‘And Satyrus may be dead,’ he said. ‘Demetrios has won a great victory in Greece, and Cassander is destroyed. Demetrios and Antigonus have … won.’ He took a long time, and she found that she cared nothing — nothing — for the defeat of her side.
‘Satyrus is not dead,’ she said through her sobs. She would know, she thought. Even though she had determined to tell him that she would not go with him to Tanais — even though Ephesus had clarified for her that she was a Jew and not a Hellene. She would be neither his mistress nor his wife.
She had decided. But she would feel it in her body if he died.
If Abraham heard her, he ignored her.
‘Demetrios had him killed,’ Abraham said, and his voice cracked.
Miriam raised her head. ‘Satyrus is alive,’ she said.
Abraham looked shocked. And in a moment — in her eyes, in her posture — he understood.
Abraham understood, and he searched for rage — rage at his sister’s betrayal of her … widowhood?
There was nothing there but his own sorrow for his father. ‘You love Satyrus?’ he asked.
Miriam hung her head. ‘I will not wed him.’
Abraham understood in those words, and he put his arms around her. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, my dear.’
9
Ephesus
Dawn. Light the colour of fresh rose petals that rouged the river where it met the sea — wave tops that showed pink, not white. Gulls wheeled away into the sky, frightened by predators or merely playful. Off the river mouth, a school of dolphins leapt and leapt again, and further offshore, a line of sea haze veiled the islands like Poseidon’s coast, waiting for the heat of the sun to burn it off.
Up the coast, five big Athenian grain ships, close up against the beaches, had their sails turned from white to blinding pink by the sun.
Deep in the haze, a flash, and then another — a rhythmic flash.
Flash.
Flash.
A line of flashes, as the rising sun caught oars — many, many oars.
Ten sets of oars.
Flash-flash-flash.
Racing speed. Ramming speed. Into the dawn.
Apollodorus stood amidships, his helmet forgotten on the deck as his hair blew in the wind of his reckless race up the estuary. Ephesus lay before him, high on her ridge, and the Temple of Artemis, one of the wonders of the world, sparkled in Dawn’s embrace.
Closer to hand, fifty ships’ lengths ahead, lay Antigonus’s Asian fleet, moored in the gentle current or beached with their sterns pulled up high above the waterline, and the great camp of their oarsmen and marines stretched up the farm fields and around isolated stands of olive and oak and seemed to reach right up to the town.
Anaxagoras stood by him, and Charmides, and Coenus, and Theron, and Eumenes of Olbia.
There was nothing to be said — nothing but the rush of the wind, the sparkle of the sea, and the enormity of their risk.
And then they were through the chops of the estuary and into the river, still racing, the crews in top training. On the shore, sentries were shouting.
‘Sing the paean!’ Apollodorus called, and all through the fleet, the oarsmen took up the song. The daughters of Apollo were just being hymned on the mountainside of Delphi when the first rams crushed the first helpless ships at anchor.
Out in the estuary, the second Bosporon squadron came on, with Melitta standing in the bow of her penteres, and she heard the hymn rise to the gods, and she grinned.
‘Let them see who we are,’ she said to Herakles, Alexander’s son, who stood behind her, awestruck to be participating in such a mighty enterprise.
Forty warships — the entire fleet of her kingdom.
‘Sing!’ she commanded Herakles, and he caught the song from across the water and raised his clear young voice, and their rowers took it from him, so that forty crews — eight thousand throats — roared the paean into the dawn.
High on the hillside above Ephesus, six men heard the paean.
‘Got their beaks in,’ Stratokles said. He smacked his fist into his palm. ‘It’s a pleasure to work with such competent people,’ he added happily.
Thirty stades away, a minute column of smoke began to rise, and then another and another, like threads on the horizon.
The town garrison began to pour out of the gates, men tying their armour, tossing sword belts over their heads, shoving arms through porpakes.
‘Let’s do it,’ Satyrus said.
The six of them slipped forward, from one grove to the next, until they lost sight of the estuary and the river because they were so close to the wall.
‘Follow me!’ Stratokles said. He sprinted towards the wall; a sentry shouted, and an arrow flew.
Now close to the wall, which rose ten times the height of a man, course upon course of mud brick atop stone. Another arrow flew, and it stuck in the face of Satyrus’s shield.
Stratokles ran diagonally across the face of the nearest tower. The sentries were sounding the alarm but of course the city alarms were already ringing, and their local bell was ignored. As Stratokles had planned.
Around a corner of the wall, where a local farmer had planted his olives right up to the tower.
Up an olive tree, into the crotch, a long step up to the course where the stone met the mud brick — a ledge. Stratokles was panting, but he pointed up the wall; a long, diagonal, like a shallow set of steps hidden by the tops of the olives and by vines.
‘Smugglers,’ he panted.
Satyrus cut past him and ran up the secret steps in the wall.
His bodyguards protested, but he had to do this himself, and so he did. Right up the wall, six men against one of the mightiest cities in Asia.
The sentries were alert, but either they didn’t know of the secret steps or they couldn’t believe anyone would attack them there — there wasn’t a man at the top of the wall, and Satyrus was on the platform.
A man shouted from the nearest tower, and a fully-armed hoplite came running, full tilt, out of the door of the tower.
Achilles came up the wall behind Satyrus. ‘We have to clear the towers without more alarm.’ Satyrus said.
Achilles nodded, and went west.
Satyrus braced. The oncoming hoplite was a brave man. He ran like a god, and he carried a heavy spear.
His inexperience showed in everything from the way he wore his helmet to his overly ornate greaves. Satyrus tipped him off the wall with his shield and the man broke his back falling to the sheds below the wall. But he died quietly.
Satyrus ran for the open door of the tower.
The second Bosporon squadron had fire pots, and they used them, going right in on the beach and putting fire into ship after ship, but further east, on the beaches by the city, the crews were awake and moving, and they began to pour into their hulls. There were sixty ships there. Enough to overwhelm the twenty Bosporons, despite the damage they’d inflicted.
Somewhere in the chaos, Plistias of Cos was cursing the gods and rallying his men. He had five ships launched, and then ten; formed — more forming. He knew the penteres he was facing as soon as he saw it — he knew who he was going to fight.
Even at odds of three to one, he knew his men would have to keep their nerve or die here.
But they stayed steady, despite the shouting in the town, despite the ships burning on the beaches and the turtled wrecks in the estuary. He was proud of them. Then he had twenty ships formed, enough to make a fight of it, and he flashed his shield, and his squadron rowed forward to face bloody Melitta of Tanais.
Into the tower, up the steps, onto the fighting platform — two men, both half-asleep, both watching the disaster out in the anchorage and frankly unbelieving that the war was upon them. Satyrus considered offering them surrender, but he couldn’t afford to lose his surprise. He put his javelin through the nearest man and drew his sword.
‘Yield,’ he said.