He did handle the Aphrodite with his usual competence, sending her north up the coast. "No good anchorage tonight," he told the crew. "No proper harbor, I mean. Plenty of beaches, but do you really want to risk putting her ashore?"
Almost as one man, the sailors tossed their heads. Italy was a populous land, swarming with Samnites and other barbarians. Nobody was eager to give robbers a chance to swoop down on the ship.
"Sensible fellows," Menedemos said. Sostratos wondered what he would have said had the sailors wanted to beach the Aphrodite. Something interesting and memorable: of that Sostratos had no doubt. As things were, his cousin continued, "Since we don't have to hurry to make a port tonight, we're going to spend some more time pretending we're a war galley."
That didn't produce unanimous agreement from the crew. Sostratos hadn't thought it would. Practicing naval maneuvers was hard work, much harder than just sailing the akatos north would have been. And, of course, there was no guarantee the sailors would need what they were practicing. If they didn't, they would have put in all that effort for nothing.
Of course, if they didn't practice and ended up needing to fight, that would carry its own penalty, too: a penalty worse than blistered hands and weary backs. Sostratos could see that as plainly as he could look down and see his feet on the deck. He wondered why it wasn't obvious to everyone.
But the grumbling wasn't too bad. Before long, the Aphrodite zigged first one way, then the other. She spun in her own length, moving much faster than she had when turning back toward Hipponion after the pentekonter sheered off. "Starboard oars - in!" Diokles shouted, and the rowers on that side of the ship pulled their oars inboard at the same time.
The oarmaster glanced at Menedemos, who grinned back at him. "I've seen triremes where they didn't do it so smoothly," Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head.
"Same here." Diokles turned back to the rowers. "Resume!" The starboard oars went back into the water in the same unison with which they'd left it. The keleustes let the men row for a few strokes, then shouted, "Portside oars - in!" This time, the maneuver proved less successful; a couple of oars came in slower than they might have.
"That's not so good." Sostratos and Menedemos spoke together.
"I know it isn't." The oarmaster sounded angry and chagrined. When he yelled, "Resume!" this time, he didn't try to hide that annoyance. He went right on at an irate bellow: "Now listen to me, you worthless lugs - if we ever need that command, we'll need it bad. If you're late, it's your arms that'll get wrenched out of their shoulder sockets. We're going to keep working on this till we get it right - right, do you hear me?"
All the portside rowers were, of course, looking straight back toward the keleustes on the poop deck. Like Epimetheus in the myth, rowers had a perfect view of where they'd been and none of where they were going. Sostratos eyed their sweaty faces more openly than he could have most of the time, because they were paying him no attention at all, but were listening to Diokles' tirade. Most of them, especially the ones who'd been slow, looked embarrassed and angry - not at the oarmaster, but at themselves for failing him.
To Menedemos, Sostratos murmured, "If I talked to them like that, they'd throw me over the side."
"They'd do the same to me," his cousin answered. "They'll obey me; sure enough, but a skipper shouldn't scream at his sailors. That's what makes mutinies happen: they think you're a gods-detested whoreson. But they respect a tough keleustes - the fellow in that job's supposed to have a hide thick as leather."
Sostratos pondered that. Menedemos had the knack for getting men to do what he wanted because they liked him. Diokles was ready to outroar anyone who presumed to stand against him. And what about me? Sostratos wondered. Neither of those ways seemed open to him. When people did what he wanted, it was because he'd persuaded them that that was the right thing to do under the circumstances. Such persuasion had its uses, but not, he feared, in emergencies.
Again and again, Diokles shouted, "Portside oars - in!" After a while, Sostratos thought the rowers had the maneuver down cold, but the keleustes kept drilling them. When at last he relented, it was with a growled warning: "We'll do it again tomorrow, too. We're talking about saving your necks, remember."
At sunset, the anchors splashed into the sea. The Aphrodite bobbed in light chop, well off the Italian coast. Even if a storm blew up, the ship had plenty of leeway - and galleys were far less vulnerable to being driven ashore by hostile wind and wave than were ships that relied on sails alone.
The evening meal was about as frugal as breakfast had been. Sostratos ate bread and oil and olives and cheese. Menedemos bit into an onion pungent enough to make Sostratos' eyes water from three cubits away. He washed it down with a sip of wine. Catching Sostratos' eye, he said, "It's not what we got at Gylippos' supper, but it fills the belly."
"What you got at Gylippos' supper was trouble," Sostratos replied. "How's your ankle today?"
He'd meant that as a gibe, but Menedemos answered seriously: "Standing at the steering oars all day long doesn't do it any good, but it's healing. It would be worse if I had to run around a lot."
"You did that back in Taras," Sostratos pointed out.
"Yes, O most beloved cousin of mine," Menedemos said, so poisonously that Sostratos decided he'd pushed things about as far as he could go.
On the second evening out from Hipponion, the Aphrodite reached the town of Laos, which lay at the mouth of a river of the same name. Laos' harbor was rather better than that of Hipponion, and the merchant galley tied up at one of the piers. Hardly any of the longshoremen and loafers spoke more than a few words of Greek: they talked among themselves in one Italic language or another.
Across the pier was a sailing ship from Rhegion. Her skipper, a tubby, gray-haired fellow who gave his name as Leptines, ambled by to look over the Aphrodite. "I envy you your oars," he said. "I've been crawling up the coast - crawling, I tell you - tacking all the way. I'll be a month getting to Neapolis, maybe more. How am I supposed to make ends meet if I can't get from here to there?"
Sostratos poured him some of the same wine he was drinking himself and asked, "Why didn't you sail south, to take advantage of the winds?"
"I usually do." Leptines gulped the wine. "Ahh, that's good. I usually do, like I said, but not this year. Too big a chance of somebody's navy snapping me up if I went along the Sicilian coast."
Sostratos dipped his head. The Aphrodite hadn't tried sailing down to Syracuse, either. Menedemos gave Leptines an engaging smile. "Any special ports we should know about on the way up the coast?"
Leptines didn't directly answer that. Instead, he returned a question for a question: "What are you carrying?"
"Peafowl chicks and perfume, papyrus and ink, fine Khian wine, Koan silk, perfumes - things like that," Menedemos replied. "How about you?"
"Wool and timber and wheat and leather," Leptines said. "I should've known a merchant galley from out of the east would only come here for the luxury trade. If we were competing, I wouldn't give you the hour of the day, but you won't do my business any harm even if you will get up north ahead of me."
"Well, then?" Menedemos asked in his most ingratiating voice. Sostratos hoped his winecup hid his own snicker. His cousin sounded as if he were trying to talk a girl into bed. Had he sounded that way with Phyllis? Sostratos wouldn't have been surprised.
His tone certainly worked on Leptines. "There's one place by the coast south of Neapolis where there's more to it than you'd think," the trader from Rhegion said, "provided you don't mind doing business with Samnites, that is."