Anaxagoras emerged from the open ground nearest the former Temple of Poseidon and took Satyrus’ oil bottle without asking, scooping it from Satyrus’ towel. He came and stood with Satyrus, using his expensive cedar oil liberally.
‘Is she not the very wonder of the world?’ he asked quietly.
Satyrus grunted. ‘That’s my oil,’ he said.
‘Learn to share, is my advice, lord king,’ Anaxagoras said. From another man, the words might have been a calculated insult. Anaxagoras was too open for such petty things. ‘Have you kissed her?’
‘And you have?’ Satyrus asked, stung.
Anaxagoras laughed.
Men compete in many ways, and Satyrus was not so petty as to pass on this one. If Anaxagoras could be the cheerful athlete, why, so could he.
‘If you use my oil, we’ll smell the same,’ Satyrus said.
‘And?’ Anaxagoras paused.
‘Well, when she kisses you, she’ll assume it’s me. Starving poets don’t use cedar oil.’ Satyrus smiled with a confidence that was entirely artificial — like showing courage when the Argyraspides charged, sometimes a man has to make himself stand to the challenge.
Anaxagoras sighed. ‘I haven’t kissed her.’
‘Nor I,’ agreed Satyrus. ‘Now give me my oil back. Before Abraham kills us both.’
DAY TWENTY-NINE
Another day of inaction — exercise, food, stinking corpses dug from the rubble and burned. Funeral games for Amyntas, and a dinner by the tents. Scattershot dropped by the engines on the walls killed a dozen citizen children playing with some goats, and killed all the goats.
Towards evening, the storm that had threatened for a week suddenly began to manifest, and Miriam and Aspasia bustled around with other women arranging every unbroken vessel to catch water. The town had a dozen wells, but the constant rain of heavy rocks was damaging cisterns and dropping dirt and sand into well shafts.
The sun sank, a bright red ball in dark grey clouds, and Leosthenes the priest claimed it was an omen. He demanded Satyrus’ attention.
‘Lord, it is a sign from the Golden Archer. I had a dream to accompany it, and I take it to mean that we should attack the mole.’ Leosthenes began a complex discourse on his dream and on the interpretation of dreams, and the importance of the dreams of a priest.
Satyrus nodded and walked away, leaving the priest to tell his dream to an audience of marines and sailors. Leosthenes — and Apollo, for that matter — wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know, and he took Neiron with him to find Panther in the small square at the south end of the port, where they’d first landed, what seemed like ten years before.
‘Navarch,’ Satyrus said, to greet the older man.
‘My lord,’ Panther said, rising from a late supper of olives and bread. ‘A cup of wine for the king.’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘I need my head clear. Panther, you’re the best sailor here — how long until that storm breaks?’
Panther raised an eyebrow. ‘Three hours?’ he guessed, looking at Neiron as a gust of wind shot through his tent.
Neiron nodded. ‘That’s what I said.’
‘Two hours after dark,’ Satyrus said. ‘I’ve heard it said that Rhodians are the best sailors in the world, Panther. Care to put it to the test?’
Panther shot to his feet. ‘Ares, Satyrus, you want to hit them tonight?’
Satyrus shrugged. ‘Neiron usually calls me rash.’
Neiron shook his head. ‘Not this time. Navarch, we think that if you give us one of the ships you’ve readied — well, we have the best armoured oarsmen in the town. Perhaps in the world,’ he said, with a piratical gleam. ‘We’ll land on the mole — right out of the storm.’
Satyrus leaned over to explain as another gust hit the tent. ‘Even now, all those ships lashed to the mole have to cut their grapples and row away, or be dashed to pieces.’
Neiron nodded. ‘Jubal saw it two days ago, but we couldn’t risk talking about it.’ The town now had desertions every day — so many slaves and mercenaries that there was no point in investigating the treason of the west gate.
Panther nodded, and finished his wine in two gulps. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.
An unfamiliar ship, in total darkness.
But he had the best one hundred and sixty rowers of Arete’s complement, and the best twenty marines of the whole combined force, and all of his own officers.
In fact, the town was again risking everything in one throw. Menedemos commanded the largest trireme, and Panther the second largest: both intended to break the spiked boom protecting the engine-ships and throw fire pots into them. Satyrus saw to it that they had dozens of householders’ fire pots aboard.
‘The attack on the mole will, at least, even if we fail, provide a diversion,’ Satyrus said when they gathered the commanders.
And the boule voted to take the risk. All the knucklebones in one helmet.
It took an hour to get the men to their oars. They were in armour, with helmets and swords and spears which were lashed in piles on the main gangway — the trireme wasn’t a cataphract and lacked a main deck above the rowers.
Outside the ship, the wind howled like the living embodiment of wind, and the stern of the ship crashed into the stone wharf again and again, even in the inner harbour of Rhodes. A stade away, across the harbour, the waves broke on the mole and arched up to the height of two men, even three, in the cool night air, and the wind brought the spume across the harbour.
‘Bastards on the mole ain’t too comfortable,’ Neiron said.
‘They’ll be awake,’ Satyrus said. ‘Take the helm, friend. I’ll go in with the marines.’ He had Draco with him. Apollodorus was ashore, at the sea gate opposite the mole, awaiting some signal that the attack was on the mole before he led a hundred picked men out into the dark and up the landward face — the piled rubble, old barrels and sacks of sand with which Demetrios’ men had built their temporary wall.
‘Cast off,’ Satyrus said softly, and men sprang into action. Xiron, the new oar master — better known now as the right file in the phalanx, a hard drinker called the Centaur by his men — called the beat softly, beating time with a spear butt, and the oars dipped, held water and moved.
Aphrodite’s Laughter sprang across the harbour. It took fewer than four strokes for the crew to remember their profession, and then the warship moved at ramming speed.
Neiron had practised this route over and over, the last few hours, rehearsing how he would turn. His intention was to keep the ship hidden by the anchored ships in the inner harbour until the last possible second, and he’d talked them through it, every oarsman standing in the agora in torchlight, so that no man could say later he hadn’t known the route.
Under the stern of a big grain freighter, and then a sudden turn to starboard, and another to port, and they were flying up a line of anchored hulks — a dozen once beautiful triemiolas now stripped to their decks, a wooden wall protecting the town, a screen. Only the most observant man on the mole might glimpse Aphrodite’s Laughter running up the line — almost as far as the harbour entrance.
‘Ready, all decks!’ Satyrus called. He risked a yell — everything depended on this one turn.
The handful of oblivious men were slapped by their oar-mates. Men rose a little on their haunches, ready to back their oars.
‘Ready about!’ Satyrus called from amidships. The full weight of the sea wind caught them, but they’d planned for it, and the bow was already slipping south, just as they wanted it to-