Abraham nodded. ‘I accept.’
‘Good,’ Satyrus said. ‘Because I’m going to dig.’
The sun was a smear on the horizon, and no one had the energy to comment on the rosy fingers of dawn. The diggers lay like the dead, except for Aspasia, Miriam, Nike and a dozen other women, who were carrying the wounded to the rear. Men rose to help them — but not many.
Anaxagoras stepped out of the ranks of the hoplites, and a dusty ex-slave put his hand on the musician’s chest.
‘Back in the ranks, brother,’ Satyrus said.
‘But-’
‘If there’s an attack right now, you and the ephebes are all we have,’ Satyrus said. ‘The citizen hoplites worked all night.’
Memnon, who looked as much like a slave as the king, stopped next to him and leaned on a heavy shovel. ‘We lost a prime lot of weight, though,’ he joked.
And the Sakje and the Cretans, who had been kept back from the digging, manned the new embrasures with the dawn. Satyrus took a wineskin and climbed the tower.
It took almost an hour for there to be enough light to see — or shoot. But Satyrus watched the crossbow teams move forward, saw them scratch their heads, literally — at the change in the Rhodian south wall.
Satyrus and Jubal mapped out the positions of the crossbow teams and sent the information to Idomeneus via Helios. A Sakje was caught moving and was shot through both hips, and he died screaming.
‘I need to teach you to read and write,’ Satyrus said to Jubal.
‘Heh,’ Jubal said. ‘Why you think I can’ read?’
‘You may be the best siege engineer in the world, just now,’ Satyrus said. ‘And I need you to learn the maths. For all of us.’
‘I know maths,’ Jubal said. ‘I read Pythagoras.’
A whistle sounded, and as one, the whole of Melitta’s Sakje force rose to their feet. Further east, the entire Cretan force did the same, standing up behind the great baskets. All together, they drew. Master archers called ranges and lofted their own bows, and the bone whistle sounded again, and all of them loosed — six hundred arrows.
Seconds later, they loosed again, and then again and again, until the arrow squall filled the air between the walls with a continuous flurry.
In the enemy forward positions, men were hit. The crossbow snipers suffered heavily, and the survivors of the first volley, shocked, hugged their cover.
Small groups of Sakje archers ran forward down the rubble wall and sprinted across no-man’s land, unopposed, as the fourth and fifth volleys ripped through the air.
The bone whistle sounded, and not a single arrow left a string. The last volley flew, whistling arrows shrieking to add to the terror, and the sprinters were across, clambering up through the stakes and sharpened tree branches of the enemy lines. The enemy snipers raised their heads too late: the Sakje were shooting point blank — and the enemy had no engines registered on their own lines.
Thyrsis returned in triumph, brandishing a captured gastraphetes.
Satyrus let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
Demetrios did not ponder long on the new development. Before the morning was old, the men on the tower could see his pikemen moving into assault positions.
‘Finally!’ Satyrus said.
There were thousands of them. They blackened the ground behind the enemy’s entrenchments — four taxeis and then a fifth stretched four deep across the rear.
‘Using his veterans to push the newer troops forward,’ Satyrus said. Abraham had joined him, and Hellenos, and they kept the younger men busy, up and down the ladders.
Jubal grinned. ‘Now — now he take the poison pill. Let he have it!’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘but if those men get onto the new wall, we’re done for. We have to make a fight of it, and then we have to withdraw in good order — without taking too many casualties.’ He spat. ‘Zeus Sator, stand by us. Herakles, guide my arm.’
He raced down the tower — now he feared the power of that assault — and Helios was waiting with his armour.
‘Every man,’ he said. ‘Every man into the ditch behind the bow.’
When they came, they came fast and hard. They knew that the defeat of their snipers meant that they would face massed archery, and they’d been coached.
They didn’t have their sarissas, either. They had javelins and light spears, or nothing but swords. They came forward at a dead run, screaming with fear, rage, battle spirit. Their officers came first, and the arrows reaped them first.
It was the first time that Demetrios had attacked a wall without massive bombardment. It was the first time he’d put ten thousand men in a single wave.
It was the toughest assault yet, and the Macedonians didn’t flinch at the arrows though they died in heaps on the wall. The last horse length of the climb was brutal — Jubal had deliberately built the walls at a changing pitch to lure infantry into believing that they could be climbed easily. Only when a man was halfway to the top did he see clearly how steep the last few feet were, and few men stopped to reason why every section had a sloped zone with easy climbing.
Into the heart of the archery.
The archers reaped phalangites like a woman cutting weeds in her garden, but they began to tire — even the Sakje — and their arrow supply ran short. And then, at the call of a bone whistle, they broke. The Sakje were fast, running to reform being a part of their core tactics. The Cretans were slower to break, and lost men to the triumphant Macedonians as finally they got over the wall.
Satyrus had the ephebes, the citizen hoplites and the oarsmen formed along the trench.
‘Stand up!’ he called.
The town garrison had their spears in their hands and they all but filled the wall. The Macedonians came over the crest of the rubble — the wall was fifty feet wide in places — and crashed headlong into the formed Rhodians. Spearless, spread out in no particular order, their feet punished by the sharp gravel of the walls, the Macedonians hesitated, and the Rhodians rolled them down off the wall in a single charge.
Satyrus was never in action — he was too busy calling commands. And as soon as his men cleared the wall top, he ordered them to face about. Already the enemy had missiles flying, heedless of hitting their own recoiling troops.
The Rhodians went back down their own wall and into the reserve trench behind it.
The Sakje came forward, rearmed with arrows, and filled in the strong places on the rubble wall top. The Cretans were slower to return.
Idomeneus was dead.
The second attack was half-hearted. The archers cleared off the wall, but the Antigonids had lost too many officers and the men hung back. The whole attack bogged down into desultory javelin-throwing, the Antigonids occupying the wall top but not pressing their advantage.
Satyrus waited as long as he felt that he could and then attacked them, clearing the wall top. This time, as soon as his men crested the wall, the enemy barrage struck, and he took casualties. But many of the enemy rounds dropped short or long, and his men got away with only twenty down — twenty armoured men he could not afford to lose.
The third attack failed to dislodge the Sakje. They shot and shot, some of them using their bows at arm’s reach, others drawing their long knives, and the Cretans held their ground too, and the enemy soldiers paid heavily for their timorousness in not pressing their attack. Caught in the open ground, they took casualties they needn’t have taken.
‘Demetrios is pushing new troops forward,’ came the message from the tower.
‘My boys and girls are down to five shafts each,’ Melitta said.
Two hours until sunset.
‘Give they the wall,’ Jubal said.
Abraham nodded. ‘You said to make it look like we wanted to hold it. We held it all day. Give it to them.’
Satyrus looked into the golden afternoon. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry, friends. We have to go hand to hand.’