Jubal frowned. It was rare for the Nubian to frown. He watched as the fourth crane was erected, chewing on a piece of rawhide, on and on. Long after Satyrus expected an answer and then gave up on getting one, the black engineer shook his head and turned away.
‘It means we fucked,’ he said quietly, and spat.
The next morning dawned crisp and cold and windless. No sails marked the far horizon.
In Demetrios’ camp, the four cranes were slowly linked with cross beams, so high in the air that men took a quarter of a watch to climb the ladders up to the cranes’ tops.
Satyrus didn’t let himself watch too long. It was demoralising. Instead, with Lysander at his heels, and Charmides, who had taken over as his hypaspist, he walked down to the olive grove, entered the steps under the sanctuary of Demeter and inspected the pithoi of grain there — the city’s remaining stock.
A pair of very lean cats sat by the guard’s brazier.
‘Out of rats?’ Satyrus asked, but the joke fell flat. The grain guards — his own marines — barely raised their heads. A quarter-ration of grain was enough to sustain life. Just. And no more.
He walked along the ranks of the pithoi, and he opened them, and he and Lysander inspected them with the priestess, Hirene, and her assistant Lysistrada. Satyrus smiled to himself, but the smile was grim.
Lysander marked his tablets carefully, and they bowed to the priestesses and went back above ground. Satyrus paused to pat the cats. And noted, with a cold surprise, that his hand was thin. Skeletal, in fact.
‘Puss, puss,’ he said. ‘Didn’t anyone give you some horse meat?’
Hepius, a marine phylarch from Athens, squinted out of the dark. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Let’s fatten ’em up a bit before we eat ’em.’
Hirene let out a squawk of outrage.
Satyrus managed a smile. ‘Despoina, your cats are safe as long as the town stands.’
But to Charmides, he said, ‘All officers. Right now.’
‘We have two weeks’ food at quarter-rations,’ Satyrus said.
They just looked at him. All the surviving members of the boule; all the officers of his long-lost Arete. His sister’s people, and the captains of the ephebes. The surviving Cretans. They didn’t raise their voices, shout, or even murmur.
They just watched him with flat eyes, waiting.
Aspasia was as thin as a mainmast stripped of the yard. And Miriam — Miriam’s eyes filled her face, and her long legs were a mockery. Her hip bones showed through her chiton.
Nor was Charmides much better. He was thin, and Nike’s death had left him bitter.
Abraham looked like a living skull. But he was the one to speak. ‘I will go to Demetrios,’ he said. ‘Someone must try.’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘No. No, if anyone goes, it will be me. After all, he wanted this to be personal. Between us.’
‘What do we do?’ Apollodorus asked. ‘Sit and wait?’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘I wanted you to know. I believe in Diokles. He will come back. I think we should eat our sandals and hold on.’
Memnon sighed. He looked at his wife. ‘I thought we’d won. Ten times, I thought we’d won. But,’ he looked around, ‘we’ve lost, haven’t we?’
Satyrus nodded in agreement, but Miriam stepped forward.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, we have not lost. By God above, men are fools. We have struggled, and we have not surrendered.’ She looked around. ‘Three years ago, I sat at my loom in Alexandria and wished that, someday, I could have a real life where I could breathe free air and be a person, a human being, free of the Tyrant who ran my life. We have held — for almost a year. Spring is coming. We had a year.’ She stammered off at the end, and then gave a self-conscious laugh and was silent. But when no one mocked her, she said, ‘If I die tomorrow, I will not bow my head. My God will understand. We Jews are stiff-necked people. Let us talk no more of surrender.’
She was embarrassed at her own words, but Memnon clasped her hand, and Damophilus and Apollodorus clapped her on the back.
Melitta cleared her throat. ‘For the Sakje, there will be no surrender. And brother — I came to rescue you, not to die here.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘Well, then. Thanks. All of you. Let’s quarter the ruins and search the cellars — especially the first houses to take hits — and see if we can dig up a few mythemnoi of grain.’
Charmides managed a real laugh. ‘It’s always about the grain,’ he said.
Dawn, and chanting from the enemy camp.
The stick figures of Rhodian citizens lined the sea wall and the south wall closest to the enemy camp.
Ropes — great hawsers, thick enough to be visible even at that distance — were rigged to the massive crane structure. And by early morning, they were taught.
The monster that rose over the enemy camp was so tall that it reached above the towers, and in its last seconds as it was righted, it rocked twice — leaning so far that one of the crane arms was dashed to pieces, and a dozen men fell to their deaths. But righted it was.
The tower was the height of twenty men. The wheels along its base were twice the height of a man. It was as wide as two houses and as deep again, tapering slightly from bottom to top like an immense pyramid, and through the open sides the Rhodians could see six floors.
No sooner was it steady on its wheels than slaves and soldiers raised a great cry and began to roll it forward.
It rolled well. The wheels worked.
It was the largest moving thing made by the hand of man that Satyrus had ever seen.
Demetrios watched his toy with the joy of the creator. His hands had shaped both wood and iron. He had marked the drawings, and his hands had pulled the hawsers to raise the recumbent tower from its building site. Its sheer size awed him, and he had helped design it. Ctesibius, the chief designer, couldn’t stop looking at it.
‘Now I am a god,’ Demetrios said.
Ctesibius agreed. ‘A pyramid on wheels,’ he said, his voice low. ‘Full of engines. Fifty cubits on a side.’ The engineer giggled.
‘What shall we call it?’ Plistias asked.
‘Helepolis,’ Demetrios intoned like a priest. ‘The Destroyer of Cities.’
The giant thing which towered over their tallest wall and made a mockery of their defences might have been the last straw.
But the men and women of Rhodes had endured ten months of war, and their sense of awe was dulled. Had the great machine been brought against them in the first month -
But no: it was the tenth month. For three days they watched as the smiths carried iron plates to the waiting leviathan. On the fourth day, artisans and slaves began bolting the iron to the frame — all nine storeys of it. More building was still going on at the top of the frame, and the whole edifice had been rolled clear of the abatises that surrounded the enemy camp onto a swathe two stades wide that six thousand slaves, the survivors of the fever, began to clear like a pathway for the gods from the machine right up to the south wall. They filled the deep places and levelled the smallest heights, long lines of them working all together so that they crept across the plain, too slow to watch, too fast for hope.
A whole taxeis stood guard all night in front of the machine, with a hundred Cretan archers.
Satyrus watched them with Jubal from his own, much lower tower. Watched them for most of a day.
And watched the empty sea.
One by one, Satyrus talked to his friends. He talked, alone, to Miriam. To Abraham. To Anaxagoras and Melitta, to Charmides and Lysander and Apollodorus, to Korus and Memnon, to Damophilus and Socrates.
None of them was interested in taking the two surviving ships. None of them was interested in surrender.
So at noon that day, the three hundred and third day of the siege, the one hundred and twenty-fifth day of the archonship of Pherecles of Athens, the one hundred and nineteenth Olympiad, Satyrus ordered his marines into the vaults of Demeter with the permission of the priestesses and removed the last eighteen pithoi. And he gathered the entire population in the agora and distributed the grain. All the grain.