Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities
“Before he was fully awake, Demetrios had his fleet on the water and the Rhodians, warned by their sentries, manned their machines and heated their missiles.Demetrios’ ships had wet hides across their bows and decks, and they came on boldly into a withering fire. Their boldness was misplaced. Three handspans of red-hot iron with a barbed tip cares nothing for a sodden bull’s hide. Sailors wrestled with the red-hot shafts, trying to prise them loose, and the town’s mercenary archers and all the archers from sixty Rhodian triremes – hundreds of men – shot shaft after shaft across the harbour into the sailors and the harbour began to fill with corpses, the way dead flies can litter the surface of a bucket of wine in the sun.After an hour, the engine-ships had fired three times, and found the range. A hail of stones fell on the sea wall, just two streets to the south from Abraham’s house, hammering the half-built wall down on its underpinnings. Dried mud bricks vanished in puffs of mud-smo...ke, and stones cracked under the onslaught, and the facing broke and broke again.At the centre of the maelstrom a breach was opened, fifty paces wide.But Demetrios’ ships could not stand the counter-battery of heated missiles, fire arrows, javelins – anything that could be thrown or shot across the harbour.MoreLess
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