'what we need is wood,' Satyrus said.
It had taken a day to build a camp on the bluff behind the stone farmhouse, out of sight of the shore and well watered by the creek. Another day had been filled in cutting the boatsail mast free, floating the Falcon, jury-rigging a bow and pulling the hull up the creek to the new camp, so that he could receive the care he deserved, out of sight of cruising ships in the great bay.
By the third day, Satyrus was standing in Alexander's largest stone barn, eyeing the curved joists that held the main beams. 'What we need is wood,' he said again.
'I don't think that Alexander, however well disposed to us, would fancy our stripping his barns of their innards to rebuild the bow.' Theron was still tired, and still moved stiffly. Six men had died of their wounds, and Satyrus was beginning to wonder if he would ever run well again himself – his hip was not knitting well, and he had trouble sleeping because of the pain in his arm, but Theron was recovering his sense of humour, and Satyrus had begun to feel that he might yet survive this.
'T hose beams and joists came from somewhere,' Satyrus insisted.
'We could just ask him,' Theron said.
So Satyrus did.
'Sakje brought them – dragged them overland from up-country on sledges,' Alexander said. 'I traded them for wine – forty amphorae, good stuff from Mytilene.'
Satyrus thought about that while he looked at the bow of his ship, now protruding from the water at a gentle angle, pulled up by the might of two hundred men and four oxen until the whole hull was clear of the creek. The wrecked bow stuck up over his head the height of a man. He walked back and forth. 'Even if we get timber,' he said to Diokles, 'we need a ram.'
'One thing at a time,' Diokles said. 'I say we rebuild the bow without a ram and sail him home – as fast as we can. New ram in Alexandria is just a matter of money.' He looked at Satyrus and Satyrus was afraid he saw pity in the man. 'You think you can fit him for war and rescue your uncle – that ship sailed four days ago, lord. He's taken, or dead. It's us as needs to get free – and no ram bow will save us in these waters.'
Satyrus drank herb tea and walked back and forth, looking at his ship and at Diokles. After an hour, he nodded.
'Right,' he said. 'You're right. Wooden bow. We'll have to rebuild him – move the masts. Without the ram, he's a pig – we know that. Have to rebalance the whole hull.'
Diokles nodded slowly.
Theron came up, his dark chlamys thrown back because the weather was fine. 'I have some talent for mathematics,' Theron said. 'So does Satyrus. Let's design him while Alexander summons the Sakje, and perhaps we'll have wood by the time we're ready to build.' The Sakje appeared within a day of the beacon being lit, as Alexander had predicted, thirty horsemen with two hundred horses who arrived at twilight. Alexander greeted them in his orchard, where all Satyrus could see was a flash of gold and a whirl of horseflesh that made his eyes fill with the hominess of it. Without meaning to, he ran out into the orchard, no longer the staid lord and navarch, but a boy coming home to his mother's people.
A tall man on a tall horse covered in red paint clasped hands with Alexander and they spoke rapidly, like old friends too long separated. Satyrus knew the man immediately from his boyhood hearth.
'Kairax!' he called. His mother's tanist in the west, now ruler in his own right of the western gate of the Assagatje confederacy. He had grey in his beard where it had been all dark, and furrows in his cheeks, but the hand tattoo of his clan was still bold and dark on his bicep, and his arms were still heavy with muscle.
Kairax turned at his shout and whooped. In a moment, Satyrus was enveloped in the Sakje's heavy arms, and it was all he could do to fight back tears. 'I didn't know it was you!' he said. His Sakje came out haltingly.
'Nor I you, little cousin! And not so little!' Kairax nodded approvingly. 'You are a man. And yet you came here by ship and not by horse? How is that?'
Satyrus spoke – for too long, he suspected – of the adventures of exile, and Kairax bowed his head when Satyrus spoke of the murder of his mother.
'Too long have we born with this Eumeles,' Kairax said. 'Marthax always counsels patience – but he hated your mother, and he is old, and my young men grow restless.' He looked at Satyrus from under his bushy brows. 'What kind of cousin are you, that you came with ships before you asked your relatives for help? I think that perhaps you have spent too many summers on the sea of water, and not enough summers on the sea of grass.'
Satyrus bowed his head in acknowledgement. 'Elder Uncle, I stand corrected,' he said, the Sakje coming back to him like a memory of youth.
Kairax grinned. 'Bah – you're too big to get a beating,' he said. 'Alexander of the Stone House says that you need wood.'
'Big wood – big trees. Like the ones in his barn,' Satyrus said.
Kairax nodded. 'If I bring them, then what?'
Satyrus didn't know what to say.
'Listen, lad,' Kairax said. 'The Assagatje are like dry grass on a summer's day, and you could be the lightning in the sky. Come with me and light the grass.'
Satyrus was tempted – so tempted that he had to remember everything that his uncle Leon and his uncle Diodorus had said about sea power to refuse the offer. 'Eumeles must be beaten at sea,' he said. 'Until then, he can use his ships to fight the Sakje.'
Kairax laughed. 'Ships against the Sakje? I would like to see that!'
'Every town closed against you?' Satyrus said. 'Garrisons of men who could arrive and leave by sea and never come within bow-shot?' Satyrus remembered something. 'And some of the Sakje must be loyal to Eumeles, Kairax. There were Sakje archers on every ship – good ones, who shot well, like men who have given their word.'
Now it was Kairax's turn to hang his head. 'It is as you say,' he said. 'Marthax sends young men to serve Eumeles and they go willingly, for the treasure.'
Satyrus took his arm and squeezed it. 'I am back to stay,' he said. 'I intend to kill Eumeles and make a kingdom of the Euxine.'
Kairax shook his head. 'That is not a Sakje thing,' he said.
Satyrus nodded. 'No – a Greek thing. But it will make the Sakje and the farmers free. And it will rid you of Marthax and me of Eumeles.'
Kairax made a Sakje gesture with his nose, like a man smelling something interesting – a sign of approval, if you knew the ways of the people. 'It is a big dream,' he said.
'I need wood to make it happen. I need to repair this ship, slip away past Eumeles' fleet and find my friends.' He didn't add that he needed to find a fleet of his own. 'I'll come back with ships.'
Kairax was no longer alone. While the two of them had spoken, his trumpeter and several of his principal warriors had got the drift of their conversation, and now they gathered around.
'Srayanka's son!' they called. A tall young woman reached out and touched his cheek. 'For luck!' she said in Greek.
He was reminded of Ataelus, and again tears filled his eyes. Twice, warships passed along the coast, but neither chose to land.
'They fear the Sakje,' Alexander said with satisfaction. 'Taxing sons of bitches. I pay my tenth to Kairax, and he is worth every penny. I don't pay an obol to that bastard in Pantecapaeum. His writ don't run here, and those sailors know it.'
'But they're still looking for us,' Satyrus said.
On the third day after Kairax came down from the hills, twenty Getae men and two women came with forty mules and twenty oak trees dragged between them. Satyrus paid gold – almost the last of his ready money – and before the sun set that night, his men were at work with the farmer's ample tools, cutting new timbers for the bow.
'T hree days,' he told Diokles and Theron.
'And you're coming with us?' Theron asked. His glance slid over Satyrus to the Sakje girl, Lithra, who hadn't left Satyrus's side for two days – and nights.
Satyrus knew he was being mocked, but he shrugged. 'We need a fleet. I can't get that here.'
'She's not going to be happy,' Diokles said.
Satyrus shrugged again. 'She is not a Greek girl, who needs me to wed her. She's a spear-maiden of the Cruel Hands, and we've already had that little talk. Gentlemen, if you've completed your inquest into my personal life, we can get this ship built and be away.'
'He's just like his father,' Alexander said into the silence.
Despite a growing irritation with the older men around him, Satyrus couldn't find anything in 'he's just like his father' to earn anger, so he smiled at them and walked off to find Lithra. 'You are for leaving soon,' she said. They were curled together in the hay – the air had a bite in it – and something awkward was making him want to scratch, but post-coital dignity demanded that he lie as if unconcerned.
'Yes,' he said.
'I for understanding Greek better,' she said. 'So?'
'I'll be back,' he said. It sounded pitiful, even to him.
'I know!' she said. She rolled him over. She was a tall girl with small breasts and a waist so small, chest muscles so hard, that passing his hand over her stomach made him hard. Her body was wonderful, and despite the partial barrier of two not-quite-shared languages, he knew her well enough to find more to like than just her body. Already.
She reached down and ran a practised finger up the base of his penis. 'Greek girls do this?' she asked.
Satyrus thought of Amastris. There was a mixture of guilt and something else – something hard to describe – in thinking of Amastris with another woman's hands on his hoplon. 'No,' he said.
Lithra leaned over. 'For you losing if not coming back, Satrax. Lithra rides ten days and never tires, five arrows in the mark before turning, ten men killing in the hills.' She leaned down, her face lit by the late sunset. 'Come back. I for liking you.'
Satyrus loved it when she called him Satrax. He caught her hands, rolled her under him and their mock struggle filled the air with straw, the dust rising in a cloud like smoke in the setting sun until they were coughing and laughing, despite the pus on his arm wound and the now permanent ache in his thigh.
'I'll be back,' Satyrus said, wondering if he was lying or telling the truth.
She smiled and stayed in his blankets one more night, but in the morning she was mounted with her warriors, and they rode away. She waved once, and was gone over the first range of hills, and Satyrus couldn't decide which of his actions deserved the biggest share of the guilt he felt. Guilt from inside and shame from the taunting of his elders, until he shunned them to work on the bow himself, adzing the timbers with the best of the sailors and the farmer's grandsons, who had more experience of woodworking than any of the sailors.
He worked until he slept, and slept only to rise and work again, and on the fifth day the last plank was fitted into its mate, the long pieces carefully edged and fitted to each other with wafers of flexible poplar between them to keep them together, and the bow was rebuilt heavily in stacked oak beams. The mainmast was fixed back into the deck a little farther aft, and so was the boatsail mast, so that the Falcon had something of the look of a triemiolia, and they gave him a broader central deck, a cataphract that would add weight and make him stiffer under sail – or so they hoped. And protect the rowers, in a fight.
Theron had all the men not engaged in work out in the countryside all day, hunting or practising with their weapons, so that by the time the bow was ready to ship, they were, to quote Theron, the most dangerous crew of oarsmen in the Euxine. 'Some of them can even throw a javelin,' he said with a smile.
'You look better, master,' Satyrus said. 'Perhaps we could fight a fall or two.'
Theron shook his head. 'Your hip is still bad, and I can smell that arm from here. You need to get that looked at. It's still weeping pus. And I'm not willing to be the target of your anger,' he said.
'I'm not angry,' Satyrus said. But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than he knew that he was.
Diokles came up with a pair of spears over his shoulder. 'Well, if we have to, we could board,' he said. 'No one expects the oar benches to clear in the first moments of a fight.'
He was probably joking, but Satyrus nodded. 'We should practise,' he said. 'Tomorrow, while we take him out in the bay with the deck crew, you should see how fast we can get them off the benches.'
'By Ares, he's serious,' Theron said.
'He's a serious man,' Diokles said, 'when his dick's dry.'
Satyrus decided it would be bad for discipline if he said what was on his mind, so he forced a false smile and walked away to supervise the final fitting of the bow timbers and the new rails. He understood in his head that he'd done a bad thing by taking a lover – that he'd had something that the other men didn't have, which made him the target of a lot of teasing. He knew this in his head, but in his gut he was angry at them for being so petty.
In the first of the sun, they were afloat off the creek, the lower hull full of rocks from the beach to stand him up. He wasn't the Falcon – or rather, he was the Falcon some moments, and then, in a heartbeat, he was another ship altogether – stiffer, better under sail, harder to row and down by the stern, sloppy in a turn. The bow leaked. Satyrus spent much of the day crouched over the new bow timbers, feeling the water and worrying.
'You need to relax,' Diokles said. 'They'll swell.'
'You need to shut up and do your work by yourself,' Satyrus spat. 'You're a good helmsman – but I can replace you. I promoted you from the oar bench. My personal life is not part of your deck, and neither is my head. Walk away.'
Diokles turned on his heel and headed to the stern.
Satyrus cursed his temper and his foolish words – but he did not retract them.
They didn't exchange a word while they loaded, making every effort to bring his bow down in the water. They stood well apart while Satyrus was embracing Alexander and all his sons at the edge of the beach.
'Your father's friend – the hero. He's brought me nothing but luck. Glad I could help you.' Alexander had given them a farewell dinner, a big fish from the bay and wine for all hands that must have cost the man a small fortune.
'When I am king, you will never pay a day's tax,' Satyrus promised.
'That's right, I won't!' the farmer responded. 'Don't now, neither. Good luck, lad. You're the image of your dad – a little longer, I think, but a good man. Go and put the bronze to that bastard in Pantecapaeum for all the other farmers.'
The old man embraced Theron, who had spent time with his grandsons, and Diokles, who bore it stiffly, and then they were away, tearing up the bay on a fresh breeze.
'If the wind holds, there's no cruiser in the Euxine can take him on this reach,' Diokles said, to no one in particular. He nodded to Theron. 'Quit wrestling and become a shipwright.'
Theron gave a half-smile. 'I suppose something of my father rubbed off on me,' he said, watching Satyrus.
Satyrus knew that Diokles meant his little speech as a peace offering, but he couldn't bring himself to answer, or apologize, and that made him feel like a fool. His arm was becoming heavy and swollen and he felt light-headed. If there was an enemy ship off the bay, they never saw him, flying along with the wind astern as soon as they turned south, so that the farm seemed a dream. Satyrus spent the morning watching his precious bow like a mother cat with her first kittens, but the leakage was no more than any dry ship gives in his first hours at sea, and by noon he was dry, as the wood swelled to close the gaps in the new construction. Satyrus wiped his hand against the fresh-cut timbers, smiled in satisfaction and walked up the new cataphract deck to the stern.
'Straight on for the Great Bosporus?' Diokles asked. It was the closest to direct communication that the two of them had tried in two days. 'We might make it if we sailed the deep green. Tomorrow night, with a good landfall and the will of the gods.'
'Tomis,' Satyrus said, and regretted his terse answer immediately. Diokles was trying to apologize. Satyrus had the ready wit to know that this flow of conversation wasn't really about their course. Was and wasn't. He tried the same in return. 'Tomis is in Lysimachos's satrapy. Should be friendly. Besides, we have friends there – my father's guest-friends and others. At this rate, we'll be there before nightfall. We'll weather the strait in daylight, day after tomorrow.'
'Tomis?' Diokles said. 'I could get a new ship there.'
'Don't be an ass, Diokles,' Satyrus said. He braced himself. 'I need you,' he said, with the same effort he'd use in a fight.
'Huh,' Diokles said, with the air of a man with more to say. They'd coasted all day, never losing sight of the Ister delta and her thousands of islands and broad fan of silt, and then followed the coast as it turned due south, the land visibly civilized, with Greek farms as far as the eye could see and the loom of the Celaletae Hills in the west.
'Tomis breakwater!' the lookout called.
'High time,' Neiron said. He'd had an easy day, with the wind just right for sailing.
'Ships on the beach,' the lookout called.
Satyrus nodded to his officers. 'I'll go.'
None of them seemed inclined to argue. He pulled his chiton over his head and dropped it on the deck and raced aloft up the boatsail mast. The lookout was Thron, the youngest and lightest of the ship's boys.
'Look at that, sir!' he said, pointing at the sweep of the beach beyond the breakwater. Tomis boasted two galley beaches, one each side of a rocky headland. They could only see the northern beach.
There were three triremes on the beach and a fourth warship floated at a mooring in the broad curve of the bay. He was the Golden Lotus.
'Kalos! Get the sails off him! Now!' Satyrus called from the lookout.
'Aye, sir!' Kalos called back, and bare feet slapped the decks as the deck crew ran to their stations.
'Good eye, boy,' Satyrus said. He pointed at the deck. 'A silver owl for you when your watch is over.'
'For me?' Thron beamed.
Satyrus ignored his hero-worship and dropped to the deck.
Diokles was already turning them out to sea. 'What's up?' he asked.
'Golden Lotus is in the roadstead,' Satyrus said. He looked around. 'All officers!' he called.
Neiron was getting the rowers to their benches. He waved.
Kalos had the telltale sails down. An observer on the beach would have only bare poles to look for against the sunset now. He came aft, pausing to curse a deckhand who was sloppy in his folding of the precious sail.
Apollodorus, another survivor of Gaza, came forward from the bow. Unarmoured, he was magnificently muscled, though short. A very tough man, indeed. With Abraham gone, he was the phylarch of their marines.
Satyrus pointed at the harbour. 'Leon might have come here,' he said.
'Can't be Leon,' Theron said. 'He had ten ships around him when we escaped. He was taken.'
'We escaped,' Satyrus said.
'He didn't,' Theron insisted.
'No chance at all?' Satyrus asked, which quieted them. 'Tomis is a friendly port. If those are Eumeles' ships, he's an idiot, or his navarch is. And we have a hull packed with oarsmen trained to fight. But – if that's Leon, we'll look like fools and possibly kill some of our friends. We need to know.'
Kalos shrugged. 'Sail in, lay alongside and put our knives to their throats. If it's friends, we say we're sorry and let them buy us some wine.'
'That's why you're not a navarch,' Neiron said, rubbing the back of his head. 'I agree with the master. We need to know.'
Theron nodded slowly. 'I agree.'
Satyrus nodded. 'Good. I'll go.'
Theron shook his head. 'Don't be foolish, lad.'
Satyrus turned and looked at his former athletics coach. 'I am not a lad, and I am not foolish, Theron. We'll talk of this another time.' He spoke carefully, without anger as best he could manage. Time to stake out some new ground with all of them, he decided. 'I have guest-friendships here. I am young, and I can swim, and I'm mostly unwounded.'
'Let Diokles go, or one of the boys,' Theron said. He was clearly stung by his former student's rebuke. 'Your arm is bad.'
'I've had worse,' Satyrus said.
'Bullshit, boy.' Theron stepped forward.
'Watch yourself, sir. I am not your pupil here. I am your commander. And I am not boy to you. Understand?' He turned.
'Very well, sir.' Theron was angry. 'Send Diokles!'
'Diokles is my first officer, but he lacks the social distinctions that will protect me,' Satyrus said.
'Which is a nice way of saying that they could just pick me up and make me row, if they was hostile,' Diokles said.
'If they capture you, you won't live an hour,' Theron said.
'The price of glory,' Satyrus said. 'I'm going. Diokles, lay me ashore just north of the headland. Go up the coast, get a meal in the oarsmen and come back for me tomorrow night. Off and on until the moon rises. If you see three fires on the beach, come in and fetch me off. If there are just two fires, I'm taken and it's a trap. No fires – well, I'm not there. Clear?'
Theron shook his head. 'I'm against it.'
Theron was a gentleman and a famous athlete, and the rest of them were plain sailormen. None of them spoke up, either way. Satyrus looked at his former coach. 'Your reservations are noted,' Satyrus said, a phrase of Leon's that leaped to his mind and sounded much more adult than fuck off.
Theron's face darkened, but over his shoulder, Diokles grinned and then turned away to hide it. The water was cold – winter was less than two feasts away and the Euxine was already more like the Styx than seemed quite right. Satyrus went over the side less than a stade from the shore, his leather bag and sword belt and all his clothing inside a pig's bladder, which he tried to keep over his head as he swam with a spear in his left hand. The distance was short, but the first shock took the breath from his lungs, and he was labouring by the time his feet brushed the gravel of the beach, his arm burning like fire from the salt and the exertion. He lay on the shingle, panting, for a minute before he got up, brushed the sea-wrack off his body and got dressed. Water had penetrated the bladder and his wool chiton was wet, and so was his chlamys – but they were good wool, and he was warmer by the time he pulled the sword belt over his head, set his bag on his shoulder, picked up his hunting spear and loped over the dune and on to the road.
There were farms on either hand, their vines along the road and their barley fields stretching away in autumnal desolation, interspersed with scraggly olive trees and heavy apple trees. Even as Satyrus watched the fields, he saw a slave propping a branch that was heavy with fruit.
Satyrus jogged along the road behind the dune until he came even with the slave. The man was quite old.
'Good evening!' Satyrus called out.
The slave turned, looked at him and went back to cutting a prop.
'How far to Tomis?' Satyrus asked.
The old man looked up, clearly annoyed. He pointed down the road. 'Not far enough,' he said.
Satyrus had to laugh at that. He set off again, running a couple of stades to where the road turned as it rounded a low headland and the farms fell away because the soil was so poor. Olive trees on terraces climbed beside the road, and just past the turn, a big rabbit perused a selection of wild fennel in the sunset. Satyrus put his spear through the animal and gutted it on the spot, and he ran on with a prayer to Artemis on his lips and the rabbit dangling from his lonche.
A few stades further on, he found an apple orchard full of men and women picking in the last light. Satyrus smiled at two women who were sharing a water bottle by the road, and they lowered their eyes and retreated towards the trees.
'How far into Tomis?' he called.
The younger maiden shook her head and kept backing up. The elder stopped well out of his reach and shrugged. 'Around the headland, you see her,' she said in Bastarnae-accented Greek.
A man came up from the apple trees, holding a spear. 'Greetings, stranger,' he called from a good distance.
Satyrus bowed. 'I am Satyrus,' he said.
'Talkes,' the man said. He was wary, but he eyed the rabbit greedily. 'You were hunting, sir?'
'I was lucky,' Satyrus said. 'I'm looking for friends. Where can I find Calchus the Athenian? Or Isokles, son of Isocrates?'
'You are in luck,' the man said. 'My pardon, sir. My mistress is Penelope, daughter of Isokles.'
'Does she reside on this farm?' Satyrus asked. He vaguely remembered that Isokles had a daughter. She'd be twice his age. Married – to Calchus's son Leander. Or so he seemed to recall.
'Not safe in town just now,' the man said quietly. 'If you hadn't come up so quiet, we'd have been gone ourselves – we're supposed to flee armed men. She'll be at the farmhouse. If you tell me your errand, I'll approach her.'
'I'd rather tell her myself,' Satyrus said.
Talkes shook his head. 'No, sir. These are hard times round here. No one is getting near my mistress 'less she says.' Talkes held a spear like a man who regarded the weapon as an old friend, the partner of many a day in the field. A dangerous man.
Satyrus nodded. 'Very well. Tell your mistress that I am Satyrus, and my father was Kineas, and I am a guest-friend of her father's, and I crave her hospitality.' Satyrus sighed for the foolishness of it – if any of these slaves talked, he could be taken very easily. 'Do you know who has those boats on the beach in town?'
'They're the king's. Not our satrap – not old Lysimachos. They belong to the new king. Eumeles.' Talkes shook his head. 'Killed some men from the militia yesterday morning in a fight on the beach. Killed mistress's father, too. Burned some farms. Thought you might be one of them. Still not sure, mind. Teax, get back to the house, now. Tell mistress about the stranger. I'll wait here.' The man looked at him, tilting his head. 'You are Satyrus, then? The one the soldiers are looking for?' Talkes turned. 'Run, girl!'
The woman so addressed – the younger one – vanished like a foal from a spring hunt, pulling her heavy wool chiton up her legs and running as fast as an athlete.
'I have some wine I could share,' Satyrus offered.
'Keep it,' Talkes said. 'The rest of you, back to work.' Talkes backed away and lowered his spear, and he stood in the shadow of an old apple tree, watching his labourers and Satyrus by turns.
Satyrus thought that he probably knew everything he needed to know. But curiosity held him. He drank a mouthful of his own wine and hunkered down on his haunches to wait.
'I'd have a swallow of that now, if you was to offer again, stranger.' Talkes took a hesitant step closer.
Satyrus nodded. He put the stopper back in his flask and set it on the ground. Then he picked up his spear, rabbit and all, and stepped well clear. 'Be my guest.'
Talkes sidled up to the canteen carefully, as if afraid it might be a dangerous animal. But he took a swallow and smiled.
'You're a gent, and no mistake,' he said. 'Mind you, you could still be one of the tyrant's men,' he added, and took another swallow. He grinned, and went back to watching his workers.
Satyrus had another swallow of his wine. 'How long have they been here?' he asked.
'Four days,' Talkes responded.
Three weeks and more since the sea battle. Plenty of time for Eumeles to refit a captured ship and sail it here – especially as fine a ship as Golden Lotus.
'Mistress says bring him to t'house,' Teax said from the near darkness. 'Say he guest-friend.'
The walk to the house was tense, at best, and Satyrus felt as if Talkes' spear was never far from his throat. They climbed the rest of the hill and went down the other side. The house was dark, but up close, Satyrus could see that the shutters were tight on every window.
'Spear and sword, young master,' Talkes said at the door.
Satyrus considered refusing, but it seemed pointless. He handed over his weapons and was ushered inside. 'My rabbit is a guest gift,' he said.
'I'll send her to cook, then,' the Bastarnae man said. 'Mistress is this way.'
The house wasn't big enough to be lost in, but Satyrus followed Talkes as if he was in Ptolemy's palace in Alexandria, and soon he was standing before a heavily draped woman in a chair, sitting with a drop spindle in her hand and three oil lamps. She smelled a little of roses, and a little of stale wine. Satyrus couldn't help but notice how bare the house was – all the furnishings he could see were home-made.
'You are really Kineas's son?' she asked without raising her head.
Satyrus nodded. 'I am,' he said.
The lady choked a sob. 'They killed my father two days ago,' she said. 'He would have loved to have seen you.' She raised her head and mastered herself. 'How may I serve you?' she asked.
'I would like to claim guest-friendship of your house,' Satyrus said.
'My house has fallen on hard times,' she answered. 'Rumour says you are a great captain in the army of the lord of Aegypt? How do you come to my door with a rabbit on your spear? Eumeles' captains are searching for you.'
Satyrus decided he would not lie to this gentle, grey-eyed woman, despite her faint smell of old wine. 'I tried to take my father's kingdom back from Eumeles of Pantecapaeum. I failed and nearly lost my life and my ship.'
She rose, placing her spindles – carved ivory, better than most of the other objects in the room – in an ash basket full of wool. 'They know all about you, Satyrus. You will not survive staying here. They killed my father for being your friend, and Calchus is next, if they catch him. If I keep you, they'll come here and kill us.' She shrugged. 'But I am an obedient daughter and I will not refuse you. Perhaps it would be better for me to end that way.'
'Hide me overnight, and I will avenge your father at nightfall,' Satyrus said. 'I will not be your death.'
She came out of an unlit corner with a cup in her hand. 'I am Penelope,' she said. 'Here is the cup of welcome. No one here will betray you. I welcome you for the sake of your father, the first man I ever looked on with a woman's eyes. He might have wed me.'
'He wed my mother, the queen of the Sakje,' Satyrus said. He drank from the cup. There was cheese in it, and barley, and it went down well. He could smell the rabbit cooking.
'It is better to have a queen as a rival than another woman, I suppose,' Penelope said. 'At any rate, your father never promised, and he never returned.'
'And did you marry?' Satyrus asked, after a pause.
'Do I look like a maiden?' she laughed, and her laugh was angry. 'I married Calchus's youngest son.' Her bitterness was obvious. 'No queen for a rival there!' she said, and snorted.
Satyrus lacked the experience to know how to pass the subject over. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
She raised her head and glared at him. 'Spare me your pity, boy.' Then she shook her head. 'How do you plan to avenge us? And what makes you think that more killing will make this better?'
Satyrus drank his wine to cover his confusion. Finally, he shrugged. 'I have a ship,' he said. 'I will clear them out of the town.'
She nodded. 'The satrap will be here any day, and then Eumeles will find himself in a war. Best stay clear of it, Satyrus son of Kineas.'
Satyrus shook his head. 'Who commands them?'
Penelope shook her head. 'I could find out, I suppose.' She smiled, then raised her eyes and gave an odd smile that seemed to catch only half her face. 'When you let yourself die, it is often hard to bring yourself back to life,' she said. And then, 'Never mind. Pay me no heed. I'm a bitter old woman, and might have been your mother.'
'You aren't old,' Satyrus said, gallantly. Indeed, under the heavy folds of her drapery, she was no less attractive than Auntie Sappho – and that was saying something.
'Hmm,' she said softly. 'I had forgotten the taste of flattery.'
'Dinner, mistress,' Talkes said from the doorway. Dinner was simple. His rabbit vanished into a stew made of barley and some late-season tubers, with good, plain bread and a harsh local wine. The slaves – or servants, he couldn't tell – ate at the same table as their mistress, a big, dark table worn to a finish like the black glaze of the Athens potters.
He ate and ate. The stew grew on him; he'd been eating whatever his mess cooked up on various beaches for weeks. The wine was acidic, but hardy. The bread was excellent.
'My compliments to your cook,' Satyrus said.
The four Bastarnae girls all tittered among themselves.
'You will stay the night?' Penelope asked.
'Yes, despoina,' Satyrus answered.
'Do not, on any account, try to have sex with my girls. Teax is young enough, and silly enough, to warm your bed – but I can't afford to lose her or feed her baby. Understand, young sir?' Penelope's hard voice was a far cry from her apparent weakness earlier. Satyrus concluded she was a different woman in front of her staff. A commander.
'Yes, despoina,' Satyrus said.
Penelope raised an eyebrow. 'You are a most courteous guest, to obey the whims of an old woman.'
Satyrus went back to eating his soup. Talkes, the overseer, watched every move he made.
Satyrus was just reaching for a third helping of stew when there was a rattle at the gate of the yard.
'Open up in there.' The voice was sing-song, as if a clown or a mime was demanding entry.
Talkes looked at his mistress.
Penelope stood up and looked at Satyrus. 'I'll hide you,' she said. It was a simple statement of fact. She took his hand and led him up into the exedra. She opened a heavy wooden chest and pulled out a quilted wool mattress, which she shook out and placed on her bed. She had his sword, and she handed it to him.
'Get in,' she said.
'I could-' he began.
'You could get us all killed. Now get in.' She held the lid and he climbed in, clutching his sword between his hands. He just fitted, with his ankles pulled almost under his head. The position hurt, and it hurt even more a few minutes later, when the screams in the courtyard began. The next hour was the longest, and worst, of Satyrus's life. His curse was that he could hear everything. He heard the men in the courtyard, the mime's voice mocking Penelope, the soldiers spreading out to search, the sounds of breaking crockery. He heard himself betrayed by the old slave up the road, and by the blood and offal he'd left cleaning the rabbit.
He heard the clown voice threaten Talkes, and he heard the same voice threaten to sell Penelope into slavery.
'Or I could give you what your father got, stupid woman. Where is he? Where is he?' The man sounded honestly angry.
'Do as you will,' Penelope said. 'When Lysimachos comes, you are a dead man.'
'All you dirt farmers sound the same sad song. Look, slut, your precious satrap is not coming. I'm lord here now. Eumeles is king of the Euxine and I'll be archon here. Want me to burn the house? Tell me where this man is.' The sing-song voice sounded unnatural, like a priest or an oracle.
'Nothing in the barns!' shouted another man, deeper voiced.
'Search the upstairs – the exedra. Slash every mattress and dump the loom. Everything!' clown-voice said.
'Two slave girls in the cellar. No men.' Another deep voice, this with the accent of the Getae.
'Let's see 'em!' came a shout, and then there were hoots, catcalls. More broken crockery and the sound of screams, and two men were in the exedra with him, searching. He could hear them poking around, he could smell the results as they broke a perfume jar. And below, he could hear Teax being raped – catcalls, sobs.
'May all of you rot from inside! May pigs eat your eyes!' Penelope screamed.
'Shut up, bitch, or you'll be next.' A laugh, and more laughing.
'I want a piece of that,' said a voice near his box.
His knees burned like fire and his sense of his own cowardice rose like the fumes of wine to fill his head. If I were worth a shit, I would rise from this box and kill my way through these men or die trying, he thought. He clutched his borrowed sword, prepared to kill the man who opened the chest.
'Athena's curse on you, man with the voice of a woman!' Penelope's voice, strained with rage and terror, carried clearly. 'May your innards rot. May you never know the love of a woman. May jackals root in your innards while you still have eyes to see. May worms eat your eyes. May all your children die before you.'
Teax screamed again.
'Why are we up here? The fucker's long gone – if he was ever here.' The deeper voice kicked the box where Satyrus lay.
Penelope screamed.
'Burn it,' clown-voice said in the courtyard. 'Kill them all. Stupid fucking peasants.'
They lit the roof, but the beams never caught, and Satyrus crept from his box and dragged himself, his legs unusable, down the stairs to the courtyard, heedless of the danger. But poor as they were at arson, they were skilled at killing. Penelope lay in a black pool of blood, so fresh that it glittered in the fitful light of the burning roof, and Teax lay naked. The look on her face – the horror, the terror, the loss of hope – burned itself into his brain. He closed her eyes, fouling his legs with her blood, and he threw his good wool chlamys over her.
Talkes was still alive. Someone had rammed a spear right through his guts, but he was alive when Satyrus found him.
'Killed!' Talkes said. 'All killed!' His eyes met Satyrus. 'You lived.'
Satyrus nodded. 'I did,' he said, feeling wretched.
Talkes nodded. 'I – want to live, too.' He nodded again, and died.
Satyrus thought of burying them all, or putting their bodies in the farmhouse and burning it. Both were gestures he couldn't afford. When his legs would function, he gathered his spear from the entry way and ran off across the orchards towards the coast. Inside his head, he was walling himself off from the image of Teax. He'd done it before, with the girl he'd killed by the Tanais River, with the feeling that he'd abandoned Philokles to die at Gaza. He knew just how to push that image down to concentrate his fear and his hate on one end.
Revenge.