Funeral Games (18 page)

‘Charge him yourself, you ball-less fucking Athenian!’ a gruff voice called out. ‘You, warrior. We offer you life. Take it and go free.’

‘Come here and die,’ Philokles said. ‘I’m killing your wounded.’ From the sounds, he was doing just that. ‘Who’s the little fuck in the fancy helmet? Anyone you liked?’

‘Fuck you! Leave him—’

‘Too late. Dead now. This big mule—’

‘Fuck YOU!’ the Athenian voice screamed. There was a rush of feet, and then an impact like stone on stone. There were two men on Philokles.

This was the longest exchange so far. Philokles and the two enemies hammered at each other for five blows - ten blows, and Satyrus stabbed repeatedly at the other men’s feet, but they were fast and had foot-guards on their sandals. Finally, gruff-voice swore and ducked back - but the smaller man forced Philokles back in a flurry of blows. The Spartan was tiring.

Then the smaller man put his shield over one of the bodies, hoisted the man, took a blow from Philokles on his own blade and backed up a step. Philokles hammered his shield. Satyrus lunged at his lower leg and was defeated by a heavy bronze greave. The man backed away again. ‘Archer!’ he roared.

‘Anyone else?’ Philokles said. ‘I’ll come and get you, then.’

‘Archer!’ the Athenian screamed again.

‘Fuck this!’ the gruff voice said, and there was the sound of feet moving away.

‘Stand your ground!’ the commander ordered. ‘You - shoot him!’

‘Drop,’ said Melitta’s voice.

Satyrus didn’t have far to drop, so he obeyed.

He heard the buzz of an arrow like a drone flying fast, and it hit armour like a hammer on a gourd.

There was a thin scream, and from his new vantage point back on the floor, Satyrus could see a pair of feet in expensive sandals, stumbling. Then, by the light of the courtyard torches, he caught sight of the man - a livid scar across his face. He was lifting another big man over his shoulder, weaving and then gone into the garden.

‘Nice shot, Melitta,’ Philokles said. The words were sane enough, but the voice the dead timbre of a madman - but a sober madman. Fighting had burned the wine out of Philokles. ‘In the dark, too.’

Satyrus had a hand on Theron. ‘Theron’s alive,’ he said. Then, ‘That was the same man we saw on the plains south of the Tanais. Scar-face.’

‘Stand your ground,’ Philokles said. ‘We’re not done yet.’ He sank to one knee. ‘Scar-face tagged me in the shin. Good swordsman.’ He coughed and stood back up.

Melitta took her brother’s hand and helped him to his feet. She had her bow in her hand.

‘There’s fighting by the gate,’ Philokles explained. ‘More fighting.’

They could hear it, and the screams of the wounded. Satyrus took a deep breath and made himself rewrap the Thracian cloak around his arm. Then he stepped forward until he was abreast of Philokles.

‘Here I am,’ he said. Although all his Ms sounded like Bs. Like scar-face.

‘Good boy,’ Philokles said. ‘If they come again, just keep them from wrapping my shield for as long as you can.’

Satyrus resisted the temptation to wipe his nose. Blood was still pouring down his chest.

Melitta came up close behind them. ‘I have eight arrows,’ she said. ‘That’s all I had in my room.’

‘I’m sorry I brought you here,’ Philokles said. The fighting at the gate was petering out. ‘Shall I - shall I kill you?’

Satyrus felt his knees tremble again and cursed himself. ‘No!’ he said. ‘I’ll die fighting.’

Melitta took a deep breath. ‘I think—’ she began.

‘Hold! Put down your weapons!’ came a deep voice.

Satyrus grasped his little sword tighter.

‘I have forty swords and as many archers,’ the voice said. ‘Whoever you are, I order you to put down your weapons.’

‘Zeus Soter, my lord, the fuckers have killed everyone in the place,’ said a thin, rasping voice, and suddenly there were lines of torches coming in under the colonnade. Twenty feet away, a big black man in head-to-foot bronze armour filled the colonnade, as big as Philokles. He was like a man made of bronze. He looked around quickly and caught site of the three armed people in the dead end. ‘You!’ he shouted. A line of armed men filled the colonnade in front of him with drilled rapidity.

‘Who are you?’ Philokles’ voice boomed.

‘I am Nestor of Heraklea, the commander of the guard. Put down your weapons or die.’

‘I am Philokles of Sparta, and these are the children of Kineas and Srayanka of Tanais,’ he said.

‘Let me see! Let me through there,’ the captain said. He stepped out of the line and peered at them. ‘Ares, Spartan! You must be quite the spearman. So they didn’t get past you, eh?’ He stepped forward. ‘Ground your weapons, all of you. My orders are to take you to the tyrant if you live.’

Philokles swept out an arm and pushed both of the twins behind him.

Melitta sobbed. ‘Kill me,’ she said. ‘I’m too scared to do it myself.
I won’t be a slave!
’

Nestor heard her. ‘No, lady! Stop!’ He held up his hand, and the line of his soldiers paused. ‘We did not do this. A rumour came to us that you were to be attacked tonight. We came in time. I have two dead men in the yard. You may live, lady - I give my word, I bring you no harm but my master’s orders.’

Satyrus stood, naked, covered in blood, and afraid. He looked at Philokles, and Philokles shook his head.

‘I cannot make this choice,’ he said. ‘I can kill men, and discuss philosophy, but I cannot choose. It may be as he says. It may be that you will leave this place to be a slave.’

Satyrus reached back and grabbed his sister’s blood-slick shoulder. ‘There’s no logic in it, Lita. The tyrant doesn’t need us dead.’

‘You wager my life in a brothel?’ she asked. ‘And your own?’

A dying man gave a long moan.

‘We retain our arms,’ Satyrus called out, his thin voice cracking as he called. ‘None of you comes within a sword cut of us.’

Nestor shrugged. ‘If that’s what it has to be, my lord.’

Satyrus’s eyes met Melitta’s.

His eyes said,
I want to live.

So did hers.

‘Not if the price is too high,’ she said out loud.

‘I think we can do this,’ he whispered. ‘If not - I’ll try to kill us.’

Satyrus stepped past Philokles, from the dark into the torchlight. There were bodies everywhere, and the torchlight wasn’t kind. It was worse than the end of
Orestes
. ‘I am Satyrus of Tanais,’ he said. He bent and wiped his blade on the cloth of a dead man.

Nestor bowed. ‘My lord. Will you - Ares, you’re a child. Someone get a cloth!’

 

The worst of it was that everyone else was dead. Zosimos lay by the gate, hacked down with a heavy blade so that his head was askew from his trunk. Kinon had died in his bed, but he’d been pinned in his sheets and then hacked to pieces. Satyrus didn’t see the steward’s body, but he saw the blood trickling down the steps of the slave quarters like water from a spring, and he finally lost it, spewing tuna steak and barley bread into the blood while some foreign soldier held his head.

If the tyrant’s guard wanted to enslave him, he wasn’t doing much to resist.

‘There, laddy,’ the soldier said. ‘Gives me the fucking willies. Poor boy.’ He was patted on the head.

‘Let go of my brother or I’ll cut your hand off,’ Melitta said. She was standing alone in a circle of soldiers, naked and covered in blood, with her akinakes in her hand. Philokles was sitting on a step, drinking wine from a skin.

‘Hermes, girl! I’m helping him!’ The soldier stepped back. ‘Fucking Medea come to life.’

‘Get her a dress,’ Nestor said.

‘I found another live one,’ a third soldier said. He produced Kallista. She was shrieking with sobs, uncontrolled, unacted, her fists pummelling at the man who held her. She was not beautiful. She looked like the embodiment of fury.

Nestor addressed himself to Satyrus. ‘May I get you some - never mind. Listen, boy. We’re walking away from this. I’m taking you to the citadel. Can you hear me?’

Satyrus straightened his back. ‘Something I have to do first,’ he said. He walked over to the crowd of corpses where the tyrant’s guard had stormed the gate. ‘A torch, please.’

One of the guardsmen gave him a torch. He held it high, looking for a man with a scarred face. He didn’t find one.

‘Some of them got away,’ Satyrus said.

Nestor shrugged. ‘Not unless they can fly,’ he said.

‘Have you searched the whole house?’ Satyrus asked.

Nestor shrugged. ‘My orders are to bring you along. We’ll search tomorrow.’

Satyrus was too tired to argue. ‘Lead on,’ he said. He held out a hand to Philokles, who got unsteadily to his feet.

They walked through the courtyard paved in corpses, out of the gate, where a thin trickle of liquid splashed out into the street’s gutter and shone red in torchlight.

‘Do you need to be carried?’ Nestor asked Satyrus.

‘No, I can walk,’ he heard himself say, as if from a distance. ‘Be careful of my sister.’

‘No man would touch your sister,’ Nestor said.

Somehow, they walked the stade along the twisting city streets, passing twice through the walls until they came to the citadel gate. Nestor gave the password and sentries grounded their spears, the butt-spikes clashing on paving stones, and then they were inside. There were paintings on the walls, and the floors were heated, and slaves appeared with bowls of water as if from the air.

And then they were in a chamber as big as a rich man’s house. On the dais sat the fattest man he’d ever seen, a man as broad as he was tall. He had a shock of blond hair that stood straight up, and his eyes burned with intelligence under heavy brows.

‘Welcome,’ he said.

The twins were ushered to the space in front of him, and Kallista was brought to stand with them. She was utterly silent, her beauty extinguished in grief. Melitta was naked except for a soldier’s cloak, and her feet glistened with blood. Satyrus was conscious of his nudity. The Thracian cloak was still around his shoulders and over his left hand. At some point he had sheathed his blade, but his hand rested on the hilt. His right ankle ached. More than ached. His face throbbed, and his nose led the chorus of pain.

Philokles loomed behind him, still carrying an aspis and a sword.

The tyrant waved at a slave. ‘Get my doctor,’ he said. To Philokles he said, ‘You are the first armed men to enter my presence in a generation. ’>

Philokles seemed to be speaking from very far away. ‘I think we can accept the tyrant’s good intentions, Satyrus. Satyrus?’

Satyrus’s eyes were resting on the face of another child, or perhaps a young woman, whose head peeked out from behind a curtain just beyond the dais. Her face was like that of a Nereid, with an upturned nose and freckles and a cloud of dark curls. Their eyes met. Having faced death and survived, Satyrus had the courage to smile at the Nereid. She smiled back.

‘Satyrus?’ Philokles sounded gravely concerned.

‘Get my doctor!’ the tyrant said.

Standing there with a smile on his face, Satyrus became conscious that he was wounded. His ankle hurt, and there was blood coming off his shin, a moist sweat on the arch of his foot. When he looked down, it came in little spurts that sparkled in the lamp light. He watched it for a moment, and then he was gone.

 

Melitta thought that the worst part of the whole night was waiting to see if her brother would die. It was clear from the attentions of the guards and the slaves that the tyrant had no ill intentions, and so his wound became her whole focus. She refused sleep, drank some watered wine and watched Sophokles, the Athenian surgeon, bandage his foot after giving him something that slowed, but did not stop, the bleeding.

Melitta didn’t like the doctor. And, having heard what she had heard in the fight, she distrusted all Athenians.

When he was done wrapping the bandage, the man got to his feet. He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘Will he—?’ she asked.

‘It is with the fates and the gods,’ he said. He turned to a slave - there were four of them in the alcoves at the end of the room. The tyrant seemed to have a great many. ‘Get me wine, and poppy juice,’ he said. To Melitta, he said, ‘You should sleep. I will give you poppy, and you will have rich dreams.’

She stepped back from him. ‘I wouldn’t accept it,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here until he awakes.’

‘He has lost a great deal of blood, girl. He won’t awake for a while - indeed, he’ll sleep for hours. Or - he’ll die.’ The Athenian doctor shook his head.

‘I can wait,’ she said.

He put on a voice he must save for women and idiots. ‘Listen, honey,’ he said, putting an arm on her shoulder. ‘You can’t affect the outcome. You need to sleep. A little girl like you—’

She rolled out from under his hand and backed against her brother’s couch. ‘I’ve lost my mother and my kingdom and people are trying to kill me and my brother and I think I’ll just stay awake beside him,’ she said.

‘Don’t make me—’ he began.

She pulled her knife out of its sheath under her arm. She adopted the stance that Philokles and Theron had been teaching her - left arm out, knife hand close to the body and low.

‘You’re deranged,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Perhaps,’ she said.

The doctor affected patience. ‘Don’t make me wake your guardian, girl. He’ll be quite angry.’

Melitta met his eyes steadily. ‘Theron? Call him.’ She was too tired to be afraid. ‘Better yet, why don’t you go and see to Philokles?’

‘Theron? The man with the blow to the head? He’ll be fine.’ The doctor was impatient. ‘Girl, you are interfering with my work.’

She stood aside, the knife held firmly. ‘Be my guest,’ she said. ‘I’ll just watch.’