Mentioning Kos got the Macedonians' attention. "What be there?" demanded the one who could make a stab at real Greek. "Ships? Ptolemaios' ships? How many of Ptolemaios' ships?"
"How gross?" the other one added, and then corrected himself: "How big?"
"I wasn't watching all that closely," Sostratos answered, and proceeded to exaggerate what he had seen. No one gave him the lie; though Rhodes' shipwrights had built war galleys for Antigonos, the island inclined more toward Ptolemaios. Rhodes shipped a lot of Egyptian grain all over the Hellenic world.
Sostratos didn't exaggerate enough to make the Macedonians serving Antigonos suspect him - only enough to give them long faces. They spoke back and forth between themselves; he understood not a word. Then, to his relief, they left.
Beside him, Menedemos let out a glad sigh to match his own. "I thought they were going to jump out of their corselets when you started talking about Ptolemaios' sixes and sevens at Kos," Sostratos' cousin said.
"So did I," Sostratos said. "I wanted to give them something to think about - something that wasn't quite true, but sounded as if it could be."
"Well, you hit the nail on the head," Menedemos told him. "If that doesn't set Antigonos' carpenters building like maniacs, to the crows with me if I know what would."
"I wouldn't mind - but where will it stop?" Sostratos wondered. "If you can build sevens, are nine better? What about thirteens, or maybe seventeens?"
Menedemos shrugged. "Not my worry. Not Rhodes' worry, either, I shouldn't think. How many rowers would you need in a seventeen?" He held up a warning hand. "No, don't go trying to figure it out, by the gods. I don't want to know, not exactly. However many it is, Rhodes might be able to man one or two of them. No more, I'm sure."
He was stretching things; but not by that much. He did persuade Sostratos not to finish the calculation he had indeed started. Instead, Sostratos asked, "You don't intend to do much in the way of trading here, do you?"
His cousin tossed his head. "Not much point to it: ordinary wine and plain pottery. I mostly wanted the anchorage." Menedemos hesitated. "If we could get our hands on those statues in Hera's temple, though, they'd bring a pretty price in Italy, don't you think?"
"Myron's Zeus and Athena and Herakles?" Sostratos laughed. "I'm sure they would. But remember, Ikaria's close by, and it got its name because Ikaros fell to earth there after flying too close to the sun. You'd fall and fail if you tried to get those statues, too."
Menedemos laughed. "I know. Had you worried there, didn't I?" Before Sostratos could answer, the peacock screeched. Menedemos snapped his fingers. "That reminds me - time to make ourselves a little money. Do you want to show people the peafowl?"
"I'm dying to," Sostratos replied.
He might as well have saved his breath; Menedemos paid no attention to him. Menedemos paid attention to him only when that suited his purposes. Sostratos' cousin hurried up the gangplank to the wharf and started singing the praises of peafowl. In short order, he started collecting khalkoi. Nobody got to look at the birds without handing over a couple of the little bronze coins. Sostratos showed off the peafowl till it got too dark for spectators to see them.
"What's the take today?" he asked when Menedemos gave up on luring any more spectators aboard the Aphrodite.
Khalkoi clinked as Menedemos built them into shaky piles. "Half an obolos, an obolos, an obolos and a half . . ." When he was through reckoning piles, he said, "A drakhma, four oboloi, six khalkoi. Nothing that'll make us rich, but not bad, either."
"Sixty-three people," Sostratos said after a moment's thought.
"No, that isn't bad at all. Peafowl are interesting birds - it'll be interesting to see if we can get them to Italy without tossing them overboard, for instance."
For once, his cousin didn't rise to the bait of the joke. Instead, Menedemos gave him an odd look. "Without a counting board, I couldn't have figured out how many people saw the birds to save my life."
"It wasn't hard." Sostratos changed the subject: "Will you look for an inn?"
Menedemos tossed his head. "Too late now. I'll just sleep on the deck. I've done it before. I can do it again." He waved a hand. "If you want to go into town, though, don't let me stop you. Plenty of sailors heading in for a good time."
"No, thanks," Sostratos said. His cousin was the one who was fond of luxury. If Menedemos could stand another night wrapped in his himation on the poop deck, Sostratos could, too. A man of philosophical bent was supposed to be indifferent to bodily pleasures . . . wasn't he?
Sostratos wondered about that as he lay with his chiton bundled up under his head for a pillow. Even though he was wrapped in his mantle, he couldn't get comfortable on the planks. He'd had an easier time drifting off on the beach on Leros.
As Menedemos had said, some of the rowers went into Samos to roister. The rest dozed on their benches. Some of them snored. Others, probably even more uncomfortable than Sostratos, talked in low voices so as not to disturb their shipmates. Sostratos tried to eavesdrop on them till he finally fell asleep.
He woke once in the middle of the night, pissed into the water of the harbor, and fell asleep again almost at once. The next time he woke, it was daybreak. Menedemos was already sitting up, an almost wolfishly intent look on his face. He dipped his head to Sostratos. "A lot to do today," he said. "We won't make Khios in one day from here, not rowing all the way. A good two-day pull. Since we didn't pass the night at sea coming to Samos, I intend to do that, to give the men a taste of what it's like."
"Whatever seems good to you," Sostratos agreed. "Our fathers trust you to command the ship. I haven't seen anything that makes me think they're wrong." Saying that didn't come easy to him; Menedemos often wore on his nerves. But his cousin did know what to do with the Aphrodite and how to lead her crew. However much Sostratos might have wanted to deny that, he couldn't.
Menedemos jumped to his feet. He paused just long enough to ease himself over the akatos' side. Then, still naked, he shouted the sailors awake. They yawned and grunted and rubbed their eyes, much less enthusiastic about facing the new day than he was.
He laughed at them. "We're heading toward the finest wine in the world, and you whipworthy catamites complain? I thought I'd signed up a crew of real men." His scorn lashed them to their feet and into action. Sostratos wondered how they would have acted had he exhorted them like that. Actually, he didn't wonder. He knew. They would have flung him into the Aegean. Had they been feeling kindly, they might have fished him out again afterwards.
He had his own morning duties to attend to. He gave the peafowl barley and water for their breakfast. The birds ate with good appetite. He'd seen they ate better in harbor than while the Aphrodite moved across the open sea. That was nothing remarkable. A lot of people went off their feed on the open sea, too.
"How many men are we missing, Diokles?" Menedemos asked.
"Not a one, captain, if you can believe it." The keleustes shook his head in amazement. "I wonder about these fellows, I truly do. You're hardly a man at all if you can't go out and make a night of it."
"They want the Khian, too," Menedemos said. "Even a sailor can afford it when he buys it where they make it."
Sostratos said, "The dealers won't be so generous as the tavernkeepers will. They'll be selling their best, not the cheap stuff you get in taverns, and they'll squeeze us till our eyes pop."
Menedemos grinned at him. "That's why you're along. You're not supposed to let them squeeze us."
"Ha," Sostratos said. "Ha, ha." He brought out the syllables just like that, as if they were dialogue in a comedy. "I can't keep them from squeezing us, and you'd better know it. With a little luck, I can keep them from squeezing us quite so much."
"All right." Menedemos dipped his head. He seemed in a good mood this morning, likely because the Aphrodite wouldn't have to sit in the harbor while Diokles hunted down men who gave more thought to roistering than to how they earned the money to roister. He pointed to Sostratos. "Grab yourself
some bread and oil and wine. I want to get out into the open sea as soon as I can."
"All right." Sostratos drummed his fingers on the gunwale. "We'll have to lay in some more supplies when we got to Khios. We're using them faster than I thought we would."
"Take care of it." Menedemos was already eating and spoke with his mouth full. Sostratos tried to resent his cousin's peremptory tone, but couldn't quite. He was the toikharkhos; taking care of such things was his job. As he came back to the poop, Menedemos added, "The sooner I can get out of this port, the better I'll like it."
"Those Macedonians?" Sostratos asked.
"Sure enough," Menedemos agreed. "I didn't like the way they asked questions - like they were demigods looking down their noses at ordinary mortals." He dipped a piece of bread into olive oil and took a big bite. As he swallowed, his lip curled. "Demigods would speak better Greek, though."
"Khios won't be any better when it comes to that," Sostratos predicted. "It bends the knee to Antigonos, too."
"Well, yes, but it's not sitting over Kos, the way Samos is," his cousin answered. "The officers up there won't be so . . . eager to squeeze everything we know out of us. I can hope they won't, anyhow."
"It makes sense," Sostratos said. "You have a pretty good idea of the way the politics work."
"For which I thank you." Menedemos sounded as if he meant it. Then he added, "I may not know everything that's happened everywhere since before the Trojan War, but I do all right."
"I don't pretend to know everything that's happened everywhere since before the Trojan War," Sostratos spluttered. Only after he was done spluttering did he realize Menedemos had been hoping he would. He shut up with a snap. That also amused his cousin, which only annoyed him more.
"Come on!" Menedemos called to his men. "Let's cast off and get going. Like I told you, we're two days away from the best wine in the world." That got the men working. It got the Aphrodite away from the harbor ahead of many of the little fishing boats that sailed out of Kos. And it got the akatos through the narrow channel between the island and the mainland of Asia in fine fashion.
Sostratos hadn't really thought about just how narrow the channel was. "If you had stone-throwers on both sides of it," he remarked to Menedemos, "you could make this passage very hard and dangerous."
"I daresay you're right," Menedemos answered. "It may happen one of these days, too, though I hope none of Antigonos' generals is as sneaky as you are."
Half her oars manned, the Aphrodite fought her way north. The broad stretch of sea between Samos and Ikaria on the one hand and Khios on the other was one of the roughest parts of the Aegean: neither the mainland nor any islands shielded the water from the wind blowing out of the north. The merchant galley pitched choppily as wave after wave slammed into her bow.
The motion gave Sostratos a headache. A couple of sailors reacted more strongly than that, leaning out over the gunwale to puke into the Aegean. Maybe they'd taken on too much wine the night before. Maybe they just had weak stomachs, as some men did.
As some men did, Menedemos had a quotation from Homer for everything:
t" 'The assembly was stirred like great waves of the sea,
The open sea by Ikaria, which the east wind and the south wind
Stir up from Father Zeus' clouds.' "t
"What about the north wind?" Sostratos asked. "That's the one troubling us now."
His cousin shrugged. "You can't expect the poet to be perfect all the time. Isn't it marvel enough that he's so good so much of the time?"
"I suppose so," Sostratos said. "But it's not good to lean on him the way an old man like Xenophanes leans on a stick. That keeps you from thinking for yourself."
"If Homer's already said it as well as it can be said, what's the point to trying to say it better?" Menedemos asked.
"If you're quoting him for the sake of poetry, that's one thing," Sostratos said. "If you're quoting him to settle what's right and wrong, the way too many people do, that's something else."
"Well, maybe," Menedemos said, with the air of a man making a great concession. At least he's not sneering at using philosophers' ideas to judge what's right and wrong, the way he sometimes does, Sostratos thought. That is something.
He soon discovered why Menedemos showed no interest in twitting him: his cousin's thought turned in a different direction. Setting a hand on Diokles' shoulder, Menedemos said, "It's two days to Khios no matter what we do. Shall we start putting them through their paces?"
"Not a bad notion," the keleustes replied. "The more work we get in, the better the odds it'll pay off when we really need it."
"With luck, we won't need it at all," Sostratos said. Both Diokles and Menedemos looked at him. He felt he had to add, "Of course, we'd better not take the chance."
His cousin and the oarmaster relaxed. "Enough trouble comes all by itself, even when you don't borrow any," Menedemos said. He raised his voice. "All rowers to the oars. We're going to practice fighting pirates - or whatever else we happen to run into on the western seas."
Sostratos had wondered if the men would grumble at having to work harder than they would have done if they'd rowed straight for Khios. A few of them did, but it was grumbling for the sake of grumbling, not real anger. And so, on the rough sea north of Samos and Ikaria, the akatos practiced darting to the right and to the left, spinning in her own length, and suddenly bringing inboard all the oars now on one side of the ship, now on the other. They worked on that last maneuver over and over again.
"This is our best chance against a trireme, isn't it?" Sostratos said.
"It's our best chance against any galley bigger than we are - best besides running away, I mean," Menedemos answered. "It's our only chance against a trireme: if we can use our hull to break most of the oars on one side of his ship, that lets us get away. Otherwise, we haven't got a chance."
"I suppose not." Sostratos sighed. "I wish someone would keep pirates down all over the Inner Sea, the way Rhodes tries to do in the Aegean."
"While you're at it, wish navies didn't hunt merchantmen when they saw the chance, too," Menedemos said. "Here close to home, we're fairly safe, because Ptolemaios and Antigonos both care about keeping Rhodes happy. Farther west . . ." He tossed his head. Sostratos sighed again. One more thing to worry about, he thought. As if I didn't have enough already.
4
Menedemos woke in darkness, the Aphrodite tossing not too gently under him. A couple of cubits away, Sostratos lay on his back on the poop deck, snoring like a saw grinding through stone. Menedemos tried to slide straight back into sleep, but his cousin's racket and his own full bladder wouldn't let him.
Short of kicking Sostratos and waking him up, Menedemos couldn't do anything about his snoring. And Sostratos wasn't the only offender, only the nearest one; a good many rowers buzzed away, making the night anything but serene. I can ease myself, though, Menedemos thought, and got to his feet to do just that.
As he stood at the rail, the Aphrodite might have been alone on the sea, alone in all the world. Zeus' wandering star was about to set in the west, which put the hour somewhere close to midnight. The moon, a waxing crescent, had already vanished. All he could see was the star-flecked dome of the sky, and the blacker black of the night-time sea. Khios to the north, the Asian mainland to the east . . . He knew they were there, but he couldn't prove it, not by what his eyes told him.
One after another in endless succession, waves lifted the merchant galley's hull. The swell was bigger than it had been during the day. Menedemos hoped that didn't mean a storm would be blowing down out of the north. This early in the sailing season, it might.
"Bring me safe to Khios, Father Poseidon, and I'll give you something," he murmured; the sea god had a temple on the island, not far from the city. Praying for good weather was as much as he could do. Having done it, he lay down again, wrapped himself in his himation, and tried to go back to sleep. He wondered if he would succeed with Sostratos making horrible noises almost in his
ear. He yawned and pulled the thick wool of the himation up over his head and aimed several unkind thoughts at his cousin.
The next thing he knew, the sun was rising over the distant mainland to the east. He rolled over to wake Sostratos, only to discover that Sostratos was already among those present - was, in fact, fixing him with a reproachful stare. "I hardly slept a wink last night, you were snoring so loud," Sostratos said.
"I was?" The injustice of that all but paralyzed Menedemos. "You're the one who kept making the horrible racket."
"Nonsense," Sostratos said. "I never snore."
"Oh, no, of course not." Menedemos savored sarcasm. "And a dog never howls at the moon, either."
"I don't," Sostratos insisted. Menedemos laughed in his face. Sostratos turned red. He waved toward Diokles, who was stretching on the rower's bench where he'd passed the night. "He'll tell us the truth. Which of us was snoring last night, O Diokles?"
"I don't know," the keleustes answered around a yawn. "Once I closed my eyes, I didn't hear a thing till I woke up at dawn."
"I did." That was Aristeidas, the sharp-eyed sailor who often served as lookout. "You get right down to it, both of you gents were pretty noisy."
Sostratos looked offended. Menedemos felt offended. Then they happened to glance toward each other. They both started to laugh. "Well, so much for that," Sostratos said.
"I'm going to sleep on the foredeck from now on," Menedemos said. "Then I can blame it on the peafowl." He peered north. No clouds gathered on the horizon, though the breeze had freshened. "I hope the weather holds till we make Khios. What do you think, Diokles?"
If anyone aboard the akatos was weatherwise, the oarmaster was the man. Menedemos watched him not just turn to the north but scan the whole horizon. He smacked his lips, tasting the air as he might have tasted fine Khian wine. At last, after due deliberation, he said, "I expect we'll be all right, skipper."
"Good." Menedemos had made the same guess, but felt better to have someone else confirm it. He grinned at the keleustes. "If you're wrong, you know I'll blame you."
Over the Wine-Dark Sea Page 11