Also making for the outlet was a big, beamy round ship, deeply laden with wheat or wine or some other bulk commodity. Like any round ship, this one was made to travel by sail. Her handful of crewmen strained at the sweeps, but the fat ship only waddled along. Expecting her to move aside for the Aphrodite would have been absurd. Menedemos pulled in on one steering-oar tiller and pushed the other one away from him. Graceful as a dancer, the merchant galley swung to port. As she passed the round ship, Menedemos called out to the other captain: “What’s the name of your wallowing scow, the Sea Snail?”
“I’d sooner be aboard her than Poseidon’s Centipede there,” the other fellow retorted. They traded friendly insults till the Aphrodite ’s greater speed took her out of hailing range.
Another round ship, this one with her enormous square sail lowered from the yard and full of the breeze from out of the north, was just entering the harbor as the Aphrodite left. Again, his ship being far more maneuverable than the other, Menedemos gave her as wide a berth as he could, though the harbor mouth was only a couple of plethra across.
As soon as the akatos got out onto the open sea, her motion changed. That breeze pushed swells ahead of it; the merchant galley began to pitch and roll. Menedemos kept his balance without conscious thought. Sostratos gripped the rail to help steady himself. He gripped it till his knuckles whitened, as a matter of fact, for he needed a while at the start of each trading run to regain his sea legs-and his sea stomach.
Some of the rowers also looked a trifle green. Maybe that meant they’d done too much drinking the night before. But maybe they also had trouble with the ship’s motion. Most of them, like Sostratos, would soon master it. As for the ones who couldn’t, what business did they have going to sea?
Menedemos said, “I think we can take most of the men off the oars now.”
“Right you are, skipper,” Diokles answered. He called out, “Oцp!” The rowers rested at their oars. Menedemos kept the merchant galley’s bow pointing into the swells with the steering oars. Diokles asked him, “Eight men on a side suit you?”
“That should be fine.” Menedemos dipped his head. “We don’t want to wear them out,” The akatos used its full complement of rowers for swank, as when setting out at the start of each new trading run, and for emergency speed, as when escaping from pirates or turning to fight them. Otherwise, the crewmen took turns at the oars.
While the sailors being relieved brought their oars inboard and stowed them, Menedemos peered north toward the Karian coast. We’re off again, he thought, and the familiar excitement at being on his own coursed through him. And I’m away from Rhodes, and from my father, and from Baukis. That wasn’t excitement, exactly, but it would do.
2
Coming into Kaunos, on the Karian coast, Sostratos knew a certain surge of hope. So might a man coming back to a polis where he’d lived twenty years before have hoped a hetaira he’d kept company with then was still beautiful and still as glad to see him as she had been once upon a time. He’d been to Kaunos only the year before, but all the same…
“Do you suppose…?” he said to Menedemos.
Three words were plenty to let his cousin know what he was talking about. “No, my dear, I’m afraid I don’t suppose,” Menedemos answered. “What are the odds?”
Sostratos prided himself on being a rational man. He knew what the odds were-knew all too well, in fact. Yet, like someone hoping a long-dead love affair might miraculously revive, he did his best to look away from them rather than in their direction. “We found one gryphon’s skull in the market square here,” he said. “Why not another?”
“You’d do better to ask why we found one, wouldn’t you, when none was ever seen in these parts before?” Menedemos said.
“I suppose T would.” Sostratos heaved a melodramatic sigh. “After all the evils, hope came out of Pandora’s Box, and I’ll cling to it as long as I can.”
“However you like, of course,” his cousin answered, guiding the Aphrodite alongside a quay with fussy precision and minute adjustments of the steering oars. Satisfied at last, Menedemos dipped his head. “That ought to do it.”
“Back oars!” Diokles called to the rowers. After they’d used a couple of strokes to kill the merchant galley’s forward motion, the oarmaster held up his hand and said, “Oцp!”
The rowers rested. Some of them rubbed olive oil into their palms. Their hands had softened over the winter, and the first couple of days aboard ship had left them sore and blistered. And they’d rowed all the way up from Rhodes. They’d had no other choice, not with the wind dead in their faces all the way north.
A couple of soldiers strode up the pier toward the Aphrodite . “This seems just like last year,” Sostratos said.
“Are you trying to make an omen of it?” Menedemos asked. Suddenly shamefaced, Sostratos dipped his head. Menedemos laughed. “Omens are often where you find them, I admit, but do remember that last year the men who questioned us served Antigonos. Old One-Eye’s hoplites arc gone. Ptolemaios’ men threw ‘em out.”
“I’m not likely to forget that,” Sostratos said tartly. “Antigonos’ soldiers almost caught us here in the harbor.”
“Hush,” Menedemos told him. “You don’t want to say such things where these boys might hear you.”
That, no doubt, was good advice. “What ship are you?” called the soldier with the fancier plume in his helmet, “Where are you from? What’s your cargo? “
“We’re the Aphrodite , best one, out of Rhodes,” Sostratos answered. Rhodes tried to stay on good terms with all the squabbling Macedonian marshals, but was especially friendly to Ptolemaios of Egypt, who shipped enormous amounts of wheat through her harbor. “We’ve got perfume, fine oil, Koan silk, books-”
“Let me see a book,” the soldier said.
“What would you like? We have some of the best parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or a poem that’s as, ah, spicy as anything you’ve ever read,”
Ptolemaios’ trooper tossed his head. “I’ve never read anything at all, on account of I haven’t got my letters.” He seemed proud of his illiteracy, too. “But if you’ve really got books, I know you’re traders and not some gods-detested spies.”
Maybe that was logic. Maybe it was just stupidity. Sostratos couldn’t quite decide which. Would spies be clever enough to bring books along in case some officious junior officer decided he wanted to have a look at them? Who could guess? Sostratos stooped under a rower’s bench, opened an oiled-leather sack, and took out a roll of papyrus. He worked the wooden spindles to show the soldier the roll did indeed have words written on it.
“All right. All right. I believe you.” The fellow motioned for him to stop. “Put the silly thing away. By Zeus, you are what you say you are.” He turned on his heel and tramped back down the pier. The other soldier, who’d never said a word, followed him.
“That was easier than I’ve seen it a good many places,” Menedemos remarked.
“I know.” Sostratos looked up to the forts atop the hills west of Kaunos. Antigonos’ soldiers had held out for a while in one of them, even after the city fell to Ptolemaios’ men. “I wonder if the Rhodian proxenos ever came back here.”
“If you really care, we can ask,” Menedemos said with a shrug. A year before, the Aphrodite had taken the Kaunian who looked after Rhodian interests in his city to Rhodes itself; he’d feared arrest from Antigonos’ men when word came that Ptolemaios’ soldiers were sweeping west along the southern coast of Anatolia. He’d had reason to fear, too; soldiers who’d come to arrest him had got to his house just too late, and they’d come down to the harbor just too late to keep the Aphrodite from sailing.