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.’
She put on a light thorax of iron scales on heavy deer hide; no yoke, in the Sakje way, and a light helmet that allowed her free vision. Today she wore her gorytos openly.
Nikephorus was armed in bronze from head to toe. So were Coenus and Theron. Diokles wore a bronze thorax and a leather Boeotian cap.
They shared a kylix of wine, poured libations to Poseidon and Herakles and all the gods, and went to their ships.
The sun was well above the horizon when they rowed carefully up to Kynossema and lowered their main masts, prepared to fight.
On the other side of the point, around the difficult corner where fleets had waited since the siege of Troy, Plistias’s ships manoeuvred into their fighting formations — two lines of heavy ships and a third of lighter ships, well over to the European shore, backs to their beach. It was a surprisingly cautious formation. For one thing, it allowed Melitta’s fleet to turn the corner in the channel at Kynossema without opposition.
The Bosporons had twenty-eight ships and they formed two lines, with fifteen in the first line and only thirteen in the second, and then the lines passed the point one at a time, wheeling in unison on the barbed rocks on the European shore like so many hoplites drilling in the agora.