‘Tomorrow is Anthesteria in Athens and Tanais,’ he said. ‘When men rope up the temples and let the spirits of the dead roam free. When Dionysus walks the earth. Feast. Eat it all.’
Silently, orderly and disciplined, they took the grain — just exactly a double ration of grain for every man and woman.
In Abraham’s tent, his friends were quiet. Satyrus took his turn with the two bronze cauldrons full of barley meal and coriander, and the whole of an unlucky migrant bird that had passed too close to Melitta’s bow. The smell alone was like lust and gluttony together.
‘So,’ Miriam said, approaching him cautiously, like a hunter. ‘We’re done for?’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘I trust my gods,’ he said. ‘We Hellenes are also a stiff-necked people.’
Apollodorus stuck a horn spoon into the porridge and tasted it, burning his tongue. ‘Ow!’ he said.
‘Serves you right,’ Satyrus shot back, smacking him with his wooden spoon.
Apollodorus didn’t bother to look contrite. ‘You’re feeding us up,’ he said. ‘So we’re going to attack.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘That’s right.’
Apollodorus embraced him. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s die standing up.’
It turned out that people can get drunk on grain, if they’ve been hungry long enough.
Anthesteria was not always the loudest of holidays — kept in late winter, a cry to the coming spring, usually celebrated indoors. But with a double ration of food in their bellies, the six thousand surviving Rhodians sang hymns to the night and all the gods, roaring away — hymn after hymn to Demeter and Kore, and then to Apollo, to Herakles, to Ares and Athena. Thankful only for food and one more day, they sang to every god. Hymn after hymn rose to the heavens, an endless paean from nightfall to midnight. Shivering sentries on the Antigonid entrenchments wondered how, how in all Tartarus the Rhodians had the strength to sing, or even to walk. They huddled in their cloaks and smelled the smell of warm food floating on the wind, and when the hymn to Dionysus came across no-man’s land, disgusted sentries spat in contempt for their own improvident commanders — or joined the song.
Satyrus looked around the fire. The stars had wheeled away past the middle watch, and every man who could walk was in armour — and some of the women as well. Every officer was here, in the middle of the agora, at the biggest bonfire they could build — not really all that big. Carrying wood was hard work, and starving men are easily tired. And the wood was mostly gone with the grain and the oil. The beached ships were already consumed.
Satyrus looked at them in the firelight. It was a kind, ruddy light, and it gave Charmides and Miriam back their beauty, three months gone; gave Melitta back her youth, lost in the valleys of the Tanais, and Anaxagoras looked like a god.
‘Listen to me,’ Lysander barked, long before Satyrus was ready to stop drinking them in. One last time.
They were instantly silent. It took a year’s siege to turn Greeks into disciplined men and women — but they were. The only sound was the hymn-singing, led by Leosthenes, out along the south wall.
Satyrus nodded. ‘So,’ he said. He smiled. Looked from face to face. It was almost funny, the way they expected him to provide a magical spell of victory. ‘So. Friends.’ He hung his head, embarrassed by their trust in him. And then he raised his head. ‘Listen. There is no trick to save us, now. I don’t have a fancy plan. When we raise the paean to Athena, we go over the south wall and go for the monster.’ He shrugged. ‘First man there is King of Misrule.’
Anaxagoras sighed. ‘That’s it?’ he asked.
Satyrus nodded. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Kill everyone who gets in your way. It’ll be dark. That can’t hurt us.’
Abraham raised an eyebrow — for a moment, his old self. ‘And when the sun rises?’ he asked.
Satyrus locked eyes with Miriam. ‘Die well,’ he said. Then he walked from man to man and embraced them all. He hugged Aspasia. He hugged his sister, and she shook her head.
‘This is not what I came for,’ she said.
‘Then escape!’ he murmured into her hair.
‘No. No — I couldn’t face Mother in the spirit world, if I left you.’ She hugged him closer. ‘You kill a thousand, I kill a thousand — Abraham’s good for five hundred, Charmides looks capable — and we wipe them out.’
And last, he embraced Miriam. ‘I would have married you,’ he said.
‘I would have accepted,’ she said. She kissed him.
And then he led them to the foot of the wall, and the morning star rose, and four thousand voices started on the hymn to Athena.
Once, visiting Athens, Satyrus had watched a desperate older man beat a much better younger man at pankration, on the palaestra of the Lyceum outside the walls of the city. Hundreds of men had watched as the older fellow — a plain-spoken country man, trained well enough but no champion, stubbornly refuse to raise a hand in surrender, for the simple reason that the young champion had been rude in his challenge. And when he was groggy from blows to the head, the younger man mocked him as a drunkard, a satyr, a shepherd.
Satyrus had watched the older man’s face absorb the insult. Watched as the man stopped, readied himself and threw everything he had left into a stupid roundhouse blow, the sort of big, long, easy-to-dodge blow that untrained men use. The younger man saw it coming. But somehow — through indecision or poor training, or, as Satyrus saw it, the punishment of the gods — the champion stood as if rooted to the spot in amazement as the other man’s twinned fists slammed into the side of his head, and he slumped to the ground, completely unconscious.
On that night, the remnants of the Rhodian garrison swept over the south wall like a black sea and rolled over the remnants of the second wall and the first wall, crushing the sentries and the reserve, and raced across the plain like a well-ordered tide across a salt flat when the moon is full.
Like the young champion, the Macedonian taxeis awaited the garrison with confidence.
Satyrus kept the oarsmen to an easy jog once they made the good ground. They were keeping up with the ephebes and the town mercenaries, but the city hoplites were lagging behind and there was nothing Satyrus could do about it. So he led them at a jog across the open ground, and saw the enemy phalanx form with plenty of time to achieve close order.
Satyrus slowed his oarsmen three hundred paces from the glittering enemy line. Dawn was already a pale line in the east, and there were trumpets everywhere.
He smiled. It was too late. For these men.
‘Files!’ he called, and the oarsmen doubled to the front, a Spartan manoeuvre that left every front-rank shield firmly overlapped — the synaspis.
His men hadn’t stopped moving. A year of continuous action allows a unit to achieve a degree of drill that borders on beyond human. Half-files merely slowed a half a pace, waited while the new file leaders marched into the intervals at a jog, and then, as the shields locked, gave a low shout — just the file leaders.
‘Spears!’ Satyrus called. Two hundred paces. And the Macedonians weren’t moving. It was getting late for them to start forward — he could see their spears moving — but it was hard to read them in the dark, and Satyrus didn’t really care very much what they did.
Behind and alongside him, the front three ranks levelled their spears, and the back seven ranks pressed forward tighter, still at a fast walk.
‘Paean!’ Satyrus called.
Apollodorus raised his head.
A wall of sound leaped out from the oarsmen, and the Macedonians reacted as if they’d been hit by arrows — they recoiled, and into their confusion came the marines, and the moment of impact was like a thousand bronzesmiths beating on a thousand cauldrons across the sky, and the Macedonian phalanx burst asunder at the impact, and was destroyed.