“That makes sense. Your mother may not have licked you all the way dry yet, but you know your trade,” Blepyros said. “Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll line my men up outside the shed here. Tell ’em whatever you’re going to tell ’em, and if five or six want to go with you, fine. I can pick up replacements easy enough.” A certain hard glint in his eye suggested he might not be fussy about how he picked them up, either.
The next morning, the rowers looked like … rowers: sun-tanned men with wide shoulders, thick arms, and horny hands. Most were Hellenes, though there were also a handful of Egyptians. “I need half a dozen men to pull a one-man oar on an akatos from here to Cyprus, and then on to Rhodes,” Menedemos said. “Two drakhmai a day. We won’t come back to Alexandria this year. You can settle in my polis if you like, or you can take passage on a ship sailing here next spring if things stay peaceful. What do you say?”
Three men, two Hellenes and an Egyptian, stepped forward right away. “I’m for it,” one of the Hellenes said in the broad Doric of Crete. “A little fella like that, the work’s bound to be easier than pulling a five along.”
Blepyros waited to see whether more rowers would volunteer. When none did, he said, “All you men who aren’t married, hold up a hand.” Several unwary rowers did. Blepyros pointed at three of them. “You, you, and you. Yes, you, Kerdon. Go with the Rhodian and help him out.”
Kerdon scowled. Then he took another look at Blepyros’ face and thought better of arguing. “Looks like I’m your man, Rhodian,” he said to Menedemos. By the way he talked, he might have sprung from the same Cretan village as the other rower. With more people than it had land for, Crete exported sailors and mercenaries. A lot of the men who stayed behind went to sea anyhow, as pirates. Hard as that life was, it was bound to be easier than trying to scratch out a living on a tiny, dusty, stony plot of ground.
Menedemos sketched a salute to Blepyros. “Much obliged, sir.”
“Any time.” Ptolemaios’ captain turned to the rowers who were changing ships, some willingly, some less so. “Go on, lads. Chances are you can count yourselves lucky. That little toy boat won’t get into any sea fights. You stay with me, who knows how much fun you’ll have off Cyprus?”
Naval battles with fours and fives and sixes were a different business from those involving triremes. Triremes fought with lizard-quick maneuver; the ram at the bow was their main weapon, though they also carried a few archers. Along with the swarms of rowers, the bigger war galleys had far more marines on them. They would lay alongside an enemy ship, board it, overwhelm its fighters, and then slaughter the men at the oars. For all practical purposes, it was land warfare on the ocean.
Menedemos wanted no part of it. The Aphrodite would be at an even worse disadvantage against such seagoing monsters than a trireme would. Hoping his new recruits felt the same way, he said, “Come along with me. You can meet the men you’ll be rowing with.” He eyed the Egyptian. “You do speak Greek, don’t you?”
“Fornicating right, I do,” the brown man answered.
“All right.” Menedemos laughed. “Let’s go, everybody.” As he led the rowers toward the inn where the Aphrodite’s men were quartered, he wondered just where Blepyros would get his replacements. He guessed they’d come from the fishermen and merchant seamen who used the Harbor of Happy Return, on the other side of the long mole from the Great Harbor. Some of them would want to pull an oar for Ptolemaios, or at least for his silver. Others might prove less eager, which, Menedemos suspected, wouldn’t matter one bit to the war galley’s skipper.
As Menedemos and the akatos’ new crewmen neared the inn, Sostratos came out the front door. Seeing the miniature procession, he stopped in glad surprise. “You got them!” he exclaimed.
“I figured I would,” Menedemos answered. Then he spoke to the new rowers: “This is my cousin, Sostratos. He’s toikharkhos on the Aphrodite.” He remembered the title meant something different on a merchant ship from what it did aboard a naval vessel. “That means he’s the supercargo and the purser, not a petty officer. He’ll write down your names, and you’ll draw your pay from him.”
That made Sostratos the object of the new rowers’ interested attention. He took from his belt pouch a stylus and a small, three-faced wooden tablet whose leaves were coated with wax. “I’ll take your names now, if that’s all right.” When he got to the Egyptian, he asked, as Menedemos had, “You do speak Greek?”
“No, not me. Not a fornicating word of it, not even a little bit,” the man answered.
Sostratos blinked. “He did the same thing to me,” Menedemos told him.
“Did he?” Sostratos said, and then, to the Egyptian, “All right, tell me your name.” He poised the sharp end of the stylus above the wax.
“I’m Attinos son of Thonis,” the fellow said.
Sostratos asked him to repeat it, then set it down in Greek letters as best he could. “The real register is on papyrus, which isn’t so easy to alter without leaving a trace,” he said, holding the stylus with the blunt end, the end that rubbed out, uppermost to show what he meant. “I’ll enter all of you properly as soon as I can, but I have what I need for now.”
“Go on in. Meet our Rhodians—they’ve pretty much taken over the place since we got here,” Menedemos told the new men. “They’ll be glad to see you. Nobody wants to start a trip with empty benches.”
In went the rowers. The inn had its own wineshop; Menedemos hoped no brawls would start right away. When things inside the place stayed quiet, he breathed easier. To Sostratos, he said, “They’re warm bodies, anyhow, and at least they know what to do with an oar.”
“My dear, I wasn’t complaining—not a bit of it,” his cousin answered. “I’m more impressed than I can tell you. I didn’t think you’d be able to fother our leak so fast.”
“Thank you!” Menedemos said, and then, “Thank you very much.” Sostratos was more in the habit of calling him a thickskull than of singing his praises. That thought led to another: “Do you know what the Ptolemaios said about you while he was, ah, hiring the Aphrodite?”
“No. What?” Sostratos asked. Menedemos told him, imitating the lord of Egypt’s gruff voice and manner as best he could. Sostratos dug his toes into the dirt in embarrassed pleasure, like a girl hearing someone say she’s pretty for the first time. “Did he really say that? It won’t be easy to live up to.”
“Let’s see if we can get back to Rhodes in one piece, and without Demetrios only half a bowshot behind us. If we manage that, you can worry about everything else later,” Menedemos said.
“You say the sweetest things,” Sostratos murmured. Menedemos laughed and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cousin’s cheek. Yes, when you laughed you could pretend for a little while that the things you laughed about didn’t really matter, and that they had no chance at all of happening.
Sostratos peered over the Aphrodite’s rail, down into the muddy, filthy water of Ptolemaios’ Harbor. The akatos had even less freeboard than usual; Ptolemaios’ workers had filled it fuller with weapons than he and Menedemos did with merchandise.
They had another new rower, as one more man who’d come down from Rhodes decided at the last minute to stay in Alexandria instead of going home again. Like a couple of the other new fellows, Okumenes was a Cretan. He took the akatos’ oars so much for granted, Sostratos wondered if he’d rowed before in a piratical pentekonter. The way his eyes darted now here, now there also suggested he was looking for the chance to lift something.