"He cannot go tonight," said my father. "He's wounded and feverish."
"I can too go," I said, beginning to rise.
My parents flew at me with protests. As we struggled, I to rise and they to force me back upon the bed, everything began to whirl, and I swooned away.
"How do you feel, my darling?" asked my mother. "As weak as a new puppy," I said. "How long was I out of my mind?"
'Two days. You raved about wishing to fight the Demetrios singlehanded, and many times you tried to leave your bed."
"How goes the battle?"
"Your father will tell you when he comes in. Now drink some broth, like a good boy."
Boom! A distant concussion sounded, much louder than anything I had heard from the battle yet.
"Zeus! What's that, Mother?" I asked.
"Some horrid new engine. Now, take another spoonful—"
When he came, my father said: "The day before yesterday Demetrios attacked again with his sea towers. This time the towers were covered with green hides, so that our flaming darts had no effect. But Superintendent Rhesos had prepared some jugs of incendiary mixture—naphtha laced with sulphur—and our stone throwers hurled these at the towers. When the towers had been well splashed, a single incendiary dart set a fine blaze on one, and both were pulled out again."
Boom! "What is that thing, Father?"
"I'm coming to that. Yesterday Demetrios' men ran two big merchantmen up to the South Mole and unloaded great masses of timber and fittings, which they began to assemble despite a harassing bombardment from our wall. This morning the sun disclosed two new catapults larger than any I ever heard of. They cast three-talent balls, more than a foot in diameter. With these and his other stone throwers, Demetrios seeks to batter down our harbor wall while with long-range dart throwers he hampers Makar's efforts to strengthen it. The gods only know what the outcome will be."
BOOK V — PYTHON
When I rejoined my crew, limping on a stick, the first thing I saw in the dim light before dawn was their crop of beards. (I let mine grow for a while, too, but alas! it was no success, being sparse and straggly, with bare patches. Since then I have kept my face well shaven, in accordance with modern fashions.)
The Lightning was mounted atop the harbor wall, midway between the arsenal and the base of the East Mole. Pronax, the loader, was missing; a man named Mys had taken his place. Berosos had a bandage around his neck where an arrow had grazed him.
Of the battery as a whole, the ill-fated Eros was gone for good. It had been smashed by a ball in the waterfront fighting, the day after Demetrios had seized the South Mole.
As for the wall itself, the pounding from Demetrios' stone throwers had opened cracks in the towers and curtain walls into which a man could thrust his hand. Other balls had knocked gaps in the parapet, so that it gaped like a row of broken teeth.
Even before dawn the ugly little brown figure of Makar dashed about, ordering his men to the repair and reinforcement of the wall. But he seemed to be losing ground.
Out on the South Mole stood Demetrios' two new giant stone throwers. The frames of these catapults towered twenty-five feet into the air, and their throwing arms alone were over ten feet long. There was a familiarity about them that nagged me until I realized that they were the full-sized versions of the model that I had seen the engineer Apollonios demonstrate.
Smaller catapults, including those captured from us, stood on the penthouses. Two of Demetrios' sea engines lay moored to the mole, one bearing three stone throwers on its platform and the other four dart throwers.
The waterfront was littered with broken stone and with cracked and broken catapult balls. The unbroken three-talent balls from the heavy engines had not been collected, because we had nothing to shoot them with.
My comrades told me of our unsuccessful attack on Demetrios' fleet with fireboats the night after the capture of the mole; of infantry attacks with ladders against the wall; of how Pronax was slain by a dart.
As the sun, glowing like molten bronze in a crucible, rose behind them, little black figures moved about the mole. Nearby, Bias passed the command:
"Shoot at will!"
"We are laid for the right-hand one of the big fellows," said Onas.
"Cock your piece," I said.
Apollonios' great engines took a long time to cock. When the recoiler of the right-hand one was at last pulled back, the loaders rolled one of the balls up on a kind of stretcher or litter: a long wooden frame with a handle at each corner. Then four men raised the frame shoulder high and decanted the ball into its place in the trough.
Another wait, and the stone thrower went off with a tremendous crash. The three-talent ball sped high into the air, whispered down upon us so that we all flinched, and struck the wall with a thunderous boom. The impact shook the entire wall; I could feel the structure rock beneath my feet. The ball, rebounding, rolled back across the waterfront almost to the water's edge and stopped, spinning slowly for a few turns before it lay still.
Then the other engine discharged. Boom!
We cranked and shot, shading our eyes against the rising sun and making tiny adjustments to try to drop our darts amid the laboring crews of the heavy stone throwers. Demetrios' other catapults on the mole and on the moored sea engines opened up also.
As the sun, now a golden disk, sprang clear of the blue horizon, a mass of hostile ships appeared at the entrance to the Great Harbor, with masts lowered and oars rising and falling. Two triremes rowed into the harbor, as far apart as the width of the entrance allowed. Each held the end of a boom of floating logs, chained together and studded with iron spikes. The triremes pushed this boom out of sight around the arsenal to face the Rhodian fleet, which lay, fully manned, prepared to sally forth.
Following the boom, several light missile ships took stations in the harbor and added their barrage of three-span darts to those whistling up from the mole.
Towards noon the Lightning fell still. Bias called up from the ground outside the walclass="underline"
"O Chares! Why don't you shoot?"
"We're down to our last six darts, sir. I am saving those for an assault. When can we get some more?"
"Plague! The god-detested smiths promised a hundred for the battery by noon, but I doubt if they'll get them done. I've sent Phaon to pick some from the salvage pile. Meanwhile, eat."
While we ate, we grumbled over the conditions imposed by the siege. Mys, our new loader, said: "All this talk of keeping prices down is a lot of ordure. Do you know what happened to me last night?"
"What?" I said.
"I went into Evios' tavern for a drop, and the abandoned rascal had the impudence to say he was out of Rhodian, though he had some rare Chian and Lesbian at twice the fixed price! I drank a cup, but it was the same old local wine. This is Evios' way of getting around price control."
"The joy girls have put up their prices, too," said one of the cockers. "They claim the Assembly's decrees don't apply to them."
"If they go much higher," said another, "I may have to become a boy-lover after all."
"And a water-drinker as well," said Mys.
Said another: "But that's unhealthy!"
"Which is?"