Satyrus smiled and tried to dispel the heaviness in his brain – and his heart. 'I agree. Fine men – and a good party, too.'
Sappho smiled into her cup. 'As the veteran of a few parties, my dear, I can tell you that good men are what make a good party – not the quality of the lobsters or the antics of the flute girls.'
Satyrus smiled at her. 'Philokles might have said the same.'
Sappho nodded. Her laugh was self-mocking, and Satyrus didn't know what to make of it, so he tried to change the subject. 'You are satisfied that you can restrain Phiale?' he asked.
She nodded. 'Gabines sent me a note,' she said. 'We will watch Phiale. And Sophokles has gone to Sicily. He won't return unless you do. I am not a worthy target.'
Satyrus snorted. 'That just shows what a fool he is. You command me and my sister. You direct the finances of the Exiles and as far as I can discern, it was you, not Coenus, who dispatched my sister to take the leadership of the Sakje.'
Sappho raised her wine. 'Flatterer!' she said.
'Men are strange,' Satyrus said. 'Greek men pretend that women are inferior, when it seems to me that you, who are the daughter and former wife of boeotarchs, wife now of a strategos, are the match for any man in a contest of wits.'
'I have had a triumph or two,' Sappho said. She drank again. 'All flattery gratefully accepted. I've passed the age when men will be stopped in the street by my looks.'
He got up unsteadily, having had too much wine for a man so close to his recovery. 'You are wrong, Aunt! Men still praise your beauty.' He walked towards her unsteadily. She had seldom been so beautiful.
Sappho rose from her couch and straightened her chiton. 'You are the image of your father, Satyrus. Right down to his clumsy, but welcome, flattery. Your feelings for Phiale have left you vulnerable. Be wary.' She embraced him, and he felt her warmth, the press of her breasts against his chest – and then she stepped away.
He flushed, because as usual, his aunt was dead on the mark. 'Will I ever grow up?' he asked.
Sappho laughed, her eyes sparkling, until he laughed, too. 'A good party brings out the lechery in all of us,' she said. 'Go and conquer the Euxine,' she added. 'And get your sister to come back for her son, before I decide to keep him.'
'You said you wanted no more children,' Satyrus said. 'I remember you saying it to us.'
She shook her head and turned away. 'I have seen men who have a will of iron where women are concerned – until one takes them by the hand, and at the first touch, they become clay in her hand.' She shrugged. 'Women can be that way about children.'
'But-' he began.
'Shush, nephew,' she said. 'Go and conquer the Euxine. I'll see to the child.' In the morning, his squadron came off the beach all together. Leon's officers – Satyrus's officers now – were all professionals, better officers, man for man, than Ptolemy's navy had available to them. Satyrus lounged against the rail of the Lotus and listened to their orders, watched the rowers and the deck crews race to get the ships down the beach and into the water. The two light triremes were easy, but the heavy quadriremes with their bow catapults and their heavy crews were slower to launch, and Diomedes, the new helmsman of the Plataea, could be heard from a stade away.
But their hulls were newly cleaned. The Lotus had been scraped and dried while Satyrus lay in his bed shouting at visions in his head, and the rowers pulled him north along the coast of Palestine at a fair clip.
Satyrus watched the coast go by, his eyes always flicking to the empty horizons to the west, where Cyprus lurked out of sight. But winter – high winter – was not the time to risk a heavy blow on the open sea south of Cyprus.
They beached at Ake, the northernmost outpost of Ptolemy's power, and rested a day and a night before racing north with a rare favourable breeze. They passed Tyre in the full light of day, and saw the inner harbour crammed with military shipping, but all their masts were down and most of the hulls were stacked out of the water. And three hours later, they blew past Sidon, their sails still full of their good north wind. The helmsmen and the trierarchs all offered libations to Poseidon, and they stood on. If a pursuit was launched, they never saw it.
'I thought Ptolemy had a squadron moving up this coast as a feint,' Neiron said. 'We should have seen it.'
'I have a growing suspicion that we are Ptolemy's feint,' Satyrus answered. He looked at the land in the ruddy light of a winter evening. 'We might not get weather this good again for ten days. It is too good to stop for the night.' He looked at Neiron. 'I'm of a mind to try to get north of Laodikea before we look for a beach.'
Neiron nodded. 'Ask me to solve your land quarrels and I'm all at sea,' Neiron said. He nodded and scratched under his beard. 'Here, I'm happy to give advice. We'll have this wind until at least the rising of the morning star. The sky is clear and the men are still fresh – no one's touched an oar all day.' He frowned. 'Besides – you want them ready for anything by the time we enter the Euxine. Some small risks now will give us better crews.'
They passed Laodikea in the dark, its position marked only by the dull glow of a town at night – and even then, most of the light came from the Temple of Poseidon's eternal fire on the height behind the town.
The morning star was rising when they passed the headland at Gigarta and Neiron indicated the darkness of the open ocean. 'There's a set of islands north and west of Tripolis,' he said. 'If I line up the Kalamus headland with the North Star, we should be on a beach in an hour.'
The wind was dropping, and the sails flapped every few minutes as the wind backed and spat.
Satyrus nodded. 'Weather change?' he asked.
'Like enough,' Neiron answered.
'Do it,' Satyrus ordered, and an hour later he was eating hot stew on a beach just big enough for seven warships and their crews. And he noticed a certain regard among the helmsmen and trierarchs. Night sailing was not for the weak of heart.
In the morning, they rowed away north, with the wind blowing from off the land. The triemiolia could sail on a broad reach, but the triremes and quadriremes couldn't, and their rowers got plenty of practice.
Noon saw them north of the old pirate haven at Arados, and they ate their evening meal on the beach at Gabala on the coast of Syria.
In fact, they spent three days on the beach at Gabala, lashed by winds and heavy rain that made launching the light triremes impossible, and Satyrus was forced to use his manpower to pull the ships clear of the water, high up on the beaches. And he had a thousand rowers to feed, so that his men were roaming the countryside for food before the winter storm ended, every scrap of provision consumed.
On the fourth day, he got them under way with empty bellies and some empty benches where men didn't return. The Plataea made heavy going of the launch, and laboured in the waves, because his upper-tier rowers had eaten something bad and dysentery was rife.
They'd been at sea less than an hour before Satyrus saw the squadron astern. He pointed, and Neiron swore. 'Poseidon's stade-long member,' he said. 'Where'd they come from?'
Satyrus shook his head. 'Tyre? Sidon? I always knew there was a risk, coming up this coast. We're sailing right through Demetrios's fleet.' He shook his head. 'Ptolemy has a lot to answer for.'
Noon, and they passed the headland at Posideion, and every man threw a handful of barley into the sea if he had any grain. The squadron behind them was just a series of nicks on the horizon, and even those sightings were occasional. No one had a mast raised on a day like this, with the wind blowing more north than anything else, and all the rowers cursed their lot at every stroke of the oars.
In early afternoon, the wind shifted back to the east, blowing off the land, and the pursuing squadron began to gain ground, their fresher rowers and more recent food beginning to tell.