He heard the clown voice threaten Talkes, and he heard the same voice threaten to sell Penelope into slavery.
'Or I could give you what your father got, stupid woman. Where is he? Where is he?' The man sounded honestly angry.
'Do as you will,' Penelope said. 'When Lysimachos comes, you are a dead man.'
'All you dirt farmers sound the same sad song. Look, slut, your precious satrap is not coming. I'm lord here now. Eumeles is king of the Euxine and I'll be archon here. Want me to burn the house? Tell me where this man is.' The sing-song voice sounded unnatural, like a priest or an oracle.
'Nothing in the barns!' shouted another man, deeper voiced.
'Search the upstairs – the exedra. Slash every mattress and dump the loom. Everything!' clown-voice said.
'Two slave girls in the cellar. No men.' Another deep voice, this with the accent of the Getae.
'Let's see 'em!' came a shout, and then there were hoots, catcalls. More broken crockery and the sound of screams, and two men were in the exedra with him, searching. He could hear them poking around, he could smell the results as they broke a perfume jar. And below, he could hear Teax being raped – catcalls, sobs.
'May all of you rot from inside! May pigs eat your eyes!' Penelope screamed.
'Shut up, bitch, or you'll be next.' A laugh, and more laughing.
'I want a piece of that,' said a voice near his box.
His knees burned like fire and his sense of his own cowardice rose like the fumes of wine to fill his head. If I were worth a shit, I would rise from this box and kill my way through these men or die trying, he thought. He clutched his borrowed sword, prepared to kill the man who opened the chest.
'Athena's curse on you, man with the voice of a woman!' Penelope's voice, strained with rage and terror, carried clearly. 'May your innards rot. May you never know the love of a woman. May jackals root in your innards while you still have eyes to see. May worms eat your eyes. May all your children die before you.'
Teax screamed again.
'Why are we up here? The fucker's long gone – if he was ever here.' The deeper voice kicked the box where Satyrus lay.
Penelope screamed.
'Burn it,' clown-voice said in the courtyard. 'Kill them all. Stupid fucking peasants.'
They lit the roof, but the beams never caught, and Satyrus crept from his box and dragged himself, his legs unusable, down the stairs to the courtyard, heedless of the danger. But poor as they were at arson, they were skilled at killing. Penelope lay in a black pool of blood, so fresh that it glittered in the fitful light of the burning roof, and Teax lay naked. The look on her face – the horror, the terror, the loss of hope – burned itself into his brain. He closed her eyes, fouling his legs with her blood, and he threw his good wool chlamys over her.
Talkes was still alive. Someone had rammed a spear right through his guts, but he was alive when Satyrus found him.
'Killed!' Talkes said. 'All killed!' His eyes met Satyrus. 'You lived.'
Satyrus nodded. 'I did,' he said, feeling wretched.
Talkes nodded. 'I – want to live, too.' He nodded again, and died.
Satyrus thought of burying them all, or putting their bodies in the farmhouse and burning it. Both were gestures he couldn't afford. When his legs would function, he gathered his spear from the entry way and ran off across the orchards towards the coast. Inside his head, he was walling himself off from the image of Teax. He'd done it before, with the girl he'd killed by the Tanais River, with the feeling that he'd abandoned Philokles to die at Gaza. He knew just how to push that image down to concentrate his fear and his hate on one end.
Revenge.
6
Two cold camps, because Sarpax, the navarch, didn't fancy showing fires. They rowed up the Propontis into the teeth of a strong autumn wind and passed Byzantium at first light, rowing hard, so that the oarsmen grumbled. They parted with their convoy there and continued north.
Melitta could only think of how much she missed her son. Her breasts were heavy with milk, and they alone served to keep Kineas on her mind all the time – milk so plentiful that it hurt her, and every time she considered donning her armour she flinched from the thought. The lightest brush of fabric on her nipples started the flow again, so that she lived in a perpetual state of embarrassment and her chitons were all stained with milk and the biting wind froze her nipples.
So much for the great adventure of her life. She missed her son, and she played no role at all in the ship, except to watch the horizon and worry.
And miss her son.
Nihmu was little help. She stood in the bow, watching the sea, smelling the air like a dog, scrutinizing every ship they passed as if Leon might be aboard.
It was Nihmu who spotted the patrol ship, just as the water changed colour and the high banks of the Propontis fell away on either side. She came back, her leather boots scuffing the deck.
'Trireme,' she said. 'Just on the horizon.'
Coenus went forward with the navarch and came back shaking his head. 'He's got the wind,' Coenus said. 'And he's coming for a closer look.'
Sarpax joined him. 'Ladies, into the tabernacle, if you please. Serve out weapons. Gentlemen,' he said, as the ship's officers gathered, 'we will act as if we're willing to be boarded until I give the word. The word is "attack". If I give the word, do your best to kill them. The truth is – once they're alongside us, we have more marines. Eh? But if ever they break away, we are all dead men. Eh?' Sarpax's oiled moustache gleamed like the pearl he wore in his right ear.
'I can shoot,' Nihmu said. She grinned at Idomeneus. 'Better than him.'
'Me, too!' Melitta blurted.
'Take your bows to the tabernacle, then,' Sarpax said. 'No archery before I say. Quickly now! If they want a quick peek below decks, we all look as innocent as lambs.'
Melitta opened the hatch cover in the forward bulkhead of the tabernacle – the small, enclosed space just under the bow, the only closed space on a ship as small as a trade pentekonter. Through that narrow aperture, she saw the other ship closing on the opposite tack, her great square sail drawing with all the wind that had forced curses from the rowers for five days.
'Heave to!' the other ship called. 'What ship?'
'Who says?' Sarpax roared. 'Tunny, fifteen days out of Rhodos.'
'Heave to!' the other commander called. 'I'm coming under your lee.'
The trireme got her mainsail down neatly enough, although they made a hash of closing the last few boat-lengths to come alongside.
'Throw me a grapple!' the other man called.
Melitta could hear Sarpax mutter something as he ordered a grapple thrown across. Then he ordered another.
'Who are you?' Sarpax roared.
'Wasp, of Pantecapaeum. In service to the king of the Bosporus. Now stand clear – I'm coming across!'
Melitta couldn't see a thing, but the pentekonter was so small that she could feel as six men crossed, the smaller boat rolling and shaking as each new weight came aboard.
'What cargo?' the commander asked.
'Wine for Tomis, copper ore for Gorgippia,' Sarpax replied.
'Twenty silver owls,' the other man demanded. 'Tax.'
'Tax on the open sea?' Sarpax sounded outraged.
'Tax for our suppression of piracy,' the other returned. 'Pay, or I'll sink you.'
Playing the injured merchant, Sarpax cursed. 'You're the only pirate I see here!'