Over the Wine-Dark Sea Read online

  "If I were commanding the Aphrodite, we'd go by way of Corinth," Sostratos said slowly. He scratched his chin. "But that's not what you asked, is it? If I were you, I expect we'd go by way of Cape Tainaron."

  Doing his best not to show whether Sostratos was right or not, Menedemos asked, "And why is that?"

  "Because you think we'll pick up mercenaries bound for Italy: either to Syracuse to fight against Carthage or to the mainland poleis to hold back the local barbarians," Sostratos answered. "Passengers are pure profit, after all."

  "So they are." Menedemos dipped his head in agreement. "And that is just what I intend to do, and for your reasons. Take note - you're not useless after all, no matter what anybody says."

  "You needn't sound so disappointed," Sostratos said. In a different tone of voice, that would have meant he still felt gloomy. As things were, he sounded more like his usual self. Because he sounded like his usual self, Menedemos could forget about him for a while, as he could forget about a parted line after it was spliced. He could - and he did.

  As he passed the southern tip of Khios, he swung the Aphrodite west for the passage across the Aegean. The akatos sailed well enough with the wind on the quarter; at his orders, the sailors swung the yard to take best advantage of it, and also brailed up some of the canvas on the leeward side. "A little more," he called, and they hauled again on the lines that raised the fabric section by section. He waved to show he was satisfied.

  First the Asian mainland and then Khios itself slid down below the horizon and out of sight astern. Nothing new appeared ahead, nor would anything till the next day. For the first time on the journey, the Aphrodite sailed out of sight of land. Besides his own ship, Menedemos saw a couple of fishing boats, a leaping dolphin, and a few birds. Other than that, nothing but sun and sky and sea.

  Diokles said, "Always seems a little odd, doesn't it, being out here all by our lonesome?"

  "It makes me wish there were a better way to guide a ship over the open ocean than steering by the sun and by guess," Menedemos answered.

  "I've sailed with some skippers who'd rather cross the open sea by night. They say they steer better by the stars than by the sun," Diokles said.

  "I've heard others say the same thing," Menedemos replied. "One of these times, I may try it myself. Not today, though. After a while, I want to raise the sail to the yard, put everyone on the oars, and get in more practice at fighting the ship."

  The keleustes rumbled approval, deep down in his throat. "That's a good notion, captain, no two ways about it. It's like most things: the more work we do, the better off we'll be."

  "With a sunny day, we can twist and turn however we like and have no trouble picking up our course again later," Menedemos added. "When it's all foggy and overcast, you have a hang of a time figuring out which way's which - have to go by wind and wave, and they can change on you before you know it."

  "That's true, by the gods. And in a storm . . ." Diokles rubbed his ring, as if speaking of a storm might make one blow up.

  "In a storm, you worry about staying afloat first and everything else later." Remembering his cousin for the first time in a while, Menedemos raised his voice: "In a storm, we'll chuck the peafowl over the side to lighten ship."

  "Suits me fine," Sostratos said, "as long as you're the one who explains to our fathers why we did it."

  Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic, as if that were a more frightening prospect than a storm. After a little thought, he decided it was. A storm would either blow over or sink him, but Sostratos' father, and especially his own, could keep him miserable for years to come.

  "Land ho!" Aristeidas called from the foredeck. Pointing, he went on, "Land off the port bow!"

  Sostratos was on the foredeck, too, wrestling a peahen back into her cage. He closed the door behind the squawking bird, slipped the bronze hooks into their eyes, and got to his feet. Shading his eyes with his hand, he peered in the direction the lookout's finger showed. "Your sight is sharper than mine," he said. Not very much later, though, he pointed, too. "No, wait - now I see it there." He turned and called back to the stern: "What island is that?"

  At the steering oars, Menedemos only shrugged. "We'll find out when we get a little closer. One of the Kyklades, anyway. I was aiming for Mykonos, but you don't always hit what you aim for when you get out of sight of land."

  "If that is Mykonos, we'll see a couple of little islands off to the south and east," Aristeidas told Sostratos. "I mean little islands, not much more than rocks."

  "Does anyone live on them?" Sostratos asked.

  The lookout shrugged. "Probably - but they aren't places where you'd want to stop and find out, if you know what I mean."

  In due course, the little islands did appear. Menedemos seemed as proud of them as if he'd invented them himself. "Is that navigating, or is that navigating?" he crowed when Sostratos came back to the poop deck.

  "That's navigating, or else good fortune." Sostratos had been annoyed enough lately that he wanted to annoy his cousin in return.

  But, to his own further annoyance, he couldn't. Menedemos just grinned at him and said, "You're right, of course. If you think I'll complain when the gods throw me a little good fortune, you're daft."

  That didn't even leave Sostratos any room to quarrel. He said, "We ought to put in at the island and take on water. We're getting low."

  "All right." Now Menedemos didn't look quite so happy. After a moment, though, he brightened. "I'll anchor offshore and let them bring it out in boats. That'll be easier and faster than beaching."

  "More expensive, too," Sostratos pointed out.

  "While we're going out to Italy, we spend money," Menedemos said airily. "When we get there, we make money." That was indeed how things were supposed to work. Menedemos took it for granted that they would work that way. Sostratos was the one who had to make them work that way.

  He started to get annoyed all over again, but checked himself. I take it for granted that we'll get to Italy so I can work on seeing that the voyage turns a profit. Menedemos is that one who has to make things work that way.

  The Aphrodite anchored off Panormos, on the northern coast of Mykonos. Her arrival at first produced more alarm in the little town than anything else. Only after a good deal of shouting could Menedemos convince the locals he wasn't commanding a pirate ship. "They think everything with oars is full of corsairs," he grumbled.

  "Maybe they have reason to think so," Sostratos answered. "If they do, we need to be wary in these waters."

  Menedemos clicked his tongue between his teeth. "I suppose so. Well, it's not as if it's something we didn't already know." With obvious relief at changing the subject, he pointed to the town. "Here comes the first boat."

  After that first boatman - a fellow who, though only a few years older than Sostratos and Menedemos, had lost most of his hair - delivered water to the Aphrodite and came back unscathed, more islanders came out to the akatos. After a while, Sostratos turned to Diokles. "You must have come here before," he said, and the oarmaster dipped his head. Sostratos went on, "Is it my imagination, or are there a lot of bald men on this island?"

  "No, sir, it's not your imagination," Diokles answered. "Haven't you ever heard somebody say, 'bald as a Mykonian'?"

  "I don't think so," Sostratos said. "Of course, now I'll probably hear it three times in the next two days. That's how those things seem to work."

  "So it is," Diokles said with a chuckle. Sostratos started to say something more, but the keleustes held up a hand. "Hold on a bit, would you? I want to hear what that fellow in the boat is telling the skipper."

  Sostratos outranked the oarmaster. Not only that, he was the son of one of the Aphrodite's owners. A lot of men, in such circumstances, would have gone right on talking. Menedemos probably would, Sostratos thought. But he fell silent, not least because he was also curious about what the local had to say.

  "That's right," the fellow said to Menedemos. "A ship just about the size of yours.
That's one of the reasons we all had the hair stand up on the backs of our necks when you sailed toward town." He had little hair save on the back of his neck - he was bald, too.

  "Do you know where she's based?" Menedemos asked.

  "Sure don't," the Mykonian answered, tossing his head. "Lots of beaches that'll hold a pirate ship. Plenty of little tiny islands here in the Kyklades, places where nobody lives, or else maybe a goatherd or two. A pirate crew could sail out of one of those and you'd never find it, except maybe by accident."

  "You're probably right." Menedemos didn't sound happy about agreeing.

  " 'Course I'm right," the bald man said with the sort of certainty only people who haven't traveled very far or done very much can have. He went on, "Plenty for the polluted son of a whore to feast on, too, what with all the ships bringing people to pray or to make offerings to Apollo on holy Delos."

  "Ah, Delos. That's right," Menedemos said. Sostratos found himself dipping his head, too. Along with its larger but less important neighbor, Rheneia, Delos - famous for being the birthplace of Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis - lay just west of Mykonos. Pirates could easily make a comfortable living preying on the ships that brought pious Hellenes there.

  "Since you ain't pirates, you'd be smart to watch out for 'em," the Mykonian said. "Otherwise, you might end up on Delos your own selves - in the slave markets, I mean."

  "We'll be careful," Menedemos assured him. The local didn't seem convinced. But he also didn't seem much interested in what happened to a ship full of strangers. With a shrug, he rowed back toward Panormos.

  "Well, well," Diokles said. "Isn't that interesting?"

  "Interesting, yes." Sostratos did his best to sound as detached as the oarmaster. "It's not as if we didn't know there would be pirates along the way. And we haven't run into this ship yet, whosever it may be."

  "If the gods be kind, we won't, either." Diokles rubbed the ring with the image of Herakles Alexikakos. But then a scowl darkened his weathered face. "Of course, if these pirates plunder ships bound for Delos, they don't fear gods or men. Too much of that these days, if anyone cares what I think. Back before so many men called themselves philosophers, most folks respected the gods. They didn't go around stealing from them."

  Sostratos bristled at that. He was about to launch into a spirited defense of philosophy and philosophers when Menedemos called, "Raise the anchors! Lower the sail! Let's be away - and everybody keep a sharp eye out for pirates, because there's supposed to be one in the neighborhood."

  "I wonder how many of your rowers brought swords aboard," Sostratos said to Diokles.

  "There'll be some - don't know how many myself, not offhand," the keleustes said. "Everyone'll have a knife. Belaying pins . . . Did your cousin bring his bow?"

  "I don't know," Sostratos answered. "I'm sorry."

  Diokles made unhappy clucking noises. "We ought to have at least one aboard. That way, nobody can start shooting at us without us shooting back." He rubbed the ring again. "Maybe I'm worrying about the reflection of a bone, like the dog in the fable. The sea is a big place. Maybe we won't have to worry about these pirates at all. I hope we don't."

  As the Aphrodite pulled away from Panormos, Sostratos asked Menedemos, "Do you have your bow? The keleustes is worried about it." He was worried about it, too, but didn't care to admit that to his cousin. Menedemos too often made him pay when he showed anything that looked like weakness.

  "I've got it," Menedemos answered. "I hope it's not the only one aboard. What I wish we had is a dart-thrower at the bow, like the ones Ptolemaios and Antigonos' fives carry. That would make a pirate ship sit up and take notice." He sighed. "Of course, we've got nowhere to put it, especially not with the peafowl all over the foredeck, and it'd be heavy enough to ruin the ship's trim. But I still wouldn't mind carrying one, not at times like this."

  The Aphrodite sailed through the channel between Mykonos and Tenos, the larger island to the northwest. Delos, which seemed hardly more than a speck of land, lay to port after the akatos cleared Mykonos. The polis of Delos stood on the island's west side. The white stone of the temples gleamed dazzlingly under a warm spring sun.

  Several boats went back and forth between Delos and Rheneia; the channel separating the two islands couldn't have been more than four stadia wide. "I wonder who's dying," Sostratos murmured.

  "What's that?" Menedemos said.

  "I wonder who's dying," Sostratos repeated. "Delos is sacred ground, you know - too sacred to be polluted by death. If somebody's in a bad way there, they take him across the channel to Rheneia to finish the job. They do the same for women in childbirth, too."

  "Childbirth's just about as bad as dying when it comes to pollution," Diokles said.

  Menedemos dipped his head. "Women's things are a strange business. I thank the gods every day for making me a man." Neither Sostratos nor the oarmaster disagreed with him.

  A tubby sailing ship approaching Delos from the northwest sheered off sharply when her crew spied the long, lean shape of the Aphrodite. Diokles grunted laughter. "If we were pirates, we'd have them for supper," he said.

  Sostratos' cousin steered the merchant galley south past Rheneia's western coast, which held a town even smaller and less prepossessing than Mykonos' Panormos. Menedemos clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Poor Rheneia," he said, "always running second behind its little neighbor. That must be hard."

  You wouldn't know, would you? Sostratos thought. He almost said it out loud, but ended up keeping quiet. What was the use? Menedemos might not even realize what he was talking about.

  Far to the south, beyond Rheneia, clouds swirled above Paros, twisting into all sorts of improbable patterns. Sostratos merely admired their beauty. To Diokles, the view of the island helped define the Aphrodite's route. "One nice thing about the Kyklades," the keleustes said. "There's always an island or two on the horizon somewhere, so you can figure out where you are."

  "It's a lot easier than navigating out of sight of land," Menedemos agreed.

  He had lynx-eyed Aristeidas at the bow as a lookout, but it was one of the sailors one the starboard side who sang out, "Sail ho!" and pointed west.

  As Sostratos had when Aristeidas sighted Mykonos, he peered in the direction in which the sailor pointed. This time, he scratched his head and said, "I don't see anything."

  "It's there," the man insisted. After a moment, a couple of other sailors added loud - and alarmed - agreement. Sostratos kept peering. He knuckled his eyes, for he kept on seeing nothing.

  From the poop, Menedemos shouted, "All men to the oars! Diokles, give us a lively beat. We'll see if we can't show the polluted robbers our heels."

  Sailors rushed to their benches. A couple of them trod on Sostratos' toes as they hurried past. He cursed, not from pain but from frustration: he still couldn't see the sail that had everyone else jumping like chickpeas on a hot griddle. He rubbed his eyes again. People said reading could make you shortsighted. Sostratos had never believed that. His vision, if not of the very best like Aristeidas', had always been good enough. Now he began to wonder.

  And then, just as the Aphrodite, propelled now by sail and oars, seemed to gather herself and leap forward over the wine-dark water of the Aegean, he did spy the sail and understood at once why he hadn't seen it earlier. He'd been looking for a white square of linen against the blue sky. This sail, though, was blue itself, making it harder to see at any distance.

  Now he pointed."There's the pirate," he called back to Menedemos.

  "There's a pirate, anyhow," his cousin agreed. "Whether that's the pirate or not, the one the fellow on Mykonos talked about, I don't know and I don't care. But no honest skipper makes his sail into a chameleon."

  "Not just his sail." Now that Sostratos knew where to look, he had much less trouble spying the other ship. "His hull's painted the color of the sea, too."

  "If you're going to do those things, you don't usually do them by halves," Menedemos said. He turned to Diokles. "Up the s
troke, keleustes. They're gaining on us."

  "Skipper, we can't row any harder than what we're doing," the oarmaster answered. "In fact, we won't be able to hold this sprint very long."

  Menedemos cursed. So did Sostratos, all over again. Sure enough, the pirate ship was visibly bigger than when he'd first spotted it. As did those of the Aphrodite, its oars rose and fell, rose and fell, in smooth rhythm, digging into the water and then breaking free once more. The pirates were stroking no more rapidly than the Aphrodite's crew, but they had a faster ship: they didn't have to worry about hauling cargo, only fighting men.

  It hardly seemed fair, Sostratos thought as he counted the oars on the pirate's port side, which he could see better than the starboard as her captain steered on a course that converged with the Aphrodite's. He counted the oars, muttered to himself, and then counted them again. "Menedemos!" he called, his voice rising nearly to a shout. "Menedemos!"

  "What is it?" His cousin, understandably, sounded harried. "By the gods, it had better be something good, if you're bothering me at a time like this."

  "I think so," Sostratos answered. "If you take a long look at that pirate ship, you'll see she's just a triakonter - she's got fifteen oars on a side, and that makes thirty altogether."

  "What?" Menedemos sounded astonished. When he saw the pirate ship, all he'd tried to do was get away, as any skipper would have done. He hadn't bothered taking its measure. Now he did, and started cursing all over again. "We've got more men than he does." He pulled back on the tiller to one steering oar and forward on the other, so that the Aphrodite swung sharply toward the pirate ship. The shout he let out was in much harsher, broader Doric than he usually spoke: "Now let's git him!"

  Even as the akatos turned toward the triakonter, Menedemos called more orders. Up went the sail, brailed tight against the yard. Aboard a war galley, the sail and the mast would have been stowed away so as not to interfere with the attack run, which always went in under oar power alone. Menedemos couldn't do that in the Aphrodite, but he did the next best thing.