“Skedaddle.” By the way Sostratos said it, it wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, a Greek word at all. “What are you babbling about, my dear?”
“I’m not babbling at all,” Menedemos replied with dignity. “It’s the opening scene in Aristophanes’ Knights. Don’t you know it?”
Sostratos tossed his head. “If I did, I wouldn’t be wondering whether you’ve gone out of your mind. Well, I might not be, anyway.”
Taking no notice of him, Menedemos went on, “Nikias and Demosthenes—you know, the Athenian generals—”
“I didn’t think you meant Demosthenes the orator,” Sostratos broke in. “Aristophanes was dead long before he came along.”
“True. Anyway, they’re complaining that Kleon’s lies have confused the Athenian people and led them astray, and so they want to get away.”
“Athens would have been better off if Nikias had got away before he led the expedition to Sicily,” Sostratos said.
“Yes, yes. But you wanted to know what I was talking about,” Menedemos said. “See, Nikias tells Demosthenes to say ‘Daddle.’ So Demosthenes goes ….”
“ ‘Daddle.’ ” Yes, Sostratos still sounded like someone humoring a maniac.
“Splendid, O best one!” Menedemos made as if to applaud without quite lifting his hands from the steering oars. “Then Nikias says that Demosthenes should say ‘Let’s ske.’ And Demosthenes says ….”
“ ‘Let’s ske,’ ” Sostratos repeated obediently. Then he tossed his head. “So what?”
“Say them over and over again, slowly at first but then quicker, as if you’re playing with yourself in bed,” Menedemos said, adding, “I’m quoting the playwright there, too.”
“You would be,” his cousin muttered, but he continued, “Daddle …. Let’s ske. Daddle—let’s ske. Daddle. Let’s ske daddle! Oh! I see where this is going!”
“That’s right—straight over the hill,” Menedemos agreed.
“And this came into your mind, such as it is, just how?” Sostratos asked.
“About the way you’d expect. I was thinking some more about what we might do when we got to Cyprus,” Menedemos said.
“From what you said before, you didn’t plan on skedaddling.” Sostratos rolled his eyes. “That word again!”
“If we make landfall at Paphos, though, or somewhere else near the western end of the island, we’re a lot closer to Rhodes than we would be at Salamis,” Menedemos said.
“Still dangerous,” Sostratos said. “We’ve been over this ground. If we run, we make Ptolemaios angry at us—and at Rhodes. Would he sit on his hands if Demetrios and Antigonos attack the polis after we do that?”
Menedemos gnawed on the inside of his lower lip, the way he did when he worried about how Baukis was doing. “I don’t think he would,” he said slowly. “With men like him, reasons of state count for more than grudges.”
“You hope they do,” Sostratos returned. Menedemos opened his mouth, then closed it again. He had no good answer for that. His cousin, an uncommonly sensible man, made all too much sense here.
Then he stopped worrying about it, because sailors from Ptolemaios’ ships ahead of the Aphrodite started shouting “Land ho!” and pointing northward. Menedemos peered ahead. Was that a smudge on the northern horizon? Maybe it was, but he couldn’t yet make out what kind of smudge it was.
“Take the steering oars, my dear,” he told Sostratos. “I’m going up to the bow to get the best look I can.”
Once he got a decent look at the shoreline ahead, he would know where the fleet was. He’d gone all around Cyprus on one trading journey or another. Landscapes he’d seen once, he remembered. He carried much of the coastline of the eastern regions of the Inner Sea around inside his head, as if on papyrus book-rolls. Most skippers he knew had their own inner libraries like that. Recognizing a stretch of coast from a bare glimpse was a tool of his trade, as an oven was for a baker.
For a while, he called down Aristophanean curses on the big, awkward galleys ahead of the Aphrodite. Their bulk kept him from viewing the coastline as clearly as he wanted to. But, little by little as land drew closer, he saw what he needed to see.
He hurried back to the stern platform. As he reclaimed the steering oars from Sostratos, he said, “You’re a better navigator than the buffoons the Ptolemaios uses. We’re a little east of Paphos, a long way west from Salamis.”
“Yes, that’s about where I put us, too,” his cousin replied, and Menedemos realized, perhaps later than he should have, that skippers weren’t the only ones who knew their way along the coast. His eyes slid to Diokles. The keleustes had seen more coastline than he had. Did he remember it the same way? By how knowingly he dipped his head, that seemed certain.
Menedemos gave his attention back to Sostratos. “All right. You’re Ptolemaios. We wind up here, not off Salamis. What do we do now?”
“It depends,” Sostratos said judiciously. “Did we come to Paphos because the navigators are bad or because they’re good? If we go into the harbor for rest and refit, that would be good. If Demetrios has moved west and put a garrison in the town ….” He didn’t go on, or need to.
“I didn’t even think about skullduggery like that. See? I bring you along for a reason,” Menedemos said, which made his cousin stick out his tongue at him. “From what I’d heard, I just assumed Demetrios was staying in the east to finish Salamis off.”
“If he landed near Karpaseia, he may not have bothered with the cities down here, that’s true. We’ll find out soon enough.” Sostratos pointed north, at the rest of the fleet. “Look! They’re swinging west, towards Paphos. Either they’re going to fight for it or they think they’ll get a friendly welcome. I wonder which.”
“You said it. We’ll find out soon enough,” Menedemos answered.
New Paphos, with its harbor, was a much more recent foundation even than Rhodes. King Nikokles had moved most of the town, though not its temples, from its older inland site, over the last few years of his reign. The Paphians did nothing to keep Ptolemaios’ fleet from filling the harbor—filling it to overflowing, in fact.
Despite their acquiescence, Sostratos said, “I hope the Ptolemaios keeps a tight lookout on the town.”
“That might be smart, yes,” Menedemos replied. King Nikokles had been Ptolemaios’ ally … till he started intriguing with Antigonos. When Ptolemaios found out about that, two of his henchmen made Nikokles kill himself. His whole family followed suit, in spectacularly horrid style. How the Paphians felt about that … would be something the lord of Egypt needed to wonder about.
Sostratos knew the story. Five or six years before, it had been on everyone’s lips. He turned out to know it better than his cousin did, in fact, for when he went on, “Yes, I wonder just how much hatred Kallikrates and Argaios sowed here when—” he found he had to stop. Menedemos’ eyes were almost bugging out of his head.
“Wait! Who?” he said.
“Kallikrates and Argaios. You know, the two Macedonians who took care of Nikokles.”
“Oh, by the gods!” His cousin clapped a hand to his forehead. “By the gods! I’d forgotten their names. I met the two of them in the palace, when Ptolemaios commandeered this ship. I just took them for old drinking buddies of his, not, not .…”
“His hired murderers?” Sostratos suggested.
“Something like that, yes.” Menedemos looked and sounded shaken to the core.
It might have been just as well that four men chose that moment to row a boat toward the akatos. “Ahoy, the Aphrodite!” called a red-caped officer at the bow.