he took Manes' head from Abraham and held it by the perfumed hair as he raised his eyes and looked around the circle.
'Tomorrow, everyone will drill at sea. Manes' ships are mine. See to it that their crews are dispersed among my squadron. All of his officers who care to swear faith to me may do so. The others may walk home.' He had no trouble keeping his voice steady, although he was talking too fast. He had done it. In his head, he thought, I wonder if I'll ever be afraid again?
The circle was silent.
Satyrus bowed to Demostrate. 'I apologize for my poor temper. Tomorrow, as we row, your men will drill.'
Demostrate smiled. 'Very well.'
Behind Satyrus, he heard the sound of dozens of swords and knives slipping back into sheaths.
'Listen!' he shouted. He looked around. The wind – the precious wind that blew straight for his target, that he was about to misuse – blew hard enough to make torches snap and hiss. He raised his voice. 'Listen! Eumeles has more ships, bigger ships, and he's had a winter to drill them. We have better marines and better captains – better men.'
That got a grumble of appreciation.
'Better men work harder. So we'll row for a few days to harden our muscles, and every officer can take his turn rowing. We'll practise the manoeuvres – we'll make the Bull, we'll form two lines, we'll practise diekplous until we can do it asleep. There won't be a second chance at this!' He wanted to yell at them, tell them what children they were, how they'd squandered their time at Heraklea instead of practising, listening to a fool like Manes when they could have a kingdom, but there was no point. None at all. 'Work now, and you'll find winning the battle easy. Easy means fewer dead. Or – squabble among yourselves, and die.'
He caught the eye of Manes' senior captain, standing behind Ganymede, who was weeping. The man flinched.
'Understand?' Satyrus asked. He looked around. He'd shocked them silent, and the silence had quite another quality. Satyrus dropped Manes' head in Ganymede's lap and dusted his hands together, the universal sign of a craftsman satisfied with his work. 'Excellent. We will row away at dawn. Watch for the shield.'
He turned and walked up the beach. Four days of rowing along the coast and they had begun to resemble a fleet. He rowed all day, regardless of the wind, and the men were too tired to quarrel in the evening. He practised the formations even as they travelled, so that they often made less than thirty stades an hour, sometimes as little as six or seven. They emptied his store ships, one after another, all the way up the coast.
The day of his appointed meeting off Pantecapaeum came and went. There was nothing he could do about it. Until his fleet was ready to fight, there was no point in trying – none at all. At first he felt like blaming his officers for not telling him how bad they all were – but then it came to him that it was his failure. He was in command. They trusted him. The pirates expected to win by numbers and courage and luck. The Rhodians, Satyrus guessed, had never expected to win at all. They were here to see that the pirates didn't survive.
He rowed through a day of south wind and rain, and another that was cold enough to count as winter. Five days saw them off Phasis, where the fleet formed the Bull to his satisfaction in a time that was not too humiliating. The Bull was his favourite formation, because it allowed his elite vessels to form on the flanks where they could actually manoeuvre, while his heavier units and all the pirates formed the loins in the centre, two deep, where their heavier crews and boarding tactics stood the best chance of success.
They sailed north for an hour in the battle formation. That did not go so well.
Satyrus sighed, and they landed for the night. Helios got men together from every ship and went over the signals again. Panther stood and declaimed about diekplous to a circle of pirate captains and Diokles gave prizes to rowers nominated by their captains – prizes of a gold daric each, twenty days' pay.
Satyrus roamed among the fires, eating garlic sausage and listening to the men. Most were quite happy. He shook his head. Into the darkness, to Herakles, or perhaps to the shade of his father, he said, 'I have so much to learn.'
The night was silent. Another day and they made Dioskurias, where he bought every head of cattle in the market and emptied the grain warehouses to feed his fleet – and laughed to hear that his sister was operating on the Hypanis River with an army. And Eumeles was at sea with his fleet, lying off Olbia.
An Olbian merchant told him that Eumeles had heard that the army of Olbia had marched, and had put all his troops on shipboard to seize the rival city while she was denuded of troops.
'Our Eumenes has marched on Pantecapaeum,' the man said. 'Eumeles is in for a rude awakening.'
'Two days,' Satyrus said. His heart was nearly bursting. His sister was still holding out, and his delays had not ruined them, and Eumeles was off Olbia. 'Two days, and we'll have him.'
But merchants are not always right. The next morning, Satyrus had been less than an hour at sea when his lookouts spotted the lead ships. After he'd heard twenty counted, Satyrus felt his fingers turn cold and his stomach began to flip.
Eumeles wasn't at Olbia. Eumeles and his fleet were right there, waiting at Gorgippia.
20
Melitta had saddle sores because her legs were always wet. Her body ached all day and she slept badly at night, and she wondered if she was really fit to lead the Sakje. None of her riders ever complained.
They rode south and west, across the rising ridges that would eventu ally be the Caucasus. In the valleys, they visited the farms, riding up in a swirl of horses and angry cattle. Closer in to Tanais, they were seldom the first Sakje party – often they found the farmstead deserted, or found the families on the road, their belongings on their backs.
But soon enough they were the first hint that the farmers had that their world was on fire. Melitta got to know the whole routine, the whole exhausting duty that brought her as close to cynicism as anything she'd encountered. The initial hostility, the slavish courtesy, the hidden anger, the acceptance, the obedience and exaggerated reverence for her person were all stages she saw enacted, day after day, as her party cleared the southern valleys ahead of Upazan's expected invasion.
By the time her saddle sores had festered into angry red weals with disgusting yellow-pus centres, she'd cleared the high ground as far east as her mother's writ had ever run in the south, and she was heading down the Hypanis from the east – a neat reversal of her winter trek the other way. Gaweint, her best outrider, brought her daily news from Ataelus, who was operating one valley farther north.
Melitta had begun to worry that she was costing her farmers a season of sowing and reaping for nothing. What if Upazan didn't come? What a fool she would look! And how her farmers would loathe her.
Being queen of the Assagatje had never been so unappealing. The more so as the old people called her 'Srayanka' to her face, never 'Melitta' or even 'Lady'. Sometimes she could overlook it – an old woman in a highland village near the headwaters of the Hypanis was nearly blind, and she touched Melitta's face and called her fellowpeasants to come and see the Lady Srayanka, back from the dead. But others were not so innocent. They simply wished her to be her mother. The power of their wishes was enough to make her conform, but inside she squirmed.
As she rode west, downstream on the Hypanis, her party began to collect other parties – a war band of Grass Cats, another of Standing Horses, each of whom had completed their sweep south.
The day after they met up with Buirtevaert, a young sub-chief of the Standing Horses who greeted her by her own name and raised her spirits, she found herself at the head of a long column of Sakje as she rode around the last bend in the road to Gardan's farm.
Outriders had warned Gardan, and he was mounted in his own farmyard with his family all on shaggy ponies behind him. He had a heavy wagon pulled by his oxen, and she could see his small forge and his anvil roped to the back of the wagon, right on the back axle. She rode up and he saluted like a Sakje.
'Lady – we are ready to ride.' He bowed and looked at her from under his brows, which were just as bushy as she had remembered. 'So you came back.'
She grinned. There was something about Gardan that was hard not to like. 'I did,' she said.
