Menedemos laughed. “I wonder, O best one, if there’s any limit to how many questions you can dream up. If there is, you haven’t touched it yet.”
His cousin looked wounded. “What’s wrong with curiosity? Where would we be without it? We’d be living in mud huts and trying to knock hares over the head with rocks, that’s where.”
“Two more questions,” Menedemos said, “even if you did answer one of them.” He wondered how angry-and how entertaining-Sostratos would get at the tweaking. He didn’t tease his cousin as much as he had when they were younger; Sostratos had got better at holding his temper, and so offered less amusement now.
He held it this morning, saying, “I have one question more: what difference does it make to you?”
“None, really. I was just curious.” Menedemos made a face, realizing he’d delivered himself into Sostratos’ hands.
“Thank you, my dear. You just proved my point for me.” Sostratos could have said more and worse. That was small consolation to Menedemos. What his cousin had said was plenty: plenty to make his ears heat, plenty to make Diokles laugh softly. For the next little while, Menedemos gave exaggerated attention to steering the ship-which, at the moment, needed little steering. He’d lost the exchange; he knew he’d lost it; and he hated losing at anything. That he’d lost it through his own foolish choice of words only made losing more annoying.
But he couldn’t stay irked for long, not with the breeze filling the sail and thrumming in the rigging, not with the gentle motion of the ship and the soft splashing as the ram at her bow cut through the water, not with…
Thinking of the ram brought him up short. “Serve out helmets and weapons to the crew, Diokles,” he said. “More pirates in these waters, Furies take ‘em, than fleas on a scavenger dog. If they want us, we’d better make sure they get a hard fight.”
Since the akatos had had to fight off pirates each of the past two sailing seasons, Diokles couldn’t very well disagree. In fact, he dipped his head and said, “I was going to do that anyway pretty soon.”
Before long, with bronze pots on their heads and swords and spears and axes in their hands, the men on the Aphrodite looked piratical themselves. The merchant galley was beamier than a pentekonter or hemiolia, but the crews of fishing boats and round ships weren’t inclined to make such fine distinctions. They never had been. Now, though, they fled with as much haste as Menedemos had ever seen. Fishing boats smaller than the neat little craft the merchant galley towed behind her rowed away with the men in them pulling as hard as if they crewed a war galley charging into battle. Two different sailing ships heeled sharply to the south as soon as their sailors spied the Aphrodite. They wanted to get as far away from her as they could, as fast as they could.
“If standing behind the sail and blowing into it would help them go faster, they’d do that, too,” Menedemos said with a laugh.
“They’ll be hours beating their way back up to their old course against the wind,” Sostratos said.
“Too bad for them,” Menedemos said.
“Hard to blame them,” Sostratos said. “When taking chances can get you sold into slavery or murdered and tossed over the side, you don’t do it. If we believed in taking chances, we wouldn’t have armed ourselves.”
He wasn’t wrong. Even so, Menedemos said, “You know, there are times when you squeeze all the juice out of life.”
“There are times when I think you want just enough juice to drown yourself,” Sostratos replied.
They scowled at each other. Menedemos yawned in Sostratos’ face to show how dull he thought Sostratos was. Sostratos turned his back, walked over to the rail, and pissed into the wine-dark sea. Maybe that was general contempt; maybe he was getting rid of juice. Menedemos didn’t inquire. Sostratos set his chiton to rights and stalked up to the foredeck, back very stiff.
Diokles clucked in distress. “The two of you shouldn’t quarrel,” he said. “The ship needs you both.” He used the dual, implying Menedemos and Sostratos were a natural pair.
Menedemos was steering the ship. He couldn’t turn his back on Diokles, no matter how much he wanted to. At the moment, he would sooner have given his cousin a good kick in the fundament than been yoked to him in the Greek language as part of a pair. Sanctimonious prig, he thought.
For the rest of the day, none of the sailors seemed to want to come near either him or Sostratos. The men walked on tiptoe, as if the Aphrodite’s planking were covered with eggs and they would be whipped if they broke one. Songs, jokes, the usual chatter-all disappeared. Only the sounds of wind and wave remained. The merchant galley had never been so quiet.
Too stubborn and too proud to make any move toward Sostratos, Menedemos stayed at the steering oars the rest of the day. Slowly, slowly, the island of Syros drew near. It was even more desiccated than Kythnos. The Aphrodite had stopped here, too, a couple of years before. Menedemos remembered the verses from the Odyssey wherein Eumaios the swineherd praised the island from which he’d come. He also recalled Sostratos’ comment: that the praise proved Homer a blind poet.
He angrily tossed his head; he didn’t want to think about Sostratos at all. Doing his grim best not to, he steered the merchant galley around the northern tip of the island (which, like Kythnos, was taller than it was wide) and down toward Syros town on the eastern coast. The town sat inside the curve of a little bay. The harbor was fine; had the island of Syros had more in the way of water and people and crops, the harbor could easily have supported a real city. As things were, it mattered about as much as nice eyebrows on an ugly girl.
Because only a few fishing boats and the occasional ship going from somewhere else to somewhere else used the harbor, no one had bothered to improve it with moles and piers. The Aphrodite sat in the bay a couple of plethra from the town. Her anchors plopped into the water to hold her fast.
By the sun, an hour or so of daylight remained. Sostratos called for sailors to row him ashore. “Where do you think you’re going?” Menedemos demanded.
“There’s a temple to Poseidon here,” Sostratos answered. “There’s supposed to be a sundial in it made by Pherekides, who taught Pythagoras. It may be the oldest sundial in Hellas. While we’re here, I’d like to take a look at it. Why? Are you planning to sail off without me?”
“Don’t tempt me.” But Menedemos gestured gruffly toward the boat. “Go on, then. Be back by dark.”
Sostratos pointed to the handful of houses that made up the town. “If you think I’d stay there, you’re-” He broke off.
You’re even stupider than I thought you were. That was what he’d been on the point of saying, that or something like it. Menedemos’ resentment flared anew; he conveniently forgot all the equally unkind thoughts he’d had about Sostratos. “On second thought, stay away as long as you please,” he snapped.
He watched the boat take his cousin to the shore, watched Sostratos talk with an elderly local and take an obolos out of his mouth to give the fellow, watched the graybeard point uphill and to the north, and watched Sostratos hurry off in that direction. He also watched the men who’d rowed Sostratos ashore disappear into a wineshop.
“Skipper, what will you do if the young gentleman has trouble?” Diokles asked. “Going off on your own in a strange place isn’t always the smartest thing you can do.”
“How could there possibly be a problem?” Menedemos answered. “Sostratos seems sure it’s safe, and he knows everything. If you don’t believe me, just ask him.”
Diokles gave him a reproachful look. “Most of the time, the two of you”-he used the dual again, perhaps to drive home his point, perhaps to annoy Menedemos-”have pretty good sense. But when you don’t, you really don’t.” Most of the time, he would have added something like, meaning no disrespect. Today, he didn’t bother.