A fresh breeze in his face, Menedemos grinned enormously. He felt like a man who’d been riding donkeys all his life and suddenly found himself on the back of a Nisaian charger. This ship moved. She was made for speed, and delivered it.
Once they cleared the mouth of the harbor, he swung the trihemiolia east, intending to cruise along the Karian coast looking for pirates-or for ships that could be pirates. “This is the first time I’ve skippered one of these patrols,” he said to Philokrates. “What are the rules if we spy a pentekonter or a hemiolia going along minding her own business?”
“About what you’d expect,” the oarmaster replied. “We go up to her, we question her crew, and we sink her if we don’t like the answers we get. A captain or an owner who thinks we made a mistake can complain to the Rhodian government.”
“If he hasn’t drowned, of course,” Menedemos said.
Philokrates dipped his head. “Well, yes. There is that.”
Right away, Menedemos noticed one difference between the Aphrodite and the Dikaiosyne. Fishing boats and round ships fought shy of the akatos, fearing she might be a pirate ship. But sailors of all sorts waved toward the trihemiolia. A three-banked oar-powered ship had to be a war galley, a hound dedicated to hunting down the wolves of the sea.
“You don’t want to get too close to land and let the wide-arsed catamites playing watchman for the pirate crews get a good look at you,” Philokrates said.
“I understand,” Menedemos answered. “You know what, O best one? It might be fun to send a round ship or a merchant galley close enough to the coast to be easy to spot, with the Dikaiosyne out far enough to see the decoy, but too far out to be seen from shore. Then, when the pirates come out for the nearer ship, this one could dash in and swoop down on them.”
The oarmaster contemplated the scheme. A slow grin spread over his leathery features. “Fun, you say, do you? By Poseidon ’s trident, I like your notion of fun. You ought to talk with Admiral Eudemos when we get back to Rhodes. He’s the one who’d have to give the orders to bring off something like that. Don’t forget, now, because I think it could work.”
“I won’t forget,” Menedemos said. “Even if I did, you could tell the admiral.”
“You thought of it. You deserve the credit,” Philokrates said, which went a long way toward making him a friend for life. He added, “You are a clever fellow, aren’t you? First the notion for this class of ship, and now a pretty trap? Not bad. Not bad at all.”
Menedemos was much more used to hearing Sostratos called clever than to having the word applied to him. He almost denied it-almost, but not quite. He had thought of trihemioliai, and he had come up with the decoying scheme. He would have praised anyone else who’d done such things. Didn’t it follow that he deserved praise, too? He liked it as much as anybody else: more than some people he could think of. His father was sparing of praise, but that didn’t mean other people had to be.
With its countless headlands and little bays and streams running down from the hills into the Aegean, the Karian coastline was a pirate’s ream. It offered myriads of places to wait in ambush till a tempting target sailed by. A quick dash, and the victim was caught. It offered even more places to hide a pirate ship against the prying eyes of the Rhodians. Menedemos knew patrols like this didn’t, couldn’t, stop piracy altogether. But making it difficult, dangerous, and expensive was worth doing.
“Ship ho off the port bow!” the lookout bawled.
Menedemos swung the trihemiolia to the north. He told Philokrates, “Up the stroke, if you please. Let’s see what she can do if the men put their backs into it.”
The keleustes dipped his head. “Right you are, skipper.” The tempo of the drumbeats he gave the rowers picked up. “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” he shouted, using his voice to emphasize the change. The piper matched his piercing note to the one Philokrates played on the drum.
And how the Dikaiosyne responded! The galley seemed to bound across the Aegean toward the other ship. And that other ship didn’t hang around waiting to be questioned. She turned and fled toward the shore as fast as she could go. “Pentekonter!” the lookout said. “Probably full of cutthroats right to the gunwales.”
“Not full enough, by the gods,” Philokrates said. “No pentekonter ever made could outrun this ship. We outrun triremes. We run down hemioliai, by Zeus! A pentekonter? This for a stinking pentekonter!” He spat on the deck.
Sure enough, the Dikaiosyne ate up the distance between the two ships, plethron by plethron, stadion by stadion. But the Karian coast also drew closer with every surge from the oars. “Marine archers forward!” Menedemos shouted. When they didn’t seem to hear him, he sent Xenagoras up to them, adding, “Tell ‘em to shoot as fast as they can. The more rowers we hurt, the better our chance of catching them before they can beach.”
Philokrates grinned. “You know your business. A lot of first-time skippers, you have to hold their hands and show ‘em what to do. Not you.”
“You and the mates know this ship better than I do,” Menedemos answered. “But I’ve fought pirates before, too. Then they had more men and faster ships than I did. I’ve got the edge now, and it feels good-you’d best believe it does.”
As the marine archers hurried forward, they put the trihemiolia down by the bow and slowed her just a touch. Menedemos ordered other men back toward the stern, restoring her trim. The archers began to shoot.
A couple of pirates went to the pentekonter’s stern to shoot back, but her poop deck was even smaller and more crowded than, say, the Aphrodites; it would hold no more. One of the bowmen on the pirate ship reeled back, clutching at his chest, as a shaft from the Dikaiosyne went home. Another man took his place. Then a rower on the pentekonter took an arrow in the shoulder and fouled the man in front of him. Again, another pirate pulled him away, but the pentekonter needed some little while to straighten out her stroke.
Even so, the pirate ship made the beach. Menedemos had known she would. She rode half her length up onto the soft, golden sand. Rowers jumped off her and ran inland as fast as they could. “Do you want to go after them?” Nikandros asked. “We’ve got a lot more men. We could catch some of the rogues.”
Menedemos had had time to think about that on the chase. Regretfully, he tossed his head and told the mate, “No. No telling how many pals the abandoned villains have back in the hills. We’ll burn their ship. That’ll put them out of business for a while.”
Burn her they did. And the pentekonter made such a pyre, it was plain her timbers had been kept dry as carefully as a war galley’s. Black smoke rose high into the sky. “Good riddance,” Philokrates said. “Pity they weren’t all in her.”
“Oh, yes.” Menedemos dipped his head. “But let’s keep pushing east a little while longer now.”
Before answering, the oarmaster glanced toward the sun. Menedemos did the same. It was somewhere right around noon. Philokrates said, “If we go much farther east, most noble one, we won’t get back to Rhodes before sundown.”
“I know that,” Menedemos said. “But don’t you think pirate crews know it, too? Wouldn’t they be likely to base their ships out a little farther from Rhodes than our patrols usually go? They’d think they were likely to be safe. Maybe we can give them a surprise. And if we have to, we can find our way home by the stars or spend a night at sea. I’ve done it plenty of times in my akatos.”
“An akatos isn’t such a crowded ship as a trihemiolia,” Philokrates pointed out. That was true. The war galley was bigger than the Aphrodite, but she wasn’t four times as big, and she carried four times the crew-that was why she could go so fast. Menedemos wondered how real his command of the Dikaiosyne was: if he gave an order Philokrates didn’t fancy, would the keleustes and the crew obey him or ignore him? He didn’t find out here, for Philokrates grinned and said, “Let’s try it. You make a good point, and we’d have a lot to be proud of if we came back to Rhodes after we’d skinned a pair of pirates.”