“Seeing all the squares the brails and the seams make on the sail always makes me think of geometry lessons,” Sostratos said. “What can we prove from the figure before us? What is the area of this rectangle or that one?”
“Geometry lessons.” Menedemos shuddered. “All I remember when I think of them is the schoolmaster with his stick. He drew blood sometimes, the polluted rogue.”
“I didn’t get hit all that often,” Sostratos said.
“No-you were the one who always had his lessons straight,” Menedemos said. “The other boys in the class didn’t love you for it.”
“I know.” Sostratos sighed. “I’ve never had any trouble understanding being disliked for doing things wrong. Who wants a bungler around? But having people hate you for doing what’s right, doing what you’re supposed to-that always seemed unfair to me.”
“You made the rest of us look bad,” his cousin said.
“You should have paid attention, too, then,” Sostratos said. “Those lessons weren’t that hard.”
“Not to you, maybe,” Menedemos said. “As far as I was concerned, the master might have been speaking Aramaic. Perimeter and hypotenuse and isosceles and I don’t know what all else.” He took a hand off the tiller and held it up. “And don’t you start explaining them to me, either. I don’t have to worry about them anymore.”
Sostratos’ ears burned. He had been on the point of launching into a geometry lesson. Like most of what he’d studied, mathematics had come easy for him. That it hadn’t for Menedemos and the other boys still perplexed him. But if it wasn’t a matter of their not studying, not paying attention, what was it?
He’d hardly posed the question in his own mind before Menedemos said, “Some of us are good at some things, others at others. You soaked up lessons the way a soft cloth soaks up water. But you won’t claim you’re better than I am at figuring out how people work, I hope.”
“Oh, I might claim it, but it wouldn’t be true,” Sostratos said. “You have the edge on me there.” He plucked at his beard. “I wonder why that should be.”
“People would be boring if everybody were just like everybody else,” Menedemos said. “We’d all go around like this”-he looked very severe and stiffened his body till he almost seemed cast from bronze-”as if we were so many Spartan hoplites all in a line in the phalanx.”
Laughing, Sostratos said, “Why couldn’t you make us all into pretty girls? But if we were all pretty girls, what would be the point of chasing one?”
“There’s always a point to chasing pretty girls.” Menedemos spoke with great conviction. But even joking with Sostratos hadn’t made him stop paying attention to the Aphrodite and the breeze. “Swing the yard forward a little more,” he called to the sailors.
As the men made the adjustment and the stays creaked, Sostratos asked, “Do you think we can go all the way to Knidos today?”
His cousin looked ahead. Knidos lay at the end of a long spit of land jutting west into the sea from the coast of Karia. At last, regretfully, Menedemos tossed his head. “If we’d put to sea earlier in the day, I do believe I’d try it, and sail on by the stars if we weren’t there by sunset.
As things are, though, it’s too much to ask of the sailors on their first day out. We’ll put in at Syme.”
“All right.” Sostratos would have done the same himself. Sometimes, though, Menedemos liked to push things. Sostratos pointed to the little island ahead. “Will you use that bay in the south where we put in a few years ago?”
“No, I was thinking of anchoring at the town on the north coast,” Menedemos answered. “It’s not much of a town, I know, but in a way that’s all the better. The men can go into a tavern without being tempted to run off and desert.”
“Gods know that’s true,” Sostratos agreed. “Nobody in his right mind would want to desert at Syme. No matter what you were trying to escape, what could be worse than staying there the rest of your days?”
Menedemos considered that. He didn’t need long to shudder. “Nothing I can think of,” he replied.
Little fishing boats coming back from their day’s work bobbed around the Aphrodite as her bow anchors went into the sea in front of the town of Syme. The town lay on a sheltered bay of the island with which it shared a name. Most of the fishing boats beached themselves, the men aboard them hauling them farther out of the water than oars could drive them. Menedemos had beached the merchant galley in the sheltered bay of which Sostratos had spoken. He didn’t feel like doing it here. If trouble came, he wanted to be able to get away in a hurry. He couldn’t very well do that with a beached ship.
“These folks are probably all right,” Diokles said, bearing down just a little on the word probably.
“I know,” Menedemos said. “If two or three other ships were here with us, I think I’d run her up onto the sand. This way… no. When fall came and we didn’t get back to Rhodes, somebody could come after us, and they might say, ‘The Aphrodite? Oh, no, she didn’t put in here. She must have come to grief somewhere else.’ Who could give ‘em the lie? I don’t think they’d do that, mind you, but why tempt ‘em?”
“You get no arguments from me, skipper,” the keleustes said. “Why tempt ‘em? is just right, far as I’m concerned.”
Up and down the length of the Aphrodite , sailors stretched and twisted, working kinks out of muscles they hadn’t used all winter. Some of them rubbed olive oil onto their blisters. Teleutas, who happened to be back by the poop deck, rubbed something else on them instead, from a small flask he’d stuck under his bench. Menedemos sniffed. “Isn’t that turpentine?” he asked, his eyebrows leaping in surprise.
“That’s right,” the sailor said.
“Doesn’t it burn like fire?” Menedemos said.
“It’s not so bad,” Teleutas answered. “It hardens the flesh instead of making it soft, the way oil does. I was talking with an Epeirote sailor in a tavern. He said they use it up there, and I thought I’d give it a try.”
“Better you than me,” Menedemos said.
Another rower, a former sponge diver named Moskhion, asked, “Can we take the boat and go ashore, skipper? We can buy ourselves some wine and some better grub than we’ve got on the ship here. Maybe there’s a brothel in town, too.”
“I don’t know about that,” Menedemos said. “This isn’t what you’d call a big place, and ships don’t put in here all that often. But yes, you can go find out, if you have a mind to.”
The merchant galley towed her boat behind her, on a line tied to the sternpost. The boat was new. She’d lost the old one the sailing season before, on the way back to Rhodes from Phoenicia. When two pirate ships attacked off the Lykian coast, a sailor had cut the old boat loose to help the Aphrodite fight them off. And so she had-but she hadn’t been able to go back and recover the boat.
Soldiers pulled the new boat alongside the akatos and clambered down into her. She carried half a dozen oars-small ones, compared to the nine-cubit sweeps that propelled the Aphrodite -and could hold a dozen men. The sailors briefly argued over who would row her back to the ship for the next group, then set off for the town of Syme.
“Are you going ashore?” Sostratos asked.
Menedemos tossed his head and mimed an enormous yawn. “Not likely, my dear. I might never wake up again. What about you?”
“I’m tempted,” his cousin answered. “After all, Syme’s less than a day’s sail from Rhodes. You can see this place any time you look west. Even so, I’ve never been into the town.”
“Yes, and we both know why, too: it’s not worth going into,” Menedemos said.
“Too true.” Sostratos thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I live in Rhodes. I’ve stayed in Athens. I’ve visited Taras and Syracuse- poleis that are poleis, if you know what I mean. I’m sorry, but I can’t get excited about Syme. This is one step up from a village-and a small step, too.”