Over the Wine-Dark Sea

2

Waving a cloth, Erinna ran at a peahen. "Get out of my herbs, you nasty thing!" Sostratos' sister shouted. "Shoo!"

"What's it got in its beak?" Sostratos asked from the edge of the courtyard as the peahen beat a reluctant retreat.

"A wall lizard," Erinna answered. Sure enough, the tail disappeared down the peahen's gullet. Erinna went on, "I don't mind when the peafowl eat lizards and mice. But they eat the cumin and the fennel, too. I don't think you feed them enough."

"I do so." Sostratos indignantly pointed to the barley set out in a broad bowl, from which two other peahens were eating. "They get almost as much as a slave does. I just think they like some opson with their sitos, the same as we do."

Erinna rolled her eyes. "Well, they can get it somewhere besides my herb garden."

"It could be worse," Sostratos said. A horrible, vaguely hornlike noise from next door showed how it could be worse. "Menedemos has the peacock at his house. It does everything the peahens do, and squawks four times as much besides."

"I can't wait till you've bred all the peahens to it," his sister said. "I can't wait till you take them to the Aphrodite and sail far, far away with them."

"It won't be long," Sostratos said. "Now that ships are starting to put in to our harbor, Menedemos grudges every day the galley stays here."

"I'll miss you," Erinna told him. "But I won't miss these miserable, obnoxious birds at all." The peafowl she'd chased from the herb garden sidled back toward the plants, undoubtedly hoping she'd forgotten about it. Forgetting about a bird that big wasn't easy, though. Erinna flapped the cloth again, and the peafowl drew back.

Sostratos would have taken oath he saw anger in the bird's beady black eyes. He said, "You don't have to watch the garden yourself, you know. You could set a slave woman to doing it."

"I tried that yesterday," Erinna said darkly. "She paid more attention to her mug of wine than to the peahens, and we'll go short of garlic for a while - either that or get some from people whose gardens just have snails or caterpillars, not these, these - goats with feathers, that's what they are."

Before Sostratos could answer, the peacock next door let out its blatting cry again. Dogs in the neighborhood started barking. They'd been yapping their heads off every since the peafowl came to Sostratos and Menedemos' houses. The birds probably smelled like a banquet to them, and the peacock especially made enough noise to remind them he was around even when the wind blew from the wrong quarter.

Another horrible noise came from next door, followed by some equally horrible curses. "Hades stuff you with olives and boil you in a saucepan!" Menedemos shouted. "Roast you over a low fire! May your peahens give you the bird clap, so you can't pee through your peacock cock!"

Erinna giggled. Sostratos felt more inclined to applaud. That wasn't Aristophanes, but it almost could have been. Then Menedemos shouted again, this time in pain. Sostratos didn't need to be able to see through the walls between them to be sure the peacock had had its revenge. He wondered whether it had kicked or pecked. Peafowl were formidable at both ends - and with their buffeting wings - as the luckless sailor who'd chased the peacock had discovered to his sorrow.

Erinna said, "You really should have kept Menedemos from buying these pestilential birds."

Sostratos tossed his head. "Once Menedemos sets his heart on doing something, the twelve Olympians couldn't stop him. He'll go far - you mark my words. Of course, he may have to go pretty fast, too, to stay in front of all the husbands he's outraged."

"Oh." Erinna had to flap her cloth at the peahen yet again. Sostratos hoped that would distract her, but it didn't. After forcing the bird to retreat, she said, "Is that really true? About Menedemos, I mean."

"Some of it is, anyhow," Sostratos answered.

His sister clicked her tongue between her teeth. "Respectable women have to make do with a leather sausage if their husbands don't please them. Men can have all the women they want. It hardly seems fair for them to go after wives when they could dip their wicks with slaves and whores."

"I suppose so." Sostratos thought of the redheaded Thracian slave girl. But Erinna hadn't been talking about him; she'd been talking about Menedemos. He said, "You know how our cousin is. For him, sometimes, half the reason for doing something is knowing he shouldn't."

"It could be." Erinna considered. "It probably is, in fact. But what would he say of you if he had the chance?"

"Of me?" Sostratos echoed in surprise. "Probably that I'm too boring to say anything much about." He yawned to emphasize the point.

"Xanthos is boring - or at least that's what everybody says," Erinna answered. "You just don't care to talk about fighting and drinking and women all the time, that's all."

Sostratos went over and gave her a brotherly hug. The peahen, seeing the protector of the herb garden distracted, darted forward. Sostratos and Erinna shooed it off again together. The trouble is, most people like to hear about fighting and drinking and women, Sostratos thought. He did himself, sometimes. And Menedemos could indeed go on most entertainingly about any or all of them.

I'd better give it up, Sostratos thought, or I'll convince myself that I am boring after all. He took a warning step toward the peahen. It backed away, looking as if it hated him.

Getting a ship ready to sail was always a tricky business. Menedemos was convinced he had a harder time with the Aphrodite than he would have had with a round ship, a sailing ship. The reason was simple: with forty oars to man, he needed far more sailors than the master of a sailing ship did.

"We're still a couple of men short," he said to Diokles, his keleustes.

The oarmaster dipped his head in agreement, but didn't seem particularly upset. "We'll hire harbor rats, that's all," he answered, "and if they drink up their wages the first good-sized port we come to, well, to the crows with 'em. Plenty more of that kind to be picked up in any harbor of the Inner Sea."

"I want as good a crew as I can get." Menedemos pointed toward the Aphrodite's bow. "That ram isn't there just for show. Crete breeds pirates the way a dog breeds fleas, and Italy's the same way. And the war between Syracuse and Carthage goes on and on, so the Punic navy's liable to be prowling around, too."

Diokles shrugged. He was about halfway between Menedemos and his father in age, burnt brown by the sun, with the massive shoulders and heavy arms of a man who'd spent a lot of years working an oar himself. "The way I look at it is like this," he said "if a Carthaginian galley with four or five men to a bank of oars comes after us, it won't matter whether a couple of our rowers aren't everything they might be, because we'll get sunk any which way."

Since he was probably - no, almost certainly - right, Menedemos didn't argue with him. Instead, he turned to Sostratos and asked, "How's the cargo shaping?"

His cousin held out a three-leafed wooden tablet faced with wax, on which he'd written the manifest with the sharp end of his bronze stylus. As items came aboard, he'd either erased them with the blunt end or drawn a line through them, depending on how harried he was at any given moment. "We've still got some papyrus to take on board," he answered, showing Menedemos the tablet, "and the peafowl, and their feed, and wine and water and oil and bread for the men."

"We don't need that much," Menedemos said, "for we'll be putting in to real ports most nights."

"I know, but we do need some, and we haven't got it yet," Sostratos replied. "There will be nights when we just haul the ship up onto the beach wherever we happen to end up, and there may be storms."

Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic. Diokles had on only a loincloth, so he couldn't turn aside the omen that way. But he wore a ring with the image of Herakles Alexikakos, the Averter of Evil. He rubbed it and muttered a charm under his breath.

"On land, I'm not particularly superstitious," Menedemos remarked. "When I'm about to go to sea . . . That's a different business."

"You'd best believe it," Diokles agreed. "You never can tell with the sea. You can't trust it." He stopped - and started. "What's that dreadful noise?"

"Oh, good." Menedemos spoke with considerable relief. "Here come the peafowl."

Slaves from his father and uncle's houses carried the caged birds down to the Aphrodite. They'd managed to attract a fair-sized crowd of curious onlookers; men didn't carry half a dozen big, raucous birds through the streets of Rhodes every day. And a good thing, too, Menedemos thought. The peacock wasn't the only one screaming its head off. The peahens were squawking, too, though less often and not quite so loud.

"Where are you going to want these miserable things stowed, sir?" one of the slaves asked Menedemos.

He looked to Sostratos. Menedemos was captain; his cousin didn't tell him how to command the akatos. As toikharkhos, Sostratos had charge of the cargo. Since Sostratos was good at what he did, Menedemos didn't want to joggle his elbow.

"We have to keep them as safe as we can," Sostratos said. "They're the most delicate cargo we've got, and the most valuable, too. I want them as far away from the water in the bilges as I can get them. We'd better put them up on the little stretch of foredeck we've got."

That made Menedemos frown, regardless of whether he wanted to joggle his cousin's elbow or not. "Can we stow them there and still have room for the lookout to get up to the bow and do his job?" he asked. "If he can't see rocks ahead or a pirate pentekonter, a whole shipload of peafowl won't do us any good. If you could stack the cages . . ."

"I don't want to do that," Sostratos said unhappily. "The birds above would befoul the ones below, and they could peck at one another, too."

"Will you make up your mind?" asked the slave at the head of the procession. "This stinking cage is heavy."

"Take them up and put them on the foredeck," Sostratos said, speaking with more decision than he usually showed. "We'll just have to find out whether there's room up there for them and the lookout, too."

Down the gangplank and into the Aphrodite trudged the slaves. The peafowl screamed bloody murder; they liked descending at an angle even less than they liked being carried on level ground. By the way the slaves let the cages thud to the pine timbers of the foredeck, they'd got very sick of the birds.

Menedemos came up behind them. "Put those cages in two rows, with a lane in the middle," he said. When the slaves were done, he surveyed the result and reluctantly dipped his head. "I suppose it will do," he called to Sostratos. "But we'll have to warn the lookouts to steer the middle path. If they come too close to the birds on either side, they'll get their legs pecked." He laughed. "We've got Skylle and Kharybdis right here aboard the Aphrodite."

"Homer never saw a peacock - I'm sure of that." Sostratos pointed. "Here comes the last of the papyrus . . . and here comes something else, too. What's in those jars, Menedemos? They aren't on my list here."

"Oh, I know about those," Menedemos answered. "They're crimson dye from Byblos. Father just got them yesterday, from a ship that just came in from Phoenicia."

"Crimson dye . . . from Byblos." Menedemos' cousin spoke with exaggerated patience: "How many jars did Uncle Philodemos get? Why didn't anyone bother to tell me about them till now?" He looked daggers at Menedemos.

"Sorry," Menedemos said, more contritely than he'd thought he would. "It's two hundred jars, by the way."

"Two hundred jars." Sostratos still sounded furious. "This had better not happen again. How am I supposed to do my job if nobody tells me what I'm supposed to be doing?" He pointed to the men who were loading oiled-leather sacks of papyrus beneath the rowers' benches. "Shift those farther astern. We've got to make room for the crimson dye."

Menedemos gave his attention back to Diokles. "Go get us those rowers. I want to be at sea before noon. We probably won't make Knidos even so. No help for it; we'll just have to beach ourselves on Syme."

"Right, skipper." The keleustes dipped his head. "I'll take care of it." He went up the gangplank to the quay at which the Aphrodite was tied up, and shouted for rowers in a great voice.

"Have we got all our cargo aboard?" Menedemos asked Sostratos.

"Unless there's more you haven't told me about, yes," his cousin answered tartly. Menedemos tossed his head, denying even the possibility. Sostratos didn't look appeased, but said, "In that case, everything's loaded." He peered down the quay, though he, unlike Menedemos, wasn't following Diokles with his eyes. "I was wondering if we'd get any passengers."

"I was hoping we would - they're pure profit," Menedemos said. "But it's still early in the sailing season, so some lubbers won't care to put to sea so soon. We'll probably get some in Hellas. There are always people who want to go across to Italy." He clapped his hands together. "Here comes Diokles. That was fast."

"I wonder what'll be wrong with the rowers," Sostratos said.

"We'll find out. At least they aren't falling-down drunk in the morning: a little something, anyhow," Menedemos said. "Get their names, tell 'em it's a drakhma a day, and it'll go up to a drakhma and a half when they show they're worth it. And then . . ." He clapped again, hard this time. "Then we're off."

He hurried past the mast and back to the raised poop deck at the stern of the Aphrodite, slapping rowers on the back as he went and also making sure the jars and sacks that held the cargo were securely stowed under their benches. He'd watched Sostratos attend to that, but he checked it anyhow. The Aphrodite was his ship; if anything went wrong, it was his fault.

He took the tiller bars to the new steering oars in his hands and tugged experimentally. He'd done the same thing every time he came aboard after the Aphrodite went into the sea: the steering oars pleased him that much. Khremes the carpenter had been right - a little old man could handle them all day and never get tired. He'd never felt a pair that pivoted so smoothly.

Diokles came up onto the poop beside Menedemos. Sostratos joined them a moment later, tying his tablet closed with a thin strip of leather. "Let's have a lookout forward," Menedemos called. He pointed to a sailor naked but for a knifebelt round his middle. "Aristeidas, take the first turn there. You've sailed with me before - I know you've got sharp eyes. Mind the peafowl, now."

"Right, captain." Aristeidas hurried up onto the foredeck. The peacock tried to peck him, but he darted past and took hold of the forepost. He waved back to Menedemos.

"Bring in the gangplank," Menedemos commanded. At his shouted order, a couple of longshoremen undid the lines that held the Aphrodite to the quay and tossed the coarse flax ropes into the akatos. With what was almost a bow to Diokles, Menedemos asked, "You have your mallet and your bronze square?"

"I'm not likely to be without 'em," the keleustes answered. "My voice'd give out if I had to call the stroke all day." He stooped and picked up the little mallet and the bronze square, which dangled from a chain so as to give the best tone when he struck it. The stern-facing rowers poised themselves at their oars. Diokles dipped his head to Menedemos. "When you're ready."

"I've been ready for months," Menedemos said. "Now the ship is, too. Let's go."

The keleustes smote the bronze with the mallet. The rowers took their first stroke. To leave the harbor, Menedemos had every oar manned - as much for show as for any other reason. The quay shifted. No: the Aphrodite began to move. Diokles used the mallet again. Another stroke. Again. "Rhyppapai!" the oarmaster called, using his voice to help give the men their rhythm.

"Rhyppapai!" the rowers echoed: the old chant of the Athenian navy, used these days by Hellenes in galleys all over the Inner Sea. "Rhyppapai!! Rhyppapai!"

"You can tell they haven't had oars in their hands for a while," Sostratos remarked.

"They're pretty ragged, aren't they?" Menedemos agreed. Even as he spoke, two rowers on the port side almost fouled each other, and one on the starboard dug the blade of his oar into the water as he brought it back for a new stroke. Menedemos shouted at him. "Nikasion, if you're going to catch a crab, make it the kind you can cook next time!"

"Sorry, skipper," the rower called back, dropping the chant for a moment.

Clang! Clang! After a while, Menedemos knew, he would hardly hear the keleustes' mallet striking the bronze square. At the beginning of every voyage, though, he had to get used to it all over again. A tern plunged into the water of Rhodes' Great Harbor less than a bowshot from the Aphrodite and came out with a fish in its beak. A screeching gull chased it, but the smaller bird got away with the prize.

A sailing ship was coming into the harbor as the akatos neared the narrow outlet between the two moles that protected it from bad weather. Menedemos tugged on the tillers to steer the Aphrodite a little to starboard and give the clumsy, beamy round ship a wider berth. Under the forward-pointing, goose-headed sternpost, the fellow at the sailing ship's steering oars lifted a hand to wave and thank him for the courtesy.

"Where are you from?" Menedemos called across a plethron of blue water.

"Paphos, in Cyprus," the other ship's officer answered. "I've got copper and olive oil and some shaped cedar boards. Where are you away to?"

"I'm bound for Italy, with papyrus and ink and perfume and crimson dye - and peafowl," Menedemos added with no small pride.

"Peafowl?" the fellow on the sailing ship said. "Good luck to you, friend. The peacocks are pretty, sure enough, but I've seen 'em - they're mean. I wouldn't have 'em on my ship, and that's the truth."

"Well, to the crows with you," Menedemos said, but not loud enough for the fellow on the beamy merchantman to hear. He turned to Sostratos. "Fat lot he knows about it."

Only about three plethra separated the tips of the two moles from each other. Inside, the waters of the Great Harbor were glassy smooth. As soon as the Aphrodite passed out into the Aegean proper, the light chop made the motion of the ship change. Diokles smiled. "Your rowing may get a little rusty over the winter," he said, never missing a beat with the mallet, "but you never forget how to stand when she rolls and pitches a little."

"No," said Menedemos, who'd made the adjustment so automatically, he hadn't even noticed he'd done it. He scratched his chin, then shot Sostratos an amused glance: his cousin's beard was a handy thing to be thoughtful with. "I'll keep them all at the oars till we round the nose of the island. Then, if the wind holds, we'll lower the sail and let it do the work."

The keleustes dipped his head. "That seems good to me." Diokles paused, then asked, "You'll want to drill them, though, on the way out, won't you? If we have to fight, the practice'll come in handy. It always does."

"Of course." Menedemos dipped his head. "Yes, of course. But let's give ourselves a couple of days to shake off the cobwebs and rub oil on our blisters. There'll be time for sprints and time for ramming practice, believe me there will."

"Good enough," the oarmaster said. "I just wanted to make sure it was in your mind, skipper, that's all. I think we'll have a pretty fair crew once we do shake down. A lot of the men at the oars have rowed in triremes or in fours or fives. Nothing like serving in the polis' fleet to turn out a solid rower."

As if on cue in a comic play, Aristeidas sang out from his post at the bow: "Trireme off to starboard, captain!"

Menedemos shaded his eyes from the sun with the palm of his hand. So did Diokles and Sostratos. Menedemos saw the ship first. "There she is," he said, pointing. The trireme, twice the length of the Aphrodite but hardly beamier, glided along southeast under sail, the rowers resting easy at the oars. As the lean, deadly shape drew nearer, he made out Rhodes' rose in red on the white linen of the sail.

"Pirate patrol," Sostratos remarked.

"Nothing else but," Menedemos agreed. "Unless a pentekonter or a hemiolia can run away, it's got even less chance against a trireme than we do in the Aphrodite against a pirate ship. But the other side of the coin is, you wouldn't want to take a trireme up against a bigger war galley these days."

"By Poseidon the earthshaker, I should hope not," Diokles said. "Anything from a four on up will have extra timbers at the waterline to make ramming tougher, and it'll have a deck swarming with marines. I wouldn't want to fight a big old mean spur-thighed tortoise like that in a trireme, and I don't know anybody who would, either."

"When we Hellenes fought Persia - even when Athens fought Sparta less than a hundred years ago - all the warships were triremes," Sostratos said. "No one knew how to build anything bigger."

"When the Argives sailed to Troy, they all went in pentekonters," Menedemos said. "Nobody back then even knew how to build triremes." He laughed at how surprised Sostratos looked to find himself topped. Menedemos grinned. "You can keep your fancy historians. Give me Homer any day."

"That's right," Diokles said, though Menedemos didn't think the keleustes could read or write. But everyone, literate or not, had heard the Iliad and Odyssey countless times.

Stubborn as usual, Sostratos tossed his head. "Homer is where you start. No one would argue with that. But Homer shouldn't be where you stop."

There were times - at supper, say, or in a symposion with his cousin leading the drinking and keeping things moderate - when. Menedemos would have been glad to argue that. Now he had the Aphrodite to run, and the ship came first. She'd traveled past the northernmost spit of land on the island of Rhodes. Looking south, Menedemos could see into the city of Rhodes' small western harbor.

"Lower the sail!" he called, and sailors leaped to obey. Down it came from the main yard, canvas flapping till the wind took it and filled it. Like any sail, it was made from oblong blocks of cloth sewn together; the light horizontal lines and the vertical brails gave it the appearance of a gameboard.

Even before Menedemos could give the orders, the men swung the great square sail to take best advantage of the wind coming down from the north. They brailed up the leeward half so as to get the precise portion and amount of sail needed.

"They're good," Sostratos said.

"Diokles said it," Menedemos answered. "They know what they're supposed to do, because they've done it before. The Aphrodite's not so big as a trireme, let alone a four or a five or those new ships the generals are making with six or seven men to a bank of oars, but we do things the same way the bigger ships do. And a sail's a sail, no matter what kind of ship you're in. Only difference between us and a proper warship there is that we're not big enough to need a foresail."

His cousin grinned a sly grin. "You make me feel as if I were back at the Lykeion in Athens. Here, though, it's not Theophrastos lecturing on botany; it's Menedemos on seamanship."

Menedemos shrugged. "If your fancy philosophers would want to listen, I'd fill their ears for them. This is what I know, and I'm good at it." Like any Hellene, he was justly proud of the things he was good at, and wanted everyone else to know about them, too.

"And because you know these things so well, do you think you know others every bit as well?" Sostratos asked.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Menedemos gave him a suspicious stare. "When you start asking that kind of question, you're trying to lure me into philosophy myself, and I don't care to play."

"All right, I'll stop," Sostratos said agreeably. "But when Sokrates was defending himself in Athens, he talked about artisans who knew their own trade and thought they knew everything on account of that."

"And the Athenians fed him hemlock, too - even I know that much," Menedemos said. "So maybe he should have found something else to talk about."

For some reason - Menedemos couldn't fathom why - that seemed to wound his cousin, who subsided into sulky silence. Menedemos gave his full attention back to the Aphrodite. Getting the most from both sails and oars was a subtle art, one most merchant captains with their tubby roundships didn't have to worry about. He let the wind on the quarter drive the akatos westward, while using half the rowers - the others rested at their oars - to head the ram at her bow north as well, toward the little island of Syme.

As the island seemed to rise up out of the sea. Diokles pointed toward it and said, "Miserable little place. Not enough water, not enough decent land for it to amount to anything."

"Well, you're not wrong," Menedemos said. "If it weren't for sponges, nobody would remember the place was here."

That brought Sostratos out of his funk. He tossed his head, saying, "Thoukydides talks about the sea-fight between the Athenians and the Spartans off Syme and the trophy the Spartans set up there in the last book of his history. That makes the island, like the history itself, a possession for all time." He slid from Doric to old-fashioned Attic for the last few words; Menedemos presumed he was quoting his pet historian.

Hearing Sostratos quote Thoukydides, though, jogged his own memory, and he quoted, too, from Homer:

"You know the Iliad even better than I thought you did, if you can recite from the Catalogue of Ships in Book Two," Sostratos said.

"Homer to sink my teeth into, Aristophanes to laugh at," Menedemos replied. "To the crows with everybody else."

Before Sostratos could come back with something indignant, Diokles asked, "Whereabouts on the island will you want to beach her tonight?"

"You know the gnarled finger of land that sticks out to the south, the one that points to the islet called Tetlousa?" Menedemos said. "There's a small inlet there, on the western side of it, with the best and softest beach on Syme. That's where I want to put us."

"I do know that inlet, captain, and I do know that beach." The oarmaster dipped his head. "I asked because I was going to speak of them if you didn't."

"And the town on the island is at the north end, isn't it?" Sostratos said. "We'll be as far away from a lot of people as we can - though on Syme, that's not very far."

If Sostratos was talking about practical matters again, and not about literature, that suited Menedemos fine. He said, "You're right. We haven't got that many choices on Syme, anyhow, not when most of the coast is rocky cliffs."

Before long, he ordered the sail brailed up again, for the Aphrodite swung almost due north once it got past Tetlousa - straight into the teeth of the breeze. He put more men back on the oars. The sun was sinking in the west, and he didn't want to have to feel his way into that inlet in the dark. He was all too liable to misjudge things and run the Aphrodite up against the rocks. Sooner than risking that, he would have spent a night anchored at sea, with the rowers sleeping on their benches. They wouldn't be happy about that. They'd have to do it a few times, especially on the journey across the Ionian Sea from Hellas to Italy, but it would be a bad omen the first night out.

But he had plenty of daylight left when Aristeidas sang out from the bow. "There's the inlet, captain!" The lookout pointed to starboard. A moment later, he let out a yelp. "Papail! That stinking peacock got me on the leg!"

Now you've got to watch yourself," Menedemos said. He leaned on the tillers to the steering oars and swung the akatos into the tiny bay.

At the bow, Aristeidas cast a lead-weighted line into the sea to gauge its depth. "Ten cubits," he called. Menedemos waved to show he'd heard. That was enough water and to spare.

At Diokles' shouted orders, the portside rowers backed water while those to starboard pulled with the usual stroke, so that the Aphrodite spun through half a circle in very little more than her own length. When her stern faced the beach, the keleustes cried, "Oö!" and the rowers rested at their oars. "Now," Diokles said, "back water all - at the beat, mind - and bring her up onto the sand." He smote the bronze square with his mallet.

After a few strokes, the Aphrodite's false keel - of sturdy beech, to protect the true keel beneath it - scraped sand as the rowers grounded her. "Oöp!" the oarmaster cried again. Sailors sprang out onto the beach to drag the galley farther from the sea.

Menedemos dipped his head, more than a little pleased with the way things had gone. "This was a good first day," he said to anyone who would listen.

Fires crackled on the beach. Sailors sat around them, eating bread and olives and oil and drinking rough wine. Some of them rubbed their bodies, and especially their sore hands, with more olive oil. A few small fish from the bay and a couple of rabbits sailors had knocked over with rocks sizzled above the flames, adding savory smells to the air and a little opson to the sitos and wine.

Sostratos spotted his cousin over by the biggest, brightest fire. Menedemos spat out an olive pit and drank wine from the same sort of mug he'd called for at the symposion. Sitting there on the sand among the rowers, Menedemos seemed as much in his element as in the fanciest andron. Sostratos sighed. Save perhaps for the Lykeion, he'd never found anywhere he truly felt he belonged.

But he had to do what he had to do. "Hail, cousin," Menedemos called as he came over. "What have you been up to?"

"Checking on the peafowl," Sostratos answered. "I have to tell you, I don't like what I'm seeing."

"What's wrong?" Menedemos asked sharply. Then he checked himself and asked the question a different way. "What do you think is wrong?"

The change angered Sostratos. If his cousin didn't like what he heard, he'd just given himself an excuse to do nothing about it. Trying to keep the ire out of his voice, Sostratos said, "They're looking peaked. I don't think they like staying cooped up in those cages. I don't think it's healthy for them."

Sure enough, Menedemos tossed his head. "Tell it to Aristeidas," he answered. "The peacock drew blood when it pecked him there a little before we landed."

"I don't care," Sostratos said. "Remember how unhappy the birds were when we brought them from Himilkon's warehouse to our houses? Remember how they perked up when they got to run around the courtyards? They like to run around. My sister ran herself ragged trying to keep them out of her herb garden. Now they're caged up again, and they're starting to droop again, too."

"They'll be fine." But Menedemos spoke without so much conviction.

"Three minai, twenty-four drakhmai, three oboloi," Sostratos said. "We want to keep them healthy, you know."

Talking about the birds hadn't got through to his cousin. Reminding Menedemos how much the peafowl had cost did. Wincing, Sostratos' cousin said, "What do you think we ought to do?"

Serious as usual, Sostratos began, "Well, my prescription would be - "

Menedemos burst out laughing. "What have we got here, Hippokrates for peafowl? You've already come halfway toward talking Attic. Will you start spouting Ionian dialect when you go on about doctoring them? ' 'E 'opped on 'is 'orse and 'ammered the 'ide off it with 'is whip.' " He dropped the rough breathings at the beginnings of words, as Ionian Hellenes were wont to do.

The sailors sitting around the fire laughed and poked one another in the ribs; Menedemos had laid on the dialect with a shovel. Sostratos fought to hold on to his patience. "My prescription would be," he repeated in tones threatening enough to make his cousin keep quiet and hear him out, "to let the birds run free whenever we possibly can."

"What? Now?" Menedemos' eyebrows flew upwards. "They'd run off and get away, and a fox would never know what an expensive supper it had."

"You ask me, any fox that tried to catch a peafowl would be sorry a heartbeat later." Sostratos kicked at the golden sand. Now he was annoyed at himself. Theophrastos would have had something sharp to say about irrelevance. Of course, Theophrastos had something sharp to say about almost everything. Sostratos went on, "I don't mean here, especially not at night. But they ought to have the chance to get some exercise while we're at sea, where they couldn't possibly escape."

"No, they can't escape at sea, that's true - not unless they jump into the drink," Menedemos allowed. "But they're pretty stupid, so they might do just that. And I'll tell you something else they'd do: they'd drive the rowers mad. Or do you think I'm wrong; O best one?"

His withering sarcasm failed to wither Sostratos, who answered, "Most of the time, we haven't got a full crew on the oars, nor anything close to one. The men who aren't at the benches could fend them off the ones who are."

"Maybe." But Menedemos sounded anything but convinced.

Sostratos shrugged. "You're the captain. It's up to you. But if the birds do come down sick, that's in your lap, too."

"No. That's in the lap of the gods." Menedemos gulped his wine and glowered at Sostratos. "Are you sure about all this?"

"No, of course I'm not sure," Sostratos answered, more than a little exasperated. "Unless you break your leg or something, a proper physician isn't sure what's wrong with you nine times out of ten. But I'm telling you what I've noticed."

If Menedemos was drunk enough or cruel enough to tell him where to head in, he could walk across Syme to the little town at the north end of the island and hire a fishing boat to take him back to Rhodes. He could . . . but he couldn't. The Aphrodite carried his family's wealth no less than Menedemos'. If he abandoned that investment while fearing Menedemos would make a hash of things with it, neither his own father nor Uncle Philodemos would ever forgive him. And how could he blame them for that? He couldn't.

But how could he stand Menedemos' berating him for doing what he was supposed to be doing and doing it as well as he could? He was every bit as much a free Hellene as his cousin. Slaves had to take abuse; that was one of the reasons no man wanted to be a slave. He waited, grinding his teeth from nerves.

By the look on Menedemos' face, he was about to let fly. But then, eyeing Sostratos, he choked back whatever he'd been on the point of saying. He took another swig of wine from his mug instead. When he did speak, he had himself under control again: "All right. I suppose we can try it, at least when the weather's good and we're in waters where we don't have to worry about pirates. But the birds go back in their cages the instant anything even starts to smell like trouble."

"A bargain," Sostratos said - a great gust of relief. "Thank you."

His cousin shrugged. "Every now and then, I'm tempted to forget why you come along when I take a ship out." His grin was on the nasty side. He'd given Sostratos what he wanted; now he would try to make Sostratos pay for it. And Sostratos, having won the point he had to win, was willing to put up with more than he would have otherwise. Then Menedemos surprised him by adding, "Even if I am tempted, I'd make a mistake if I did it."

Sostratos stared, Menedemos usually amused himself by giving him a hard time, not by paying him compliments. He did that so seldom, in fact, that Sostratos concluded he had to mean this one. He bowed. "Thank you, cousin."

"You're welcome." Menedemos' eyes glinted. Maybe it was just the firelight, but Sostratos didn't think so. And, sure enough, his cousin went on, "See how much you thank me when you're trying to round up the peafowl in a hurry because it's starting to blow a gale."

That didn't sound like anything Sostratos much wanted to do. Still . . . "I'd sooner chase them than throw them over the side with rocks tied to their feet so they'll sink."

"Oh, you're right, no doubt about it." But that glint remained in Menedemos' eyes. "Remember what you just said. It's the sort of thing the gods like to listen for."

Several sailors dipped their heads in agreement. Sostratos thought of himself as a modern, well-educated man. Unlike the sailors - even unlike his own cousin - he didn't get most of his ideas about the gods from the Iliad and the Odyssey. But what Menedemos said had a horrid feeling of probability to him, too. He spat in the bosom of his tunic to turn aside the omen.

"You don't do that very often," Menedemos remarked.

Sostratos answered with a shrug: "We're on the sea now. Diokles said it - things are different here."

"I know that," Menedemos said. "I'm surprised you're willing to admit it."

"We're on the sea," Sostratos repeated. "And we're on the sea with peafowl. If that doesn't make things different, I don't know what would." He plucked at his beard. Since he'd got what he wanted from his cousin, changing the subject looked like a good idea. And so he did, asking, "Do you plan on putting in at Knidos tomorrow?"

"I planned to, yes," Menedemos answered. "It's a good harbor, and a good day's journey from here, too. A couple of hundred stadia - we'll be able to use the sail some, I expect, as long as the breeze holds, but the boys will do some rowing, too. We can put some fresh water aboard, buy some food . . .. Why? Did you have some different scheme in mind?"

"No." Sostratos tossed his head. "I was just wondering if you intended to lay over for a day and do some business there."

"Not unless you find something that drives you wild," Menedemos said. "My thinking is, it's too close to home. What's the point to taking all our expensive goods for a short haul when we're bound to get a lot more for them farther west?"

"Good. We're sailing in the same direction," Sostratos said.

One of the sailors by the fire, a skinny bald man named Alexion, nudged Menedemos and said, "Once we're in the harbor at Knidos, skipper, you ought to charge folks a khalkos apiece, say, to watch master Sostratos here go chasing after all those peafowl." He laughed. So did the other sailors in earshot. So did Menedemos.

And so did Sostratos: if he found the joke funny, they weren't laughing at him . . . were they? But then he grew thoughtful. "Himilkon got half a drakhma from you for just a tail feather, cousin. If we charged people a khalkos or two to come to the edge of the quay and look down into the Aphrodite while the peacock was out of his cage - well, we wouldn't get rich doing it, but I bet we'd make a drakhma, maybe a couple of drakhmai, whenever we did it."

Menedemos looked thoughtful, too. "You're right. We probably would." He turned and slapped Alexion on the back. "Whatever we bring in the first day we try it, it's yours, for having the idea."

The rower's grin showed a broken front tooth. "Thanks, skipper. You treat a fellow right, no two ways about it."

"Fair's fair," Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head, wondering if he would have thought of the same thing himself. He hoped so, but he wasn't altogether sure.

The fires died down to embers. Sostratos wrapped himself in his mantle and lay down on the beach with his cloak under his head for a pillow. A nightjar's froglike call came from not far away. The sky was clear, a blue almost black. Only a faint gleam from the Milky Way lightened it near the southern horizon. Zeus' wandering star blazed brilliant, high in the southern sky; that of Ares, duller and redder, hung farther west. Sostratos stared up at them for a little while, then yawned, rolled over on his side, and fell asleep.

"Rosy-fingered dawn!" Menedemos shouted to wake the Aphrodite's crew. The tag from Homer had never seemed more apt. He wondered how the blind poet had been able to describe things so exactly. Beams of pinkish light in the east foretold the arrival of the sun, which couldn't be more than a quarter of an hour away. Even as he watched, the pink began to turn gold.

Sailors groaned and grunted and sat up, rubbing their eyes. Some of them kept right on snoring. Sostratos often did that. To Menedemos' disappointment, his cousin's eyes were open. Sostratos got to his feet and went off behind a bush to piss.

"Get some bread. Get some oil. Get some wine," Menedemos called as the men woke their sleepy comrades. "No slaves here - we've all got to work once we eat."

"What other cheery news have you got for us?" Sostratos asked around a yawn as he came back from behind that bush.

"Once we get the Aphrodite in the water, you can let the peafowl out - one or two at a time, mind, and the peacock by himself - to get whatever exercise they can," Menedemos answered. "Tell off as many sailors as you need to keep them from fouling the men who stay at the oars and mind the sail."

His cousin dipped his head. "Thanks again," he said. "I really do think the birds will be better for it."

"I hope so," Menedemos said, which was true; he didn't want to have to explain to his father that he hadn't been able to sell the peafowl because they'd all died before he got to Italy. "But there's one thing even more important," he added, and watched Sostratos raise a dubious eyebrow. But that was also true: "I hope the ship will be better for it."

"It will be all right," Sostratos said confidently. Menedemos clicked his tongue between his teeth and didn't answer. His cousin was a clever fellow - cleverer than I am, Menedemos thought, without rancor or envy - and a first-rate toikharkhos. But Sostratos had never had to give orders to a crew; he'd never been responsible for a whole ship and everybody in it. He could say things would turn out all right, but Menedemos was the one who had to make them turn out all right.

Just getting that akatos back into the sea was harder work than it would have been with a trireme or even a piratical pentekonter. The Aphrodite had fewer men and, because of the cargo she carried, was heavier in proportion to her size than a vessel meant solely for fighting. Menedemos put half a dozen oarsmen into the ship's boat, and ran a line from its stern to the Aphrodite's stempost. While they rowed with all their might to help pull the beached ship forward, he and the rest of the crew pushed against her stern and sides.

She didn't want to move. Wiping sweat from his forehead with his hand, Diokles said, "We may have to lighten her before she'll get back where she belongs."

"To the crows with that," Menedemos said, though he'd been thinking the same thing. "Taking jars and sacks off, putting them back aboard - we'd never make Knidos by nightfall. The hours aren't so long as they will be come summertime." In the winter, a day's twelve hours were cramped, while a night's twelve stretched. In summer, the reverse held true. At this season of the year, daylight hours and those of the nighttime roughly matched.

"Shall we give it another try, then?" the keleustes asked.

"Unless you feel like swimming home," Menedemos answered. Diokles tossed his head. Menedemos raised his voice to a shout: "Come on! Put your backs into it this time! One more good heave and we'll be off!"

He was anything but sure he was telling the truth, but it was what the sailors needed to hear. He heaved with them, his bare feet digging into the golden sand. At first, he thought this try would prove as fruitless as the last. But then the false keel grated as the ship lurched forward: not much, only a digit's worth or not even that, but some.

Everyone felt the tiny motion. "We can do it!" Menedemos cried. "At my count . . . one, two, three!"

Another scrape of timber on sand. The men grunted and cursed as they shoved. Out in the little bay, the rowers in the boat pulled as if they had a five full of Carthaginians on their tail. The Aphrodite moved a little more, and then a little more - and then, more than a little to Menedemos surprise, slid into the Aegean. The sailors raised a cheer.

"We'll spend the night tied up to a pier in Knidos," Sostratos said, "but the next time we have to go aground on a sandy shore, let's not beach ourselves so hard."

"Well, that isn't the worst idea I've ever heard," Menedemos answered. "Still and all, though, we do want to let the timbers dry whenever we get the chance. Rowing's harder work when you have to shove along the extra weight that goes into a waterlogged ship."

He waded out into the cool water of the bay and, agile as a monkey, swarmed up a rope and over the side of the Aphrodite. Rather less gracefully, Sostratos followed. Before long, all the men were in the Aphrodite and the akatos' boat tied to the sternpost once more for towing.

"Out of the inlet," Menedemos said, "then around the southern coast of Syme, and then west and a little north to Knidos." Still dripping, his hair wet and slick, he took his place at the steering oars and dipped his head to Diokles. "If you'd be so kind, keleustes."

"Right you are, skipper." The oarmaster clanged his mallet against the bronze square. "Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!"

"Rhyppapai!" the rowers echoed, taking their beat from him. Menedemos had only ten men a side at the oars. He would work the men in shifts, the way any captain not in a desperate hurry did.

Sostratos asked, "May I let a couple of peahens out now?"

"Wait till we're well away from Syme and in more open water," Menedemos answered. "We don't want the miserable birds trying to fly to land and going into the sea instead."

"You're right. I hadn't thought of that," Sostratos said. Menedemos couldn't imagine himself making an admission like that, even if it was true. If he hadn't thought of something, he didn't want anybody but himself knowing it. His cousin went on, "Tell me when the time is right, then."

"I will," Menedemos said, somewhat abstractedly: the bulk of the island was shielding him from some of the wind he wanted to use. He ordered the big square mainsail lowered from the yard, but it flapped and fluttered and didn't want to fill. Even after the sailors used the brails to haul up most of the canvas on the leeward side, he wondered if he should have bothered using it at all; it hardly seemed to add anything to the Aphrodite's turn of speed. Then he shrugged. The men would think it helped, even if it didn't really do much. Keeping them happy counted for something, too.

After an hour or so, the Aphrodite glided between the narrow spit of land at Syme's southwestern corner and the closest of the three tiny islets that straggled out from the spit. Once the ship got free of Syme's wind shadow, the sail bellied out and went taut. "That's more like it," Menedemos exclaimed, and ordered more of the sail lowered to take advantage of the breeze.

"Now?" Sostratos asked: so much for waiting for Menedemos to give him the word.

Menedemos considered. Now that Syme no longer blocked his view, he could see the long, narrow Karian peninsula at whose end Knidos sat. But the peninsula lay perhaps forty stadia to the north: far enough away for it to seem a little misty, a little indistinct. He didn't suppose the peafowl would try to fly to it. "Go ahead," he said. "Let's see what happens. Pick your sailors first, though, and tell them what they're going to have to do."

His cousin dipped his head. Menedemos gave him no more specific instructions; he wanted to see how Sostratos would handle the business. Most of the sailors Sostratos chose were men Menedemos would have picked, too, men he reckoned sensible and reliable. But his cousin also pointed to the two rowers Diokles had plucked off the wharf as the Aphrodite was about to sail. Maybe he wanted to work them in with the rest of the crew. Maybe he just reckoned them expendable. Either way, Menedemos didn't think he would have wanted them for this work.

"Just keep the birds away from people who are doing things that need doing," Sostratos said. "Except for that, let them run around and eat whatever they can catch. We'll have fewer lizards and mice and cockroaches aboard the Aphrodite after a while."

He was probably right. Menedemos hadn't looked at that side of things. No man born of woman could keep down the vermin that inevitably traveled with men and cargo. Vermin were part of life; Menedemos suspected mice and roaches ate scraps of ambrosia on Olympos. Some ship captains took along Egyptian cats to try to keep down the mice, though he'd never been convinced the nasty little yowlers caught enough to be worthwhile.

His cousin stooped on the little foredeck to unlatch a peahen's cage. A moment later, Sostratos hopped back with a yelp of "Oimoi!" He wrung his hand.

"Still have all your fingers?" Menedemos called from the steering oars at the poop.

By the way Sostratos looked down, Menedemos guessed he was checking to make sure of that himself. His cousin dipped his head. "I do," he said, "though no thanks to this monstrous fowl." He shook one of the fingers he still had at the peahen. "You hateful bird, don't you know I'm doing you a favor?"

Maybe the peahen heeded him. At any rate, it didn't try to peck him again. He swung the cage door open. The bird emerged. A heartbeat later, so did another one. Menedemos and Sostratos called that second peahen Helen, because the peacock mated with her more enthusiastically than with the other peahens. When she walked past his cage now, he started screeching loud enough to make Menedemos wince even though he stood at the Aphrodite's stern.

With a flutter of wings, the two peahens went down the wooden stairway and into the undecked bottom of the akatos. One of them pecked at something. "That was a centipede!" a sailor said. "Good riddance to the horrible thing."

The bird called Helen pecked at something else. A rower let out a howl: "That was my leg! You lefthanded idiot, you're supposed to keep the miserable creature away from me."

"I'm sorry, I'm sure," said the fellow called an idiot: one of Diokles' new men, a chap named Teleutas. He flapped the little net he was holding at the peahen, which didn't peck the rower twice. All the same, Menedemos didn't judge this the best way to blend the newcomers with the rest of the crew.

Another rower yelped. The sailor who hadn't kept the peahen from nipping at him had been rowing for Menedemos and Sostratos' families since they were both little boys. Maybe nobody could stop the peafowl from making nuisances of themselves. In that case, maybe Sostratos hadn't made such a bad choice with Teleutas and the other new sailor - whose name Menedemos kept forgetting - after all.

Helen the peahen hopped up onto an empty rower's bench and stretched her neck so she could peer over the gunwale at the Karian coastline in the distance. Would she know it lay in the distance? Or would she forget she had clipped wings and try to strike out for the land she saw?

Before anyone could find out, Sostratos threw a net over her. He didn't want fifty drakhmai of silver splashing into the Aegean. It was a fit home for dolphins - Menedemos saw three or four leaping out of the water off to port - but not for expensive birds.

Helen gave a screech the peacock might have envied and lashed out with feet and beak through the mesh of the net. Sostratos cursed, but didn't let her escape till he got her down where she couldn't do herself mischief.

"This is supposed to keep the birds healthy?" Menedemos called. "Looks like you'll just run them ragged."

Sostratos shot him a harried look. "I'm doing my best," he answered. "If you've got any better ideas - if you've got any ideas at all, Menedemos - suppose you tell me about them."

Menedemos went back to steering the akatos. His cheeks felt on fire; he hoped the flush didn't show. His cousin looked down his nose at him for preferring Homer and bawdy Aristophanes to Herodotos and Thoukydides, and for preferring wine and flutegirls to philosophical discussion at a symposion. But Sostratos didn't usually come right out and call him a fool, especially not when the whole crew of the Aphrodite could hear him. Of course, Sostratos wasn't usually so harassed as he was while trying to shepherd bad-tempered birds that didn't feel like being herded.

Occupied with the peafowl, Sostratos didn't even seem to notice what he'd done. He let Helen out of the net and gave her and the other peahen some more time to run around loose. If either one of them presumed to climb up to the poop deck, Menedemos told himself he'd kick it off no matter how expensive it was. But his cousin and the sailors kept the peafowl away. That left Menedemos disappointed. He was so angry, he wanted to kick something.

After Sostratos got the peahens back in their cages, he let out the peacock. All the sailors exclaimed: they hadn't seen the male bird uncaged. "Be careful of those tail feathers," Sostratos warned. "They're what makes the bird worth what he's worth. If anything happens to them - if anything happens to him - it'll come out of your hides."

Menedemos wouldn't have put it that way. Putting it that way, he thought, meant the sailors wouldn't dare do anything much to or with the peacock. And he proved a good prophet. The peacock ran around staring and pecking and kicking and screeching, and Sostratos had to take care of it and recapture it almost completely by himself. Irked at his cousin, Menedemos gave no orders to make life easier for him, as he might have otherwise. Had Sostratos complained, Menedemos would have told him where to head in. But Sostratos didn't complain. He netted the peacock as neatly as a fisherman might have netted some anchovies, and returned him to his cage without taking any wounds. Even Menedemos had to admit to himself it was a job well done.

As the Aphrodite made her way toward Knidos, Sostratos gave the other three peafowl some exercise time in turn. One of them drew blood from a rower. His friends had to grab him to keep him from bringing the bird to an untimely end.

Once the last peahen was back in its cage, Sostratos mounted the steps to the poop deck. He looked haggard. "I hope that's done the peafowl some good," he said. "It's certainly kept me on my toes."

"This is what you asked for," Menedemos reminded him. "If the birds do look perkier, you'll be doing it every day."

"Gods," Sostratos muttered. Menedemos, still feeling heartless, affected not to notice. His cousin spoke a bit louder: "They're liable to be more trouble than they're worth."

"Not when they're worth at least three and a quarter minai," Menedemos said. Sostratos groaned, not loudly but unmistakably. Again, Menedemos pretended not to hear.

Knidos had a fine harbor. A little island sat just off the Karian coast. Part of the town was on the mainland, the rest on the island. Stone moles connected the two, dividing the harbor in twain. Sostratos breathed a sigh of relief as longshoremen tied the Aphrodite up to a pier. He looked forward to sleeping in a bed at an inn. It wouldn't match the bed he had at home, but it would have to be an improvement on wrapping himself in his himation and lying down on the sand.

A bald man with a gray-streaked bird pointed to the cages on the foredeck and asked, "What have you got in there?"

"Peafowl," Sostratos answered.

"Peafowl," Menedemos echoed, in an altogether brighter tone: he remembered Alexion's moneymaking scheme, which had slipped Sostratos' mind. He went on, "Peafowl from the steaming jungles of India. You can see them up close for only two khalkoi - the sixth part of an obolos." The man with the gray beard paid out the two little bronze coins without hesitation. He came aboard the Aphrodite and stared at the birds through the slats of the cages.

They gave him a good show. Two of them tried to peck him, and the peacock screeched loud enough to make him jam his fingers in his ears. "Nasty things, aren't they?" he said to Sostratos, who'd stayed by the birds. By worrying about the way they looked after staying in their cages all the time, he'd apparently appointed himself chief peafowl-keeper along with all his other duties.

Those screeches drew more people to the pier. With his usual eye for the main chance, Menedemos went up the gangplank and talked rapidly, fluently, and perhaps even truthfully about peafowl. His patter was plenty to send more curious Knidians down to the Aphrodite to take a look for themselves. He collected the khalkoi on the pier; nobody set foot on the galley without having paid. Sostratos remained by the peafowl to make sure nobody tried to poke them with a stick or yank out one of the peacock's tail feathers or do anything else he shouldn't have. He told what he knew about the birds and listened to the locals' news, not all of which he'd heard before.

Men and boys and even a few women kept coming aboard till the sun sank in the Aegean. By then, most of the sailors - everyone, in fact, except for six or eight guards Diokles chose - had gone into Knidos to sample the harborside taverns and brothels. Sostratos reluctantly resigned himself to spending the night on the Aphrodite: only a fool would wander through a strange town at night by himself with nothing but a torch to light his way.

Some of the akatos' crew brought back bread and oil and olives and wine for the men who stayed behind. It wasn't much of a supper, but better than nothing. Alexion happily counted the pile of small change Menedemos gave him. "Better than a drakhma here, sure enough," he said. "Thank you kindly, skipper."

"Thank you," Menedemos told him. "You earned it. The birds will make us money the rest of the trip."

"I heard a couple of interesting things," Sostratos said, dipping a chunk of bread into some oil as he sat on the timbers of the poop deck. "I think we can forget about the peace the four generals signed last summer."

"I don't suppose anyone expected it to last long." Menedemos spat an olive pit into the palm of his hand, then tossed it over the side. Sostratos heard the tiny splash as it went into the water. Colors faded out of the world as twilight deepened and more stars came out. Menedemos asked, "What happened?"

"They say here that Ptolemaios has sent an army up into Kilikia to attack Antigonos there," Sostratos answered. "The excuse he's using is that Antigonos broke the treaty by putting garrisons in free and independent Hellenic cities."

Menedemos snorted. Sostratos didn't blame him. Knidos, for instance, called itself a free and independent Hellenic city, but it did Antigonos' bidding, as did most Hellenic cities in Asia Minor - including those of Kilikia in the southeast. Rhodes, now, Rhodes truly was free and independent . . . since expelling Alexander's garrison. That didn't mean any of the squabbling Macedonian generals wouldn't be delighted to bring the city to heel again.

After another snort, Menedemos asked, "What else did you hear?"

"You know Polemaios, Antigonos' nephew?" Sostratos said.

"Not personally, no," his cousin answered, which made him snort in turn. Menedemos went on, "What about him?"

"A fisherman told me that a ship came into Knidos from Eretria on the island of Euboia," Sostratos said.

Menedemos impatiently dipped his head. "He's been holding the island - and Boiotia, too: all that country north of Athens - for Antigonos for the past couple of years."

"Not any more," Sostratos said. "He's gone over to Kassandros with his whole army."

"Has he?" Menedemos whistled softly. "I'll bet old One-Eye is fit to be tied. Why on earth would he do a thing like that?"

"Who can say?" Sostratos answered with a shrug. "But Antigonos' sons are grown men - Demetrios especially, though Philippos can't be more than a few years younger than we are. With two sons in the family, how much inheritance can a nephew hope for?"

"Something to that, I shouldn't wonder," Menedemos said. "If Antigonos gets his hands on Polemaios now, though, he'll give him his inheritance, all right: one funeral pyre's worth."

"I wouldn't want Antigonos holding that kind of grudge against me." Sostratos agreed. "And, of course, he'll be at war with Kassandros over this, because it really weakens him in Hellas. I wonder why the generals bothered making their treaty at all."

"It must have seemed like a good idea at the time," Menedemos said. "More often than not, that's why people do things."

There in the twilight - almost the dark, now - Sostratos eyed his cousin. Menedemos might well have been describing himself and his own reasons for doing this or that . . . which didn't mean he was wrong about the generals. Sostratos tried to take a longer view of things. He knew he often failed, but he did try.

"It shouldn't have anything to do with us, not directly," he said. "We won't be heading to the northern parts of Hellas or up to Macedonia, either."

"Not directly, no," Menedemos said. "But if Kassandros sends out a fleet and Antigonos sends out a fleet - they aren't pirates, but they'd both think we made tasty pickings. They aren't pirates, but they're liable to be worse than pirates. The Aphrodite's got some chance of beating a pentekonter, but we'd need a miracle against a trireme, let alone anything bigger."

"Maybe it's a good time to get out of the Aegean and head west," Sostratos said, and then, before Menedemos could answer. "Of course, it would be even better if Syracuse and Carthage weren't fighting over there."

"No such thing as good times for traders," Menedemos said. "No such thing as safe times, anyway. My father would say that, anyway, and I think yours would, too."

"Probably." Sostratos yawned, then sighed. "I was hoping for a real bed tonight, and what do I get? Wood." He wrapped his himation around himself.

His cousin laughed. "I was hoping for a real bed with somebody warm and friendly in it, and what do I get? Wood and you." He too stretched out on the poop deck and made himself as comfortable as he could. "Good night."

"Good night." The planks were hard, but Sostratos had had a long, wearing day. He fell asleep almost at once.

He woke a little before sunup. The peacock, punctual as a rooster, announced the coming day with a squawk that probably shook half of Knidos out of bed. Sostratos yawned and stretched and rolled over so that he faced Menedemos. His cousin's eyes were also open. "Do you think Diokles is awake?" Menedemos asked.

"Yes, unless that horrible screech frightened him to death," Sostratos answered.

"Ha! If only that were a joke." Menedemos got to his feet. With his himation a blanket and his chiton a pillow, he was as naked as the day he was born: nothing out of the ordinary on a ship, in port or on the sea. He raised his voice: "Diokles."

The keleustes had slept on a rower's bench, leaning up against the planking of the Aphrodite. He waved back toward the poop. "Good day, captain," he said. "Gods, that's a sweet-voiced fowl we're carrying, isn't it?"

"Sweet as vinegar," Menedemos answered. "Sweet as rancid oil. How many rowers went into town yesterday and still haven't come back?"

Diokles didn't even have to look around to answer: "Five. Not too bad, all things considered."

"No, not too," Menedemos said. "But tell off some men and start scouring the wineshops and the whorehouses. I want a full crew when we sail, and I want to leave inside an hour's time. The wind'll be in our teeth all the way to Kos, so I don't want to head up there with any empty benches - we'll row every cubit of the trip."

"I'll see to it," Diokles promised. "Most of the dives are close by the harbor, so we shouldn't need long to sift through 'em. And if we're still a man or two short, there's bound to be somebody who'll want to ship with us."

"Let's try to round up our own first," Menedemos said, and the oarmaster dipped his head. He chose large, well-made men to come with him. They all had knives on their belts, and some of them carried belaying pins, too. "He's smart," Menedemos remarked to Sostratos. "The best way not to run into trouble is to show that you're ready for it."

"You're bound to be right." Naked as Menedemos, Sostratos strode to the gunwale and pissed over the side into the harbor water. Then he went up to the little foredeck to see how the peafowl were doing. The peacock greeted him with another raucous screech.

"How do they look?" Menedemos called from the stern.

"All right, I suppose," Sostratos answered. "We're still finding out how they're supposed to look. Nothing wrong with their voices, that's certain. I'm going to give them something to eat while the ship's still tied up to the quay."

He waited for his cousin to wave agreement, then undid a leather sack of barley and piled grain onto half a dozen plates, one of which he set in front of each cage. The slats in the doors were wide enough to let the birds stick their heads out and eat. That made anyone who walked by step lively, but it meant he didn't have to open the cages to feed the peafowl.

"Are they eating all right?" Menedemos asked. On land, he did as he pleased, indulging his passions far more than Sostratos chose to do. Aboard ship, nothing escaped his notice. The peacock had Argos' eyes in its tail; Sostratos' cousin seemed to have them in his head.

Sostratos watched the birds pecking away like so many outsized chickens, then dipped his head. Menedemos waved again to show he'd seen the answer. No, nothing got past him.

A couple of the missing rowers returned by themselves, one hung over and the other so drunk he almost fell off the pier before he got to the Aphrodite. "Are you going to dock his pay?" Sostratos asked.

His cousin tossed his head. "No, he's here on time - and he's here all by himself, too." An evil smile spread over Menedemos' face. "I'll do something worse - I'll wait till he's really starting to hurt, and then I'll put him on the oars. If that doesn't cure him, gods only know what will."

"Not a bad notion," Sostratos said, admiring the rough justice of it. He paused thoughtfully. "The exercise may help ease the confusion in his humors and cure him quicker than sitting idle would."

"Maybe." Menedemos chuckled. "Even if it does, though, he won't be happy while it's going on." Sostratos could hardly disagree with that.

One of the rowers came running up the pier toward the Aphrodite. "Diokles says to tell you we've got three of them, captain," he called. "No sign of the other two."

"They came back on their own," Menedemos answered. "Diokles can bring in the rest of the lost sheep, and then we'll be off."

The sailors had to carry one of their comrades, who'd guzzled himself into a stupor. By the glint in Menedemos' eye, Sostratos knew what his cousin had in mind for that fellow once he revived. Fair enough, Sostratos thought. Drinking yourself blind is excessive. Diokles giving the beat, the Aphrodite left the harbor of Knidos and headed for Kos.