Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities by Christian Cameron

Author:Christian Cameron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Orion Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

DAY TWO

When Satyrus awoke, every muscle in his body hurt. But for the first time in months, he awoke to the sun on his own time, without interruption, and he felt like rising. He threw off his blankets and rose, stretched, rubbed his shoulders and walked across to the windows that gave on to the harbour.

He could see right down the coast to the south. He could see fires flickering in the distance, towards Afandhi, and there were columns of smoke across the horizon. Satyrus walked out onto his balcony to have a better view, and then, thinking better of it, he climbed the ladder – not without pain – to the roof of his room, from which he had a panoramic view of the city.

Demetrios had already begun to fortify his camp. He was a very active commander – Satyrus already knew that, but if he’d needed more evidence, it was provided by the fact that in the first light of dawn, Demetrios’ whole cavalry force was in the field, well forward, almost within bowshot of the city, and behind them, covered by the armoured cavalry. Bands of men were cutting down every olive grove on the north end of the island, piling the trees and sending them by sledge to the camp, where other work parties were sharpening the branches and making them into a giant abatises, a sort of bramble entanglement that would surround the camp as a first line of defence. Within the abatises, as tiny as ants, more men dug into the loose soil and the rock under it with picks, and still more men wove giant baskets to hold the sand and soil, and yet more men filled those baskets with shovels, so that a line of earthworks reinforced by baskets made of olive rose over the ditch inside the felled trees.

The pace of the work, man for man, was agonisingly slow, as the soil was virtually non-existent over the rock. But taken as a whole, the pace was staggering – Demetrios must have enslaved the entire farm population of the island overnight, and his work parties would have his ships enclosed in a wall in two or three days.

But despite the activity of the men around the camp – the thousands of men around the camp – what drew Satyrus’ professional eye was the activity on the distant beach. He looked and looked, and couldn’t decide what he was seeing.

It dawned on him that he’d been on the roof for some time, and that he’d heard something—

‘Satyrus!’ came a call from below. It struck him that someone had been calling his name for a while.

‘Up here,’ he said.

Aspasia came out onto the balcony beneath him, a long Persian robe over her shoulders and her grey hair unbound on her back. ‘You frightened me, idiot boy. I thought you’d run off again.’ She motioned. ‘Come and have your medicine. Gracious gods, boy, you are naked.’

With some chagrin, Satyrus realised that he was, indeed, naked.

‘I’ve seen it all before,’ Aspasia said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.