At Pasos’ order, the Egyptians spread the big square sail and got moving. Before long, they left the lake and entered one of the many Nile branches that formed the Delta. Little farming villages were everywhere, sometimes screened from easy view by reeds, sometimes not. The air was hot and wet. The more villages Sostratos saw, the more he realized how packed with people Egypt was. Hellas seemed a desert by comparison.
“O Pasos!” Sostratos called after a while. “What are those odd reeds with the tufts on top?” He pointed.
“Don’t you know?” Pasos looked bemused. When Sostratos tossed his head, the skipper went on, “Is papyrus plant. Is what we get sail from, and for writing on.”
“By the dog!” Sostratos exclaimed. The whole phrase was By the dog of Egypt!, but he swallowed the end of it, not wanting to chance offending Pasos. “When I think of papyrus, I think of the sheets we write on. I’ve seen boats made from the plants, but I don’t think about those so much.” He stared at them with fresh interest. They still looked like odd, tufted reeds.
The Nile’s current fought the breeze filling the papyrus sail; the barge slowed from a lazy walk to a crawl. But it did keep making headway against the river. As the marshy land was full of people and villages, the Nile was just as full of boats and ships and rafts. Some were no more than skins stretched over a framework of sticks. Some were papyrus boats, like the ones the Aphrodite had met on the Inner Sea nearing Alexandria. Others, bigger, hauled this and that up and down the river. Without the Nile, Egypt would have ceased to exist. Sostratos had known that before: known it in his head. Now, seeing it, he felt it in his belly, too.
And Alexandria was the place where everything bound for the wider world went out, the place where everything Egypt got from the wider world came in. Alexander had known what he was doing when he founded the first of the many cities he’d named for himself. Ptolemaios, ruling there, could hardly help from becoming the richest man in the world … if he could keep it.
A sentry in the naval harbor scowled at Menedemos. “Who the daimon are you?” he growled in Macedonian-flavored Greek. “You’ve been skulking around here the past few days.” He hefted a spear.
“I’m Menedemos son of Philodemos, a trader from Rhodes.” Menedemos didn’t think he’d been skulking. He’d been watching quite openly as Ptolemaios’ men began to fit out their fleet for the counterattack on Cyprus. Contradicting an armed man seemed less a game and more a risk than it would have a few years earlier, though.
“That’s what you say,” the sentry answered. “How do I know you aren’t spying for the gods-hated Cyclops and his pup?”
Menedemos could have asked how he was supposed to get word to Antigonos and Demetrios across the thousands of stadia of the Inner Sea. Instead, he pulled a sheet of papyrus from a pouch on his belt. “This is a letter from the Ptolemaios himself, giving me leave to come here.”
He started to present it to the sentry, but the fellow waved it away. “You wait right here. Right here, you hear? I got to find me an officer. You aren’t here when I come back, I’ll stick you if I ever see you again. You got that?”
“I’ll wait.” Menedemos was talking to the sentry’s back. He chuckled to himself. In Rhodes, at least one man in three could read and write, and you didn’t need to be part of the upper crust to know how. He’d seen things were different elsewhere in the Hellenic world. They certainly were here. The sentry seemed offended Menedemos should expect him to have his letters.
After a little while, the Macedonian came back. An officer with a red cape to show his rank strode behind him. “Let’s see this letter,” he said brusquely. He had a Macedonian accent, too, but one with an Attic overlay that made Menedemos think of Sostratos. Sure enough, anyone who talked like that would be able to read.
“Here you are.” Menedemos gave him the square of papyrus. He held it out at arm’s length; he was old enough for his sight to have started lengthening. But he could make sense of it—his lips moved as he sounded out the words.
When he finished, he gave the letter back to Menedemos. “He is who he says he is,” he told the sentry. That was what Menedemos thought he said, anyhow. When he spoke to a countryman, he sounded much less like an Athenian and much more like a Macedonian.
“So he can go wherever he wants and see whatever he pleases?” The sentry sounded scandalized.
But the officer dipped his head. Macedonians might be half barbarous, but they weren’t barbarous enough to nod. “That’s right. The Rhodians aren’t friends with old One-eye. They like us better—we make them money.”
That mixed truth and scorn in almost equal measure. Menedemos wasn’t inclined to complain. Neither was the sentry, who said, “Sorry I bothered you, O best one.”
“It’s all right. If you aren’t sure what you need to do, you should always ask someone.” The officer gave Menedemos the ghost of a wave. “Hail,” he said, and walked off.
“Go on. You can do what you want,” the sentry said. “I’m just glad Philippos there didn’t break something over my head.”
Whenever you had to get someone who could give you orders to do something, you ran the risk that he might take it out on you for interrupting whatever he was already up to. Menedemos faced that problem, among others, with his father.
He ambled along as if he had not a care in the world, seeing what he could see. He didn’t seen any of Ptolemaios’ war galleys, the fours and fives and even gibber ships that were all the rage with Alexander’s jumped-up generals. He could see the sheds that housed them and kept them dry till they had to put to sea. Most of those were longer and quite a bit wider than the ones that sheltered Rhodes’ triremes. He reminded himself to ask Ptolemaios to get the Aphrodite into a shed. Then he counted the sheds, but he didn’t check to see how many actually had vessels inside them. Even with Ptolemaios’ letter, that would have looked too much like spying.
No one put freighters in shipsheds. Freighters would always be slow. If they were a little slower with their planking waterlogged, so what? Menedemos took off his hat to scratch his head when he didn’t see many tied up at the quays. Then he spied men carrying sacks and crates and jars into a shipshed. That made him pull his hat brim down lower over his eyes so he could pretend he didn’t care what was going on there.
Ptolemaios would need supplies for his fleet and for his soldiers. Grain, beans, oil, wine …. Armies fed off the countryside as much as they could, but they needed some rations to supplement what they stole. If all those things didn’t go aboard the usual freighters, where would they go? On galleys that could keep up with the rest of the fleet? If you had the rowers to power them, why not? It would make you fast, for sure.
He didn’t see any meat animals or horses. That told him the fleet wouldn’t sail right away. Cows and sheep and horses for the cavalry wouldn’t board ship till the last minute. They’d be easier to care for while still on land.
Like the staples that fed warriors, weapons didn’t need much care. Some workers carried sheaves of arrows for the archers and the larger, fatter bolts some catapults flung. Others had lumpy leather sacks: bigger catapults threw round stones about the size of a head at the works that protected poleis. If Demetrios had so quickly moved down from Karpaseia, where he’d landed, and besieged Salamis, he would have such artillery himself, and Ptolemaios had better not be behindhand.
Spears, helmets, shields, swords—an army also needed more than the ones the soldiers carried or wore. Some would get lost, some would get smashed, some would get thrown away when a man ran for his life. Centuries before, Arkhilokhos had written a lyric poem about that, telling how the Thracian who had his shield was welcome to it, and he’d get another, better, one when he found the chance.