Tyrant: Force of Kings (13 page)

Herakles looked at Mytilene as if he’d arrived in paradise. Miletus had been too big for a man who’d grown to adulthood in a town with four thousand inhabitants including slaves. But Mytilene was ideal.

Besides, Stratokles was allowing him to ride abroad, well dressed. If they were going to make this work, it was going to start here.

They brought horses across – always a good investment, taking horses to Lesbos, especially big, well-bred warhorses from Persia. So they rode up from the port, looking like a prince and his retinue.

Herakles was in his element, and he positively sparkled – like his mother – when it became clear to all of them that the mercenaries could see a resemblance. Heads turned, all the way from the beach.

Stratokles arranged lodgings with a guest friend – the Athenian proxenos, in fact. But before he could try the wine or the olives, much less the women, he received a summons, from a source he chose not to ignore.

‘So,’ Apollodorus said. ‘Are you a raven come to pick the bones, or an ally?’

Stratokles rolled the wine around in his cup. ‘We’ve been adversaries more times than allies,’ he said.

Apollodorus nodded. ‘True enough.’

Stratokles took a deep breath. ‘I came to hire men for another purpose,’ he said. ‘But …’

‘But you could be tempted to help me?’ Apollodorus said.

‘If you’ll help me,’ Stratokles answered. ‘And I have to warn you that Leon and I have never been friends.’

The Numidian came in from behind a tapestry. ‘Well shot, snake. I told him as much. But I’m the one who sent to bring you here.’

‘Sent?’ Stratokles asked. ‘Where?’

‘Why, Heraklea, of course. Although I wondered at first if you had done this yourself.’ Leon shook his head. His hair was almost all white. It made Stratokles feel old.

Stratokles shook his head. ‘Amastris—’

Leon smiled. ‘Cut you loose.’

‘Tried to have me killed, actually.’ He shrugged.

Leon smiled again. ‘I understand the feeling,’ he said.

‘She failed. I went east for a while.’ He raised an eyebrow.

Leon took a deep breath. ‘You mean you are
not
here at my invitation?’ he asked.

Stratokles shook his head. ‘I gather that’s the wrong answer,’ he said. ‘Too bad, because I think I’m willing to help.’ He looked around. ‘Surely the Lady Melitta is here, as well?’

‘She’s got the rest of the fleet,’ Leon said. Apollodorus was shaking his head. Leon drank some wine, leaned forward, and said, ‘I think he can help. So do you. Why not tell him?’

‘Because everything we say to him will go straight to Demetrios,’ Apollodorus said. ‘Now that he’s sitting here, I remember how much I hate the bastard.’

Stratokles laid both of his hands on the table. ‘Apollodorus, if Leon and I can do business, I don’t think you have any right to pretend your rivalry is older and deeper. I don’t think we’ve even crossed blades. In fact, I think we’ve been comrades – at Tanais.’

‘I almost gutted you at Rhodos,’ Apollodorus said.

‘Bah – we’re all professionals. Leon, tell me what you want from me. I swear to you – by any gods you wish – that I have no employer just now and that I won’t sell what you tell me for one month from today.’ He stood up.

Leon took him at his word. ‘Bring the image of Herakles,’ he said. ‘Swear on Lord Herakles and the heroic dead of Marathon, where Athens proved her greatness, may their shades come to haunt you if you break your oath, that you will keep anything we tell you here to yourself for one full lunar month from today.’

Stratokles met Leon’s eye. ‘I swear on Lord Herakles and the heroic dead of Marathon, where Athens proved her greatness, may their shades come to haunt me if I break my oath, that I will keep anything you tell me here to myself and my lieutenant Lucius, who will be bound by the same oath, for one full lunar month from today.’

Apollodorus leapt from his chair. ‘You heard him change the oath!’ he said.

Leon nodded. ‘He meant us to hear that he’s a truthful man. If he helps us, he has to explain to his henchmen.’ He nodded.

Stratokles thought it was unfair how handsome Leon remained. It lent him a dignity that Stratokles was never likely to have.

‘So?’ he said. ‘I’ve sworn.’

Leon passed him a cup of wine. ‘Here. It’s a long story.’

Later, the two men shocked each other by clasping hands.

That night, Stratokles wrote a long letter to Hyrkania, and sent two of Herakles’ Macedonians and six recently hired mercenaries to carry it over land. And then he sat down to a symposium with Lucius and all of Satyrus’s captains and, odd as it felt, he enjoyed himself.

Part II

5

‘Plistias of Cos,’ Diokles said, peering into the sun under both hands. ‘See the funny little break above the beak of his penteres? That’s for ripping oars. He had it cast for his flagship.’

‘Anyone could cast one,’ Melitta muttered, also shading her eyes with her hands.

Diokles just shrugged. It was an eloquent shrug – it suggested that while anyone could, only one man would.

It was a hazy summer day in the Dardanelles, and Diokles’ flagship led a line of twenty-four warships. Down the channel, mostly hidden by the Point of Winds, lay the northern fleet of Demetrios and Antigonus, sixty warships.

Diokles turned to his helmsman, an older Italiote, Leonidas of Tarentum. ‘Steady. I want to come within easy hail of him.’

‘Easy hail it is,’ Leonidas answered.

Melitta turned back to her navarch. ‘Should we be getting into armour?’ she asked.

Diokles pursed his lips. ‘Despoina, I don’t know. That’s for you to answer. It’s all about what signal you want you want to send. Peace? War?’

Melitta admired his calm. ‘We will fight if he does not move,’ she said.

Diokles nodded. ‘I know.’

She nodded, twisted her mouth – very like her brother, really.

She vanished under the tent-like awning she’d installed amidships – like having a Sakje yurt on a ship – and re-emerged wearing a coat of pale caribou with blue elk-hair work and golden plaques and bells. She pulled it on and belted it, hung her akinakes from her hip, and went to the stern.

Diokles smiled, but he didn’t do it where the Lady of the Assagetae could see him.

Plistias stood his ground, his ship well out in the current with two triremes on station behind him, well warned that there was another squadron in the channel.

Diokles had not matched his force – he came forward alone, confident that the high state of training and the superior construction of his ship would see him clear if Plistias behaved badly.

He chewed the ends of his moustache.
Confident
wasn’t the right word. His crew and his ship would give him a chance—

‘How did it come to this?’ Melitta asked. ‘I hate not knowing.’

Diokles shrugged. ‘If Demetrios really has taken your brother or killed him, he is counting on the “not knowing” to slow us.’

Coenus and Theron emerged from the tent amidships, wearing simple chitons like farmers.

Coenus looked under his hand at Plistias’s flagship. Shook his head. ‘I wish the odds were better,’ he said.

Theron snorted. ‘I was brought up to understand that in narrow waters, the smaller fleet has no disadvantage,’ he said. ‘Look at Salamis.’

Diokles and Coenus both shrugged simultaneously.

Coenus smiled. ‘I’d rather test that theory from the position of a massive advantage of force,’ he said. ‘And as I think Diokles will agree, in early spring we had a massive advantage in rowers – ours work year-round, and theirs do not. But now? We have an advantage in spirit, perhaps. But his fleet is worked up, now. Look at his oars work. It’s not beautiful, but it is well enough done.’

Diokles grinned. ‘I thought that you were a cavalryman.’

Coenus raised an eyebrow. ‘What part of Greece is more than a day’s walk from the sea? Certainly not Megara.’

‘Nor Corinth,’ Theron said.

A stade away, and Plistias’s oarsmen only pulled to hold their station.

‘He’s waiting for something,’ Coenus muttered.

Diokles didn’t like the waiting, the
not knowing
. Especially as there were warships launching past the headland and masts coming down, readying for a fight – or that’s what it appeared to him.

Melitta turned to him. ‘If he attacks us, I will shoot him dead. Let my arrow be the signal for the ballistas to let fly.’

‘You may already be dead,’ Diokles said with brutal honesty.

Melitta shrugged. ‘Then my mother’s line will have ended, and what happens will be of little moment to gods or men.’

‘I may still be alive,’ joked Theron, amused by her view of the world. ‘Diokles, here, might care to live.’

She rolled her shoulders in irritation. It was easy to forget how young she really was, until she showed irritation, or beamed with happiness. Not much of the latter, lately.

A quarter stade, and they could hear the oar beat on the other ship as clear as if their oar master was on Diokles’ ship.

‘What ship?’ asked one of Plistias’s men in a brightly burnished bronze thorax.

‘
Atlantae
,’ Diokles called, his voice like a trumpet. ‘Of Tanais and Pantecapaeaum.’

Half a hundred pous, now – point-blank shot for the ballistae. The archers on the
Atlantae
were armed and had arrows to their bows, but they stood amidships, well clear of the rails. But the ballistae were loaded, and Jubal’s new invention, the crank-repeaters, were fully tensioned.

Plistias of Cos’s ship,
Golden Demeter
, was also fully ready. His two forward ballistae were cranking even as the two ships sailed on, closer and closer, not quite nose to nose.

‘Oars in,’ Diokles said in a calm, clear voice, and the oar master, Milos, repeated the order quietly.

Melitta found the quiet more dangerous than the noise. Quiet, to her steppe-trained ears, meant ambush. She stood, fully exposed in white caribou, on the stern platform, and she could hear the sound of almost two hundred oars being dragged into oar ports and crossed between benches – a manoeuvre endlessly practised, but never quiet.

By bringing in their oars, they signalled that they were not going to fight. The time it would take to get their oars in the water would be critical, in a fight.

Twenty pous or less separated the ships – almost close enough to jump. Melitta smiled.

‘Closer,’ she said quietly to the helmsman.

He tapped the steering oars with the flats of his hands, and the bow twitched to port.

Before she could change her mind, or her councillors could dissuade her, Melitta stepped up onto the rail, a long leg flashing in the summer sun, and leapt for Plistias’s ship.

She landed easily, a little shorter than she had intended, balanced, and stepped down off the rail onto the helmsman’s deck of the
Golden Demeter
. Half a dozen marines looked at her as if she’d grown wings and flown.

While they gaped, she glided forward. ‘Plistias of Cos?’ she asked.

He nodded, his mouth still a little open.

‘Melitta, Lady of the Assagetae. My brother is King of the Bosporons.’

‘Despoina,’ he said politely. The man’s marines were just reacting.

‘Your master, Demetrios, has taken my brother against the provisions of the Truce of Rhodes —’

‘What?’ Plistias shook his head. ‘Despoina, I have—’

She put a hand in his face. ‘Please, be silent.’

Another man on the deck inclined his head. ‘Despoina, we have heard nothing to suggest … that is, King Demetrios has the highest opinion—’

The sharp movement of her hand would have beheaded the man, had she held a sword. She took a deep breath. ‘You will take your fleet out of the straits and retire to the Aegean, or we fight. No room for negotiation. If your king has not taken my brother, I will allow you back into the straits when I know this. If your king has him, he can have access to the straits by restoring my brother to me.’

Plistias shrugged. ‘Despoina, you have too few ships to make good your threats.’

Melitta shrugged right back. ‘I’ll give you until tomorrow to retire. You have been warned.’ She smiled her
killer of the steppe
smile, the smile that had earned her the name
Smells Like Death
. ‘If I had had my way, we would simply have attacked you this morning. But my brother’s people believe in talk. So I have spoken.’

She stepped between two of the marines as if they weren’t there, vaulted onto the rail, and was across to her own ship in another breath.

‘Oars out,’ Diokles said.

‘We do not respond to threats!’ Plistias called.

‘Back water,’ Diokles said to the oar master as soon as the oars were out. Across the water, he could see men with bows at full stretch. It didn’t require an order to start the war – just a mistake.

Four strokes, five strokes, and the distance started to open. Already, only the bow-mounted heavy weapons would bear.

‘That was … not what we agreed to,’ Coenus said carefully.

‘I changed my mind,’ Melitta said cheerfully. ‘Now that man, at least, knows who I am.’

‘He will think you are a barbarian,’ Theron said gently.

Melitta shrugged a shoulder out of the caribou coat. ‘But, my dear teacher, I
am
a barbarian.’

Dawn. Smoke rising on the far horizon, probably Imbros. Well beyond the straits – five parasanges or more. Melitta watched it with satisfaction.

‘Apollodorus?’ Coenus and Nikephorus stood beside her.

She nodded. ‘Unless someone has captured our signal book or one of our messengers.’

‘Plistias will have seen it too,’ Nikephorus said.

Melitta laughed. ‘I hope that Lysimachos and Cassander and Antigonus see it, as well. What we are doing is sending a threat, and we need that threat to be seen and understood in every camp.’