Early in Elaphebolion, Demetrios sailed from Loryma. I was down on the South Mole, in helmet and leather jack, commanding Talos. What I saw was enough to terrify a demigod.
The entire sea between Rhodes and the mainland seemed filled with purple-hulled ships. In the van came a long rank of Demetrios' great battle transports, sixers and seveners and some of even higher rates. In the center rowed a ship that was larger than any, flying an admiral's purple sails: Demetrios' new elevener. It had a feature unheard of in those days: two full-sized masts, each bearing a sail. On the sterns of hundreds of ships gleamed the golden eagles of the empire, while the same device was painted or embroidered upon their sails.
Behind the battle transports came hundreds of other ships. There were great blocks of fivers and smaller galleys, towing transports for men and horses. Behind these came still other hundreds of vessels: low, lean, thirty- and forty-oared craft with blue-gray hulls—Demetrios' piratical allies. There must have been at least a thousand ships belonging to pirates and slavers. Everybody knew that Rhodes had not been plundered for years, and news of Demetrios' attack had brought out all the pirates of Crete and the Anatolian coasts, like vultures to a dying beef.
News of the gathering of the pirates firmed our spirits as nothing else could have done. We knew that, even if Demetrios was inclined to leniency if the city fell, he could never protect us from his evil allies, who hated Rhodes for her long campaigns against them. The streets would run with blood, heads would be piled in the squares, and those who lived would do so as slaves in Carthage or Italy or other distant lands.
Behind us, on shore, the women wept as in the time of Nannakos, and the old men prayed. The murmur of it came across the water.
Closer and closer crept the great fleet. As the ships of the first rank neared, the following ranks became visible. Never had so vast a fleet, in all of history, been gathered under one man.
Bias, still looking the artisan despite his crested helmet, said: "It looks like he's going to stand straight into the harbor, sails up and all, to see if we'll let him in without a fight. Cock and load your pieces, but don't nobody shoot till I give the word."
On came the swarm, the elevener pulling to the front. Capacious though our two harbors were, they could never have held all the ships arrayed against us. I said:
"Give the range, Berosos."
"Twenty-two plethra," he said.
We waited in taut silence.
"Twenty plethra."
"Eighteen plethra."
"Cockers, cock your piece," I said. "Sixteenth notch. Train to the left. A little more; good. Load your piece."
All up and down the mole, torsion skeins creaked and pawls clicked over their racks.
"Sixteen plethra," said Berosos.
A little white wave curled over the ram of the elevener as it wallowed towards us through the deep blue sea. Gulls circled and mewed. The sun glittered on the helmets of the marines who crowded Demetrios' decks. Sailors scurried to furl the sails of the leading ships. Up in folds went the painted golden eagles.
"Fifteen plethra," said Berosos.
"Shoot at will!" cried Bias, and the cry was taken up by the other battery commanders.
"Shoot!" I said.
Onas struck his knob. With a rattling crash the catapults up and down the mole let fly. The darts arose in long arcs with a simultaneous shriek.
"Pull up your recoiler," I said. "Cock your piece; fourteenth notch. Load your piece. Hurry, curse you! Train to the right; that big fellow. Shoot! Pull up your recoiler—"
An answering chorus of thumps and crashes came from the leading ships, and darts streaked towards us. I soon found the difference between shooting afloat and ashore. While the defenders scored many hits, the tossing of the ships caused nearly all the enemy's missiles to fly wild.
The air was full of missiles, coming and going.. Three-span darts whistled about us like rain. We shot and shot, flinching a little as a dart came close, but always coming back to shoot again. After one bad shot I said:
"Your ranging is off, Berosos. You're giving them too short."
"Not I!" he said. "Our skeins are weakening, instead."
Whichever was true, I began adding a notch or two to the pullback of the recoiler, and soon we were hitting again. Closer came the great ships, with darts sticking from their woodwork like spines from a hedgehog. Although their decks were too high for us to see our hits on Demetrios' men, we knew we had scored heavily.
The scorpion men cocked their weapons, raised them, and set their butt braces against their breasts. Archers nocked their shafts; slingers fitted bullets into their pouches. The yells of the men on the ships and the shore became one long howl, as of a myriad of wolves. Several of our men lay in their blood on the mole, and none could spare the time to help them. Bolts, bullets, and arrows whizzed off to rain upon the ships, where the gilded soldiery now crouched behind their shields. Even the heavy old flexion catapults built by Isidores, moved by tremendous exertions to the moles, discharged their one-talent balls with booming crashes.
Onas muttered: "At least there will be no doubt in the king's mind of his welcome."
The elevener swung off to our right, southward towards Lindos. Like a platoon of phalangites doing a column-left, the vast mass of ships followed, most of them turning while out of range.
"Cease shooting!" commanded Bias.
While our wounded and slain were carried off, the fleet crept south with thousands of oars rising and falling until it had passed the end of the city wall. Here is a kind of third harbor—a natural one, formed by a sandspit, the Southeast Peninsula, that runs out towards the Chatar Rocks. This South Harbor, as it is called, has not been developed, because the other two have sufficed for commerce and naval craft; it was used by fishermen only.
Now, Demetrios could not use the near side of the South Harbor, because it could be reached by our engines. So the fleet entered the harbor on the far side and lined up along the Southeast Peninsula. Other ships, for which room was wanting in South Harbor, passed around the rocks and came to rest on the indented coast beyond.
As the sun went down behind the akropolis, throwing the temple of Helios-Apollon into black relief, the king's ships, with much shouting, splashing, and trumpet braying, found their berths. The smaller ones were drawn up on the strand while the larger rode at anchor.
We stood to our arms until after sunset. When the stars had come out, a shooting star flashed across the sky. Berosos said:
"Right through the Virgin! Blood and doom and disaster dire shall there be—"
"Hold your tongue!" I said. "We have a short way with fortunetellers who predict disaster in wartime."
Bias bustled up. "Chares! Did you have trouble with falling range?"
"Yes, a little."
"Then take your piece back to the shed. We'll adjust the skeins tonight."
Groaning with weariness, we levered Talos up on its rollers and hauled it along the mole. Artemis and the ever-unlucky Eros came with us, for they, too, had had troubles.
In the armory Bias struck the skeins of Talos with a mallet, thrust an awl between them and moved it this way and that, and finally said:
"I don't think we'll unwind and restring her. We'll shim up those shackles by driving wedges under the shackle rings."
After commanding one of the mechanics to deal with this, he passed on to the other engines.
Whereas Eros had the same trouble as Talos, the trigger mechanism of Artemis had been giving difficulty. While Bias-and his mechanics worked on the latter fault, the mechanics set stepladders against Talos and Eros, climbed up, and began adding tension to our skeins by wedging up the shackles. Now and then they paused to hammer the skeins and listen to their tones, to make sure that the tension was equal on both sides. On Talos all went well, but from Eros came a loud crack and a groan of tortured carpentry.