Tyrant: King of the Bosporus Read Online Free PDF Page A

Satyrus watched sailors pull one down and throw him to his death in the water. Abraham accepted the surrender of another – Abraham was the only man Satyrus had ever seen accept surrender in a sea fight.
    ‘Oh, Ares!’ Satyrus said. He could just walk.
    ‘Pull!’ Neiron called, and the
Falcon
was a ship’s length clear of their enemy.
    ‘Switch your benches!’ Satyrus called. He looked aft. Diokles had an arrow through his thigh and was using the oars to keep himself erect.
    Their ram had, in fact, ripped the stern right off the green ship, andhe was settling fast, his rowers in chaos. But the enemy was trying to take Theron’s ship over the bow as a stolen life-raft. Satyrus could see Theron with his marines fighting in the bow. He was the biggest man in the fight.
    North and west, the whole enemy fleet was bearing down on their fight. The rest of their squadrons were gone. Just a stade away, a pair of golden-yellow triremes had bow waves – full ramming speed.
    ‘Diokles!’ Satyrus yelled, pointing at the new enemy.
    Diokles was already leaning on his oars, using the momentum of the backed oars to turn the bow south.
    Satyrus saw it as if a god had stepped up next to him and put the whole idea in his mind – he saw the fight and what he had to do.
    As the bow swung south, he saw more and more enemy sailors and marines flooding aboard
Herakles
.
    ‘Lay me alongside
Herakles
,’ Satyrus said.
    Diokles bit his lip and said nothing.
    Satyrus accepted his unspoken criticism and ran forward, collecting deck-crewmen with weapons as he went.
    ‘Abraham!’ he called.
    Neiron called the first stroke of the new motion. His voice was weak, but he had to hold on. Satyrus was running out of options, and he was
not
going to abandon Theron.
    Abraham was kneeling by a dying marine. The man was bleeding out and Abraham was holding his hand.
    Satyrus waited until the man’s eyes fluttered closed. Then he seized the dead man’s javelin and his sword. ‘We’re going aboard
Herakles
,’ he said.
    Abraham shook his head. ‘You’re insane,’ he said quietly.
    ‘I’m not letting Theron die when I can save him,’ Satyrus bit back.
    ‘What about the rest of us?’ Abraham asked. ‘
Punch straight through!
Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?’
    Satyrus shook his head to clear it. It seemed so obvious to him. ‘We put the green ship between us and those two,’ he said, pointing at the nearest new enemies, now just half a stade away. ‘We rescue Theron and we’re gone.’
    Abraham shrugged. He had blood leaking out of an eye – or perhaps just out of his helmet. ‘Whatever you say,
prince
.’
    The rest of the marines looked tired but hardly done in. Most of them had fought at Gaza.
    ‘On to the deck of the
Herakles
,’ Satyrus said. ‘Clear it and we’re gone. A gold rose of Rhodos to every man who follows me on to that deck.’
    Even as Satyrus spoke, Diokles had the speed to turn them back east, so that the oarsmen pulled in their oars and
Falcon
coasted alongside his stricken brother.
    Satyrus leaped on to the rail. ‘Clear the deck,’ he called, his voice breaking, but then he was over the rail of the
Herakles
and his javelin took an enemy marine in the side of the head, knocking him unconscious inside his helmet. Satyrus went straight into the next man, shield up, so that the rim of his own aspis crashed into the man’s armoured jaw and he smelled the sweat on his enemy as the man tried to turn and got a spear in his teeth from a sailor. Satyrus bore him down and pushed on into the flank of the enemy boarding force, into the unarmoured sailors who didn’t have shields and died like sacrificial animals under his borrowed blade. And when they broke, he kept killing them, cutting them down as they fled into the bow, killing them even as they jumped over the side, as if by killing these men who served his enemy he could regain his lost kingdom.
    Theron was by the mast, his back against it. He was