Tyrant: Force of Kings (6 page)

Anaxagoras raised his left hand, indicating he’d lost, and Apollodorus unwrapped him from the folds of his cloak. ‘I needed last night,’ he said. The words held no apology, but the tone did.

‘I have been thoroughly put in my place,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I’ll go back to the lyre and leave the sword to you two.’

‘Nonsense,’ Apollodorus said. ‘If you could beat me, I’d be a pretty poor specimen. I’ve fought for twenty years – and practised ten years before that.’ He nodded to Satyrus. ‘Your turn.’

Satyrus caught the sword that Anaxagoras tossed him – and found that Apollodorus was on him immediately, sword and cloak weaving like a pair of dancers. He reacted without thought, ducking, backing – got his cloak on the other man’s sword and tried for a seizure and missed, tried snapping a kick to the other man’s shin and connected – a glancing blow, but it put him in the pattern and Apollodorus fell back, and Satyrus snapped his chlamys, his sword hidden behind it, and stepped back himself to breathe – and Apollodorus’s sword hit his wrist hard enough to cause him to drop his own sword.

Anaxagoras clapped his hands together. There were other men standing under the colonnade and they applauded as well. ‘Splendid!’ called a younger man – Satyrus couldn’t remember his name, but the man had been an Ephebe during the siege. He was still thin. Satyrus wondered if any of them would return to their full weight after a year on starvation rations.

He rubbed his wrist and smiled at Apollodorus. ‘You are still the master,’ he said.

Apollodorus rubbed his shin. ‘If you had kicked for real, I might never have launched that blow,’ he said.

Satyrus found his hands were shaking – muscle fatigue and the daimon of combat together. ‘I’m done,’ he said, showing his shaking hands.

Other men went out onto the sands, wrestling or boxing, and Satyrus realised that they had all been waiting for him – giving him the sand, as men said of someone they respected. He smiled around, trying to catch every eye – thanking them for their good opinion of him.

It was good to be a hero.

He went in to get a massage and a bath.

Later, after a review of his accounts with Abraham’s steward, he met Anaxagoras in the courtyard, his lyre tucked under his arm as a much younger man would.

‘Revenge is sweet,’ Anaxagoras said with an evil smile.

Indeed, Anaxagoras was the very best of teachers – endlessly patient, his voice carefully modulated, slow to praise and slow to anger – so that when he did praise, a student knew he had done well indeed, and when his cheeks did mottle red, a student knew he’d been very foolish indeed.

Nor was this in any way a reversal of their bouts on the palaestra. Anaxagoras was a competent wrestler, an excellent boxer, a quick study at pankration, and now a brilliant swordsman. Satyrus was, at best, an indifferent musician. He loved to play – enjoyed any music, was constantly and pleasantly surprised that he could play anything at all – but seldom practised hard, so that simple fingerings were still the limit of his powers, and it was rare that duties – and pleasures – allowed him the time or the inclination to take a complete lesson.

‘Play the scale again. This time, every other note,’ Anaxagoras said.

Satyrus did as he was told.

‘Now again, with regard to the tempo. Every note exactly the same
length
,’ Anaxagoras said.

The control of his face suggested he was hiding a smile. Satyrus tended to play all the notes in a tune, but without the strict adherence to time essential to make the music correctly.

‘And again,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Your habit of resting your thumb on the sound board is part of the reason you cannot make your transition correctly.’

Satyrus turned his head sharply, a retort on his lips. And relented, reason telling him that anger at a teacher who was trying to help him was unworthy – foolish and boyish. Besides, his teacher’s carefully controlled face suggested that this was, in fact, a form of revenge.

The third day in port. Miriam seemed a thousand Parasanges away, and a newly arrived Cyprian ore-freighter had somehow got ahead of his last three grain ships at the pier, and even when the confusion was sorted out, he’d lost another day. In his irritation, he slipped and got the tip of Anaxagoras’s sword in his throat – hard enough to make him feel the front of his gorge with the back, and it ached all day.

‘When we’re on campaign somewhere, in our tenth or eleventh straight day of rain, and I feel like crap, and there’s no wine, I’ll wish I’d enjoyed these days more,’ Satyrus said to Anaxagoras. He was sitting with his lyre in his lap. His throat hurt and he had no interest in playing. Or rather, he had every interest in playing well, and no interest in doing the work to get there, today.

‘You are a king, not a mercenary,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Surely sooner or later you will stop fighting.’

Satyrus shrugged. ‘Unlikely. When Lysimachos and Ptolemy and Seleucus and Cassander and Demetrios and all the busy, scheming bastards are dead, perhaps. But there’ll be more of them, I expect. Perhaps worse. The rumour is that Lysimachos is getting ready to march into my territory – claiming that he only seeks to march his army around the Euxine to Asia.’

‘Now that he is to marry Amastris?’ Anaxagoras said.

Satyrus looked out at the sea, blue as his former lover’s eyes in the bright sunlight. ‘They’re married now,’ he said, ‘unless something happened to prevent it.’

‘Shall we drink to them?’ Anaxagoras asked. ‘Is this why you are so far away from us?’

Satyrus spilled a libation. ‘To Hera, goddess of the marriage bed. May Amastris be blessed. May they both be happy.’

‘You mean that?’ Anaxagoras asked.

Satyrus smiled. It was a crooked smile, but not a mean one. ‘I think I do. I’m doing my best to mean it.’

Anaxagoras chuckled. ‘Listen, philos. When I was young—’

‘Look at the grey beard!’ Satyrus said.

Anaxagoras glanced at Charmides, who was admiring a serving girl as she, quite self-consciously, carried water on her head across the street. ‘Charmides makes all of us feel old,’ he said, and they both laughed. The younger man glanced at them and smiled.

Satyrus smiled back at him. ‘Will Charmides ever be old?’ he asked.

Anaxagoras shook his head, dismissing the topic. ‘At any rate, when I was young I wanted to marry a beautiful girl – a free girl. A local farmer’s daughter. She was modest and clever and her legs – oh, even now, I think of her—’

‘Aphrodite, philos, this was, what, six years ago? Stop telling it as if you were decades from her!’ Satyrus laughed.

‘And my father forbade it, of course. Rich men’s sons do not wed farmer’s daughters, no matter how good their legs are.’ He laughed, but his eyes were far away.

Satyrus felt a prickle of unease.

‘And the worst of it was that I knew –
I knew from the first
that my pater was right, and that I would never marry her. But I was stubborn, and romantic, and I pursued her. Long enough to convince her father I meant business.’ He shrugged. ‘And then I realised that she was merely clever, not actually intelligent. That she cared deeply for money and fine things.’

‘It is easy to sneer at such thoughts, when you are rich,’ Satyrus said.

‘Too true. This is not a pretty story, nor one that shows me to best advantage.’ Anaxagoras poured himself more wine. ‘Eventually, I sopped seeing her. It was easy to do – after all, she was a free woman and modest, so that seeing her at all had required enormous effort. You understand?’

‘Of course,’ Satyrus said.

‘And then – within a year – she married. She married well – better, in fact, than me. An aristocrat’s son – a powerful man with powerful connections and an old, old family. And to this day I cannot decide what my role in all of this was – did I love her? Do I bless her success? Should I have wed her myself ?’ Anaxagoras drank off his wine. ‘See? No great lesson there. Just real life.’

Satyrus nodded. The silence floated between them, easy enough. Easy silence had been the first sign they were friends, and now it endured, a token of esteem.

‘I worry that I cannot marry Miriam,’ Satyrus said.

The connection was obvious enough. Miriam was a Jew, not a Hellene. The daughter of one of the Middle Sea’s richest merchants, no one could suggest that marrying her was marrying
down
. But she was a barbarian, a foreigner, an alien.

‘I know,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘I wondered the same. I even wondered if, by courting her, I was – oh, I don’t know. A foolish thought.’

Satyrus smiled. ‘Redeeming yourself, brother?’

‘Proving that I wasn’t such a snob, more like. Although Miriam does rather rise above snobbery.’ Their eyes met, and Satyrus grinned.

‘My mother was more of a barbarian than Miriam will ever manage to be,’ he said.

‘Your father was not a king, of course. Were they married? Your parents?’ Anaxagoras asked.

‘Before Greeks and Sakje,’ Satyrus said. ‘I almost feel as if I was there, I’ve heard the tale so often. Pater was campaigning against Alexander, out on the Sea of Grass.’ He poured wine to the shade of his father. ‘Do you know that most of our sailors and marines worship my father as a god?’

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘I know that Apollodorus wears his amulet, and so does Charmides.’ He smiled. ‘Does it trouble you?’

Satyrus shrugged. ‘When I was a boy, I thought that he spoke to me. And when I was sick last year, he and Philokles seemed to visit me constantly. And yet Philokles never suggested to me that my father was anything but a good man. A difficult standard by which to measure myself, a worthy one, but no more.’ He shrugged again. ‘As I grow older, I find … how can I say this? I find the idea of my father’s deification a little offensive. Obscene.’

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘I’m trying to imagine how I would feel if my own father were deified.’ He laughed. ‘And I can’t. A good man of business – a pious man and a good father for a ne’er-do-well son. But godhood is not in him, and when he passes, his shade will not reach to the heavens for apotheosis.’ Anaxagoras rubbed his beard. ‘I’m not sure he’d want it even if offered.’

Satyrus took a deep breath. Then he changed his mind. ‘Tomorrow?’ he asked.

Apollodorus nodded. ‘Why don’t we stop being so serious, walk down to the pier, and see?’

The land breeze of the early morning found them already clear of the harbour mouth, the great mainsail rigged to catch the world’s wind, a gentle Boreas blowing them west, almost dead astern on their track for Athens after they weathered the northern promontory of Rhodos. The ships that had been laden with grain for Rhodes were full now of copper from Cyprus, cedar planks from Lebanon, skilled slaves who would become freemen in a year or two at Tanais or Pantecapaeaum, marble, spices and even a consignment of fine Aegyptian furniture for a rich merchant in Olbia. They also had the hard silver specie that had paid for the abundance of grain. Two days later, he sent them away north off Lesbos, under guard of half his ships, with Diokles, his most trusted trierarch, in command.

Aekes, a small, fiery man, brought his
Ephesian Artemis
off the beach in style and rowed away west – the scout ship. Satyrus followed him with two penteres, two triemiolas, and six triremes; almost a quarter of his full fleet, and some of the best ships – and some of his rawest, too.

He missed Diokles already, having seen little enough of the man in Rhodos, but keeping all of his best captains at his side all the time was poor strategy and unfair to them. He kept Aekes, though, because he could be trusted with anything – he had worked his way up to trierarch from the starting position of a Spartan helot, and he owed Satyrus his status, his citizenship, and his fortune.

Steering his own penteres – not his beloved
Arete
, lost to fire in the siege of Rhodos, but
Medea
, a smaller, lighter fiver built in Olbia – Satyrus pondered on Athens as a destination and what this visit meant to him. More than just seeing Miriam – although seeing Miriam was the greatest part of it, he admitted to himself. He must decide, before his prow touched the great pier at Piraeus, whether he meant to marry her. But there were other opportunities in Athens, other perils – he was a citizen there, and one whose activities made him both famous and infamous; a hero and a monster. Demetrios the besieger was the city’s current lord. Satyrus wanted to land in Athens ready for anything that might transpire. He wanted to be done with his state of war against Demetrios because, among other things, he expected shortly to be at war with Lysimachos.

Looking at Anaxagoras, taking a nap in the sun, Satyrus thought back to their last conversation in Rhodes and frowned to himself.
Hard to lie to a friend. Harder to hide from yourself.
Satyrus’s sense of bitterness – betrayal, even – over Amastris’s change of heart was deeper than he wanted to admit to another man. He told himself that the feeling was
not
just the jealousy of the jilted lover. He reminded himself that he would have lain with Miriam a hundred times – a thousand – during the siege, had she only been willing. He allowed that Amastris was a ruler, as he was, and had duties to her city, as he did.

Despite all of that, he couldn’t think of her without a rush of anger. Her decision to marry the Satrap of Thrace – a major player in the war against Antigonus – made war with Lysimachos almost certain; a war that would pit him against Ptolemy, if not in immediate fact, then in form, and would have repercussions across his personal, professional and mercantile life. It was this that had caused him to be so very careful of the trierarchs he chose to take to Athens. He wanted only his most trustworthy men, men who would look after his interests even when offered major bribes, even when threatened. He had no idea what the city might try to do. But he needed to keep the door opened by the truce with Demetrios ajar, at least, even if it meant trading with the enemy. Amastris’s wedding had put him there, and he had no choice but to react this way.

Or that’s what he told himself.

So he had Aekes scouting ahead, and Anaxilaus and his brother Gelon – both aristocrats from Sicily, wealthy men and no friends to Athens. They had
Oinoe
and
Plataea
. And Daedelus of Halicarnassus brought up the rear of the column in another heavy penteres –
Glory of Demeter
, a famous ship.