He looked, shot – this time at a robed Sakje warrior just two horse-lengths away – and his breastplate turned another arrow and he sat down suddenly.
'They're too damned good!' he joked to Apollodorus.
The marine captain didn't answer. He was sitting against the bulkhead, leaning forward, and Satyrus realized suddenly that he was unconscious – or dead.
'Marines!' he called, and suddenly the ship turned again, and he was thrown into the gutter at the edge of the deck. He scraped his face on Apollodorus's scale armour and came to rest against Helios, whose eyes were as big as copper coins. Philaeus was roaring for all rowers to back oars, and Satyrus forced himself to his feet and looked aft. Neiron was leaning hard on the steering oars, and forward the stern of the big penteres was passing down their side, just a ship's length away and getting farther – and then the enemy ship seemed to pitch both of its masts over the side as if he'd been bitten by a sea monster.
'What in the name of Hades?' Satyrus rolled to his feet and ran to the command platform. The arrows had stopped coming.
Stesagoras had an arrow through his bicep. 'Poseidon's mercy, your honour. She was a monster and no mistake.' One of his mates broke the arrow and the Alexandrian forced the shaft out of the entry wound and fell in a faint.
Satyrus looked over the side – and understood. The enemy ship was already breaking up, having run full tilt on to a rock in the shallow bay that their captain had taken for a beach. There was no beach – just a row of breakers and a cliff ten times the height of a man.
'There he goes,' Neiron said. 'Poseidon, and all the sea nymphs.' He waved. 'The Thinyas rocks. Almost ran on 'em myself.' He made the peasant sign to avert ill-fortune.
Satyrus looked at the sky and then astern. 'Can we save their people?' he asked.
Neiron grinned. 'Now you're talking.' Then he sobered. 'Mind you, they galled us hard.'
Satyrus shrugged. 'Once they're wet, a rower is a rower,' he said, quoting an old proverb about the brotherhood of the sea. There were some men – Phoenicians, for the most part – who believed in letting drowning seamen die, to propitiate the sea. But Greeks tended to rescue men if it could be done.
'Shall I put about, then?' Neiron asked.
'Marines!' Satyrus yelled. He nodded. 'On me!'
They rescued half a hundred men. Helios, in addition to his other talents, could swim, and he fearlessly leaped into the freezing sea and dragged men out – first a ship's boy and then a small, wiry man.
After Satyrus watched him pull the second man to the side, Neiron got his attention and pointed at the shore. Satyrus saw twenty more men make it to shore and vanish over the cliff at the water's edge.
'Shall we hunt them down?' one of his marines asked.
Satyrus shook his head. 'I wonder how long they'll take to get home?' he mused. They spent the night on an open beach, a hundred stades short of Heraklea. The night gave Satyrus time to daydream about his lady love, whom he hadn't seen in almost a year. Amastris of Heraklea was beautiful – as well as being intelligent, rich and the only niece of the Euxine's second most powerful man, Dionysius of Heraklea.
Satyrus sat alone on a lion skin – a present from Gabines when they sailed, straight from old Ptolemy, or so he said. He had a big black mug of soup and he was wrapped in his two warmest cloaks, and still the wind cut at him.
Neiron clambered up the rocks to him. 'I'm too old to go looking for a sprite like you,' he said.
'That was a first-rate ship,' Satyrus said. He took a swig of scalding soup. Down on the beach, the survivors of the Winged Dolphin – for so he proved to be named – huddled around a fire. 'If all of Eumeles' ships are that good, we're in for a fight.'
'Captain was from Samos. He got away. The rest was good sailors. All pirates.' Neiron shrugged. 'You need to eat. And, if I may say so, you need to walk around the men.'
Satyrus nodded. He got to his feet and drank more soup. 'Tomorrow I roll the dice. I'm scared.'
Neiron said nothing.
'Stesagoras and Philaeus are good men,' Satyrus said. 'So are you, Neiron.' He held out his hand.
Neiron seemed surprised. But he clasped hands. 'Why – thank you, Navarch.'
'Call me Satyrus,' he said.
Neiron smiled. 'Well – never thought I'd see the day.' He laughed. More soberly, he said, 'We'll need more marines, a new marine officer and a peck of archers. Those Sakje raped us.'
'They hurt us off Olbia, too.' Satyrus shook his head and finished his soup. 'My people,' he said bitterly. 'Apollodorus deserves a proper burial.'
'Aye.' Neiron looked away. He and the marine had never exactly been friends. 'At Heraklea?'
'Have to be.' Satyrus nodded. 'T hanks. I feel better.'
'Talking often has that effect, sir – Satyrus,' the helmsman said. The harbourmaster at Heraklea stepped aboard and his eyes widened. 'Satyrus of Tanais?' he asked.
Satyrus remembered him. It had only been four years – he remembered the man from the heady days of intrigue and assassination at the court of Heraklea. The months just after his mother had been murdered.
'Bias?' he said, and offered his hand.
'Lord!' Bias responded. In Heraklea, they had had tyrants and aristocrats for so long that Greek men might bend the knee like barbarians, to a man of better blood.
'Is Nestor still the tyrant's right hand?' Satyrus asked.
'Isn't he my son-in-law?' Bias asked, and laughed. 'Pretty bold, just sailing in here, lord. The tyrant is no friend of yours these days. There's a rumour in the agora that you – um-hmm – have spent too much time with his niece. And the tyrant of Pantecapaeum wants you dead. We have peace with them.'
Satyrus nodded. 'I need to see Nestor,' he said. 'And then I will make it right. And Bias – I love Amastris. I would never trifle with her.' He felt a little odd as the lie rolled out of his mouth. But it had been her – or so he told himself. And there had never been any trifling about it.
Bias didn't even bother to look at the bill of lading. 'If you want to see Nestor,' he said, 'come ashore in my boat.'
Satyrus considered the possibility that he would be taken, alone, and killed to satisfy the obligations of statecraft. Then he shrugged. 'Neiron, take command,' he said. 'If I don't return by nightfall, take the ship out of the harbour. You know what to do then.'
Neiron nodded.
As they rowed ashore, Bias leaned forward. 'What is your helmsman to do if you don't return, lord?' he asked.
Satyrus watched the rowers. He flashed the older man a smile. 'Fetch my fleet,' he said. 'And burn the town to ash.'
Bias sat down on his thwart.
'Just so that we understand each other, Bias. I love Amastris – not Heraklea.' Satyrus shrugged. 'I mean no ill. But – if I am taken, there will be a consequence.'
'Where is your fleet?' Bias asked. He tried to sound offhand.
Satyrus waved a hand vaguely. 'Close enough,' he said.
They landed by the customs wharf and Satyrus was left alone. There was some discussion in whispers around him, and he began to regret the boldness of his arrival. He wished he was surrounded by marines.
After an hour, a strange man, obviously a slave and terrified, came and ushered him into a very comfortable house, largely empty of furnishings, near the wharves. Satyrus was sufficiently scared that it took him some minutes to realize that it was Kinon's house. Kinon had been Leon's factor in Heraklea, and had died in a night of blood and terror, when Eumeles' paid assassins came for the twins. Satyrus had to fight the temptation to look for bloodstains on the flagstones.
He waited an hour, by the old water clock in the garden. The rose bushes were dead. Satyrus got wine from the terrified slave and loosed the sword in his scabbard, increasingly convinced that he'd made a mistake. Better to have come with the fleet at his tail and no negotiations.
But he'd promised himself – and his aunt – to try other ways. And Amastris – how could he use force against her city?
More time passed. The old slave brought him more wine – excellent wine, for all that the house was
