Read Tyrant: King of the Bosporus for Free Online

their benches to fight.
Herakles
was dead in the water.
    Why was
Herakles
cheering? Satyrus stood on his toes, then jumped up on the rail, grabbing for a stay.
    Leon’s
Golden Lotus
swept past the sinking stern of the green like an avenging sea monster and took the second golden hull right in the stern quarter, his bow ripping the enemy ship like a shark ripping a dolphin, spilling men into the water and goring his side so that he sank still rowing forward, gone in ten heartbeats, and
Lotus
swept on.
    Herakles
got his rowers together. With time to breathe, Abraham rowed clear of the sinking green and turned for the open water to the east. He had only two-thirds of his oars in action, but they were together.
    Falcon
handled badly – light as a feather, down by the stern, tending to fall off every heading. The rowers were pulling well, and he handled like a pig.
    Satyrus was staring over the stern, where
Lotus
had rammed a second ship.
    His ram was stuck.
    Even as he watched, an enemy ship got his ram into
Lotus
, and the great ship shuddered the way a lion does when he takes the first spear in a hunt.
    Satyrus ran to the stern, as if he could run over the rail and the intervening sea to his uncle’s rescue.
    ‘Nothing we can do,’ Diokles said.
    ‘Ares – Poseidon. We can do this. With Herakles, we’ll—’
    Diokles shook his head. ‘Can’t you feel it, lad? Our ram’s gone. Ripped clean off when we hit the green.’
    Satyrus felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. Leon was
so close
.
    ‘He did it for you,’ Diokles said. ‘Let’s save the ships we have and run.’
    ‘Herakles, Lord of Heroes,’ Satyrus choked on his own prayer.
    Run, boy.
    A second ram went into
Lotus
. And while he contemplated suicide in the form of rushing his ship to Leon’s rescue, the gap widened to two stades, then three. Then five. Now there were a dozen enemy ships around
Lotus
.
    ‘Run,’ he said, hanging his head.
    ‘Aye,’ Diokles said. ‘Now get yourself into the bow and set the men to plugging the gaps in the strakes, or we’re all dead men.’

ALEXANDRIA, AEGYPT, 311 BC
     
    O f all the places in the world for a woman to give birth, there weren’t many that could better Alexandria.
    Melitta lay on the special
kline
that the doctors had brought her and chewed idly on the leather strap she had for labour pains. She was covered in sweat, and her bloated body was fighting with all of its not-inconsiderable strength to push the baby out, and she still had the capacity to think about her brother, out on the wine-dark sea, conquering their kingdom while she lay on a bed conquering her pregnancy. That’s how she had come to think of it – a conquest. Nothing in her life – not war, not abduction, not the threat of assassination – had prepared her for the discomfort, the enforced idleness and the
boredom
of pregnancy.
    ‘Here they come again,’ she muttered. Her room was full of doctors and midwives – too many people, she thought. Sappho had ignored Nihmu’s advice – that Nihmu and Sappho should deliver the baby themselves.
    Wave of pain.
She bit down on the leather strap, convulsed with the thing – palpable, like lying in water, except that this was inside and outside her.
    ‘Not long now,’ the man nearest the bed said. Nearchus – Leon’s personal physician.
    Nihmu had one of her hands. ‘Breathe!’ she said in her Sakje-accented Greek. ‘He is right,’ she said with a smile that Melitta could just see through the tangle of her hair. ‘You are almost done.’
    ‘Very lucky, for such a young girl,’ another voice said.
    Wave.
    As she surfaced from the latest wave, she realized that they were right, and everything that the priestesses of Hathor and the priestessesof Hera said was true – the waves came closer and faster and lasted longer. She could no longer hold an image of her brother’s expedition in her head. There was no reality beyond the—
    Wave.
    This time, she became aware that something