“Light a torch and take these fellows back to the harbor. Then hurry back here. I know how long you need to get there and back. If you don’t hurry, I’ll make you sorry.”
“I’ll hurry. I’ll hurry.” Under his breath, the slave added something that wasn’t Greek. The torch hissed and popped and crackled as it caught from a lamp. The boy nodded to Menedemos and Sostratos. “Let’s go.”
“Have a good time?” Diokles asked when they got back to the Aphrodite.
“Hard to have a bad time with a woman, wouldn’t you say?” Sostratos answered. He handed the slave an obolos. The youth stuck the coin in his cheek and went back into Olbia. Sostratos continued, “She said her mother sold her into slavery to keep them both from starving.”
“Did she?” Menedemos said. “The girl I was with said her father sold her for the same reason.” He shrugged. “They both might have been telling the truth.”
“Yes, but they both might have been lying to make us feel sorry for them and give them a little something,” Sostratos said. “You have to be foolish to believe much of what you hear from a whore in a brothel, I suppose, but from now on I’ll believe even less.”
Menedemos took off his chiton, crumpled it into a ball, and laid it on the poop deck. He wrapped himself in his mantle and lay down for the night. Sostratos imitated him. The timbers were hard, but Menedemos didn’t mind. He slept aboard the merchant galley often enough during the sailing season to be used to the way they felt. He yawned, twisted a couple of times, said, “Good night,” to his cousin, and slept.
The Aphrodite crawled east along the southern coast of Anatolia from Pamphylia into Kilikia. Every so often, when she went farther from shore than usual, Sostratos got glimpses of Cyprus, lying low on the southern horizon. He’d never come so far east, but the island didn’t excite him as it would have had it been the merchant galley’s destination. As things were, he looked forward to visiting it for a little while and then pressing on toward Phoenicia.
“Some of the towns on Cyprus are Phoenician, you know,” Menedemos reminded him. “They planted colonies there at the same time we Hellenes did.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Sostratos said impatiently-everyone knew that. “But we probably won’t stop at any of them before we go farther east, will we?”
Menedemos tossed his head. “I hadn’t planned to, no. I was going to round that eastern peninsula the island has and then sail down to Salamis, and that’s a Hellenic city. From Salamis, you go straight across the Inner Sea to Phoenicia.”
“All right.” Sostratos sighed. “I’d have liked a chance to practice my Aramaic before we got there, though.”
“Well, when you were picking a girl in that brothel in Olbia, you should have asked if any of them could make those funny noises,” Menedemos said.
Sostratos stared at his cousin in astonishment. “By the dog of Egypt, you’re right. I should have. Slaves come from all over the place. One of them probably did speak it. I never would have thought of that.”
“To be fair, my dear, you didn’t go there to talk,” Menedemos said.
Diokles laughed. He sent Menedemos a reproachful look. “Confound it, skipper, you made me mess up the rowers’ stroke.”
“Too bad,” Menedemos said with a grin.
“Why didn’t that occur to me, though?” Sostratos asked himself, ignoring both of them. “We could have screwed and talked.”
“And talked, and talked,” Menedemos said. “If you’d found a woman who spoke Aramaic, you probably wouldn’t have bothered getting her clothes off.”
“Not likely!” Sostratos said what he had to say, though Menedemos might have been right. Would he have been too interested in talking with a woman to bother bedding her? It wasn’t certain, but he knew it wasn’t impossible, either.
While Sostratos pondered that, his cousin pulled one of the Aphrodite’s steering-oar tillers in toward him and pushed the other away. The akatos swung toward the south, away from the Kilikian coast and toward the island ahead. The yard had run from the port bow back toward the stern on the starboard side, to take best advantage of the northerly breeze as the Aphrodite sailed east. Now, with the ship running before the wind, the sailors hurried to straighten the yard even before Menedemos gave orders.
We have a good crew, Sostratos thought. They know their business.
He looked back past the akatos’ sternpost. The stretch of sea between the ship and the mainland grew wider and wider. In most circumstances, that would have filled him with foreboding. Not here, not when every stadion farther from Kilikia meant a stadion closer to Cyprus.
The sun shone brightly from a blue sky dotted by only a handful of puffy white clouds. A storm seemed unimaginable. Sostratos resolutely refused to imagine one and tried not to remember the squall off the Lykian coast. Instead, he turned to Menedemos and said, “We ought to make the island by nightfall tomorrow.”
“Yes, that seems about right,” his cousin said. “If I’d turned south earlier today, I’d sail on after nightfall tonight, steering by the stars. But we’ll be at sea all night either way, so I don’t see much point to it.”
“One night at sea shouldn’t be bad.” Sostratos pointed down to the blue, blue water. “Look! Isn’t that a turtle?”
“I didn’t see it,” Menedemos answered. “But I’ve heard they lay eggs on that eastern promontory. Hardly anybody lives there, though, so I don’t know for sure. Here-take the tillers for a minute, will you? I’ve got to piss.”
When Sostratos did take hold of the tillers, he felt rather like Herakles taking the weight of the world so Atlas could go after the golden apples of the Hesperides. Menedemos handled the steering oars from dawn till dusk every day. The only difference was, Atlas had intended to walk away from the job for good. Menedemos would take it back in a moment.
Sostratos felt the Aphrodite’?, motion much more intimately through the tillers than he did with the soles of his feet. The slightest swing of the steering oars made the ship change direction; they were strong enough to control the akatos’ course despite the best efforts of the rowers. She could have got along perfectly well with only one, though the second did make her easier to handle.
“No rain today,” Sostratos said to Menedemos’ back as his cousin eased himself over the side. “No gods-detested round ships coming out of the rain, either.”
“There’d better not be,” Menedemos said with a laugh.
“That wasn’t my fault!” Sostratos exclaimed. He’d been steering a year before when a merchantman loomed out of the rain and struck the Aphrodite a glancing blow, carrying away one steering oar and staving in some portside timbers. She’d had to limp back to Kos and wait for repairs, which took much longer than anyone had expected.
Menedemos shook himself off and let his chiton fall. “Well, so it wasn’t,” he said. Had he tried to say anything else, Sostratos would have given him all the argument he wanted and then a little more besides.
As things were, Sostratos just said, “May I steer a little while longer?” He scanned the sea. “There’s nothing for me to run into-I don’t even see any dolphins right now.”
“All right, go ahead.” Menedemos made as if to bow. “I’ll stand around being useless.”
“If you’re saying that’s what I do when I’m not steering, I’ll have something to say to you, too,” Sostratos replied. Menedemos only laughed.
A tern flew out from the direction of the mainland and perched on the yard. The black-capped bird cocked its head now this way, now that, as it peered down into the sea. Laughing still, Menedemos said, “All right, O best of toikharkhoi-what fare do we charge for taking him to Cyprus?”
“If he pays us a sprat, we’re ahead of the game,” Sostratos answered. “If he shits in a sailor’s hair, we’re behind, and we tell him we’ll never take him anywhere else.”