‘I’m tired of being stared at,’ Melitta said to her brother.
‘I’m tired of being tested. Trade you!’ Satyrus said with a wry smile.
‘Deal!’ she said, and spat in her hand. They shook without his unwrapping his arms from the steering oar.
‘Now you’ve put a notch in my wake,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘You’re pretending to be a sailor while I pretend to be a Greek woman,’ she said. ‘When do we get to stop pretending?’
Satyrus watched the horizon over the stern for a long minute. ‘I remember when I thought that you were so much older than me,’ he said. ‘Now I think maybe I’ve passed you – for a while. Because I learned something last year, and I learned it again after I kissed Amastris.’
‘You kissed Amastris? Not some slave girl in her clothes?’ Melitta leaned forward.
‘Was she chewing cinnamon just before she summoned me?’ Satyrus asked.
Melitta gave an enigmatic smile. ‘So – you kissed her. Was it beautiful? ’
Satyrus sighed. ‘It was beautiful, Lita. That’s what I mean. It wasn’t like kissing Phiale at all. Kissing Phiale made my member stiff. Kissing Amastris made me soften.’
‘You’re killing me. My brother has a poetic soul? While I’m left with all this chaff?’ She waved around her at the men on deck. Then, seeing that Peleus was coming up the central deck, she leaned close. ‘Tell me what you learned.’
‘We’re always pretending.’ He looked at her, eye to eye, so close that he could see the flecks of colour in her iris, and she could see her own reflection in his. She could feel his breath on her face. ‘I pretend to be brave when I’m afraid. I pretend to be interested in sex when I’m interested in impressing my peers, I pretend to be religious when I go to temple. I pretend to be obedient when I steer the ship.’
She cast a glance at Peleus and he grabbed her arm. ‘Listen, Melitta. Because that’s what every ephebe knows. But what I know is that the pretending becomes the reality.’
Melitta looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. ‘But-’ She made a face. ‘Satyrus, why can’t you be like this all the time?’
Satyrus furrowed his eyebrows. ‘What?’
Melitta raised her arms as if supplicating the gods. ‘At sea, you are – as wise as Philokles. As subtle as Diodorus. On land, you’re often – well, my not-quite-a-man brother.’
‘Thanks. I think,’ Satyrus said. After a second, he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. At sea I’m in command – at least this trip. Command – well, it’s like a dose of cold water when you’re asleep. And I keep seeing people do things I know that I do. Xeno does stuff that makes me tremble, and so help me-’ He laughed, and Melitta joined him.
‘If you two was sailors, I’d expect a mutiny,’ Peleus said. He spared Melitta a smile. ‘May I offer the despoina an apology for my rude ways when we was running from pirates?’
Melitta gave him the full weight of her smile – eyes flashing, teeth, a hand sweeping back her hair. If these were all the weapons she had to use as a ‘Greek’ woman, she’d wield them ruthlessly. ‘Were you rude, helmsman? I thought that you were doing your duty.’ She swept by him down the deck, heading for her own awning with Dorcus under the boatsail mast.
She heard his grunt as she moved away, and smiled again in satisfaction. They weren’t her weapons of choice, but they did cut.
Well past midday, and the sea rose, blue and blue, out to the rim of the horizon’s bowl. The sun rode the sky above them, heading west, and the handful of fleecy clouds were more ornament than threat.
‘Nothing more frightening except a storm,’ Kalos muttered. He squatted in the stern, out of the wind. He kept his eyes forward, as if he didn’t want to see the empty rim of the bowl, unmarked by even the hint of land in any direction.
‘Don’t be a woman,’ Peleus said. ‘The boys do as you do.’
‘I hate not seeing a coast,’ Kalos said. He got to his feet, stretched like a big, ugly cat and glided forward, light on his feet and unaffected by the roll.
‘I hate it too,’ Peleus said. He gave Satyrus his secret smile. ‘But cutting across the empty sea is what makes us better sailors, lad. And you have to look like you know your way – like there’s a path of gold hammered into the surface of the water for you and only you.’
Satyrus thought of his advice to his sister. ‘I pretend I’m not afraid all the time,’ he said.
‘We have a name for that, lad,’ Peleus said, slapping his shoulder. ‘We call that courage.’
‘Do you know where we are?’ Satyrus asked.
Peleus looked around. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But give or take a thousand stades, we’re west of Cyprus. I draw some hope from that bank of low cloud that just came up under the bow. See it?’
Satyrus stretched his neck to see under the mainsail. ‘I think I do.’
‘I’ll go forward and look – slowly, so it doesn’t look bad. Notch in your wake, lad.’ Peleus went forward, adjusting sheets and cursing the oarsmen, most of whom hadn’t touched an oar since mid-morning and were so much human cargo.
Satyrus watched him go and stood looking at his sister and thinking of Amastris. Thinking that, like the flower of the lotus, Amastris was probably something that would be bad for him in the long run. What if he endangered their chance at revenge? At having their own kingdom? In his mind’s eye he could see Ataelus – just to name one man – the small Sakje had been with his mother when she died. He’d escaped to raise his clan in revolt, and he had worked tirelessly at rallying the former coalition of the Eastern Assagatje to fight against the Sauromatae and against Eumeles, supported by Leon. Or Lykeles, who spoke against Heron every day in the assembly in Olbia.
What if he incurred her father’s real displeasure? Or Ptolemy’s?
He watched his wake. Life, he thought, is too complicated. He enjoyed being a helmsman. He enjoyed the simple, yet endless, task – he enjoyed the trust and the responsibility and the palpable success at the end of the day. If you piloted a ship well, it came to port. Task complete. Kingship seemed to be much worse.
His thoughts wandered off to the moment when she slipped into his arms, the surrender of her mouth, the quickness of her tongue ‘Planning to sail back to Rhodos, lad?’ Peleus said. He pointed at the long curve of the wake.
‘Oh – ugh!’ Satyrus brought the ship back on course with a perceptible turn that made heads come up all along the deck. He was irrationally angry – at himself, at Peleus – at always being tested. Again.
‘Girl?’ Peleus asked.
‘Yes,’ Satyrus answered, almost inaudibly.
‘Don’t think about any of that when you’re at the helm. Mind you, you’ve been at it without relief for a watch and a half. I’ll take the helm.’
‘I’m fine,’ Satyrus said.
‘No, you ain’t. I’ll take the helm, navarch. If you please.’ Peleus was suddenly very formal.
Satyrus stood straight and managed to get the oar into the helmsman’s hand, despite the shame of his burning face. ‘You have the helm.’
‘I have the helm. Go and lie down and dream of your girl, boy. You earned a rest – don’t fret.’
Despite this last admonition, Satyrus knew that he’d made an error – a bad error, one that in a normal young man would have been punished by a blow or worse. He walked to the awning in silence, and the deck crew made way for him as if he was injured. Sailors were very perceptive to social ills – they had to be, living so close – and he’d seen before how a man who had been punished was treated with consideration that verged on tenderness.
Now that same blanket surrounded him, and he hated that he had failed them. He collapsed on a cushion of straw next to his sister. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he said.
She raised an eyebrow but said nothing, and after a long bout of recrimination, he managed to fall asleep.
Evening came – a beautiful evening. Satyrus woke to find his head pillowed in his sister’s lap, with the first star – Aphrodite – just rising above the ship’s side. ‘You were tired,’ his sister said.