The sail was brailed up to the yard. If the breeze came back, Menedemos would order it set again. For now, he didn’t need to worry about it. Neither did the rowers. Some of the men not at the oars dozed in the sun. Some rubbed olive oil on their bodies and especially their hands, which would have softened in a winter ashore. And some dropped hooks and lines into the wine-dark sea, using bits of salt fish as bait in the hope of catching something tastier.
Dark blue water below. Brighter blue sky above. That was the world, as it looked to Menedemos. Land somewhere, no doubt, but nowhere close, nowhere in sight. They were far enough out in the middle of the open sea that even gulls and terns and pelicans were scarce. The rowers exclaimed when a dolphin paced the Aphrodite for a while, every so often leaping out of the water and arrowing back in nose first with scarcely a splash.
“He’s having more fun than we are,” Sostratos remarked.
“If I could swim like that, I wouldn’t use a ship, either,” Menedemos answered.
“Not even if you wanted to carry cargo?” his cousin said in sly tones.
“Oh, I’d just strap it on my back and carry it along with me,” Menedemos said blithely. Sostratos made a face at him.
Perhaps frightened by the dolphin, flying fish also took to the air. A couple of unlucky ones came down inside the akatos instead of back in the Inner Sea. Rowers who weren’t at the oars grabbed and gutted them and took them forward to grill them on a little charcoal brazier near the bow. Having any fire on a ship always worried Menedemos, but it was too useful to do without. The grinning men gobbled their snacks, then licked their fingers clean.
The sun was nearing its noontime height. When it got there, he’d give the steering oars to Sostratos. After the first day out of Rhodes, he and his cousin had been splitting day and night between them. Diokles could also conn the galley at need—there wasn’t much aboard ship he couldn’t do, save possibly some fine work with the carpenter’s tools—but, with the wind quiet, he was more useful giving the rowers the stroke.
“Come on, Leskhaios!” the keleustes barked to one of the men at the oars. “Put your back into it, my dear! You signed on as rower, not as a passenger. You aren’t paying your way to Egypt. We’re paying you—or we will if you work a bit.”
“My hand is bleeding. I tore off a callus,” Leskhaios said.
“Rub oil on it. Wrap it in a rag or a strip of leather. Your shift will be up pretty soon.” Like most oarmasters, Diokles had heard it all before, and none of it impressed him. He added, “When you come off your oar, use wine or vinegar or turpentine if we have any instead of olive oil. That will toughen up your hide quicker than anything else I know.”
“It’ll hurt like I’ve got a weasel biting me, too,” the rower said.
Diokles shrugged. “You can pay a little now, or you can pay more later because you didn’t heal fast.”
“Do you want to take him off the oars and put him on the sail till his hand heals up?” Menedemos asked—softly, so only Diokles would hear.
Shrugging, the keleustes said, “You’re the skipper. If you tell me to, I will. But I don’t think he’s hurting all that much. I just think he’s looking for a chance to get paid for being lazy.”
“You may be right,” Menedemos admitted—it wasn’t as if he’d never run across rowers who did as little as they could get away with. “But take a look at his hand once his shift is up. If it really is bad, he can have some time away from pulling.”
“Just as you say.” Diokles put a hint of reproach in that, but only a hint. He’d sailed with Menedemos on several trading runs now. He put up with the skipper’s easygoing, newfangled ways not least because Menedemos had them without flaunting them.
“Something else we might do tomorrow,” Menedemos said, “is set everybody on the oars for a while so we can practice the kinds of maneuvers rowers on war-galleys have to know.”
After so many years under the sun, Diokles usually squinted. Now his eyes narrowed further. “You reckon it will come to that?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but it may.” Menedemos waved north and east, in the general direction of Cyprus. “If Demetrios takes the island, we may run into his ships—or pirates he’s hired—on the way home.”
“Pirates!” Diokles spat on the planking. “That for pirates! As for proper naval ships, won’t their crews know Rhodians are neutral and not to be interfered with?”
“I hope so, but you never can tell,” Menedemos said. “And remember, if Antigonos goes to war with Rhodes while we’re down in Egypt, we turn into fair game even though we may not even know the fighting’s started. So I want us to be as ready as we can.”
“Fair enough. That makes sense.” The keleustes dipped his head. Then he eyed the rowers farther forward in the Aphrodite. “Some of the lads will have pulled in a trireme, sure enough. They’ll help give the others the hang of it.”
“I hope so.” Menedemos lowered his voice again: “I hope they don’t need to start rowing in triremes again, too. Antigonos has a lot more men behind him than we do.”
“Truth. Too much truth. Antigonos is stronger than we are, but Furies take me if I care to bend the knee to any man. I’d sooner tie a boulder to my leg and jump off a pier,” Diokles said.
“Spoken like a free Hellene!” Menedemos exclaimed. He felt the same way himself. He knew no citizens in Rhodes who didn’t. A polis stayed free and independent as long as it could … and then, like as not, went down in a horror of fire and plunder and slavery.
He didn’t want to think about that, not for Rhodes. But not thinking about it was much harder than not wanting to think about it.
He felt better after putting the crew through their paces the next morning. They sprinted for a couple of stadia; when they did, not even Diokles could grumble about how they towed. They practiced sharp turns to port and starboard. They sprinted some more, then one side would suddenly back oars while the other kept rowing straight ahead, which made the Aphrodite turn almost within her own length.
And they practiced lifting each side’s oars out of the water, so the akatos’ hull could smash an enemy ship’s oars with its weight. Some of them had been aboard when the Aphrodite disabled a Roman trireme that way a few years before.
After the exercises finished, the men panted at their oars and passed around watered wine to ease their thirst. “What do you think?” Menedemos asked Diokles.
“They could be better—it’s not like they practice all the cursed time,” the keleustes said. “We should keep working them. But they could be worse, too. I may be spoiled judging them because I’m a Rhodian and I expect the best.”
“We need the best from them,” Menedemos said. “If we fight pirate pentekonters, we may get away with less. But against triremes or fours or fives, we’re out of our weight. Either we have to be faster than they are or we have to be better.”
“Or we’re sunk,” Diokles replied, and Menedemos knew he wasn’t using a figure of speech.
Sostratos could tell they were nearing the Egyptian coast. Out on the open sea, pelicans and gulls had been scarce. Now they teemed again, as they did near Rhodes.
“What’s that?” A rower pointed to something floating in the sea. “Looks like an overgrown feather duster.”
“That’s a palm tree. I saw them in Palestine,” Sostratos said. “It must have washed out from the Delta. So we are getting close to land.”
Menedemos saw the drowned palm tree, too, and called, “Two drakhmai to the man who first spies land!”
That set the men at the oars, who faced the akatos’ stern, to looking over their shoulders. It almost fouled the stroke. “Pay heed to what you’re supposed to be doing,” Diokles growled, “or it’ll cost you silver instead of making you any.”