His cousin grinned and said, “They’ll be scrawling your name on the walls next thing you know.”
“Oh, to the crows with you!” Sostratos said. The rowers were teasing him for the fun of it. Menedemos really had had that kind of popularity, admiration, whatever the perfect word was. Sostratos knew how acutely he’d felt the lack of it when he was fourteen or fifteen.
That was half a lifetime ago now, of course. If he chose to, he could fill the role of erastes now, not eromenos: the lover, not the beloved. He was a man, not a youth. But the youth lived just under the man’s skin, and always would. The pain the youth had known then could still stab the man.
For a wonder, Menedemos seemed to hear whatever had been in his voice. He let it go instead of pushing it the way he often did. That let Sostratos simmer down. It didn’t let him forget. No one ever forgot being ignored and unwanted. You could, if you were lucky enough and wise enough, perhaps find a way to live without letting it trouble you too much. But it never went away.
The Aphrodite slipped out of Kourion even before the sun climbed up over the eastern horizon. “Rosy-fingered dawn,” Sostratos murmured as the sky lightened toward real morning.
“Really, my dear?” Menedemos said. “I’m the one who quotes Homer most of the time. And when I do, you tell me Sokrates or Platon or Theophrastos show how the poet was talking rubbish.”
“Funny. When I talk about Sokrates, you throw Aristophanes’ Clouds at me,” Sostratos said. “I wonder how often people who thought they were funny shouted bits of it at him when he walked down the street. I wonder why he didn’t punch them in the nose, too. By the gods, I would have.” Of themselves, his hands balled into fists.
His cousin sent him a quizzical look. “What’s got into you today?”
“Nothing,” Sostratos said, and not a word more.
“You sound like Odysseus telling Polyphemos the Cyclops his name was Nobody,” Menedemos remarked.
“Nodysseus would come closer,” Sostratos said. Sure enough, outis, the Greek word for nobody, sounded very much like the resourceful hero’s name.
“That’s pretty bad,” Menedemos said, but he sounded more admiring than not.
“Don’t blame me. Blame Homer,” Sostratos said.
“You’re here. He isn’t,” Menedemos answered. He looked around. “And we’re out of the harbor, and I don’t think anyone in Kourion has any idea we were part of Ptolemaios’ fleet.”
Sostratos cupped his hands in front of his mouth and called, “We did what we needed to do! A day’s bonus for all the rowers aboard!”
The men pulling the oars raised a cheer. Menedemos cocked an eyebrow. “You might have waited till we got farther away. Now the Kourians may be wondering why we’re so happy to leave their worthless little town.”
“Huh!” Sostratos sniffed. “If you had to live out your days in that miserable place, wouldn’t you want to get away as fast as you could if only you had the chance?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Menedemos said. “There’s no place in the world so grand as Rhodes—well, except Alexandria and Athens, I suppose.”
“Alexandria’s big. I don’t know how grand it is, though I expect it will be once it’s had the time to finish baking,” Sostratos said, which made his cousin chuckle. But his voice turned serious as he went on, “Athens, now … Athens isn’t just a polis. Even after everything that’s happened to it the past hundred years, Athens is the world. Rhodes is a fine place—don’t get me wrong, O best one. But the first time I went into Athens, I felt as though I’d come from a little farming village somewhere, with dung still on my feet.”
“And I’ll bet the Athenians made you feel that way, too.” Menedemos was a couple of palms shorter than Sostratos, but by tilting his head back somehow contrived to look down his nose at him.
The sun rose as Sostratos laughed. “They can be like that, yes—you’ve seen it for yourself,” he said. His cousin dipped his head. Sostratos continued, “But it’s not just the people. It’s the buildings and the art and the knowledge and the past. Hellas is what it is, for better and for worse, because Athens is what it is.”
“These days, Athens is Demetrios’ lapdog. We saw it happen.”
“I know. But it’s more than that, too, or he wouldn’t have wanted it,” Sostratos said. To his relief, Menedemos didn’t argue. The Aphrodite went on toward Rhodes.
XIV
“Oh, the gods be praised!” Menedemos exclaimed when his home polis came into sight ahead.
Diokles looked over his shoulder. “We knew things were all right when we talked to those fishermen off the coast.”
“We knew things were all right when we saw Demetrios’ friends weren’t burning every farmhouse and village on the island so they could lay siege to the polis,” Sostratos added.
“There’s a difference between hearing things or reasoning about things and finding out with your own eyes,” Menedemos insisted. “It’s like the difference between hearing about love and being in love.”
“Trust you to come up with a comparison like that,” Sostratos said. Diokles laughed. Menedemos lifted one hand from the steering oar to aim a filthy gesture at them both. Diokles laughed harder. Sostratos hadn’t been laughing, but he started.
“There are the harbor forts,” Menedemos said, pointing. “People look to be working on the seawalls, too. That’s good. We’ll be … as ready as we can be, anyhow.”
The keleustes and his cousin stopped laughing then. The news they were bringing back to their home city wasn’t good, and nothing could make it good. Even if Ptolemaios had escaped from the battle off Salamis, he wouldn’t be able to send, or want to send, another fleet north from Egypt for some time to come. Rhodes was on her own.
Menedemos sighed. “All we can do is all we can do. Diokles, get rowers on all the oars, will you? We may as well look good when we come into the harbor, eh?”
“Right you are, skipper.” Diokles bawled orders to the men. Soon every bench was full. He picked up the stroke, too, even before Menedemos asked him to. The oars dipped into the water and rose from it in smooth unison. The rowers wanted to show off, too.
I wonder if any admirals or trireme captains will be watching us come in, Menedemos thought, and then, I wonder how many of our crew will be rowing for the polis before long. The answer to that seemed much too clear. Unless Rhodes changed course and yielded to Antigonos and Demetrios, she would have to fight, on the sea as well as on land.
As the Aphrodite neared the moles that protected the Great Harbor from storms at sea and the forts on the moles protected it from seaborne attack, men in the forts who recognized the akatos and knew where she’d gone began shouting for news.
Menedemos shouted back at them: “I’ll tell it when I’m tied up at a pier—not a heartbeat before!”
The Rhodian soldiers swore at him. Like any other Hellenes, they wanted to hear the latest before anyone else could. They’d score points then for passing it on. Only they wouldn’t today, because Menedemos didn’t aim to tell it more than once, and then to people who needed to know it for reasons better than getting a leg up on gossip.
Two graybeards eating bread and drinking wine on a rowboat in the harbor, out for an afternoon wasting time in the sun, also called for news as the Aphrodite stroked past. They seemed even more offended than the soldiers when they didn’t get it.
“Here we go! Here we go! Easy! Easy!” Diokles glided up to a pier. “Now back oars—stroke! Once more!” He eyed the planks and the pilings. “Good. We’re home, by the gods!”