The lounger clucked reproachfully. He tried again: “What will she have in her when she goes to sea?”
“This and that,” Sostratos said, his voice bland. The lounger gave him an exasperated look. His answering smile said as little as he had. His father and uncle’s trading firm was far from the only one in the city of Rhodes. Some of their rivals might have paid a drakhma or two to find out what they’d be up to this sailing season. Men who hung around the harbor could make their money without getting calluses on their hands. They could-with a little help from others. Sostratos had no intention of giving that kind of help.
This fellow, if nothing else, was persistent. “You know where you’ll be sailing?” he asked,
“Oh, yes,” Sostratos said. The lounger waited. Sostratos said no more. The other man took longer than he should have to realize he wasn’t going to say any more. Muttering unpleasant ties under his breath, he turned away.
I should have answered him in Aramaic, Sostratos thought. I’d have got rid of him quicker. Then he shrugged. He’d done what needed doing.
Another man called out to him: “Hail, Sostratos! How are you?”
“Hail, Khremes.” Sostratos had known the carpenter for years and liked him. He wouldn’t have to play games with him, as he had with the lounger. “I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Khremes told him. “Your cousin, he’s a pretty clever chap, isn’t he?”
“Menedemos? I’m sure he’d be the first to agree with you,” Sostratos said, a little more sharply than he’d intended.
A good-natured soul, Khremes missed the edge to Sostratos’ voice. He was also in the grip of enthusiasm: “That notion he had for the war galley made special to be a pirate hunter-that was wonderful,” he burbled. “A trihemiolia-a ship that can fight like an ordinary trireme and stay up with a pirate crew’s hemiolia. Fabulous! Why didn’t somebody think of it years ago?”
Sostratos had hated pirates with a clear, cold loathing even before they attacked the Aphrodite and stole the gryphon’s skull. Now.. Now he wanted to see every sea robber ever born nailed to a cross and dying slowly and horribly. If someone praised Menedemos for coming up with a ship type that would make life harder for those whoresons, he wouldn’t complain.
He said, “When something matters to my cousin, he goes after it.” As often as not, Menedemos’ ingenuity was aimed at other men’s wives. But he did hate pirates as much as Sostratos said. Sostratos had never heard of an honest sailor who didn’t hate them.
“Good for him,” said Khremes, who didn’t have to worry about the results of some of Menedemos’ escapades.
“Well, yes,” said Sostratos, who did. He went on, “We’re really going to start building trihemioliai, are we?”
The carpenter dipped his head. “We sure are. The admirals spent all winter talking about it”-he opened and closed his thumb against his four bunched fingers to simulate a gabbling mouth-”and now it’s really going to happen. They’ll make three to begin with, and more if they turn out to be as good as everybody hopes.”
“May it be so,” Sostratos said. Thinking of Menedemos as someone who’d done something important for Rhodes didn’t come easy. More than a little bemusedly, Sostratos continued, “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind putting to sea in one of those new trihemioliai instead of our akatos here. We’re going east this year, so we’ll have to sail past the Lykian coast, and the Lykians are pirates at sea and bandits on land.”
“Isn’t that the truth? Miserable barbarians.” Khremes paused. “Do you suppose you could use a trihemiolia for a merchant galley?”
“No,” Sostratos answered without hesitation, and tossed his head to emphasize the word. “However much I’d like to, there’s not a chance it’d work,”
“Why not?” the carpenter said. “You’d be the fastest trader on the sea.”
“Yes, and also the most expensive,” Sostratos pointed out. “The Aphrodite sails with forty rowers, plus enough extra men to handle the sail with all the rowing benches filled. They all make at least a drakhma a day; most of them make a drakhma and a half. That’s two minai of silver every three days in wages, more or less. But a trihemiolia would carry more than three times as many men to pull the oars. That’d be-let me see- Zeus, that’d be about two minai every single day. We’d have to carry nothing but gold and rubies to have any chance of breaking even with expenses like that.”
“Ah.” Khremes dipped his head. “No doubt you’re right, best one. I hadn’t thought about costs, only about the ship.”
Sostratos was toikharkhos aboard the Aphrodite , Everything that had to do with the cargo fell to him. He thought of costs first, last, and always. But, because he liked Khremes, he let him down easy: “Well, my dear fellow, I wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to putting a ship together.”
“You begin at the beginning-where else?” the carpenter said. “You make your shell of planks, and you fasten them all together with mortises and tenons so the shell’s good and strong, and then you nail some ribs to the inside for a little extra stiffness.”
“Well, everyone knows that much,” Sostratos agreed. “But knowing just how to do it-that’s your mystery.”
“No mystery to it at all,” Khremes insisted. “Anybody who works around the harbor could make a proper job of it.”
Sostratos didn’t want to argue with him. As far as the carpenter could see, the harbor was the whole world. Khremes never thought about tanners and potters and farmers, for whom the shipwright’s craft was altogether strange-and whose trades were as strange to him. His friends were other carpenters or men who worked in related trades. That all helped make him better at what he did, but did nothing to prove his judgment on matters unrelated to shipbuilding was particularly keen. Of course, he might not agree.
“When you do sail off to Phoenicia, I expect you’ll slicker those barbarians right out of their sandals,” Khremes said.
“I hope so,” Sostratos said, and his opinion of the carpenter’s judgment improved remarkably.
Menedemos was furious and made only the slightest effort to hide it. “Olive oil?” He threw his hands in the air. “By the dog of Egypt, why are we taking olive oil to Phoenicia? They grow olives there, too, don’t they?”
“Yes.” Sostratos sounded embarrassed, which didn’t happen very often. “We’re taking olive oil because-”
“Don’t tell me,” Menedemos broke in. “Let me guess. We’re taking k because it’s what your new brother-in-law’s family makes. Am I right, or am I wrong?”
“You’re right,” his cousin said unhappily. “Damonax used Erinna’s dowry to get some of the crop out of hock, and-”
“And now he expects us to sell the oil and make him a nice profit,” Menedemos interrupted once more. “We might even do it if we were going to Alexandria, since they don’t grow olives there. But that’s not where we’re going. Did you tell him as much?”
“Of course I did,” Sostratos said. “He doesn’t understand how these things work, though-not really, anyhow. He’s no trading man. And…plague take it, he is my new brother-in-law, so I can’t just tell him, ‘To the crows with you,’ the way I would with somebody who isn’t part of the family. So we have to do our best, that’s all.”
“I’d like to do my best to boot him right into the harbor,” Menedemos growled, but then, reluctantly, he subsided. “Family ties.” He rolled his eyes. “My father’s disgusted, too, but he didn’t tell Damonax no, either. He has more trouble saying no to your brother-in-law than he ever did to me, I’ll tell you that.” The trouble his father had telling Damonax no rankled, like so many of the things his father did.
“Believe me, it could have been worse,” Sostratos said. “When Damonax first came up with this scheme, he wanted to load the Aphrodite with oil to her gunwales, not leave a digit’s worth of space for any other cargo. He had the oil, so why shouldn’t we carry it?”