Chapter 194: Fire on the Water

Dawn came grey and cold.

The Greek fleet moved at the first light. The signal went up on Agamemnon’s flagship — a red banner, raised twice. The columns formed. Twenty ships abreast. The first wave entered the strait.

From the northern wall, Lysander watched them come.

The strait was narrow. Less than half a mile across at its tightest point. The Greek ships had to enter in columns, squeezed between the headland and the southern shore. The first ships were the most exposed. If the net held, they would be trapped. If the fire ships reached them, they would burn.

"The net," Hector said beside him.

Lysander looked at the water. The surface was calm. The current ran south through the strait — steady, predictable, the same current that Daidalos had designed the net to exploit. If a ship’s oars were fouled, the current would hold it in place. The fire ships would close in. The trapped ship would burn.

"Watch," Lysander said.

The first twenty ships entered the strait. They moved slowly — oars pulling, prows cutting the current. The lead ship was a war galley, bronze ram forward, shields lining the rails. Behind it, another. And another.

They passed the point where the net should have been.

They did not stop.

Lysander’s stomach dropped.

"They pass," Hector said.

"The net is gone."

Hector looked at him. "Gone."

"Cut. Someone cut it. The anchors are still there — the fittings are still in the rock. But the ropes are gone."

Hector’s face did not change. He turned to the harbour signalman. "Launch the fire ships. Now."

The signalman raised the red flag. Below, in the eastern bay, three vessels moved. Their crews had been sleeping beside their weapons. Now they moved — fast, practised, the crews pulling on their gear and lighting the braziers on deck. The sulfur compound was loaded. The jars were sealed. The rudders were manned.

The first fire ship cleared the bay and entered the strait. It was a coastal freight vessel, stripped of everything except the jars on its deck and the men who would steer it into the enemy. The crew had volunteered. Every one of them. They knew what they were sailing into. They sailed anyway.

Daidalos was on the second fire ship. He had insisted. The compound was his. The ships were his. The design was his. He would not send men to die on a ship he had built without being there to make sure it worked.

The third fire ship followed. Smaller. Faster. Crewed by four men who had been fishermen before the war and had learned that a fishing boat and a fire ship were the same hull with different cargo.

The three ships moved into the strait. The current helped them — flowing south, toward the Greek column, pushing them faster than oars alone.

On the Greek side, the lead ships saw them coming.

"Fire ships," a lookout shouted. The word passed from ship to ship. The column tightened. Oarsmen pulled harder. The captains tried to close the distance between their ships — tight formation meant fewer gaps for the fire ships to exploit.

The Greek archers were ready. Every ship carried bowmen. They drew. The first arrows flew.

The arrows came in a volley — a hundred shafts arcing across the strait. They struck the lead fire ship. Some hit the deck. Some hit the jars. One pierced a crewman’s shoulder. He fell. Another man took his place at the rudder.

The arrows kept coming. The Greek archers were good. They fired fast, aimed at the jars, aiming for the sulfur compound.

The first jar cracked.

The compound ignited.

The fire ship became a torch. The flames rose from the deck — blue-white from the sulfur, orange from the pitch, the heat so intense that the men on the nearest Greek ship felt it on their faces from thirty cubits away. The crew jumped. Some made it to the water. Some did not.

The burning ship drifted on the current, a mass of flame and smoke, its hull groaning as the tar-sealed planks caught fire. It moved south through the strait, past the Greek column, a floating pyre that lit the water around it.

The second fire ship was Daidalos’s.

He steered it hard to port, away from the burning wreck of the first ship. The Greek archers adjusted. Arrows hit his deck. One struck the mast. Two hit jars — but the jars held. The bronze fittings Daidalos had designed were thicker than the first ship’s. The arrows could not pierce them from distance.

Daidalos closed the distance. Fifty cubits. Forty. Thirty.

At thirty cubits, he could see the faces of the Greek rowers. They were terrified. The fire ship was bearing down on them, its deck smoking, its jars intact, and the compound inside those jars would turn their ship into a coffin.

At twenty cubits, the Greek archers fired again. Point blank. The arrows hit the jars. This time, from twenty cubits, they pierced.

The compound ignited.

Daidalos felt the heat before the flame. A wall of warmth that hit his face like an open oven. Then the flame — blue and white and hungry, climbing the mast, consuming the deck, spreading across the surface of the jars and into the air.

He jumped.

The water was cold. The current grabbed him. He swam — not south, toward the Greeks, but west, toward the Trojan shore. Behind him, the fire ship hit the nearest Greek vessel and stuck. The compound splashed onto the Greek hull. The fire spread.

The Greek ship burned.

Men screamed. Some jumped into the water. Some tried to put out the fire with buckets. The fire ate the buckets. It ate the oars. It ate the rail and the mast and the sail. The ship became a torch, drifting in the current, crashing into the ship behind it.

That ship caught fire too.

Daidalos swam. His lungs burned. The current pushed him south, toward the Greek fleet, and he fought it, pulling west with everything he had. His arms were not young. His body was not built for this. But he was Daidalos, and he had built the fire ship, and he was not going to die in the water next to the thing he had created.

A Trojan patrol boat found him. Two fishermen from Maea’s community, rowing a small skiff through the smoke. They pulled him aboard. He lay on the bottom of the boat, coughing water, his hands burned, his face black with soot.

"The third ship," he said.

"It went through," one of the fishermen said. "It hit a Greek ship. Two ships burning."

Daidalos closed his eyes. Two Greek ships burning. His fire ship had done its work. The compound had done its work. The design had been correct.

But the net had been cut. And the Greek fleet was still coming.

The third fire ship hit two vessels. The compound spread across the water between them — a burning film on the surface that clung to the hulls and would not wash off. Both ships burned. The men on them jumped into the strait and swam for their lives.

But behind the burning ships, the Greek column kept coming.

Ship after ship. Twenty abreast, then another twenty, then another. The strait was wide enough for twenty and the Greeks filled it. They rowed through the smoke, past the burning wrecks, past the men in the water, past the debris of three fire ships that had done their work and died.

Lysander watched from the wall.

Three fire ships. Two Greek ships burning. Maybe three. But the fleet behind them was a thousand strong. Three ships was nothing. Three ships was a wound. The fleet was a flood.

"They are through the strait," Hector said.

"Yes."

"The harbour is next."

"They will try to land on the northern beach. The wall is the target."

Hector turned to the wall. His men were at their positions. The kill zones were marked. The oil was hot. The logs were tied. The archers were on their platforms.

"Hold the wall," Hector said. To the section commanders. To the soldiers. To Lysander. To the city behind him. "Hold the wall."

The Greek fleet cleared the strait and entered the bay. The water was wide here — enough for the fleet to spread out, to form lines, to approach the beach in waves. The first wave was already moving.

Twenty ships. Heading for the northern beach. The soldiers on their decks were visible now — armoured, shielded, holding spears, ready to jump into the shallows and charge the slope toward the wall.

Lysander counted the ships. Twenty in the first wave. Perhaps thirty. Behind them, more. The fleet was enormous. The first wave was a test. The second wave would be the real assault.

"Archers," Hector called. "Ready."

The archers drew. Paris was on the eastern wall, his bow strung, his quiver full. Antenor was beside him. The hunters were beside Antenor. Every man who could hold a bow was on the wall.

The first ships reached the shallows. The prows ground into the sand. The soldiers jumped.

"Hold," Hector said.

The soldiers waded through the shallows. They reached the beach. They formed a rough line and began to climb the slope toward the wall.

"Archers. Loose."

The arrows flew.