Damonax stared at him. Sostratos was usually a mild-mannered man, one who might let himself be pushed around where most Hellenes wouldn’t have. Not here, though. A nervous smile on his face, Damonax said, “I meant no harm, truly.”
“Neither did Oidipous,” Sostratos snapped. “Not a bit. How did that turn out?”
His brother-in-law flinched. Unlike Sostratos, Damonax was conventionally pious. He didn’t take the old myths as parables or explanations; to him, they were truth. “My dear fellow!” he managed after a false start. “That’s … a bit much, don’t you think?”
“And telling my men how to do their work on my ship isn’t a bit much, you mean?” Sostratos was implacable as a Fury.
“I won’t do it again.” Damonax sounded like a small boy who meant, Not while you can catch me, anyway. After a moment of weighing the odds, he asked, “What will be stowed back towards the stern?”
None of your cursed business. That got as far as the tip of Sostratos’ tongue, but no farther. You could always say things some other time. You couldn’t call them back once said, and he guessed he’d given Damonax enough already. What he did say was, “Wine. Fine wine. Grapes don’t do well in Egypt. The Egyptians make a brew out of dates—”
“Sounds disgusting!” Damonax broke in.
“I tried it a couple of years ago, when we went to the land of the Ioudaioi,” Sostratos said. “It will get you drunk if you pour down enough, and it won’t give you a flux of the bowels the way plain water can, but it’s not what anyone would call good. So ordinary freighters bring lots of ordinary wine into Egypt for the soldiers and cooks and carpenters and masons and what have you. We’ll bring some of the fine vintages, for the people who can afford them.”
“Why do you want them there and not the oil?” Damonax asked.
“Because a metretes of wine is heavier than a metretes of oil,” Sostratos said. A metretes was the amount a large amphora held. He went on, “The ship will handle better if we have more weight at the stern, not at the bow.”
“I didn’t know that,” Damonax said, as if he blamed Sostratos for his own ignorance. Realizing how that had to sound, he added, “Your business is more complicated than it looks at first glance, isn’t it?”
“Most things are,” Sostratos replied, which made his brother-in-law wince again. “We’ll get the oil aboard. We’ll get it to Egypt and get the best price we can for it. We’ll do the same with the wine, and with everything else we’re carrying.” He said not a word about the amber. The fewer people who knew of it, the better.
“What kind of wine will you carry?” Damonax asked.
Sostratos would have told him that—it wasn’t a secret. In fact, he was a little surprised his brother-in-law didn’t already know. But Damonax came up to the polis of Rhodes only when he had business here; he stayed on his farm most of the time. Before Sostratos could answer, though, a procession of bearers, each carrying a two-eared amphora, approached the Aphrodite from the direction of the family warehouse.
Pointing at them with his chin, he said, “Here they come now. Suppose you tell me where they’re from.”
Damonax scratched the side of his jaw as he considered. “Well, I recognize those jars the men in front have, the ones that are longer and skinnier and more conical than Rhodian ware. They’re from Khios, aren’t they?”
“Euge! Very good, best one!” Sostratos made as if to clap his hands. “That’s not just any wine from Khios, either. That’s Ariousian, from the northwestern part of the island. Some came into Rhodes last year, while we were in Athens, and my father and my uncle bought all they could.”
“Ariousian!” Damonax’s voice went dreamy. “The best wine in the world, people say.”
“Some people say that,” Sostratos allowed. “But what about the other amphorai, the ones that are fatter than those we make here?”
Those amphorai made his brother-in-law frown. At last, reluctantly, Damonax said, “I’m afraid they have me stumped.”
“Well, you don’t see them all that often in Rhodes.” Sostratos could afford to sound tolerant. He knew at a glance the shape of amphorai from at least a score of different islands and poleis, perhaps twice that many. Menedemos likely recognized even more. Sostratos continued, “Thasos lies way to the north in the Aegean; it’s off the European coast, just east of the fingers of land that come down from the Khalkidike. And Thasian wine …. Wine doesn’t get much better, if it gets any better at all.”
“Thasian! That’s the one with the bouquet like apples!” Damonax exclaimed. “I’ve had some once or twice. It was so smooth, I didn’t want to water it.”
“No?” One of Sostratos’ eyebrows slid upwards. “I didn’t realize we’d brought a Macedonian into the family.” Macedonians were notorious for drinking their wine neat, as if they were Thracians or other outright barbarians, not men who passed themselves off as Hellenes. From everything Sostratos had seen, they’d earned that notoriety.
“I hope you know me better than that, O best one,” Damonax said. Sostratos had to dip his head, acknowledging that he did. His brother-in-law had his share of human flaws and foibles, but drunkenness wasn’t one of them. Then Damonax turned the subject: “Is it true, what they’re saying about the Demetrios?”
Sostratos spread his hands, palms up. “I don’t know, my dear. What have you heard? I wouldn’t give you an obolos for a thousand of the stupid stories that go through the market square.”
“That the son of Antigonos is trying to take Cyprus away from Ptolemaios.”
“Oh. That is true. Or at least I’ve heard it from people I believe.”
“Like Komanos?” Damonax gibed. Sure as a daimon, being excluded from the meeting with the prominent politician still rankled.
“No,” Sostratos said. Not directly, he added to himself. He didn’t like to lie, but he didn’t want to tell Damonax the whole truth, either. “I got the news from Uncle Philodemos, as a matter of fact. My guess is, Menedemos told him. Menedemos gets everywhere and hears everything—you know that.”
Damonax sniffed. “Your cousin thinks he’s a lot more clever than he really is.”
It wasn’t a thought Sostratos had never had, but he’d had it more often and much more strongly about Damonax than about Menedemos. All he said was, “You may be right.”
“Will you sail straight across the Inner Sea, then?” Damonax asked. “How can you hope to find Alexandria if you do?”
“We’ll manage,” Sostratos said. “You go to sea often enough, you learn to steer pretty well by the sun and stars.” He prided himself on how well he could do that. If pressed, he would have admitted he was no better than Menedemos and might have been worse than Diokles. The oarmaster, of course, had started going to sea years before Sostratos was born.
Perhaps luckily, Damonax didn’t press him. Instead, with a small shiver, he said, “I wouldn’t care to get out of sight of land.”
Good. Otherwise you’d come along and want to run things. Sostratos didn’t say that, either. He said nothing at all. Around Damonax, nothing was often the best thing to say.
III
Menedemos stood on the raised, planked platform at the Aphrodite’s stern. One hand gripped the handle of each steering oar. From long use, the wood was smooth under his palms.