The Sacred Land

3

Myra had struck Sostratos as nothing out of the ordinary. Phaselis, on the other hand-the last Lykian city to the east- impressed him a good deal more. It was large enough to boast three harbors. The locals fished not only on the sea but also in a nearby lake. The population was a mixture of Lykians and Hellenes.

As the Aphrodite tied up at a quay, Menedemos said, “I wish we had a letter or a friendship token from that Euxenides we carried last year. He was about the best carpenter I’ve ever seen-and if he still has kin here in Phaselis, they’d probably feast us for taking him out of danger.”

“Well, they might,” Sostratos answered. “But even if they did, would we want them to? Euxenides was one of Antigonos’ officers, remember, and Ptolemaios is lord of Phaselis-for the time being, anyhow.”

His cousin grunted. “I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right, no doubt about it. If Euxenides’ relatives are all for old One-Eye, Ptolemaios’ men won’t be very happy about them… or about us for dealing with them.”

“That’s what I meant,” Sostratos said. “This whole business of trading is hard enough without getting soldiers angry at you. And speaking of trading, what do they sell here? Hides, I suppose, and timber, which we’ve got no real use for.”

Menedemos’ smile was almost a leer. It said, I know something you don’t know. Sostratos hated being on the receiving end of a smile like that. He hated having other people know things he didn’t, too. Menedemos, who knew him as well as anyone, undoubtedly also knew that. “You were studying Phoenicia and Aramaic so hard, you forgot to pay attention to how we would get there.”

Sostratos said something in Aramaic. Not only was it splendidly vulgar in its own right, it sounded like a man ripping a thick piece of cloth in half. Best of all, Menedemos didn’t understand a word of it. Returning to Greek, Sostratos said, “What do they have here, then?”

“Why, smoked fish,” Menedemos answered. The fearsome noises Sostratos had just made kept him from rubbing it in. “This place is supposed to have some of the best smoked fish in the world.”

“Papai!” Sostratos said.

“What’s the matter?” his cousin asked.

“I actually knew that, but it had gone clean out of my head.”

“I’m not surprised, my dear. You’ve got so many useless facts jostling and crowding each other in there, it’s no wonder some of them fall out now and again.”

“But they shouldn’t.” Sostratos hated forgetting things. A man who prided himself on his wits naturally worried about any failure. He changed the subject, as much for his own sake as for Menedemos’. “If it’s good enough, we can carry smoked fish to Phoenicia.”

“Better than the dried and salted stuff that usually travels.” The horrible face Menedemos made showed his opinion of that, though the Aphrodite carried some to feed its crew. “We ought to be able to charge enough to make it profitable, too. That’s your job, of course.”

“Of course,” Sostratos agreed. It wasn’t that his cousin was wrong- Menedemos was right. But if they couldn’t make a profit on smoked fish, Menedemos wouldn’t get the blame, Sostratos would. That was what being toikharkhos meant. With a small sigh, Sostratos said, “Let’s go into town and see what they’ve got.”

One thing Phaselis had-as Patara had had, and Myra, too-was plenty of soldiers. Some were Hellenes and swaggering Macedonians: Ptolemaios’ garrison troops. Others were Lykians, who sounded as if they were sneezing whenever they opened their mouths.

“Looks like Ptolemaios thinks his men are on this coast to stay,” Sostratos remarked. “He’s training up plenty of local barbarians to give them a hand.”

“If he does, he’s liable to be an optimist,” Menedemos answered. “Antigonos is going to have more than a little to say about who rules Lykia.”

“I know. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just telling you what it looks like to me,” Sostratos said.

They walked past a statue whose base had an inscription written in Greek letters that spelled out nonsense words. “Must be Lykian, like that stele in Patara,” Menedemos said.

“No doubt, though it could be anything at all for the sense it makes to me,” Sostratos said. “Karian and Lykian both, even if I did figure out a name on the stele.”

“If they want anybody to care about what they say, they’d better use Greek,” Menedemos said.

“Well, yes, of course,” Sostratos agreed.

Phaselis stood on a long spine of land projecting out into the sea. The market square lay in the center of town, not far from the theater. Pointing to the bowl scooped out of the gray local stone, Menedemos said, ‘‘That looks Hellenic enough,”

“So it does,” Sostratos said. “There are Hellenes here. There have been for hundreds of years. Lakios of Argos paid Kylabras the shepherd a tribute of smoked fish in exchange for the land on which to build the city, and that was back in the days we know only from myth and legend.”

“I think I’d heard that once, but I’d forgotten it,” Menedemos said. Unlike Sostratos, he didn’t seem worried about forgetting something. He went on with his own thought: “They’ve been smoking fish here for a long time, too, then,”

“I’ve heard they still offer it to Kylabras,” Sostratos said. “They reckon him a hero.”

“If I were a hero, I’d want a fat bullock, or maybe a boar,” Menedemos said. “Fish is for ordinary mortals and their opson,”

“Custom,” Sostratos said, as he had not long before.

“Smoked tunny!” shouted a fellow in the agora. Another chimed in with, “Smoked eels! Who wants some fine smoked eels, nice and fat?”

“Smoked tunny? Smoked eels’?” Menedemos’ ears seemed to prick up like a foxs. “I thought they’d smoke any old thing. But those are some of the best fish there are. I wonder how they taste smoked.”

“Shall we go find out?” Sostratos said. “If they won’t give us samples, we’ve got no reason to buy, do we?”

“Not a bit,” Menedemos said. “Not a bit, by Herakles-and he’d have a taste, too, if he were here.” Sostratos dipped his head. If there was food around, food of any sort, Herakles would eat it.

The fellow crying his eels was a bald Hellene with a freckled scalp and startling green eyes. “Hail, my friends,” he said as Sostratos and Menedemos came up. “You’re new in Phaselis, aren’t you?”

“That’s right,” Sostratos answered. “We’re from the Aphrodite , an akatos out of Rhodes. Smoked eels, eh?” He gave his name and his cousins.

“Pleased to meet you both. I’m Epianax son of Kleitomenes. Yes, smoked eels. We give ‘em to the gods, and you can’t say that about fish very often.”

“We’ve heard stories about that,” Sostratos said. “Your hero’s name is Kylabras, isn’t it?”

Epianax dipped his head. “That’s right, I wouldn’t have expected a man from as far away as Rhodes to know it, but that’s just right. And what’s good enough for Kylabras is more than good enough for mortal men.”

Menedemos grinned at him, “I hope you’re going to give us a chance to eat your words, O best one.”

“Give you a chance to eat my…” Epianax frowned, then laughed when he got it. “Say, you’re a clever fellow, aren’t you? That’s a neat way to put things, to the crows with me if it isn’t. I’ll use it myself, if you don’t mind.”

“Be my guest,” Menedemos told him. “After all, we’ll only hear it the once.” That made the eel-seller laugh again. Sostratos and Menedemos shared a look. The people in Phaselis’ agora were liable to be hearing the same line thirty years from now, if Epianax lived so long. Menedemos went on, “You will let us try a sample, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes.” Epianax had a formidable knife on his hip: another few digits and it could have been a hoplite’s shortsword. He used it to hack off a couple of lengths of smoked eel, then handed one to each Rhodian. “Here you are, most noble ones. Take a taste, and then we’ll talk.”

Sostratos popped his piece of eel into his mouth with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand: it wasn’t sitos, which he would have eaten with his left, and it wasn’t fresh fish, for which he would have used two fingers and his thumb, not just one. He chewed, savoring both the smoke and the fatty richness of the eel. He had to work hard not to show how delicious he thought it was.

“Not bad,” Menedemos said after swallowing. A certain tension in his expression said he was having the same problem as Sostratos. Maybe Epianax, who didn’t know him, wouldn’t notice. His voice sounded casual enough: “What do you want for it? If the price is decent, we might take some along with us-we’re bound for the east, and it could do well there.”

“You talking about cash, or do you want to trade for it?” Epianax asked. “What are you carrying?”

“We’ve got prime olive oil, fine Rhodian perfume, Koan silk, hams from Patara, papyrus and ink, and some books,” Sostratos said.

“Didn’t expect you’d have oil,” Epianax remarked. “Most places can make that for themselves.”

This time, Sostratos didn’t meet Menedemos’ eye. His cousin muttered something he couldn’t make out, which was probably just as well. Damonax, he thought unkindly. He hadn’t imagined that acquiring a brother-in-law would hurt his business, but it had. As loyally as he could, he said, “It’s excellent oil, from the very first of the harvest.”

“Must be,” Epianax said, and let it go at that. Menedemos’ snicker wasn’t very loud, but a snicker it unquestionably was. Sostratos wished the vulture that tore at Prometheus’ liver would give the Titan a holiday and torment Menedemos for a while. But then Epianax surprised him by asking, “What sort of books have you got?”

“You know your letters?” Sostratos said, blinking,

“Wouldn’t be much point to the question if I didn’t, would there?” the eel-seller answered. “Yes, I know ‘em. Don’t have a whole lot of cause to use ‘em, but I can fight my way through Homer, say.”

“We have some of the most exciting books of the Iliad and the Odyssey with us,” Menedemos said. The look he gave Sostratos added that it was only because of him that they had those books, which wasn’t true at all. Sostratos felt hampered, constricted; he didn’t want to start an argument in front of a stranger.

To help remind his cousin he’d been the one who actually bought the books from the scribes who’d copied them, he said, “And we also have a, ah, spicy poem from a modern writer, a fellow named Periandros of Knidos.”

“Spicy, eh?” Epianax’s eyes lit up. He knew what that meant, or hoped he did. “What’s it about?”

“You know the statue of Aphrodite that Praxiteles put up at Knidos, the one that shows the goddess bare?” Sostratos said.

“I should hope I do,” Epianax answered. “Everybody knows about that statue.”

He was right, of course. The image of Aphrodite had roused enormous interest and excitement when it went into her shrine a generation before. Roused and excitement were words literally true, too. Hellas was a land where respectable women veiled themselves on the rare occasions when they appeared in public. Not long after the astonishing, shocking statue went up, a man ejaculated on its marble crotch. For him, Aphrodite proved truly the goddess of love.

Sostratos said, “It’s about that fellow-you’ll have heard the story about him,” Menedemos would have given the details. Sostratos didn’t, and didn’t need to; the eel-seller dipped his head. Sostratos continued, “It’s about what would have happened if the statue turned to flesh and blood just then.”

“And?” Epianax asked hoarsely.

“And you’ll have to buy the poem to find out what Periandros has to say about that,” Sostratos told him.

“Well, what do you want for it?” Epianax demanded.

How often does anyone sell books in Phaselis? Sostratos wondered. Not very, unless I miss my guess. In which case… “Normally, I’d ask twenty drakhmai, but I’ll make it eighteen for you,” he said, and waited to see if the eel-seller would go right through the cloth roof of his stall.

When Epianax didn’t, Sostratos knew he would make a good profit. “You mean eighteen drakhmai’s worth of my eels, right?” Epianax asked.

“Yes, certainly,” Sostratos said. “I suppose you sell them for a drakhma apiece, the same as they do in Rhodes?” Nobody in Rhodes sold smoked eels like these, but Epianax didn’t need to know that, either.

He dipped his head now. “I’d’ve asked a little more if you didn’t know what you were doing, but a drakhma’s fair. Still and all, I think eighteen drakhmai’s a little on the steep side for a book. What do you say to fourteen?”

They settled on sixteen after a short haggle that left Sostratos feeling happy at his profit and vaguely guilty at the same time. He and Menedemos chose their eels; Epianax threw in a beat-up leather sack in which they could carry the smoked fish back to the Aphrodite. Sostratos got the book of poetry from the ship and gave it to the eel-seller.

“Thanks, best one.” Epianax looked as if he could hardly keep from unrolling the scroll and plunging right in. “I’ll read this myself and I’ll read it to my pals in taverns and such-a book’s always better in company.”

Sostratos didn’t think so, but knew he held a minority opinion. Until only a few generations before, hardly anyone had owned books of his own, and they were always read in public. With a shrug, the Rhodian said, “However you like, of course.”

“I’ll do you a good turn, if I can,” Epianax said. “Do you know the place called ‘Dinos’?”

“ ‘Whirlpool’?” Sostratos echoed. “No. Where is it? To a sailor, a whirlpool’s a good thing to stay away from. Do you fish for your eels as well as smoke them? Is that how you know about the place?”

“No, no, not at all,” the eel-seller said. “You misunderstand. It’s an oracle-a grove sacred to Apollo by the sea, a few stadia north of here. There’s one particular pool that’s always full of eddies. The person who wants to know the god’s mind takes two skewers, each with ten pieces of roasted meat on it. Some say you can use boiled, too, but I think they’re wrong.”

“An oracle,” Sostratos murmured. He prided himself on his rationality, but how could you deny there were ways of knowing the future? Intrigued in spite of himself, he asked, “How does the priest divine the god’s will?”

“He sits at the edge of the grove, while the man offering the sacrifice looks into the pool and tells him what kinds of fish come and eat the different pieces of meat,” Epianax answered.

“That would be a fine oracle for fishermen,” Sostratos said. “But suppose a farmer who eats cheese and olives for his opson every day comes to the sacred grove. How would he know what to tell the priest if he can’t figure out which fish is a mackerel and which one’s a shark?”

The eel-seller scratched his head. “Good question, my friend. I don’t know the answer, but I suppose the priest does, and I’m sure the god does. An oracle wouldn’t hardly be an oracle if just anybody could see how it worked, now would it?”

In a way, that made sense. In another way, it annoyed Sostratos. He had a restless itch to know, to find an explanation, Epianax had a point: divine things didn’t lend themselves to explanation. But weren’t things that didn’t lend themselves to explanation likely to be unreal? Part of Sostratos was tempted to think so. The rest resisted the impulse.

“If you’re going that way, you can see for yourself,” Epianax said.

They would be going up the Lykian coast toward Pamphylia, then east to Kilikia and the shortest crossing to Cyprus. Sostratos hedged: “I don’t know whether we’ll stop or not. My cousin’s the skipper. It’ll depend on how much of a hurry he’s in to get to Phoenicia.”

“Is that where you’re headed?” The eel-seller started to giggle.

“What’s so funny?” Sostratos asked.

“Only that you may have a harder time selling those smoked eels than you think,” Epianax answered. “A lot of Syrians and other folk like that don’t eat fish. Their gods won’t let ‘em, or some such.”

“Oimoi!” Sostratos clapped a hand to his forehead. “I knew the Ioudaioi won’t eat pork, but I’d never heard that any of those people wouldn’t eat fish. What do they do for opson?”

“Not my worry,” Epianax said.

“No, it’s mine,” Sostratos agreed. Why didn’t Himilkon tell me? Did he think I already knew? Or has he lived among Hellenes long enough to get over his silly superstition? No way to tell, not without sailing back to Rhodes to ask the Phoenician. After a moment, Sostratos brightened. “Well, there’ll be plenty of Hellenes in the coastal towns. If the barbarians don’t catch fish, the men who serve Antigonos will be all the gladder to see us.”

“Mm, that’s so.” Epianax looked down at the roll of papyrus in his hands. “I still think I got the better of the bargain. When those eels are gone, they’re gone for good, but I’ll be reading this book twenty years from now if I can keep the mice from nibbling at it.”

“The best sort of bargain is one where both sides go away happy,” Sostratos said diplomatically. “I’m heading back to the harbor now. Farewell, and enjoy the poem.”

“If it’s got Aphrodite in it without her clothes, I expect I’ll like it just fine.” Epianax sounded very sure of himself.

When Sostratos came aboard the merchant galley, he told Menedemos what he’d learned from Epianax. His cousin shrugged. “I’d thought we’d sell the eels to the Hellenes in Antigonos’ army anyhow,” he said. “I know we’re all opsophagoi when we get the chance. Who wouldn’t rather stuff himself with turbot or tunny or cuttlefish or lobster than with barley cakes or wheat bread?”

“Sokrates wouldn’t, for one. Opson is fine, he’d say, but it’s the relish- it’s what you eat with the staple, with the sitos. If you do it the other way round, then your bread turns into the relish, doesn’t it?”

“So what?” Menedemos said cheerfully, and smacked his lips. “If I had the silver for it, I’d eat fish till I grew fins.”

“Gods be praised you don’t, then,” Sostratos said. But how could you argue with somebody who not only admitted he was an opsophagos but sounded proud of it? Seeing no way, Sostratos didn’t try. Instead, he passed on what Epianax had said about the oracle at Dinos.

“That is interesting,” Menedemos said. “But what did he tell you? It’s only a few stadia north of Phaselis? I don’t see much point in stopping.”

“You surprise me,” Sostratos said. “Don’t you want to learn what the god has to say about our voyage?”

Menedemos tossed his head. “Not me, my dear. I’ll know in a few months any which way. Why? Are you that curious?” He answered his own question: “Of course you are. You always are. Do you really care about what the god says, or are you interested in watching how this particular oracle works?”

Sostratos’ ears heated. “You know me too well,” he mumbled.

“Only your mother and father have known you longer,” Menedemos said. “And they have to love you, for they bore you. Me, I see you as you are-and, somehow or other, I put up with you anyway.”

“Thank you so much,” Sostratos told him.

His cousin ignored the sarcasm. “My pleasure-most of the time, anyhow. But listen-I’ve got news. While you were talking with the eel-seller, I chatted up some of the sailors here in port. Things are stirring, sure enough.”

“What sorts of things?” Now Sostratos sounded interested. If anything could distract him from his own gloom, it was news of the outside world.

“Well, do you know Kleopatra, Philip of Macedon’s daughter and Alexander’s sister?”

“Personally?” Sostratos said. “No.”

Menedemos gave him the exasperated stare he’d hoped for. “No, not personally, you thick-head. Do you know of her? “

“Who doesn’t?” Sostratos replied. “When she married Alexandras of Epeiros, Philip was murdered at their wedding feast. That put Alexander the Great on the throne. It made him Great, in fact, because who knows what he would have been if Philip ruled another twenty-five years, as he could have? After Alexandros died, she married Alexander’s marshal Perdikkas, and after he died some other officer-I forget whom.

She’s in one of Antigonos’ Anatolian towns these days, isn’t she?”

“Yes, in Sardis-for the moment,” Menedemos said portentously.

“Ah?” Sostratos said. “ ‘For the moment,’ is it? Tell me more.”

“Well, what one of my chattering friends told me was that she doesn’t want to stay in Sardis or under old One-Eye’s muscular thumb anymore,” Menedemos replied. “The story is, she wants to go over to Ptolemaios.”

“He’s got that base over there on Kos, right across from the Anatolian mainland,” Sostratos said, and Menedemos dipped his head. Sostratos thought quickly. The conclusion he reached didn’t take much in the way of complicated calculation. “Kleopatra will never get to his men alive.”

“You sound sure of that,” Menedemos said.

“I’ll bet a mina of silver on it, if you’re in the mood,” Sostratos told him.

“A hundred drakhmai? By the dog of Egypt, you are sure, aren’t you?”

“Will you take the bet?”

Now Menedemos thought it over. He didn’t need long, either. “No, thanks. Antigonos can’t afford to let her get to Ptolemaios; he’d lose too much face. And he’s ruthless enough to kill her if she tries. In other words, you’re likely right.”

“Whether I am or I’m not, we’re both reasoning the same way, anyhow,” Sostratos said. “All right, then, we won’t bet. And we won’t stop at the oracle, either?” He did his best to sound woefully disappointed.

“Not if it’s that close to Phaselis,” Menedemos answered. “Don’t you want to get to Phoenicia and Ioudaia and practice your Aramaic?”

The question was good enough to keep Sostratos from complaining as the Aphrodite’s, rowers took her out of the harbor of Phaselis. He wondered whether Kleopatra had already fled Sardis. Poor woman, he thought. If she’s tried it, she’s probably already dead. Who’s left from Philip’s dynasty, then? No one. No one at all.

As the Aphrodite slid past the sacred grove at Dinos, Menedemos eyed the pines and oaks. The grove looked like any other unhallowed Anatolian forest to him. As Epianax the eel-seller had told Sostratos, though, it did come right down to the sea. Its holiness had let it survive in the lowlands where most timber had been cut away to make room for farms. The only trees close by were cultivated groves of olives and almonds. But the hills rose steeply from the sea. A man wouldn’t have to go many stadia inland to find himself in the woods once more.

“Rhyppapai!” Diokles called. “Rhyppapai!” The breeze was fitful. When it did blow, it came mostly from the north. If the akatos was going to get anywhere, it had to travel by oar power.

Dolphins leaped and frolicked alongside the ship. “They’re a good omen,” Menedemos remarked to his cousin.

Sostratos dipped his head. “So says the part of me that goes to sea every sailing season. The part of me that went to the Lykeion in Athens has its doubts.”

“Why take chances?” Menedemos asked. “If you take omens but they aren’t real, you don’t hurt yourself, but if you ignore them and they are, you can end up in all sorts of trouble.”

“You can end up in trouble following omens that aren’t real,” Sostratos said, “Suppose you believe some lying fool of a soothsayer and do what he tells you, and it turns out to be the worst thing you could have done? Or what about the prophecy the Pythia at Delphi gave to King Kroisos of Lydia;

If Kroisos o’er the Halys River go

He will a mighty kingdom overthrow’?

What about that?”

“Oh, no, my dear.” Menedemos tossed his head. “You won’t get me with that one. That’s not the oracle’s fault. It’s Kroisos’ fault, for not asking whether he’d overthrow the Persian kingdom-or his own.”

Sostratos gave him an impudent grin, “I can’t fault your logic. I doubt whether Sokrates himself could fault your logic. But logic, remember, lies at the heart of philosophy. And you’re a man who sneers at philosophy. So where, O marvelous one, is the logic in that?”

“In your proktos,” Menedemos suggested.

“Aristophanes and his jokes arc funny in their place. When they get out of their place…” Sostratos sniffed.

Menedemos started to point out that Aristophanes had had a good deal to say about philosophy and especially about philosophers. At the last instant, he held his tongue. He knew what would happen if he sailed down that channel. He and Sostratos would get into a row about how big a role Aristophanes and Clouds had played in Sokrates’ death. How many times had they had that argument? Too many for Menedemos to want to go through it again. By now, the steps were almost as formal as a dance.

“Sail ho!” Aristeidas shouted as Menedemos was casting about for something different to say. “Sail ho off the starboard bow!”

A sail was more important than any argument. Menedemos peered out to sea. After a moment, he spotted the sail, too. “Looks like a round ship. And… isn’t that another sail behind it?”

“Yes, skipper, it is-more than one, in fact,” the lookout answered.

“By the gods, you’re right,” Menedemos said after another look. “Three, four, five, six… I make k eight sail altogether. Is that right?”

Aristeidas shaded his eyes with his hand. “I see… ten, skipper, I think. A couple of them are well out to sea there. And look! To the crows with me if the lead ship hasn’t got Ptolemaios’ eagle on its sail.”

“They must be grain ships, keeping his garrisons in Lykia supplied,” Sostratos said.

“He’s got nerve, sending round ships along this coast without any war galleys escorting them,” Menedemos said. “Two or three pirates could put paid to that whole fleet.”

“Ptolemaios has garrisons in all the good-sized towns around here,” Sostratos reminded him. “That has to make a difference.”

“Some difference,” Menedemos allowed. “How much, I don’t know. Most pirate ships don’t operate out of those towns. They skulk behind headlands or at the mouths of little streams, and then leap out at whatever passes by.”

“You make them sound like ferrets, or other little vicious animals,” Sostratos said.

“That’s how I feel about them,” Menedemos replied. “Don’t you?”

“I feel that way about pirates, not about pirate ships,” Sostratos said. “Ships are just-ships. It’s the whoresons inside ‘em who make the trouble.”

“You’re too subtle for me. If I see a pentekonter or a hemiolia, I want to sink it right there on the spot,” Menedemos said. “I don’t care who’s in it. Whoever’s in a ship like that is bound to be up to no good, because you can’t do good in a ship like that. If it weren’t for pirates, there wouldn’t be ships like that.”

“That’s why they’re going to build that trihemiolia you were talking about last fall,” Sostratos said. “She’ll be a pirate-hunter’s dream ship, if she sails the way everybody thinks she will.”

“And that’s why you build a new ship: to see if she sails the way everybody thinks she will, I mean,” Menedemos answered. “I wouldn’t mind being her skipper, though-I’ll tell you that.”

“If anyone’s earned the right, you have,” his cousin said. “If not for you, there wouldn’t be a trihemiolia.”

Menedemos shrugged. “That’s true. But I’ll tell you something else every bit as true, my dear: I’m out here on the Inner Sea, bound for Phoenicia to make a living for my family, and there are plenty of captains back in Rhodes who want to command a trihemiolia every bit as much as Ida”

“That’s not fair,” Sostratos said.

“The world’s not fair,” Menedemos replied with another shrug. “Anybody who goes out in it a little bit will tell you the same. Sooner or later, I expect I’ll get a chance. And when I do, I’ll show people what kind of officer I am.” That seemed enough of that. He pointed toward Ptolemaios’ approaching merchantmen. “Those are big ships, aren’t they?”

“I think they’re bigger than the ones that brought grain into Syracuse for Agathokles sailing season before last.” Sostratos plucked at his beard. “It makes sense they should be, I suppose, Agathokles had to take what he could get. Ptolemaios can pick and choose.”

“And Ptolemaios has more money than Agathokles ever dreamt of,” Menedemos added.

“I said something about Kroisos a little while ago. Ptolemaios has more money than Kroisos ever dreamt of,” Sostratos said. “Ptolemaios has more money than anybody ever dreamt of, except maybe the Great Kings of Persia-and they held Egypt, too.”

“Egypt’s the richest country in the world. It’s so rich, it hardly seems fair,” Menedemos said. Not only was the land rich in gold (and emeralds, as he had reason to know), but the Nile floods renewed the soil every year. They let the peasants raise enormous crops (some small part of which lay in the holds of those approaching round ships), and let whoever ruled Egypt collect even more enormous amounts of taxes.

“Ahoy!” The shout came thin across the sea from a sailor at the bow of the leading merchantman. “Ahoy, the galley! What ship are you?”

Are you a pirate? If you are a pirate, will you admit it? That was what the fellow meant. Menedemos shouted back: “We’re the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes.”

“Out of Rhodes, eh?” The sailor on the round ship sounded suspicious. He had reason to; with Rhodes a leading trading partner for Egypt, a pirate would do well to disguise himself as coming from that island. “What trading house are you from?”

“Philodemos and Lysistratos’,” Menedemos replied. “Philodemos is my father; Lysistratos is my toikharkhos’ father.” Maybe Ptolemaios’ man knew a bit about Rhodes, or maybe he was just seeing if pirates would stumble trying to invent something plausible. Either way, Menedemos was not the sort of man to let him get by with cheek unchallenged. He shouted a question of his own: “What ship are you?”

And he got an answer. “This is the Isidora, out of Alexandria,” answered the sailor on the round ship. Then the fellow realized he didn’t have to tell Menedemos anything. He shook his fist at the Aphrodite. “It’s none of your business who we are and what we’re doing.”

“No, eh? But it’s your business who we are and what we’re up to?” Menedemos returned. “Well, you can go howl, pal! We’re free Hellenes just the same as you are, and we’ve got as much right to ask you questions as you do with us.”

“Euge!” Sostratos and Diokles said together, A couple of sailors clapped their hands. Menedemos grinned at the praise. The arrogance of the soldiers and sailors who served under Macedonian marshals could surpass belief.

The man on the Isidora had it in full measure, too. He threw back his head and laughed as the two ships passed closest to each other. “Go ahead and bark, little dog,” he said. “When a big dog decides he wants your house, you’ll run away yelping with your tail between your legs.”

Rage ripped through Menedemos. “I ought to sink that son of a whore. Who does he think he is, to talk to me that way?”

Again, Sostratos and Diokles spoke together. This time, they both said, “No!” Menedemos knew they were right, but he still steamed like a sealed pot forgotten in a fire. He felt as if he could burst and scatter shards everywhere.

One after another, the grain ships glided past the Aphrodite, The men aboard them no doubt thought them majestic. To Menedemos, wallowing seemed a better word. They sailed well enough with the wind right behind them, as it was now. Trying to tack against it, though, they were so slow as to be nearly helpless.

A sailor on the Aphrodite shouted, “I hope real pirates get you, you fig-suckers!”

That went too far. “By the dog, Teleutas, keep quiet!” Menedemos hissed. “They aren’t our enemies.”

“No, but they’re acting like a bunch of wide-arsed little pricks,” Teleutas answered. Menedemos snorted out an exasperated breath. He’d had Teleutas aboard for three sailing seasons in a row now, and he kept wondering why. The man did as little as he could to get by. He wasn’t particularly brave. He wasn’t even an entertaining sort, to make up for his other lacks. If he keeps on like this, I’d do better to leave him behind next year, Menedemos thought. Let him drive some other captain crazy-

He’d certainly hit a nerve aboard Ptolemaios’ transports. Mention of pirates did, with honest sailors. The sailors who heard him screamed abuse at the Aphrodite. They made obscene gestures. They shook their fists. One of them even threw something at the merchant galley. Whatever it was, it splashed into the Inner Sea far short of its goal. Teleutas laughed a mocking laugh, which only inflamed the men from Alexandria more.

“They know who we are,” Sostratos said unhappily. “They won’t forget. They’ll blacken our name in every port Ptolemaios holds-and he holds a lot of them.”

“I know,” Menedemos said. “What can I do about it now, except maybe pitch Teleutas over the side?”

“Nothing.” His cousin scuffed a bare foot across the planks of the poop deck. “I’m the one who took him on a couple of years ago, there right before we sailed. I’ve been sorry at least half a dozen times since.”

“I had the same thought,” Menedemos answered. “He doesn’t really pull his weight, and he does get into trouble-and get us into trouble. But he’s never made me quite angry enough at him to sail off without him… and I did bark at the Alexandrians before he did, curse it. I guess I’m likely not the first captain he’s aggravated, that’s all,”

“Well, there goes the last grain ship,” Sostratos said. “Many goodbyes to them-but I wouldn’t wish pirates on anybody.”

“No, neither would I,” Menedemos said, and then, “Well, hardly anybody.”

He couldn’t tell by the coastline where Lykia stopped and Pamphylia began-the difference lay in the people, not the landscape. But Olbia, a strong fortress on the far side of the Kataraktes River, unquestionably belonged to Pamphylia. The Kataraktes lived up to its name, rushing down from the mountains in back of Olbia toward the sea and booming over the rocks as it came.

Menedemos, used to the little Rhodian streams that dried up in the summertime, eyed the river with no small wonder. Sostratos smiled at him and asked, “If you think this is such a marvel, what will you make of the Nile if we go to Alexandria one day? “

“I haven’t the faintest idea, my dear,” Menedemos replied. “But the Nile, I’m sure, doesn’t make such a racket as it flows into the Inner Sea.”

“No, indeed. You’re right about that,” his cousin agreed. “The cataracts of the Nile are thousands of stadia up the stream. Herodotos talks about them.”

“Herodotos talks about everything, doesn’t he?”

“He was curious. He traveled all over the known world to find out what really happened, and how it happened, and, most important of all, why it happened. If it weren’t for him, there might not be any such thing as history today.”

“And would we be any worse off if there weren’t?” Menedemos murmured. That horrified Sostratos no less than Teleutas had horrified Ptolemaios’ sailors. Menedemos had hoped it would.

But then Sostratos gave him a sour smile. “You’re trying to poke me again. I’m sorry, best one, but I don’t feel like being poked.”

“No, eh?” Menedemos used a finger to poke his cousin in the ribs. Sostratos yelped. Then he snapped at the finger as if he were a dog. Menedemos jerked it back in a hurry. They both laughed. Menedemos said, “If you think I look tasty, you haven’t been taking enough opson with your sitos. You need to eat better.”

“If I wanted to eat well all the time, I wouldn’t go to sea,” Sostratos answered. “Stale bread, cheese, olives, dried fish… Not your opsophagos’ feast. And what you can get in a portside tavern isn’t much better. You can’t catch enough fish from an akatos to make for much in the way of fancy opson, and, even if you could, you couldn’t cook it in any particularly interesting ways.”

“Nothing wrong with grilling a fish on a brazier,” Menedemos said. “These fancy chefs who want to smother everything in cheese aren’t half so smart as they think they are.”

“Don’t let your Sikon hear that,” Sostratos warned him. “He’ll throw you out of his kitchen on your ear.”

“Oh, no.” Menedemos tossed his head. “Sikon’s a good cook, but that doesn’t mean he’s always fancy. He says sometimes cooks use those complicated, spicy sauces because they don’t want you to know they’ve botched the cooking of the fish itself.”

“I wouldn’t want to argue with him.”

“Neither would I, by Zeus!” Menedemos said. “Nobody in his right mind would want to pick a quarrel with Sikon. He’s one of those slaves who’ve been there forever and think the place is really theirs. And that’s part of the trouble he’s having with Baukis.”

“She thinks he has to watch every obolos?”

“Partly that. And partly she’s my father’s second wife, so she doesn’t think she gets the respect she deserves.” Menedemos laughed. He could talk about, even think about, Baukis as long as he did so impersonally. He went on, “And, of course, Sikon doesn’t give anybody any more respect than he has to, and not as much as he should. That’s why they squabble all the time.”

“What does your father say?”

“As little as he can. He doesn’t want to make Baukis angry, but he doesn’t want to make Sikon angry, either.” Menedemos rolled his eyes. “If he were as mild with me as he is with them, we’d get along a lot better.”

“If he won’t do anything to end the bickering, isn’t ending the bickering your place?” Sostratos asked.

“Well, it might be, if I weren’t at sea half the year. And I don’t want to get stuck in the middle of the quarrel, either. Sikon’s a jewel. I don’t want him mad at me. And I don’t want to get my stepmother”-he chuckled at that; the idea still struck him as absurd-”upset, either. That might make my father give me an even harder time than he does already.”

What he wanted to do with Baukis, to Baukis, would make his father give him something worse than a hard time. So far, here as in few other places, his will had ruled his desires. That was what a man was supposed to do. Having desires was one thing, acting on them when they were foolish something else again. In the Iliad, both Agamemnon and Akhilleus had put their individual desires above what was good for the strong-greaved Akhaioi, and both had suffered because of it.

“You do make sense,” Sostratos said. “You make more sense than usual, as a matter of fact.” He reached out and set a hand on Menedemos’ forehead. “Are you feeling all right, my dear?”

“I was, till you started bothering me.” Menedemos shook the hand away.

His cousin laughed. “That sounds more like you. Are you enough like yourself to answer a question?”

“Depends on what it is,” Menedemos replied. More than once, Sostratos had asked why he seemed quieter and gloomier than usual. He’d given either evasive replies or none. He didn’t intend to tell Sostratos or anyone else what he thought about his father’s second wife, what he wanted to do with her.

But Sostratos had something else in mind; “From where along the coast do you want to sail for Cyprus?”

“Ah,” Menedemos beamed at his cousin. That was a completely legitimate question, and one he’d been thinking about himself. “I’d like to go a good deal farther east before I swing the ship south across the Inner Sea. The shortest passage between the mainland and the island, I think, is about four hundred stadia.”

“Yes, I believe that’s about right,” Sostratos agreed. “My only reservation is, this whole southern coast of Anatolia-Lykia, Pamphylia, Kilikia-crawls with pirates. I was just wondering if you’d weighed the risk of a longer voyage over the open sea against that of an attack as we make our way east.”

“Not easy to do,” Menedemos said slowly. “There are always risks when you cross the open sea. You can’t avoid them. That’s why you stay within sight of land whenever you can-unless you’re going somewhere downhill, so to speak, the way Alexandria is from Cyprus, where you can really count on the wind wafting you along during the sailing season. Pirates, now, pirates are different. They might not bother us at all, and there’s no risk to sailing east if they don’t.”

“Of course there’s a risk,” Sostratos said. “They might attack. That’s what makes a. risk. If we knew they would attack, it wouldn’t be a risk any more. It would be a certainty.”

“Have it your way, then. I think we’re saying the same thing in different words. But I don’t know how to weigh the one risk against the other. Since it’s easier to gauge the risk of sailing across the open sea, that’s the one I want to cut out as far as I can.”

“All right,” Sostratos said. “I’m not sure I agree with you, but I’m not sure I don’t, either. You’re the captain.”

“Would k make you happier if I talk to Diokles before I finally make up my mind?” Menedemos asked.

Sostratos dipped his head. “I’m always happy when you talk to Diokles. He’s forgotten more in the way of seamanship than most people ever learn.”

“I’m not interested in what he’s forgotten, I’m interested in what he remembers.”

But the oarmaster proved less helpful than Menedemos had hoped. He scratched his chin as he thought it over. At last, he said, “I’ve seen skippers do both, matter of fact. Six oboloi to the drakhma either way.”

“Well, in that case, I’m going to keep sailing along the coast here, as I’d planned,” Menedemos said. “Even if a pirate does look us over, we aren’t likely to have to fight him. Most of them want easy pickings-a round ship with only a few sailors aboard that’s too slow to run away and too weak to fight back. They can see that we’d give ‘em a good battle even if they did manage to catch us.”

“Most of them can,” Diokles agreed. “Of course, there’s always the odd bastard you can’t count on, like that fellow in the strait between Andros and Euboia last season.”

Menedemos relayed most of Diokles’ opinion to Sostratos. He didn’t mention the pirate who’d attacked them the previous sailing season. He knew what his cousin would do on hearing about that pirate and his crew: he would start cursing them for stealing the gryphon’s skull. Menedemos had heard those curses too many times to want to listen to them again.

Sostratos said, “It’s your choice to make, I hope it turns out well,”

“You’re not going to make doleful comments like that till we get to Cyprus, are you?” Menedemos asked. “They don’t make the crew very happy, you know.”

“Oh, yes. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I do know the difference between what I can say to you and what I can say when the sailors are listening, believe me.”

“I hope so.” But Menedemos didn’t press it. His cousin had always been good about keeping his opinions to himself when they might damage morale. To change the subject, Menedemos asked, “Shall we find the market square here? You never can tell what they might have.”

“Yes, we might as well, because you never can.” By Sostratos’ expression, he hoped for another gryphon s skull. But he also remembered the practical side a merchant needed, for he went on, “And I’ll bring some perfume along. You never can tell what we might sell, either.”

“No, indeed,” Menedemos said. “If we sold a book in Phaselis, by the gods, we can sell anything anywhere.”

But Olbia’s agora, close by the harbor, proved a disappointment. It wasn’t that the market square had nothing for sale, only that it had nothing to warm the heart of an akatos’ captain. The Olbians bought and sold grain and olives and local wine and dried and fresh fish and plain pots- all useful stuff, but none of it worth Menedemos’ while. There was also a separate timber market next to the main agora, but that didn’t interest him, either.

“Round ships would do splendid business here,” he said. “As for us…” He put a hand in front of his mouth, as if hiding a yawn.

“I know.” Sostratos sounded gloomy, too, “You couldn’t imagine a more ordinary place if you tried for a year,” He raised his voice nevertheless: “Perfume! Fine perfume from Rhodian roses!”

People walked by without even looking. “I wonder if they have noses here,” Menedemos grumbled. “By the way some of them smell, I doubt it.”

“Fine Rhodian perfume!” Sostratos called again, before going on in a lower voice, “You never can tell. That hetaira in Miletos last summer-”

“Oh, you lucky dog!” Menedemos said. “That she wanted silk was one thing. That she wanted you, too…” Such things happened to him now and again. He hadn’t expected them to happen to his staid cousin.

Thinking along with him, Sostratos answered, “You can’t have all the luck all the time, you know. Some of it has to stick to other people, too.”

“Oh? Why?” Menedemos asked.

“That’s an argument for another day, my dear,” Sostratos said as he held out a jar of perfume to a passerby. “From Rhodes. The finest…”

The passerby kept walking. Sostratos’ shoulders slumped. “This is the hardest part of the business for me: telling strangers they ought to buy something from me, I mean.”

“Well, how will they know if you don’t tell them?” Menedemos asked reasonably.

“I keep telling myself the same thing,” Sostratos said. “It helps, but only so much. Then I remember how it annoys me when I’m walking through the agora at Rhodes to have some loudmouthed, quick-talking fellow from another polis stick something under my nose and tell me I can’t hope to live another day without it, whatever it is.”

“But you buy every once in a while, don’t you?” Menedemos said. “I know I do.”

“Yes, but I always feel like a fool afterwards,” Sostratos said.

“That’s not the point,” Menedemos said. “The point is, every so often somebody will part with his silver. And who cares how he feels afterwards?”

As if to prove the point, they did make some sales. The first was to a Hellene a few years older than they were, who said, “I just got married a couple of months ago. I think my wife would like this, don’t you?”

“Would you expect us to say no?” Sostratos asked.

“Pay no attention to him, best one,” Menedemos told the prospective customer. “He’s too honest for his own good.” He laughed.

So did the newly wed Hellene. After a moment, halfheartedly, so did Sostratos. The local himself smelled powerfully of fish. Fish scales glinted on his arms and legs and on his chiton. Probably in the dried-fish trade, Menedemos judged. Whatever trade he was in, he made good money at it, for he paid the Rhodians’ price with little haggling.

Menedemos didn’t doubt the trade of the next fellow who stopped before them. The sword on his belt and the scars on his face and right arm proclaimed him a soldier. So did his Macedonian accent, which was so thick as to be almost unintelligible. Little by little, Menedemos gathered that he wanted the perfume for a hetaira named Gnathaina.

“Ah, she calls herself after her jaw, eh?” Menedemos had to tap his own jaw-gnatbos in Greek-to get the Macedonian to understand what he meant.

“Aye, so she do,” the soldier said at last.

“Well, friend, is she good with that jaw of hers?” Menedemos asked with a wink. The Macedonian didn’t follow that at all. He did buy the perfume, though, which was what really mattered.

They made their biggest sale of the day as the sun sank in the direction of Lykia. The fellow who bought several jars was plump and prosperous, as smoothly shaven a man as Menedemos had ever seen. He couldn’t decide if the local was Hellene or Pamphylian; most of the people hereabouts spoke Greek with the same slightly nasal accent. Whatever he was, the Olbian already smelled sweet.

He also haggled with great enthusiasm and persistence, and he got a better price for his perfume than either the newlywed or the Macedonian. After he’d clasped hands on the bargain, he said, “My girls will be happy to daub this stuff on.”

“Your girls?” A lamp went on in Menedemos’ head. “You keep a brothel?”

“That’s right,” the sleek fellow answered. “I’ll do plenty of extra business on account of this, too. Men want their girls smelling good, not all sweaty and nasty.” He hesitated. A moment later, when he asked, “You and your friend here feel like one on the house?” Menedemos understood why: generosity warring with a brothelkeeper’s usual stinginess. For a wonder, generosity won.

“What do you think?” Menedemos asked, expecting his cousin to toss his head.

But Sostratos said, “Why not? Been awhile since I had a little fun.” He turned to the brothelkeeper. “The sun will probably have set by the time we have to go back to the harbor. Will you give us a torchbearer to light the way?”

“Certainly, best one,” the man said. “You’ll be a paying customer if you come for another go tomorrow, or I may want to buy something else from you. Either way, I can’t afford to have you knocked over the head.”

He sounded perfectly serious, as if he wouldn’t have cared what happened to the Rhodians if it weren’t for the off chance he might do business with them again one day. And he probably wouldn’t. Traveling all over the Inner Sea, Menedemos had got to know a fair number of brothelkeepers. Their trade made them hard and remorselessly practical.

“Well, come on,” the fellow said now. He sounded resigned; he might be regretting his impulse of a moment before but without any good way to go back on it.

“No point to bringing more than a drakhma or so along,” Menedemos said pointedly. Sostratos got the hint and dipped his head. They both took leather pouches from their belts and stowed them on the Aphrodite. The brothelkeeper watched attentively. Menedemos wanted him to; this way, he wouldn’t decide robbery made good business.

The brothel lay only a few blocks from the harbor and the agora. Menedemos thought he could have found his way back on his own. Still, though, a torchbearer who knew Olbia would be welcome. Navigating in a strange town by moon- and starlight wasn’t something Menedemos wanted to try unless he had to, and that would be all the light there was if he and Sostratos came back by themselves. No one wasted torches or lamp oil to light the streets after sunset.

Inside the brothel, some of the dozen or so women were spinning wool into thread, which made the brothelkeeper money even when they weren’t lying with men. Three or four others played dice for khalkoi or oboloi. A couple of others ate bread and olive oil and drank watered wine. They weren’t naked-they hadn’t been expecting business. But none of them veiled her face, as a respectable woman or even (perhaps, or especially) a high-class hetaira would have done. As far as Menedemos was concerned, that was exciting enough by itself.

“Take your pick, friends,” the brothelkeeper told the Rhodians. He held up the perfume jars to the women. “I got this essence of roses for you from these fellows. I want whichever of you they pick to give ‘em a good time.”

Menedemos pointed to one of the women playing knucklebones. “Come on, sweetheart. Yes, you.”

“All right. I come,” she answered resignedly in accented Greek. She was about his age, swarthy, with a prominent nose and hair so black it was almost blue. She wasn’t beautiful-as well hope to find a ruby the size of a man’s thumb as a beautiful girl in a harborside whorehouse-but she wasn’t ugly, either. As she got to her feet, Sostratos picked a woman, too: one of those who’d been spinning. Menedemos hadn’t given her a second glance and had other things on his mind now.

The whore he’d chosen took him to a little room that held a bed, a stool, and not much else. As Menedemos shut the door behind them, he asked, “What do I call you?”

She looked at him in surprise. “Most men do not bother to ask. You can call me Armene. It is not my name, but Hellenes cannot say my name.”

“That means you’re from Armenia, doesn’t it?” he said. He had a vague idea where the place was: somewhere in eastern Anatolia or the Caucasus. He didn’t think he’d ever met anyone from that land before.

Armene nodded, which by itself would have proved her no Hellene. “Yes. My valley had no rain two years in a row. My father sold me to a slave trader to keep me alive and let him and my mother buy food so they could live, too. The slave trader sold me to Kritias here, and so…” She shrugged once, and then, shrugging again, pulled her long chiton off over her head.

Her body was stocky but still curved, her breasts large and heavy and tipped with dark nipples. Though a barbarian, she’d taken up the Hellenic custom of singeing away the hair between her legs. Menedemos took off his tunic, too, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I am a gift for you, yes?” Armene said. “Tell me what you want, then.” She couldn’t keep a certain apprehension from her voice. He’d heard that in other brothels. The women had no choice and knew it too well.

Menedemos stretched out on the bed. “Come here. Lie down beside me.” She did. The bed was narrow for two side by side. Her breasts brushed his chest; her legs bumped his.

She gave him a worried look. “I am sorry.”

“It’s all right,” He squeezed her breasts, then lowered his head to them. Surprisingly often, even a slave in a brothel would take pleasure if a man worked a little to give it to her. Menedemos caressed her. He stroked her between her legs, as a Rhodian hetaira had taught him to do a long time before.

After a while, though, Armene set her hand on his. “You are a kind man,” she said, “but I do not kindle. I do this, but I do not enjoy it.”

“All right. I thought I’d try,” he said, and she nodded again. He rolled onto his back. “Why don’t you ride me like a racehorse?” If the brothel-keeper-Kritias, Armene had called him-was going to give him a present, he’d take the most expensive one he could get. If he were paying for it, having the girl climb on top would have cost him more than bending her forward or bending her back.

She nodded as she swung herself over him. “I thought you would ask this.”

“Why?”

“Because I am doing the work,” she answered. She took him in hand and guided him into her, then slowly began to move. Her breasts hung just above his face, like sweet, ripe fruit. He leaned up a little and teased her nipples with his tongue. She kept methodically moving up and down, up and down.

Before long, Menedemos was moving, too, driving his spear home with every thrust. His hands clutched her meaty buttocks. The bed squeaked under the two of them. As his delight peaked, he went into her as deeply as he could, holding her against him till the spasm of pleasure passed.

Then, laughing, he said, “You see? You didn’t do all the work.”

“No, not all,” Armene agreed as she slid off him. Some of his seed dribbled down onto his hipbone. “Good,” she said. “The more out, the less in to make a baby.” That wasn’t Menedemos’ worry. He rubbed the stuff off of him and onto the mattress cover while Armene squatted over a chamber pot she pulled out from under the bed. He’d seen more than a few women, whores and bored wives alike, assume that position after making love. He’d heard more than a few of them say the same thing, too.

He and Armene both dressed. With a conspiratorial grin, he gave her a couple of oboloi, whispering, “Don’t tell Kritias,” She popped the little silver coins into her mouth. She and Menedemos went out into the waiting room.

Sostratos and the woman he’d chosen emerged from her chamber a few minutes later, Menedemos still thought her plain. By the way she smiled now, though, Sostratos had made her enjoy their time together. Menedemos laughed to himself. He tried to please women because, when they took pleasure, it added to his own, Sostratos, he suspected, did it for its own sake. He hadn’t asked his cousin about that, but Sostratos also looked pretty contented now.

The whores had lit lamps in the waiting room. “Boy!” Kritias the brothelkeeper shouted. No one appeared. Kritias muttered to himself. “Boy!” he shouted again. “Get your lazy, worthless carcass in here, before I sell you to a silver miner I know!”

That brought the slave-a scrawny youth of about fourteen-on the run. Maybe Kritias was joking. The boy didn’t care to take the chance. Slaves sent to the mines seldom lasted long. “What you need, boss?” he asked.

“Light a torch and take these fellows back to the harbor. Then hurry back here. I know how long you need to get there and back. If you don’t hurry, I’ll make you sorry.”

“I’ll hurry. I’ll hurry.” Under his breath, the slave added something that wasn’t Greek. The torch hissed and popped and crackled as it caught from a lamp. The boy nodded to Menedemos and Sostratos. “Let’s go.”

“Have a good time?” Diokles asked when they got back to the Aphrodite.

“Hard to have a bad time with a woman, wouldn’t you say?” Sostratos answered. He handed the slave an obolos. The youth stuck the coin in his cheek and went back into Olbia. Sostratos continued, “She said her mother sold her into slavery to keep them both from starving.”

“Did she?” Menedemos said. “The girl I was with said her father sold her for the same reason.” He shrugged. “They both might have been telling the truth.”

“Yes, but they both might have been lying to make us feel sorry for them and give them a little something,” Sostratos said. “You have to be foolish to believe much of what you hear from a whore in a brothel, I suppose, but from now on I’ll believe even less.”

Menedemos took off his chiton, crumpled it into a ball, and laid it on the poop deck. He wrapped himself in his mantle and lay down for the night. Sostratos imitated him. The timbers were hard, but Menedemos didn’t mind. He slept aboard the merchant galley often enough during the sailing season to be used to the way they felt. He yawned, twisted a couple of times, said, “Good night,” to his cousin, and slept.

The Aphrodite crawled east along the southern coast of Anatolia from Pamphylia into Kilikia. Every so often, when she went farther from shore than usual, Sostratos got glimpses of Cyprus, lying low on the southern horizon. He’d never come so far east, but the island didn’t excite him as it would have had it been the merchant galley’s destination. As things were, he looked forward to visiting it for a little while and then pressing on toward Phoenicia.

“Some of the towns on Cyprus are Phoenician, you know,” Menedemos reminded him. “They planted colonies there at the same time we Hellenes did.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Sostratos said impatiently-everyone knew that. “But we probably won’t stop at any of them before we go farther east, will we?”

Menedemos tossed his head. “I hadn’t planned to, no. I was going to round that eastern peninsula the island has and then sail down to Salamis, and that’s a Hellenic city. From Salamis, you go straight across the Inner Sea to Phoenicia.”

“All right.” Sostratos sighed. “I’d have liked a chance to practice my Aramaic before we got there, though.”

“Well, when you were picking a girl in that brothel in Olbia, you should have asked if any of them could make those funny noises,” Menedemos said.

Sostratos stared at his cousin in astonishment. “By the dog of Egypt, you’re right. I should have. Slaves come from all over the place. One of them probably did speak it. I never would have thought of that.”

“To be fair, my dear, you didn’t go there to talk,” Menedemos said.

Diokles laughed. He sent Menedemos a reproachful look. “Confound it, skipper, you made me mess up the rowers’ stroke.”

“Too bad,” Menedemos said with a grin.

“Why didn’t that occur to me, though?” Sostratos asked himself, ignoring both of them. “We could have screwed and talked.”

“And talked, and talked,” Menedemos said. “If you’d found a woman who spoke Aramaic, you probably wouldn’t have bothered getting her clothes off.”

“Not likely!” Sostratos said what he had to say, though Menedemos might have been right. Would he have been too interested in talking with a woman to bother bedding her? It wasn’t certain, but he knew it wasn’t impossible, either.

While Sostratos pondered that, his cousin pulled one of the Aphrodite’s steering-oar tillers in toward him and pushed the other away. The akatos swung toward the south, away from the Kilikian coast and toward the island ahead. The yard had run from the port bow back toward the stern on the starboard side, to take best advantage of the northerly breeze as the Aphrodite sailed east. Now, with the ship running before the wind, the sailors hurried to straighten the yard even before Menedemos gave orders.

We have a good crew, Sostratos thought. They know their business.

He looked back past the akatos’ sternpost. The stretch of sea between the ship and the mainland grew wider and wider. In most circumstances, that would have filled him with foreboding. Not here, not when every stadion farther from Kilikia meant a stadion closer to Cyprus.

The sun shone brightly from a blue sky dotted by only a handful of puffy white clouds. A storm seemed unimaginable. Sostratos resolutely refused to imagine one and tried not to remember the squall off the Lykian coast. Instead, he turned to Menedemos and said, “We ought to make the island by nightfall tomorrow.”

“Yes, that seems about right,” his cousin said. “If I’d turned south earlier today, I’d sail on after nightfall tonight, steering by the stars. But we’ll be at sea all night either way, so I don’t see much point to it.”

“One night at sea shouldn’t be bad.” Sostratos pointed down to the blue, blue water. “Look! Isn’t that a turtle?”

“I didn’t see it,” Menedemos answered. “But I’ve heard they lay eggs on that eastern promontory. Hardly anybody lives there, though, so I don’t know for sure. Here-take the tillers for a minute, will you? I’ve got to piss.”

When Sostratos did take hold of the tillers, he felt rather like Herakles taking the weight of the world so Atlas could go after the golden apples of the Hesperides. Menedemos handled the steering oars from dawn till dusk every day. The only difference was, Atlas had intended to walk away from the job for good. Menedemos would take it back in a moment.

Sostratos felt the Aphrodite’?, motion much more intimately through the tillers than he did with the soles of his feet. The slightest swing of the steering oars made the ship change direction; they were strong enough to control the akatos’ course despite the best efforts of the rowers. She could have got along perfectly well with only one, though the second did make her easier to handle.

“No rain today,” Sostratos said to Menedemos’ back as his cousin eased himself over the side. “No gods-detested round ships coming out of the rain, either.”

“There’d better not be,” Menedemos said with a laugh.

“That wasn’t my fault!” Sostratos exclaimed. He’d been steering a year before when a merchantman loomed out of the rain and struck the Aphrodite a glancing blow, carrying away one steering oar and staving in some portside timbers. She’d had to limp back to Kos and wait for repairs, which took much longer than anyone had expected.

Menedemos shook himself off and let his chiton fall. “Well, so it wasn’t,” he said. Had he tried to say anything else, Sostratos would have given him all the argument he wanted and then a little more besides.

As things were, Sostratos just said, “May I steer a little while longer?” He scanned the sea. “There’s nothing for me to run into-I don’t even see any dolphins right now.”

“All right, go ahead.” Menedemos made as if to bow. “I’ll stand around being useless.”

“If you’re saying that’s what I do when I’m not steering, I’ll have something to say to you, too,” Sostratos replied. Menedemos only laughed.

A tern flew out from the direction of the mainland and perched on the yard. The black-capped bird cocked its head now this way, now that, as it peered down into the sea. Laughing still, Menedemos said, “All right, O best of toikharkhoi-what fare do we charge for taking him to Cyprus?”

“If he pays us a sprat, we’re ahead of the game,” Sostratos answered. “If he shits in a sailor’s hair, we’re behind, and we tell him we’ll never take him anywhere else.”

After perhaps a quarter of an hour, the tern took off and plunged headfirst into the water of the Inner Sea. It emerged a moment later with a fish just above sprat size in its beak. Instead of returning to the yard, it flew over the Aphrodite and away. It must have clamped down on the still-wiggling fish, for the last couple of digits’ width of the tail fell at Sostratos’ feet.

“There, you see?” he told Menedemos. “I wish some of the people we deal with would pay us so promptly.”

“Well, that’s the truth, and I can’t tell you otherwise,” his cousin said.

Menedemos let him steer for about an hour, then took back the tillers. As Sostratos stepped away from them, he did feel useless. Most of what you do on a trading run, you do ashore, he reminded himself. He knew that was true, but it made him feel no more useful at this moment. He looked back past the stern again, hack past the ship’s boat that followed the Aphrodite almost as the Great Dog and the Little Dog followed Orion through the night sky of winter.

Not long after Menedemos took the tillers, Aristeidas spotted a sail off to starboard. Sostratos peered east himself. He might have got a glimpse of a pale sail right at the edge of the horizon, or he might have imagined it. He couldn’t tell. Did he really see it, or did he imagine he saw it because sharp-sighted Aristeidas said it was there? Plenty of men believed things for no better reason than that someone they respected- whether rightly or wrongly-said it was so. Am I one of the herd? Maybe I am.

Then the lynx-eyed lookout said, “Gone now-under the horizon. Must have seen us and not wanted to find out what we were.”

“If we were pirates, they wouldn’t get free of us so easy,” Menedemos said. “We’d be after them like a hound after a hare. And we’d catch them, too. No place to hide on the sea-they couldn’t duck into a hole or under a thorn bush, the way a hare can.”

Cyprus was visibly closer than the Anatolian mainland when, with the setting of the sun, the Aphrodite ’s anchors splashed into the Inner Sea. Sostratos washed down barley rolls, cheese, onions, and briny olives with watered wine. “I should have kept the fish tail the tern dropped,” he said. “It would be the fanciest opson I’ve got.”

“An opsophagos who goes to sea for the fish is going to be disappointed most of the time,” Menedemos answered. “Yes, he’s right above all those beauties, but how often does he ever see them?”

“Somebody caught a lovely mullet last year-remember?” Sostratos said.

“Yes-one mullet, for one sailor out of the whole crew,” Menedemos said. “Those aren’t good odds, you know.”

“Too true,” Sostratos agreed. “But I do wonder what sort of interesting fish they catch off Cyprus and Phoenicia.”

“We found out some of the people thereabouts don’t eat fish at all- and you say your Ioudaioi won’t eat pork, isn’t that right?” Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head. His cousin laughed. “Who can guess why barbarians have the strange customs they do? If they didn’t, they’d be Hellenes.”

Once more, Sostratos quoted Herodotos quoting Pindaros: “ ‘Custom is king of all,’ That’s true wherever one goes, I’m sure, with Hellenes as well as barbarians.”

By the next afternoon, he could clearly see the forested hills of Cyprus’ eastern spike of land. Hawks wheeled above the woods. Now and then one would swoop down after prey it could see and Sostratos couldn’t. A gull that was resting contentedly on the masthead took off all at once with a harsh squawk of fear and a mad flapping of wings. The falcon that flew past paid it no heed but went on its way straight and swift as an arrow.

“Splendid bird,” Sostratos murmured.

“The gull didn’t think so,” Menedemos said.

“Yes, the gull hared out of there,” Sostratos replied, and his cousin made a face at the pun on laros and lagos. Sostratos smiled. As far as he was concerned, that pun welcomed him to Cyprus.