After a while—three hours or so behind the moon, he thought, though he knew that was guesswork—Zeus’ wandering star shouldered its way into the sky. It was brighter than Hermes’, though less so than Aphrodite’s. Unlike those two, Zeus’ star didn’t always stay close to the hem of the sun’s robe. It went all around the sky, lingering about a year in each constellation of the Zodiac.

  Babylonians and Phoenicians believed they could use the planets’ motions through the heavens to foretell the future. Himilkon the merchant talked about horoscopes now and then. Over the year, quite a few Hellenes had come to believe in such things, too. Sostratos wondered if there was anything to it. How could you tell?

  By the time Zeus’ star was about halfway up from its rising to the meridian, Sostratos found himself yawning at the steering oars. It was midnight, or close enough.

  Like most Hellenes, he usually rose and set with the sun. Everything was different at sea, though. He yawned again, hoping he’d be able to sleep past sunup. Then he bent down and touched Menedemos’ shoulder. He made haste to get back to the steering oars; his cousin had a habit of waking quickly and completely, sometimes with a knife in his hand.

  Now Menedemos looked around wildly for a moment, then relaxed as he realized where he was. In a low voice, he asked, “How’s everything?”

  “Seems all right,” Sostratos said. “The breeze hasn’t been very strong, but it’s been steady. We’ve put some stadia behind us, sure enough.”

  “Good.” Lithe as an Egyptian cat, Menedemos got to his feet. Sostratos envied his cousin’s grace without being able to match it. Menedemos slowly turned through a whole circle, taking in the heavens and especially the positions of the moon and Zeus’ wandering star. He dipped his head to Sostratos. “Fair enough. You’ve done your half of the night.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?” Whispering, Sostratos couldn’t sound as indignant as he wanted to.

  Menedemos chuckled softly. “No, my dear. Everyone who knows you knows you’re honest to a fault. But you do jump when somebody pokes you with a pin.”

  Sostratos seldom saw the sport in that; people who’d been the butt of too much of it rarely did. Menedemos’ smile said he thought it was funny, and thought anyone who didn’t think it funny was a bit of a drip. He hadn’t gone through boyhood teased and tormented. And he would have laughed had Sostratos told him so.

  Sighing, Sostratos said, “Take the steering oars, why don’t you? I wouldn’t mind shutting my eyes for a bit, and that’s the truth.”

  “I’ll do it.” For a wonder, Menedemos left that there instead of teasing Sostratos about staying up past his bedtime. He was out by night quite often, drinking with friends or chasing women.

  Sostratos stepped aside. His cousin took his place. Menedemos seemed made to conn a ship; it was almost as if he’d sprouted from the timbers under his bare feet. Sostratos lay down on the planking and twisted to try to find a comfortable way to sleep. Dogs curled up that way on the floor when they got tired. They …

  Next thing he knew, beams from the newly risen sun were poking him in the eye. The moon rode low in the west, as Aphrodite’s wandering star and Hermes’ had when he took over the steering oars. Yawning, he sat up and stretched and tried to rub feeling back into his left hand, which wanted to stay asleep after the rest of him had awakened.

  Diokles was sitting, too. He dipped his head to Sostratos. Menedemos stood at the steering oars as if he hadn’t moved a muscle since taking them back. “How do we hold?” Sostratos asked him.

  “We’re going along,” his cousin answered. “We’re out on the open sea. We’re heading south. That’s about as much as I can tell you.”

  “The open sea,” Sostratos echoed as he got to his feet. Sure enough, all he could see in every direction was water and sky. He’d been out of sight of land before, crossing from Hellas to Italy and from Cyprus to the coast of Phoenicia. It always felt strange, though, and reminded him how tiny men and all their works were when weighed against nature.

  Then one of the rowers said, “By Aphrodite’s smooth-shaved piggy, I sure could use me some breakfast.”

  Sostratos laughed. No matter how small you were when measured against nature, you had to live as best you could. His belly told him he could use some breakfast, too.

  Clink! Clink! Diokles beat out a rhythm for the rowers. The wind had palled, and the men needed to work to shove the ship forward. Menedemos had twelve sailors rowing on each side, so each man worked three parts out of five. Diokles didn’t push the pace, either. If they got to Alexandria in the afternoon rather than the morning, what difference would it make? None Menedemos could see.

  The sail was brailed up to the yard. If the breeze came back, Menedemos would order it set again. For now, he didn’t need to worry about it. Neither did the rowers. Some of the men not at the oars dozed in the sun. Some rubbed olive oil on their bodies and especially their hands, which would have softened in a winter ashore. And some dropped hooks and lines into the wine-dark sea, using bits of salt fish as bait in the hope of catching something tastier.

  Dark blue water below. Brighter blue sky above. That was the world, as it looked to Menedemos. Land somewhere, no doubt, but nowhere close, nowhere in sight. They were far enough out in the middle of the open sea that even gulls and terns and pelicans were scarce. The rowers exclaimed when a dolphin paced the Aphrodite for a while, every so often leaping out of the water and arrowing back in nose first with scarcely a splash.

  “He’s having more fun than we are,” Sostratos remarked.

  “If I could swim like that, I wouldn’t use a ship, either,” Menedemos answered.

  “Not even if you wanted to carry cargo?” his cousin said in sly tones.

  “Oh, I’d just strap it on my back and carry it along with me,” Menedemos said blithely. Sostratos made a face at him.

  Perhaps frightened by the dolphin, flying fish also took to the air. A couple of unlucky ones came down inside the akatos instead of back in the Inner Sea. Rowers who weren’t at the oars grabbed and gutted them and took them forward to grill them on a little charcoal brazier near the bow. Having any fire on a ship always worried Menedemos, but it was too useful to do without. The grinning men gobbled their snacks, then licked their fingers clean.

  The sun was nearing its noontime height. When it got there, he’d give the steering oars to Sostratos. After the first day out of Rhodes, he and his cousin had been splitting day and night between them. Diokles could also conn the galley at need—there wasn’t much aboard ship he couldn’t do, save possibly some fine work with the carpenter’s tools—but, with the wind quiet, he was more useful giving the rowers the stroke.

  “Come on, Leskhaios!” the keleustes barked to one of the men at the oars. “Put your back into it, my dear! You signed on as rower, not as a passenger. You aren’t paying your way to Egypt. We’re paying you—or we will if you work a bit.”

  “My hand is bleeding. I tore off a callus,” Leskhaios said.

  “Rub oil on it. Wrap it in a rag or a strip of leather. Your shift will be up pretty soon.” Like most oarmasters, Diokles had heard it all before, and none of it impressed him. He added, “When you come off your oar, use wine or vinegar or turpentine if we have any instead of olive oil. That will toughen up your hide quicker than anything else I know.”

  “It’ll hurt like I’ve got a weasel biting me, too,” the rower said.

  Diokles shrugged. “You can pay a little now, or you can pay more later because you didn’t heal fast.”

  “Do you want to take him off the oars and put him on the sail till his hand heals up?” Menedemos asked—softly, so only Diokles would hear.

  Shrugging, the keleustes said, “You’re the skipper. If you tell me to, I will. But I don’t think he’s hurting all that much. I just think he’s looking for a chance to get paid for being lazy.”

  “You may be right,” Menedemos admitted—it wasn’t as if he’d never run across rowers who did as little as they could get away with. “But take a look at his hand once his shift is up. If it really is bad, he can have some time away from pulling.”

  “Just as you say.” Diokles put a hint of reproach in that, but only a hint. He’d sailed with Menedemos on several trading runs now. He put up with the skipper’s easygoing, newfangled ways not least because Menedemos had them without flaunting them.

  “Something else we might do tomorrow,” Menedemos said, “is set everybody on the oars for a while so we can practice the kinds of maneuvers rowers on war-galleys have to know.”

  After so many years under the sun, Diokles usually squinted. Now his eyes narrowed further. “You reckon it will come to that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but it may.” Menedemos waved north and east, in the general direction of Cyprus. “If Demetrios takes the island, we may run into his ships—or pirates he’s hired—on the way home.”

  “Pirates!” Diokles spat on the planking. “That for pirates! As for proper naval ships, won’t their crews know Rhodians are neutral and not to be interfered with?”

  “I hope so, but you never can tell,” Menedemos said. “And remember, if Antigonos goes to war with Rhodes while we’re down in Egypt, we turn into fair game even though we may not even know the fighting’s started. So I want us to be as ready as we can.”

  “Fair enough. That makes sense.” The keleustes dipped his head. Then he eyed the rowers farther forward in the Aphrodite. “Some of the lads will have pulled in a trireme, sure enough. They’ll help give the others the hang of it.”

  “I hope so.” Menedemos lowered his voice again: “I hope they don’t need to start rowing in triremes again, too. Antigonos has a lot more men behind him than we do.”

  “Truth. Too much truth. Antigonos is stronger than we are, but Furies take me if I care to bend the knee to any man. I’d sooner tie a boulder to my leg and jump off a pier,” Diokles said.

  “Spoken like a free Hellene!” Menedemos exclaimed. He felt the same way himself. He knew no citizens in Rhodes who didn’t. A polis stayed free and independent as long as it could … and then, like as not, went down in a horror of fire and plunder and slavery.

  He didn’t want to think about that, not for Rhodes. But not thinking about it was much harder than not wanting to think about it.

  He felt better after putting the crew through their paces the next morning. They sprinted for a couple of stadia; when they did, not even Diokles could grumble about how they towed. They practiced sharp turns to port and starboard. They sprinted some more, then one side would suddenly back oars while the other kept rowing straight ahead, which made the Aphrodite turn almost within her own length.

  And they practiced lifting each side’s oars out of the water, so the akatos’ hull could smash an enemy ship’s oars with its weight. Some of them had been aboard when the Aphrodite disabled a Roman trireme that way a few years before.

  After the exercises finished, the men panted at their oars and passed around watered wine to ease their thirst. “What do you think?” Menedemos asked Diokles.

  “They could be better—it’s not like they practice all the cursed time,” the keleustes said. “We should keep working them. But they could be worse, too. I may be spoiled judging them because I’m a Rhodian and I expect the best.”

  “We need the best from them,” Menedemos said. “If we fight pirate pentekonters, we may get away with less. But against triremes or fours or fives, we’re out of our weight. Either we have to be faster than they are or we have to be better.”

  “Or we’re sunk,” Diokles replied, and Menedemos knew he wasn’t using a figure of speech.

  Sostratos could tell they were nearing the Egyptian coast. Out on the open sea, pelicans and gulls had been scarce. Now they teemed again, as they did near Rhodes.

  “What’s that?” A rower pointed to something floating in the sea. “Looks like an overgrown feather duster.”

  “That’s a palm tree. I saw them in Palestine,” Sostratos said. “It must have washed out from the Delta. So we are getting close to land.”

  Menedemos saw the drowned palm tree, too, and called, “Two drakhmai to the man who first spies land!”

  That set the men at the oars, who faced the akatos’ stern, to looking over their shoulders. It almost fouled the stroke. “Pay heed to what you’re supposed to be doing,” Diokles growled, “or it’ll cost you silver instead of making you any.”

  Instead of sighting land, someone shouted because he saw a boat out in the Inner Sea. Sostratos soon spotted it, too, and others a little farther away. Before long, the man who’d seen it first said, “That’s the funniest-looking gods-cursed boat I ever set eyes on. What’s it made of, anyway?”

  “Papyrus,” Sostratos answered. “Not the pith people use to write on, but whole stalks dried and woven together. It’s not as strong as planking, but Egypt doesn’t have many trees except for palms, and palm wood isn’t very good, either.”

  Menedemos steered toward the nearest fishing boat. The four brown men—naked but for thigh-length skirts of dirty linen—who handled the nets looked scared, but realized they couldn’t hope to flee the swiftly approaching galley.

  “Do you speak Greek?” Sostratos shouted to them from his place at the bow. They all spread their hands and shook their heads, which barbarians did instead of tossing them like Hellenes. Sostratos tried again: “Do you know the Syrian speech?” He didn’t speak Aramaic well himself, but he could just about get by in it.

  Three of the Egyptians still looked blank. Intelligence kindled on one man’s face, though. “Little bit,” he called back. His own language flavored his speech, making it harder for Sostratos to follow. Since Sostratos’ Aramaic had a heavy Greek accent, that was bound to work both ways.

  “In which direction lies Alexandria? The city of Alexandria?” Sostratos said, adding, “We give silver for the truth.”

  “Not come to pirate us?” the Egyptian said.

  “By the gods, no!” Sostratos said. “Traders us, not pirates. From Rhodes. Rhodes fights pirates.”

  The fisherman gabbled in Egyptian to his friends. One of them shrugged. Sostratos followed not a word, but he still had a good notion of what was going on. The men in the papyrus boat couldn’t run and couldn’t fight. What could they do but play along with the Hellenes?

  “That way.” The fellow who spoke Aramaic pointed south and west. “You go that way, you get there maybe sundown.”

  “Thank you,” Sostratos said, pleased with the way he and Menedemos had picked their way across the Inner Sea. They hadn’t been perfect—you couldn’t hope to navigate perfectly out of sight of land—but they had been pretty good. He turned to Menedemos, who was at the steering oars, and called, “Bring us alongside and give me a couple of drakhmai to pay him.”

  “What did he say?” Menedemos asked.

  Sostratos remembered he hadn’t been speaking Greek. He explained to his cousin, then went back to the stern to get the coins. Menedemos guided the Aphrodite next to the fishing boat (which, like the akatos, had eyes painted at either side of the bow). The men on the galley’s port side pulled in their oars so the ship could come close.

  “Here you are!” Sostratos leaned out over the gunwale and stretched out his arm with the drakhmai in the palm of his hand. The Egyptian with whom he’d talked took them. He weighed them in his own palm, then smiled broadly. Sostratos said, “Safe travel! A good catch!”

  “Safe travel you, too,” the brown man replied. “Good trading.”

  They parted on friendly terms. Before long, Leskhaios spotted a low smudge of land on the southern horizon. By Menedemos’ expression, he would rather have rewarded almost any other rower. But land it undeniably was. He gave Leskhaios the two drakhmai he’d promised.

  The land looked unprepossessing: swampy and almost venomously green. Rain might not water it, but the Nile did. Before long, the Aphrodite encountered many more fishing boats. Some ignored the akatos; others spread sail to get away as best they could. When they came back to whatever village they’d started from, the fishermen could entertain their neighbors with tales of how they’d got away from sea raiders.

  By the time the sun began to near the western horizon, they found themselves in the company of larger ships, first beamy merchantmen like the ones that came to and sailed from Rhodes wallowing along as best they could with their sails spread to catch as much of the fitful breeze as they could, and then something altogether different: a five, a war galley with three banks of oars, two men on each oar in the top and middle banks and a single rower on the lower one. An officer with a red cloak flung back over his shoulders cupped both hands in front of his mouth to hail the akatos: “What ship are you?”

  “We’re the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes,” Sostratos shouted back.

  “Out of Rhodes, hey?” The officer’s Doric accent was not too different from Menedemos’; he probably came from one of the Aegean islands himself. “You’re the first we’ve seen that crossed the Inner Sea this spring. What’s the news?”

  “We’ll put it first in the Ptolemaios’ ear,” Sostratos answered, hoping he wouldn’t anger the man by declining to spill everything he knew. Some Hellenes would have; if talking too much and to too many people wasn’t his folk’s besetting vice, Sostratos couldn’t imagine what would be.

  For a wonder, the red-cloaked officer didn’t lose his temper. “It must be important, then,” he said. Sostratos had never been wooed as a boy, unlike his cousin—when Menedemos was fourteen, his name was written on half the walls in Rhodes, prefaced by good or beautiful. He’d never pursued boys after coming to manhood, either. All the same, at that moment he would gladly have kissed the naval officer.

  He contented himself with dipping his head. “It is,” he agreed.