The other man shook his head, and threw his javelin. It clattered off Satyrus’s shield, and then Memnon beheaded him. Satyrus never even saw the strike — just the poor lad’s head sailing over the tower wall, still helmeted, to land fifty pous below in the olive trees.
Satyrus sank to one knee and panted.
Then he dropped his aspis, pulled his leather bag over his shoulder, and dumped the makings of a particularly greasy fire onto the stones of the tower top.
Memnon took a swig of vinegar and water and handed it to him, and he had a swig himself.
Got his fire laid out: tinder, carefully kept dry, wrapped in bark, with tallow.
A small clay pot, full of coals. Hot as lava.
Satyrus emptied the coals into the bark tube.
Twenty heartbeats, and smoke began to billow out.
‘Get me the straw from their sleeping pallets,’ Satyrus called over his shoulder.
Four stades away, and Nikephorus watched the tower from under the shade of his hands. At his back, eight hundred men, his best, who’d come ashore from the captured Athenian grain ships and literally crawled across the countryside since midnight.
Draco saw the smoke first. Thumped his back and pointed.
Nikephorus grunted. Just for a moment, his throat closed with some emotion, and his eyes watered. Because if this worked, his name would live for ever.
‘Stand up, you bastards! Time for your morning run!’ he called, and the gods laughed with him.
Melitta stood on her tiptoes to release her third shaft. She was shooting to kill Plistias of Cos. So far she’d killed his helmsman.
Ahead of her, Oinoe oar-raked one of the enemy ships and it fell out of line.
The noise of the fight on the river was like the noise of every battle she’d ever heard, magnified and echoed by the enclosed space and the looming hillsides above them.
An arrow scored down her side, the broad point cutting her bicep and then punching into her side, but her scale shirt turned it. She shot the archer — caught the man leaning out to follow his shot. They were half a stade apart, both ships closing so fast that she would only have time for one more shot. She drew, nocked, searching for the red crest of the enemy navarch.
He’d vanished off his command deck.
He was almost completely hidden, the length of his heavy penteres from her, with boatsail mast and all its rigging between them, and he had his helmet off — and still she saw the flash of his cuirass. She leaped up on the rail and balanced there, on her bare toes, vaguely aware that every archer on the enemy ship was now shooting at her. And then it was just her bow and her hand and her eye and the infinitely distant glimpse of bronze — no conscious thought, the lift of her fine needle-headed arrow above her target, through a waving jungle of ropes and masts and timbers …
She loosed, and tumbled back aboard as two arrows struck her thorax. The scale held one. The other punched into her.
Plistias lined up his ship — bow to bow with the enemy navarch, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that whatever happened now, he’d done his best, and most of his ships would escape. Forty or fifty, anyway — enough that the enemy’s whole brilliant surprise would be wasted.
He never saw the arrow that hit him — a needlepoint that plunged through his wrist and into his thigh where he gripped the steering oars, and he screamed and stumbled, his weight changed, and his whole vessel trembled as if the ship and not the helmsman were wounded.
His Golden Demeter fell off, and he screamed in rage and frustration as he felt the crunch — her oars were fouling against the next ship in line, and with his wrist and leg pinned he couldn’t even make himself push the helm back.
The fire on the top of the tower was billowing smoke.
‘Gate,’ Satyrus said to Memnon and Stratokles.
They nodded — three men against a company of town militia. Then they raced along the walls, all three of them now carrying town shields. The gate was between the next two towers, and it was closed. There was fighting in the courtyard behind it — Achilles and Odysseus and Ajax, back to back to back, with twenty men around them in the yard, and four or five already down. The three mercenaries were careful, cautious — only the most over-exposed man was taken down.
Memnon didn’t say anything — he simply ran down the steps by the gate, and into the back of the press, screaming a war cry.
Stratokles ignored him. ‘Gate!’ he roared.
Satyrus looked at him. In the courtyard, Ajax fell.
‘All or nothing, Satyrus!’ Stratokles said.
Satyrus knew the man was, for once, telling the truth. But it was all he could do to turn his back on the four men — four thugs he’d come to love.
But he did.
He got a shoulder under the spokes of the main drum and Stratokles got under the other. It was a six-man job.
There was no time.
Someone shouted from the other tower. An alarm bell began to ring. And another.
The bars moved by a fraction of a finger’s width.
‘One — two — three!’ Satyrus croaked.
The bars moved — stopped — moved. The sound of a pawl in a gear. Click.
‘Clear the gate! There’s men opening the gate!’ shouted a new voice in the courtyard.
A burst of eudaimonia — the sound of Achilles’s roar of rage, the shouts of fear and pain …
Click click click
An arrow that hit his greave — pain translated to strength …
Click click
‘Get the gate closed!’ from close at hand. A panicked voice.
Click click click click clickclickclickclickclickclickclick!
Satyrus raised his head and an arrow clipped his helmet and there was blood in his nose.
He could see Nikephorus at a dead sprint — a stade away.
He whirled as he heard Stratokles shout. The Athenian was sword to sword with a man in full armour, and guards were pouring up both sets of steps to the gate platform.
Satyrus made it to the head of his steps one pace ahead of his adversary, and he risked everything — balance and life and battle — on putting his shoulder into the man’s aspis at full tilt, trusting to the man’s weight to slow him.
The man fell off the steps, and Satyrus bounced back — lost his footing — rolled over his hips and got his feet under him like a dancer, and came up facing the next man’s spear-strike — wide open.
But he missed, and Satyrus had his shield up, shield foot forward — shields locked, cut low — a deep cut into the man’s foot and he was down, fouling the steps. Satyrus gave half a step, and then another, and a second spearman came up — a third, bolder than the rest, vaulted to the platform from three steps down.
Stratokles was fighting brilliantly at the head of his steps — he had two men down, and his spear was licking down onto their heads.
Satyrus had two opponents, both off balance. He lunged — shield-foot first, a sliding advance that took him off line as his shield caught his opponent’s spearhead and brushed it aside, and Satyrus punched with his shield rim, caught the other man in the helmet, took a blow, accurate but weak, in his own side, felt the blood flowing, but he stepped across in a pass, and used the rotation of his hips to power the full weight of his back-cut into the man’s exposed right side where his partner’s shield no longer covered him. He cut neck and helmet together — so that blood exploded from the wound and the helmet’s base creased and the man fell back onto the steps.
The men on the steps were looking over their shoulders. And then they were running.
Satyrus heard the footsteps as clearly as if he were listening to the end of a footrace. He felt light-headed — his mouth tasted as if he’d drunk all night.
He stumbled down the steps after his beaten foes.