Fluffy clouds glided across the sky from north to south. Every so often, one of them would pass in front of the sun and give the men on the Aphrodite a brief respite from its glare. But then the shadow would pass on. If Sostratos looked astern instead of ahead, he could watch it darken a receding stretch of ocean behind the akatos.
“Cousin!” Menedemos called from his place at the steering oars. “Come back here, will you?”
“Of course! Do you want me to spell you for a while?” Sostratos said.
“No, not yet.” Menedemos tossed his head. “We need to talk, though.”
Sostratos made his way back to the stern platform. About half the oars were in the water. The other rowers dozed or rested or played knucklebones on the benches. Up the three oaken steps Sostratos went. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.
“What do we do if things go wrong off Cyprus?” Menedemos said, and then, a heartbeat later, “Why are you laughing?”
“Because I was thinking about the same thing just a moment ago, that’s why,” Sostratos said.
“Oh, you were, were you? Well, what were you thinking? I want to know—you’re good at it.”
“What if I am? That and a few oboloi will get me enough sardines for a decent opson.”
“If the Ptolemaios thinks well of your wits, my dear, you’d best not play them down yourself,” Menedemos said. “So what brave thoughts did Athena goddess of wisdom send you?”
Sostratos didn’t think his wisdom, what there was of it, came from Athena. He thought it came from Athens, where he’d studied till his family called him back to Rhodes. But no point talking about that. “My thoughts aren’t brave. I was wondering more how we’d get away,” he said.
“I wonder why!” Menedemos took his right hand off the steering oar for a moment to wave at the akatos and then at Ptolemaios’ much bigger ships ahead. The Aphrodite had ruined a trireme once. Ptolemaios’ ships, and Demetrios’, too, dwarfed even triremes by comparison.
“If we do have to run for it, chucking all the arrows and bolts and whatnot we’re carrying into the sea will lighten the ship a good deal and help us go faster,” Sostratos said.
“I know it will, but I don’t want to do it unless I really have to,” Menedemos said.
“Really?” One of Sostratos’ eyebrows lifted. “Why not?”
“Because as things are, if we have to run we’ll bring Rhodes a shipload of arms the polis can use against Demetrios, that’s why.” Menedemos sounded as bleak as Sostratos had ever heard him.
He also made more sense than Sostratos wished he did. “Do you truly think it will come to that?” he asked.
“Malista. Don’t you?” Menedemos returned. “Sooner or later—probably sooner—we’ll have to fight. I hope we can do it. We’ve lived at peace for a long time. We’ve forgotten what war is all about. In the gymnasion, one of those Cretan soldiers of fortune would have carved gobbets off me as if I were a sacrificial sheep with its throat cut. Demetrios has thousands of men like that—tens of thousands, for all I know. If they get over the wall and into the city ….” He spat into the bosom of his chiton to turn aside the evil omen.
That was nothing but superstition. The rational part of Sostratos’ mind insisted as much. He imitated the gesture anyhow. It may not help, but it can’t hurt, he told himself. Even as he did, he knew he was rationalizing, not rational.
He said, “If we go under, that’s pretty much the end of the free and independent polis in Hellas. A few left in Italy and Sicily, but Italy and Sicily are the back of beyond.” He didn’t even notice his own condescension, though it would have infuriated Italiote Hellenes.
“Of course they are,” Menedemos agreed. He waved at the fleet again, and then more broadly to take in Cyprus. “If things go wrong …. If things go wrong, we flee if we can and fight if we have to. I keep trying to make firmer plans, but I can’t. I hoped you could.”
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Sostratos said, that being the smoothest way of admitting he didn’t know what to do next, either. He continued, “I have a different question for you, though.”
“What is it? I’d be glad for anything that takes my mind off the main worry for a little while.”
“As you’ve watched our course by day and especially by night, doesn’t it seem to you that we’re bearing a bit too far west of north to put in at Salamis?”
Before Menedemos could answer, Diokles spoke up: “It does to me. I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed, and I was wondering whether I was losing my wits, too.”
Menedemos eyed the sun. He eyed the ships ahead of the Aphrodite. Rubbing his chin, he said, “Harder to gauge exactly by day than by night, but it seems to me you aren’t wrong. What do you want to do? Hustle up to the Ptolemaios’ galley and tell him his admirals and navigators don’t know what the daimon they’re doing?”
“He’s a general, not an admiral. As far as I know, he did all his fighting for Alexander on land, not at sea. If the men who should know are making a mistake, he won’t recognize it himself,” Sostratos said.
“He’d better not be making for Rhodes,” Diokles growled, but he tossed his head a moment later. “We haven’t swung that far west. I don’t reckon we have, anyway. But I’ll be watching the course and the stars tonight—you’d best believe I will.”
“So will I,” Menedemos said. “But even if we think they’re going astray, we can’t be sure. They may have a plan of their own. And it’s not as if we can put down cords and measure angles, the way they do when they lay out a new street. All we’ve got are—” He opened and closed his eyes three or four times.
“I know. Once you get out of sight of land, navigation isn’t much better than a guess and a prayer,” Sostratos said.
“Too right, it isn’t!” his cousin said with feeling. “Let me see a stretch of coast and I’ll tell you where we are. One stretch of ocean, though, looks too much like another.”
“If we could fly like Daidalos, we could glide high above the ships and see the coast from a long way away,” Sostratos said.
“Or have our wings come undone and crash into the sea like Ikaros,” Menedemos said. “The way things are going on this voyage …. We have all the silver, but what good does it do us if we can’t bring it home? I told Ptolemaios the same. He said my other choice was getting the Aphrodite stolen out from under me, so here we are.”
“Here we are,” Sostratos echoed mournfully. The leather sacks full of coins under the stern platform didn’t reassure him, either.
Menedemos knew the fleet was nearing land before any came up over the horizon. Gulls and terns and pelicans lived on land and went out to sea to get food, the way fishermen did. Over the waters halfway between Alexandria and Cyprus, the skies were almost bare of them; he’d noticed the same thing sailing south. When they returned, he knew Cyprus was drawing nigh. Floating branches and, once, a plank told the same story.
He wished the mast were up. He would have sent a small, skinny sailor up to the top to see what he could see: not Daidalos’ wings, but as much as he could do. Then he shrugged, standing there at the steering oars. Sostratos was back on the stern platform, and sent him a quizzical look. Menedemos ignored it. Unless he meant to skedaddle, spying land sooner wouldn’t matter anyway.
The grin that spread over his face caught him by surprise. “Skedaddle!” he exclaimed.
“What’s that?” his cousin asked.
“Skedaddle,” Menedemos repeated happily. The look Sostratos gave him this time suggested that the knots in his rigging had come undone. He said the word again, relishing the silly sound: “Skedaddle.”