Free Tyrant: King of the Bosporus by Christian Cameron Page A

quietly.
    Recognition glittered in Sappho’s fire-lit face. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘How blind of me not to have seen it. Curse her.’
    Melitta clasped her aunt more closely. ‘We don’t
know
. But why else is she here?’ Then she choked on a sob. ‘Take care of him for me!’ she said, unwilling at the last to leave her son.
    Before she left, she went and held him again, though she’d promised herself that she would not. While she held him, Hama emerged from the darkness behind Phiale. He had a whispered exchange with Sappho and vanished into the mansion.
    ‘She won’t leave us for a while,’ Sappho said with satisfaction. ‘With a little luck, she can shit her treason out.’ She showed her niece a papyrus packet of orange powder.
    ‘Awful if we’re wrong,’ Melitta said.
    ‘Too bad,’ Sappho said, her eyes hard. ‘Goodbye, honey bee.’
    And then they were aboard with a smell of verdigris and old fish, and the rowers picked up the beat, and they were away into the first colour of dawn.
    They made Rhodos in six days, having come up the south coast of Cyprus. Melitta had been to Rhodos with her brother, but the City of Roses remained a place of mystery and intrigue to her. The helmsman went to report at the Temple of Poseidon and Coenus accompanied him. The two men returned, scratching their beards.
    ‘The pirates are worse,’ Coenus announced to the table of officers ina comfortable wine shop on the waterfront. ‘So bad that Rhodos can no longer suppress them, and her trade is being choked. The worst of the bastards are around the town of Byzantium – in the Propontis.’
    ‘Where we are going,’ Melitta added. ‘Why do Greeks call everything the Propontis? Assagatje have real names – the Strait of Fast Water, the Strait of Horses.’
    Cardias shrugged. ‘The Thracian Bosporus divides the lands of the Thracians in Asia and Europe – and is the entrance to the Euxine. That’s the Great Propontis. The Cimmerian Bosporus divides—’
    ‘Lands that the Cimmerians don’t hold any more and the Bay of Salmon!’ she said impatiently.
    ‘That’s right.’ Cardias shook his head and looked at his master’s wife. ‘Mistress, I’m against this. Such a small ship? They’ll bottle us up in the narrows and we’ll be fishbait – and you’ll decorate a brothel.’
    Nihmu shrugged. ‘No. That will not happen.’
    Coenus shook his head. ‘Lady, I’ve seen you in action, and you are deadly sure with a bow – and so were your winged words. But you yourself said that you lost your gift of prophecy with your marriage.’
    Nihmu shrugged. ‘No pirate will touch this vessel,’ she pronounced. ‘I have seen it.’
    ‘Poseidon’s member – your pardon, ladies. Very well. Listen, the Rhodians have a convoy for the Euxine in ten days. Can we wait and sail with it?’ Cardias was pleading.
    ‘Of course!’ Nihmu said. ‘You think that because I am sure I am also foolish?’
    Coenus shook his head. ‘I remember you like this,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t missed it.’
    The convoy was ready in just eight days, and they were away, up the coast of Asia. They touched at Chios and Mytilene and then they were rowing north, right into the wind to make the mouth of the Hellespont before dark. The whole convoy passed Troy in the last light of the sun, Melitta and Coenus saying the verses to one another as the rowers carried them past the tomb of Achilles. They made the fishing town at Sigeion after dark, and suffered through the perils of camping on an open beach, lighting fires from fire pots in the dark and collecting wood from the driftwood piles at the high-water mark by touch and feel.
    Melitta sank into her sheepskins thankfully and dreamed that she had lost her son and that spirits brought her his swaddling clothes, covered in blood, and she awoke screaming with Nihmu’s arms around her.
    In the morning she arose, feeling as if she’d been beaten with a stick, to watch the men load all their