Salamis

VI

Oxcarts half full of straw waited at the end of the wharf where the Aphrodite was tied up. Rowers—some of them hauled out of wineshops and brothels, more than a few obviously the worse for wear—hauled jars of Damonax’s olive oil from the akatos to the carts and set them in the straw.

Menedemos tilted his hat back on his head and turned to his cousin. “Are you sure you’ll be all right without me?” he asked.

“Yes, my dear.” Sostratos smiled patiently. “I made it to Jerusalem and back on my own. I expect I can get to Memphis and back, too.”

“But this is Egypt,” Menedemos said. Sostratos brought out the maternal in him. He always had, even when they were little boys. Menedemos didn’t understand it. He’d never felt that way about anyone else.

“I’ll be fine.” Sostratos had enjoyed having a protector when he was small. The idea pleased and amused him less these days, not least because he towered over his cousin. Menedemos didn’t care. No matter how large and clever his cousin was, he still had trouble coping with that maddening tribe known as the human race. He needed a helping hand. Menedemos would give him one—unless they happened to be squabbling, of course.

“Don’t you think you should take more men along?” No, Menedemos didn’t want to leave it alone.

“I’ll be fine,” Sostratos repeated. “A few men will help me. All the rowers we have won’t save me if the Egyptians—or the Hellenes and Macedonians down in Memphis—decide they really want to get rid of me.”

Menedemos knew he was right. Knowing didn’t make him feel any easier about it. Like a duck with ducklings, he fussed over everything. “Be careful down there. Come back as soon as you can.”

“The Egyptians would say ‘up there,’ ” Sostratos answered imperturbably. “Memphis is up the Nile from Alexandria. This is Lower Egypt to them, even if it sits on top of what they call Upper Egypt.”

“I don’t give a curse what the Egyptians say,” Menedemos told him, eyeing the men and the amphorai and the oxcarts. The carts were almost loaded. Pretty soon Sostratos would go off on this adventure. Menedemos unhappily recalled he’d encouraged his cousin to travel south if he got the chance. Sostratos would do well, or he’d do not so well. Whatever he’d do, he’d do it by himself. Menedemos was still unloading wine on fancy merchants.

“Everything will go fine,” Sostratos assured him, which only made him worry more. Sostratos couldn’t know that. Hearing him say it made Menedemos sure he would jinx it.

Menedemos eyed the men driving the oxcarts. Two were Egyptians, the other two Hellenes. They looked bored, as people who drove oxen often did. Oxen went at their own pace, even slower than walking. You couldn’t hurry them. Such men seemed unlikely to turn on Sostratos and the rowers, but Menedemos worried about it anyhow.

And the rowers! Sostratos wished his cousin hadn’t chosen Leskhaios for anything that might need more thought than pulling an oar. Not that Leskhaios couldn’t think, but that he liked to argue to a degree unusual even in a Hellene. He put Menedemos in mind of Thersites in the Iliad: full of inopportune questions and unwilling to listen to sensible answers. Sometimes the only thing such men understood was a good clout. Could Sostratos see that?

“Are we ready?” Menedemos’ cousin called. No one told him no. He waved to the drivers. Almost in unison, they flicked their whips above their beasts’ backs. Not one actually touched his ox. The animals started forward anyhow, snorting as the weight of the cart and cargo resisted their work. Then the ungreased wheels squealed and the carts began to move.

“Safe journey! Gods go with you, you thickskull!” Menedemos said when Sostratos and his little band strode after the oxcarts.

“Thickskull? Me? You should talk!” Sostratos sounded more than confident enough.

Menedemos felt like a father watching his son march off to war. He wanted to call his cousin back. He had no reason to, but that didn’t have anything to do with it. Sostratos looked over his shoulder after a dozen paces and waved. All Menedemos could do was wave back.

Once he was sure his cousin had got out of earshot, he turned to Diokles and asked, “Do you think he’ll be all right?”

“He should be,” the keleustes answered. “The Ptolemaios, he’s got this place roped down pretty tight. Not much nasty business goes on unless he wants it to. Happens he likes us Rhodians just now. People here know it, too. Everything’ll be fine, skipper.”

“You have a good way of looking at things,” Menedemos said gratefully. He’d wanted reassurance and he’d got some.

The oxcarts’ wheels squealed more as they slewed round a corner and disappeared. A moment later, Sostratos and his rowers also vanished from Menedemos’ ken. He fought down the urge to run after them. He had his own business to see to.

But Diokles also had things on his mind. Before Menedemos could leave the quay, the oarmaster set a hand on his arm and asked, “Do you have any notion how long we’ll be tied up here, skipper?” He pointed with his chin in the direction of the Aphrodite.

Menedemos understood the question behind the question. When the akatos stayed in the sea without getting hauled up onto a beach or into a shipshed, her timbers soaked up waters like so many sponges. That made her heavy and slow. With regret, Menedemos tossed his head. “I’m sorry, but I’ve no idea. At least till Sostratos and the rowers come back, plainly.”

Diokles clicked his tongue between his teeth: a discontented noise if ever there was one. “Any chance you might ask the Ptolemaios if we can use one of his sheds? We’ll be heavier than I like by the time we get near Rhodes any which way with all those days at sea, but I don’t want to make it any worse than I have to, know what I’m saying?”

“I’m afraid I do,” Menedemos answered. If Demetrios quickly beat Menelaos and overran all of Cyprus, he might turn on Rhodes next. If he didn’t quickly overrun Cyprus and Ptolemaios sailed north to oppose him, that fight might well involve the home island and home polis, too. Any which way, warships and pirate galleys might prowl in the waters around Rhodes. The Aphrodite could use every extra barleycorn of speed she could get.

“So will you ask him, then?”

“If he’ll see me. If he won’t see me, I’ll talk to the harbormaster or one of his men. If they say no, well, I tried. If they say yes …. You’re right. We’d be better off for it.”

“Good. That’s been on my mind.” The oarmaster looked pleased. “Like you say, no sure bet they’ll do what we want—gods-cursed Macedonians can be arrogant as all get-out. But if they will, it’ll help. I keep seeing pentekonters chasing us like sharks after tunny.”

“Heh,” Menedemos said uneasily. Those long, lean fifty-oared galleys were pirates’ favorite ships because of their speed. Even fresh and dry, the Aphrodite wasn’t quite that fast. Because she carried cargo, she was beamier than a pentekonter. But, gods willing, they’d be near Rhodes if they had one of those encounters. That would help their chances of escape.

“Don’t worry too much, skipper,” Diokles said. “You’ve been doing this for a while now. Me, I’ve been doing it longer than you’ve been alive. Odds are you’ll still be at it when you’re old and gray like me.” He chuckled. “I was going to say ‘old and gray and ugly like me,’ but I don’t expect you’ll ever get this ugly now matter how old you are.”

Menedemos kalos, they’d written on walls when he was a youth. He hadn’t let it swell his head, the way some boys did. He’d never heard it put quite like this before, though. He laughed, too, and batted his eyes at the crusty keleustes. “You say the sweetest things, my dear.”

Diokles broke up. So did Menedemos. Laughing hard felt good. As when he lay down with Seseset, he had a little while when he didn’t need to worry about his business … or about what might happen to Rhodes.

Pasos watched as Sostratos and his rowers stowed the last amphora of Damonax’s olive oil on his barge. He also had jars of cheap wine from Phoenicia and bolts of woolen cloth for the Hellenes who’d settled along the Nile—Egyptians commonly preferred linen.

“Oil from those olive things? Really?” the barge captain said.

“Olive oil. That’s right. Very fine olive oil,” Sostratos said.

“I taste olive oil one time, here in Alexandria, just to see what is this stuff.” Pasos screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue, as if he’d just choked down some nasty medicine. “Bad! Horrible! Have to be crazy to use. Even stinks when you burn in lamps.”

“Hellenes are fond of it,” Sostratos replied with dignity. His men, their work done for the moment, dipped their heads to show they thought he was right. A couple of them laughed at the Egyptian.

“Hellenes is daft. Well, I see this already.” Pasos brushed a fly away from his face. The air around the stagnant canal was full of flies and gnats and midges and other buzzing, biting annoyances. After the sun went down, it would probably have more than its fair share of mosquitoes, too.

“It’s all right, friend. We think Egyptians are the mad ones,” Sostratos said. That made Pasos laugh in turn. He said something in his own language to his sailors. Translating, Sostratos realized. The barge crew laughed with their captain. By the way they pointed at Sostratos and his men, the Hellenes might have been so many monkeys with tails.

Men on the pier tossed the mooring lines into the barge. Pasos spoke to his crew again, his voice this time sharp with command. The men set sweeps—oars far longer and heavier than the ones the Aphrodite used—in the oarlocks (only loops of rope, but they served) and began to row, easing the big, ungainly craft out into the middle of the canal.

At first, Sostratos wasn’t sure the handful of men straining so hard could move the heavily laden barge at all. But it did move—slow enough to make a turtle or even a snail chuckle, yet it did.

“That’s not the kind of rowing we do, but those fellows know their trade,” said one of the Hellenes, a fellow with a broken nose whose name was Arkesilas. “Cursed hard trade, too, looks like.”

“It does, yes.” Sostratos was thinking the same thing.

Pasos ambled over to him. “We set sail when we can,” he said. “Take a while. Nothing on barge happen quick.”

“I’ve had the same thought out on the sea,” Sostratos replied. An akatos, though, was a much livelier craft than this ugly floating box. Waves and wind mattered more than they would on the Nile, too.

Once the barge was positioned as Pasos liked, the sailors raised the mast and set stays to secure it in place. The sail was a broad rectangle. “Look at that!” Arkesilas said. “They’ve got the brails on the back of the sail, not the front.”

“Why, so they do!” Sostratos exclaimed. It wasn’t a surprise. Just the opposite, in fact: he was noticing for the first time something he’d read about years before. Herodotos maintained that Egyptians did everything in the opposite way from most other folk, and how they placed their brails was one of his examples. Sostratos hadn’t known he remembered that, but seeing it called the words up in his mind. And as for the sail itself …. “Are you catching the wind with papyrus, Pasos?”

“Papyrus.” The Egyptian’s head bobbed up and down. They shared that gesture with most other barbarians, no matter what Herodotos said. “You Hellenes, you like linen better, yes?”

“Yes. Papyrus doesn’t grow in our land. You Egyptians, you have linen, too.” Sostratos gestured toward Pasos’ kilt. “Why don’t you use it for sailcloth?”

With a shrug, Pasos answered, “For what our ships on river do, papyrus just as good. Cheaper, too.”

He had a point. He wouldn’t need to worry about waves or suddenly swinging winds or even the rain that might turn his sail all spongy and useless. “You’ll sail down to Memphis and then let the current take you north again?” Sostratos asked.

The barge skipper nodded again. “This trip, keep going south of Memphis, too. Then come north like you say. That how we do it. This ship not fast, but just enough with wind to go against ….” He gestured to show he meant current; he couldn’t come up with the Greek word even though Sostratos had just used it.

Sostratos dipped his head to show he understood. He even sympathized—he had the same kind of lapses when he spoke Aramaic. He said, “You have a nice … steady life on the Nile.” He almost said an easy life. Compared to sailing the sea and worrying about storms and pirates and generals who lusted after your polis, it was. But the sailors worked as hard as any sailors anywhere. Sostratos wouldn’t have cared to pull one of those long, heavy sweeps for even a little while.

“Steady life, yes. But tough life. You Hellenes, you make to pay too many taxes,” the Egyptian said.

Sostratos spread his hands. “I can’t do anything about that. My ship has to pay them, too. I think we pay more of them here, because Rhodes is a foreign land. The Ptolemaios doesn’t rule us, even if we’re friendly to him.”

“Too much wars. Too much fightings,” Pasos said. Considering the times they lived in, Sostratos could hardly tell him he was wrong.

That big, wide sail filled with the breeze that blew off the Inner Sea. The mast groaned and creaked at the push, but the stays held. That happened on the Aphrodite, too. It may not be just like the sailing I’m used to, but it’s still sailing, Sostratos thought.

The barge began to move down the canal. The motion was so slow, Sostratos wondered at first if he was imagining it. Little by little, doubt left him. They might have no better speed than the oxcarts had shown bringing the oil here, but eventually they’d get where they were going.

After a while, they got to the city wall. Sostratos had wondered if they would have to lower the mast and sail to pass under masonry with a portcullis that could be lowered to block access to Alexandria, but they didn’t. There was simply a gap in the wall through which the canal passed. To Sostratos, that spoke of Alexander’s confidence, and Ptolemaios’, that the new city would stay safe and secure.

Thinking about the way the wider world worked, he was glad Rhodes’ fortifications had no gaps.

The canal swung east and ran between the southern wall and Lake Mareotis, which lay south of Alexandria. The ground was low, muddy, marshy, and riotously green, far greener than anything Sostratos had ever seen anywhere else. Herons, black ibises, and little naked boys fished at the edge of the canal. Something large swimming beneath the surface made a sinuous ripple on it.

Sostratos pointed to the mark on the otherwise quiet water. “Is that the trace of a crocodile, O Pasos?” he called.

“Yes. Crocodile.” The Egyptian grinned wickedly. “You maybe not go swimming right now, hey?”

“Water’s too foul for swimming anyhow.” Sostratos hoped he sounded calm enough. He did mean what he said. Rivers might bring fresh filth from upstream, but at least they carried downstream the filth that was right here. In the currentless canal, anything that got dumped stayed where it was and rotted.

That didn’t seem to trouble the crocodile. There was a thrashing and a startled squawk near the bank. One ibis disappeared, while many more flew away. A couple of the fishing children nearest the attack moved back from the water. The rest kept on with what they were doing.

Shouting to one another in their own language, the sailors swung the yard slantwise so the sail could keep pushing them forward. Pasos and another Egyptian plied steering oars near the stern; the barge was too beamy for one man to handle both port and starboard. They chattered back and forth, plainly used to working with each other.

Sostratos soon got bored. He wasn’t used to being a passenger; to him, passengers were as useless as cargo. But, since he and his men know not a word of Egyptian, they couldn’t be of much use.

The canal swung south, then entered the lake. Little fishing boats scooted here and there, moving much faster than the barge. Pasos steered past low-lying islands. “Do those ever get flooded?” Sostratos asked.

The skipper nodded. As Sostratos had in the Sacred Land, he found himself getting used to the gesture. “Can happen,” Pasos said. “High flood in Nile, plenty more water come down than most times. Lake fill full, islands go under.” He made a face. “Big mess.”

“I imagine it would be,” Sostratos said. Some of the islands had houses on them. “What’s it like farther up the river when the flood is high?”

“Bad,” Pasos answered. “Big bad. Villages wash away. People drown. Animals, too. Have to dig out canals again when water go down. Big bad.” The other steersman, who seemed to understand a bit of Greek but not speak it, said something in his own language. After nodding again, Pasos translated: “Flood bad, but drought worser. No water for fields, crops fail and people starve.”

Hellenes thought of Egypt as a land of plenty. Ptolemaios certainly ruled Egypt as if it were a land of plenty. To the Egyptians, though, the land showed both kind and harsh faces. With enough water, it comfortably fed its swarms of people. With too much or too little ….

One of the branches of the Nile flowed into Lake Mareotis. Before they reached it, the sun began to set. At Pasos’ order, the sailors dropped several anchors—heavy stones on ropes—into the shallow water. Egyptians and Hellenes ate together. Flat cakes of barley bread and a mush made from smashed beans were unexciting fare, but they filled the belly. Instead of wine, the Egyptians drank beer. Sostratos gamely downed a cup, but found it sour and unappetizing. “Wine is better,” he told Pasos.

“Oh, yes,” the skipper agreed. “Wine is better. Wine cost more, too. Can drink beer without—” He mimed an urgent squat.

“I understand.” Sostratos dipped his head. Drink plain water anywhere and you asked for a flux of the bowels.

As the light faded, mosquitoes came out in buzzing clouds. Sostratos slapped whenever he felt one land. So did the other men on the barge. “We’ll all look like raw meat tomorrow,” a rower named Thersandros said mournfully. “The dogs will chew us up.”

“They have cats here, too,” Sostratos said. He’d seen some wandering the streets of Alexandria. He didn’t know if they were wild or tame or somewhere in between. He wasn’t sure the cats knew, either.

“I couldn’t tell you what those furry things are good for,” Thersandros said.

Pasos overheard him and came up to the Hellenes. “You smart, you no say such things here,” he told the rowers. “Cats, they is gods in some parts Egypt. Someone understand you talk bad about them, you maybe get beat up, maybe get killed. Same with crocodiles. Same with lots other animals. You no want trouble, you watch mouth.”

Thersandros didn’t watch his mouth. He opened it, no doubt to tell the barge skipper he didn’t care a khalkos for what a bunch of barbarians thought. Before he could, Sostratos contrived to kick him in the ankle and quickly spoke up himself: “Thank you, O Pasos. We will try to respect your customs here, the way we would expect foreigners”—he carefully didn’t say barbarians—“to respect ours in Hellas.”

The Egyptian weighed that, then nodded. “You speak good, Hellene.” He went back to his own folk.

By the mutinous look on Thersandros’ face, he didn’t think Sostratos spoke well. In a low voice, he said, “Hellenes rule Egypt now. We tell these cat-worshiping savages what to do.”

“Ptolemaios collects taxes from Egypt. He collects grain and papyrus and anything else he needs. He does that because he’s got an army behind him,” Sostratos answered, as patiently as he could. “The Persians did it before him, and the Egyptians themselves before that. But if you go into a tavern and start laughing at cats or crocodiles or monkeys or whatever they worship, do you think the Egyptians won’t knock you over the head or stick a knife in your back?”

“And then the Hellenes will—” Thersandros began.

Sostratos cut him off with a sharp chopping motion. “The Hellenes will ask around. The Egyptians will say, ‘We don’t know what happened to him. He must have had an accident.’ And they’ll be happy, and you’ll be dead. It’s their country. There are a lot more of them than there are of us.”

Had they been of the same status, Thersandros would have kept arguing. Sostratos saw it on his face. As things were, he subsided, if with ill grace. Maybe he would remember, maybe not.

As the sky darkened, stars came out one by one. Like any seafarer, Sostratos looked on them as old familiar friends. The two brightest stars in the Little Bear described small circles around the north celestial pole. They both lay noticeably lower in the sky here than they did back home.

The Egyptians curled up and went to sleep—all but one, who kept an eye on the barge’s surroundings, and on the Hellenes. In a low voice, Sostratos said, “We’ll do what they do. One man will stay awake all the time. I’ll take first watch tonight. We’ll trade off later in the voyage. Go to sleep now, men, and I’ll rouse one of you when the time comes.”

As the rowers began to snore, he tried to remember everything Herodotos had written about Egypt and the Egyptians. Plainly, the Father of History had seen this land himself, and talked as best he could with men who knew its past. Alexandria hadn’t been here when he lived, of course, nor had the Macedonians. Egypt lay in Persian hands then. But most of what he’d set down still seemed pretty accurate.

After a while, the Egyptian watchman noticed Sostratos was also awake. He waved. He might have waved several times before Sostratos noticed him. Sostratos waved back when he did. Good manners satisfied, the two men who didn’t speak each other’s languages went back to being alone together.

When Sostratos judged the time right, he shook Thersandros by the shoulder. He moved back quickly—Thersandros awoke with a knife in his hand. “Oh. It’s you,” the rower said, and the knife disappeared. Better to have a ready-for-aught along than not. Sostratos hoped so, anyhow.

He lay down and closed his eyes. Next thing he knew, the sun was prying them open. When he had to sleep aboard the akatos, he didn’t usually do so well. Then again, Lake Mareotis was far calmer than the Inner Sea.

His men were awake, some of them breakfasting on more barley bread and beans. The Egyptians were eating, too. The Hellenes helped them haul up the anchor stones. Nothing complicated about that, as there was with the stays and rigging. Gestures sufficed to show what wanted doing.

At Pasos’ order, the Egyptians spread the big square sail and got moving. Before long, they left the lake and entered one of the many Nile branches that formed the Delta. Little farming villages were everywhere, sometimes screened from easy view by reeds, sometimes not. The air was hot and wet. The more villages Sostratos saw, the more he realized how packed with people Egypt was. Hellas seemed a desert by comparison.

“O Pasos!” Sostratos called after a while. “What are those odd reeds with the tufts on top?” He pointed.

“Don’t you know?” Pasos looked bemused. When Sostratos tossed his head, the skipper went on, “Is papyrus plant. Is what we get sail from, and for writing on.”

“By the dog!” Sostratos exclaimed. The whole phrase was By the dog of Egypt!, but he swallowed the end of it, not wanting to chance offending Pasos. “When I think of papyrus, I think of the sheets we write on. I’ve seen boats made from the plants, but I don’t think about those so much.” He stared at them with fresh interest. They still looked like odd, tufted reeds.

The Nile’s current fought the breeze filling the papyrus sail; the barge slowed from a lazy walk to a crawl. But it did keep making headway against the river. As the marshy land was full of people and villages, the Nile was just as full of boats and ships and rafts. Some were no more than skins stretched over a framework of sticks. Some were papyrus boats, like the ones the Aphrodite had met on the Inner Sea nearing Alexandria. Others, bigger, hauled this and that up and down the river. Without the Nile, Egypt would have ceased to exist. Sostratos had known that before: known it in his head. Now, seeing it, he felt it in his belly, too.

And Alexandria was the place where everything bound for the wider world went out, the place where everything Egypt got from the wider world came in. Alexander had known what he was doing when he founded the first of the many cities he’d named for himself. Ptolemaios, ruling there, could hardly help from becoming the richest man in the world … if he could keep it.

A sentry in the naval harbor scowled at Menedemos. “Who the daimon are you?” he growled in Macedonian-flavored Greek. “You’ve been skulking around here the past few days.” He hefted a spear.

“I’m Menedemos son of Philodemos, a trader from Rhodes.” Menedemos didn’t think he’d been skulking. He’d been watching quite openly as Ptolemaios’ men began to fit out their fleet for the counterattack on Cyprus. Contradicting an armed man seemed less a game and more a risk than it would have a few years earlier, though.

“That’s what you say,” the sentry answered. “How do I know you aren’t spying for the gods-hated Cyclops and his pup?”

Menedemos could have asked how he was supposed to get word to Antigonos and Demetrios across the thousands of stadia of the Inner Sea. Instead, he pulled a sheet of papyrus from a pouch on his belt. “This is a letter from the Ptolemaios himself, giving me leave to come here.”

He started to present it to the sentry, but the fellow waved it away. “You wait right here. Right here, you hear? I got to find me an officer. You aren’t here when I come back, I’ll stick you if I ever see you again. You got that?”

“I’ll wait.” Menedemos was talking to the sentry’s back. He chuckled to himself. In Rhodes, at least one man in three could read and write, and you didn’t need to be part of the upper crust to know how. He’d seen things were different elsewhere in the Hellenic world. They certainly were here. The sentry seemed offended Menedemos should expect him to have his letters.

After a little while, the Macedonian came back. An officer with a red cape to show his rank strode behind him. “Let’s see this letter,” he said brusquely. He had a Macedonian accent, too, but one with an Attic overlay that made Menedemos think of Sostratos. Sure enough, anyone who talked like that would be able to read.

“Here you are.” Menedemos gave him the square of papyrus. He held it out at arm’s length; he was old enough for his sight to have started lengthening. But he could make sense of it—his lips moved as he sounded out the words.

When he finished, he gave the letter back to Menedemos. “He is who he says he is,” he told the sentry. That was what Menedemos thought he said, anyhow. When he spoke to a countryman, he sounded much less like an Athenian and much more like a Macedonian.

“So he can go wherever he wants and see whatever he pleases?” The sentry sounded scandalized.

But the officer dipped his head. Macedonians might be half barbarous, but they weren’t barbarous enough to nod. “That’s right. The Rhodians aren’t friends with old One-eye. They like us better—we make them money.”

That mixed truth and scorn in almost equal measure. Menedemos wasn’t inclined to complain. Neither was the sentry, who said, “Sorry I bothered you, O best one.”

“It’s all right. If you aren’t sure what you need to do, you should always ask someone.” The officer gave Menedemos the ghost of a wave. “Hail,” he said, and walked off.

“Go on. You can do what you want,” the sentry said. “I’m just glad Philippos there didn’t break something over my head.”

Whenever you had to get someone who could give you orders to do something, you ran the risk that he might take it out on you for interrupting whatever he was already up to. Menedemos faced that problem, among others, with his father.

He ambled along as if he had not a care in the world, seeing what he could see. He didn’t seen any of Ptolemaios’ war galleys, the fours and fives and even gibber ships that were all the rage with Alexander’s jumped-up generals. He could see the sheds that housed them and kept them dry till they had to put to sea. Most of those were longer and quite a bit wider than the ones that sheltered Rhodes’ triremes. He reminded himself to ask Ptolemaios to get the Aphrodite into a shed. Then he counted the sheds, but he didn’t check to see how many actually had vessels inside them. Even with Ptolemaios’ letter, that would have looked too much like spying.

No one put freighters in shipsheds. Freighters would always be slow. If they were a little slower with their planking waterlogged, so what? Menedemos took off his hat to scratch his head when he didn’t see many tied up at the quays. Then he spied men carrying sacks and crates and jars into a shipshed. That made him pull his hat brim down lower over his eyes so he could pretend he didn’t care what was going on there.

Ptolemaios would need supplies for his fleet and for his soldiers. Grain, beans, oil, wine …. Armies fed off the countryside as much as they could, but they needed some rations to supplement what they stole. If all those things didn’t go aboard the usual freighters, where would they go? On galleys that could keep up with the rest of the fleet? If you had the rowers to power them, why not? It would make you fast, for sure.

He didn’t see any meat animals or horses. That told him the fleet wouldn’t sail right away. Cows and sheep and horses for the cavalry wouldn’t board ship till the last minute. They’d be easier to care for while still on land.

Like the staples that fed warriors, weapons didn’t need much care. Some workers carried sheaves of arrows for the archers and the larger, fatter bolts some catapults flung. Others had lumpy leather sacks: bigger catapults threw round stones about the size of a head at the works that protected poleis. If Demetrios had so quickly moved down from Karpaseia, where he’d landed, and besieged Salamis, he would have such artillery himself, and Ptolemaios had better not be behindhand.

Spears, helmets, shields, swords—an army also needed more than the ones the soldiers carried or wore. Some would get lost, some would get smashed, some would get thrown away when a man ran for his life. Centuries before, Arkhilokhos had written a lyric poem about that, telling how the Thracian who had his shield was welcome to it, and he’d get another, better, one when he found the chance.

Throwing away your armor to flee the faster was still a serious business. Back then, it had been a mark of complete cowardice and disgrace, a slave’s brand on a reputation. It had till the poet laughed at it, anyhow. Arkhilokhos helped change the way the Greek-speaking world looked at such things.

A man with a stack of round shields for hoplites in his arms walked through a door in the back of a shipshed. Those shields, like everything else going into the ships, would get stacked somewhere aboard a four or a five that wasn’t along to fight. Another man with shields followed the first, and another, and another yet. Soldiers had something to say about how the world looked at things, too.