Looking back over his shoulder, Menedemos watched Patmos recede behind him. Had he taken the akatos due west, he would have sailed through the Kyklades for the third time that sailing season. Instead, he used the steering oars to swing her somewhat to the north, so that she went up between Ikaria on his right hand and Mykonos on his left. Tenos lay northwest of Mykonos, Andros northwest of Tenos, Euboia northwest of Andros. Menedemos steered the Aphrodite on a course parallel to them but well to the east, out in the middle of the Aegean. He didn't see another ship all day, which suited him fine.
“Late tomorrow or early the next day, we'll be able to slide through the channel between Andros and Euboia and make for Athens,” he said.
“Good enough. Better than good enough, in fact,” Sostratos said. “You had the right of it: not many ships out here in the middle of the sea.”
“We don't guarantee getting through without any trouble this way,” Menederaos said. “We do make our chances better, though. And we never get out of sight of land, the way you can sailing west to Great Hellas. So we always know where we are.”
“Not easy to get out of sight of land in the Aegean,” Sostratos said. “I'm not sure you could do it, not on a clear day.”
“Up in the north, maybe,” Menedemos said. “There's that broad reach from Lesbos to Skyros. Otherwise, though”—he tossed his head—”no, I wouldn't think so.”
Some of the sailors baited lines with bits of bread and cheese and let them down into the sea. They caught a few sprats and a mackerel or two. And then, just when Menedemos was about to order the anchors dropped, Moskhion pulled in a gloriously plump red mullet. “He'll have friends tonight,” Sostratos said.
“Won't he, though?” Menedemos agreed. The splendid fish made his mouth water. “I hope I'm Moskhion's friend tonight.” As the captain of a merchant galley learned to do, he pitched his voice to carry.
Moskhion looked up from the mullet, an impish grin on his face. “Have we met, sir?” he asked, as bland as if he were a man with estates out to the horizon condescending to speak to a tanner.
Menedemos laughed as loudly as everyone else who heard the sailor. “You'll find out whether we've met,” he growled, mock fierce.
As the sun set, the men who'd caught fish grilled them over little braziers. The savory scent of the flesh filled the air. Moskhion did share the mullet as widely as he could, and sent small portions back to Menedemos, Sostratos, and Diokles. “That's only a bite,” Sostratos said as he washed his down with a swallow of wine, “but it's a mighty tasty bite.”
“It sure is,” Menedemos agreed. “A bite of mullet's worth a bellyful of cheese any day.” He knew a hungry man would say no such thing, but he enjoyed the luxury of a full belly. He ate an olive and spat the pit into the sea.
Diokles pointed into the southern sky, a little west of the meridian. “There's Zeus' wandering star,” he said.
“Where?” Sostratos said, and then, “Ah. There. Now I see it. I wonder if it's true, as the Babylonians say, that the motions of the stars foretell everything we do.”
“How can anyone know something like that?” Menedemos said. “Me, I want to think I do things because I want to do them, not because some star says I must.”
“Yes, I want to believe the same thing,” his cousin said. “But is it really true, or do I want to believe it because the stars say I should want to?”
Diokles grunted and refilled his wine cup. The oarmaster said, “That kind of talk makes my head ache.”
“What do the Babylonians have to say about twins?” Menedemos asked. “They're born at the same time, and sometimes they're like each other, but other sets are as different as eggs and elephants. By the stars, they should all be just alike, shouldn't they?”
“That's true.” Sostratos beamed at him. “Very logical, in fact. I wonder if any philosophers have ever thought about what that means. When we get to Athens, I hope I remember to ask.”
Twilight deepened. More stars came out. Menedemos spotted Kronos' wandering star, dimmer and yellower than that of Zeus, not far above the eastern horizon. Pointing to it, he said, “I know what that star foretells: not long after I see it, I'll go to sleep.”
“Amazing,” Sostratos said. “I was born half a year before you, but it means the very same thing for me.” They both laughed.
The Aphrodite rocked gently on the sea. Menedemos took the motion altogether for granted. It wasn't enough to bother his cousin, who was more sensitive to such things. They lay down side by side on the poop deck. Diokles went forward to sleep on a rower's bench.
When Menedemos woke, morning twilight had replaced that of the evening. He yawned and stretched and watches stars fade from the sky, as he'd watched them come out the night before. High up in the air, a gull screeched.
He got to his feet and tasted the wind, then dipped his head in satisfaction. It hadn't swung during the night, nor had it died. Up toward the bow, one early-rising sailor spoke to another: “Doesn't look like we'll have to pull too hard today,”
“Good,” the second sailor answered.
Sostratos stayed asleep till the men started hauling in the anchors. Then he looked about in bleary confusion. “Hail, slugabed,” Menedemos said.
“Oh. Hail.” Sostratos looked around some more, rubbed his eyes, and got to his feet. As he did, he wet a finger to test the wind. What he found brought a smile to his face and eagerness to his voice. “Do you think we'll be able to slide between Andros and Euboia this afternoon?”
“Maybe.” Menedemos shook a stern finger at his cousin. “But even if we do, we've got another day's sail after that before we put in at Peiraieus.”
“I know. I know.” Sostratos waved impatiently. “But we're so close now, I can all but taste Athens.”
Menedemos pursed his lips as if he were tasting, too. “Rocks and dirt and a little bit of hemlock, left over from Sokrates. Splash it with oil and it's not so bad.”
“Splash you with oil and you're still an idiot,” Sostratos said, doing his best not to splutter.
After a bow and a wave for his cousin, Menedemos raised his voice to call out to the sailors: “Eat your breakfast, lads, and then we'll be away. As long as the gods are kind enough to give us the breeze we need, we'd be fools and worse than fools if we didn't make the most of it.”
Down came the sail from the yard. A gust of wind filled it almost at once. The mast creaked as it took up the strain. At Menedemos' shouted instructions, the men swung the yard from the starboard bow back to take best advantage of the breeze. The Aphrodite slid through the light chop, graceful as a tunny.
Flying fish sprang out of the water. So did dolphins, which leapt far higher and more gracefully. Menedemos tossed a barley roll into the Aegean. The merchant galley's boat had hardly passed it before a dolphin snapped it up. The sailors murmured in delighted approval. A couple of them clapped their hands. “Good for you, skipper,” Diokles said. “There's good luck.”
No less superstitious than any other seafaring man, Menedemos dipped his head. “Good luck for the dolphin, too,” he said. “If it hadn't been in just the right spot, a sea bird would have got there first.”
Sure enough, a small gull with a black head that had been swooping toward the roll pulled up with an angry screech: “Ayeea!” A moment later, a tern plunged into the sea. It came out with a fish in its beak.
“Between the dolphin and the bird, they've got sitos and opson,” Menedemos said.
Instead of laughing at his little joke, Sostratos tossed his head. “For dolphins and terns, fish are sitos: they're what they have to have. When you gave them the barley roll, that was opson for them, even though it would be sitos for us.”
Diokles clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Here I've been going to sea almost as long as you've been alive, young sir, and I never once thought of it like that. You've got an odd way of looking at the world—an interesting way,” he hastened to add.
“A left-handed way,” Menedemos said, which wasn't
a compliment.
They didn't have the sea to themselves but for wild things that day. A few fishing boats were out on the wide water east of the Kyklades. When their crews saw the Aphrodite approaching, they lowered their sails and made for first Tenos and then, in the afternoon, Andros as fast as they could go. One of the crews cut a net free to be able to flee the faster.
“Poor frightened fools,” Menedemos said. “That'll cost them a good bit of silver or a good bit of time to make good, and we didn't want anything to do with them.”
“We ought to paint a legend on the side of the ship: I AM NOT A PIRATE,” Sostratos said.
“And how long would it be before a pirate painted the same thing on his hemiolia?” Menedemos returned.
Sostratos screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue in a Gorgon's grimace. “That's a horrible thought,”
“Are you telling me Fm wrong, though?” Menedemos asked. His cousin tossed his head. Menedemos' smile held slightly grudging approval. One thing Sostratos was, without a doubt: an honest man.
As the sun sank toward the rough horizon to the west, Sostratos pointed toward the channel between Andros and Cape Geraistos, the southernmost part of Euboia. “There it is. We can get through before nightfall.”
“We can get through, yes,” Menedemos said. “But we can't get very far past the channel if we go through now. When morning comes, we'd be sitting out in the open for anyone to spot. If we stay out here on the open Aegean till morning, though, we can dash between the islands and round Cape Sounion before nightfall tomorrow. How does that sound?”
Sostratos didn't look happy, but he didn't say no. He just sighed, made a pushing motion, and turned away. After a moment, Menedemos realized he was miming Sisyphos' eternal torment. Every time the wicked man got his boulder up near the top of the hill, it would slip away and roll to the bottom again.
“It's not so bad as that,” Menedemos said.
“No, it isn't,” Sostratos said. “It's worse.”
Diokles spoke up: “Whether we go through now or in the morning, I'd serve out weapons first. You never can tell.”
“That's a good idea,” Menedemos said. “I wish it weren't, but it is.” He rubbed his chin as he thought. “I do believe I'm going to bring us up a little farther north before we anchor for the night. That way, I can run straight before the wind in the morning, and we'll slide through as fast as may be.”
“Very nice,” the keleustes said. “You're right as can be—the sooner we're through there, the better.”
The sun was just on the point of setting when Menedemos ordered the anchors into the sea. Sostratos still looked glum. “Cheer up,” Menedemos told him. “See? We're even aimed the right way now.” Sure enough, he'd swung the Aphrodite around so her bow pointed southwest, straight toward the gap between the islands—and toward the mainland of Attica beyond.
His cousin sighed. “I know it, my dear. But it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not going to be content till it does.”
Or even after that, Menedemos thought. The ideal world Sostratos built up in his mind sometimes made him have trouble accepting reality and its imperfections. Menedemos didn't twit him about it, though; the akatos was too crowded a place to make arguments worse.
Bread and olive oil, cheese and olives, rough red wine: a sailor's supper at sea. Not even a taste of mullet to savor tonight; the men hadn't caught anything much above sprat size. Menedemos shrugged. I'll eat better when we get to Athens, he thought.
“Another night on the planks,” Sostratos said as they stretched out side by side on the poop deck. “I won't be sorry to sleep in a bed again.”
There, Menedemos thought he could jab without making his cousin angry, and he did: “Back in Miletos, you weren't doing much in the way of sleeping when you ended up in that hetaira's bed.”
Sostratos snorted. “You're a fine one to talk.”
“Who, me?” Menedemos did his best to sound innocent. “I didn't do anything much in Miletos.”
“No, not in Miletos,” Sostratos said darkly.
Menedemos made some other protest, but only deep, heavy, even breathing answered him. Before very long, he fell asleep, too. He woke somewhere in the middle of the night, wondering why he had. Then he realized the Aphrodite's, motion had changed. The swells from out of the north remained, but the wind-driven chop had eased. He muttered something or other under his breath, wrapped his himation tighter around himself, and went back to sleep.
But when he woke the next morning, he wasn't surprised to find that the wind had died even though he hardly remembered rousing before. Catching his eye, Diokles mimed rowing motions. Menedemos dipped his head to the oarmaster.
“All I have to say is, it's a good thing we're not a round ship,” Sostratos declared after Menedemos woke him and he realized they were becalmed. “If we were a round ship that had to lie here on the sea so close to Athens with no way to get any closer, I do believe I'd scream.”
“I believe you'd scream, too,” Menedemos said. His cousin gave him a dirty look. He went on, “But, since we go about as fast with oars as we do with the sail, you can save your screams till you need to throw them at your fellow philosophers.”
“I'm not much of a philosopher,” Sostratos said sadly. “I haven't got enough leisure.”
“You're doing something useful, which is more than a lot of those windbags can say for themselves,” Menedemos replied. His cousin looked shocked. Before Sostratos could rush to philosophy's defense, Menedemos added, “Eat your breakfast and then do one more useful thing: help me hand out weapons to the crew,”
Like most merchant galleys—and, for that matter, like most pirate ships—the Aphrodite carried a motley assortment of arms: perhaps a dozen swords (Sostratos belted his on), a handful of peltasts' light shields, some javelins and pikes, hatchets, a couple of ripping hooks, iron crowbars, knives. Menedemos set his bow and a quiver of arrows where he could grab them in a hurry. Or, more likely, where Sostratos or somebody else can get his hands on them, he thought. I'll he busy steering the ship.
He shrugged. Odds were, this was nothing but a waste of time. Even if a pirate chieftain did make a run at the Aphrodite, a show of strength would probably make him choose a different victim. But if you didn't treat what might lie ahead as if it were real, you wouldn't be ready on the off chance it turned out so.
“Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” Diokles called, and beat out the stroke with his mallet and bronze square. As the channel between Arados and Euboia drew near, he looked back over his shoulder at Menedemos and asked, “Will you want to put a man at every oar for the dash through the strait?”
The oarmaster acted as if the Aphrodite might be sailing straight into danger. Menedemos didn't see how he could do anything less. He dipped his head. “Yes, let's,” he said, “We haven't had to do much of that kind of thing this sailing season. Let's see how well they handle it.”
“Good enough.” Diokles ordered the rowers to the rowing benches. Menedemos sent Aristeidas up to the foredeck to keep an eye out for pirates as the akatos passed each promontory. If we're going to do this, we'll do it the best way we know how, he thought.
His own gaze kept swinging from north to south, from one island to the other, as the merchant galley sped down the channel. Diokles had hardly set a hotter pace when they were trying to escape the Roman trireme the summer before. The men will be glad to ease off once we're through, Menedemos thought. But then, just when he'd started to think they'd safely made the passage, Aristeidas pointed to port and shouted, “A ship! A ship!”
“A pestilence!” Mencdernos exclaimed as the vessel emerged fromthe concealment of a headland on the northern coast of Andros and raced toward the Aphrodite.
“What do we do now?” Sostratos said. “Maybe we should have tried coming through yesterday afternoon.”
“Bastard was probably lurking here then, too,” Menedemos said. “There aren't many honest uses for a hemiolia, anyhow.” The two-banked galley was short and lean and one
of the swiftest things afloat. Her crew had already taken down the mast and stowed it abaft of the permanent rowing benches of the upper bank.
“Turn towards 'em and try and scare 'em off?” Diokles asked.
“That's what I'm going to do,” Menedemos answered. “They can't have a crew much bigger than ours, so why would they want to mix it up?” He swung the Aphrodite into a tight turn toward the hemiolia. “Up the stroke, if you please.”
“Right you are, skipper.” The keleustes smote the bronze square more quickly still, shouting, “Come on, boys! Put your backs into it! Let's make that polluted vulture run for his nest!”
“I hope he will run,” Sostratos said quietly.
“So do I,” Menedemos answered. The hemiolia gave no sign of sheering off. Its rowers worked their oars at least as smoothly as those of the Aphrodite. The men whose benches had been taken up to give room to stow the mast and yard now stood by the gunwale, ready—or acting ready—to swarm aboard the merchant galley.
“Do you want me to take your bow, the way I did on the run up to Khalkis?” Sostratos asked.
“Yes, go ahead; duck under the tillers and do that,” Menedemos told him. “Then go forward. Use your own judgment about when to start shooting. Aim for their officers if you see the chance.”
“I understand.” His cousin got the bow and the quiver, then hurried up between the two rows of panting, sweating rowers toward the foredeck. The men who powered the Aphrodite couldn't see what was going on, which was true of the rowers in every sea fight since before the Trojan War. As far as the ship went, the rowers were just tools. Menedemos and Diokles had to get the best use from them.
On came the hemiolia. “Doesn't look like those whoresons want to quit at all, does it?” the oarmaster said.
“No,” Menedemos said unhappily. He was unhappy; he'd taken the Aphrodite closer to Andros than to Euboia because he'd worriedmore about pirates on the southern coast of the latter island. That meant this pirate ship hadn't had to go so far to close with the akatos. More unhappily still, Menedemos went on, “We couldn't very well have run away. A hemiolia will run down any other kind of ship on the sea.”
The Gryphon's Skull Page 31