Funeral Games (56 page)

Satyrus hadn’t seen. He stood up, whirled, his face crumpling as he saw his hero lying on the deck in a pool of lung-bright blood. He fought a strong desire to sit on the deck and go to sleep. He sucked in a breath.

‘See to the wounded. You there,’ he pointed at a marine, ‘don’t kill their wounded. I want prisoners. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir!’ The marine looked ready to fall over, but he stood up.

Satyrus leaped the rail and ran down the amidships deck. ‘I need an oar master,’ he shouted. ‘Who’s the man?’

The oarsmen were not used to having their opinions asked. Even as they rowed, heads turned and the stroke suffered. Satyrus didn’t know the oarsmen as well as a real navarch should. But he knew Kleitos, who, though young, was often sent off in the light boat. Kleitos had rowed with him that night in Alexandria two weeks ago, which now felt like another world.

‘Kleitos!’ he called. He pulled the man’s arm, then pushed a deckhand on to the bench. ‘You are the oar master.’

‘Me?’ the young man asked. His jaw worked silently, his eyes wide.

‘I want to turn to starboard in our own length - all the way around. The way Peleus and Kyros did it.’ Satyrus looked out over the stern - plenty of room now. Backing water for fifty strokes had them well clear of both wrecks.

The lighter Athenian trireme was limping away, only a dozen oars going on her port side, and she was turning involuntarily out to sea.

‘Starboard oars,’ Kleitos said.

‘Louder!’ Satyrus said.

‘Starboard oars!’ Kleitos shouted. He had good lungs, when he used them. ‘Back-water on my mark!’

‘They’re already backing, lad,’ Kalos said. The deck master was standing by Kleitos.

‘Portside oars, switch your benches!’ the man called. His voice was tentative, and many of the oarsmen looked at Kalos before obeying.

Satyrus winced - he’d made a bad choice. Kleitos was not ready for the job - but Satyrus didn’t have another oar master under his hand.

The ship tilted as ninety men shifted their weight and reversed the way they sat. ‘Port side, give way on my mark! Give way, all!’ Kleitos seemed to be getting the knack of it, although his orders came a little too fast and the execution was slow.

It didn’t matter, because the Athenian galley hadn’t made a stade since they started their turn.

Satyrus ran aft, to where a deckhand held the steering oar, petrified with responsibility. ‘I have the helm,’ he said. ‘Go and see to Master Peleus.’

The sailor ran off, bare feet slapping the deck.

‘Master Kalos!’ Satyrus called. ‘I’ll do my best to lay us alongside that Athenian. I intend to come up from her stern and take her. You will prepare the deck crew to board her. You will go aboard with all our marines and all our deck crew and get her boatsail on her. Is that clear?’

Kalos’s grin filled his ugly face and showed all his missing teeth. ‘You’re going to
take
her? Aye, Navarch!’

With the sails down, Satyrus could see the whole run of his deck. Xenophon was standing, and there were three prisoners stripped of their armour being bound to the mast. Peleus lay in his own blood with two deckhands standing ineffectually above him.

‘Master Xenophon!’ Satyrus called. His voice was cracking every shout. He wanted to sit down and rest, but they were not done yet.

Xenophon’s bare feet slapped the deck as he ran to the stern. ‘Sir!’

‘Take all the marines who can fight and support Master Kalos in boarding the Athenian.’ Satyrus corrected his course even as Kleitos ordered the starboard side rowers to pull forward again. They were around - perhaps the ugliest manoeuvre in the
Golden Lotus
’s history, but they were around. Satyrus leaned forward. ‘Xeno, can you do it? Secure that ship? Kill their oarsmen if it comes to that? Do I need to put another man in charge?’

‘Try me,’ Xeno said. He grinned. ‘I got us through the boarding party!’

‘So you did.’ They embraced, spontaneously, a certain hard joy flowing between them. And then Xeno turned away and started calling for ‘his’ marines. And Satyrus felt better. Suddenly he stood up, aware that his shoulders had been hunched since he’d thrown the spear.

‘Right then,’ he said to himself. ‘Lita!’ he called, and his sister ran down the central deck. He had some time in hand - perhaps a hundred heartbeats until he would have to give the next order. He was flying on the daimon that came to men in war and sport - so full of it that his hands shook and his knees trembled, but his head was clear and the world seemed to slow. Melitta sprinted to his side. ‘Sir!’ she said. She smiled when she said it.

‘You and Dorcus are the closest I have to doctors. See to the arrow in Peleus’s lungs - and the other wounded.’ Quietly, he said, ‘See that he goes easy if that’s what it takes, Lita.’

Melitta’s nose was pinched in an unaccustomed way, and she had a tendril of snot across part of her face and blood on her forehead. She used her sleeve to wipe her face. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said, and turned away, shouting for Dorcus.

Satyrus still had time in hand and he turned to watch the Macedonians.

The quinquereme was in the surf with her oarsmen aboard, and two triremes were coming off the beach, but the wind was rising - from the south and west - and the helmsmen were being careful. Satyrus felt that he had time in hand - still. Just ahead and to port, the Athenian wallowed in the growing swell, oarsmen beating the water ineffectually.

‘Master Kalos, get me that boatsail rigged before you go off,’ he said. ‘Slow the stroke, oar master.’ He felt very much in control. He looked at the sky, and back at the beach.

The sailors got the boatsail rigged, the stain of Kyros’s blood like a blossom in the centre of the sail. The moment it filled, the
Golden Lotus
leaped forward like a warhorse changing gaits, a smooth acceleration that made some of the sailors grin with pleasure, while aboard the Athenian trireme, men pointed over the rail at them in panic.

Satyrus put a second sailor on to help steer, because at this speed she could veer wildly, and he kept four of the sailors back from the boarding party to manage the sail.

‘Oars in!’ Satyrus roared.

The Athenian turned away, yawing wide at the last minute, but Satyrus had seen the helmsman move his hands and he was on the Athenian’s stern, his ram under the Athenian’s port side in a few heartbeats, and the Athenian’s rowers panicked, fleeing their benches to avoid the second oar rake, and in the confusion Xenophon leaped across the narrowing gap alone on to the enemy deck. He landed, rose to his feet and knocked the enemy helmsman unconscious in one continuous motion and then faced the enemy trierarch. Grapples flew from all along the
Lotus
’s deck and the sailors were over the side, flooding the enemy rowing deck.

Just a few feet away, the enemy trierarch and Xenophon faced off. Xenophon made a simple fake and then cut overarm at the top of the Athenian’s shield. His opponent took the blow on his shield and pushed forward, knocking Xenophon to the deck effortlessly. He towered over the prostrate young man and raised his spear.

Melitta shot. Her arrow rose on the breeze, a shot that had to pass the length of the ships, past ropes and rigging and hulls and rails, and fell from its apogee as if guided by Athena’s hand to bury itself in the mercenary’s thigh, a handspan above his greave. The man fell to one knee, and Xeno was up.

The mercenary parried, parried again, using his spear with desperate skill. He tried to rise to his feet and failed, fell in his own blood, and
still
managed to block Xenophon’s death stroke. He rolled over - red blood from his thigh wound dripping from his fine bronze cuirass - and got back up on one knee. Xenophon stepped back and saluted him, and the mercenary laughed and returned the salute - then turned it into a cut.

Xenophon parried, but now he had a long red line on his sword arm.

During the pause, Kalos had stepped up behind the Athenian with a deck maul. After the salutes were done, Kalos struck, hitting the Athenian hard in the side of the head. The man went down.

Satyrus was able to breathe again, and under his breath he offered a prayer to Athena and to Herakles for preserving Xenophon, who, for all his skill, was clearly outmatched.

After the Athenian trierarch went down, the Athenian ship offered no fight at all. The swell was increasing, out away from the beach, and it was all their port-side oarsmen could do to keep them bow-on to the waves, which were twice the height they’d been ten minutes before.

Satyrus dropped back and then put his ram under the Athenian’s stern with a far more threatening
crash
than he had intended - but he got it done, and the rest of the marines and sailors were across in a single long peal of thunder.

‘Follow me, and may Poseidon send we make it,’ Satyrus called. ‘Try and keep their navarch alive!’

Kalos waved and Satyrus could hear him bellowing orders, could see the Athenian marines being disarmed in the bow, Xeno with his helmet off, pouring water on a wound. He ranged alongside with the wind in his brailed-up boatsail alone and his archers covered the decks. There was no more resistance.

Kalos had the Athenian boatsail mast up before the waves turned to whitecaps, and then he was scudding away. The Athenian trireme was damaged, but with the wind now directly astern, she went well enough, and Kalos had time to reorganize the rowers - captives, now.

Satyrus watched the quinquereme come off the beach and start to pull into the waves.

Two unemployed oarsmen brought Peleus to sit in the stern. He was as white as new-scraped parchment and blood dribbled from his mouth, but he was alive. Melitta and Dorcus had washed him and cut the arrow shaft at the wound so that he could rest against things. The fact that the shaft hadn’t been withdrawn told Satyrus everything.

‘Master Peleus.’ Satyrus sat on his heels, holding the oar, trying to hear the helmsman as his lips moved.

Peleus raised his head. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Need to get on the beach. Now!’

‘If you were hale, master, we could have a go at the big ship.’ Satyrus found that his cheeks were wet. ‘What do you mean, on the beach?’

‘Storm,’ Peleus said.

Satyrus looked out to sea and knew that the helmsman was right.

‘Fucking beautiful,’ Peleus said. He had himself up on an elbow, and he could just see over the stern. ‘Two to one, under the eyes of the enemy!’ He laughed, and the laugh turned to a gurgle and a spray of blood. Peleus’s eyes caught Satyrus’s, and the younger man could see that the older was going - could all but see his shade pulling free of his body.

‘Storm coming,’ Peleus said. Then, with enormous effort, ‘Tell Rhodos!’

He slumped then, and Satyrus thought he was gone. He turned to watch over his stern. The storm was coming from the sea, moving so fast that he could see the bow-shaped front and feel the drop in temperature. Out to seaward, there was a line, like a line of fog, but Satyrus knew it was a squall line.

Landward, the quinquereme had already abandoned the chase. He was backing into the heavy surf even as they rounded Laodikea Head and the beach full of Macedonian ships vanished around the point.

They were sailing fast - so fast that a moment’s inattention caused the hull to tremble like a dog on a leash and sway. They were overhauling the captured Athenian hand over fist now that they had the sail well set.

They passed within an oar’s length and sailed on, the edge of the storm carrying them as fast as a galley dared to sail. They cleared the rocks north of Laodikea Head and then the next bay to the north in minutes.

‘I’m going for it,’ Satyrus said. He was speaking to Peleus, whose eyes still had life in them. There was no one else to talk to - Kleitos was busy with his new responsibilities and Melitta was forward with the archers. ‘I’m going to try to beach right here and make it through the night.’

Peleus nodded, startling him. ‘Good boy,’ he said.

Satyrus hadn’t been at sea his whole life, but he’d seen storms. He prayed that this one would follow the usual pattern - a lull just before the front came in.

‘Master Kleitos!’ he called.

Kleitos came up.

‘I intend to beach us, stern first, on the next beach - see her?’ Satyrus pointed over the starboard bow, and Kleitos looked blank.

‘When I order the boatsail down, you must have all the oarsmen ready - one quarter circle turn to port and then back oars for their lives.’ Satyrus mimed the manoeuvre with his hands.

Kleitos nodded, but his eyes showed no understanding.

‘Repeat it to me,’ Satyrus urged.

‘When you drop the boatsail, quarter turn to seaward and back him into the surf,’ Kleitos said. He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

‘Pass that word to every man. No relying on orders at the last minute. Got me?’

‘Aye, Navarch!’ Kleitos’s eyes were dull - he was already exhausted by the effort of command.

Satyrus grabbed an oarsman. ‘What’s your name, man?’

‘Diokles, lord.’

Satyrus started, recognizing the man from the night in Alexandria.

‘Diokles, can you take the steering oar?’ Satyrus had seen Diokles with Peleus often enough - if they were friends, the man had to be competent. He’d been in charge of the watch.

Diokles reached out and took the heavy oar. ‘I have the helm,’ he said. His voice was thick, foreign and raspy. He looked down at Peleus, who gave a very short nod.

Heartbeats until they were in the surf. So much to do. ‘You have the helm!’ Satyrus said, and went forward. He found the four sailors.

‘On my command, bring the boatsail down. Down flat - understand - nothing to catch the wind.’ Too much information - he could see it on their faces.

‘We know our business, Navarch,’ the oldest said. He gave a lopsided smile. ‘No worries, lad,’ he whispered hoarsely.