Damonax stared at him. Sostratos was usually a mild-mannered man, one who might let himself be pushed around where most Hellenes wouldn’t have. Not here, though. A nervous smile on his face, Damonax said, “I meant no harm, truly.”

  “Neither did Oidipous,” Sostratos snapped. “Not a bit. How did that turn out?”

  His brother-in-law flinched. Unlike Sostratos, Damonax was conventionally pious. He didn’t take the old myths as parables or explanations; to him, they were truth. “My dear fellow!” he managed after a false start. “That’s … a bit much, don’t you think?”

  “And telling my men how to do their work on my ship isn’t a bit much, you mean?” Sostratos was implacable as a Fury.

  “I won’t do it again.” Damonax sounded like a small boy who meant, Not while you can catch me, anyway. After a moment of weighing the odds, he asked, “What will be stowed back towards the stern?”

  None of your cursed business. That got as far as the tip of Sostratos’ tongue, but no farther. You could always say things some other time. You couldn’t call them back once said, and he guessed he’d given Damonax enough already. What he did say was, “Wine. Fine wine. Grapes don’t do well in Egypt. The Egyptians make a brew out of dates—”

  “Sounds disgusting!” Damonax broke in.

  “I tried it a couple of years ago, when we went to the land of the Ioudaioi,” Sostratos said. “It will get you drunk if you pour down enough, and it won’t give you a flux of the bowels the way plain water can, but it’s not what anyone would call good. So ordinary freighters bring lots of ordinary wine into Egypt for the soldiers and cooks and carpenters and masons and what have you. We’ll bring some of the fine vintages, for the people who can afford them.”

  “Why do you want them there and not the oil?” Damonax asked.

  “Because a metretes of wine is heavier than a metretes of oil,” Sostratos said. A metretes was the amount a large amphora held. He went on, “The ship will handle better if we have more weight at the stern, not at the bow.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Damonax said, as if he blamed Sostratos for his own ignorance. Realizing how that had to sound, he added, “Your business is more complicated than it looks at first glance, isn’t it?”

  “Most things are,” Sostratos replied, which made his brother-in-law wince again. “We’ll get the oil aboard. We’ll get it to Egypt and get the best price we can for it. We’ll do the same with the wine, and with everything else we’re carrying.” He said not a word about the amber. The fewer people who knew of it, the better.

  “What kind of wine will you carry?” Damonax asked.

  Sostratos would have told him that—it wasn’t a secret. In fact, he was a little surprised his brother-in-law didn’t already know. But Damonax came up to the polis of Rhodes only when he had business here; he stayed on his farm most of the time. Before Sostratos could answer, though, a procession of bearers, each carrying a two-eared amphora, approached the Aphrodite from the direction of the family warehouse.

  Pointing at them with his chin, he said, “Here they come now. Suppose you tell me where they’re from.”

  Damonax scratched the side of his jaw as he considered. “Well, I recognize those jars the men in front have, the ones that are longer and skinnier and more conical than Rhodian ware. They’re from Khios, aren’t they?”

  “Euge! Very good, best one!” Sostratos made as if to clap his hands. “That’s not just any wine from Khios, either. That’s Ariousian, from the northwestern part of the island. Some came into Rhodes last year, while we were in Athens, and my father and my uncle bought all they could.”

  “Ariousian!” Damonax’s voice went dreamy. “The best wine in the world, people say.”

  “Some people say that,” Sostratos allowed. “But what about the other amphorai, the ones that are fatter than those we make here?”

  Those amphorai made his brother-in-law frown. At last, reluctantly, Damonax said, “I’m afraid they have me stumped.”

  “Well, you don’t see them all that often in Rhodes.” Sostratos could afford to sound tolerant. He knew at a glance the shape of amphorai from at least a score of different islands and poleis, perhaps twice that many. Menedemos likely recognized even more. Sostratos continued, “Thasos lies way to the north in the Aegean; it’s off the European coast, just east of the fingers of land that come down from the Khalkidike. And Thasian wine …. Wine doesn’t get much better, if it gets any better at all.”

  “Thasian! That’s the one with the bouquet like apples!” Damonax exclaimed. “I’ve had some once or twice. It was so smooth, I didn’t want to water it.”

  “No?” One of Sostratos’ eyebrows slid upwards. “I didn’t realize we’d brought a Macedonian into the family.” Macedonians were notorious for drinking their wine neat, as if they were Thracians or other outright barbarians, not men who passed themselves off as Hellenes. From everything Sostratos had seen, they’d earned that notoriety.

  “I hope you know me better than that, O best one,” Damonax said. Sostratos had to dip his head, acknowledging that he did. His brother-in-law had his share of human flaws and foibles, but drunkenness wasn’t one of them. Then Damonax turned the subject: “Is it true, what they’re saying about the Demetrios?”

  Sostratos spread his hands, palms up. “I don’t know, my dear. What have you heard? I wouldn’t give you an obolos for a thousand of the stupid stories that go through the market square.”

  “That the son of Antigonos is trying to take Cyprus away from Ptolemaios.”

  “Oh. That is true. Or at least I’ve heard it from people I believe.”

  “Like Komanos?” Damonax gibed. Sure as a daimon, being excluded from the meeting with the prominent politician still rankled.

  “No,” Sostratos said. Not directly, he added to himself. He didn’t like to lie, but he didn’t want to tell Damonax the whole truth, either. “I got the news from Uncle Philodemos, as a matter of fact. My guess is, Menedemos told him. Menedemos gets everywhere and hears everything—you know that.”

  Damonax sniffed. “Your cousin thinks he’s a lot more clever than he really is.”

  It wasn’t a thought Sostratos had never had, but he’d had it more often and much more strongly about Damonax than about Menedemos. All he said was, “You may be right.”

  “Will you sail straight across the Inner Sea, then?” Damonax asked. “How can you hope to find Alexandria if you do?”

  “We’ll manage,” Sostratos said. “You go to sea often enough, you learn to steer pretty well by the sun and stars.” He prided himself on how well he could do that. If pressed, he would have admitted he was no better than Menedemos and might have been worse than Diokles. The oarmaster, of course, had started going to sea years before Sostratos was born.

  Perhaps luckily, Damonax didn’t press him. Instead, with a small shiver, he said, “I wouldn’t care to get out of sight of land.”

  Good. Otherwise you’d come along and want to run things. Sostratos didn’t say that, either. He said nothing at all. Around Damonax, nothing was often the best thing to say.

  III

  Menedemos stood on the raised, planked platform at the Aphrodite’s stern. One hand gripped the handle of each steering oar. From long use, the wood was smooth under his palms.

  As had been true the past few years, part of him was anxious to escape from Rhodes and from the longing for his father’s wife that he dared not show. Part of him was anxious for her, too. She’d have the baby, whether his or Philodemos’, before he came back from Egypt. Childbearing was dangerous; his own mother, whom he barely remembered, had died trying to bring forth a second child. The infant hadn’t lived, either. If anything happened to Baukis ….

  He made himself not think about that. Looking up to the sky, he gauged the breeze by the way a few small, puffy white clouds drifted from northwest to southeast. When one of them didn’t glide in front of it, the sun shone brightly.

  Dipping his head to Diokles, he said, “When we get out of the harbor, we’ll raise the mast, set the sail, and let the wind do our work for a while.”

  The keleustes’ grunt was what passed for laughter with him. “The rowers will think they’re on a holiday cruise,” he said. He’d been a rower himself till he advanced to setting the men at the oars their paces. His broad shoulders, powerful arms, and callused hands still showed his old trade. Though he had to be past fifty, he was no one Menedemos would have cared to wrestle. Years under the harsh sun of the Inner Sea had baked him brown as an Egyptian.

  “Are we ready?” Sostratos called back from the much smaller platform at the akatos’ bow.

  “Malista!” Menedemos answered, and dipped his head. Sostratos waved to a dockside lounger who’d already got a couple of oboloi. The man undid the line that tied the trading galley’s bow to a bollard on the pier and tossed his end of the rope into the Aphrodite. Sostratos coiled it with fussy precision; he wasn’t a natural sailor, not to Menedemos’ way of thinking, but attention to every detail made him a pretty good one.

  Down the tarred planks walked the man. He undid the stern line and tossed it aboard the ship. The nearest rower made sure it didn’t stay loose for long. As soon as everything was shipshape, Diokles asked Menedemos, “Are we ready to get going?”

  “I expect we are,” Menedemos answered. Irrationally, he expected the galley’s motion to change now that she was no longer connected to the wharf. That didn’t happen, of course; the Aphrodite had had next to no motion before—the water inside the harbor was almost as smooth as polished metal—and still had next to none now.

  Triremes and other naval vessels used fluteplayers to give the men the stroke the keleustes ordered. The Aphrodite, a much smaller galley, couldn’t afford extra men. Diokles had a hammer and a small brass gong. He clanged it once, to get the rowers’ attention. They weren’t worked in yet; some were still hurting from a last carouse the night before. He stroked the gong again, harder this time.

  After a few heartbeats, they’d all set hands on their oars and were looking back toward him. “Thank you so much, my dears,” he said. “Time to get your backs sore. Time to get your hands blistered. I know all your calluses have gone away over the winter—you’re such sweet, soft fellows.” Except for the sardonic rasp in his voice, he might have been a suitor courting a handsome youth in the gymnasion. But the rasp was there. “Try not to be too ragged. Try to remember what to do and how to do it together. So back oars, boys, at the gong—!”

  He clanged once more. Not quite in unison, the rowers stroked. No one fouled anyone else, which was a good enough first stroke to satisfy Menedemos. Diokles hit the gong again. The akatos slowly moved away from the pier and out into the harbor. Diokles shifted the men to the usual forward stroke. He kept the rhythm lazy to let the twenty men on each side of the ship get used to pulling after a winter away from the water.

  The rowers grunted and swore and complained before the akatos had gone even half a stadion. Menedemos grinned at them and let them grumble. Rowers always acted like that. He would have feared a sickness was running through them had they stayed quiet.

  A tubby little fishing boat waddled over the water ahead of the Aphrodite. The boat could barely get out of its own way, and couldn’t get out of the galley’s, even if she was making less than half speed. Menedemos pulled the handle of the port steering oar toward himself and pushed the starboard oar handle out. The Aphrodite swung to port and glided past the boat. “Where you bound for in your sea-centipede?” one of the fishermen called.

  “Lesbos,” Menedemos answered. If one of Demetrios’ warships met the boat, he didn’t want the fellows in it to tell the Macedonians anything worth knowing.

  The fisherman leered at him. “Want to get your prong sucked, do you?” he said; women from Lesbos had a name for that vice.

  “To the crows with you, Pausias,” Menedemos replied in mock anger—he knew most of the Rhodian men who went to sea. Pausias just laughed.

  Moles narrowed the entrance to the Great Harbor and that to the naval harbor just to the north. They also let stout chains be stretched across the harbor mouths to keep invaders from landing soldiers inside. Menedemos had known that as long as he could remember. Now, eyeing the fortifications at the ends of the moles, he considered it much less hypothetically than he ever had before.

  A big, beamy merchantman, probably full of grain or cheap wine or oil or stone, came into the harbor at a pace even more snaillike than the fishing boat’s. Next to that big snail, Menedemos’ ship was indeed a centipede, all legs and litheness. Like him, the merchant ship’s skipper stood at the steering oars. He sketched a salute and called something in Aeolic dialect so thick Menedemos could hardly understand him. Chances were he really did hail from Lesbos, then.

  “What’s that you say?” Menedemos shouted back across half a stadion of water.

  “Safe voyage!” the Lesbian yelled.

  This time, Menedemos got it. He lifted his hand from the starboard steering oar to wave. “And to you, friend!” All Hellenes might not be brothers, but all seafarers were.

  All except pirates and the whoresons in Demetrios’ fleet, Menedemos thought. As any more or less honest skipper would, he hated pirates with a cold and deadly passion. Rhodes, which depended on free passage across the sea, hunted them like the vermin they were.

  “Here we go, lads!” Diokles told the rowers, and upped the pace a little as the Aphrodite left the Great Harbor and headed out onto the Inner Sea.

  Now the ship’s motion changed. The water was still smooth by any reasonable standard, but it was choppier than it had been inside the protected harbor. “How do you hold, cousin?” Menedemos called toward the bow.

  “I’m holding fine so far,” Sostratos answered. Did he look a trifle green? Menedemos couldn’t be sure, but he thought so. Sostratos’ stomach tormented him every time they set out on a new trading run. Some men never got over seasickness, and were miserable whenever they had to put to sea. Sostratos wasn’t like that, but he felt it the first few days he was on the water.

  “Well, remember to lean over the rail far enough if you have to give back your morning bread and oil and wine,” Menedemos said.

  His cousin gave back not his breakfast but a filthy gesture. Menedemos laughed. Sostratos couldn’t be feeling too dreadful if he was up to that. To starboard, the island of Rhodes slid past. The land was still spring-green. The sun would burn it brown and barren by the time the Aphrodite came home.

  Gods grant summer’s burning is all we have to fear, Menedemos thought.

  The breeze hummed in the rigging. Sostratos noticed the noise only when he thought about it. The mast had gone into its socket in the keel and the big square sail had been unbrailed as soon as Menedemos decided the wind was likely to hold: not too long after they left the harbor, in other words.

  Sostratos’ stomach, though not altogether happy to be at sea, hadn’t actively rebelled. He thanked the gods in whom he indifferently believed for that. His supper—bread, salted sprats, olives, and wine worse than what they planned to sell—seemed to be sitting all right. Now he had to keep the akatos running south and a little east through the night.

  Twilight hadn’t fully left the sky. Aphrodite’s wandering star and Hermes’ a little below it blazed through the paleness near the western horizon. In the east, the moon, a day past full, was just climbing out of the waves and drying itself off before it rose higher in the sky.

  A handful of rowers stayed awake to tend the sail at need. Most slumbered at their benches, some as naked as when they’d rowed, others wearing chitons against the cooling night air. Snores rose here and there up and down the akatos’ length.

  Menedemos and Diokles lay on the stern platform, not far from Sostratos’ feet. Menedemos had a tunic under him to soften the wood a little; Diokles didn’t bother. The keleustes took life just as it came and never worried about anything till it happened. Sostratos admired the attitude without being able to imitate it.

  More and more stars came out as night took hold. Lamps and smoke made it hard to see so many when in Rhodes. No smoke here, out on the sea. No smoke stench, either, nor reek of slops and rotting garbage and people who never washed enough. You didn’t notice city stinks so much when you were in the middle of them all the time. You did notice once you’d got away from them, though.

  The planets—the word meant “wanderers” in Greek—sank into the sea, first Hermes’, then Aphrodite’s. Sostratos imagined he ought to hear a hiss when their light was quenched, but of course he didn’t. The moon’s golden glow splashed from wavecrests. It seemed almost bright enough to read by, though from experience he knew it wasn’t.

  Steering south as he did, he had to look back over his shoulder to find the North Pole, which lay about halfway between the two brightest stars in the Little Bear. Eyeing that constellation and the Big Bear nearby, he wondered why they both had tails. So far as he knew, no actual earthly bears did. If I ever meet an astronomer or an astrologer, I’ll ask him about that, he thought.

  On through the night the Aphrodite went. Sostratos steered by the stars near the North Pole, by the moon, and by the slowly wheeling constellations. His navigation wouldn’t be perfect—navigation on the open sea never was—but it would be good enough.

  The men tending the sails woke up other rowers to replace them and got some rest themselves. Every now and then, someone would rouse and ease himself into the sea. Then he’d sit down on his bench and go back to sleep.

  Sostratos came close to resenting the sailors when they stirred. They didn’t say anything to him—no need—but they reminded him he wasn’t all alone on the sea with his thoughts, as he wished he were.