"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 stroke, 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.
Sostratos kept his eye on the pirate ship. How many times had potential prey turned on the robbers and killers and slavers that green-blue hull carried? Were they ready to fight? If they were, and if they wanted to do it ship against ship and not man against man, they had a chance, and probably a good one: that triakonter was both faster and more maneuverable than the Aphrodite.
Closer and closer the two galleys drew. Faint across the water, Sostratos heard shouts aboard the pirate ship. Several men stood on its little raised poop deck. By the way they waved their hands and shook their fists, they were arguing about what to do next.
When the ships were only a couple of stadia apart, the pirate suddenly broke off his own attack run, swinging away toward the southwest. Staying aggressive, Menedemos went right after him. But the smaller, leaner ship was now running straight before the wind, and she had a better turn of speed than the merchant galley. Little by little, she pulled away.
"Can I ease the men back, skipper?" Diokles asked. "We're not going to catch those bastards no matter how hard we pull."
"Go ahead," Menedemos answered, and the oarmaster slowed the rhythm of his mallet on bronze. The men sensed the relaxation at once. They let out a great cheer. Some of them took one hand off their oars to wave to Menedemos, and he took his right hand off the steering-oar tiller for a moment to wave back. "Thanks, boys," he called. "I guess those villains didn't know who they were messing with when they tried to mess with us, did they?"
The sailors cheered louder than ever. Menedemos grinned, basking in the praise. Sostratos wondered how he would respond if people cheered him like that. Then he wondered what he could do to make people cheer him like that. He was the one who'd noticed the pirate ship was only a triakonter. Nobody else had even thought to look.
But he'd just been accurate. Menedemos was the one who'd made the bold, unexpected move, the move anybody could see had saved the ship. He got the credit. He knew how to get the credit, and he knew what to do with it once he had it.
Me? Sostratos thought. I'm a good toikharkhos, is what I am. He might wish he were bold, but he wasn't. Well, the world needs reliable men, too. He'd told himself that a good many times. It was, without the tiniest fragment of doubt, true. It was also, without the tiniest fragment of doubt, small consolation.