“That’s… probably true,” Menedemos said, “I don’t remember Homer talking about sounding leads in the Iliad or the Odyssey, and resourceful Odysseus would surely have used one if he’d known about it.”
“Herodotos does mention them, so they’ve been known for more than a hundred years,” Sostratos said. “Sometime between the Trojan War and the Persian Wars, some clever fellow figured that out. I wonder who. I wonder when. I wish I knew. That’s a man whose name deserves to live. I wonder if he was a Hellene or a Phoenician or a gods-detested Lykian pirate. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know for certain.”
His cousin gave him an odd look, “It hadn’t even occurred to me that the fellow who came up with the lead could have been anything but a Hellene.”
“We’ve borrowed all sorts of things,” Sostratos said. “The Phoenicians gave us the alpha-beta. Theirs is older than ours, and you should have heard Himilkon go on and on about how they’re happy with it just the way it is. The Lydians were the first ones to mint real coins, or so Herodotos says-before that, everybody had to weigh out scrap gold and silver. And even Dionysos is supposed to come from out of the distant east, so maybe we learned to make wine from barbarians, too.”
“Wherever we learned it, it’s a good thing we did,” Menedemos said. “I wouldn’t want to spend my whole life drinking water. Or it could be even worse than that. We could drink milk the way the Thracians and the Skythians do.” He made a revolted face, sticking out his tongue like a Gorgon painted on the facing of a hoplite’s shield.
“That would be dreadful.” Sostratos made a nasty face of his own. “Cheese is all very well-cheese is better than all very well, as a matter of fact-but milk?” He tossed his head. “No, thanks.”
“We found out the Syrians don’t fancy seafood, remember,” Menedemos said. “Now that’s ignorance, nothing else but,”
“Of course it is,” Sostratos said. “And that strange god the Ioudaioi worship won’t let them eat pork.” He sent his cousin a warning look. “You’re going to start talking about Pythagoreans and beans and farting again, aren’t you? Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to do any such thing,” Menedemos insisted. Sostratos didn’t believe him for a moment. But then his cousin went on, “What I was going to do was tell you there’s a little tiny island between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland that’s called Pordoselene.”
“What? Fartmoon?” Sostratos exclaimed. “I don’t believe it,”
“Apollo smite me if I lie,” Menedemos said solemnly. “It even has a polls of the same name. And there’s another island, even smaller, also called Pordoselene, in front of the polis, and that island has a temple to Apollo on it.”
“Fartmoon,” Sostratos said again, and shrugged in bemusement. ‘‘We’re not even out of sight of land yet, but we’re already getting… peculiar. By the time we spy the Phoenician coast, I expect we’ll all be raving mad.” He sounded as if he was looking forward to it.
5
“Ship ho!” Aristeidas called from the Aphrodite’s small foredeck. He pointed. “Ship off the starboard bow!”
Menedemos peered in that direction. “I don’t see a sail,” he said, but swung the merchant galley a little to the south anyway. Over the past couple of years, he’d come to rely on Aristeidas’ eyesight.
“No sail, skipper,” the lookout said. “There’s the hull-do you see it? Fishing boat, I’d guess.”
“Ah.” Menedemos had been looking for the wrong thing. As soon as Aristeidas told him what he ought to see, he spotted it. “We’ll come up to him, and he can tell us just where we are.”
The coastline of Phoenicia had come into view a little while before: a low, dark smudge of land rising up out of the endless blue flatness of the waters of the Inner Sea. Had Menedemos sighted land in Hellas, he wouldn’t have needed to figure out where he was. But neither he nor anyone else aboard the akatos had ever come so far east before; the silhouettes of the hills against the sky didn’t tell him where the ship was, as they would have in lands he’d already visited.
“He’s making sail, skipper,” Aristeidas called, and Menedemos dipped his head-he saw the pale square of linen coming down from the yard, too. The lookout added, “He must think we’ve got a pirate ship. A lot of these little boats do.”
“Well, we’ll keep after him anyhow,” Menedemos said. “We’d make a pretty sorry excuse for a pirate if we couldn’t catch up with a tubby scow like that, now wouldn’t we?” He raised his voice: “Sostratos!”
His cousin, as far as he could tell, might not have noticed the boat at all-he was watching dolphins leaping and cavorting off to port. He started at the sound of his name and looked around wildly, as if wondering what had been going on while his mind was elsewhere. “What is it?” he asked apprehensively.
“See that fishing boat?” Menedemos said. By Sostratos’ expression, he might never have heard of fishing boats, let alone seen one before; when he thought about other things, he thought hard. Patiently, Menedemos pointed it out. He was relieved to see the light of intelligence appear on his cousin’s face, and went on, “How would you like to practice your Aramaic with whoever’s aboard her?”
“I can do that, I suppose,” Sostratos said. “What do you want me to say?”
Maybe that hadn’t been the light of intelligence after all. Menedemos drummed his fingers on the steering-oar tiller. “Do you know where we are, my dear?” he asked sweetly. “Do you have any idea which Phoenician city we’re closest to?”
“Of course not.” Sostratos sounded affronted. “How could I know that?”
“Well, one good way might be to ask the people on the boat there, don’t you think?”
“Oh,” Sostratos said. This time, it really was the light of intelligence, or something like it, anyhow. Still sounding slightly peevish, Sostratos asked, “Why didn’t you tell me to do that before?”
Menedemos drummed his fingers on the tiller again. “Never mind,” he said; he didn’t feel like arguing with his cousin. “Just take care of it when we catch up with them, all right?”
“Certainly, O best one,” Sostratos replied with such dignity as he could muster. “And it goes to show some people in these parts do catch fish, doesn’t it?” Menedemos supposed it did. He hadn’t thought of that.
The fishermen in that boat were good sailors. They got the sail down with commendable haste and wrung every digit of speed they could from their little craft. That made the Aphrodite take longer to catch up to them but never gave them the slightest chance of escaping her. They were much too far out to sea to get to shore before she came up alongside them. Even then, they were ready to fight. A couple of them brandished what were either gutting knives or shortswords. A third shot an arrow that splashed into the sea fifteen or twenty cubits short of the merchant galley.
“Tell them we’re friendly. Tell them we don’t want to murder them or sell them into slavery,” Menedemos said. The fisherman with the bow let fly again. This arrow came closer. Menedemos scowled. “I get more tempted every minute, though.”
His cousin shouted something in Aramaic. The fishermen shouted back. Menedemos raised a questioning eyebrow. Sostratos coughed. Then he said, “They’re telling me to do things to my mother Sophokles never thought of in OidipousTyrannos .”
“Barbarians curse that way, don’t they?” Menedemos said.
“They’re not paying me compliments, my dear,” Sostratos answered.
“Heh,” Menedemos said. “All right. Find out what we need to know. And tell them that if they don’t learn manners we cursed well will ram them and sink them, just to teach them to respect their betters.”