Owl to Athens

by H. N. Turteltaub

  “We should be able to,” Sostratos said stubbornly.

  “That’s not what Diokles said, and you know it,” Menedemos said.

  His cousin sighed. “So it isn’t.” Sostratos looked out to sea, as if he’d had enough of the argument.

  Menedemos looked out to sea, too, for different reasons. With the overcast and the spatters of rain, all he had to gauge direction were the waves and the breeze. He couldn’t find the sun, and neither Lesbos nor Psyra rose above his contracted horizon. He hated sailing under conditions like these. Navigation was somewhere between a guess and a bad joke. If the sea had been calm, he could have sailed in circles and never known it. He wasn’t doing that now—he was pretty sure he wasn’t, anyhow—but he hoped he wasn’t veering too far to the west or south. The one would only take him out of his way. The other might cause a meeting he didn’t want with Psyra or even Khios.

  “What do you think of our course?” he asked Diokles.

  The oarmaster checked the breeze with a spit-wet finger, then looked over the side—the sea, reflecting the gray of the sky, was anything but wine-dark today—to eye the waves. “Feels about right to me, skipper,” he replied at last. “Can’t say much more than that, not with the weather the way it is. Soon as it clears out, or soon as we get close to land, we’ll know where we’re at.”

  “That’s true,” Menedemos said. “What I don’t want is to get too close to land too soon, if you follow me.”

  “Oh, yes.” Diokles dipped his head. “Grounding a galley to dry out her timbers is all very well, if she’s not too heavily laden to get her afloat again afterwards. But going aground when you don’t want to, or ripping out her belly on a rock you never saw—that’s a whole different business.”

  “Yes.” Menedemos wondered what his father would say if he wrecked the Aphrodite. Actually, he didn’t wonder—he knew, at least in broad outline. In something like that, the small details were unlikely to matter.

  He tried to look every which way at once: dead ahead; to port and to starboard; astern past the boat, which bobbed in the chop behind the akatos. No suddenly looming land. No piratical pentekonter driving out of the mist and straight toward the Aphrodite. No trouble anywhere. He worried all the same.

  When he said that out loud, Diokles dipped his head again. “A good thing you do, too. You’re the skipper. Worrying’s your job. Gods protect me from a captain who doesn’t.”

  Sostratos spent a lot of time doing lookout duty up on the Aphrodite’s cramped foredeck. Part of that was expiation for Aristeidas, the best lookout he’d ever known. Part of it was a sensible desire to keep the merchant galley safe, combined with the knowledge that a toikharkhos was just cargo—or, more likely, ballast—as long as she sailed on the open sea. And part of it was the chance to watch birds and fish and other creatures at the same time as he was doing something useful.

  Flying fishes leaped from the water and glided through the air before returning to their proper element. A black-capped tern folded its wings, dove into the Aegean, and came out with a silvery fish writhing in its beak. The flying fishes had most likely gone from water to air to keep from becoming prey. The tern had gone from air to water to turn fish into prey.

  It didn’t get to enjoy its catch. A gull chased it and made it drop the sprat before it could gulp it down. Moskhion had come up to the fore-deck to check the forestay. He pointed at the gull, which grabbed the stunned fish from the surface of the sea and greedily gobbled it up. “Might as well be a Macedonian.”

  “Why?” Sostratos said. “Because he’d sooner live off the work of others than work himself? Me, I was thinking of him as a pirate.”

  “Six oboloi to the drakhma either way, young sir,” Moskhion answered. Dolphins leaped from the water and then dove back in with hardly a splash. The former sponge diver’s face showed unalloyed pleasure as he pointed to them. “I love dolphins. I think they’re the most beautiful fish there are.”

  “I love dolphins, too. What seafaring man doesn’t?” Sostratos said. “And they are beautiful, no doubt about it. But they’re not fish.”

  “What?” Moskhion scratched his head. “What are they, then? Cabbages?” He laughed at his own wit.

  Smiling, Sostratos said, “They’re no more cabbages than they are fish.”

  The sailor started to laugh again, but the mirth faded from his face as he studied Sostratos’. Moskhion frowned. Some men, when they heard an opinion they’d never met before, wanted nothing more than to wipe it from the face of the earth. So the Athenians served Sokrates, Sostratos thought. Moskhion wasn’t of that school—not quite. But he wasn’t far removed from it, either. He said, “Why, what else can dolphins be but fish? They live in the sea, don’t they? They haven’t got any legs, do they? If that doesn’t make ‘em fish, what does?”

  “Being like other fish would make them fish,” Sostratos said. “But as my teacher’s teacher, a lover of wisdom named Aristoteles, pointed out, they aren’t like other fish. That means they have to be some different kind of creature.”

  “What do you mean, they aren’t?” Moskhion demanded. “I just showed you how they were, didn’t I?”

  “Seaweed lives in the sea and hasn’t got any legs,” Sostratos said. “Does that make it a fish?”

  “Seaweed?” As if humoring a madman, Moskhion said, “Seaweed doesn’t look like a fish, young sir. Dolphins do.”

  “A statue may look like a man, but is a statue a man? If you ask a statue to lend you a drakhma, will it?”

  “No, but half the men I know won’t, either,” Moskhion retorted, and Sostratos had to laugh. The sailor went on, “How is a dolphin different than a fish? Just tell me that, if you please.”

  “I can think of two important ways,” Sostratos answered. “You must know that, if you keep a dolphin in the sea and don’t let it come up for air, it will drown. Any fisherman who’s caught one in a net will tell you that. And dolphins bring forth their young alive, the way goats and horses do. They don’t lay eggs like fish.”

  Moskhion pursed his lips and scratched at the corner of his jaw. “They’re funny fish, then. You’re right about that much, I expect. But they’re still fish.” He went down from the foredeck into the waist of the ship.

  Sostratos stared after him. The sailor had asked for reasons why dolphins weren’t like fish. He’d given them. What had it got him? Nothing—not a single, solitary thing. “Funny fish,” he muttered. Sokrates had crossed his mind a little while before. Now the Athenian sage did again; Sostratos thought, If he had to deal with people like that, no wonder he drank hemlock. It must have seemed a relief.

  Moskhion hadn’t been rude or abusive. He’d even gone through the forms of reasoned argument. He’d gone through them . . . and then ignored them when they produced a result he didn’t like. As far as Sostratos was concerned, that was worse than refusing to argue at all.

  From his station at the stern, Menedemos called, “If you’re going to be a lookout, my dear, kindly look ahead, not toward me.”

  “Sorry,” Sostratos said, reddening. He gave his attention back to the sea.

  He wondered whether, a moment later, he would have to scream out, Rock! and give his cousin just enough time to steer the merchant galley out of harm’s way. If he were telling the story in a tavern—and especially if Menedemos were telling it in a tavern—it would go that way. But he saw no rocks. He saw little of anything: only gray sky above and gray sea below. He wished he could see farther out to sea, but, unless Menedemos’ navigation was far worse than he feared, it mattered much less on this broad reach of the Aegean than it would, say, down in the Kyklades. In those crowded waters, you could spit over the side and hit an island no matter where you were.

  Darkness fell with no special drama. Light oozed out of the sky. At Diokles’ command, the rowers shipped their oars. Men who weren’t rowing brailed up the sail. Anchors splashed into the sea. Menedemos ordered lamps lit and hung from the stempost and sternpost. He said, “If some idiot’s sa
iling on through the night, we ought to give him at least a chance to see us.”

  “Did I argue?” Sostratos replied.

  “Not about that.” Menedemos paused to dip up a cup of the rough red wine the crew drank aboard ship. “But Moskhion’s been going on about how you tried to tell him dolphins aren’t fish.”

  “By Poseidon’s prick, they aren’t!” Sostratos yelped. “Ask any man who’s studied the issue, and he’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “Maybe so, O best one, but any sailor, it seems, will tell you you’re out of your mind,” Menedemos replied.

  “It’s the Apology of Sokrates all over again: men who know one thing well think they know all things well because of their little piece of knowledge.”

  “More than a few of our sailors have been fishermen, too,” Menedemos said. “If they don’t know fish, what do they know?”

  “Not much, in my opinion.” But Sostratos spoke in a voice not much above a whisper. He did remember he wouldn’t be wise to anger the men. With an odd mix of amusement and annoyance, he watched his cousin’s relief that he remembered.

  He too drank wine, and ate an uninspiring shipboard supper. He almost thought of it as a Spartan supper. Then he remembered the horrid black broth served in the Lakedaimonians’ messes. Contemplating that nasty stuff made an opson of olives and cheese and an onion seem far more palatable.

  The clouds and mist remained after full night came. “Too bad,” Sostratos said, wrapping himself in his himation. “I always like looking at the stars before I go to sleep.”

  “Not tonight.” Menedemos was also making himself as comfortable as he could on the poop deck.

  “I wonder what they really are, and why a few of them wander while the rest stand still,” Sostratos said.

  “Those are questions for gods, not men,” his cousin replied.

  “Why shouldn’t I ask them?” Sostratos said. “Men should ask questions, and look for answers to them.”

  “Go ahead and ask all you like,” Menedemos said. “Getting answers to those questions is a different story, though.”

  Sostratos wished he could have quarreled with that. Instead, he sighed and dipped his head, saying, “I’m afraid you’re right. Until we find some way to reach out and touch the stars, we’ll never be able to find out what they are or why they shine.”

  “Well, my dear, you don’t think small—I will say that,” Menedemos replied with a laugh. “How do you propose to touch the stars?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. I wish I did.” Sostratos yawned. “I haven’t the faintest idea how I’m going to stay awake any more, either.” The next thing he knew, he wasn’t.

  When he woke, the sky was getting light. It wasn’t the rosy-fingered dawn of which the poets wrote, though: no pink and gold eastern sky, no sunbeams darting up from the sea. Only a sullen gray like that of the day before made night withdraw.

  Menedemos was already up. “Good day, my dear,” he said. “Here you’ve gone and taken away the fun of giving you a good kick, the way I was about to.”

  “So sorry to deprive you of your simple pleasures.” Sostratos got to his feet and stretched to work the kinks out of his back. Rubbing his eyes, he added, “I’m feeling pretty simple myself right now.”

  Up and down the length of the Aphrodite, sailors were rousing. Diokles had already got up from the rower’s bench where he’d spent the night. He seemed as well rested as if he’d slept in the bedchamber of the Great King of Persia. “Good day, young sirs,” he called to Sostratos and Menedemos.

  “Good day,” Sostratos said. “We should pass through the strait between Euboia and Andros before sunset, shouldn’t we?”

  “I hope so,” the oarmaster said. “If we’re anywhere near where we ought to be, and if our navigation today’s halfway decent, we ought to manage that.”

  “And if we don’t, everyone will blame me.” Menedemos made a joke of it, where a lot of captains would have been deadly serious. Pointing up toward the clue-obscuring sky, he said, “I do have an excuse for not guiding us to within a digit’s breadth of our perfect path.”

  “No arguments, skipper,” Diokles said. “I expect you’ll get us where we’re going. If I didn’t think so, I’d be a right idiot to sail with you, wouldn’t I?”

  After barley rolls dipped in oil and washed down with watered wine, sailors slowly spun the capstans and brought up the anchors. As soon as they were stowed, the sail came down from the yard. It billowed and flapped and then filled with wind. Menedemos steered the ship west-southwest.

  “I hope it’s west-southwest, anyhow,” he said with a wry grin, “It’s my best guess.”

  “Warmer than yesterday, I think,” Sostratos said. “Maybe the clouds and mist will burn off as the sun gets higher.”

  Little by little, they did. The sun came out, first through clouds still thick enough to let a man look without pain at its disk and then more strongly. The sky went from gray to a hazy blue: still not quite the weather for which Sostratos would have hoped, but definitely better. The horizon stretched as the mist faded.

  “Land ho!” a rower called. “Land to port and astern.”

  “That’s Psyra, I think,” Sostratos said, shading his eyes to peer east.

  Menedemos laughed. “It had better be. Otherwise we’re really lost.”

  Not too much later, Sostratos spotted Skyros off the starboard bow. He felt proud of himself. His eyes were no better than anyone else’s— indeed, he knew they were worse than those of several sailors. But knowing where Psyra was let him do a geometry problem in his head and figure out about where Skyros ought to be.

  And then, as the day continued to clear and the horizon to extend, several sailors pointed dead ahead at almost exactly the same time. “There’s Euboia!” they called.

  “Good,” Menedemos said. “We’re about where we’re supposed to be. If anything, we’re a little farther west than I thought we were. We will get through the strait between Euboia and Andros today, and then it’s on to Athens.”

  “On to Athens!” Sostratos couldn’t have been happier if his cousin had said . . . He thought about that, then grinned. He couldn’t have been happier if Menedemos had said anything else.

  As the strait neared, Menedemos ordered weapons and helmets served out to the crew. The men set bronze helms, most of them un-crested, on their heads. The sailors not at the oars hefted spears and swords and belaying pins. The rowers stashed their weapons under their benches where they could grab them in a hurry.

  “I hope this is all a waste of time,” Menedemos said. “But a lot of you men were along a couple of years ago, when that pirate tried to board us. We fought off the polluted son of a whore. If we have to, we can do it again.”

  I hope we can do it again, he thought. He glanced over to Sostratos, waiting for his cousin to start mourning the gryphon’s skull the pirates had carried away with them. But Sostratos didn’t say a thing. Maybe he’d learned to accept the loss. More likely, he’d learned Menedemos would come down like a rockslide if he started complaining about the gryphon’s skull.

  Fishing boats fled the Aphrodite with even more alacrity than usual. Teleutas laughed and said, “With all the ironware and bronze we’re showing, they’re sure we’re pirates now.” His helmet jammed down low on his forehead and a fierce grin on his narrow, homely face made him look like a man who would sooner steal than work.

  I know he steals, Menedemos reminded himself. Sostratos caught him at it in loudaia. If he ever steals on the Aphrodite, he’s gone. But Teleutas had never got caught doing that. No one on the merchant galley had complained of a thief. Maybe he had too much sense to steal from his fellow Hellenes. For his sake, Menedemos hoped so.

  The channel between the islands was less than sixty stadia wide. Menedemos sailed the Aphrodite right down the middle of it. He was close enough to land to see sheep kicking up dust in the hills above the beach on Euboia, and to see one of those little fishing boats go aground at the mouth of a strea
m on Andros. He and the whole crew kept close watch on inlets and rocky outcrops—those were pirates’ favorite hiding places.

  Today, though, everything seemed as peaceful as if no one had ever thought of taking robbery to sea. When Menedemos said that out loud, Sostratos tossed his head. “Don’t believe it for a moment, my dear,” he said. “Somewhere up in those hills—probably more than one place up in those hills—a pirate lookout is watching us and thinking, No, more trouble than they’re worth. And that’s all that’s keeping us safe.”

  Menedemos didn’t need long to decide his cousin was right. He said, “Well, I wish the lookout who loosed that last pirate ship against us in these waters would have thought the same thing.”

  “So do I,” Sostratos said. Menedemos cocked his head to one side, waiting for him to say more. Sostratos caught him waiting and laughed. “I’ve said everything I can about the gryphon’s skull.”

  “Till the next time you do,” Menedemos gibed.

  Sostratos laughed again, on a different note. “Maybe you’re right. I hope not, but maybe. I think we are going to make it out of this channel.”

  “It’s not very long,” Menedemos said. “We only seem to take forever going through it.”

  “Oh, good,” Sostratos said. “I thought I was the only one who felt that way.”

  “No, indeed, best one, and I’m not ashamed to admit it,” Menedemos said. “After all, we’re passing through a place where we’ve already had trouble. If you think I’m not nervous about the passage, you’re daft. I don’t like fighting off pirates any better than you do.”

  “You do it well,” Sostratos said. “If you didn’t, we’d be slaves now, or dead.”

  “For which I thank you,” Menedemos said, “but I’ve already had more practice than I ever wanted.” He turned his head from one side to the other. Now the coastline of Andros was swiftly falling off to the southeast, that of Euboia to the northwest. “We’re through it now for sure. Anyone who wants to come after us will have a long chase, and we’re not that much slower than a pirate ship.”