“Well?” Menedemos asked when he got there, as his cousin hadn’t been able to make out what the sailor on the bigger transport was saying.
Sostratos relayed the message, finishing, “As soon as that gods-cursed pentekonter gets back to Salamis, Demetrios will come after us.”
“Or as soon as it gets back to his fleet,” Menedemos said. “He knew we were at Paphos. He’s bound to know we were at Kition, too. He knows which way we have to come—we’re not going to descend on him from the north. He may have his fleet waiting out there just over the horizon.” He pointed in the direction they were going.
“You’re right. He may.” Sostratos hated feeling outthought, but he did at that moment. Demetrios was only too likely to try to force the action. He’d done that in Athens, and here on Cyprus ever since invading the island. Menedemos had seen as much. Sostratos hadn’t, not till his cousin pointed it out to him.
“Chances are we won’t even know the sea-fight’s started till a galley catches fire and we spy the smoke from the pyre,” Menedemos said. “I can’t see Ptolemaios’ warships from here, only the transports. Can you?”
“No.” Sostratos tossed his head. “But the forward transports will be able to see them. When we see the ships ahead of us speeding up or changing formation, we’ll know what we need to do.”
“No, we’ll just know what’s going on. It’s not the same thing,” Menedemos said. “We won’t know what to do unless we have to run from a five or try to fight one, and that will mean the perfume’s gone into the soup.”
“Too right it will!” Sostratos spat into the bosom of his tunic. He told himself again and again that he didn’t really believe the apotropaic gesture would turn aside ill-fortune. If the gods were there at all, if they deigned to pay any attention whatever to poor, miserable mankind, surely they had too many other things to do to alter fate every time someone entreated them.
That all made perfect logical, reasonable sense. It didn’t keep him from spitting into the bosom of his chiton every now and again. The gesture couldn’t hurt anything, and it might just possibly do some good, so ….
Sostratos frowned and cupped a hand to his ear. “What is it?” Menedemos asked sharply.
“Horn calls ahead … I think,” Sostratos answered. “Ptolemaios’ war galleys are signaling back and forth, unless I miss my guess.”
“Makes sense,” his cousin said: a two-word epitaph that might go on Sostratos’ grave monument. “Trumpets carry a long way, and with luck the foe won’t know what your calls mean.” After a moment, Menedemos added, “Your ears are good. I can’t hear them.”
“Better you leave your hands on the steering oars,” Sostratos said.
“There is that,” Menedemos said, and then, “What are they doing? Can you tell?”
Now Sostratos used his hand to shade his eyes, though he faced away from the sun. He stared for a little while, but ended up tossing his head. “Whatever it is, they’re too far ahead for me to make it out. But they haven’t signaled like that before. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re likely shaking themselves out into the line of battle, but I can’t prove it.”
“Which means Demetrios will have sailed out to meet us. Happy day!” Menedemos whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Which means that, by the time the sun goes down, we’ll have answers to the questions we’ve been asking since before we left Alexandria.”
Shadows told Sostratos it was a little past noon. The sun told him the same when he turned to glance at it. They’d got an early start from Kition. And, evidently, Demetrios had got an early start from Salamis.
“Here’s hoping Menelaos breaks out of the harbor,” Sostratos said. “Sixty ships coming to give Demetrios one up the prokton would hand him something new to worry about.”
“That would be marvelous!” Menedemos said. “Do you think he can?”
“I wish I did. How about you?” Sostratos said. Menedemos’ expression told him everything he needed to know.
“Well,” his cousin said, “we’ll do the best we can even without him. Keeping him jugged up in there is costing the Demetrios some ships, at least, ships he won’t be able to throw at Ptolemaios.”
“True enough.” Sostratos couldn’t help noticing that he and Menedemos had both tagged the enemy warlord with the the of respect, but not their own fleet’s commander. Maybe that just meant they were more familiar with Ptolemaios. Or maybe it meant they both thought Demetrios stood a better chance of winning.
Sostratos didn’t want to believe that. Your chances when you lost a battle ranged from bad to worse. Captured and held for ransom? Captured and sold into slavery? Maimed? Speared? Drowned? He tried not to think of any of those and wound up thinking about them all, in turn and together. Cursing his runaway imagination, he waited to see what the afternoon would bring.
Part of Menedemos wanted Ptolemaios’ transports to close up on his war galleys. That would give the transports’ skippers, himself among them, a better notion of how the fight ahead of them was going. But part of him wanted to stay as far away from the sea-fight as he could. If Demetrios beat Ptolemaios, the longer the start on enemy pursuit he had, the better his chances of getting away clean.
For now, all he could do was peer northwards, try to make out the distant horn calls, and worry. Maybe I should have let Ptolemaios take the Aphrodite away from me, ran through his head more than once. He and Sostratos and the rest of the crew could have waited out the war in Alexandria.
But Ptolemaios had paid, and paid extravagantly. This would be a profitable voyage … if it brought them back to Rhodes, anyhow. Menedemos wished he hadn’t thought of Rhodes. Thinking of Rhodes made him think of Baukis, of the baby that might be his, of her screaming in childbed the way women did, and of his own father listening to those screams. Next to thoughts like that, brooding about a mere sea-battle seemed a pleasure.
It did, at any rate, till Diokles pointed to the new plume of smoke rising a bit west of due north. “Something’s on fire,” the keleustes said.
“So it is.” Menedemos did some more tuneless whistling. “Isn’t that delightful? We just have to hope it’s something that belongs to Demetrios.”
Something. If you thought of a war galley on fire, you could pretend to yourself that it carried no rowers or naval officers or marines or catapult crewmen. Only a thing of rope and wood and cloth and metal was burning, not a small town’s worth of young men. No, those weren’t men roasting there like a sacrifice on an altar, or jumping into the sea to drown so they wouldn’t roast … jumping into the sea to drown with tunics already blazing or with flesh already blazing.
Yes, that was only a ship. Didn’t you have to think of war as being about things, not about men? How could you fight it if you thought about the men on the other side you were going to maim or kill, or about the men on your own side the enemy would slaughter? How could you fight if you thought about the enemy slaughtering you?
Diokles’ voice brought Menedemos back to himself: “Skipper, the transports ahead of us have stopped rowing. By your leave, I’ll do the same. We don’t want to get too close to the war galleys till we know what’s going on up there.”
“Yes, do it,” Menedemos said.
“Easy oars!” Diokles bawled, and emphasized the order by clanging away with hammer and triangle.