I hope we can do it again, he thought. He glanced over to Sostratos, waiting for his cousin to start mourning the gryphon’s skull the pirates had carried away with them. But Sostratos didn’t say a thing. Maybe he’d learned to accept the loss. More likely, he’d learned Menedemos would come down like a rockslide if he started complaining about the gryphon’s skull.
Fishing boats fled the Aphrodite with even more alacrity than usual. Teleutas laughed and said, “With all the ironware and bronze we’re showing, they’re sure we’re pirates now.” His helmet jammed down low on his forehead and a fierce grin on his narrow, homely face made him look like a man who would sooner steal than work.
I know he steals, Menedemos reminded himself. Sostratos caught him at it in loudaia. If he ever steals on the Aphrodite, he’s gone. But Teleutas had never got caught doing that. No one on the merchant galley had complained of a thief. Maybe he had too much sense to steal from his fellow Hellenes. For his sake, Menedemos hoped so.
The channel between the islands was less than sixty stadia wide. Menedemos sailed the Aphrodite right down the middle of it. He was close enough to land to see sheep kicking up dust in the hills above the beach on Euboia, and to see one of those little fishing boats go aground at the mouth of a stream on Andros. He and the whole crew kept close watch on inlets and rocky outcrops-those were pirates’ favorite hiding places.
Today, though, everything seemed as peaceful as if no one had ever thought of taking robbery to sea. When Menedemos said that out loud, Sostratos tossed his head. “Don’t believe it for a moment, my dear,” he said. “Somewhere up in those hills-probably more than one place up in those hills-a pirate lookout is watching us and thinking, No, more trouble than they’re worth. And that’s all that’s keeping us safe.”
Menedemos didn’t need long to decide his cousin was right. He said, “Well, I wish the lookout who loosed that last pirate ship against us in these waters would have thought the same thing.”
“So do I,” Sostratos said. Menedemos cocked his head to one side, waiting for him to say more. Sostratos caught him waiting and laughed. “I’ve said everything I can about the gryphon’s skull.”
“Till the next time you do,” Menedemos gibed.
Sostratos laughed again, on a different note. “Maybe you’re right. I hope not, but maybe. I think we are going to make it out of this channel.”
“It’s not very long,” Menedemos said. “We only seem to take forever going through it.”
“Oh, good,” Sostratos said. “I thought I was the only one who felt that way.”
“No, indeed, best one, and I’m not ashamed to admit it,” Menedemos said. “After all, we’re passing through a place where we’ve already had trouble. If you think I’m not nervous about the passage, you’re daft. I don’t like fighting off pirates any better than you do.”
“You do it well,” Sostratos said. “If you didn’t, we’d be slaves now, or dead.”
“For which I thank you,” Menedemos said, “but I’ve already had more practice than I ever wanted.” He turned his head from one side to the other. Now the coastline of Andros was swiftly falling off to the southeast, that of Euboia to the northwest. “We’re through it now for sure. Anyone who wants to come after us will have a long chase, and we’re not that much slower than a pirate ship.”
Sostratos pointed west. “There’s the headland of Laureion, with Helen’s island in front of it. Attica!”
“Yes, Attica,” Menedemos agreed dryly. “We limped into Sounion at the cape there a couple of years ago, too, if you’ll remember, to bury our dead after the fight.”
His cousin flushed. “So we did. But we’re not limping now. And we haven’t been robbed of what was our main reason for coming to Athens.” He pointed a thumb at himself before Menedemos could speak. “Yes, I know I just mentioned the skull-but it was in the context of what we were talking about.”
“Context.” Menedemos rolled his eyes and addressed some invisible audience: “He takes one look at Attic soil and starts babbling about context. What’ll he be like when we actually set foot in Athens? Odds are, no one will be able to understand his Greek at all.”
“Oh, go howl!” Sostratos pointed back toward the southeast, not at Andros but up into the heavens. “What would you say the phase of the moon is?”
Menedemos looked over his shoulder to see the moon, white and pale in the late-afternoon sky. “First quarter-perhaps a day after.”
“That’s what I thought, too.” Sostratos beamed. “That means it’s the seventh or eighth of Elaphebolion. The Greater Dionysia starts on the tenth. We’re going to make the festival.”
“Good,” Menedemos said. “I like the theater as well as the next fellow-unless the next fellow happens to be you, maybe-but I also know we have to do business. I keep hoping you’ll remember that, too.”
“How could I possibly forget, having you to remind me?” Sostratos spoke with such surpassing sweetness, anyone who didn’t know him would have been sure he meant every word and was grateful.
Menedemos, who knew Sostratos as well as any man alive, was sure his cousin meant every word and wanted to push him over the rail. With a sweet smile of his own, he said, “All right, then. As long as we understand each other.”
“We usually do.” Again, Sostratos sounded altogether acquiescent. Again, Menedemos was not deceived. But then his cousin grew serious. “Do you think we can round Cape Sounion today, perhaps go all the way to Anaphlystos harbor?”
After studying the sun, Menedemos tossed his head. “What I think is, we’ll be lucky to get to Sounion. More likely, we’ll lie up in one of the little bays on Helen’s island.” Sostratos looked as if Menedemos had just kicked a puppy. Relenting a little, Menedemos added, “Even so, we should have no trouble reaching Peiraieus tomorrow.”
Sostratos brightened. Menedemos had known his cousin would. He could have said the ship would spend the night in Persia-or, for that matter, in Tartaros-as long as he also said it would get to the harbor of Athens the next day. Sostratos said, “I wonder why Helen is tied to so many islands. There’s another one, to the west, that’s supposed to be where she first slept with Paris on the way to Troy.”
“That I don’t know,” Menedemos said. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t worried about it much, either. When I think about Helen, I’d rather think about why Paris wanted her than why they remember her on islands.”
“But everyone knows why Paris wanted her,” Sostratos said. “The other question’s much more interesting, because it doesn’t have an obvious answer.”
“That makes it more interesting?” Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head. They stared at each other in perfect mutual incomprehension.
The Aphrodite reached an inlet at the north end of Helen’s island as the sun slid behind the highland of Cape Sounion. The island ran from north to south, and was much longer than it was wide. No polis stood anywhere on it, nor even a village. Sheep and goats wandered the low, rolling ground, cropping grass and bushes. As darkness spread over sea and land, herdsmen’s campfires glowed like golden stars off in the distance.
No one came up to the ship to ask for news or give any of his own. That saddened Menedemos. “The shepherds think we’ll grab ‘em and sell ‘em into slavery,” he said.
“We wouldn’t,” Sostratos said.
“No, of course not. Couldn’t very well sell ‘em in Athens even if we did grab ‘em,” Menedemos said. “I wouldn’t care to enslave free Hellenes anyway-if the herders are free Hellenes and not already enslaved like Eumaios the swineherd in the Odyssey.”
“They don’t know where we’re from or where we’re bound,” Sostratos said. “For all they can tell, we might be Tyrrhenians who’d sell them in the slave markets at Carthage.”
“I know. That’s what bothers me,” Menedemos said. “Even so close to Athens, people worry about pirates and raiders.”