked around. ‘But Demetrios’s fleet is in the Pontus – charging tolls and hemming Lysimachos out of Asia.’