“We haven't,” Menedemos answered. “But our starboard steering oar just did. Almost tore my arm out of the socket when it hit, too.” Sure enough, the steering oar was torn out of the housing that secured it to the ship. And another crackle of splintering timber said the narrow length of the tiller hadn't come through undamaged, either.
The rock missed impaling the Aphrodite's flank. A moment later, soft sand scrunched under her false keel as she beached herself as prettily as anyone could have wanted.
“Well, that's a nuisance,” Sostratos said.
“It certainly is,” Menedemos said, “I can guide the ship well enough with only one steering oar, but it's not something I want to do. If you've only got one and something goes wrong ...”
He's a sensible and cautious seaman, Sostratos thought, most of the time, anyway. Why doesn't his mind work the same way when he's on dry land?
One more crackle and the steering oar fell away from the tiller and onto the sand, leaving Menedemos holding what was left of the tiller. With an oath, he threw it down onto the poop deck, narrowly missing Sostratos’ toes. “What a miserable piece of luck,” he said. “It was only a year old, and part of the best pair we ever had.”
“You want to make repairs here, skipper, or go on up to Kos and have the shipwrights there do a proper job of it?” Diokles asked.
“I'm going to have to think about that,” Menedemos answered. “For now, let's push her farther out of the water. I'll be able to take a better look at the damage then, too.”
“Makes sense,” the oarmaster agreed. He angled the gangplank down from the deck to the beach and descended. Sostratos and Menedemos followed. Sailors in the undecked waist of the ship simply scrambled over the side and dropped to the sand.
Sostratos, Menedemos, and Diokles added their weight and strength to those of the sailors. Sostratos' hands gripped the thin lead sheathing that helped hold shipworms at bay; his toes dug into the sand. Digit by digit, the Aphrodite moved up the beach.
Euxentdes of Phaselis helped, too, and had plainly done such work before. After they'd shifted the ship far enough to suit Menedemos, the passenger asked, “Have you got woodworking tools aboard?”
“Of course we do,” Sostratos answered. “If we end up in trouble, we may not find a kind-hearted nymph like Kalypso to lend us axe and adze and drill, as resourceful Odysseus did.”
“I'm usually the one who quotes Homer,” Menedemos said, “and you're usually the one who says I shouldn't, and that it doesn't fit. What have you got to say for yourself now?”
“Quoting him does fit here,” Sostratos admitted. To keep from admitting any more, he turned back to Euxenides. “Are you a shipwright yourself, then?”
“No, no.” The passenger tossed his head. “But I make and I serve catapults. I'm a good carpenter. If I can't repair that steering oar, I can certainly make you another to match it.”
That wasn't Sostratos' choice to make. He glanced over to Menedemos. His cousin rubbed his chin. He didn't want to be beholden to Euxenides; Sostratos could see as much. “We've got men aboard who can do the same job,” Menedemos said at last.
“No doubt,” Euxenides answered, “but I can do it right”
“He has a point,” Sostratos said. “There isn't much in the way of carpentry that's more complicated than what goes into catapults.”
“That's right,” Euxenkles said. “No offense to your trade, captain, but shipbuilding is child's play beside it.”
Menedemos grimaced. Sostratos turned away so his cousin wouldn't see him smile. More often than not—almost all the time, in fact—Menedemos did the pushing. Here, he was being pushed, and he liked it no better than anyone else did. “Let's talk about it in the morning,” he said. “Nothing's going to happen till then anyhow.”
“As you say, best one,” Euxenides answered politely. Sostratos didn't think he could have phrased his own indecision as smoothly as Menedemos had done.
The Aphrodite's crew had already realized they weren't going to get anything much in the way of repairs done before sunset. Some of them were gathering brush and driftwood for fires. Others went up and down the beach, thrusting spearshafts and sticks into the sand in search of sea-turtle nests. A couple of plethra away from the akatos, one of them stooped to dig with his hands, then whooped and waved. “Found some eggs!” he called.
Sostratos trotted over. “Let me have a look at those, Pasiphon, before you throw 'em in a pot,” he said.
Pasiphon had pulled an oar on the Aphrodite the year before, and knew of Sostratos' ever-wakeful curiosity. “Sure thing,” he said, and tossed Sostratos an egg as he might have thrown him a ball.
Awkwardly, and as much by luck as anything else, Sostratos caught it without breaking it. It turned out to differ in several ways from the birds' eggs he already knew. For one thing, it was round, not pointed at one end. It can't very well roll out of an underground nest, he thought, but a round egg wouldn't be good up in a tree. Creatures were surely shaped to suit the situation in which they found themselves. He hadn't imagined that extended to eggs, but saw no reason it shouldn't. The eggshell was leather)', not hard and brittle like that of a bird's egg. He wondered why; no explanation immediately occurred to him. The egg was also larger than any bird's egg he'd seen. That did make sense—sea turtles were large creatures themselves.
A little later, just as the sun quenched itself in the waters of the Aegean, another sailor found a nest. Like the first, it held a couple of dozen eggs. Everybody could have one, to go with the barley bread, cheese, olives, and wine the Aphrodite carried to keep her sailors fed.
Euxenides proved adept at more than carpentry. He twirled a fire drill and got a blaze going from scratch as fast as anyone Sostratos had ever seen. Searching for the lushest bushes, the sailors found a spring a stadion or so inland from the beach. They filled pots with fresh water and brought them back.
When Sostratos got his boiled egg, he discovered a couple of other differences between it and a bird's egg. The white didn't coagulate to nearly the same degree as a bird's egg would have. And the yolk was a deeper, richer orange than that of any bird's egg he'd ever seen; even by firelight, he was sure of that. The egg tasted fine, though.
Menedemos and Diokles told some men to serve as sentries through the night. “I don't think anyone on Telos will bother us,” Menedemos said, “but I don't want to wake up with my throat cut and find out I was wrong.”
Sostratos was immune to such duties. He found a spot not too far from one of the fires and curled up by it. The sand wasn't so soft as a proper bed, but made a better mattress than the planking of the poop deck. The thick wool of his himation held the night chill at bay. He stared up at the stars, but not for long.
When Menedemos woke in the predawn twilight, he needed a moment to remember that the Aphrodite wouldn't be leaving Telos as soon as her crew shoved her back into the Aegean. His yawn turned into a curse. “Miserable, polluted rock,” he muttered, and got to his feet to go over and inspect the damage to the steering oar.
Most of the sailors were still snoring, but Menedemos found Euxenides of Phaselis already crouched by the oar examining it. “Hail,” he said coolly.
“Oh. Hail,” Euxenides answered. “I should be able to give you something that will serve you pretty well, if you don't mind my taking a few hours to make it. Forgive my saying so, but next to catapults this isn't very fancy work.”