Tyrant: Force of Kings (7 page)

He could not take only his most trustworthy captains, however. None of the rest of his captains were remarkable men, and all of them were new to him – he had Eumenes of Olbia’s son Ajax, a fine young man with a fine new ship called
Apollo of Olbia
, and two ships from Pantecapaeaum commanded by relatives of his former adversary, Heron, the last Tyrant of Pantecapaeaum – Lykeles son of Draco, and Eumeles son of Tirseus, both too young to have reputations. They had light triremes –
Tanais
and
Pantecapaeaum
.

And finally, he had a pair of Rhodian-built triemiolas, decked triremes with a half deck for carrying full sail and more sailors – or marines. Their captains were prosperous men who had been made by Leon: Sandokes of Lesbos, a foppish man famed for his daring navigation, trierarch of the powerful
Marathon
and the Etruscan; and Sarpax, whom Leon had employed for twenty years. Satyrus could see Sarpax from the helm, because the tall Etruscan was standing in the bow of his
Desert Rose
just a few horse lengths astern of
Medea
.

He put the inexperienced men in the middle of his line, the way a good strategos would place them in the phalanx. They had expert helmsmen to help them – his money and reputation now attracted some of the best on the ocean.

It was all very satisfying. He looked back down the line of his fighting ships, all heeling well to starboard with the press of wind, sails well set, the ropes that crossed them appearing to be restraints on mighty Boreas himself. And behind his warships, sixteen heavy merchants – six Athenian grain ships, towering over the rest, and ten of his own. A fortune in grain, carefully guarded, representing the wealth of his kingdom and a new avenue of diplomacy. Grain for Athens.

Where Stratokles had begged him to take it. Stratokles, who had single-handedly engineered Amastris’s betrayal – her wedding to Lysimachos.

On the bench built under the rising strakes of the stern by the helmsman’s station, Anaxagoras opened his eyes. ‘Who could doubt the gods on a day like this one?’ he asked.

Satyrus smiled and looked away.

‘Aha,’ Anaxagoras said, swinging his feet onto the planks of the deck. ‘You could. Thinking of Miriam?’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘Lysimachos. Cassander. Stratokles.’ The last name he spat.

‘He has done you no disservice,’ Anaxagoras said.

‘Hmm,’ Satyrus said.

‘None, philos. You need to keep everyone a little further away – arm’s length, I think Coenus said.’ Anaxagoras nodded north, towards distant Tanais, where Coenus was regent. ‘The appearance of alliance with Athens will give everyone pause.’

Satyrus shrugged. ‘I know.’

‘And you don’t like it,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Do you ever think that men make war because they don’t want to go through the tedious process of keeping peace?’

Satyrus laughed. ‘You have me exactly. I was just thinking how much simpler open war was than peace. We overawe Athens with our fine warships while we sell her grain from our fine merchant fleet – while selling to Rhodes and offering our ships to Ptolemy. At least when Demetrios was firing his huge rocks at us, we knew which way the enemy lay.’

Anaxagoras shook his head. ‘No we didn’t. Think of Nestor’s betrayal. Think of all the idiotes who would have sold Rhodes for some cash and a guarantee of survival. Think of the welter of cross-purposes – slaves, mercenaries, soldiers, your men, Rhodians, old versus young – all the factions, all the sides. That was war.’ Anaxagoras smiled when his eye caught that of Charmides, who was exercising amidships. ‘What you wish for,
lord
, is the freedom that man has to pretend that the world is simple, when you and I both know that in war and in peace the world is very, very complicated.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Who made you so wise?’ he asked.

‘Dionysus,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘And old Aristotle played his part, I expect.’

‘We could go wrestle at the Lyceum,’ Satyrus said. ‘There’s glory for you.’

‘Now you’re talking, brother. Wrestling at the Lyceum, and the finest courtesans in the world. Oh – I didn’t mean to say that aloud.’ He roared with laughter at Satyrus’s reaction. ‘Got you, got you.’

Satyrus laughed too. Astern, Sarpax waved. He was laughing, too.

They made landfall at Delos in late afternoon. Satyrus was a pious man, and the opportunity to revisit the temple complex was appealing, even with Athens looming – or rather, the more appealing because Athens was looming – just a few days away. And he told himself that he needed a body slave.

He beached his ships on the windward side of the island, and paid a fisherman to take him around the point to the temples. Sandokes and Aekes and their helmsmen came, as did Apollodorus and Charmides. Anaxagoras had eaten bad shellfish on the beach and was busy returning it to Poseidon, or so he croaked between bouts of being sick.

This time, Satyrus sent Apollodorus ashore first to make sure that the priests knew that his visit was religious and not official, and then waded ashore himself, paying the fisherman a gold daric to stay on the beach waiting. The man bit it, looked at it carefully, and then gave him a pleased smile.

‘I’d a’ sold you my boat for it,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Don’t tell the priests or they’ll find a way to take it from you,’ Satyrus said, only half joking.

The fisherman laughed and rowed away down the beach to where poorer men waited in lines for a turn in the temple.

No waiting for kings, of course, even those not on official visits.

Satyrus sat in the anteroom to the oracle, trying to put his mind in a state receptive to the god. He had wrestled with Anaxagoras before crossing, and the bout was very much in his mind – Anaxagoras had thrown him with an outstretched arm and what had seemed the gentlest nudge to his hip, and Satyrus found in the move a whole new expression of balance in combat. It filled his mind, kept him from the meditative state.

With apologies to the two men waiting with him – an Athenian from one of the priestly families and a Corinthian – he stepped out onto the porch of the temple and took up a fighting stance and began to rotate his foot at odd angles.

The hierophant was watching him when he stopped. ‘I have seen a woman offer her dancing to the god, but never a man offer his footwork at the pankration. Nonetheless, yours is fine.’ He grinned – not the grave, dignified high priest at all, just for a moment, but a Greek man with an appreciation for a fine sport and a fine body.

Satyrus was abashed – a very rare feeling for him. ‘My apologies, I meant no disrespect. I
have
been practising the lyre …’ He trailed off, feeling like a teenage boy caught nuzzling a slave girl.

The hierophant cackled. ‘Your lyre work will probably never match your fighting skills, my lord. Will you come with me?’

‘It is not my turn,’ Satyrus said.

‘I gave you my turn,’ the Athenian priest said, inclining his head. ‘I am here for my city on a very minor matter of religious law.’ He smiled. ‘Had I known that I would see a famous pankrationist, I’d have come sooner.’

The Athenian priest was plainly dressed, and yet clearly a man of enormous worth. He also had a fine physique – barrel-chested and tall.

Satyrus smiled at the compliment and inclined his head in return. ‘Sir, I am on my way to Athens, where, I, too, am a citizen. Perhaps we might have a bout at the Lyceum?’

‘Polycrates, son of Lysander,’ the Athenian said, and they clasped hands. ‘We are keeping the hierophant waiting.’

The hierophant nodded. ‘It seems to me that this meeting was the reason the god brought you here. This may have been the only moment that the god required.’ He nodded at their confusion. ‘It is often thus. Brasidas met the King of the Thracians here. He was coming to ask, “By what means may I defeat the Athenians in Thrace?” I understand that he never even had to ask the question.’

He led Satyrus by the hand to the sacred lake, and prayed aloud to Apollo – a very old prayer in the old Ionian style, with his arms spread wide. Satyrus assumed the same pose and waited.

‘Ask your question,’ the high priest said.

‘
Do not go to Athens!
’ called a hoarse, low voice in the distance. And there was laughter. Satyrus turned his head and saw a group of retainers – possibly Polycrates’ men – playing by the side of the temple.

The omen was clear to Satyrus. He looked at the priest, who looked back at him, arms outstretched. ‘Were you contemplating a trip to Athens?’ he asked mildly enough.

‘I have a fleet of grain ships, fully laden, en route to Athens. The woman … that is, my best friend is a hostage there. My grain ships are the guarantee of my good behaviour. I
must
go to Athens.’

The priest nodded curtly. ‘I wish that I had a drachma for every time a supplicant has received a direct order from the god and then informed me, and my lord Apollo, that he cannot possibly obey,’ he said. ‘I would be a rich man.’

Satyrus had meant to ask something grand – to ask how he might best serve his people, or something equally vague. Delos was, he thought, best at vague questions. But now he went with the divine inspiration. ‘Lord Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow, God of the Lyre, what must I do to survive Athens?’

The hoarse voice down in the temple yard floated across the temple lake: ‘
Guest … friendship is still sacred… even in Athens
.’ as clear as if the priest had spoken it himself. In the distance, men laughed. Many conversations merged into the voice of the god.

Satyrus considered running outside to find the men – to ask what they were discussing, what joke was being told, what ribald story gave rise to these pronouncements, so like the voice of the god. But only to see the mechanism of the god’s breath. For Satyrus was as sure as anything he’d ever known that he’d heard the voice of the god floating over the sacred lake.

‘You are very close to the gods,’ the hierophant said.

Satyrus raised an eyebrow. ‘I have been told so,’ he said.

‘I know men who would kill for an answer as clear as that,’ he said. ‘Come.’

Together they walked back to the anteroom on the temple porch. The Athenian was moving his feet in just the way that Satyrus had been. He grinned, also like a much younger man caught in some secret sin.

‘I see it,’ he said. ‘A very small movement of the hips can be as powerful as a much larger movement.’

Satyrus shrugged. ‘Perhaps not as powerful,’ he said. ‘But good enough in a confined space, or a real fight.’

Polycrates nodded. ‘May I hold you to our bout at the Lyceum?’

Satyrus narrowed his eyes. ‘Allow me to go one better, sir. Let us swear a guest friendship here, and I’ll give you a ride back to Athens. We can fight on every beach from here to there.’

Polycrates’ eyes sparkled. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ he said. ‘The more especially as it would allow me to dispense with a particularly annoying pup of a trierarch who has made my life a misery. Now I can send him on his way to Corinth. You are no friend to Demetrios, as I remember?’

Satyrus bowed. ‘We are not at war, he and I,’ he answered carefully.

Polycrates nodded. ‘Well – best you know – I am his friend. Perhaps his greatest supporter in Athens. Will you still carry me home?’

Satyrus extended his hand.

Polycrates took it. ‘Let us go before the god.’

Arm in arm, with the hierophant behind them, obviously pleased, they walked into the divine presence, where the flame burned. They made their gestures to the god, and then, with the hierophant leading them, they swore guest friendship. Satyrus undertook it as King of the Bosporus, with full solemnity, and Polycrates answered him in kind, as high priest of Herakles in Athens.

When they were done, Satyrus nodded to his new friend. ‘So you are the priest of Herakles,’ he said.

‘And you are his descendant, are you not?’ asked Polycrates. ‘As are we – Heraklidae all.’

The grain fleet might have made Athens in two long, hard days, but Satyrus allowed three – he was suddenly in less of a hurry, and more determined to know Polycrates, and to gather what news he could from fishermen. The most likely threat came from Demetrios – it seemed obvious, when he thought of it, lying on the sand at Syros watching the wheel of the stars over his head, that Demetrios meant to take him and hold him. No surer way of preventing his re-entering the war when the truce sworn at the end of the siege of Rhodes expired.

Besides, Polycrates was a wonderful close-in fighter, and Satyrus found that the man had things to teach him. He had a technique for fighting from the ground – a technique that Satyrus had seen Theron use, but had never been taught. Polycrates could lever himself up on his shoulders and neck and grasp with his legs like a pair of blacksmith’s tongs, seizing his opponent and pulling him to a ground grapple which Polycrates, built like a large rock, would inevitably win.

Charmides was annoyed by the technique. ‘What is to keep me from walking away as soon as you go to ground?’ he asked the older Athenian.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘We do not always fight by choice, Charmides. What if circumstance or Tyche places you on the ground? What if you are attacked
after
being knocked down? We do not always fight from a position of advantage.’

‘In fact,’ Apollodorus said with a quick smile, ‘we
never
seem to fight from a position of advantage. No one attacks you because you are ready to be attacked, young man.’

Charmides was abashed, and blushed. ‘Of course not. I should have held my tongue.’

In fact, there was quite a crowd to spar with the big Athenian man. He was courteous, careful, and very good.

So good that he won the first night against Satyrus, three throws to two. Satyrus lay watching the stars. It was a long time since anyone had beaten him. He could console himself that he had not used all of his skill – but neither had the other man, he was sure. No one would, in a friendly grapple on the beach. And it was a long time since he had lost, and he was trying to bear it with good grace.