Sostratos wasn’t surprised when Menedemos put in at Kourion, well short of Paphos, on the voyage west. People in Paphos would remember the Aphrodite had stopped there with Ptolemaios’ fleet. They’d ask questions without convenient answers. Best to skirt that if at all possible.

  In Kourion, they knew Ptolemaios’ fleet had sailed east to meet Demetrios’, but that was all they knew. Menedemos didn’t tell them anything more. “I sailed from Alexandria myself, a few days after the Ptolemaios left,” he said to people who called questions from the piers. “I aim to stay out of trouble, not get into it.”

  “You lie like a Cretan,” Sostratos told him—quietly, so none of the locals would overhear.

  “The daimon I do,” his cousin answered. “I aim to stay out of trouble, but sometimes I miss.”

  Sostratos burst out laughing. When it came to bare-faced effrontery, Menedemos could play with anyone. But Menedemos wasn’t in this game alone. “How do we keep the rowers from blabbing?” Sostratos said. “I know we’re only here for the night, but—”

  “Promise them an extra day’s pay if no one gets diarrhea of the mouth,” Menedemos said at once. “With silver on the line, they’ll watch each other like falcons, and we’ve got more of it than we know what to do with, almost.”

  “My dear, I think you just rolled a triple six!” Sostratos sketched a salute. Then he went up the rowing benches, passing the word on to the oarsmen. The ploy worked as well as his cousin had hoped it would. The men loudly and profanely agreed to keep their mouths shut, and to pound to gravel anyone who slipped up.

  With a few rowers, Sostratos went down the pier to the shops near the base. He bought fried fish and fresh bread, enough for everyone to enjoy a good supper. They brought the food back to the akatos and handed it out.

  “Euge!” the sailors cried. Some of them raised cups full of rough shipboard wine in salute.

  One of them went further, spilling out a small libation and calling, “This for Sostratos the beautiful!” The rest of the men whooped and cheered.

  “Oh, by the gods!” Sostratos exclaimed, which only made the rowers whoop some more. His face felt on fire; he hoped they wouldn’t notice his blushes. No one had ever called him beautiful when he was a youth. He knew too well he hadn’t been beautiful—that kind of praise always went to Menedemos. To hear it now, although it wasn’t serious, flustered him more than he cared to admit, even to himself.

  His cousin grinned and said, “They’ll be scrawling your name on the walls next thing you know.”

  “Oh, to the crows with you!” Sostratos said. The rowers were teasing him for the fun of it. Menedemos really had had that kind of popularity, admiration, whatever the perfect word was. Sostratos knew how acutely he’d felt the lack of it when he was fourteen or fifteen.

  That was half a lifetime ago now, of course. If he chose to, he could fill the role of erastes now, not eromenos: the lover, not the beloved. He was a man, not a youth. But the youth lived just under the man’s skin, and always would. The pain the youth had known then could still stab the man.

  For a wonder, Menedemos seemed to hear whatever had been in his voice. He let it go instead of pushing it the way he often did. That let Sostratos simmer down. It didn’t let him forget. No one ever forgot being ignored and unwanted. You could, if you were lucky enough and wise enough, perhaps find a way to live without letting it trouble you too much. But it never went away.

  The Aphrodite slipped out of Kourion even before the sun climbed up over the eastern horizon. “Rosy-fingered dawn,” Sostratos murmured as the sky lightened toward real morning.

  “Really, my dear?” Menedemos said. “I’m the one who quotes Homer most of the time. And when I do, you tell me Sokrates or Platon or Theophrastos show how the poet was talking rubbish.”

  “Funny. When I talk about Sokrates, you throw Aristophanes’ Clouds at me,” Sostratos said. “I wonder how often people who thought they were funny shouted bits of it at him when he walked down the street. I wonder why he didn’t punch them in the nose, too. By the gods, I would have.” Of themselves, his hands balled into fists.

  His cousin sent him a quizzical look. “What’s got into you today?”

  “Nothing,” Sostratos said, and not a word more.

  “You sound like Odysseus telling Polyphemos the Cyclops his name was Nobody,” Menedemos remarked.

  “Nodysseus would come closer,” Sostratos said. Sure enough, outis, the Greek word for nobody, sounded very much like the resourceful hero’s name.

  “That’s pretty bad,” Menedemos said, but he sounded more admiring than not.

  “Don’t blame me. Blame Homer,” Sostratos said.

  “You’re here. He isn’t,” Menedemos answered. He looked around. “And we’re out of the harbor, and I don’t think anyone in Kourion has any idea we were part of Ptolemaios’ fleet.”

  Sostratos cupped his hands in front of his mouth and called, “We did what we needed to do! A day’s bonus for all the rowers aboard!”

  The men pulling the oars raised a cheer. Menedemos cocked an eyebrow. “You might have waited till we got farther away. Now the Kourians may be wondering why we’re so happy to leave their worthless little town.”

  “Huh!” Sostratos sniffed. “If you had to live out your days in that miserable place, wouldn’t you want to get away as fast as you could if only you had the chance?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” Menedemos said. “There’s no place in the world so grand as Rhodes—well, except Alexandria and Athens, I suppose.”

  “Alexandria’s big. I don’t know how grand it is, though I expect it will be once it’s had the time to finish baking,” Sostratos said, which made his cousin chuckle. But his voice turned serious as he went on, “Athens, now … Athens isn’t just a polis. Even after everything that’s happened to it the past hundred years, Athens is the world. Rhodes is a fine place—don’t get me wrong, O best one. But the first time I went into Athens, I felt as though I’d come from a little farming village somewhere, with dung still on my feet.”

  “And I’ll bet the Athenians made you feel that way, too.” Menedemos was a couple of palms shorter than Sostratos, but by tilting his head back somehow contrived to look down his nose at him.

  The sun rose as Sostratos laughed. “They can be like that, yes—you’ve seen it for yourself,” he said. His cousin dipped his head. Sostratos continued, “But it’s not just the people. It’s the buildings and the art and the knowledge and the past. Hellas is what it is, for better and for worse, because Athens is what it is.”

  “These days, Athens is Demetrios’ lapdog. We saw it happen.”

  “I know. But it’s more than that, too, or he wouldn’t have wanted it,” Sostratos said. To his relief, Menedemos didn’t argue. The Aphrodite went on toward Rhodes.

  XIV

  “Oh, the gods be praised!” Menedemos exclaimed when his home polis came into sight ahead.

  Diokles looked over his shoulder. “We knew things were all right when we talked to those fishermen off the coast.”

  “We knew things were all right when we saw Demetrios’ friends weren’t burning every farmhouse and village on the island so they could lay siege to the polis,” Sostratos added.

  “There’s a difference between hearing things or reasoning about things and finding out with your own eyes,” Menedemos insisted. “It’s like the difference between hearing about love and being in love.”

  “Trust you to come up with a comparison like that,” Sostratos said. Diokles laughed. Menedemos lifted one hand from the steering oar to aim a filthy gesture at them both. Diokles laughed harder. Sostratos hadn’t been laughing, but he started.

  “There are the harbor forts,” Menedemos said, pointing. “People look to be working on the seawalls, too. That’s good. We’ll be … as ready as we can be, anyhow.”

  The keleustes and his cousin stopped laughing then. The news they were bringing back to their home city wasn’t good, and nothing could make it good. Even if Ptolemaios had escaped from the battle off Salamis, he wouldn’t be able to send, or want to send, another fleet north from Egypt for some time to come. Rhodes was on her own.

  Menedemos sighed. “All we can do is all we can do. Diokles, get rowers on all the oars, will you? We may as well look good when we come into the harbor, eh?”

  “Right you are, skipper.” Diokles bawled orders to the men. Soon every bench was full. He picked up the stroke, too, even before Menedemos asked him to. The oars dipped into the water and rose from it in smooth unison. The rowers wanted to show off, too.

  I wonder if any admirals or trireme captains will be watching us come in, Menedemos thought, and then, I wonder how many of our crew will be rowing for the polis before long. The answer to that seemed much too clear. Unless Rhodes changed course and yielded to Antigonos and Demetrios, she would have to fight, on the sea as well as on land.

  As the Aphrodite neared the moles that protected the Great Harbor from storms at sea and the forts on the moles protected it from seaborne attack, men in the forts who recognized the akatos and knew where she’d gone began shouting for news.

  Menedemos shouted back at them: “I’ll tell it when I’m tied up at a pier—not a heartbeat before!”

  The Rhodian soldiers swore at him. Like any other Hellenes, they wanted to hear the latest before anyone else could. They’d score points then for passing it on. Only they wouldn’t today, because Menedemos didn’t aim to tell it more than once, and then to people who needed to know it for reasons better than getting a leg up on gossip.

  Two graybeards eating bread and drinking wine on a rowboat in the harbor, out for an afternoon wasting time in the sun, also called for news as the Aphrodite stroked past. They seemed even more offended than the soldiers when they didn’t get it.

  “Here we go! Here we go! Easy! Easy!” Diokles glided up to a pier. “Now back oars—stroke! Once more!” He eyed the planks and the pilings. “Good. We’re home, by the gods!”

  “We’re home, by the gods!” Menedemos echoed to Sostratos.

  His cousin dipped his head. “We are. We’re home with a handsome profit, too—if we can keep it.”

  “If,” Menedemos agreed.

  A couple of dockside loungers made the Aphrodite fast to bollards on the pier. Menedemos hoped she could get hauled up into a shipshed soon; she’d spent a long time at sea, and her timbers were bound to be waterlogged. But that would have to wait.

  More men came down the pier to see what the merchant galley was carrying—and, again, to sweep up as much news as they could. That wasn’t much. Sailors ran the gangplank from the ship to the pier. Menedemos crossed it. After so much time asea, planking that didn’t shift under his feet felt strange, even unnatural, to him.

  He pointed at three loungers he knew. “Two oboloi for each of you—one now, the second when you bring someone back here. Are you with me?” When none of them said no, he went on, “Karneades, go to my father’s house and fetch him here. Athanippos, do the same for Lysistratos, my uncle. He lives across the street from my father. And Simias, you bring Komanos.”

  Every man collected a small silver coin and hurried away. One of the loungers Menedemos hadn’t hired was peering into the Aphrodite. He asked, “How come your ship’s all full of shields and arrows and things?”

  “I’ll tell the whole story once,” Menedemos said. “Just once. You can wait and listen, or you can go play with it.”

  To his disappointment, the man hung around. A small crowd, and then a crowd not so small, gathered on the pier and on the dry land at its base. Half of Rhodes would know the Aphrodite had gone to Egypt, and all of Rhodes would know Antigonos’ son was fighting Ptolemaios’ brother on Cyprus. If Menedemos had news about any of that, people wanted to hear it.

  They wouldn’t want to hear what Menedemos told them. He knew that too well. One more reason to want to tell it just the once.

  Someone on the pier made as if to go down into the akatos to see what all she carried. Menedemos said, “By the gods, friend, I’ll shove you into the drink if you take one more step.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. He did.

  “Who the daimon are you?” the fellow asked.

  “The skipper.”

  The man didn’t take the step. “I can’t swim,” he said.

  Menedemos smiled, the way Medusa might have when she was turning someone to stone. “Good.”

  All at once, the Rhodian decided he wasn’t so curious after all. He drew back, and nobody seemed eager to take his place. A commotion broke out at the back of the crowd. There was Karneades trying to push his way forward, with Philodemos doing his best to help.

  “Let my father through!” Menedemos shouted in a voice that could have reached from the Aphrodite’s stern to bow in the middle of a roaring gale. Sailors would have done whatever he told them without even thinking about it. Landlubbers were less used to taking orders. That always annoyed Menedemos, never more than today.

  At last, Philodemos and his guide stood in front of Menedemos. After giving Karneades the second obolos, he clasped his father’s hand. “Hail,” he said.

  “Hail, son. It’s good to see you home,” Philodemos said.

  “It’s good to be home,” Menedemos said, and meant it. “Things have been … lively.”

  “They often are, where you’re involved.” Even at the moment of return, Philodemos couldn’t resist a gibe. He did add, “They’ve been lively here, too, I will say.”

  “Ah?” Menedemos did his best not to seem too eager for news of Rhodes.

  “That’s right. You have a new half-brother. I’ve named him Diodoros, for he is Zeus’ gift to the family,” Philodemos said.

  “Congratulations, Father. I hope your wife came through the birth well.” Menedemos made himself sound calm and detached over something he cared about more than anything else in the world. If anything had happened to Baukis ….

  She can’t be dead, Menedemos told himself. His father’s hair wasn’t cropped short, as it would have been if he were mourning. But birth was as hard on women as battle was on men. Baukis might be suffering from fever, might be … Menedemos didn’t know what all she might be. He’d never needed to worry about it, not in detail.

  But Philodemos dipped his head. “She’s as well as can be expected, gods be praised. And the little fellow looks much the way you did when you were a baby. He looks a lot like me, in other words. I must have strong seed.” He sounded pleased with himself, even smug.

  Menedemos wondered whether Diodoros looked like him because they both had the same father or because he was the baby’s father. Odds were Baukis wasn’t sure herself, in which case no one would ever know for certain. In law, Diodoros was Philodemos’ son.

  Then Menedemos got distracted, perhaps mercifully: the escorts leading Lysistratos and Komanos came to the harbor at about the same time. They and the men they’d brought fought their way through the crowd. Menedemos paid off the other two loungers. He greeted his uncle and the powerful civic leader. Then he held both hands in the air to get the crowd’s attention.

  Little by little, the men who’d been gabbling quieted down. “Hear me, O gentlemen of Rhodes,” Menedemos said, as if he were speaking before the Assembly. That started them chattering again. He’d known it would. “Hear me!” he repeated, louder this time. He finally got something close enough to silence to suit him.

  “The Ptolemaios and the Demetrios fought a great battle on the sea off Cypriot Salamis,” he told the crowd. “I was there in the Aphrodite, which Ptolemaios had hired to help carry his military supplies.”

  His father, his uncle, Komanos, and others in the crowd who understood how things worked looked startled and alarmed. Rhodes was supposed to stay neutral in the wars among Alexander’s generals. The political leader said, “Why did you go with Ptolemaios’ fleet?”

  “Because, O most excellent one, my other choice was having my ship confiscated and getting interned in Alexandria,” Menedemos answered bleakly. “This way, at least we got some silver for having the Aphrodite used. The Demetrios won the battle, I’m afraid. Most of Ptolemaios’ fleet is lost. I don’t know if he lives, or whether he’s free if he does. Not many of his ships got away. We were one of the lucky ones.”

  That set everyone exclaiming, as he’d once more known it would. Well, almost everyone. Komanos opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything. Menedemos’ father also held his peace. His expression went thoughtful rather than shocked. Menedemos dared take that for a good sign. Uncle Lysistratos said, “So all these tools for murder in the Aphrodite would have gone to Ptolemaios’ soldiers if they’d managed to land near Salamis?”

  “That’s right, sir. I don’t think any of them managed to, or even to escape Demetrios’ fleet. We had to outrun a big war galley ourselves. Believe me, I thought about throwing all that stuff into the drink so we could go faster,” Menedemos said.

  “Why didn’t you?” Komanos asked.

  “Well, O best one, for one thing, we managed to stay ahead of that big beamy whoreson without doing it,” Menedemos replied. “And, for another, I thought Rhodes could use every sword, every arrow, every shield we were carrying. Just in case, if you know what I mean.”

  Komanos somberly dipped his head. “I know much too well. The polis may be in your debt.”

  “I live here, too, sir. I want to go on living in a free and independent polis if I can.” Belatedly, Menedemos realized he and Sostratos might have sold the warlike gear to the city for a good bit of silver. He shrugged. Sometimes profit came at too high a price. He hadn’t been joking. Rhodes could use every weapon she could lay her hands on. And she could use every drakhma in her coffers, for weapons or work on the walls or ships or grain or … anything.