As Syracuse receded behind the merchant galley, Menedemos took more than half the sailors off the oars. The ship glided up the Sicilian coast toward the mainland of Italy. Dolphins leaped. Terns splashed into the sea, some only a few cubits from the Aphrodite. One came out with a fish in its beak.
"You'll have an easy trip home," Menedemos called to him from the stern. "No more peafowl to worry about."
"I'm so disappointed they're gone," Sostratos answered.
Not only his cousin but half the sailors laughed. Aristeidas the lookout said, "The foredeck still smells like birdshit."
"You're right - it does," Sostratos agreed. "It probably will for a while, too."
"So it will," Aristeidas said darkly. "Now that you don't have to take care of peafowl any more, you can go wherever you like on the ship. Me, I'm stuck up here most of the time."
You can go wherever you like. Aristeidas had said it without irony, and Sostratos took it the same way. Then he thought about what a landlubber would make of it. The Aphrodite was only forty or forty-five cubits long, and perhaps seven cubits wide at her beamiest. From the perspective of someone used to strolling through a polis or across his fields, that didn't give a man much room. A sailor, though, had a much more cramped view of what was roomy and what wasn't.
As if to prove as much, Sostratos went back to the poop deck, which to him felt as far from the smelly foredeck as Athens was from Rhodes. Menedemos asked him, "What have we got left to trade on the way home?"
"A little wine," Sostratos answered. "Some perfume. I'd like to get rid of that, if we see the chance - taking it back to Rhodes would be a shame, when it came from there. And we still have some silk." He sighed.
Menedemos took a hand off the steering oar to poke him in the ribs. "I know what you're thinking of: that copper-haired Keltic girl you were screwing in Taras."
Sostratos' ears heated; he had indeed been thinking of Maibia, in and especially out of the Koan silk tunic she wore. "Well, what if I was?" he asked roughly.
"It's all right with me." As usual when the talk rolled around to women, Menedemos sounded disgustingly cheerful. "I've got plenty to think about myself."
"If you'd do some thinking beforehand . . ." Sostratos said.
"That takes away half the fun. More than half," he cousin answered.
"I don't see it that way," Sostratos said with a shrug.
"I know you don't." Menedemos leaned forward and spoke in a low voice: "Just exactly how much silver are we carrying? In the name of the gods, don't yell out the answer. The last thing we want to do is give the sailors ideas." In something close to a whisper, Sostratos told him. Menedemos whistled softly. "That's even more than I figured. It's almost enough for ballast."
"On a ship this size?" Sostratos made the automatic mental calculation, then tossed his head. "Don't be silly."
"Mm, I suppose not." By the look of concentration on his face, Menedemos was making the same calculation. "But I'll tell you this: it's more silver than my father expected us to bring back. And I'll rub his nose in it, too."
"Why bother?" Sostratos asked. "Uncle Philodemos will be glad to see you home safe, and he'll be glad of the profit. Isn't that enough?"
"No, by Zeus." A hot eagerness thrummed in Menedemos' voice, like a following wind in the rigging. "Ever since I started toddling around and stopped making messes on the floor, he's always gone on and on about what a great trader he is and how I don't measure up. Let's see him talk like that now."
"I didn't come out here thinking to outdo my father," Sostratos said.
"You're toikharkhos. I'm captain," Menedemos said, that hot eagerness turning to something cold and hard for a moment. But he went on, "Uncle Lysistratos doesn't go around bragging and carping all the time; I will say that. And the two of you get along better than Father and I do. Anyone who saw us would say that."
"I suppose so," Sostratos said. "We'd have a hard time getting along worse than the two of you, wouldn't we?"
"You're as comfortable together as a foot and an old sandal, and you know it," Menedemos said. "The two of you fit like that. Do you have any idea how jealous it makes me?"
"No, I didn't, not till you just mentioned it." Sostratos studied his cousin with an avid curiosity of a small boy seeing an unexpected lizard emerge from under a chunk of bark. "I'm usually the one who holds things inside, but you've kept that secret for years. Forever, really."
By Menedemos' expression, he wished he hadn't told it now. He said, "I'm not sorry to get away from Rhodes for months at a time, I'll tell you that."
"I can see as much," Sostratos said judiciously. He set a hand on Menedemos' shoulder. "We won't be back for a little while yet. Nothing happens in a hurry on the sea. Even when we were fighting that Roman trireme, we seemed to be moving as slowly as if we were in a dream."
"Not to me," Menedemos said. "It all happened very fast, as far as I was concerned. I needed to gauge just the right moment to tug at the steering oars, and it all felt like it happened in a heartbeat. That's the sweetest sound I ever heard - our hull riding up and over that polluted whoreson's oars."
"If you think I'll argue, you're mad," Sostratos said. "That sound meant we stayed free men, and what could be sweeter than that?" He pointed ahead. "There's Cape Leukopetra, with Cape Herakleion just off to the east."
"I know, my dear. I saw them quite a while ago." Now Menedemos sounded acidulous, perhaps because he'd shown more of himself to Sostratos a little while before than he'd wanted to. "I don't have to change the way the ship is heading this very instant, you know."
"So you don't," Sostratos agreed. "Proves my point - nothing happens in a hurry on the sea."
Menedemos stuck out his tongue. They both laughed. Laughter came easy when they'd made a profit, when they were sailing away from danger and not into it, and - for Sostratos, at least - when they were homeward bound.
"That should just about do it," Menedemos said as the Aphrodite eased into place alongside a quay in Kroton's harbor.
"I think so, too, skipper," Diokles said. "Oöp!" he called in a louder voice, and the rowers rested at their oars. A couple of sailors tossed lines to men on the quay, who made the merchant galley fast.
"You were here earlier this summer, weren't you?" one of the roustabouts called.
"That's right," Menedemos answered. "We went up the west coast of Italy, and then down to Syracuse with the grain fleet from Rhegion. You've heard how Agathokles landed not far from Carthage?"
"Sure have," the roustabout said. "That took balls, that did."
From the bow, Sostratos asked, "Do you know what happened when the Roman fleet attacked Pompaia? We were up that way, and almost got caught."
"It came to grief, or that's what I heard," the Krotonite said. Several sailors clapped their hands together in grim delight. The roustabout went on, "The sailors and soldiers aboard scattered to plunder, and the folk from all the towns thereabouts - not just Pompaia, but Nole and Noukeria and Akherrai, too - gathered together and drove 'em back to their ships with heavy losses." More sailors clapped. Some of them cheered. The local added, "Some people say one Roman ship got wrecked by a merchantman, but you won't get me to swallow that."
"I wouldn't either, if I were you," Menedemos said gravely. The sailors who heard him sniggered and brought their hands up to their mouths to keep from laughing out loud. The roustabout gave them curious looks, but nobody said another word, so he shrugged and started to turn away.
Before he left, Sostratos asked him, "How does the marvelous Hipparinos like his peafowl chicks?"
"You're those fellows!" The Krotonite snapped his fingers in excitement. "I thought you were those fellows, but I wasn't sure, and I didn't like to take the chance. Do you know what happened there? Do you?"