Christian Cameron - Destroyer of Cities

‘Needs a pair of flute girls,’ Lysander said, hesitantly. He wasn’t one of them, yet. He wasn’t sure if his humour would be accepted.

Jubal laughed. ‘Funny, eh?’ He shook the instrument, laid it carefully on the ground, pressed his ear against it and listened. ‘Mines,’ he said.

Anaxagoras got it. ‘The drum skin passes the vibration, of course.’

Kleitos the helmsman was stripping the sails from the remaining ships in the harbour and rigging them as warmer tents for the poor. The Sakje, ever practical, had hollowed out cellars of collapsed houses and made warrens and tunnels there, where they lived in the warm — and where they could light a brazier and smoke out the whole warren.

Melitta almost always walked with him. The people of Rhodes saw her as a deliverer no matter how desperate they became, and many an angry word at her brother she deflected. And the weeks stretched on without relief.

The feast of Apollo came and went, and the fever came back to haunt former slaves and free alike — a quarter of them died in a single week, and the charnel smell of their burning corpses, like a vast burned offering of pig and goat, made every hungry stomach churn in desperation. More than once, Satyrus retched bile.

But after the second round of fever, the sickness seemed to abate. Leosthenes had nothing left to sacrifice but birds. He prayed unceasingly.

Gangs of children roamed the ruined city, poking into houses with sticks, finding half-rotted corpses of dogs which they cooked and ate, or miraculous treasures — buried pithoi of oats and barley. The luckiest treasure-finders brought their goods to the agora and sold them, but by the two hundred and thirtieth day, there was no coinage that could buy food — all anyone wanted was food, and a jewelled brooch worth a small ship wouldn’t buy a cup of olive oil.

Twice, sentries sent out to catch people defecating in public areas actually caught people roasting a corpse. And Satyrus knew they weren’t catching all the attempts. Among the Sakje, it was not even a taboo act.

And still, Demetrios did not attack.

At night, Satyrus sat with Abraham, whose intellect was unharmed but whose body was wrecked. ‘He’s determined to starve us to death,’ Abraham said. Jubal poured some warm water, just tinged with wine — the greatest luxury they had — and some honey.

Melitta agreed. ‘He’s had it with being a god. He has the men to surround us, and the means. Look at the boom across the harbour — six stades of wood, all spiked and chained together. Look at the new trenches on the west wall — not even close enough for arrows to be exchanged. We are contained ,’ she said, as if the word were an insult.

Satyrus looked up at the sound of Miriam entering the tent — with Anaxagoras at her back. Hunger had given her the edgy coltishness of a very young woman, until you looked at her face. She had the stern lines of a forty-five-year-old grandmother engraved on her skin. Her nose had grown hawkish.

Satyrus thought her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

She sank down next to him as if she were twice her age, and Anaxagoras groaned just the same way as he rested his back against Satyrus’.

‘I feel as if I’m being punished for hubris,’ Satyrus said. He smiled. ‘I know how selfish that sounds. But I wanted to beat him . So I did. Look where it got us.’

Abraham laughed weakly. ‘I wish I’d seen it, though. How long did it take to plan?’

Satyrus smiled at Jubal, and Jubal grinned his big, friendly, apparently not-so-smart grin. ‘Long time,’ he said. ‘Eh? Long time.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Jubal had the idea the night we lost the great tower. We started our mines — by Hephaestos, we started them before we had the plan to go with them. I wanted a bolt hole. That proved foolish. I had a dream — sent by Apollo, I think — of the tunnels, and we dug them. But it was only when the great tower fell to his engines that we saw how to use our tunnels.’

Miriam waved her hands. ‘And then — oh, my brother — just when you got sick, you remember that Demetrios wouldn’t take the third wall. And his men started a mine,’ she giggled.

‘And we had to storm the mine before it broke through into one of ours.’ Anaxagoras said, suddenly understanding. ‘That’s why you were alone in the dark.’

‘Not alone,’ Jubal said. ‘He was there with me.’ He roared with laughter.

Abraham shuddered when he laughed.

Apollodorus came in, drank some warm water with honey and wine, and sat heavily. Charmides came in with Lysander, and they sat back to back against the tent pole.

Anaxagoras chuckled. ‘You know how I can tell that the gods are kind?’ he asked.

Melitta raised an eyebrow. ‘This will be good.’

‘The hungrier and thinner I am, the easier I get drunk,’ Anaxagoras proclaimed. ‘I may write a song about it. Anacreon never had such a subject. As we run short of wine, why, the gods give me the power to be drunk on less!’

He raised the cup, drank a polite sip and smacked his lips like a connoisseur. ‘Ahh. . looted from a cellar yesterday, I believe.’

Melitta laughed and smacked her leather-clad knee with her hand.

Satyrus couldn’t help but notice how firm her flesh seemed to be.

He looked around. ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said. Anaxagoras was right — he was light-headed on half a cup of watered wine.

‘Silence for the polemarch,’ Abraham said.

Satyrus got unsteadily to his feet. ‘Melitta, we have hundreds of Sakje warriors,’ he began.

‘I knew you’d notice, brother, given time,’ she said teasingly.

‘Demetrios has a horse herd,’ Satyrus said. ‘We have the best horse thieves in the girdle of the world here inside these walls. I propose that we sneak over there, lift his horses, ride them back — and eat them.’

Melitta laughed and slapped her knees again. ‘He must expect us to attack,’ she said.

‘Arrogance is its own reward,’ Lysander said. ‘I would be happy to lead.’

Melitta put a hand on his knee. ‘If you are anything like our Philokles, you can’t ride and you make more noise than a lion in a sheepfold,’ she said. ‘But if you want to lay out for us how the horses are hobbled, we’ll try it.’

‘When?’ Satyrus asked.

Melitta laughed. ‘The moon’s dark. Now’s fine.’

The horse raid rolled along with an inevitability that seemed fated — the Sakje gathered in the dark of the west gate as if summoned, and the Greeks had no idea how it had been done. Melitta spoke to them in the liquid tongue of the Assagetae.

They laughed. She drew pictures in the dirt by torchlight, and they laughed again.

Satyrus and Apollodorus took the marines out of the sally ports and across the empty ground towards the new enemy entrenchments — the contravallation that enclosed the town in a cordon of earth, sand and rock.

There were sentries. They were alert. They sounded the alarm.

The marines stormed the wall anyway — the sentries were badly outnumbered, and Plistias had not stationed a quarter-guard to reinforce the most distant section, so that Satyrus was on top of the earthen rampart fifty heartbeats after his sword had cleared its scabbard.

‘Prisoners,’ he shouted.

The enemy phalangites had the same notion. Fifty of them surrendered. But only after they had sounded the alarm.

The trumpet notes rang out into the night, and trumpets responded from the camp.

Anaxagoras came up next to Satyrus. ‘I wish that I was with your sister,’ he blurted out.

‘Me too,’ Satyrus said.

It was pure joy to be out of the city. Melitta hated the damned city, the rubble, the perpetual smell of shit, the corpses and rotting crap, the brown stink of her hands. It was like a special hell for Sakje. Her brother had no idea how much it hurt the Sakje to be penned inside the foolish walls.