Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities by Christian Cameron Page A

Euxine and the current moving them briskly south and west towards Byzantium, which was stades away on the far bank.
    Satyrus and Diokles had fought an entire season in these waters. They knew the tides, which were shallow, and the Dardanelles, which were as treacherous as the pirates who infested them.
    ‘Regrets?’ Neiron asked Satyrus.
    ‘Pah,’ Satyrus answered. He wasn’t sure what he thought of the new priest and his confident assertion of victory. It seemed like hubris.
    An hour later, and the lookouts told him that Timaea was in sight. He climbed the foremast and peered into the gloom and saw lights, but they might have been any of the fishing villages, Thracian and Greek, or pirate havens that flourished along this coast.
    Was it really possible that Dekas had left twenty ships in Timaea and that they wouldn’t even keep a watch? Or was it a trap? It would have to have been a very elaborate trap, counting on his headstrong ways.
    Satyrus began to drum on the weather rail as he contemplated all the ways his risk – his rather colossal risk – might fail.
    ‘They’ll hear you in Timaea,’ Neiron called. ‘Relax, lord.’
    Another hour, and they were under oars, ghosting along a stade from the muddy banks of the strait, and it was obvious to every man aboard that the harbour of Timaea was crowded with ships. More than twenty ships, and at least fifteen more pulled up on the beach. There were merchant ships anchored out at the wharves, and beached so that they tipped to lie on their high, round sides.
    Satyrus blew on his cold hands and leaned over the fighting platform that sat above the huge ram of his Arête .
    ‘I count forty-four warships,’ said the lookout as quietly as he could manage.
    Neiron made a sound with his tongue behind Satyrus, who gave a low whistle.
    Satyrus was silent for fifty agonising heartbeats, during which he lived, and died, a dozen different ways. He made a decision, then another, and then another. Then he took a deep breath.
    Satyrus caught the glint of Neiron’s eye in the dark. ‘Do it,’ he said.
    Neiron’s eyes said that he agreed. He turned to Helios. ‘Light the rest of the lanterns,’ he said. ‘On my command – battle speed.’
    There was a growl from the oar deck. Satyrus rose from his position in the bow and stretched to counter the sudden pain in his legs – too long in one position, and insufficient exercise the last three days. A private smile came to his face. Plenty of exercise in the next hour, either way.
    He went aft to the base of the mainmast and dropped through the deck to the cramped oar deck below. He had to stoop to move, and the cross braces that supported the main deck made him crouch to pass under them. Even on a cool spring evening, the top oar deck was stuffy and warm. In high summer, in action, it would be unbearable. And it was the coolest and draughtiest of the three oar decks. The top deck was just leaning into the stroke, and men grunted or swore or chatted – a fair amount of noise, but nothing that would keep them from hearing the oar master or the rattle of the oar pace.
    ‘Evening, friends,’ Satyrus said. He walked down the central catwalk that passed between the benches. A sixer like Arête had three decks of rowers, with two men on every one of one hundred and seventy oars. The oarsmen in the top deck had a boxlike outrigger to give them more leverage and stability for their stroke, and to make more room for the lower-deck oarsmen, the zygites and the bottom-deck thalamites . Only the upper oar deck had room for a catwalk.
    The lower-deck rowers completed their pulls and their arms moved, hundreds of men rolling forward, sliding on their oiled leather cushions to get the most out of their muscles. These were highly trained oarsmen, just getting into top condition from a row down the Euxine. The top-deck oarsmen rested, their oars crossed in front of them so that Satyrus could barely see the end of the deck in the near