Beside me, little Gnouros held my inkwell and other writing gear. I had to enter the list of cargo on the papyrus manifest, awkward though this was, because the heat was such as to melt the wax right off a tablet. Although Gnouros kept his face blank as becomes a well-trained slave, I knew that, being subject to seasickness, he dreaded the voyage. He had already stowed my gear, including my sword and my Scythian bow, in the cabin, which formed part of the deckhouse aft.
When I had checked off the last amphora of Chian, I sought the shade of the freight shed and a big mug of Egyptian beer. Gnouros and I sat with our backs to the bulkhead, drinking thirstily to the snores of several sailors from Physkon's fleet, who lay in corners of the shed. I said:
"You don't like this voyage, do you?"
"I like whatever my master likes," he said. He had received a bad sunburn, and his shoulders, snub nose, and forehead were peeling. His little gray eyes peered at me from under his dirty mop of light-brown, gray-streaked hair.
"You don't fool me, boy. Look, you've been a good and faithful servant for—how long is it, now?"
"Nine years."
"Well, during that time you've obeyed every order, as far as you understood it; and you've hardly complained once. Not one slave in a hundred does his duty so well."
"Thank you, S-sir."
"Well, how would you like to be free? With the fare back to Scythia."
He was silent for so long that I asked: "Did you understand what I said?"
"I understand all right, master. I am thinking." After another pause, he replied: "I like better to stay your slave." 'What?"
"Arrê, yes. What if I go back to Scythia? That knight who wanted to kill me would still kill me when he learn I come home."
"Perhaps he's dead or gone away."
"Maybe, maybe not Somebody else has my land and my wife by now. She never liked me much, anyway. Used to say, I did not love her because I did not beat her. She a big strong woman, and I was afraid. So, is no way to make my living. I am farmer, not sailor or merchant or clerk."
"Suppose I gave you a farm near Kyzikos?"
A little lizard fell from the overhead, plop into Gnouros' beer. With a Scythian curse he picked the creature out and threw it away. Then he said:
"Thanks, but is no good. Farming different in each country: different weather, crops, soil. I only know Scythian farming. Too old and stupid to learn other kinds.
"Besides, I am not doing badly. I get plenty to eat, good clothes to wear, good place to sleep. You not work me very hard, not hit me, not call me names. With you I travel, see strange places. Peasants on Tanais River have much worse time. Starve in famines, freeze in winter. Say they are free men, but nomad lords are always robbing and beating and killing them, futtering their women, selling their children. I rather be slave of kind, softhearted master like you."
This was the longest speech I had ever heard Gnouros make. He caught my hand and kissed it with tears in his eyes.
"Well, grind me to sausage!" I said. "Me, the most ruthless, grasping, hard-bitten shipowner in the Inner Sea, kind and soft? Stop blubbering, or by Bakchos' balls, I'll beat you into a bloody mush!"
Hippalos and I rounded up the crew of Linos, nine deck hands, and the cook. We reported our departure to Physkon's officials and went aboard. I led the ship's company in prayers and sacrificed a chicken to the powers of the deep.
I also told them I had consulted a soothsayer, who assured me that the day was lucky and the planetary aspects favorable. I had not done any such thing; as far as I was concerned, all this mumbo-jumbo before sailing was a lot of nonsense. If the gods decided to kick up a storm—assuming that there were gods and that they caused storms—they were no more likely to notice some little bug of a ship crawling across the sea than you notice whether you step on an ant as you walk. But the sailors expected such mummery, and I thought it wise to humor them.
We warped ourselves out of the harbor with the ship's boat, hoisted the mainsail and artemon, and set off down this long, shallow, steamy sea called the Red. Myos Hormos, with its dust, flies, starving dogs, and snoozing sailors, shrank into the distance. May you never be stranded there!
For the first ten-day, we sailed along briskly enough with a fair north wind, stopping at Berenikê to top off our food and water. Then, however, the wind became fitful, veering and backing and betimes dropping away to a flat calm. We had to put out the dinghy on a tow line and struggle down this glassy, reef-bound sea by oar power. I wished that somebody had invented a sail by which one could sail, not merely at right angles to the wind, but actually against it more than a few degrees.
We stopped again at Adoulis, where a swarm of Ethiopians besieged us with offers to sell elephants' tusks, rhinoceros horns, and tortoise shells. Thenceforth we struggled against head winds until we got through the Strait of Dernê. The coast turned eastward along the Southern Horn, so that we had a beam wind.
We made another stop at Mosyllon, which—although it has nothing but an exposed anchorage off the beach—is still a lively trading center because of the spices and incense gums shipped thence. After loading up with all the fresh fruit and extra water we could find room for, we pointed our bow straight out into the unknown waters of the Arabian Sea, with the seasonal southwest wind filling our sails.
To show what perverse creatures men are, the sailors had behaved well during that first month, when they were sweating at the oars and struggling down the Red Sea through calms and adverse winds, in the hottest, stickiest weather I had ever seen. Now we were out on the ocean with a fair wind and plenty of fresh bread from the galley in the deckhouse. We had nought to do but stand watches, throw dice, and play "sacred way" and "robbers" on lines drawn with charcoal on the deck.
So the men got restless. The first sign of this was a fight between two of the older sailors over the affections of the youngest and prettiest of them. The boatswain knocked one fighter down, and I knocked over the other, so that for a while peace prevailed.
To pass the time, I had been getting Rama to teach me his language. The only foreign tongue in which I was fluent was Scythian. I offered to correct his barbarous Greek, in case he wished to try another voyage to Egypt. But he declined, saying that, once he got home again, an occasional voyage to Arabia would suffice him.
"Alexandria," he said, "is fine, big city. But I do not like place where everybody is hurrying all the time. Rush, rush, rush; no rest. You even have machines to measure time, those clip-clep—how you say?"
"Clepsydras?"
"Yes. Make me unhappy, just to look at them. If Lord Buddha help me back to India, I think I stay there, where people know how to live."
"O Rama," I said, "I've heard about the wisdom of Indian philosophers. Have you any such wise men in Barygaza?"
"I am thinking." Then he tipped his head from side to side, as Indians do when they mean "very well" or "as you wish."
"There is one man of kind we call yogin, who lives outside Barygaza. Name is Sisonaga. Why, you want to be his che-taka—how you say—"
"Pupil? Follower?"
"Yes, pupil. All right, you go see him. If he is not meditating, maybe he is taking you."
"And if he is meditating?"
"Then you wait for him to come out of trance. Wait maybe five, ten days. You say you want him to be your guru—master. He is giving you exercises and training for ten, twenty years. Then you can learn to live standing on your head for hundred years. He says he for hundred and fifty already has lived."
"Why in Hera's name should anyone wish to live standing on his head?"
Rama snickered. "How do I know? I am simple sailor man. If my ship does not run on rock or sink in storm, I am happy. No time to study wisdom of ancient sages."