The Gryphon's Skull

7

Sostratos looked up at the early morning sky and clicked his tongue between his teeth. It was after sunrise, but only twilight leaked through the thick gray clouds, “Do we really want to set out in this?” he asked Menedemos. The air felt even wetter than it had a couple of days before.

“It hasn't rained yet,” his cousin answered. “Maybe it will hold off a while longer. Even if it doesn't, making Miletos is easy enough from here. And besides”—Menedemos lowered his voice—”paying the sailors for sitting idle eats into the money we make.”

That struck a chord with the thrifty Sostratos. An akatos was expensive to operate, no doubt about it. The sailors earned about two minai of silver every three days—and, as Menedemos had said, earned their pay whether the Aphrodite sailed the Aegean or sat in port.

“You think it's safe to go, then?” Sostratos asked once more.

“We should be all right,” Menedemos said. He turned to Diokles. “If you think I'm wrong, don't be shy.”

“I wouldn't be, skipper—it's my neck we're talking about, you know,” the oarmaster replied. “I expect we can make Miletos, too— and if the weather does turn really dirty, we can always swing around and run back here.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Menedemos said. He raised an eyebrow at Sostratos. “Satisfied?”

“Certainly,” Sostratos answered; he didn't want Menedemos reckoning him a wet blanket. “If we can do it, we should do it. And it puts us one day closer to Athens.”

Menedemos laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “I thought that might be somewhere in the back of your mind.” He raised his voice to the sailors forward: “Cast off the mooring lines! Rowers to their places! No more swilling and screwing till the next port!”

The sailors had moved quicker. A good many of them had spent everything they'd made so far this season in their spree in the polis of Kos. Nobody was missing, though. Dioldes had a better nose than a Kastorian hunting hound for sniffing men out of harborside taverns and brothels. “Come on, you lugs,” the keleustes rasped now. “Time to sweat out the wine you've guzzled.”

A couple of groans answered him. He didn't laugh. He'd done his share of drinking, too. The thick ropes thudded down into the waist of the Aphrodite. Sailors who weren't rowing coiled them and got them out of the way.

“Back oars!” Diokles called, and struck the bronze square with the mallet. “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” Menedemos slid one steering-oar tiller in toward him, the other out, swinging the Aphrodite around till her bow pointed north. A round ship that had been lying at anchor a couple of plethra away from the pier sculled toward the spot the merchant galley had vacated. With Ptolemaios' fleet here, Kos' harbor remained badly overcrowded.

Just for a moment, the sun peeked through the dark clouds, highlighting the Karian headland north of Kos on which Halikarnassos and, farther west, the smaller town of Myndos lay. The yellow stubble of harvested grainfields and the grayish green leaves of olive groves seemed particularly bright against the gloomy background of the sky. Sostratos hoped that shaft of sunlight meant the weather would clear, but the clouds rolled in again, and color drained out of the landscape.

Menedemos took the Aphrodite up the channel between Myndos and the island of Kalymnos to the west. When the akatos came abreast of Myndos, Sostratos pointed toward the town and said, “Look! Antigonos has war galleys patrolling there, too.”

“So would I, in his place,” Menedemos answered. He blinked a couple of times, a comical expression.

“What's that about?” Sostratos asked.

“Raindrop just hit me in the eye,” Menedemos said. He rubbed his nose. “There's another one.”

A moment later, one hit Sostratos in the knee, another on the forearm, and a third gave him a wet kiss on the left ear. A couple of sailors exclaimed. “Here comes the storm, sure enough,” Sostratos said.

The Aphrodite's sail was already up against the yard, for she was heading straight into the wind. After those first few scattered drops, the rain came down hard, far harder than it had in the Kyklades. “Very late in the year for one like this,” Menedemos said. Sostratos could hardly hear him; raindrops were drumming down on the planking of the poop deck and hissing into the sea.

“It is, isn't it?” Sostratos said. “I hope all the leather sacks are sound. Otherwise, we're liable to have some water-damaged silk.”

“You look water-damaged yourself,” Menedemos said. “It's dripping out of your beard.”

“How can you tell, the way it's coming down out of the sky?” Sostratos replied.

Instead of answering directly, Menedemos raised his voice to a shout: “Aristeidas, go forward!” The sailor waved and hurried up to the foredeck, “Polemaios can't complain about him this time,” Menedemos said.

“No,” Sostratos agreed, “but how much good will he do with the rain coming down like this? I can hardly see him up there, and he's only—what?—thirty or thirty-five cubits away.”

“He's the best set of eyes we've got,” Menedemos said. “I can't do any more than that.”

Sostratos dipped his head. “I wasn't arguing.” Pie pulled off his chiton and threw it down onto the deck. In the warm rain, going naked was more comfortable than wet wool squelching against his skin. He looked back toward the Aphrodite's boat, which she towed by a line tied to the sternpost. “I wonder if you'll need to put a man with a pot in there to bail.”

“It is coming down, isn't it?” Menedemos said. An unspoken thought flashed between them: I wonder if we'll need to start bailing out the ship. Sostratos knew he hadn't expected weather this nasty, and his cousin couldn't have, either, or he wouldn't have set out from Kos. Menedemos quickly changed the subject; “Take the steering oars for a moment, would you? I want to get out of my tunic, too.”

“Of course, my dear.” Sostratos seized the steering-oar tillers with alacrity. Menedemos usually had charge of them all the way through the voyage. Sostratos didn't have to do any steering past holding the merchant galley on her course. Even so, the strength of the sea shot up his arms, informing his whole body. It's like holding a conversation with Poseidon himself, he thought.

Menedemos' soggy chiton splatted onto the planks of the deck beside his own. “That's better,” his cousin said. “Thanks. I'll get back where I belong now.”

“All right,” Sostratos said, though his tone suggested it was anything but.

Laughing, Menedemos said, “You want to hang on for a while, do you? Well, I can't say that I blame you. It's like making love to the sea, isn't it?”

That wasn't the comparison Sostratos had thought of, but it wasn't a bad one. And it suits my cousin, too, he thought. “May I stay for a bit?” he asked.

“Why not?” Menedemos said, laughing still. But then he grew more serious: “Probably not the worst thing in the world for you to know what to do.”

“I do know,” Sostratos answered. “But there's a difference between knowing how to do something and having experience at it.”

Before Menedemos could reply, Aristeidas let out a horrified cry for the foredeck: “Ship! By the gods, a ship off the port bow, and she's heading straight for us!”

Sostratos' head jerked to the left. Sure enough, wallowing through the curtain of rain and into sight came a great round ship, her sail down from the yard and full of wind as she ran before the breeze— straight for the Aphrodite. Sostratos knew what he had to do. He pulled one steering oar in as far as it would go, and pushed the other as far out, desperately swinging the akatos to starboard. That wasn't making love to the sea but wrestling with it, forcing it and the ship to obey his strength. And the sea fought back, pushing against the blades of the steering oars with a supple power that appalled him.

Had Menedemos snatched the steering-oar tillers from his hands, he would have yielded them on the instant. But his cousin, seeing that he'd done the right thing, said only, “Hold us on that turn no matter what.” And Sostratos did, though he began to think he was wrestling a foe beyond his strength. “Pull hard, you bastards! Pull!” Menedemos screamed to the rowers, and then, to the men who weren't rowing, “Grab poles! Grab oars! Fend that fat sow off!” He cupped his hands and screamed louder still at the round ship: “Sheer off! Sheer off, you wide-arsed, tawny-turded chamber pot!”

A couple of naked sailors on the round ship were yelling, too. Sostratos could see their open mouths. They were so dose, he could see that one of them had a couple of missing teeth. He couldn't hear a word they said, though. One of them ran hack and snatched up a pole, too, to try to push the Aphrodite away. But the big, beamy ship lumbered on, right toward the merchant galley.

Right toward? At first, Sostratos had been sure she would simply trample the Aphrodite under her keel, as a war galley might have done. But his hard turn gave him hope. He had to turn his head farther to the left every moment to keep an eye on the round ship. Maybe she would slip past the akatos' stern. But she was close now, so close. . .

“Port oars—in!” Diokles yelled, not wanting them broken and crushed by the round ship's hull. With only the starboard rowers working, the Aphrodite tried to slew back to port. Sostratos held her on course against the new pressure.

Poles probed out from each ship, trying to hold the other off. Sostratos felt two or three thud against the merchant galley's flank. With a far larger crew, the Aphrodite had more men straining to push away the round ship. Sailors on both ships cursed and called on the gods, sometimes both in the same breath.

They almost got their miracle. Had the rain been even a little lighter, had lynx-eyed Aristeidas spied the round ship even a handful of heartbeats sooner, the two vessels would have missed each other. But, with a grind of timbers, the round ship's side scraped against the Aphrodite's stern. Sostratos jerked his arm off the port steering oar an instant before the other ship carried the oar away. Had he been late, he would have had the arm torn from its socket.

The round ship sailed on, as if without a care in the world. Sostratos shook himself, as if waking from a bad dream. But a dream wouldn't have left him naked on a pitching, rolling deck, both hands now on the tiller of the surviving steering oar.

“You did well there,” Menedemos said quietly. “You did as well as anyone could. I'll take it now. Duck under the poop deck and see if we're taking on water. To the crows with me if that fat pig”—a word with a lewd double meaning—”didn't stave in some of our planking.”

“All right,” Sostratos said. “Why didn't you take the steering oars away from me? Maybe the round ship would have missed.”

Menedemos tossed his head. “You had us going hard to starboard. That was the right thing to do, and I couldn't have done anything different. I didn't want the tillers without hands on 'em for even half a heartbeat there, so I just left you alone. Now go see how we're doing under here.”

As Sostratos went past Diokles, the oarmaster clapped him on the back. That made him so proud, he all but flew down the steps from the poop deck to the waist of the ship: Diokles was not a man to show approval when it hadn't been earned.

Ducking under the poop deck, Sostratos found the one drawback to sending a tall man down there—he banged his head twice in quick succession on the underside of the deck timbers, the second time hard enough to see stars. He wished he had some of Menedemos' Aristophanic curses handy.

Then he found more reason to curse than a lump on the head, for his cousin had known whereof he spoke. The collision had staved in three or four of the timbers near the stern, cracking the tenons and breaking open the mortises that held them together. Seawater came through—-not in a steady stream, but by surges, so the damage was close to the waterline but not below it.

Sostratos backed out from under the decking {and, not being the most graceful of men, hit his head once more for good measure). He went up onto the poop deck and gave Menedemos the news.

“I knew it,” Menedemos said savagely. “And what do you bet we didn't do a thing to that stinking round ship? It'll have timbers as thick as its skipper's head. How much water's coming in?”

“It's not too bad,” Sostratos answered. “It's leaking in spurts, not steadily.”

“If we patch it with sailcloth and bail, do you think we can turn back and make Kos?”

“I suppose so,” Sostratos said. “Myndos is a lot closer, though.” He pointed east.

“I know it, my dear,” Menedemos answered. “I'll go there if I have to. But I'd rather not. Damage like that takes a while to repair, and word will get to Myndos that we were the ones who brought Polemaios to Kos. If I have a choice, I'd sooner not be there when it does. If I don't”—he shrugged—”that's a different story, and I'll do what I have to do.”

“Ah.” Sostratos dipped his head. “That makes good sense. As I say, it's not too bad. We got off easier than we might have. You might want to go under there and see for yourself.”

“I suppose I'd better,” Menedemos said. “All right, take the steering oars—uh, oar. Who would've thought we'd lose two on the same voyage? Long odds there, by the gods. Swing her around to southward to run with the wind. We'll make for Kos unless I decide we can't get there.”

When Menedemos came back up onto the poop deck, he was rubbing the top of his head. Seeing that made Sostratos feel better about his own bumps. Menedemos said, “They're sprung, sure enough, but I think we can plug 'em. You're right—that's not too bad a leak. We'll make Kos easy as you please.” He shouted commands, sending a couple of sailors under the poop deck with sailcloth to stuff up the sprung seams and ordering the sail lowered from the yard.

Sostratos peered forward. “What'll we do if we spot the round ship?”

“We ought to ram her,” Menedemos growled. “See how she likes it, by the gods.” In more thoughtful tones, he went on, “If we find out who she is, maybe we can go to law with her skipper or her owner.”

“Maybe.” Sostratos knew he sounded dubious. Going to law against anyone from another polis—and collecting a judgment if you won—was often a task to make Sisyphos' seem easy by comparison. Often, but perhaps not always. Sostratos brightened a little. “If she puts in at Kos, we could go straight to Ptolemaios.”

“So we could.” Menedemos smiled a predatory smile. “Hard to find a better connection than that, isn't it?”

Before Sostratos could answer, a sailor came out from under the poop deck and called to Menedemos: “Skipper, we've plugged up the sprung seams as best we can, but we're still taking on some water.”

“How much is 'some'?” Menedemos demanded. He waved a hand. “Never mind—I'll see for myself. Sostratos, take the steering oar again and keep us on our course.” As soon as Sostratos had hold of the tiller, his cousin disappeared under the deck once more. When he emerged, his expression was as gloomy as the weather. “Pestilence take it, I don't want to have to make for Myndos.”

Diokles said, “Skipper, why not fother a square of sailcloth smeared with pitch over the damage? War galleys will do that when they're rammed—if they have the time before they're rammed again, I mean.”

“Hold the sailcloth against the ship with ropes, you mean?” Menedemos said, and the oarmaster dipped his head. Menedemos looked thoughtful. “I've never tried that. You know how to go about it?”

“I sure do,” Diokles answered. Some men would say as much regardless of whether it was true. Sostratos didn't think the keleustes was one of them.

Evidently his cousin didn't, either. “All right. Take charge of it,” Menedemos said. “I'll learn from you along with the sailors.”

“Right,” Diokles said. “Getting pitch on the sailcloth will be a bastard in this rain, but what can you do?” As some of the sailors started that messy job, he ordered the sail brailed up again and took all but four rowers off the oars. “Hold her course steady,” he told Sostratos. “We don't want much speed on her right now, on account of we'll bring the boat alongside, and it'll have to keep up.”

“I understand,” Sostratos said.

The oarmaster called to the crew: “Now, who can swim? We have anybody who's ever dived for sponges?” One naked sailor raised a hand. Diokles waved to him. “Good for you, Moskhion.” He spoke quietly to Sostratos: “He'll be swimming under the hull. He ought to have something for it.”

“Of course.” Sostratos dipped his head and raised his voice: “Two days' pay bonus for you, Moskhion.”

With a grin, Moskhion went down into the boat, along with the sailcloth to be fothered over the sprung seams and the lines to make it fast to the hull. He had a line tied around his own middle, too, and carried one tied to a belaying pin on the Aphrodite. A couple of rowers kept the boat alongside the akatos. Another pair of sailors wrestled the sailcloth against the damaged planks. Sostratos got all this from Diokles and Menedemos' comments. He wished his cousin would take back the surviving steering oar so he could see for himself, but no such luck.

Splash! Moskhion went into the sea. A surprisingly short time later, he scrambled over the starboard gunwale. He undid the line from his own waist and wrapped the one he'd carried round another belaying pin. Then he hurried over to the port side, got down into the boat again, hauled in his safety line, and tied it round himself again.

After four trips under the hull, he said, “That ought to do it.”

“Let's see what we've got, then.” Menedemos hurried down off the poop deck to go below and see what the fothering had done. Over his shoulder, he added, “You earned your three drakhmai, Moskhion.”

“Wasn't as hard as sponge diving,” the sailor said. “There, you go down so deep, your ears hurt and your chest feels like somebody piled rocks on it—and you carry a rock yourself, to sink faster. You keep that up, you're an old man before you're forty. Tin glad to pull an oar instead.”

When Menedemos came out from under the decking, he looked pleased. “Down to just a trickle now. Thanks, Diokles—I wouldn't have thought of that trick. Two days' bonus for you, too. Remember it, Sostratos.”

As Sostratos dipped his head, Diokles said, “Thank you kindly, skipper.”

“I'll take the steering oar now,” Menedemos said, and he did. He raised his voice to call out to the crew: “Eight men a side on the oars. And we'll lower the sail from the yard again now. The sooner we get back to Kos, the sooner we can get patched up and be on our way again.”

Tin beginning to wonder if the Fates ever intend to let me get to Athens,” Sostratos said. “Here's one more delay, and not even one where we can turn a profit.”

“This one's not our fault, by the gods,” Menedemos said. He raised his voice again: “Two days' pay to whoever spots the ship that hit us. When we find out who she is, we will take it up with Ptolemaios.”

That had the sailors avidly peering out to sea all the way back to Kos, but no one spied the round ship. Maybe the weather was too dirty, or maybe she'd been making for Kalymnos, not Kos. “Maybe she sank,” Sostratos said as the Aphrodite neared the port from which she'd set out early in the morning.

“Too much to hope for,” Menedemos said. “I don't see any of Ptolemaios' war galleys on patrol outside the harbor. They ought to be. The weather isn't too nasty to keep Antigonos from giving him a nasty surprise if he's so inclined.”

When the akatos came into the harbor itself, Sostratos exclaimed in surprise: “Where did all the ships go? There's space at half the quays, where this morning everything was tight as a—”

“Pretty boy's backside,” Menedemos finished for him. That wasn't what he'd been about to say, nor anything close to it, but it did carry a similar meaning,

A fellow who wore a broad-brimmed hat to keep the rain off his face came up the pier to see who the newcomers were. Sostratos asked him the same question: “What happened to all the ships?”

The man pointed north and east. “They're all over there by the mainland. Ptolemaios used the cover of the storm to mount an attack on Halikarnassos.”

Menedemos scowled at the Koan carpenter. “What do you mean, you can't do anything for the Aphrodite?” he demanded,

“What I said,” the Koan answered. “I usually mean what I say. We're all too busy repairing Ptolemaios' warships and transports to have any time left over to deal with a merchant galley.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do till you find the time?” Menedemos said. “Hang myself?”

“It's all the same to me,” the carpenter told him. The fellow picked up his mallet and drove home a treenail, joining a tenon and the plank into which it was inserted. Then he reached for another peg.

Muttering, Menedemos walked away. It was either that or snatch the mallet out of the Koan's hand and brain him with it. But that wouldn't do any good, either: it wouldn't get the man to work for him, which was what he needed.

In the harbor of Halikarnassos, carpenters were probably just as busy repairing Antigonos' war galleys. That also did Menedemos no good. He looked northeast, toward the city on the Karian mainland. A plume of smoke marked any city at any time; smoke was a distinctive city smell, along with baking bread and the less pleasant odors of dung and unwashed humanity. But a great cloud of black smoke rose from Halikarnassos now. Did it come from inside the place, or had the defenders managed to fire a palisade Ptolemaios' men had run up? From this distance, Menedemos couldn't tell.

He hoped Halikarnassos fell, and fell quickly. His reasons were entirely selfish. If Ptolemaios' ships weren't constantly limping back to the harbor of Kos with sprung timbers or smashed stemposts or out-and-out holes from stones thrown by engines, the carpenters here wouldn't be working on them at all hours of the day—and, sometimes, by torchlight at night. They would have a chance to fix the Aphrodite.

But Ptolemaios had hoped to seize the town by surprise. That hadn't worked. Now his men had to settle down to besiege it, which could take a long time. Troy took Agamemnon and Odysseus and the rest of the Akhaioi ten years, Menedemos thought, and wished he hadn't.

Things would go faster than that nowadays. Homer's hexameters said nothing of catapults that flung javelins or stone balls weighing thirty minai or more. Homer's hexameters, as a matter of fact, said next to nothing about siege warfare itself, even though the Iliad was about the siege of Troy. Alexander's army could probably have stormed Hektor's city in ten days, not ten years. Menedemos paused to scratch his head at that thought. Agamemnon and Akhilleus and the Aiantes and Diomedes and the rest might have been heroes, some of them the sons of gods, but they hadn't known a lot of things modern soldiers took for granted.

Alexander had admired Akhilleus. He'd taken a copy of the Iliad with him on his campaigns in the trackless east. Had he ever realized his men could have thrashed the warriors who'd sailed the black ships to Troy? Menedemos doubted it.

The next thing that went through his mind was, I can't tell Sostratos about this. His cousin might shrug and say he'd thought of the same thing years before. If Sostratos hadn't thought of it, though, Menedemos knew he would get no peace till his cousin had squeezed the whey out of every single related possibility. Keeping quiet was a better bet.

His own thoughts returned to the Aphrodite. He didn't want to try making those repairs himself. He wasn't worried about the steering oar; he was confident the amateur carpenters aboard the akatos could fashion a substitute. But the planking at the stern had taken even more damage than he'd thought, with seams sprung, tenons cracked, and mortises broken open for several cubits' distance from the actual point of the collision. He wanted those planks repaired properly. If the merchant galley started taking on seawater halfway across the Aegean . . . He shuddered. Not all ships came home.

I need real carpenters. But I can't get them. So what do I do now? Only one thing I can do: I have to wait till I can get them. That was logical. It made Menedemos hate logic.

He stiffened when a pentekonter that might have come straight out of the Catalogue of Ships glided into the harbor. Such single-banked galleys were the only warships Homer had known. These days, though, they were pirate ships, not naval vessels. No pirate would have been mad enough to raid Kos harbor. And this ship peaceably tied up at a quay and started disgorging hoplites.

An officer rushed up the quay and took charge of the soldiers—or rather, tried to, for they eyed him with contempt veiled as thinly as the most transparent Koan silk might have done. Only after several minutes' talk—and only after the officer pointed back into the city of Kos, as if threatening to call for reinforcements—did the newcomers let him lead them away.

“More of Polemaios' men, I'd say,” Sostratos remarked.

“I'd say you're right,” Menedemos agreed. “They're slipping out of Khalkis a shipload at a time and heading this way.”

His cousin pointed toward the smoke rising from Halikarnassos. “If I were Ptolemaios”—he pronounced the ruler of Egypt's name with care, so Menedemos couldn't doubt which Macedonian he meant—”I'd send Polemaios' men across to the siege. . . and wouldn't it be a shame if they got used up?”

Menedemos didn't need to think about that for very long before dipping his head. “I'd do the same. But Ptolemaios doesn't seem to want to. He's just getting them out of the polis, making them encamp outside the walls. That doesn't seem safe enough to me.”

“Nor to me,” Sostratos said. “If he trusted Polemaios”—he named Antigonos' nephew carefully, too—”that would be one thing. But Polemaios turned on Antigonos, and then he turned on Kassandros, too. Ptolemaios would have to be feebleminded to think the man won't also turn on him the moment he sees a chance.”

“Ptolemaios isn't feebleminded,” Menedemos said. “He's one very sharp fellow.”

“He certainly is.” Now Sostratos dipped his head, “That's why I'm assuming he's got somebody keeping an eye on Polemaios and his soldiers. Remember how Polemaios tried to see if we knew which of Ptolemaios' officers would take a bribe?”

“That I do,” Menedemos answered. “I thought we'd be out of Kos and across the Aegean before it could possibly matter. But the stinking collision put paid to that, the collision and the fight across the channel. That cistern-arsed scow—I hope it did sink in the storm.”

“Maybe it did,” Sostratos said. “No sign of it here, anyhow.”

“Gods only know how long we'll be stuck here, though.” Menedemos drummed his fingers on the outside of his thigh.

His cousin's voice was tart: “Believe me, my dear, I like it no better than you do. I want to be in Athens. I burn to be in Athens. As a matter of fact, I burn to be anywhere but here. We ought to start going to the agora and selling what we can. We'll make something that way.”

“Not much,” Menedemos said in dismay. “Ships from Rhodes put in here ail the time. We won't get much of a price for perfume or ink—and how can we hope to sell the silk we just bought, except at a loss? Koans can buy direct from the folk who make it; they don't need to deal with middlemen.”

“I understand that, believe me,” his cousin replied. “But we have to pay the sailors no matter where we are or what we're doing, and that talent we got from Ptolemaios is melting away like the fat in a fire at a sacrifice to the gods.”

Instead of drumming his fingers, Menedemos suddenly snapped them. “I know what would bring us some money—-we've got those two lion skins. No lions on Kos. Somewhere in town, there'll be a temple to Zeus. Can't go wrong with a real lion-skin mantle for the god's image.”

“True.” Sostratos smiled, “And you're right—we ought to get a good price for at least one of the hides. Good idea.”

“Thanks,” Menedemos said. “Now if only I could come up with eight or ten more, we'd be fine.”

“Pity that fellow back in Kaunos didn't have a leopard skin to go with the others,” Sostratos said. “I know where the temple to Dionysos is.”

“Yes, I remember going by it, too, on the way from Ptolemaios' residence down here to the harbor.” Menedemos shrugged. “All we can do, though, is make the best of what we've got.”

As often happened in a town of Hellenes, finding out where Zeus' temple was cost Menedemos an obolos. Knowledge was a commodity like any other, and seldom given away for nothing. After he'd paid out the little silver coin, he was annoyed to discover that the temple lay only a couple of blocks beyond the market square. It was a small building, but elegant, in the modern Corinthian style, with columns whose capitals looked like inverted bells and were ornamented with acanthus leaves.

“Pretty,” said Sostratos, who was fond of modern architecture.

“If you like that sort of thing,” Menedemos said. “It looks busy to me. I like the good old Doric order better—no bases to the columns, and plain capitals that just go on about the business of holding up the architrave and the frieze. These fancy Corinthian columns”— he made a face—”they look like a garden that wants pruning.”

“There's a difference between plain and too plain, if you ask me,” Sostratos said. “And Doric columns are squat. These Corinthian ones can be taller for the same thickness. They make the building more graceful.”

“More likely to fall down in an earthquake, you mean,” Menedemos said. Then he and Sostratos both spat into the bosom of their tunics to avert the evil omen. In the lands around the Inner Sea, temblors came too often even without invitation,

A young priest greeted them as they came up the steps and walked into the shrine. “Good day,” he said. “Have you come to offer a sacrifice to the god?”

“No.” Menedemos tossed his head, then pointed toward the life-sized marble cult image of the king of the gods. “As a matter of fact, we've come to adorn your statue there. Show him, Sostratos.”

“I will.” His cousin undid the lashing that closed the leather sack he carried. He drew out the lion skin. Menedemos helped him spread it on the floor.

“Oh, very good!” The priest clapped his hands. “I'd loved to see that draped over the god's shoulders. But I fear I'm not the one with whom you'll have to haggle. You'll need to talk with my father, Diogenes. I'm Diomedon, by the way.”

“Pleased to meet you.” After giving his own name, Menedemos went on, “As I said, this is my cousin, Sostratos. Where is your father? Can you fetch him?”

“He's sacrificing at the altar behind the temple,” Diomedon replied. “As soon as he's finished, I'm sure he'd be pleased to talk with you. I hope you can make a bargain. Painting isn't enough to make the statue very impressive, I'm afraid.”

Smiling, Menedemos said, “I think I'd sooner dicker with you than with your father.”

“Of course.” Diomedon smiled, too. “You can tell I'm a soft touch. You won't have such an easy time with him as you would with me.”

“Why is your altar at the back of the sacred precinct, instead of in front or inside the temple?” Sostratos asked. “The other two arrangements are more common.”

Diomedon dipped his head. “I know they are. When this temple was going up—it's almost sixty years ago now, when this whole polis was being built—one of the priests went to Zeus' oracle at Dodona, and placing it there was part of the advice the god gave.”

“Can't argue with that,” Menedemos said. Sostratos looked as if he wouldn't have minded arguing about it, but a glance from Menedemos kept him quiet. They were here to sell the priests a lion skin, after all. Annoying or angering them wouldn't make that any easier.

“Here comes my father,” Diomedon said.

The man who walked into the temple through a doorway next to the cult image was a grizzled version of Diomedon himself. Not noticing his son or the two Rhodians inside, Diogenes turned back to the man who had offered the sacrifice and said, “The god was glad to receive your offering.”

“I was glad to give it,” the man replied. He was so tall, he had to duck his head to get through that doorway. Menedemos nudged his cousin. Sostratos hadn't needed any nudging: he'd recognized Polemaios, too.

“Father,” Diomedon called, “these men want to sell the temple a fine lion skin to drape over the god's shoulders.”

“Do they?” Diogenes said, and then, “What makes it such a fine skin?” Hearing that, Menedemos knew he'd have a harder dicker with the older priest than he would have with his son.

Polemaios came up through the naos in Diogenes' wake. “Ah, the Rhodians,” he rumbled. “I might have known.”

“Hail,” Menedemos said politely.

“You know these men, sir?” Diogenes asked Antigonos' nephew.

“Oh, yes—a pair of whipworthy rascals, if ever there were any,” Polemaios replied, a nasty grin on his face. But then, relenting slightly, he went on, “They're the captain and toikharkhos who brought me here from Khalkis. On the sea, they know their business.”

“Why were you sacrificing here, best one?” Sostratos asked.

Polemaios' grin turned into a scowl. “On the land, they want to know everybody else's business,” he growled, and strode out of the temple.

“A bad-tempered man,” Diogenes remarked, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along. The priest gathered himself. “I'm Diogenes, as my son will likely have told you.” He waited for Menedemos and Sostratos to give him their names, then said, “So you've got a lion skin, do you? Let's have a look.”

As they'd done for the younger priest, Menedemos and Sostratos displayed the hide. “Isn't it splendid, Father?” Diomedon said.

“Right now, I don't know whether it is or not,” Diogenes answered. “What I do know is, you probably just tacked an extra twenty drakhmai on to the asking price.” His gaze, half annoyed, half amused, swung to Menedemos. “Didn't he?”

“Sir, I don't know what you're talking about,” Menedemos said, as innocently as he could.

Diogenes snorted. “Oh, no, not much you don't.” He bent toward the hide, then tossed his head. “If I'm going to see how splendid it is, I want a proper light. Bring it out by the god's altar.”

Fat-wrapped thighbones smoked on that altar. The hot, metallic smell of blood still filled the air. Flies buzzed as a couple of temple attendants butchered Polemaios' sacrificial offering. It was a bullock: the Macedonian could afford the finest. Menedemos said, “Didn't he take any of the meat for himself?”

“No,” Diogenes said. “He gave the whole beast. Would you and your cousin care for a couple of gobbets? We wouldn't want it to go to waste.”

“Thanks. That's most generous of you.” Like most Hellenes, Menedemos seldom ate meat, though he liked it very much. Smiling, he said, “You'll make me feel like one of the beef-munching heroes in the Iliad.” He cast about for some appropriate lines, and found them: “This is Agamemnon talking, remember?—

Diogenes smiled. “You know the poet well.”

“I should hope so,” Menedemos said. “My cousin here can give you practically anything new and fancy”—Sostratos stirred at that, but kept quiet—”but Homer's good enough for me.” He didn't mention how fond he was of the bawdy Aristophanes; Diogenes didn't strike him as a man who would laugh at jokes about shitting oneself.

The priest asked, “What do you want for your lion skin?”

“Four minai,” Menedemos answered.

“I'll give you three,” Diogenes said briskly. They settled at three minai, fifty drakhmai almost at once. Diogenes wagged a finger at the bemused Menedemos. “You were expecting a long, noisy haggle, weren't you?”

“Well... yes, best one, since you ask,” Menedemos admitted.

“I don't like them,” Diogenes said. “Nothing but a waste of time. We would have come to the same place in half an hour, so why not use that half hour for something else?”

“I agree,” Sostratos said. “But only a few men do, and so we spend a lot of time dickering. Some people make a game of it, as if it were dice or knucklebones.”

“Foolishness,” die priest of Zeus declared. Menedemos dipped his head, but he didn't really think Diogenes was right. Had the priest made an opening offer of two minai and bargained hard, he might have got his hide for three minai instead of three and a half. He'd saved time and cost himself money. Which was more important? Menedemos knew his own opinion.

Diomedon went off to get the payment from the temple's treasury. When he came back with it, Sostratos quickly counted out the drakhmai. Diogenes said, “You're a careful man. This is a fine trait in one so young.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sostratos said. “Can I have that sack to carry the coins in?”

“Of course,” Diogenes replied. “I’ll wrap up the meat in some cloth, too, so you won't get blood on your chiton.”

“You're very kind,” Sostratos said.

Having done what they'd set out to do, Menedemos and Sostratos left the temple. A tavern stood only a few doors away. “Shall we get our meat roasted there?” Menedemos asked. He leered at his cousin. “If the barmaids are pretty, maybe they can roast our meat, too.”

“I knew you were going to say that,” Sostratos told him. “You read the poet all the time, do you? Where does Homer use a line like that?”

“I didn't say Homer was the only thing I read,” Menedemos answered. “If Diogenes wanted to take it that way, though”—he shrugged—”I wouldn't argue with him.”

“He's not so careful as he thinks he is,” Sostratos said in a low voice. “Plenty of Athenian owls and turtles from Aigina and other coins a lot heavier than Ptolemaios' standard in among the ones his son gave us. By weight, we made more than we did by price alone.”

“Good,” Menedemos said. “I was hoping that would happen. To some people, especially people who don't travel, one drakhma's the same as another. You can do pretty well for yourself if you know better.” He strode into the tavern. Sostratos followed.

“How d'you do, friends?” the tavern-keeper said, his Doric drawl so strong that even Menedemos, who used a similar dialect himself, had to smile. The fellow pointed to the cloth in which Sostratos carried the meat. “If you boys ain't been sacrificin', I'm downright crazy. Want me to cook that there stuff up for you?”

“If you please,” Menedemos answered. He looked around. The barmaids were plain. He sighed to himself.

“I'd be right glad to,” the taverner said, and then, with hardly any drawl at all, he added, “Two oboloi.”

Sostratos set the meat on the counter. He spat a couple of small coins into the palm of his hand and put them beside the cloth-covered gobbets. “Here you are.”

“Thank you kindly.” The taverner dropped the money into a cash-box. He unwrapped the meat and dipped his head. “That'll roast just as nice as you please. You don't want to eat it all by its lonesome, now do you? You'll want to wash it down with some wine, eh? You boys look like you fancy the best. I've got some fine Khian—can't get better this side of the gods' ambrosia, and that's a fact.”

What that was, without a doubt, was a lie. In a tavern like this one, the proprietor would charge strangers and the naive three times as much for a local wine as he could hope to get if they knew what it really was. Menedemos tossed his head. “Just a cup of your ordinary, if you please,” he said.

“Same for me,” Sostratos said.

“Whatever you like, friends,” the taverner told them, and dipped out two cups of some of the nastiest wine Menedemos had ever drunk. It was, to begin with, shamelessly watered, but it would have tasted worse if it were stronger, as it was well on the way to becoming vinegar. He couldn't even throw it in the taverner's face and walk out, because the man had skewered the meat and set it over his fire. The savory smell helped make Menedemos forget the sour tang of the stuff in the cup.

“Don't leave it on the flames too long,” Sostratos told the taverner, “The gods may like their portion burned black, but I don't.”

“I reckon I know how to cook up a piece of meat, I do/ the fellow said.

“He's going to get it too done,” Sostratos grumbled. “I know he will.”

“Even if he does, you're still ahead of the game,” Menedemos answered. “It wasn't our sacrifice.”

The tavernkeeper took the meat off the fire and put the chunks on a couple of plates, which he set in front of the Rhodians. “There you go, friends. Enjoy it, now.”

Sostratos blew on his gobbet, then cut it with the knife he wore on his belt. “Gray clear through,” he complained. “I like it pink.”

Before Menedemos could answer, a skinny man tapped his elbow and said, “That's a big chunk of meat you've got there, O best one. Could you spare a bite for a hungry fellow?”

Meat from a sacrifice was supposed to be shared. Menedemos dipped his head. “Here you go, pal.” He cut off a strip and gave it to the man.

Another customer came over to Sostratos and said, “If you don't fancy the way your meat's cooked, sir, I'll help you get rid of it.”

That made Sostratos laugh. He said, “I'll bet you will,” But, as Menedemos had, he gave some to the man. They both ended up serving out about half the meat they'd brought into the tavern. At last, Menedemos got to eat some. He sighed at the luxurious taste and feel of hot fat in his mouth. If the warriors in front of Troy ate beef all the time, no wonder they were so strong, he thought.

“More wine?” the tavern-keeper asked.

“No, thanks,” Menedemos and Sostratos said together, in tones of such emphatic rejection that the tavern-keeper looked wounded. Menedemos only snorted. Either the fellow was playing for sympathy or he didn't know what slop he'd just served them. Neither possibility impressed the Rhodian, who turned to his cousin and pointed to the door. Sostratos dipped his head. They left.

As they headed toward the harbor, Sostratos said, “You weren't sharing out drakhmai the way we shared out the meat, were you?”

“No, by the gods.” Menedemos held up the leather sack Diome-don had given him. “Unopened, unslit, unplundered, still a maiden,”

“Very good,” Sostratos made as if to applaud, then gestured for Menedemos to get the money out of sight. As Menedemos lowered the sack to his side once more, Sostratos went on, “I do wonder why Polemaios was sacrificing there.”

“Of course you do, since he wouldn't say. It is an interesting question, isn't it?” Menedemos thought for a couple of paces, then suggested, “In thanks for getting here to Kos in one piece?”

“No. He would have said if it were something simple like that.” Sostratos' reply was quick and certain. “And you saw him on the ship. You saw him when he met Ptolemaios, too. He wouldn't waste a bullock on anything like running away. He had that done to him. He's a man who wants to do things himself.”

“Well. . . you're probably right,” Menedemos said. “Which leads to the next question: what does he want to do, and to whom?”

“Sure enough,” Sostratos agreed. “I'll tell you one thing, though.”

“Only one?” Menedemos said.

His cousin ignored that, continuing, “Ptolemaios is a lot more interested in the answer than we are.” Precise as usual, he checked himself: “Perhaps he's not more interested in it, but he's more concerned about it.”

“You're right,” Menedemos said. They went on down to the Aphrodite together.

Sostratos sucked the flesh from the tail of a roasted prawn, then tossed the piece of shell on the floor of Kleiteles' andron. “Another lovely opson, best one,” he told the Rhodian proxenos.

On the couch next to his, Menedemos dipped his head. “Your hospitality almost makes being stranded here worthwhile.”

“You're very kind, my friends,” the olive-oil merchant said. In the cage in the corner of the men's chamber, his trained jackdaw hopped up and down its ladder, carrying the toy shield in its beak.

Pointing to the gray-eyed bird, Sostratos said, “We feel caged ourselves. You're a Koan. You have connections here that we don't. Can you find us a ship's carpenter? He'd be well paid for his work, believe me.

“I do believe you,” the proxenos said. “But I don't think it can be done, not till Ptolemaios takes Halikarnassos.”

“You think the city will fall, then?” Sostratos said.

Kleiteles dipped his head. “Don't you? Antigonos hasn't even tried to relieve it. From what I hear, most of his army is away in the east, fighting what's-his-name—you know, the fellow who set himself up in Babylon last year.”

“Seleukos,” Sostratos said.

“That's the name,” Kleiteles agreed.

“You can count on Sostratos to remember such things,” Menedemos said. Sostratos couldn't tell whether his cousin meant that for a sneer or a compliment. He'd heard both from Menedemos' lips.

Kleiteles said, “Good thing somebody can keep all these generals straight. They say Antigonos sent his son Demetrios off to fight, uh, Seleukos. I bet he wishes he still had Polemaios on his side now.”

“I don't know,” Sostratos said. “You haven't met Polemaios, have you?” He waited for the proxenos to toss his head, then added, “I don't think he can be on anyone's side except his own.”

Menedemos said, “Sostratos and I find all sorts of things to argue about, but he's dead right here. If Polemaios thinks you're in his way, he'll give you the fastest, hardest knee in the nuts you'd ever get from anybody.”

“But Ptolemaios wanted him here, and wanted him here badly enough to send the two of you after him,” Kleiteles said. “And more of Polemaios' men keep coming in from Euboia: another two shiploads of them today, in fact. Ptolemaios usually knows what he's doing.”

“Usually,” Sostratos agreed. “If he's not keeping an eye on what his new ally's up to, though, he's not as smart as everybody says he is. He—”

He fell silent, for a couple of slaves came in to clear away the supper dishes and clean up the mess on the floor. You never could tell who paid slaves to listen. Their entrance also startled the jackdaw. The shield fell out of its beak and clanked against the ladder in the cage. “Chaka!” it cried, spreading its wings. “Chaka-chaka-chack!”

“It's all right, you stupid bird,” Kleiteles said. The jackdaw calmed when the slaves went away, but screeched again when they came back with wine, water, a mixing bowl, and cups.

Sostratos imagined Polemaios as a bird in a cage, too, only he wouldn't be a jackdaw. He'd be a hawk of some kind, all beak and talons and glaring eyes. If anyone tried to loose him, would he do anything but fly straight at the hawker's face?

Kleiteles dipped out a little neat wine for his guests. Sostratos poured a libation to Dionysos and drank almost absently. Once the mixed wine—not too strong—started going around, he did his best to bring his mind back to the andron. He couldn't know what was going on inside Ptolemaios' residence and whatever house Antigonos' nephew was using. He couldn't know, but wished he could.

He suddenly noticed the Rhodian proxenos eyeing him. “The last time we drank together, you talked about gryphons as though you'd seen one just the other day,” Kleiteles said. “What other strange things do you know?”

Menedemos snickered. “Now you've gone and done it,” he said.

“And to the crows with you, my dear cousin,” Sostratos said, which only made his dear cousin laugh out loud. He thought for a bit, then went on, “Herodotos says a Persian king sent some Phoenicians to sail all the way around Africa, He says they went so far south that, when they were sailing east around the bottom of it, they had the sun on their left hand.”

“That's impossible,” the proxenos exclaimed.

“I think so, too,” Menedemos said, taking a pull at his wine. He pointed an accusing finger at Sostratos. “I'll bet you believe it.”

“I don't know,” Sostratos said. “If it happened at all, it happened a long time ago. And we all know how sailors like to make up stories. But that's such an odd thing to make up, you do have to wonder.”

“Maybe you do,” Menedemos said.

“It's impossible,” Kleiteies repeated. “How could it be?”

“If the earth is a sphere, and not flat like most people say.. .” Sostratos tried to visualize it. He might have done better if he hadn't been drinking wine at the end of a long day. He shrugged and gave up. “I don't know.”

Menedemos emptied his cup, set it on the table in front of him, and yawned. “Maybe it's that meat we ate,” he said. “It can make you feel heavy.”

“I told my slave women to go to your bedrooms,” Kleiteles said. “If you're too sleepy to enjoy them, you can always send them back to the women's quarters.”

“My dear fellow!” Menedemos exclaimed. “I didn't say we were dead.” He turned to Sostratos. “Isn't that right?”

What Sostratos wanted to do was go to sleep. Admitting as much would make him look less virile than Menedemos. He didn't want Kleiteles thinking that of him. Even more to the point, he didn't want Menedemos thinking that of him. His cousin would never let him live it down. “I should hope it is!” he said, while he really hoped he sounded hearty enough to be convincing.

He must have, for the Rhodian proxenos chuckled indulgently and said, “Have fun, boys. When I was your age, I was that cockproud, too.” He sighed; he was feeling the wine, even if it was well watered. “Can't get it up as often as I used to, worse luck.”

“Onions,” Menedemos said. “Eggs.”

“Mussels and crab meat,” Sostratos added.

“I've tried 'em.” Kleiteles' shrug said the sovereign remedies had done no good.

“Pepper and nettle seed,” Sostratos suggested.

The proxenos looked thoughtful. “That might be worth a go. It'd be bound to heat up my mouth and my stomach, so why not my vein, too?” He used a common nickname for the prong, Kleiteles glanced toward Sostratos and Menedemos. “Nettle seed is easy enough to come by, but pepper's foreign. I don't suppose you've got any in your akatos, do you?”

“I wish we did,” Sostratos said. He looked at Menedemos. “Pepper, balsam—all sorts of interesting things come out of the east. We ought to think about that. Not this sailing season, of course,” he added hastily. “Next one.”

His cousin laughed. “You mean you don't want to sail off for Sidon and Byblos tomorrow morning? I can't imagine why.”

“We are going to Athens,” Sostratos said firmly. “If we ever find a carpenter, that is.” He got to his feet. “And I am going to bed.”

Kleiteles led Sostratos and Menedemos back to the guest rooms. “Good night,” he said. He doused one of the torches burning in the courtyard in the fountain and carried the other one upstairs. Darkness abruptly descended. Sostratos had to grope for the latch.

To his relief, a lamp was burning inside. The proxenos' slave woman lay on the bed waiting for him. “Hail,” she said, yawning. “You spent so long in the andron, I almost fell asleep.”

Sostratos didn't want to apologize to a slave, but he didn't want a quarrel, either. Trying to avoid both, he asked, “How are you tonight, Thestylis?”

“Sleepy, like I told you,” she answered. But she added, “It's nice that you remember my name,” and smiled at him. The smile was probably mercenary. Still, he preferred it to a scowl,

“I don't think I'll forget you,” he said. He remembered all the women he'd bedded. He remembered all sorts of things, but Thestylis didn't need to know that.

Her smile softened. “What a sweet thing to say,” she told him. “Nobody ever told me anything like that before. Most men, it's just, 'Take off your clothes and bend over,' and they never even find out what your name is, let alone remember it.” The light from the lamp suddenly sparkled off tears in her eyes.

“Don't cry,” Sostratos said.

“I didn't think somebody being kind could hurt so much,” she mumbled, and buried her face in the cloth covering the mattress. A muffled sob rose.

“Don't cry,” Sostratos repeated. He got down on the bed beside her and awkwardly patted her hair. Even as he did so, he wondered if her tears were a ploy to pry an extra obolos or two out of him. Anyone who dealt with slaves had to make such calculations. Slaves, he knew perfectly well, made calculations of their own about free men.

She sobbed again, and made as if to push him away. “Now see what you made me do,” she said, as if her tears were his fault. Maybe, in a way, they were.

“If you want to go back up to the women's quarters tonight, that's all right,” he said. Why not? He was tired, and she'd be there tomorrow. And so would he, because he still didn't know when a ship's carpenter would be able to work on the Aphrodite—or when Menedemos would get so fed up, he'd have some of the sailors make repairs that might at least carry the merchant galley to another, less crowded, polis.

Thestylis twisted. Now he could see her face, and the alarm on it. She tossed her head. “I don't dare do that,” she said. “Who knows what Kleiteles would do to me?” More tears slid down her face, leaving bright tracks in the lamplight.

He leaned over and kissed her. If she'd pushed him away then, he would have lain down beside her and gone to sleep. But her arms went around him. His hand closed on her breast through the wool of her long chiton. She sighed, deep in her throat, and squeezed him tighter. Again, he wondered if she really meant it. But with his own excitement rising, he didn't much care. He reached under the hem of her tunic, his hand sliding up the smooth flesh of her thigh to the secret place between her legs. The flesh there was smooth, too; she'd singed away the hair with a lamp.

Before long, her tunic and his both lay on the floor. He kissed her breasts. She sighed again as her nipples grew stiff to his caresses. He grew stiff, too, and took her hand and set it on his manhood. She stroked him, easing his foreskin back.

“Here,” he said. “Ride me like a racehorse.”

“All right.” She straddled him. He held his erection as she impaled herself on him. As she began to move, he squeezed her breasts and leaned up to tease their tips with his tongue. “Ah,” she said softly, and moved faster.

At the end, she threw back her head and made a little mewling cry. By the way she squeezed him inside herself, he thought her pleasure real. His hands clutched her meaty backside as his seed shot into her.

She toppled down onto him, all warm and soft and sweaty, as he was sweaty, too. But then, even when he might have started a second round, she scrambled off, took the chamber pot out from under the bed, and squatted over it, her legs splayed wide apart. A wet plop and a muttered, “Well, that's most of it,” said what she was doing.

“I'll give you half a drakhma,” Sostratos said. “You don't need to tell Kleiteles you got it from me.”

“Thank you, sir,” Thestylis said, reaching for her tunic. “You are a kind man. Some people, you might as well be a piece of meat, for all they care about what you feel.” It wasn't a complaint about men's treatment of women worthy of those Euripides had put in the mouths of his female characters, but sounded heartfelt even so.

“Don't put the chamber pot away,” Sostratos said. After using it, he put on his chiton, too. Thestylis would be lying beside him if he wanted that second round in the morning. Meanwhile .. . Meanwhile, he yawned and lay down. No need to wrap himself in his himation on a warm summer night. “Blow out the lamp.”

She did, then got into bed in the dark. Sostratos patted her, yawned again, and fell asleep.

Menedemos crouched under the Aphrodite's poop deck, mournfully eyeing the sprung planks, the sailcloth stuffed between them, the broken tenons, the mortises that had turned into actual breaks in the timbers. He cursed the blundering round ship that had run into the akatos in the rain. He cursed Ptolemaios, too, for his siege of Halikarnassos, and for good measure cursed every carpenter in Kos.

When he came out from under the poop deck, he didn't duck far enough and, not for the first time, banged his head. That left him cursing life in general. With some sympathy, Sostratos said, “I've done that, too.”

Well, of course you have, Menedemos thought sourly. You're taller than I am, and clumsier, too. He rubbed his head before speaking.

That was probably just as well, for all that came out of his mouth was, “I know.”

“What do you think?” Sostratos asked. “Have you changed your mind?”

“I only wish I had,” Menedemos answered. “There's too much damage for me to want to risk the ship going anywhere very far, and too much for us to do the repairs ourselves. Resourceful Odysseus made a boat starting with nothing but logs, but we can't quite imitate him.” He stroked his chin. “Maybe we could get up to Myndos. Maybe...”

Sostratos tossed his head. “I don't think that will do us any good. Halikarnassos is still holding out, but Ptoiemaios' men just took Myndos.”

“Which means the carpenters there will be busy working for him, same as the ones here.” Menedemos rubbed his scalp again. The bump he'd got wasn't the only thing making his head ache.

“That's right,” Sostratos said.

“When did you hear that about Myndos?” Menedemos asked. “It's news to me.”

“Just now, as a matter of fact.” His cousin pointed to a couple of men walking along the quay. “They were talking about it. If you hadn't been all muffled down below, you would have heard them, too.”

With a sigh, Menedemos said, “Well, let's gather up our perfumes and such and head for the market square. Maybe we'll do enough business to break even.”

“Maybe.” Sostratos didn't sound as if he believed it. For that matter, Meneclemos didn't believe it, either. Sostratos put the best face on things he could: “The more we sell, the less we lose, even if we don't break even,”

To Menedemos' surprise, they promptly sold four jars of perfume to a fellow with his right arm bandaged and in a sling. He had scarred shins, too, and a scar seaming his chin, and was missing the lobe of his left ear. “I've got to keep my hetaira sweet on me,” he said. “You've got to give 'em presents, or they forget all about you, and how was I supposed to give her presents when I was sitting in a tent in front of Halikarnassos?”

“You weren't sitting in a tent all the time.” Menedemos pointed to the soldier's wounded arm.

“No, and I'm almost not sorry I got hurt, you know what I mean?” the fellow said. Menedemos dipped his head, though he thought, Whether you know it or not, you mean that hetaira's got her hooks into you deep. He recognized the symptoms from experience. The soldier went on, “Now that I'm back here, at least she can't forget I'm alive.”

Sostratos pointed to his arm, too. “How did it happen?”

“One of those things,” the scarred man said with a shrug. “We tried scaling ladders. I was moving up towards one of 'em when I got shot. Might've been just as well, too, on account of I heard later they tipped that ladder over with a bunch of men on it. If I'd been near the top . . .” He grimaced. “It's a long fall.”

“Have you got any idea how much longer the siege will take?” Menedemos asked.

“Not me, best one.” The soldier tossed his head. “We're liable to still be at it by the time this heals”—he wiggled the fingers sticking out of the bandage—”and I've got to go back to work. That place has strong walls, and you might think old One-Eye's men in there were all citizens by the way they're fighting.”

Menedemos grunted. That was exactly what he didn't want to hear. Ptolemaios' mercenary took the perfume and left the agora. He wasn't worried about the siege's going on forever; he just wanted to enjoy the holiday his wound had given him. Menedemos wished he could take such a bright view of things himself.

A juggler strolled past, keeping a fountain of six or eight knives and cups and leather balls in the air. Someone tossed him a coin. He caught it and popped it into his mouth without missing a beat. Menedemos was fond of such shows. Most days, he would have thrown the fellow an obolos, too. Today, he let the juggler go by unrewarded. The man shot him a reproachful look. He stared stonily back. With news like that which he'd just got, he felt he needed to hang on to every bit of silver he had.

Sostratos said, “Not Myndos, then. Maybe Kalymnos. It's not much farther. Or we could go back to Knidos and use the wind instead of our rowers.”

“I get more tempted with every day that goes by,” Menedemos admitted. “We did make it back here from the middle of the strait between Kalymnos and the mainland. So I suppose we have a good chance of getting away with one more trip. But even so ...” He scowled. “I don't like to take the chance.”

“You're the captain,” his cousin said. “I suppose I ought to be grateful you're more careful at sea than you are on land.”

“Ha,” Menedemos said in a hollow voice. Sostratos often twitted him harder than that. He raised his voice: “Perfume from fine Rhodian roses! Balsam from Engedi—makes a fine medicine or a wonderful incense. Best quality ink! Crimson dye!”

He and Sostratos sold some ink and some balsam by the time the sun sank toward the western horizon. They sold some more perfume, too, and a small-time silk merchant bought some of their dye. They didn't come close to making the mina and a half their crew cost them every day.

As they walked back toward the harbor, Sostratos said, “I hope we won't have to start selling the silk we bought from Pixodaros.”

“We'd better not!” Menedemos said. “The only way we can unload it here where they make it is to sell at a loss. We've been over that road before.”

“Don't remind me,” Sostratos said. “But if we have to get silver to keep the sailors paid . . .” He kicked at the dirt.

''Nothing new here,” Diokles said when they came aboard the Aphrodite. But then the oarmaster tossed his head. “No, I take that back. One of Ptolemaios' fives limped back into the harbor a good cubit and a half lower in the water than she should have been.”

Menedemos cursed. “One more thing to keep the stinking carpenters busy.” He turned to Sostratos. “I wish we'd gone straight up to the proxenos' house. That's the kind of news I didn't want to hear.”

“Can't be helped, my dear,” his cousin answered, “It would have happened whether we heard about it or not.”

That was true, but did little to console Menedemos. He took a couple of steps toward the gangplank to head back into the city with the last of the light when Diokles said, “Somebody's coming this way—coming in a hurry, too.”

“By the dog of Egypt!” Sostratos exclaimed. “That's Polemaios!”

The big man trotted up the quay toward the akatos. He paused halfway there to look back over his shoulder, as if fearing pursuit. Seeing none, he hurried on. “Hail, Menedemos,” he said, panting. “You must take me away from here, and quickly.”

“What?” Menedemos said, startled. “Why?”

Antigonos' nephew scowled. “I'll tell you why. That whoremaster of a Ptolemaios thinks I've been spreading silver around to some of his officers, to turn 'em against him and towards me, that's why. . . . All lies, of course,” he added after a couple of damning heartbeats.

“Of course,” Menedemos said, not believing him for a moment.

“Will you get me out of this place?” Polemaios demanded, “By the gods, I'll pay my fare and more. Name your price. I'll meet it. I'll drown you in drakhmai, so long as you get me out of that old bastard's reach.”

Ever so slightly, Sostratos tossed his head. Here, Menedemos didn't need his cousin's advice. He said, “I'm sorry, best one, but we're laid up ourselves. A polluted round ship rammed us, and we're still waiting for repairs. If we leave the harbor, we're liable to sink before we've gone even a stadion,” That exaggerated things, but Polemaios wouldn't know it. With a wave, Menedemos went on, “Besides, you can see for yourself that most of my crew's not aboard. How could I hope to sail?”

Polemaios growled, deep in his chest, the sound a desperate hunted animal might make. He looked back toward the center of town again, then howled out a curse, for a squad of hoplites approached at a quick march. “Hide me!” he said, and then, “Too late. They've seen me.” He yanked his sword from its scabbard.

The soldiers wore helmets and corselets, some of bronze, others of linen. They carried shields and long spears. They could have made quick work of the unarmored Macedonian. But their leader, an officer with a crimson-dyed crest nodding above his helm, politely dipped his head to Polemaios. “What point to fighting, most noble one?” he said. “Why don't you come along with us till this misunderstanding is sorted out?”

Menedemos thought Polemaios would make them kill him, but the big man grabbed hope like a drowning man seizing a spar. “Let it be as you say,” he said, and sheathed the sword again. At a word from the officer, the ruler of Egypt's soldiers surrounded him.

Then the captain eyed Menedemos and Sostratos. “Why don't you Rhodians come along with us, too, so we can find out just what exactly was going on here?”

He phrased it as a request, but it was an order, and Menedemos knew it. He walked up the gangplank, Sostratos behind him. The truth lay on their side. But would Ptolemaios believe it?