Since it was too late in the day to set out upon our journey, I went to the waterfront with Pronax, carrying that stem post with the horse's head. There I struck up a conversation with some ships' officers, who knew my name from the first Indian voyage. I asked them if they had ever seen anything like this stem post. At last one old skipper, who spoke Greek with a Spanish accent, said:
"Aye, I know that. The fishermen in Gades put those things on their boats."
"Horse-figureheads?" I said.
"Aye. But that's not just a horse; that's a sea horse."
"What's the difference, since the carving shows the head only, not the fishy tail?"
"There be no difference!" roared the salt, slapping me on the back and doubling over with laughter. "But don't call one of them things a plain horse's head to a Gaditanian fisherman, or you'll have a fight on your hands. How'd you come by that thing?"
I told him of finding the figurehead beyond the Southern Horn.
"Oh, hah!" said the Spaniard. "Sometimes they sail their little cockleshells down the Moorish coast as far as the river Lixus. One of 'em must have sailed too far and been blown clear around Africa."
Spring had come again to Kyzikos, and the hills were bright with poppy and hyacinth and cyclamen, when Pronax and I, shaggy and worn, rode up to the Miletopolis Gate of Kyzikos. If I had come ashore at the docks as usual, every longshoreman and waterfront loafer would have known me and spread the news of my return. As it was, we arrived before my house unheralded.
Leaving Pronax to hold the horses, I banged on the door and shouted "Pai!" But all remained quiet, as if the house were deserted.
"Uncle!" said Pronax. "If you'll hold the horses, I'll run to your brothers' houses and tell of your return."
"Do so," I said.
Soon my kinsmen appeared, hastening towards me. There were my middle brother and my brother-in-law and my cousin; my younger brother was away on a voyage. They embraced and kissed me and showered me with questions about my voyage.
"Later, later," I said. "First, where is my family?"
They hesitated. I was stricken with dread that my wife and child had been carried off by some mishap. Any traveling man knows this fear, which often strikes when one has nearly reached home.
"Well, out with it!" I said. "Are they alive or dead?"
"They're alive," said my brother. "But—all—"
"I'll tell him," said my cousin. "Eudoxos, your wife eloped with another man and has not been heard of since. Theon is all right; he's living with Korimos and Phyio." (These were my brother-in-law and my sister.)
I leant against the house. I suppose I turned pale, for my brother muttered: "Get ready to catch him!"
"It's all right," I said. "I shan't faint. When did this happen? Do you know the man?"
My brother-in-law said: "It was your old comrade-in-arms, Hippalos the Corinthian, who arrived as captain of a Milesian ship last summer, soon after you left for Alexandria. The whipworthy rogue gave us a party, explaining that he had come to join you in another Indian voyage. He would have arrived sooner, he said; but he had been laid up in Syracuse for the winter and so had not heard about Physkon's death until long after it had happened.
"He stayed in town for a ten-day, waiting for cargo. We had no idea he was calling daily, unchaperoned, on Astra. Then little Theon came to my house with a letter from Astra, saying that she was going away with Hippalos and asking us to take care of the boy until your return. We all grabbed our swords and rushed to the waterfront, but Hippalos' ship had left."
"Didn't anybody try to follow him, to avenge the family's honor?"
"I was coming to that. Tryphon—" that was my younger brother—"went to Miletos, since Hippalos had told our harbormaster that he meant to return to his home port. Tryphon stormed into the office of Ariston and Pytheas, demanding to know where the depraved one was.
"Hippalos, they told him, had already departed for Peiraieus. Yes, they said, he had brought a woman, whom he introduced as his wife, from Kyzikos. She had shipped with him to Peiraieus. This was somewhat unusual; but, as newly-wed captains sometimes take their brides on their first voyage after the event, they thought nothing of it.
"Tryphon thought of sailing to Peiraieus; but then he might arrive after Hippalos had left that port, the gods knew whither. He thought he'd have a better chance of catching the scoundrel by waiting for him in Miletos.
"Then Hippalos' ship returned to Miletos without its captain. The mate told his employers that at Peiraieus, Hippalos dad unloaded his cargo, loaded the new one, and announced that he was quitting to take another berth. He turned the ship over to the first officer and disappeared, and the woman with him. That is the last that anybody knows about him."
"Death take him!" I said. "And to think I could have so easily let my mutinous sailors cut his throat! Has anybody a key to my house?"
Inside, I looked around for some note that she might have left me, but there was nothing. I threw myself on a couch to weep, beat the wall with my fists until they were bloody, and cried out Astra's name, while my kinsmen stood around uneasily, making awkward attempts to console me. When I had finished, I asked:
"Where's Gnouros?"
"He went with Astra," said my brother-in-law. "Gnouros told Theon that you had charged him to take especial care of your wife, and this was the best way he could think of to do so."
"He'd have done better to have killed that temple thief," I growled.
"Oh, come now! The poor fellow was only a slave. Besides, Hippalos was much the younger and the larger of the two."
"What became of Dirka?"
"Gone back to her village. She said she'd come back to Kyzikos to work if you wanted her."
My brother entertained me and our kin that night. A somber homecoming feast it was; I could not even report a commercial success to lighten the gloom. I said:
"I hope I shall have better sense than ever to trust a Ptolemy again. To let myself be robbed once was bad enough, but twice!"
"There's still wealth in the Indian trade, though," said my brother. "Isn't there some other route by which we could come to that land?"
"There's the route through Syria, down the Euphrates to Babylon and Apologos and out the Persian Gulf. But the Parthians control that route. I doubt if an outsider would be allowed to keep much profit; Mithradates would skin him as the Ptolemies did me. And anything that he missed, the Seleucids would get."
"Of course," said Korimos, "the geographers tell us that the earth is round, and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Gades, straight out into the Atlantic."
"Let us not seek to wed Aphrodite," I said. "Nobody knows how far one must sail to raise land in that direction, nor how the prevailing winds blow. At the least, India must be thousands of leagues across the water from Spain, and your crew would be as dead as Darius the Great before they reached it. Gades, Gades ... It reminds me of something. Ah, yes. The first time Hippalos came here, he'd shipped for some Gaditanian firm—Eldagon, I think the name was."
"It sounds Phoenician," said my cousin.
"It probably is. Now, if you were running away with a friend's wife, like Paris with Helen, and wanted to put the greatest possible distance between him and yourself, whither would you go?"
"To the farther end of the Inner Sea," said my brother-in-law.
"Just so. Eldagon's ships trade as far east as the Aegean. So what more natural than that Hippalos, finding one of them at Peiraieus, took a berth on it to get to Gades? He's probably captaining one of Eldagon's vessels in the western seas right now."
"Are you thinking of going after him?" asked my brother.
"Yes, I am. I'll load up the Ainetê—"