“They know who we are,” Sostratos said unhappily. “They won’t forget. They’ll blacken our name in every port Ptolemaios holds-and he holds a lot of them.”
“I know,” Menedemos said. “What can I do about it now, except maybe pitch Teleutas over the side?”
“Nothing.” His cousin scuffed a bare foot across the planks of the poop deck. “I’m the one who took him on a couple of years ago, there right before we sailed. I’ve been sorry at least half a dozen times since.”
“I had the same thought,” Menedemos answered. “He doesn’t really pull his weight, and he does get into trouble-and get us into trouble. But he’s never made me quite angry enough at him to sail off without him… and I did bark at the Alexandrians before he did, curse it. I guess I’m likely not the first captain he’s aggravated, that’s all,”
“Well, there goes the last grain ship,” Sostratos said. “Many goodbyes to them-but I wouldn’t wish pirates on anybody.”
“No, neither would I,” Menedemos said, and then, “Well, hardly anybody.”
He couldn’t tell by the coastline where Lykia stopped and Pamphylia began-the difference lay in the people, not the landscape. But Olbia, a strong fortress on the far side of the Kataraktes River, unquestionably belonged to Pamphylia. The Kataraktes lived up to its name, rushing down from the mountains in back of Olbia toward the sea and booming over the rocks as it came.
Menedemos, used to the little Rhodian streams that dried up in the summertime, eyed the river with no small wonder. Sostratos smiled at him and asked, “If you think this is such a marvel, what will you make of the Nile if we go to Alexandria one day? “
“I haven’t the faintest idea, my dear,” Menedemos replied. “But the Nile, I’m sure, doesn’t make such a racket as it flows into the Inner Sea.”
“No, indeed. You’re right about that,” his cousin agreed. “The cataracts of the Nile are thousands of stadia up the stream. Herodotos talks about them.”
“Herodotos talks about everything, doesn’t he?”
“He was curious. He traveled all over the known world to find out what really happened, and how it happened, and, most important of all, why it happened. If it weren’t for him, there might not be any such thing as history today.”
“And would we be any worse off if there weren’t?” Menedemos murmured. That horrified Sostratos no less than Teleutas had horrified Ptolemaios’ sailors. Menedemos had hoped it would.
But then Sostratos gave him a sour smile. “You’re trying to poke me again. I’m sorry, best one, but I don’t feel like being poked.”
“No, eh?” Menedemos used a finger to poke his cousin in the ribs. Sostratos yelped. Then he snapped at the finger as if he were a dog. Menedemos jerked it back in a hurry. They both laughed. Menedemos said, “If you think I look tasty, you haven’t been taking enough opson with your sitos. You need to eat better.”
“If I wanted to eat well all the time, I wouldn’t go to sea,” Sostratos answered. “Stale bread, cheese, olives, dried fish… Not your opsophagos’ feast. And what you can get in a portside tavern isn’t much better. You can’t catch enough fish from an akatos to make for much in the way of fancy opson, and, even if you could, you couldn’t cook it in any particularly interesting ways.”
“Nothing wrong with grilling a fish on a brazier,” Menedemos said. “These fancy chefs who want to smother everything in cheese aren’t half so smart as they think they are.”
“Don’t let your Sikon hear that,” Sostratos warned him. “He’ll throw you out of his kitchen on your ear.”
“Oh, no.” Menedemos tossed his head. “Sikon’s a good cook, but that doesn’t mean he’s always fancy. He says sometimes cooks use those complicated, spicy sauces because they don’t want you to know they’ve botched the cooking of the fish itself.”
“I wouldn’t want to argue with him.”
“Neither would I, by Zeus!” Menedemos said. “Nobody in his right mind would want to pick a quarrel with Sikon. He’s one of those slaves who’ve been there forever and think the place is really theirs. And that’s part of the trouble he’s having with Baukis.”
“She thinks he has to watch every obolos?”
“Partly that. And partly she’s my father’s second wife, so she doesn’t think she gets the respect she deserves.” Menedemos laughed. He could talk about, even think about, Baukis as long as he did so impersonally. He went on, “And, of course, Sikon doesn’t give anybody any more respect than he has to, and not as much as he should. That’s why they squabble all the time.”
“What does your father say?”
“As little as he can. He doesn’t want to make Baukis angry, but he doesn’t want to make Sikon angry, either.” Menedemos rolled his eyes. “If he were as mild with me as he is with them, we’d get along a lot better.”
“If he won’t do anything to end the bickering, isn’t ending the bickering your place?” Sostratos asked.
“Well, it might be, if I weren’t at sea half the year. And I don’t want to get stuck in the middle of the quarrel, either. Sikon’s a jewel. I don’t want him mad at me. And I don’t want to get my stepmother”-he chuckled at that; the idea still struck him as absurd-”upset, either. That might make my father give me an even harder time than he does already.”
What he wanted to do with Baukis, to Baukis, would make his father give him something worse than a hard time. So far, here as in few other places, his will had ruled his desires. That was what a man was supposed to do. Having desires was one thing, acting on them when they were foolish something else again. In the Iliad, both Agamemnon and Akhilleus had put their individual desires above what was good for the strong-greaved Akhaioi, and both had suffered because of it.
“You do make sense,” Sostratos said. “You make more sense than usual, as a matter of fact.” He reached out and set a hand on Menedemos’ forehead. “Are you feeling all right, my dear?”
“I was, till you started bothering me.” Menedemos shook the hand away.
His cousin laughed. “That sounds more like you. Are you enough like yourself to answer a question?”
“Depends on what it is,” Menedemos replied. More than once, Sostratos had asked why he seemed quieter and gloomier than usual. He’d given either evasive replies or none. He didn’t intend to tell Sostratos or anyone else what he thought about his father’s second wife, what he wanted to do with her.
But Sostratos had something else in mind; “From where along the coast do you want to sail for Cyprus?”
“Ah,” Menedemos beamed at his cousin. That was a completely legitimate question, and one he’d been thinking about himself. “I’d like to go a good deal farther east before I swing the ship south across the Inner Sea. The shortest passage between the mainland and the island, I think, is about four hundred stadia.”
“Yes, I believe that’s about right,” Sostratos agreed. “My only reservation is, this whole southern coast of Anatolia-Lykia, Pamphylia, Kilikia-crawls with pirates. I was just wondering if you’d weighed the risk of a longer voyage over the open sea against that of an attack as we make our way east.”
“Not easy to do,” Menedemos said slowly. “There are always risks when you cross the open sea. You can’t avoid them. That’s why you stay within sight of land whenever you can-unless you’re going somewhere downhill, so to speak, the way Alexandria is from Cyprus, where you can really count on the wind wafting you along during the sailing season. Pirates, now, pirates are different. They might not bother us at all, and there’s no risk to sailing east if they don’t.”