Salamis

XVIII

Going to the harbor every day after news of the fight between Antigonos and Demetrios on the one hand and Ptolemaios on the other gave Menedemos an excuse to get out of his father’s house. Philodemos didn’t even bark at him when he left, though, the way he did when Menedemos headed for a tavern or a brothel.

Just because he went after news, though, didn’t mean he got any. It was late in the sailing season now, more than a month and a half past the equinox. He wouldn’t have wanted to sail from Egypt to Cyprus or Rhodes today. The risk of storms grew high after the cranes flew south.

So sometimes his walks to the harbor turned into walks to other places after he saw no new ships tied up at the quays. Sometimes he came home after drinking too much. “You’re turning into a Thracian,” his father grumbled. “Have you forgotten you’re supposed to water your wine?”

“When you drink to forget, you do better when you forget to water it.” Drunk, Menedemos thought that was the height of wit. His father only snorted and stalked away.

Next morning, with a pounding headache and a mouth that tasted as if someone had emptied a chamber pot into it, Menedemos didn’t think he’d been so very clever, either. He munched raw cabbage to try to dull the aftereffects of his binge. It worked less well than he wished it would have. He drank some more wine, then. Philodemos would have been pleased at how carefully he watered it. And it actually did some good.

He didn’t go to the harbor that day, though. It might have been autumn, but it was bright and sunny, too much so for comfort. He sat in the andron, reading a book of the Iliad. It was the second book, the dullest in the poem, but it suited his mood. The Catalogue of Ships listed every town in Hellas that had joined Agamemnon to attack Troy, and told how many ships it had contributed.

Having worked his way through that, though, he wondered how many ships there were all told, and how many strong-greaved Akhaians manned them. He went through the second half of the scroll again, flicking pebbles on a counting board whenever he came to a new listing. He totaled up 1,186 ships. Then, just to make sure, he did it again. He felt proud of himself when he got the same answer twice running.

That was a lot of ships, far more than Demetrios and Ptolemaios put together had had when they fought each other off Salamis. They would have been smaller ships, though, than the monsters that met there. Any vessels bigger than a trireme dated to very recent times; he knew the Athenians and their foes hadn’t had any when they fought a century before. For that matter, even triremes would have been news to Homer. So how many men would the Akhaians have brought along?

Menedemos went back through the listings—yes, surely the most tedious part of the Iliad—once more. The Boiotians, he found, had had a hundred twenty men in each of their fifty ships. By contrast, the chieftains Methone, Thaumakie, Meliboia, and Olizon had commanded a total of seven ships with fifty men apiece.

“Split the difference,” Menedemos muttered. Halfway between fifty and a hundred twenty was … some more pebble work told him it was eighty-five. So if each ship carried about eighty-five men and there were 1,186 ships ….

Back and forth went the pebbles in their grooves. He hardly needed to look at his fingers as he flicked the tablet. The answer came to just over ten myriads: ten ten thousands. That was a lot of warriors, more than any modern general was likely to put in the field. And, to oppose them, Priamos and shining Hektor would have had about as many fighting men, or the war wouldn’t have lasted anything like ten years.

Knowing something like that made Menedemos want to tell it to somebody. His father would have been interested—he’d got his own love for the Iliad from Philodemos—but he wanted as little to do with his father as he could manage. Instead, he walked across the street to his father’s brother’s house. Luck was with him; Sostratos answered the door when he knocked.

“Hail,” his cousin said. “What can we do for you?”

“Do you know how many soldiers Agamemnon lord of men led against Troy?”

“Not offhand, my dear, no, but why do I think you’re about to tell me? Why don’t you come in before you do?”

When they were settled in the andron, Menedemos said, “You think so because I am. He commanded eight hundred ten above ten myriads, more or less.”

“And how do you know this so precisely, O sage of the age?”

Not without pride, Menedemos explained his method. His cousin listened attentively; that, at least, Menedemos had been sure he would do. Menedemos finished, “And so, you see, I’ve reckoned it up exactly.”

“You have if everything Homer says is true, anyhow,” Sostratos replied.

He shocked Menedemos. “It’s Homer!” he exclaimed. To him, that said everything that needed saying. All that made Hellenes what they were sprang from the Iliad and Odyssey.

But his cousin said, “He was a great poet, O best one, but he was a human being. He made mistakes. Doesn’t a Trojan named Khromios get killed three different times in the Iliad?”

“How do you know there weren’t three separate Trojans named Khromios?” Menedemos said. They both laughed, but nervously. They were treading on dangerous ground, ground that might give way under their feet and pitch them headlong into a real quarrel.

“Well, maybe.” Sostratos picked his words with care as he went on, “What truly makes me wonder about the epics is that hundreds of years went by between the fall of Troy and Homer’s time. You won’t disagree with me there, I hope?”

“No,” Menedemos replied, oddly reluctant to admit it for fear of walking into a trap. “Why does that matter, though?”

“Herodotos wrote about the Persian Wars less than a lifetime after they happened. Where he could see things for himself, he did very well—I found that out in Egypt. Where he could question men about exactly what happened and compare stories, he was also good. Where he couldn’t do either, where he had to listen to old tales, he wasn’t investigating anymore. Thoukydides criticized him because of it.”

“I thought you liked Herodotos better than Thoukydides, though,” Menedemos said.

Sostratos blinked in surprise, then grinned enormously. “By the gods, my dear, you’ve spent all these years listening to me! Who would have dreamt it? I do like Herodotos better. History needs to be interesting, or who’ll want to read it? But Thoukydides was right here. Once you get past what the people you’re talking with can remember, exaggerations creep in and you can’t be sure you’re rid of them all.”

“Homer wouldn’t make silly mistakes like that, though,” Menedemos said. “He is Homer, you know.”

“The point is, he wouldn’t know he was making mistakes, because he wouldn’t be able to question anyone who knew the truth,” his cousin replied. “Think, why don’t you? You’ve been all over Hellas. Is it really likely the Akhaians could have raised ten myriads of men and sent them off to besiege Troy for ten years without everybody back home starving to death because no one was left to work the fields?”

“Well … no,” Menedemos admitted reluctantly. “But if you can’t trust Homer, you can’t trust anybody.”

“You know, my dear, you can enjoy him as a poet without enjoying him as a historian. They’re different trades, like carpenter and potter,” Sostratos said.

“But … but …” Menedemos felt himself floundering. “Think of all the other poets and playwrights who’ve borrowed from him since his day.”

“That’s poetry, too. Were the gods and goddesses truly on the windy plains of Troy, helping first one side and then the other, depending on who was friendly with whom on any particular day? That is poetry, not the real world. How many gods are running around loose these days?”

“People say the Alexander was one. The Athenians say Demetrios and Antigonos are two more.”

Sostratos made a face at him. He knew why, too. Hellenes often spoke of a very talented man, or one who had done a lot, as divine. They might make offerings to his memory, or to him if he was still alive. That didn’t mean they thought he was a match for Zeus or Apollo or Ares. There were questions of degree.

As if plucking that thought from inside his head, his cousin said, “Not everybody thinks the way we do about these things. As far as the Ioudaioi are concerned, there’s only one god who does everything. They’d fight if we tried to make them give kings divine honors.”

Menedemos sniffed. “Who cares what a little tribe of barbarians off in the middle of nowhere thinks? You don’t see their god doing things these days, either, do you?”

“Certainly not,” Sostratos replied, as if he were one of the men Sokrates so enjoyed questioning.

“There you are, then,” Menedemos said.

“Here we all are,” Sostratos said. “We are, but what about the gods? For all we know, they’ve gone on holiday together: ours, and the invisible one the Ioudaioi worship even if he doesn’t do anything, and the Egyptians’ falcon and jackal-head and I don’t know what all else, and the Persians’ good god and his wicked foe, and all the others, too. They’re all at an inn somewhere, drinking neat wine and eating fried tunny and baby squid and trying to sweet-talk each other into bed. And the world they made can cursed well take care of itself.”

Menedemos laughed, more uneasily than he’d thought he would. “You know, my dear, that sounds a lot likelier than I wish it did.”

“I was just spinning a yarn, but the same thing went through my mind, too,” Sostratos said. “It would explain quite a bit, wouldn’t it?”

“Too much,” Menedemos answered. “Much too much.” Sostratos got off his couch, walked over, and solemnly set a hand on his shoulder.

Like everyone else on the island of Rhodes, Sostratos wondered when fresh news of Antigonos and Demetrios’ invasion of Egypt would come in. He wondered all the more after the first storm of the season dropped rain on the polis. His house had a new cistern, to catch and save as much water as possible in case the two new kings, victorious over Ptolemaios or not, besieged Rhodes next.

His cousin’s house across the street had a new cistern, too, nicely lined in stone and brick to retain as much water as possible. Many people who could afford such precautions took them. Maybe the brickmakers and stonemasons made extra silver because men needlessly feared a war that might not come. Sostratos didn’t think so, though. He hoped some of the artisans spent some of their profits building cisterns of their own.

For a while, he wondered whether news of the fighting in Egypt would stay hidden till spring. Bad weather on the Inner Sea curtailed sailing. But then he realized this news would also travel by land, up through Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria into Antigonos and Demetrios’ Anatolian heartland. And a rowboat could get to Rhodes from a town like Loryma. It was only 150 stadia, maybe a few more, across the strait separating the island from the Karian mainland.

So he kept up his new habit of haunting the harbor. He often saw Menedemos there, too. He worried that Menedemos might be squabbling with his father again. Uncle Philodemos, it seemed to him, often squabbled for the sport of it. They didn’t quarrel loudly enough for him to hear them shouting from across the street, but that proved nothing. Quiet quarrels were often the deadliest.

He wanted to ask his cousin if everything was all right, but remembered too well how cold and silent Menedemos had gone when he tried that before. So he greeted him whenever he saw him and talked about things like how Antigonos and Demetrios’ war against Ptolemaios was likely to be going. Since they had no facts yet, they could guess to their hearts’ content.

“It’s awfully late in the year to try a naval campaign. I mean, it’s awfully late. I wouldn’t care to do it myself, by the gods. You’re just asking for shipwreck if you put to sea now, especially in a place where you don’t have any friendly harbors close by,” Menedemos said.

He was a skipper himself, of course. By the standards of older men, he was a bold one, too, putting to sea earlier in springtime and staying out later in the fall than they might. If he said he didn’t care to go sailing this far past the autumnal equinox, that carried weight.

But Sostratos had about as much seafaring experience as his cousin, even if he hadn’t held command. And simply agreeing with Menedemos would have cut the conversation short, which he didn’t want to do. So he said, “I don’t know, my dear. If you were talking about the waters around here, I’d have to say you were right. But Egypt is a different world—we saw as much for ourselves. The seas and the winds in those parts may stay calm enough to let Demetrios do whatever his father needs him to.”

“There are storms on that coast after the setting of the Pleiades, and Demetrios couldn’t very well have moved before then,” Menedemos replied. “Hellenes have known about them for as long as we’ve been going into that part of the world. Are you pretending to be ignorant, O marvelous one? That’s not like you.”

The epithet made Sostratos’ ears burn. It sounded flattering; it was anything but. Sokrates had used it to tag people who he thought were marvelously stupid.

Sostratos did his best to hold his own: “Don’t you think the chance to seize Egypt is worth running a few risks for? How many times were you lucky to come back alive after you slept with somebody’s wife?”

“That wasn’t at sea,” Menedemos said. “At sea, you have more than yourself to worry about.”

“Well, all right.” Sostratos left it there. He didn’t really feel like arguing. And Menedemos was better about looking out for others and not thinking so much about himself and his restless prong than he had been a few years before. The river of time wears away even the hardest stone, Sostratos thought.

The sun slid down the sky towards its low point at the winter solstice. The twelve hours of daylight each felt short and cramped, while those of the night stretched like warm wax. The difference between winter and summer was more pronounced in northerly Macedonia, as it was less so down in Alexandria.

If one could work out how much the hours changed in different seasons at different places, one might learn something interesting, or so it seemed to Sostratos. He pulled out a wooden sphere with which he’d studied geometry when he was younger, but soon put it away again. He didn’t remember enough to work out exactly what he wanted to calculate.

And then he forgot spheres and geometry and the sun’s motions, for news from the edges of Egypt finally did start trickling into Rhodes. The next time he saw Menedemos heading down to the harbor, he hailed him and said, “By the gods, my dear, are you sure you’re not Teiresias in disguise?”

“I don’t think I am.” Menedemos looked down at himself. “Of course, the old seer was a man of parts, and some of the parts were pretty strange. Didn’t he spend seven years as a woman?”

“So they say. They aren’t around for me to question now, so I can’t be sure. But if he could be a woman, he shouldn’t find being a Rhodian too far beneath him. And you were a seer yourself when you said Demetrios’ fleet would run into trouble off the coast east of the Delta.”

“I didn’t need to be a seer for that, only a seafaring man,” Menedemos said. “I’d bet Demetrios’ captains tried to warn him but he didn’t want to listen to them. His loss, and his father’s.”

“Antigonos didn’t cover himself with glory coming at Egypt by land, either,” Sostratos said. “He didn’t move fast enough—I don’t suppose he could have, in that desert country—and Ptolemaios had all the approaches to the Delta well garrisoned before the invaders got to them.”

“Ptolemaios had more than soldiers fighting for him, too,” Menedemos said. “Have you heard how much he was offering Antigonos’ soldiers to go over to him?”

“No. Tell me!”

“Two minai of silver a head for ordinary fighting men, and a whole talent apiece for commanders.”

“By the dog!” Sostratos said softly. “Egypt is so rich, the Ptolemaios can spend money as if he shat it into his chamber pot every morning. After all, it worked with us, didn’t it?”

His cousin looked sour as wine that had gone over to vinegar. “Too right, it did. But what choice did I have? If I’d told him no when he wanted to hire the Aphrodite, he would have taken it anyway and we’d still be stuck in Alexandria—if he didn’t knock us over the head and toss us into a canal for the crocodiles to get rid of.”

“I wasn’t criticizing. You did what you had to do, no question about it,” Sostratos said. “And just in case there were any doubts, putting a crown on your head and calling yourself a king doesn’t turn you into a kind man.”

“I didn’t have any doubts, but why do you put it that way? Ptolemaios wasn’t officially a king yet when he made us go along with him,” Menedemos said.

“True. I wasn’t thinking of that just then. I was thinking of the old Cyclops when soldiers started slipping out of his camp and heading for Ptolemaios’ forts so they could collect their … their ….”

“Desertion bonus?” Menedemos suggested.

“Euge! Desertion bonus, that’s perfect!” Sostratos dipped his head in agreement and admiration. “Antigonos put loyal men out between his lines and Ptolemaios’, and they caught some of the would-be deserters and brought them back for judgment, I suppose you’d call it.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, my dear,” Menedemos said. “Even among the Macedonians, the Antigonos doesn’t have a name for being a gentle fellow.”

Sostratos dipped his head again. “There are reasons he doesn’t, too. He assembled his army, then brought the deserters out before the men and turned his torturers loose on them.”

“That must have given the rest something to think about,” Menedemos observed.

“Antigonos hoped it would, anyhow. But his soldiers kept sneaking away, he couldn’t get past Ptolemaios’ strongpoints and into the Delta, and Demetrios’ fleet was having too much trouble with the weather to be any help. So he gave up in Egypt. The men he has left are marching up through Phoenicia and Syria now, probably on their way back to Anatolia. The fleet is going that way, too,” Sostratos said.

“Let me guess,” Menedemos said. “As soon as spring gets here, it’s our turn. We saw all this coming a while ago.”

“We did. What we didn’t see was any way to stop it. If Antigonos and Demetrios had both died trying to grab Egypt, that might have done the trick, but they didn’t. Our turn, sure enough. Either we bend the knee or we fight for our lives—that’s how it looks to me.”

“It looks the same way to me. I wish it didn’t, but it does. Aren’t these grand times to live in?” his cousin said.

“If we win, the poets will sing about our brave deeds the same way they sing about the fight for Troy. People hundreds of years from now will know Rhodes by her greatest hour.”

“How about if we lose?”

“If we lose, some historian will write, ‘Although Antigonos and Demetrios could not seize Egypt from Ptolemaios, they subjected Rhodes in the following year.’ And that little bit will be as boring as the rest of his work. No one will want to listen to it. The scribes won’t make new copies. And pretty soon mice will nibble holes in the papyrus of the last one left, and no one will know what he wrote anymore.”

Menedemos sent him a sly look. “You could do a better job than that with the story, my dear.”

“Maybe I could, but I wouldn’t want to write about Rhodes losing. Even if I did want to, chances are I’d get killed in the fighting or captured and sold as a slave. Hard to write history if that kind of thing happens to you.”

“I suppose it might be,” Menedemos admitted. “But wasn’t Aisop a slave?”

“So they say. For one thing, though, there are almost as many different stories about him as there are about Homer. For another, you don’t need to investigate and to travel and to ask questions of lots of important men to weigh all their answers to write stories about talking animals.”

“You don’t think your master—if you had a master, I mean—would trust you to go around the Inner Sea asking your questions when he didn’t need you, knowing you’d come back after you got done?”

Every once in a while, Sostratos found standing a couple of palms taller than his cousin a useful thing. As he looked down his nose at Menedemos now, he realized this was one of those times. “Don’t be more foolish than you can help, my dear. How far do you trust your family’s slaves not to run off?”

“Not very. And Rhodes is an island. They can’t go far unless they sail in a ship or steal a boat. They still want to be free, though.”

“They do,” Sostratos agreed. “It makes you wonder whether Aristoteles knew what he was talking about when he said some men were slaves by nature. Would they try so hard to escape if they were?”

“I don’t think so. But I also don’t think we’d get the work that needs doing done unless we made somebody do it. If we had to do all that ourselves, we wouldn’t have time to be proper men.”

“Something to that, I’m sure. You aren’t just talking about work around a household or in a shop or on a farm, either,” Sostratos said. “Can you imagine the Athenians sending free men to work the silver mines at Laureion?”

“Not unless you mean free men they wanted to get rid of,” his cousin replied. “How long does your ordinary slave last when he gets sent to the mines? A few months?”

“A few ten-days, more likely,” Sostratos said. “But that silver was important to Athens. The polis spent it to build the fleet that built the Persians at Salamis. Without it, without the triremes it paid for, there might be a Persian governor there right now. We might have one here, too.”

“So we might. That’s the other Salamis, of course, the one by Athens.”

“Yes, of course. That sea-fight has had almost two centuries of fame by now. I wonder whether, two centuries from now, our sea-fight at Cypriot Salamis will be remembered ahead of it.”

Menedemos winked. “I tell you what, my dear. If I’m around two hundred years from now, I’ll write you a note with the answer.”

“That means you think I’ll be around two centuries from now, too. Generous of you.”

“When it comes to words, I’m generosity itself,” Menedemos said.

“Many men are,” Sostratos said. But he couldn’t help laughing, no matter how much he wanted to. “I wonder how generous we’ll have to be for Rhodes in the coming year. Our silver, our lives …. If the polis needs them, how can we say no?”

“I’m better with spear and shield and sword than I was when I was a youth,” Menedemos said. “Those exercises were just for show then. Now they’re liable to keep me alive. Knowing that makes me work harder.”

“It’s the same with me. I still keep hoping we won’t need to use what we’ve practiced, but I don’t believe it anysmore.”

“There’s a baby in my house, too,” Menedemos said. “He can’t keep himself safe yet. We’ve got to do it for him.”

“Your half-brother,” Sostratos said. Menedemos dipped his head. Something went across his face as he did, but it was gone too fast for Sostratos to read it, so he went on as he would have anyhow: “My cousin. As you say, we’ll do what we can. That’s all we’re able to do.”

One of the things Menedemos hadn’t understood about babies was how fast they grew and changed. When he came home from Alexandria, Diodoros had been a little lump of a thing, unable to roll over or smile or do anything but nurse, make messes, and yowl. He’d had a perpetually startled expression. And why not? The world was very new to him.

Now he was almost half a year old. He could laugh and smile. He looked interested all the time, not amazed. He’d figured out how to roll over. He reached for things and stuck them in his mouth when his hand actually got them, which it sometimes did. He’d swallowed a tiny crawling beetle before Baukis could extract it. It didn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm.

He still cried when he was unhappy or wanted something, but he made more intriguing noises, too. They weren’t words yet, but some of them were starting to sound like things that could turn into words. In the same way, you could tell that he would turn into a person.

Baukis brought him down to the courtyard more often. In the coolness of winter, she didn’t need to worry about him baking. The plants in the little garden fascinated him. And she could put an old blanket on the ground and let him roll around on it. He enjoyed that.

Menedemos enjoyed seeing Baukis out and about, even if she did have Lyke or another slave woman with her. He enjoyed the little boy more than he’d dreamt he would, too. When he scooped Diodoros off the blanket and into the crook of his elbow, the baby would laugh. Or, looking up at Menedemos, he’d smile a wide, almost toothless smile, recognizing him as a familiar, acceptable person.

“He likes you!” Baukis exclaimed whenever she saw him do it.

“No accounting for taste,” Menedemos answered the first time she said that. A few paces away, Lyke snorted softly. Baukis didn’t even notice what he said. When Diodoros found something he liked, that made her happy.

How much attention she gave the baby left Menedemos frustrated. He wanted her to notice other things—him, for instance. He had wondered if she would go again to the women’s religious festival after which they might have started Diodoros the year before. He’d hoped she would: it was the only chance he was likely to get to see her alone. But she’d stayed in. Even with the slaves to help her, taking care of the baby left her exhausted all the time.

And Diodoros was a healthy baby, for which Menedemos joined his father and stepmother in praising the gods. One of Xanthos’ kinswomen—Menedemos wasn’t sure if she was a niece or a grand-niece—had had a boy about the time Baukis gave birth. She called him Xanthiades, perhaps to curry favor with her rich relative.

But he never thrived. He was skinny and sickly and often shat green, which even Menedemos knew to be a bad sign. And, just about the time when word of Antigonos and Demetrios’ failure at the edge of Egypt got back to Rhodes, little Xanthiades died.

Xanthos sadly went on about it at great length, the way he went on about everything. Menedemos’ father didn’t tell him to shove a stopper in it. They’d been friends for years, and even Menedemos understood that talking grief out helped lessen it. But after a while, his father’s patience started to show. Sooner or later, Xanthos always went off to inflict himself on someone else. Menedemos did wonder why it couldn’t have been sooner that time.

His thoughts snapped back to the courtyard when the slave woman stepped away for something she needed or wanted to do. Alone with Baukis! Alone in public, and with him holding her son, but alone. He opened his mouth to say something witty and charming, something that would make her remember why she’d given herself to him the year before.

Before he could speak, she stepped toward him. In a low, urgent voice, she demanded, “How bad will it be come spring?”

He started to give her some reassuring lie. A look at her blazing eyes and set mouth told him that would be a mistake. “Well, I don’t think it will be good,” he said, and waited to see what happened next.

“How bad will it be?” she persisted. “Men never want to tell women anything, curse them. All I know is bits and scraps I’ve overheard. But women and babies pay the price when the men who run things are stupid, don’t they?”

“We’re as ready as we can be to defend Rhodes,” Menedemos said slowly. “Demetrios is a good general, though. We may not win.”

“Can’t we just give him whatever he wants?”

“He wants us to ally with his father and him against the Ptolemaios. Egypt trades through Rhodes, and we get a lot of our grain there, too. Besides, it would cost us our freedom. He’d surely put a garrison in the polis to make sure we didn’t go back on our promises.”

She tossed her head. “That’s not losing your freedom. Losing your freedom is being sold for a slave. Losing your freedom is watching them do to your son what they did to Astyanax in The Trojan Women.”

A man wouldn’t think that way. A man would think being forced into an alliance with a stronger power was the same as slavery. Men took care of themselves no matter what. Women, especially women with small children, couldn’t. “You feel we ought to yield, then?” he asked.

“Of course, if the only other choice is standing siege till we’re overrun.”

“That isn’t of course. If Demetrios attacks us, we do have a chance to hold him out of the polis.”

“How good a chance?”

“Good enough that it may be worth trying, anyhow.” Menedemos hesitated, then asked, “Why does my father say to you about it?”

Baukis’ nostrils flared angrily. “Nothing much. He thinks I’m a child who doesn’t understand anything, the same way most men think about women.” She eyed him. “You don’t think of me like that, do you?” You’d better not! was written all over her face.

“Not for a moment,” Menedemos assured her. Whether or not he was telling the truth … he could worry about some other time, when it might matter. As long as she was his father’s wife, it wouldn’t, or not very much.

Diodoros started to fuss. “Give him to me,” Baukis said. He did. They touched for a moment. It felt like fire to him. She didn’t seem to notice at all. She jogged him up and down and patted him on the back. He went right on fussing.

“Let me try,” Menedemos said. He wanted to feel her touch again, and he did, though again she paid the brief, accidental contact no mind. He hoisted his half-brother (his son?) onto his shoulder and patted the baby’s back the way she had.

“Don’t do it so hard!” Baukis said.

At almost the same instant, Diodoros let out a belch so loud, a fat old opsophagos would have been proud of it at a feast. As soon as he did, he went back to being happy. “There you go!” Menedemos told him. “You had that in there all the time, didn’t you?” He lowered the baby to the crook of his elbow. Diodoros stared up at him and started to laugh. Yes, they had a family look, all right. Well, they were family, one way or the other.

“He likes you,” Baukis said.

“I told you before, he’s too little to know better,” Menedemos said. She made a face at him. She liked him in that moment, if only because her son did, too. You take what you can get, he thought.

“I want him to grow up to see the kind of man you are,” she said. “He’ll learn from you, the same as he’ll learn from your father.” She didn’t talk about which of them had sired Diodoros. She would have been madly foolish to do that where anyone might overhear. And she wouldn’t know for certain, either, any more than Menedemos did.

“I want him to grow up free and safe. As long as he does that, everything will be fine,” Menedemos said. I just want him to grow up, went through his mind. Along with all the sicknesses that could cut short the thread of a child’s life, the Fates also had to steer it past war and famine … if they meant to, of course.

“Tell me it will be all right,” Baukis whispered.

“It will be all right.” Menedemos sounded as sincere as he did when he was seducing other men’s wives in far-off poleis. But Baukis was here not just in Rhodes but in his house. And Demetrios and Antigonos, while not here yet, were bound to be on their way. Spring …. Spring might be very bad.

The slave woman came back. She knew all about what Menedemos and Baukis and the rest of the free folk of Rhodes only feared. Day by day, she got through. All Menedemos could do was pray he’d never have to.