Christian Cameron: King of the Bosphorus

'Pull!' he called. The oars bit the water – the stroke was lost and had to be restored.

As the oars came up, he saw more men coming from the bow. Was Abraham dead? 'Pull!' he called as the top of the stroke was reached. 'Neiron! I need you to call the stroke. Pull!'

Neiron was sitting against the mast, his eyes unfocused.

There were three more enemy marines, and they were cautious. On the leader's command, they all threw their javelins together, and Satyrus took them on his shield and charged, shouting 'Pull!' as his war cry. He got his shield into the middle one, took a light cut on his greaves from the one to his front right and punched the hilt of the Aegyptian sword into the man's face over his shield rim – all feint for the backhand cut that Greeks called the 'Harmodius blow'. Satyrus stepped forward with his sword foot, changing his weight with the feint and pushing his shield into the other two, and then cut back at the man who had wounded him, the weight of his blow sheering through the man's helmet.

Satyrus ripped the Aegyptian weapon free of the man's head and the blade snapped – and Satyrus fell back a step. My father's sword! he thought.

The deck-crewman behind him saved his life, plunging his spear past Satyrus's shoulder into the centre man's face. The blow skidded off the man's chin and through his cheek and he went down, fouling his file-partner, whose feet had been grabbed by an alert oarsman on the oar deck below. He fell into the rowers and died at their hands.

'Pull!' Neiron called.

With a shriek like a wounded woman, Falcon pulled free of the green vessel, trapping the enemy marines on his decks. Many elected to jump – men in light armour could swim long enough to be rescued – but the officers in heavy bronze were trapped. Satyrus watched sailors pull one down and throw him to his death in the water. Abraham accepted the surrender of another – Abraham was the only man Satyrus had ever seen accept surrender in a sea fight.

'Oh, Ares!' Satyrus said. He could just walk.

'Pull!' Neiron called, and the Falcon was a ship's length clear of their enemy.

'Switch your benches!' Satyrus called. He looked aft. Diokles had an arrow through his thigh and was using the oars to keep himself erect.

Their ram had, in fact, ripped the stern right off the green ship, and he was settling fast, his rowers in chaos. But the enemy was trying to take Theron's ship over the bow as a stolen life-raft. Satyrus could see Theron with his marines fighting in the bow. He was the biggest man in the fight.

North and west, the whole enemy fleet was bearing down on their fight. The rest of their squadrons were gone. Just a stade away, a pair of golden-yellow triremes had bow waves – full ramming speed.

'Diokles!' Satyrus yelled, pointing at the new enemy.

Diokles was already leaning on his oars, using the momentum of the backed oars to turn the bow south.

Satyrus saw it as if a god had stepped up next to him and put the whole idea in his mind – he saw the fight and what he had to do.

As the bow swung south, he saw more and more enemy sailors and marines flooding aboard Herakles.

'Lay me alongside Herakles,' Satyrus said.

Diokles bit his lip and said nothing.

Satyrus accepted his unspoken criticism and ran forward, collecting deck-crewmen with weapons as he went.

'Abraham!' he called.

Neiron called the first stroke of the new motion. His voice was weak, but he had to hold on. Satyrus was running out of options, and he was not going to abandon Theron.

Abraham was kneeling by a dying marine. The man was bleeding out and Abraham was holding his hand.

Satyrus waited until the man's eyes fluttered closed. Then he seized the dead man's javelin and his sword. 'We're going aboard Herakles,' he said.

Abraham shook his head. 'You're insane,' he said quietly.

'I'm not letting Theron die when I can save him,' Satyrus bit back.

'What about the rest of us?' Abraham asked. 'Punch straight through! Isn't that what we're supposed to do?'

Satyrus shook his head to clear it. It seemed so obvious to him. 'We put the green ship between us and those two,' he said, pointing at the nearest new enemies, now just half a stade away. 'We rescue Theron and we're gone.'

Abraham shrugged. He had blood leaking out of an eye – or perhaps just out of his helmet. 'Whatever you say, prince.'

The rest of the marines looked tired but hardly done in. Most of them had fought at Gaza.

'On to the deck of the Herakles,' Satyrus said. 'Clear it and we're gone. A gold rose of Rhodos to every man who follows me on to that deck.'

Even as Satyrus spoke, Diokles had the speed to turn them back east, so that the oarsmen pulled in their oars and Falcon coasted alongside his stricken brother.

Satyrus leaped on to the rail. 'Clear the deck,' he called, his voice breaking, but then he was over the rail of the Herakles and his javelin took an enemy marine in the side of the head, knocking him unconscious inside his helmet. Satyrus went straight into the next man, shield up, so that the rim of his own aspis crashed into the man's armoured jaw and he smelled the sweat on his enemy as the man tried to turn and got a spear in his teeth from a sailor. Satyrus bore him down and pushed on into the flank of the enemy boarding force, into the unarmoured sailors who didn't have shields and died like sacrificial animals under his borrowed blade. And when they broke, he kept killing them, cutting them down as they fled into the bow, killing them even as they jumped over the side, as if by killing these men who served his enemy he could regain his lost kingdom.

Theron was by the mast, his back against it. He was covered in blood and wounded several times – his left thigh was lacerated with shallow wounds so that blood ran down his legs like lava from a new volcano. He held up a hand, the same way he would when he'd been fighting the pankration on the sands of the palaestra in Alexandria and he took a fall. He managed a smile. 'Still in the fight, eh?' he said.

Satyrus took his hand and hauled him to his feet. He looked fore and aft along the deck. The marines from the heavy green quadrireme were rallying in the bows of their own ship, and a shower of arrows swept the decks of Herakles.

'We could board him,' Satyrus said.

'If you want to die gloriously, that would be your path,' Abraham said by his elbow. He was wrapping his shield arm in linen stripped from a corpse. 'Look!'

The two golden-hulled triremes from Pantecapaeum were almost aboard them, rowing hard – but their speed had fallen off, because they'd started their sprint too early and their crews were under-trained. In the press of ships, they couldn't see what was friend and what was foe. Behind them were a dozen more triremes.

'We could take him,' Satyrus said.

'You are possessed by a bad spirit,' Abraham said. 'Do not succumb to these blandishments.' He leaned in. 'You must live, or all this is for nothing. Get your head out of your arse and think like a commander.'

Satyrus felt the heat in his own face – felt rage boiling up in his limbs. But he also saw the faces of the men around him. He saw Theron's nod of agreement. The marines' studied blankness.

'Very well,' he said, more harshly than he wanted. He looked across to the Falcon. 'Abraham, keep us from getting boarded again. When I have Herakles clear of that green bastard, take command and row clear. Understand? Theron – someone get Theron looked after. No, better – sling him across to Falcon.'

His head was clear – tired, but clear. It was like waking from a fever. Now he could see, and what he saw was the last few moments of a disaster. As soon as the pair of golden triremes figured out which side was which, he'd be dead.

He leaped for his own ship and landed with a clash of bronze on the deck. 'Diokles!' he roared.