'You need a doctor, lad,' Panther said.
That was the last thing Satyrus remembered. When he returned to consciousness, he had no idea of the passage of time and felt panic until a stranger – a woman – came into the room and took his hand.
'Who are you?' he asked.
She ignored him and put a cool hand on his, then turned it over and placed a thumb on his wrist. 'Lie down,' she said, in the same tone that Diokles used on drunken sailors, if quieter.
'How long have I been out?' Satyrus asked.
'How long have you been taking poppy juice for pain?' she asked him.
He tried to think. 'A week's sailing to reach Rhodos – sparingly the two weeks before that, and then perhaps two more weeks before that.'
'You took poppy for five weeks for a broken arm and a fevered wound?' she asked. 'What fool advised that?'
Satyrus felt too weak to argue.
'Your body now craves the poppy as much as it craves healing,' she said. 'Your arm is so badly hurt that it must be rebroken – which will be excruciatingly painful. For which I will have to give you poppy.' She shrugged. 'I recommend that you find a proper physician – preferably one with the same training I have – and let him take the poppy from your body.'
Satyrus sighed. 'I have a great deal to accomplish this winter.'
'You may find things harder if you are dead. Or permanently enslaved to the poppy. But – that is not my business. I have said my piece.' She poured a spoon of clear liquid that smelt of sugar and almonds. 'Drink this.'
'What is it?' he asked, and then he was gone.
Colours – an endless language of colours and shapes, smells, and an explosion, even in his dreams, of meanings so intense that he experienced an endless, fractal emotion, as if he was creating and destroying everything in the universe – gods, ships, monsters – and he swam inside his own body, which was itself as great as all the cosmos – what would Heraklitus say?
And then he sat in a meadow that rolled to every horizon, with a clear blue sky above and flowers like a carpet under him. He rose to his dream feet and looked around.
'You are nearer death than your physician seems to know,' the big man next to him said. Indeed, he was too big to be a man – Satyrus's head came only to the man's pectoral muscles, which were enormous. He had a lion skin on his shoulder and a wreath of laurel in his hair and he smelled like a farmer.
Satyrus bowed his head. 'Lord Herakles!' he said.
'Do I look like a lord?' the man in the lion skin asked. 'Are you mindful of my city?'
Satyrus nodded. 'I am. I intend to ask the tyrant-'
'Ask nothing. As the city will never give you the prize you desire, so you must not give it aught.' He yawned. 'Let us fight a fall. On your guard!'
Satyrus was suddenly naked, facing this giant on the sands of an eternal palaestra. He took his guard position and the moment that both of them acknowledged the contest, Satyrus shot in, powered by his legs, reaching for a lock on his opponent's knee.
He got his right arm behind those mighty thews and pulled, and then his left arm was caught in a stronger grip.
'Well fought,' his opponent said, and he felt all the bones in his arm shatter…
And he awoke to sunshine on his face. His left arm was hurting.
'He's back with us,' a male voice said. 'Get the lady.'
Time passed – a minute, a day? – and again he felt the cool hand on his wrist and then on his forehead. 'Hmm. Less fever. Hard to tell, with so much poppy. How do you feel?'
'Herakles broke my arm,' Satyrus said, before he realized what he was saying.
'Really?' she asked. She turned away, outside his line of vision, and came back with a five-page wax tablet, on which she wrote furiously, her stylus moving like the shuttle on a loom. 'What were you doing?'
'Fighting the pankration,' Satyrus said. He felt silly now.
'Wonderful!' she said. 'I do not need to consult a professional astrologer to say that this bodes well for your healing.' She reached for something. 'Drink this,' she said.
Time went away again.
Neiron came and went, and Panther, and he bathed every night in the colours and the gardens of the gods. Time flowed away from him – sometimes, he could see time itself, the stream that Heraklitus had described, flowing by him, and every drop was itself a sea of human deeds and choices, and yet once it flowed by, none of it could be caught.
Rhodos – a perfect landfall.
He killed the Sauromatae girl in the meadow, over and over again, and the two men on the beach. He watched Teax being raped, and he heard Penelope killed. Over, and over. And he wrestled with a god. He saw Eumeles kill his mother. He watched Philokles die. He imagined the Sauromatae chief, Upazan, killing his father, who he had never seen.
After a time, none of them were events of horror, but simply drops in the stream that ran through the field where Herakles stood in his lion skin.
And then he was awake, and the field and the wrestling and all the life and death flowed away and became dreams.
*
'Two weeks?' he asked. 'Despoina, I don't even know your name!'
'You may call me Aspasia,' she said. 'I am a doctor. Indeed, I am the only Asclepius-trained physician in Rhodos. And you may leave my house whenever you like, but if you want that arm to hold a shield again, you will remain here, taking only light exercise, eating the diet I prescribe, and perhaps reading, for two weeks.' She was tall – as tall as a man, and well formed, but her air of authority and the grey in her hair put her a little above his level, as if she was an officer and he was an oarsman.
On his third day of wakefulness, during the hours that were mostly normal, before he was dosed with poppy, he met her husband, a Rhodian captain and amateur scholar. He was dark-skinned, tall and broad, named Memnon.
'My father had a friend who was Memnon of Rhodos!' Satyrus said.
'It is a common name here, especially among those of us of Libyan and Ethiopian blood,' Memnon said. 'But surely you mean Memnon, the polemarch of Olbia?'
'Is he yet?' Satyrus was lying on a couch, his head propped on pillows. 'He must be quite old.'
'Is fifty old?' Aspasia asked. 'In Aegypt, a peasant would be ten years in his grave – but among Greeks, it is no great age.'
Satyrus was determined to show that he, too, had an education. 'Not too old to serve in the phalanx, at least in Sparta,' he said. 'I stand corrected.' And then he looked at Memnon the captain. 'Do you know Memnon of Olbia?' he asked.
'I do. It is a small world – and really, Rhodos is but a small town. He is my cousin. He has just written to me.'
'Will you write back?' Satyrus asked. 'May I include a note?'
'Of course!' Memnon said.
The relationship established, Memnon was quickly a friend, whereas Aspasia kept her distance. She was always courteous but never friendly. She would spend an hour by Satyrus's side, mixing drugs, and yet communicate only on medical matters. At first he took her distance for disapproval. Only with time did he see it for what it was – the mask of authority. She was a woman who gave orders to men. She was not a friend to them.
When he finally understood, he nodded in appreciation. Lying on a couch for two weeks, awake and mostly in command of his mind, left him with too much time to think, and much of it was spent considering the manner in which he commanded.
That evening, he brought it up with Memnon as they shared a game of shells and ships – a game that, at least symbolically, represented a naval battle. Memnon's board was carved of lapis and marble, so that it looked like squares of the sea, deeper and shallower, and a master had carved his ebony and ivory triremes. Each ship was
