More arrows fell. Not many — a dozen at a time.
The taxeis put out their torches.
From the stricken entrenchments, the trumpets sounded again and again, urging the Antigonids on.
Demetrios sent his cavalry out through the main gate, two hundred hippeis of his own guard, hastily mounted in the dark. They rode around for too long looking for the taxeis, found it, and arrows began to fall among them. Horses screamed in the dark.
The trumpets from the doomed entrenchment pleaded for rescue.
The taxeis marched out across the open ground the long way, safe behind their own entrenchments, a sensible decision by their commander based on the erroneous information available to him. Erroneous, in that he assumed the entrenchment was still held by his side.
‘I get better every time I blow the damned thing,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘No wonder I stuck with the lyre.’
‘They’re biting, though,’ Satyrus said. ‘It’s time to go.’
Satyrus ran along the earthen wall, giving orders, and the marines scrambled down the outward face and dashed for their own gate. Anaxagoras sounded the trumpet once again, and jumped.
Melitta smiled. Smells like death, she thought. She wished Anaxagoras was here so that she could show him how the Assagetae really fought.
The taxeis crashing through the dark to the rescue of their doomed comrades was just a goat tethered for the lion. Bait. They passed along the broad road that Demetrios’ siege engineers had built — such fastidious men. So predictable. Melitta had watched it being built — she had the map of the siege as clear in her head as her internal map of the woods, gullies and plains around Tanais.
The enemy cavalry would travel west and south of the road, riding across the open ground, sweeping to cover the flanks of the taxeis.
She waited for the marching infantry to pass her. It is never so dark that a Sakje warrior cannot count his foes. She watched them go and counted to a hundred, slowly, in Greek.
Then she rose to her feet, put an arrow to her bow and gave the shrill call of the owl.
The owl call carried across the west wall, and Satyrus nudged Anaxagoras. ‘Here she goes,’ he said.
‘Poseidon protect her, and Apollo,’ Anaxagoras said.
‘Artemis is her god,’ Satyrus said.
The Sakje rose from the grass and ran at the cavalry.
They made almost no sound, but the horses heard them. Most were ambling along, deeply unhappy at crossing such rough ground at night, heads down, interested in the tufts of untouched grass. But now one head came up, and then another. A stallion stopped and pricked his ears, and gave a great cry.
Even the riders could hear the sound of running feet.
Melitta was almost close enough to touch the rider she was after — she ran up behind him, her dead run much faster than his horse’s rapid walk. When she shot him, her feet were still flying at a dead run. The man gulped, pawed the air and fell, and Melitta was in his place, her heels on the horse’s flanks, forcing the animal to a gallop, riding far to the flank — the south-west flank.
As soon as her seat was secure, she began killing men. She would ride alongside and loose her arrow from an arm’s length away.
The hippeis died so fast that their commander fell to the ground still unsure as to whether he was under attack. Scopasis cut his throat and took his gold-hilted sword and his scalp in three efficient motions.
Thyrsis whooped and turned his mount in a tight circle. ‘Ay-yee!’ he screeched, and the rest of the warriors took up the keening cry, and the night was full of it.
‘They got the horses,’ Satyrus said.
‘Now what?’ Miriam asked.
Anaxagoras was more worried than Satyrus had ever seen him.
Satyrus wanted to tell the man how much his worry was misplaced. But he smiled instead. ‘Now a lot of people die,’ he said.
The truth was that the taxeis of Macedonians and Greeks was well led and had excellent discipline. Their officers never lost their nerve.
But not one of them ever forgot the terror of that hour at bay, waiting for the horse archers to come out of the dark. More than fifty of them died, despite their armour, the darkness and close-arrayed shields. The war cries seemed to last for ever, and when a man was hit, he fell among them and writhed and screamed, and they couldn’t move aside to let him die alone. And from time to time one of the barbarians would ride in close and throw a severed head at them, bouncing hollowly off shields, or falling with a hard, damp thump against a helmet.
They stood like professionals, and their officers praised them every time the hoof beats died away. And when the sun rose, they found they had lost slightly fewer than a hundred men.
Melitta cantered easily over the low walls, down the front face between the pilings where the marines had cleared the stakes and pits, and along the open ground to the west gate. She waited for Scopasis and Thyrsis, who whooped and raised trophies in salute, and the marines cheered her.
She saw Anaxagoras on the wall above her, and she waved her bow. He hurried down the internal steps and hauled her off the horse by virtue of height and strength. She laughed.
‘What a beautiful horse,’ he said, after he’d kissed her.
She laughed. He was big, and she like big men, and his beard was pleasant. ‘She’s an ugly plug,’ Melitta said. She wrapped her legs around his waist and kissed him, and her warriors whooped. Even Thyrsis, who had had hopes. Let him hope. She’d started this for her brother, but now she was finding the whole prospect remarkably attractive.
So was he; she could tell.
‘Horse needs a name,’ Anaxagoras said, when she’d removed her mouth from his. He put her down. He slapped the mare on the rump. ‘I’m going to call this one “Sausage”.’
Satyrus laughed. ‘Well done, sister.’
‘Sausage?’ she asked.
‘To go with “Horse meat”, “Steak” and “Meat Pie”.’ Satyrus jumped down off the inner wall. ‘We’ve been naming them as your folks brought them home.’
Inside the gate, she could see half the population of Rhodes. The horses were already dead — all but a dozen, which were under the close guard of the marines.
‘Scopasis insisted we keep the best,’ Satyrus said.
The roar of applause that greeted her appearance in the gate rose like an offering to the gods. She’d never been cheered by so many people. He face lit up, and one of her rare, full-face grins buried her scars.
31
DAY TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY AND FOLLOWING
The horse meat lasted two days. It raised morale, and filled bellies. It probably saved lives.
And then it was gone, and the winter wind blew from the north in cold gusts that mocked their hopes, every dawn, for a relief fleet.
They ate the good cuts, and then they ate the rest: entrails, ligaments, hairless hides boiled into broth. The Sakje were used to hard winters — they knew how to get food out of the hooves.
The ten horses saved against an emergency were eaten, one by one. Then they were gone.
Satyrus cut the grain ration to one-quarter of what it had been at the start.
No one had the energy to jeer, or to spit at him.
A crane appeared in the enemy camp — four ships’ masts lashed together as the base, and two more as uprights. It towered over their camp.
Then they built another.
And then another.
They were on the two hundred and eighty-fifth day of the siege. Satyrus heard about the cranes, drank a cup of warm water and walked out into the agora with his heaviest cloak on his shoulders. He was still cold.
‘What do you think it means?’ he asked Jubal.