“Don’t worry too much, skipper,” Diokles said. “You’ve been doing this for a while now. Me, I’ve been doing it longer than you’ve been alive. Odds are you’ll still be at it when you’re old and gray like me.” He chuckled. “I was going to say ‘old and gray and ugly like me,’ but I don’t expect you’ll ever get this ugly now matter how old you are.”
Menedemos kalos, they’d written on walls when he was a youth. He hadn’t let it swell his head, the way some boys did. He’d never heard it put quite like this before, though. He laughed, too, and batted his eyes at the crusty keleustes. “You say the sweetest things, my dear.”
Diokles broke up. So did Menedemos. Laughing hard felt good. As when he lay down with Seseset, he had a little while when he didn’t need to worry about his business … or about what might happen to Rhodes.
Pasos watched as Sostratos and his rowers stowed the last amphora of Damonax’s olive oil on his barge. He also had jars of cheap wine from Phoenicia and bolts of woolen cloth for the Hellenes who’d settled along the Nile—Egyptians commonly preferred linen.
“Oil from those olive things? Really?” the barge captain said.
“Olive oil. That’s right. Very fine olive oil,” Sostratos said.
“I taste olive oil one time, here in Alexandria, just to see what is this stuff.” Pasos screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue, as if he’d just choked down some nasty medicine. “Bad! Horrible! Have to be crazy to use. Even stinks when you burn in lamps.”
“Hellenes are fond of it,” Sostratos replied with dignity. His men, their work done for the moment, dipped their heads to show they thought he was right. A couple of them laughed at the Egyptian.
“Hellenes is daft. Well, I see this already.” Pasos brushed a fly away from his face. The air around the stagnant canal was full of flies and gnats and midges and other buzzing, biting annoyances. After the sun went down, it would probably have more than its fair share of mosquitoes, too.
“It’s all right, friend. We think Egyptians are the mad ones,” Sostratos said. That made Pasos laugh in turn. He said something in his own language to his sailors. Translating, Sostratos realized. The barge crew laughed with their captain. By the way they pointed at Sostratos and his men, the Hellenes might have been so many monkeys with tails.
Men on the pier tossed the mooring lines into the barge. Pasos spoke to his crew again, his voice this time sharp with command. The men set sweeps—oars far longer and heavier than the ones the Aphrodite used—in the oarlocks (only loops of rope, but they served) and began to row, easing the big, ungainly craft out into the middle of the canal.
At first, Sostratos wasn’t sure the handful of men straining so hard could move the heavily laden barge at all. But it did move—slow enough to make a turtle or even a snail chuckle, yet it did.
“That’s not the kind of rowing we do, but those fellows know their trade,” said one of the Hellenes, a fellow with a broken nose whose name was Arkesilas. “Cursed hard trade, too, looks like.”
“It does, yes.” Sostratos was thinking the same thing.
Pasos ambled over to him. “We set sail when we can,” he said. “Take a while. Nothing on barge happen quick.”
“I’ve had the same thought out on the sea,” Sostratos replied. An akatos, though, was a much livelier craft than this ugly floating box. Waves and wind mattered more than they would on the Nile, too.
Once the barge was positioned as Pasos liked, the sailors raised the mast and set stays to secure it in place. The sail was a broad rectangle. “Look at that!” Arkesilas said. “They’ve got the brails on the back of the sail, not the front.”
“Why, so they do!” Sostratos exclaimed. It wasn’t a surprise. Just the opposite, in fact: he was noticing for the first time something he’d read about years before. Herodotos maintained that Egyptians did everything in the opposite way from most other folk, and how they placed their brails was one of his examples. Sostratos hadn’t known he remembered that, but seeing it called the words up in his mind. And as for the sail itself …. “Are you catching the wind with papyrus, Pasos?”
“Papyrus.” The Egyptian’s head bobbed up and down. They shared that gesture with most other barbarians, no matter what Herodotos said. “You Hellenes, you like linen better, yes?”
“Yes. Papyrus doesn’t grow in our land. You Egyptians, you have linen, too.” Sostratos gestured toward Pasos’ kilt. “Why don’t you use it for sailcloth?”
With a shrug, Pasos answered, “For what our ships on river do, papyrus just as good. Cheaper, too.”
He had a point. He wouldn’t need to worry about waves or suddenly swinging winds or even the rain that might turn his sail all spongy and useless. “You’ll sail down to Memphis and then let the current take you north again?” Sostratos asked.
The barge skipper nodded again. “This trip, keep going south of Memphis, too. Then come north like you say. That how we do it. This ship not fast, but just enough with wind to go against ….” He gestured to show he meant current; he couldn’t come up with the Greek word even though Sostratos had just used it.
Sostratos dipped his head to show he understood. He even sympathized—he had the same kind of lapses when he spoke Aramaic. He said, “You have a nice … steady life on the Nile.” He almost said an easy life. Compared to sailing the sea and worrying about storms and pirates and generals who lusted after your polis, it was. But the sailors worked as hard as any sailors anywhere. Sostratos wouldn’t have cared to pull one of those long, heavy sweeps for even a little while.
“Steady life, yes. But tough life. You Hellenes, you make to pay too many taxes,” the Egyptian said.
Sostratos spread his hands. “I can’t do anything about that. My ship has to pay them, too. I think we pay more of them here, because Rhodes is a foreign land. The Ptolemaios doesn’t rule us, even if we’re friendly to him.”
“Too much wars. Too much fightings,” Pasos said. Considering the times they lived in, Sostratos could hardly tell him he was wrong.
That big, wide sail filled with the breeze that blew off the Inner Sea. The mast groaned and creaked at the push, but the stays held. That happened on the Aphrodite, too. It may not be just like the sailing I’m used to, but it’s still sailing, Sostratos thought.
The barge began to move down the canal. The motion was so slow, Sostratos wondered at first if he was imagining it. Little by little, doubt left him. They might have no better speed than the oxcarts had shown bringing the oil here, but eventually they’d get where they were going.
After a while, they got to the city wall. Sostratos had wondered if they would have to lower the mast and sail to pass under masonry with a portcullis that could be lowered to block access to Alexandria, but they didn’t. There was simply a gap in the wall through which the canal passed. To Sostratos, that spoke of Alexander’s confidence, and Ptolemaios’, that the new city would stay safe and secure.
Thinking about the way the wider world worked, he was glad Rhodes’ fortifications had no gaps.
The canal swung east and ran between the southern wall and Lake Mareotis, which lay south of Alexandria. The ground was low, muddy, marshy, and riotously green, far greener than anything Sostratos had ever seen anywhere else. Herons, black ibises, and little naked boys fished at the edge of the canal. Something large swimming beneath the surface made a sinuous ripple on it.
Sostratos pointed to the mark on the otherwise quiet water. “Is that the trace of a crocodile, O Pasos?” he called.