Christian Cameron: Force of Kings

Satyrus smiled. ‘I think that Demetrios has other interests besides a healthy trade balance,’ he said.

The last time he’d been at Abraham’s house, the tile floor of the andron had been naked to the stars. Now the walls were back up, and the whole house smelled of fresh clay and fresh plaster — an earthy smell with a hint of lime and acid under it.

Jacob, Abraham’s steward, let him inside the courtyard. ‘My lord!’ he said, and took Satyrus’s hand.

‘Jacob,’ Satyrus said. He embraced the older man. ‘I sent a letter.’

‘We had it, lord. The plaster is still wet, but everything is to order. I have hardly any slaves, lord — Abraham freed most of them during the siege. But I have enough staff to move furniture and make food.’ Jacob bowed to Menedemos. ‘May I fetch you gentlemen a cup of wine?’

Satyrus nodded. ‘And something for Anaxagoras and Apollodorus, as well, Jacob. They’ll be along shortly. Do you have a shortage of slaves, then?’

Menedemos nodded. ‘The city — that’s me — we’re buying almost every load that comes into town. We need them just to rebuild the walls — and level the besiegers’ camp.’

Satyrus grimaced. ‘I’d hoped to get myself a new hypaspist. Or at least a body slave.’

Jacob shook his head while an older woman served wine. ‘Perhaps at Delos, lord. Not here.’

Later, Satyrus walked out of the house alone — a rare moment for a king — and along the newly restored back streets towards the back of the temple of Poseidon, where the agora was.

It was late in the day. Down at the piers, his ships were disgorging grain as fast as slaves and oarsmen could empty the holds, and his marines and sailors were already filling the wine ships and taverns on the waterfront. Anaxagoras was sound asleep in the heavy heat of late summer.

Satyrus had a hard time moving on the streets, because everyone in the town knew him, and men would stop to embrace his arm, or bow. Women raised their eyes to him, and men smiled and pointed him out to their children.

He wondered if he were better known in Rhodes than in Pantecapaeaum. Theron had told him that this was going to be his last adventure — that it was time for him to stay home and act like a king.

Satyrus had every intention of acting like a king — when he had Miriam by his side. He was cruising the Mediterranean to honour his commitments to Demetrios — grain for Athens — and to get his hostages back. When his duty was done, and when Miriam was free, Satyrus was ready to go back to his kingdom and never, ever leave. He smiled at the thought.

Even this trip … Tanais had never looked finer, and his new ships being built at the new slips had been a sight he wanted to stay and enjoy. He’d come to enjoy giving justice, and walking in the agora, and having men listen to his opinions.

He smiled at another veteran of the siege, and bowed a little to a trio of women — widows — by the wall of the temple, where he and Miriam had curled side by side in the first light of morning, preparing for another day of siege. He felt close to her here — illogical, as she was in Athens, but he felt as if she might step out of the back streets, or emerge with her women behind her from the market.

Then he walked across the agora, where his own statue stood near those of Demetrios and Antigonus and Lysimachos. The Rhodians were great ones for dedicating statues, and even at the height of the siege they hadn’t destroyed the statues of the men laying the siege. And now he had his own. He stood looking at it.

There was no echo in it, and he felt an obscure disappointment. What had he expected? A conversation with himself?

Past the statues. Small boys were trailing him, more than a dozen of them, some begging and more just shouting his name.

At the far western end of the market there was a small grove of olives, just six or eight trees, and the entrance to an underground temple of vast antiquity, where the city’s reserve grain supply had been stored during the siege. Now there was a new altar atop the underground temple, a large, ornate marble with a deeply indented top and scrolled sides. In front of the altar were placed a dozen stele, markers for the dead of the siege.

Jubal, his oar master and sometime siege engineer, sat on his haunches by one of them. He had some teeth missing, and his face had the deep brown of old, salt-stained leather. His dusty cheeks were marked by the tracks of tears.

Satyrus ignored the boys and squatted by Jubal.

‘Neiron,’ Jubal said.

‘Helios,’ Satyrus added.

One by one, they traced the names of their own dead on the newly cut stele. Even the boys were silent.

When they were done, they paid the priestess to sacrifice a young ox, and gave most of the meat away. Before the smoke from the fat and bones began to rise to the gods, Anaxagoras came, and Apollodorus. They, too, looked at the stones. They, too, wept.

Other men came forward — some drawn by the free meat, and others by the observance, and hours passed before they were free to walk, arm in arm, back to Abraham’s house.

Menedemos was with them by then, and the five of them held a small symposium under the stars in the restored garden.

Apollodorus grew drunk quickly, and he cried and cried — a fountain of tears. Anaxagoras watched him cry like a man watched a dangerous stranger.

‘I have never seen him cry,’ he said.

Satyrus took another drink. ‘I doubt he cries while the enemy are still on his deck,’ he said.

‘Men don’t cry for lost friends, they cry for themselves,’ Anaxagoras said.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘Easy to say, philos. But when I think of Helios, I don’t think just of what I lost — good hot wine every morning. Clothes ready when I wanted them. A spear at my shoulder I could trust. By the gods — if that were all, I’d be a pitiful specimen. Apollodorus, too. What does Achilles say? Better a slave to a bad master than a king in Hades? Helios is gone to the land of shades. I’ll be there soon enough, myself.’

‘Maudlin, too.’ Anaxagoras held out his cup for more wine and flopped on his stomach.

‘What do you do when you aren’t criticising me?’ Satyrus asked.

‘I criticise myself. The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Anaxagoras laughed. ‘Where is young Charmides?’

‘Out in a brothel putting all that youth and beauty to good use, I suspect. Or perhaps wooing under some lucky maiden’s balcony.’ Satyrus spilled wine. ‘Here’s to him.’

‘Ares, you sound like some forty-year-old with a paunch and no hair,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘You are, what, five years older than Charmides?’

Across the couches, Jubal had managed to stand. He embraced Jacob, or perhaps just fell against him, and went off to bed. Satyrus rose, and so did Anaxagoras, and they left Apollodorus, face down on his kline, weeping as if he would never cease.

‘This is all taking too long,’ Satyrus muttered. He hoped that he was keeping his thoughts to himself — his ships were lading and unlading as fast as the well-bribed slaves could work, and he’d already received payment, and still it seemed to him that every jar of grain was taking an age to move.

Anaxagoras, standing next to him on the great stone pier, his ruddy skin almost white in the full glare of the sun, made an expression with his mouth — wry, deprecating, knowing, amused, all in a single pull of the lips.

Satyrus caught the expression and knew that he was transparent.

‘You know perfectly well that she’s capable of entertaining herself,’ Anaxagoras said. Unforgivably accurate, damningly exact and on the topic of his thoughts. ‘She’s not some foolish dancing girl who will pine for you a day or two and then spread herself for the next pretty young king who wanders by.’