Instead of sighting land, someone shouted because he saw a boat out in the Inner Sea. Sostratos soon spotted it, too, and others a little farther away. Before long, the man who’d seen it first said, “That’s the funniest-looking gods-cursed boat I ever set eyes on. What’s it made of, anyway?”
“Papyrus,” Sostratos answered. “Not the pith people use to write on, but whole stalks dried and woven together. It’s not as strong as planking, but Egypt doesn’t have many trees except for palms, and palm wood isn’t very good, either.”
Menedemos steered toward the nearest fishing boat. The four brown men—naked but for thigh-length skirts of dirty linen—who handled the nets looked scared, but realized they couldn’t hope to flee the swiftly approaching galley.
“Do you speak Greek?” Sostratos shouted to them from his place at the bow. They all spread their hands and shook their heads, which barbarians did instead of tossing them like Hellenes. Sostratos tried again: “Do you know the Syrian speech?” He didn’t speak Aramaic well himself, but he could just about get by in it.
Three of the Egyptians still looked blank. Intelligence kindled on one man’s face, though. “Little bit,” he called back. His own language flavored his speech, making it harder for Sostratos to follow. Since Sostratos’ Aramaic had a heavy Greek accent, that was bound to work both ways.
“In which direction lies Alexandria? The city of Alexandria?” Sostratos said, adding, “We give silver for the truth.”
“Not come to pirate us?” the Egyptian said.
“By the gods, no!” Sostratos said. “Traders us, not pirates. From Rhodes. Rhodes fights pirates.”
The fisherman gabbled in Egyptian to his friends. One of them shrugged. Sostratos followed not a word, but he still had a good notion of what was going on. The men in the papyrus boat couldn’t run and couldn’t fight. What could they do but play along with the Hellenes?
“That way.” The fellow who spoke Aramaic pointed south and west. “You go that way, you get there maybe sundown.”
“Thank you,” Sostratos said, pleased with the way he and Menedemos had picked their way across the Inner Sea. They hadn’t been perfect—you couldn’t hope to navigate perfectly out of sight of land—but they had been pretty good. He turned to Menedemos, who was at the steering oars, and called, “Bring us alongside and give me a couple of drakhmai to pay him.”
“What did he say?” Menedemos asked.
Sostratos remembered he hadn’t been speaking Greek. He explained to his cousin, then went back to the stern to get the coins. Menedemos guided the Aphrodite next to the fishing boat (which, like the akatos, had eyes painted at either side of the bow). The men on the galley’s port side pulled in their oars so the ship could come close.
“Here you are!” Sostratos leaned out over the gunwale and stretched out his arm with the drakhmai in the palm of his hand. The Egyptian with whom he’d talked took them. He weighed them in his own palm, then smiled broadly. Sostratos said, “Safe travel! A good catch!”
“Safe travel you, too,” the brown man replied. “Good trading.”
They parted on friendly terms. Before long, Leskhaios spotted a low smudge of land on the southern horizon. By Menedemos’ expression, he would rather have rewarded almost any other rower. But land it undeniably was. He gave Leskhaios the two drakhmai he’d promised.
The land looked unprepossessing: swampy and almost venomously green. Rain might not water it, but the Nile did. Before long, the Aphrodite encountered many more fishing boats. Some ignored the akatos; others spread sail to get away as best they could. When they came back to whatever village they’d started from, the fishermen could entertain their neighbors with tales of how they’d got away from sea raiders.
By the time the sun began to near the western horizon, they found themselves in the company of larger ships, first beamy merchantmen like the ones that came to and sailed from Rhodes wallowing along as best they could with their sails spread to catch as much of the fitful breeze as they could, and then something altogether different: a five, a war galley with three banks of oars, two men on each oar in the top and middle banks and a single rower on the lower one. An officer with a red cloak flung back over his shoulders cupped both hands in front of his mouth to hail the akatos: “What ship are you?”
“We’re the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes,” Sostratos shouted back.
“Out of Rhodes, hey?” The officer’s Doric accent was not too different from Menedemos’; he probably came from one of the Aegean islands himself. “You’re the first we’ve seen that crossed the Inner Sea this spring. What’s the news?”
“We’ll put it first in the Ptolemaios’ ear,” Sostratos answered, hoping he wouldn’t anger the man by declining to spill everything he knew. Some Hellenes would have; if talking too much and to too many people wasn’t his folk’s besetting vice, Sostratos couldn’t imagine what would be.
For a wonder, the red-cloaked officer didn’t lose his temper. “It must be important, then,” he said. Sostratos had never been wooed as a boy, unlike his cousin—when Menedemos was fourteen, his name was written on half the walls in Rhodes, prefaced by good or beautiful. He’d never pursued boys after coming to manhood, either. All the same, at that moment he would gladly have kissed the naval officer.
He contented himself with dipping his head. “It is,” he agreed.
“All right, then,” the officer said briskly. “Stay with us into the harbor. We’ll get your toy galley there tied up, and we’ll send you to the palace. If they think your news is as big as you make it out to be, you can bet the Ptolemaios will hear you pretty cursed quick.”
Toy galley made Sostratos’ liking for the man flicker and blow out. “Thank you so much, O marvelous one,” he said, as sardonically as he dared. Back at the steering oars, Menedemos bared his teeth at him. He realized he could have done better as a diplomat.
Luckily, the man on the five didn’t notice. “We’re going into the Great Harbor, the eastern one, and then to the Ptolemaios’ own harbor, by the palace,” he said. “Have you got that?”
Sostratos glanced at Menedemos. Menedemos dipped his head. “We have it,” Sostratos said. Diokles upped the stroke a little. The Aphrodite followed the war galley towards Alexander’s new city.
IV
Alexandria astonished Menedemos in every way he could think of. He’d been to considerable poleis before. His beloved Rhodes was one. Athens and Syracuse were bigger still. But Alexandria dwarfed them all. Alexandria might have been as big as all three of them put together.
“It’s not a polis. It’s too big to be a polis,” Menedemos said to Sostratos in the small palace room they’d been given to share. “It’s a—It’s a—” He broke off and threw his hands in the air. “I don’t even know what to call it.”
“It’s a megalopolis, a great city, and no, I don’t mean the polis in Arkadia,” Sostratos replied.
“Megalopolis.” Menedemos tasted the word, which he hadn’t heard before except as the name for that polis. He dipped his head. “Yes, that’s just what it is.”
Sostratos hadn’t finished. “The polis of Rhodes draws on the island of Rhodes for what it needs. Athens has Attica, Syracuse whatever chunk of Sicily it rules at any given time. Alexandria takes the wealth from all of Egypt, the way Babylon does in Mesopotamia. No wonder it can get bigger than any polis in Hellas or Great Hellas.”