“Pirates,” Sostratos muttered. He had to keep watch for sails and hulls, too, not just for the jut of land out of the sea. Sailing west toward Cyprus, the Aphrodite had met a couple of ships bound for Sidon or the other Phoenician towns from Salamis. Everyone had been nervous till they passed each other by. Any stranger on the sea was too likely to prove a predator waiting only for his chance to strike.
He peered ahead again, then stiffened. Was that…? If he sang out and it wasn’t, he would feel a fool. If he didn’t sing out and somebody beat him to it, he would feel a worse fool. He took another, longer look.
“Land ho!” he shouted. “Land off the port bow!”
“I see it,” a sailor echoed. “I was going to sing out myself, but the young sir went and beat me to it.” That made Sostratos feel very fine indeed.
From his station at the stern, Menedemos said, “That’s got to be Cyprus. Now the only question is, where along the coast are we? See if you can spy a fishing boat, Sostratos. Fishermen will know.”
But they proved to need no fishermen. As they came closer to the shore, Sostratos said, “To the crows with me if this isn’t the very landscape we saw when we sailed out of Salamis for Sidon. You couldn’t have placed us any better if you’d been able to look across every stadion of sea. Euge, O best one!”
“Euge!” the sailors echoed.
Menedemos shuffled his feet on the poop deck like a shy schoolboy who had to recite. “Thank you, friends. I’d thank you more if we didn’t all know it was just luck that put us here and not two or three hundred stadia up or down the coast.”
“Modesty?” Sostratos asked. “Are you well, my dear?”
“I’ll gladly take credit where credit’s mine-or even when I can get away with claiming it,” his cousin answered. “Not here, though. If I say I can navigate from Sidon to Salamis every time straight as an arrow flies, you’ll expect me to do it again, and you’ll laugh at me when I don’t. I’m not fool enough to say anything of the sort, because I’d likely make myself a liar the next time we had to sail out of sight of land.”
Before long, a five flying Ptolemaios’ eagle pendant roared out of Salamis harbor’s narrow mouth and raced toward the Aphrodite. An officer cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted, “What ship are you?” across the water.
“The Aphrodite, out of Sidon, bound for Rhodes and home,” Sostratos yelled back, resigning himself to another long, suspicious interrogation.
But no. The officer on the war galley waved and said, “So you’re the Rhodians, are you? Pass on. We remember you from when you came here out of the west.”
“Thank you, most noble one!” Sostratos exclaimed in glad surprise. “Tell me, if you’d be so kind: is Menelaos still here in Salamis?”
“Yes, he is,” Ptolemaios’ officer replied. “Why do you want to know?”
“We found something at Sidon we hope he might be interested in buying,” Sostratos said.
“Ah. Well, I can’t say anything about that-you’ll have to find out for yourselves.” The naval officer waved once more. “Good fortune go with you.
“Thanks again,” Sostratos said. As the Aphrodite made for the harbor mouth, he went back to the poop deck. “That was easier than I expected,” he told Menedemos.
His cousin dipped his head. “It was, wasn’t it? Nice to have something go right for us, by the gods. And if Menelaos likes this fancy silk of ours…”
“Here’s hoping,” Sostratos said. “How can we even be sure he’ll look at it?”
“We’ll show some to his servants, to the highest-ranking steward they’ll let us see,” Menedemos answered. “If that’s not enough to get us brought before him, I don’t know what would be.”
Sostratos admired his confidence. A merchant needed it in full measure, and Sostratos knew he had less than his own fair share. “Here’s hoping you’re right,” he said.
With a shrug, Menedemos said, “If I’m not, we just don’t sell here, that’s all. I hope Menelaos will want what we’ve got. He’s someone who can afford to buy it. But if he doesn’t, well, I expect someone else will.” Yes, he had confidence and to spare.
And he and Sostratos also had that marvelous silk from the land beyond India. When they presented themselves at what had been the palace of the kings of Salamis and was now Menelaos’ residence, a supercilious servant declared, “The governor does not see tradesmen.”
“No?” Sostratos said. “Not even when we’ve got-this?” He waved to Menedemos. Like a conjurer, his cousin pulled a bolt of that transparent silk from the sack in which he carried it and displayed it for the servant.
That worthy immediately lost some of his hauteur. He reached out as if to touch the silk. Menedemos jerked it away. The servant asked, “Is that… Koan cloth? It can’t be-it’s too fine. But it can’t be anything else, either.”
“No, it’s not Koan silk,” Sostratos answered. “What it is isn’t any of your business, but it is Menelaos’.” To soften the sting of that, he slipped the servant a drakhma. In a lot of households, he would have overpaid; here, if anything, the bribe was barely enough.
It didn’t suffice to get the Rhodians an audience with Ptolemaios’ brother. But it did get them to his chief steward, who blinked when he saw the silk they displayed. “Yes, the master had better have a look at this himself,” the steward murmured. A few minutes later, Sostratos and Menedemos stood before Menelaos son of Lagos.
“Hail, Rhodians,” Menelaos said. He not only looked like his older brother, he sounded like him, too, which was, in Sostratos’ experience, much more unusual. “Simias says you’ve got something interesting for me to see, so let’s have a look, eh?”
Ptolemaios also had that way of coming straight to the point. Sostratos said, “Certainly, sir,” and showed him the silk as he and Menedemos had shown it to Simias.
Menelaos whistled. “By the dog, that’s something!” he said, and dipped his head. “Yes, indeed, that’s really something. It’s not Koan. It can’t be Koan. The Koans couldn’t match this if their lives depended on it. Where’s it come from? You got it in Sidon, but you can’t tell me the Phoenicians made it.”
“No, sir.” This was Menedemos’ story, and he told it: “Zakerbaal, the cloth merchant who sold it to me, says it comes from a country beyond India-he doesn’t know whether to the east or to the north. He knows Koan silk, too, and said the same thing you did.”
“Next question is, how much do you want for it?” Yes, Menelaos did cut to the chase.
“Zakerbaal said it was worth its weight in gold,” Menedemos answered. “But it’s worth more than that, just because it’s so very light and filmy. I paid him in Koan silk, at five times its weight for the weight of each bolt of this.” Sostratos sent him a sharp look; he’d really paid only about half that. Of course, how would Menelaos know?
And Menedemos knew what he was doing, too, for Ptolemaios’ brother said, “So you’re telling me each bolt of this is worth five times as much as a bolt of Koan silk? That seems fair enough, I think.”
Sostratos and Menedemos both tossed their heads at the same time, an almost identical motion that looked odd because Sostratos was so much taller than his cousin. Sostratos said, “Not quite, O most noble one. We’re telling you that’s what we paid.”
“Ah.” Menelaos’ grin displayed strong yellow teeth. “And you’re telling me you want a profit, are you?”
Some Hellenes-usually those who didn’t have to worry about it- looked down their noses at the mere idea of profit. Menelaos didn’t sound as if he was one of those. Sostratos hoped he wasn’t, anyhow. Menedemos said, “Sir, that silk didn’t swim across the sea to Salamis by itself. We have to pay our crew. We have to take care of our ship. We have to live, too.”