Satyrus turned. ‘Draco, please take Anaxagoras out of the courtyard. You are relieved-’
Draco seemed to trip over a beam for a new machine, careened into the King of the Bosporus and knocked him flat.
‘Uh?’ Satyrus managed.
‘Stop being an arsehole,’ Draco whispered as loudly as a storm wind. And then he helped the king to his feet.
‘Come on, lad. Let’s go and have that cup of wine the king doesn’t want,’ Draco said, as Anaxagoras gave him a hand up.
‘I didn’t mean-’ Anaxagoras looked stricken.
‘Forget it,’ Satyrus managed. Now exposed to himself, he didn’t seem controlled and professional at all. He seemed like. . a jealous arsehole.
It made his stomach roil to find them together, but Satyrus made himself go — an hour later, last light, when he’d have been launching a raid if he thought he could get away with it.
They were sitting on stools in the soft evening air, playing their lyres — Anaxagoras with a kithara, and Miriam with the brasher sound of a turtle shell. They looked up as he brushed under the bead curtain Miriam had hung to keep her tiny courtyard inviolate.
Satyrus had done many brave things. It was years since he had seen himself as a coward. He knew himself to be brave — brave in the hardest way, the way of a man of intelligence and imagination who nonetheless faces his fears and gets things done. But facing her contempt and his pity was as hard a thing as he’d ever faced.
‘I’ve come to apologise,’ he said.
They looked at him.
He almost lost the will to go on. It was so easy to give way to anger — to allow himself to be the victim and not the aggressor. He could shout his betrayal and take refuge in violence. He could attack Anaxagoras. He could revile Miriam.
But that would be cowardly.
Excellence often exacts a terrible penalty.
‘I’ve come to apologise,’ he said again.
Miriam shot off her stool and threw her arms around him, lyre and all. ‘You are an idiot,’ she said into his ear, and pressed herself against him.
And Anaxagoras came and embraced him, too.
Excellence often brings its own rewards.
Later, he sat with both of them in the chill of the evening — they were all pressed together, sitting with their backs against a sun-warmed stone with a skin of wine none of them would ever have drunk two months before empty at their feet.
‘And I saw him die,’ Miriam finished. She was making a throwing motion, and she was crying.
Anaxagoras shook his head. ‘I feel like I bathe in blood every day.’ He spat into the sand. ‘But the worst of it is that as long as I’m fighting, it is more intoxicating than wine, or sex.’
‘Oh, sex,’ Miriam said wistfully.
Satyrus put his hands to his ears. ‘La, la, la,’ he sang, putting a brave face on his jealousy.
‘I haven’t had sex with either of you,’ Miriam said. ‘So you can both relax. I shan’t.’ She shrugged and lay back against them. ‘Unless you’d like to share me on alternate days?’
Anaxagoras shot a mouthful of wine out through his nostrils and across the remnants of a street. His coughing went on for a long time, and did a fine job of covering Satyrus’ feelings.
Miriam looked back and forth and laughed. ‘Men are so easy,’ she said.
Anaxagoras drank more wine.
Miriam laughed — a dark laugh, the laugh of a maenad. ‘What woman wouldn’t envy me?’ she said to the darkness. ‘Two great heroes who love me. But when I choose one, I betray the other. Don’t bother with your denials, gentlemen — you are what you are. And who cares? Aphrodite? Who cares if I lie with you both — both at the same time, one each day, one each hour? I’m no virgin, and we will all be dead soon.’
Miriam didn’t burst into tears. It might have been better if she had. She laughed again, her laughter like the surgeon’s scalpel — the sharp bite of truth. ‘Your Greek gods are so much more understanding of my predicament than my old patriarch,’ she sighed. She rose to her feet and kissed each of them on the lips, and then picked up her chiton skirts and ran off into the dark.
Satyrus sat still for a moment, and then looked over at Anaxagoras.
The musician shrugged. ‘You going to marry her?’ he asked.
Satyrus rubbed his chin. ‘You?’
‘She kissed me first,’ Anaxagoras said.
‘Fuck you, you. . wide-arsed musician.’ Satyrus laughed, and picked up the skin of wine.
‘Last one alive gets her?’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Don’t hog the wine.’
‘I’ll share the wine,’ Satyrus said. ‘And don’t think we get to decide the terms of the contest, either.’
Her kiss burned on his lips like a wound.
27
Daedelus came out of the late-summer dawn mist like Poseidon’s chariot. His ships were at ramming speed, and Demetrios’ guard ships died under their rams. The distant screams of the trapped rowers were like the sound of gulls, and Satyrus might have slept through the whole thing, but Jubal caught the fighting with his sharp eyes and woke everyone in the tower.
Satyrus knew the Labours of Herakles instantly. He whooped like a child watching a race, laughed aloud when the fire pots began to smash into Demetrios’ beached ships. And his smile was just as broad when the man himself stepped down from the deck of his ship onto the wharf.
‘You bastard!’ Satyrus said, embracing the mercenary. ‘Where have you been?’
But he couldn’t maintain any kind of fiction of anger — less so, even, when the grain ships began to enter the harbour. Six of them.
‘These are Phoenician ships?’ Satyrus asked.
‘Demetrios didn’t seem to need them,’ Daedelus laughed. ‘Have you no news?’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘None!’
Daedelus nodded. ‘Leon is at Syme with six thousand men and forty ships. Demetrios has made two tries at him and failed both times — he can’t spare the ships. And your sister and Nikephorus are raising the Euxine cities — we hear they have another twenty ships and all your mercenaries.’
Satyrus laughed. He felt ten years younger.
‘Wait — you haven’t heard the best. Diokles is in Alexandria, refitting.’ Daedelus smiled.
Satyrus paused a long, long time — maybe twenty heartbeats. ‘Diokles?’ he asked softly.
‘All those sailors you sent to Poseidon?’ Daedelus shook his head. ‘Diokles has seven heavy ships.’
‘Dionysus?’ Satyrus asked, hope bursting from his chest.
Daedelus shook his head. ‘Sorry lord, no. He was lost. And every man aboard. But Oinoe, Plataea, Atlantae, Ephesian Artemis, Tanais, Troy, Black Falcon and Marathon are refitting at Leon’s yard.’
Satyrus breathed a prayer to Poseidon.
‘Let’s celebrate,’ Satyrus said.
‘I brought wine,’ Daedelus said, ‘but Leon hits the beach with his diversion in about an hour, and I have to be ready to sail. But from now on, you’ll know we’re out there. Demetrios doesn’t have it all his own way at sea. And we hear that the Greek cities are begging his father for aid — Cassander is hitting them hard, undoing five years of their work.’
‘I never imagined I’d be on the same side as Cassander,’ Satyrus said.
‘I never thought I’d help save Rhodes,’ Daedelus said.
Satyrus took the news straight to the boule. The council was bitterly divided — many of the town’s leaders wanted to try to negotiate a surrender while they were still holding out, and it had become more and more obvious that the oligarchs intended to starve their own lower classes into forcing such a surrender — the most craven strategy Satyrus had ever seen. He wasn’t sure they were even doing it consciously.
Nicanor seemed to fight Satyrus automatically, and he made no pretence of his contempt for the man he always referred to as ‘our young royal’.