Salamis

XI

“How are you doing?” Menedemos asked his cousin, trying to sound sympathetic rather than scornful.

“Not … too bad.” Sostratos’ greenish pallor gave his words the lie. He’d leaned over the rail and emptied himself a couple of times since the Aphrodite left Alexandria.

“You had an easier time on the trip down to Egypt,” Menedemos said. “You kept everything down then.”

“I know,” Sostratos said dolefully. “Don’t remind me. The waves were mostly with us when we sailed south, Now they’re hitting us bow-on. The motion’s different, and so ….”

Menedemos thought he’d feed the fish again, but he didn’t quite. Before too long, Sostratos would be all right again. But he’d been on land long enough to lose his sea legs, and his sea stomach. He wasn’t wrong; traveling against the waves instead of with them did change the way the akatos pitched. To Menedemos, though, the difference was only a difference, not a disaster.

At the moment, he had every other oar manned. Putting a rower on them all was for show, as when leaving the harbor at Alexandria, or for an emergency. Ptolemaios’ skippers had also eased back as soon as they got out of sight of the Alexandrians. The Aphrodite had no trouble keeping up with the lord of Egypt’s fleet, even at the relatively slow stroke Diokles was beating out.

Up ahead, in the war galleys, the rowers would be thanking their oarmasters for whatever respite they could get. When they fought Demetrios’ fleet, they’d need every bit of strength and energy they could find. Menedemos hoped—he prayed, in fact—the men on the akatos’ oars wouldn’t need to worry about battle.

The sun sank toward the western horizon. Italy and Sicily and Carthage lay in that direction. Rhodes was farther west than Cyprus, too, though not nearly that far. Menedemos wondered whether the Aphrodite could slip away from the fleet under cover of darkness and make for home instead of Cyprus.

Regretfully, he decided that was a bad idea. He didn’t want to turn Ptolemaios into a deadly enemy by deserting. That could have consequences for years to come, if not for generations. It would hurt the family firm, and might hurt the polis, too.

Of course, if one of Demetrios’ sailors happened to recognize the Aphrodite …. Menedemos didn’t want to make deadly foes of the young warlord and his fearsome father, either.

“We’re cursed no matter what we do,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Sostratos asked. Menedemos explained. His cousin dipped his head. “All we can do is all we can do, and hope everything comes out well for us.”

“I know. And I hate having to depend on hope. It’s what came out of Pandora’s box last, remember. There’s a reason for that, too.”

Menedemos waited for Sostratos to mock the myth as, well, nothing but a myth. Sostratos often enjoyed poking at old beliefs for the fun of poking. So it seemed to Menedemos, anyhow. But his cousin just came back to where he stood and set a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Believe me, my dear, I know the feeling,” he said quietly.

As light drained from the sky, sailors in Ptolemaios’ ships set burning torches in iron sconces mounted on their sternposts. That let the vessels behind follow those ahead more easily than they might have, especially when the early hours of the night would be moonless.

Aphrodite’s wandering star blazed low in the west. That was always the brightest star in the sky. Like the love the goddess stands for, Menedemos thought. He wondered how Baukis fared and, again, whether she’d had her baby—his baby?—yet. She might be in labor right now, groaning and shrieking up in the women’s quarters, attended by the midwife and a house slave or two. Better, he supposed, to be far away than to have to listen to that for however long it went on.

The sky darkened with his mood. High in the south, Zeus’ wandering star appeared soon after Aphrodite’s. Ares’, about halfway between Zeus’ and Aphrodite’s, took longer to come out. It could rival Zeus’, but shone far fainter at the moment. So did Kronos’, which hung in the southeast.

Even though Ptolemaios’ ships had their stern lights and replaced the torches as needed, they also slowed to less than half speed as night took over. Ptolemaios sensibly rested his rowers as he could. Diokles also pulled more men off the Aphrodite’s oars.

“When will you want me to take over for you?” Sostratos asked.

“The moon should rise in an hour or so. That will do,” Menedemos said. “Keep the steering oars till it gets close to due south, then wake me. We’ll give one of the older, more sensible rowers the hammer and triangle then, too. Diokles is also flesh and blood, even if he tries to make out that he isn’t.”

“I’m doing fine, skipper—bugger me blind if I’m not,” the keleustes said.

“So am I … right now,” Menedemos said. “But we’ll all wear down to nubs if we don’t get some rest. It’ll be a lazy stroke through the night, and Sostratos can keep the rower at the right pace if he gets ahead of himself.”

“I suppose so.” Diokles didn’t sound as if he believed it. He truly trusted no man’s skill and knowledge but his own. Since he came closer with Sostratos than with most people, though, he subsided with no more than a low-voiced grumble in the back of his throat.

Up came the moon out of the sea, a fat gold daric up there in the heavens, its eastern edge gnawed away: it was a couple of days past full. “Go on, my dear. Find somewhere to curl up,” Sostratos said. “Nothing’s likely to happen while you sleep.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t.” Menedemos felt at least as leery about letting someone else do his job for him as Diokles did. And anyone who made his living by going to sea put no faith in wind and wave.

Still, only Talos the bronze man could go on and on without sleep or food. Menedemos stepped back from the steering oars and let his cousin take his place. Diokles woke a rower named Nikagoras, who’d made several voyages in the Aphrodite and hadn’t shown himself to be conspicuously stupid. When the keleustes explained what he needed, Nikagoras dipped his head and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

Diokles sat at the bench Nikagoras had vacated to go aft. As an ex-rower, he was used to leaning against the rail and falling asleep when at sea. He did it again tonight. Menedemos lay down abaft of the steering oars, where the platform narrowed toward the sternpost. He’d slept soft in Ptolemaios’ palace, but he could sleep rough, too. Closing his eyes, he proved it.

Next thing he knew, someone’s hand was on his shoulder. His eyes snapped open. His right hand darted for the knife on his belt. He found he had no belt, nor any other clothing. He remembered where he was, and who had likely shaken him awake. Sure enough, there stood Sostratos in the bright moonlight. Diokles held the steering oars for the moment, so the Aphrodite ran steady.

“Hail,” Menedemos said, and yawned. Around the yawn, he continued, “How do we fare?”

“We’re still with the Ptolemaios’ fleet.” Sostratos didn’t sound altogether happy about that, either. He went on, “Nikagoras made a good keleustes, good enough so I gave him three oboloi for duty above his station.”

“Euge!” Menedemos said, and then raised his voice so Diokles could hear: “I guess that will let us put the old stallion here out to pasture. He’s pretty long in the tooth these days.”

“Old stallion? Long in the tooth? By the gods, this old stallion’ll graze on your grave, and shit on it, too,” Diokles retorted. Then he laughed, which relieved Menedemos. He wanted to be sure the keleustes knew he was joking.

He took the steering oars from Diokles, who in turn reclaimed the keleustes’ tools from Nikagoras. The rower went up to his bench. Menedemos looked back over his right shoulder. The moon showed Sostratos had given him a little more sleep than he’d asked for.

“Grab some rest, my dear,” he told his cousin. “I’ve got the ship for now.” His mouth twisted, though in the moonlight Sostratos might not be able to see that. “I don’t exactly know what I’ll do with her, but I’ve got her.”

Sostratos’ stomach troubled him all the way north from Alexandria. He didn’t heave after the first day at sea, but often felt queasy. Hard bread and salted sprats and olives weren’t the kind of fare he would have recommended to someone with sour guts were he playing physician, but they and rough red wine were what the Aphrodite carried. He grabbed a flying fish that landed in the akatos and grilled it over the little brazier on the bow platform. It tasted better than anything else he ate on the journey to Cyprus, but it was a morsel, not a meal.

Always having Ptolemaios’ fleet on the northern horizon made this voyage different from the one between Rhodes and Alexandria. Then the Aphrodite, solitary in the middle of the Inner Sea, might have been the only ship, the only man-made object, in all the world. Sostratos had rather liked that, though it made some of the rowers anxious. Now they could have no doubt that the rest of the world was very much with them.

But, while part of the world was there, news from outside the fleet wasn’t. Sostratos wondered what Ptolemaios would do if Demetrios held all of Cyprus when this expedition arrived. Up ahead in his gaudy galley, the lord of Egypt was bound to be wondering the same thing. One could say a great many things about Ptolemaios, but he was nothing if not forethoughtful. The way he’d seized and held Egypt showed that.

Fluffy clouds glided across the sky from north to south. Every so often, one of them would pass in front of the sun and give the men on the Aphrodite a brief respite from its glare. But then the shadow would pass on. If Sostratos looked astern instead of ahead, he could watch it darken a receding stretch of ocean behind the akatos.

“Cousin!” Menedemos called from his place at the steering oars. “Come back here, will you?”

“Of course! Do you want me to spell you for a while?” Sostratos said.

“No, not yet.” Menedemos tossed his head. “We need to talk, though.”

Sostratos made his way back to the stern platform. About half the oars were in the water. The other rowers dozed or rested or played knucklebones on the benches. Up the three oaken steps Sostratos went. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.

“What do we do if things go wrong off Cyprus?” Menedemos said, and then, a heartbeat later, “Why are you laughing?”

“Because I was thinking about the same thing just a moment ago, that’s why,” Sostratos said.

“Oh, you were, were you? Well, what were you thinking? I want to know—you’re good at it.”

“What if I am? That and a few oboloi will get me enough sardines for a decent opson.”

“If the Ptolemaios thinks well of your wits, my dear, you’d best not play them down yourself,” Menedemos said. “So what brave thoughts did Athena goddess of wisdom send you?”

Sostratos didn’t think his wisdom, what there was of it, came from Athena. He thought it came from Athens, where he’d studied till his family called him back to Rhodes. But no point talking about that. “My thoughts aren’t brave. I was wondering more how we’d get away,” he said.

“I wonder why!” Menedemos took his right hand off the steering oar for a moment to wave at the akatos and then at Ptolemaios’ much bigger ships ahead. The Aphrodite had ruined a trireme once. Ptolemaios’ ships, and Demetrios’, too, dwarfed even triremes by comparison.

“If we do have to run for it, chucking all the arrows and bolts and whatnot we’re carrying into the sea will lighten the ship a good deal and help us go faster,” Sostratos said.

“I know it will, but I don’t want to do it unless I really have to,” Menedemos said.

“Really?” One of Sostratos’ eyebrows lifted. “Why not?”

“Because as things are, if we have to run we’ll bring Rhodes a shipload of arms the polis can use against Demetrios, that’s why.” Menedemos sounded as bleak as Sostratos had ever heard him.

He also made more sense than Sostratos wished he did. “Do you truly think it will come to that?” he asked.

“Malista. Don’t you?” Menedemos returned. “Sooner or later—probably sooner—we’ll have to fight. I hope we can do it. We’ve lived at peace for a long time. We’ve forgotten what war is all about. In the gymnasion, one of those Cretan soldiers of fortune would have carved gobbets off me as if I were a sacrificial sheep with its throat cut. Demetrios has thousands of men like that—tens of thousands, for all I know. If they get over the wall and into the city ….” He spat into the bosom of his chiton to turn aside the evil omen.

That was nothing but superstition. The rational part of Sostratos’ mind insisted as much. He imitated the gesture anyhow. It may not help, but it can’t hurt, he told himself. Even as he did, he knew he was rationalizing, not rational.

He said, “If we go under, that’s pretty much the end of the free and independent polis in Hellas. A few left in Italy and Sicily, but Italy and Sicily are the back of beyond.” He didn’t even notice his own condescension, though it would have infuriated Italiote Hellenes.

“Of course they are,” Menedemos agreed. He waved at the fleet again, and then more broadly to take in Cyprus. “If things go wrong …. If things go wrong, we flee if we can and fight if we have to. I keep trying to make firmer plans, but I can’t. I hoped you could.”

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Sostratos said, that being the smoothest way of admitting he didn’t know what to do next, either. He continued, “I have a different question for you, though.”

“What is it? I’d be glad for anything that takes my mind off the main worry for a little while.”

“As you’ve watched our course by day and especially by night, doesn’t it seem to you that we’re bearing a bit too far west of north to put in at Salamis?”

Before Menedemos could answer, Diokles spoke up: “It does to me. I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed, and I was wondering whether I was losing my wits, too.”

Menedemos eyed the sun. He eyed the ships ahead of the Aphrodite. Rubbing his chin, he said, “Harder to gauge exactly by day than by night, but it seems to me you aren’t wrong. What do you want to do? Hustle up to the Ptolemaios’ galley and tell him his admirals and navigators don’t know what the daimon they’re doing?”

“He’s a general, not an admiral. As far as I know, he did all his fighting for Alexander on land, not at sea. If the men who should know are making a mistake, he won’t recognize it himself,” Sostratos said.

“He’d better not be making for Rhodes,” Diokles growled, but he tossed his head a moment later. “We haven’t swung that far west. I don’t reckon we have, anyway. But I’ll be watching the course and the stars tonight—you’d best believe I will.”

“So will I,” Menedemos said. “But even if we think they’re going astray, we can’t be sure. They may have a plan of their own. And it’s not as if we can put down cords and measure angles, the way they do when they lay out a new street. All we’ve got are—” He opened and closed his eyes three or four times.

“I know. Once you get out of sight of land, navigation isn’t much better than a guess and a prayer,” Sostratos said.

“Too right, it isn’t!” his cousin said with feeling. “Let me see a stretch of coast and I’ll tell you where we are. One stretch of ocean, though, looks too much like another.”

“If we could fly like Daidalos, we could glide high above the ships and see the coast from a long way away,” Sostratos said.

“Or have our wings come undone and crash into the sea like Ikaros,” Menedemos said. “The way things are going on this voyage …. We have all the silver, but what good does it do us if we can’t bring it home? I told Ptolemaios the same. He said my other choice was getting the Aphrodite stolen out from under me, so here we are.”

“Here we are,” Sostratos echoed mournfully. The leather sacks full of coins under the stern platform didn’t reassure him, either.

Menedemos knew the fleet was nearing land before any came up over the horizon. Gulls and terns and pelicans lived on land and went out to sea to get food, the way fishermen did. Over the waters halfway between Alexandria and Cyprus, the skies were almost bare of them; he’d noticed the same thing sailing south. When they returned, he knew Cyprus was drawing nigh. Floating branches and, once, a plank told the same story.

He wished the mast were up. He would have sent a small, skinny sailor up to the top to see what he could see: not Daidalos’ wings, but as much as he could do. Then he shrugged, standing there at the steering oars. Sostratos was back on the stern platform, and sent him a quizzical look. Menedemos ignored it. Unless he meant to skedaddle, spying land sooner wouldn’t matter anyway.

The grin that spread over his face caught him by surprise. “Skedaddle!” he exclaimed.

“What’s that?” his cousin asked.

“Skedaddle,” Menedemos repeated happily. The look Sostratos gave him this time suggested that the knots in his rigging had come undone. He said the word again, relishing the silly sound: “Skedaddle.”

“Skedaddle.” By the way Sostratos said it, it wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, a Greek word at all. “What are you babbling about, my dear?”

“I’m not babbling at all,” Menedemos replied with dignity. “It’s the opening scene in Aristophanes’ Knights. Don’t you know it?”

Sostratos tossed his head. “If I did, I wouldn’t be wondering whether you’ve gone out of your mind. Well, I might not be, anyway.”

Taking no notice of him, Menedemos went on, “Nikias and Demosthenes—you know, the Athenian generals—”

“I didn’t think you meant Demosthenes the orator,” Sostratos broke in. “Aristophanes was dead long before he came along.”

“True. Anyway, they’re complaining that Kleon’s lies have confused the Athenian people and led them astray, and so they want to get away.”

“Athens would have been better off if Nikias had got away before he led the expedition to Sicily,” Sostratos said.

“Yes, yes. But you wanted to know what I was talking about,” Menedemos said. “See, Nikias tells Demosthenes to say ‘Daddle.’ So Demosthenes goes ….”

“ ‘Daddle.’ ” Yes, Sostratos still sounded like someone humoring a maniac.

“Splendid, O best one!” Menedemos made as if to applaud without quite lifting his hands from the steering oars. “Then Nikias says that Demosthenes should say ‘Let’s ske.’ And Demosthenes says ….”

“ ‘Let’s ske,’ ” Sostratos repeated obediently. Then he tossed his head. “So what?”

“Say them over and over again, slowly at first but then quicker, as if you’re playing with yourself in bed,” Menedemos said, adding, “I’m quoting the playwright there, too.”

“You would be,” his cousin muttered, but he continued, “Daddle …. Let’s ske. Daddle—let’s ske. Daddle. Let’s ske daddle! Oh! I see where this is going!”

“That’s right—straight over the hill,” Menedemos agreed.

“And this came into your mind, such as it is, just how?” Sostratos asked.

“About the way you’d expect. I was thinking some more about what we might do when we got to Cyprus,” Menedemos said.

“From what you said before, you didn’t plan on skedaddling.” Sostratos rolled his eyes. “That word again!”

“If we make landfall at Paphos, though, or somewhere else near the western end of the island, we’re a lot closer to Rhodes than we would be at Salamis,” Menedemos said.

“Still dangerous,” Sostratos said. “We’ve been over this ground. If we run, we make Ptolemaios angry at us—and at Rhodes. Would he sit on his hands if Demetrios and Antigonos attack the polis after we do that?”

Menedemos gnawed on the inside of his lower lip, the way he did when he worried about how Baukis was doing. “I don’t think he would,” he said slowly. “With men like him, reasons of state count for more than grudges.”

“You hope they do,” Sostratos returned. Menedemos opened his mouth, then closed it again. He had no good answer for that. His cousin, an uncommonly sensible man, made all too much sense here.

Then he stopped worrying about it, because sailors from Ptolemaios’ ships ahead of the Aphrodite started shouting “Land ho!” and pointing northward. Menedemos peered ahead. Was that a smudge on the northern horizon? Maybe it was, but he couldn’t yet make out what kind of smudge it was.

“Take the steering oars, my dear,” he told Sostratos. “I’m going up to the bow to get the best look I can.”

Once he got a decent look at the shoreline ahead, he would know where the fleet was. He’d gone all around Cyprus on one trading journey or another. Landscapes he’d seen once, he remembered. He carried much of the coastline of the eastern regions of the Inner Sea around inside his head, as if on papyrus book-rolls. Most skippers he knew had their own inner libraries like that. Recognizing a stretch of coast from a bare glimpse was a tool of his trade, as an oven was for a baker.

For a while, he called down Aristophanean curses on the big, awkward galleys ahead of the Aphrodite. Their bulk kept him from viewing the coastline as clearly as he wanted to. But, little by little as land drew closer, he saw what he needed to see.

He hurried back to the stern platform. As he reclaimed the steering oars from Sostratos, he said, “You’re a better navigator than the buffoons the Ptolemaios uses. We’re a little east of Paphos, a long way west from Salamis.”

“Yes, that’s about where I put us, too,” his cousin replied, and Menedemos realized, perhaps later than he should have, that skippers weren’t the only ones who knew their way along the coast. His eyes slid to Diokles. The keleustes had seen more coastline than he had. Did he remember it the same way? By how knowingly he dipped his head, that seemed certain.

Menedemos gave his attention back to Sostratos. “All right. You’re Ptolemaios. We wind up here, not off Salamis. What do we do now?”

“It depends,” Sostratos said judiciously. “Did we come to Paphos because the navigators are bad or because they’re good? If we go into the harbor for rest and refit, that would be good. If Demetrios has moved west and put a garrison in the town ….” He didn’t go on, or need to.

“I didn’t even think about skullduggery like that. See? I bring you along for a reason,” Menedemos said, which made his cousin stick out his tongue at him. “From what I’d heard, I just assumed Demetrios was staying in the east to finish Salamis off.”

“If he landed near Karpaseia, he may not have bothered with the cities down here, that’s true. We’ll find out soon enough.” Sostratos pointed north, at the rest of the fleet. “Look! They’re swinging west, towards Paphos. Either they’re going to fight for it or they think they’ll get a friendly welcome. I wonder which.”

“You said it. We’ll find out soon enough,” Menedemos answered.

New Paphos, with its harbor, was a much more recent foundation even than Rhodes. King Nikokles had moved most of the town, though not its temples, from its older inland site, over the last few years of his reign. The Paphians did nothing to keep Ptolemaios’ fleet from filling the harbor—filling it to overflowing, in fact.

Despite their acquiescence, Sostratos said, “I hope the Ptolemaios keeps a tight lookout on the town.”

“That might be smart, yes,” Menedemos replied. King Nikokles had been Ptolemaios’ ally … till he started intriguing with Antigonos. When Ptolemaios found out about that, two of his henchmen made Nikokles kill himself. His whole family followed suit, in spectacularly horrid style. How the Paphians felt about that … would be something the lord of Egypt needed to wonder about.

Sostratos knew the story. Five or six years before, it had been on everyone’s lips. He turned out to know it better than his cousin did, in fact, for when he went on, “Yes, I wonder just how much hatred Kallikrates and Argaios sowed here when—” he found he had to stop. Menedemos’ eyes were almost bugging out of his head.

“Wait! Who?” he said.

“Kallikrates and Argaios. You know, the two Macedonians who took care of Nikokles.”

“Oh, by the gods!” His cousin clapped a hand to his forehead. “By the gods! I’d forgotten their names. I met the two of them in the palace, when Ptolemaios commandeered this ship. I just took them for old drinking buddies of his, not, not .…”

“His hired murderers?” Sostratos suggested.

“Something like that, yes.” Menedemos looked and sounded shaken to the core.

It might have been just as well that four men chose that moment to row a boat toward the akatos. “Ahoy, the Aphrodite!” called a red-caped officer at the bow.

Menedemos pulled himself together with commendable speed. “I’m the skipper,” he said. “What do you need?”

“Captains’ conference aboard the Ptolemaios’ ship at the end of the first hour tomorrow morning,” the man said. “You and your toikharkhos are bidden to attend.”

“Well!” Sostratos exclaimed in glad surprise. That the invitation included him had to mean it came straight from Ptolemaios. Giving the would-be historian a chance to sit in on history in the raw, was he?

Meanwhile, Menedemos said, “Tell him we’ll be there.” The officer waved in reply. As the boat swung back toward Ptolemaios’ galley, Sostratos’ cousin elbowed him in the ribs and murmured, “Teacher’s pet!”

“Ah, to the crows with you,” Sostratos answered. Menedemos laughed—shakily, but he did. Then Sostratos added, “I hope our boat doesn’t leak.”

“That would be good,” Menedemos said. “We’ll find out, I expect.”

Lots of boats were in the water an hour after sunrise the next day. Men aboard several had to bail with dried gourds on sticks or with long-handled pots. Rather to Sostratos’ surprise, the planking on the Aphrodite’s little rowboat seemed sound.

He and Menedemos both wore their better chitons. Past that, they didn’t—they couldn’t—dress up for the occasion. Even the captains from the larger transports seemed far more glorious than they did. As for the exalted commanders of Ptolemaios’ war galleys ….

As they neared Ptolemaios’ five, Sostratos said, “I don’t think I’d want my flagship all tricked out in scarlet and gold like this. Wouldn’t every enemy galley try to sink it?”

“When you’re a warlord, you have to let people know you’re a warlord. Otherwise, why would they take orders from you?” Menedemos said. Sostratos grunted thoughtfully; the answer was more to the point than he’d looked for.

Being a five, with three decks of rowers, the flagship had more freeboard than the Aphrodite. Sostratos and Menedemos had just stepped over the rail and down into the rowboat. They couldn’t get up again the same way here. But Ptolemaios’ men had thoughtfully hung nets from the sides of the ship. Those made coming aboard easy enough.

A long fighting platform ran between the rowers’ benches, a little higher than the heads of the rowers on the upper, or thranite, row would have been. A bolt-throwing catapult was mounted near the bow. Normally, the platform would have been full of fighting men: some archers, others armed with spear and sword to board and seize enemy vessels.

Normally, but not this morning. Ptolemaios’ skippers took their place today. Sostratos’ height let him glimpse the ruler of Egypt himself. He was talking with a couple of men who, if they weren’t admirals, could have played them on the stage even without masks.

Ptolemaios kept looking toward the sun every so often. After a bit, he must have decided that the first hour had indeed ended, for he raised his voice to a roar that would have carried far across any of the many battlefields he’d fought on: “Listen to me, O best ones! Listen, curse it! Anyone who hasn’t shown up yet, a pestilence take him! He can get the word from one of you, that’s all.”

Even as he spoke, an embarrassed-looking skipper scrambled up the nets and aboard the flagship. The officers who’d come in good time laughed at the newcomer.

“So good of you to join us, Euphemides,” Ptolemaios growled. He would be one to recognize the tardy captain. After a moment to let Euphemides hang his head in shame, Ptolemaios went on, “All right, we’re on Cyprus, even if we’re a good ways west of Salamis. Last night, I sent horsemen east to let Menelaos know help is on the way.”

Sostratos wondered whether Ptolemaios’ messengers would be able to get through the siege lines around Salamis, but that wasn’t his worry. Meanwhile, Ptolemaios went on, “We’ll stay here for a few days to see how many other ships come in from the Cypriot cities the enemy doesn’t hold. Then we’ll head east to deal with the Cyclops’ mangy puppy. We’ll give him what he deserves, we’ll take back the whole island and tighten things up here, and we’ll sail home to Alexandria. Any questions?”

Several skippers said “Euge!” at the same time—almost as a chorus, in fact. No one seemed to want to ask the lord of Egypt anything. Almost before Sostratos realized he’d done it, he stuck a hand in the air. Menedemos contrived to step on his toes, but too late: Ptolemaios had already seen him.

“Who’s that?” Alexander’s marshal rumbled. “Stand aside, you men, so I can see who I’m talking to.”

There wasn’t much room on the fighting platform for the officers to stand aside, but they did their best. More than a few of them stared at Sostratos as if sure he’d lost his wits. His very plain tunic might also have inclined them to that view.

Ptolemaios continued, “Go on, tall fellow. Ask away.” A moment later, on a falling note, he added, “Oh, it’s you, son of Lysistratos. Well, what do you want to know?”

“Thank you, sir. I just wondered, are we wise to linger in Paphos?” Sostratos said. “If you can send riders to Menelaos, men who don’t like you so well can send them to Demetrios, too.”

“We won’t catch him by surprise any which way. He’ll know or guess we’re coming, and he’ll have some of his piratical friends scouting for him,” Ptolemaios said. “Fours and fives can’t outrun those cursed pentenkonters, however much I wish they could.”

Trihemioliai can, Sostratos thought. But Egypt’s navy was built for power, not speed. Ptolemaios didn’t worry about pirates nearly so much as Rhodes did.

The lord of Egypt hadn’t finished yet, either. “If any ships do come in, I’ll be glad to have them, too. From what I’ve heard, Demetrios’ fleet is bigger than mine, though he’ll need to leave some of it behind to try to keep my brother’s galleys shut up in Salamis’ harbor.” He set his hands on his hips. “Are you answered?” Every line of his body warned, You’d better be!

“Yes, sir,” Sostratos said, and not another word. He might have replied differently had Ptolemaios asked him whether he was satisfied.

“Did you really think you’d get him to change his mind?” Menedemos asked when they were safely off the flagship and in the rowboat on the way back to the Aphrodite.

“Did I think so? No. But it wasn’t impossible, not quite, so I tried,” Sostratos said.

“And now all his skippers think you’re daft,” his cousin observed.

“As if I care! They’ve forgotten what dealing with free Hellenes is like. High time they got reminded,” Sostratos said. Laughing softly, Menedemos clapped him on the back.