As had been true the past few years, part of him was anxious to escape from Rhodes and from the longing for his father’s wife that he dared not show. Part of him was anxious for her, too. She’d have the baby, whether his or Philodemos’, before he came back from Egypt. Childbearing was dangerous; his own mother, whom he barely remembered, had died trying to bring forth a second child. The infant hadn’t lived, either. If anything happened to Baukis ….
He made himself not think about that. Looking up to the sky, he gauged the breeze by the way a few small, puffy white clouds drifted from northwest to southeast. When one of them didn’t glide in front of it, the sun shone brightly.
Dipping his head to Diokles, he said, “When we get out of the harbor, we’ll raise the mast, set the sail, and let the wind do our work for a while.”
The keleustes’ grunt was what passed for laughter with him. “The rowers will think they’re on a holiday cruise,” he said. He’d been a rower himself till he advanced to setting the men at the oars their paces. His broad shoulders, powerful arms, and callused hands still showed his old trade. Though he had to be past fifty, he was no one Menedemos would have cared to wrestle. Years under the harsh sun of the Inner Sea had baked him brown as an Egyptian.
“Are we ready?” Sostratos called back from the much smaller platform at the akatos’ bow.
“Malista!” Menedemos answered, and dipped his head. Sostratos waved to a dockside lounger who’d already got a couple of oboloi. The man undid the line that tied the trading galley’s bow to a bollard on the pier and tossed his end of the rope into the Aphrodite. Sostratos coiled it with fussy precision; he wasn’t a natural sailor, not to Menedemos’ way of thinking, but attention to every detail made him a pretty good one.
Down the tarred planks walked the man. He undid the stern line and tossed it aboard the ship. The nearest rower made sure it didn’t stay loose for long. As soon as everything was shipshape, Diokles asked Menedemos, “Are we ready to get going?”
“I expect we are,” Menedemos answered. Irrationally, he expected the galley’s motion to change now that she was no longer connected to the wharf. That didn’t happen, of course; the Aphrodite had had next to no motion before—the water inside the harbor was almost as smooth as polished metal—and still had next to none now.
Triremes and other naval vessels used fluteplayers to give the men the stroke the keleustes ordered. The Aphrodite, a much smaller galley, couldn’t afford extra men. Diokles had a hammer and a small brass gong. He clanged it once, to get the rowers’ attention. They weren’t worked in yet; some were still hurting from a last carouse the night before. He stroked the gong again, harder this time.
After a few heartbeats, they’d all set hands on their oars and were looking back toward him. “Thank you so much, my dears,” he said. “Time to get your backs sore. Time to get your hands blistered. I know all your calluses have gone away over the winter—you’re such sweet, soft fellows.” Except for the sardonic rasp in his voice, he might have been a suitor courting a handsome youth in the gymnasion. But the rasp was there. “Try not to be too ragged. Try to remember what to do and how to do it together. So back oars, boys, at the gong—!”
He clanged once more. Not quite in unison, the rowers stroked. No one fouled anyone else, which was a good enough first stroke to satisfy Menedemos. Diokles hit the gong again. The akatos slowly moved away from the pier and out into the harbor. Diokles shifted the men to the usual forward stroke. He kept the rhythm lazy to let the twenty men on each side of the ship get used to pulling after a winter away from the water.
The rowers grunted and swore and complained before the akatos had gone even half a stadion. Menedemos grinned at them and let them grumble. Rowers always acted like that. He would have feared a sickness was running through them had they stayed quiet.
A tubby little fishing boat waddled over the water ahead of the Aphrodite. The boat could barely get out of its own way, and couldn’t get out of the galley’s, even if she was making less than half speed. Menedemos pulled the handle of the port steering oar toward himself and pushed the starboard oar handle out. The Aphrodite swung to port and glided past the boat. “Where you bound for in your sea-centipede?” one of the fishermen called.
“Lesbos,” Menedemos answered. If one of Demetrios’ warships met the boat, he didn’t want the fellows in it to tell the Macedonians anything worth knowing.
The fisherman leered at him. “Want to get your prong sucked, do you?” he said; women from Lesbos had a name for that vice.
“To the crows with you, Pausias,” Menedemos replied in mock anger—he knew most of the Rhodian men who went to sea. Pausias just laughed.
Moles narrowed the entrance to the Great Harbor and that to the naval harbor just to the north. They also let stout chains be stretched across the harbor mouths to keep invaders from landing soldiers inside. Menedemos had known that as long as he could remember. Now, eyeing the fortifications at the ends of the moles, he considered it much less hypothetically than he ever had before.
A big, beamy merchantman, probably full of grain or cheap wine or oil or stone, came into the harbor at a pace even more snaillike than the fishing boat’s. Next to that big snail, Menedemos’ ship was indeed a centipede, all legs and litheness. Like him, the merchant ship’s skipper stood at the steering oars. He sketched a salute and called something in Aeolic dialect so thick Menedemos could hardly understand him. Chances were he really did hail from Lesbos, then.
“What’s that you say?” Menedemos shouted back across half a stadion of water.
“Safe voyage!” the Lesbian yelled.
This time, Menedemos got it. He lifted his hand from the starboard steering oar to wave. “And to you, friend!” All Hellenes might not be brothers, but all seafarers were.
All except pirates and the whoresons in Demetrios’ fleet, Menedemos thought. As any more or less honest skipper would, he hated pirates with a cold and deadly passion. Rhodes, which depended on free passage across the sea, hunted them like the vermin they were.
“Here we go, lads!” Diokles told the rowers, and upped the pace a little as the Aphrodite left the Great Harbor and headed out onto the Inner Sea.
Now the ship’s motion changed. The water was still smooth by any reasonable standard, but it was choppier than it had been inside the protected harbor. “How do you hold, cousin?” Menedemos called toward the bow.
“I’m holding fine so far,” Sostratos answered. Did he look a trifle green? Menedemos couldn’t be sure, but he thought so. Sostratos’ stomach tormented him every time they set out on a new trading run. Some men never got over seasickness, and were miserable whenever they had to put to sea. Sostratos wasn’t like that, but he felt it the first few days he was on the water.
“Well, remember to lean over the rail far enough if you have to give back your morning bread and oil and wine,” Menedemos said.
His cousin gave back not his breakfast but a filthy gesture. Menedemos laughed. Sostratos couldn’t be feeling too dreadful if he was up to that. To starboard, the island of Rhodes slid past. The land was still spring-green. The sun would burn it brown and barren by the time the Aphrodite came home.
Gods grant summer’s burning is all we have to fear, Menedemos thought.
The breeze hummed in the rigging. Sostratos noticed the noise only when he thought about it. The mast had gone into its socket in the keel and the big square sail had been unbrailed as soon as Menedemos decided the wind was likely to hold: not too long after they left the harbor, in other words.