Out at the opening in the moles that separated Ptolemaios’ harbor from the larger Great Harbor, the lord of Egypt’s fours and fives were going out one by one. The Aphrodite waited with the other ships that carried men and beasts and supplies. The war galleys—there had to be well over a hundred of them—were the teeth and claws of the fleet, the rest of the ships just the tail. Like any other tail, they came last.
People on the moles cheered and waved squares of colored cloth as the war galleys rowed past them. They made a brave show, one the men in the fours and fives would forget as soon as they got out of sight.
The oared transports followed the warships out of Ptolemaios’ harbor. Sostratos took his place at the Aphrodite’s bow. Menedemos clasped the steering oars at the stern. Diokles stood in front of him on the stern platform, hammer and bronze triangle ready to give the rowers their rhythm. For the exit, every oar was manned. They wouldn’t keep that up once they got out on the Inner Sea. Several days of it would leave the rowers on the fours and fives worn and useless in battle.
When the oars on the freight-haulers just ahead of the akatos began churning the water to foam, Menedemos dipped his head to Diokles. “Come on, boys!” the keleustes said. “We may be little, but by the gods we’ll show ’em what we can do!” He smote the triangle with the hammer, at the same time calling, “Rhyppapai!” Another clang. Another “Rhyppapai!” Clang! “Rhyppapai!”
The Aphrodite’s oars dug into the dirty water, a little more raggedly than Sostratos would have liked. The rowers grunted and swore. They hadn’t worked for quite a while; they hadn’t got hardened by going from one polis to another the way they did on most trading runs.
Slowly, slowly, the akatos began to move. The bigger galleys in the fleet’s supply tail weren’t setting the sea on fire with their speed, either; the Aphrodite had no trouble keeping up. She might have left Ptolemaios’ harbor last of all, but Sostratos thought she did so in some style.
By the time she glided out through the opening between the moles, most of Ptolemaios’ cheering claque had given up and gone home. War galleys were exciting, ships laden with sheep or horses or catapult stones much less so. But one of the men still standing there pointed at the Aphrodite not just with his chin but with his index finger and shouted, “Look at the toy boat with all the big ones!”
Sostratos wasn’t about the let anyone sneer at his ship that way. He leaned out over the rail and stared at the man on the mole, widening his eyes as much as he could. As someone who did his best to stay rational, he—mostly—thought the evil eye was so much nonsense. But he knew other people (foolish people, as far as he was concerned) felt otherwise. If this fellow did ….
Sure enough, the Alexandrian noticed his gaze and flinched away from it as he would have from a clenched fist. He thrust out his own fist at Sostratos, thumb thrusting forth between index and middle fingers: a protective gesture. Sostratos just kept on staring. “Don’t you cast a spell on me! Don’t you dare!” the man cried shrilly. “By the gods, I’ll murder you if you do!”
Out into the Great Harbor glided the Aphrodite. Sostratos kept staring till he got too far from the man on the mole to see the point anymore. Then he walked back to the stern platform. As he passed Attinos, the Egyptian rower asked, “You really have the fornicating evil eye?”
“If you think I do, maybe I do,” Sostratos answered, and paused to see what Attinos made of that.
He might be a barbarian who flavored his Greek with obscenities the way a rich man’s cook flavored his cheese casseroles with pepper, but no one would ever call him a fool. With a sly little chuckle, he said, “Like that, huh?” He kept the stroke perfectly while he talked; he’d done enough rowing so he didn’t need to think about it.
“Just like that, my dear,” Sostratos answered, liking him very much in the moment.
“You had the shit-talking lardhead so scared, he futtering near fell in the water,” Attinos said, and laughed some more.
“I was hoping he would, but it didn’t quite happen.” Sostratos went on back to the stern.
“What were you talking about with the new fellow?” Menedemos asked when Sostratos took his place next to Diokles. He explained. “Oh, is that what you were up to?” his cousin said. “I saw you looking at the fellow and I saw him hopping around as though he’d just come out of a brothel full of fleas, but I didn’t know what was going on. Euge! You gave him something to remember you by.”
“If you really did have the evil eye, you should’ve aimed it at the Demetrios,” Diokles said.
“Or at some of the abandoned rogues who’ve cheated us or made us do things that might turn out bad for the polis.” Menedemos named no names, but looked ahead toward Ptolemaios’ gaudily ornamented flagship. By his expression, he wouldn’t have minded owning the evil eye himself at that moment.
More Alexandrians stood on the low, sandy island connected to the mainland by the mole called the Heptastadion: it was seven stadia long. They also cheered the departing war galleys. Because they were farther away, their cries had the strange, attenuated quality voices over water often took on.
Sostratos didn’t think he’d ever left a harbor to applause before. Of course, Rhodes remained a free and independent polis. It had no ruler who would order people to cheer him; it had no people who cared to curry favor with that kind of ruler. If the gods knew mercy, it never would.
If. Still hindmost in Ptolemaios’ fleet, the Aphrodite centipeded out of the Great Harbor and onto the rougher waters of the Inner Sea.
XI
“How are you doing?” Menedemos asked his cousin, trying to sound sympathetic rather than scornful.
“Not … too bad.” Sostratos’ greenish pallor gave his words the lie. He’d leaned over the rail and emptied himself a couple of times since the Aphrodite left Alexandria.
“You had an easier time on the trip down to Egypt,” Menedemos said. “You kept everything down then.”
“I know,” Sostratos said dolefully. “Don’t remind me. The waves were mostly with us when we sailed south, Now they’re hitting us bow-on. The motion’s different, and so ….”
Menedemos thought he’d feed the fish again, but he didn’t quite. Before too long, Sostratos would be all right again. But he’d been on land long enough to lose his sea legs, and his sea stomach. He wasn’t wrong; traveling against the waves instead of with them did change the way the akatos pitched. To Menedemos, though, the difference was only a difference, not a disaster.
At the moment, he had every other oar manned. Putting a rower on them all was for show, as when leaving the harbor at Alexandria, or for an emergency. Ptolemaios’ skippers had also eased back as soon as they got out of sight of the Alexandrians. The Aphrodite had no trouble keeping up with the lord of Egypt’s fleet, even at the relatively slow stroke Diokles was beating out.
Up ahead, in the war galleys, the rowers would be thanking their oarmasters for whatever respite they could get. When they fought Demetrios’ fleet, they’d need every bit of strength and energy they could find. Menedemos hoped—he prayed, in fact—the men on the akatos’ oars wouldn’t need to worry about battle.
The sun sank toward the western horizon. Italy and Sicily and Carthage lay in that direction. Rhodes was farther west than Cyprus, too, though not nearly that far. Menedemos wondered whether the Aphrodite could slip away from the fleet under cover of darkness and make for home instead of Cyprus.