“Cowards!” the sailors from the Aphrodite yelled as the triakonter turned about and headed back toward shore. “White-livered dogs! Spineless, stoneless eunuchs!”
To Sostratos’ enormous relief, those shouts didn’t infuriate the pirates enough to make them turn back. Later, he asked Menedemos, “Why do they yell things like that? Do they really want a fight with the polluted Lykians?”
“I don’t think so,” his cousin answered. “I certainly hope not, anyway. But wouldn’t you yell your scorn if a foe decided he didn’t care to have anything to do with you? Are you going to tell me you’ve never done anything like that in your life?”
Thinking about it, Sostratos had to toss his head. “No, I can’t do that. But I can tell you I’ll try not to do it again. It just isn’t sensible.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t,” Menedemos said. “But so what? People aren’t always sensible. They don’t always want to be sensible. You have trouble understanding that sometimes, if you want to know what I think.”
“People should want to be sensible,” Sostratos said.
“Ptolemaios’ officer had it straight, my dear: what people should want and what they do want are two different beasts.”
Rhodes lay only a day’s sail-or a bit more, if the winds were bad-west of Patara. Sostratos and Menedemos picked up a few more hams there to sell at home. Menedemos said, “I was thinking of going up to Kaunos for a last stop, but to the crows with it. I want to get back to my own polis again.”
“I won’t quarrel with you, my dear,” Sostratos answered. “We’ll have a nice profit to show, and it’ll get better still once we sell everything we’re bringing back from Phoenicia. No one can complain about what we did in the east.”
“Ha!” Menedemos said darkly. “That only shows you don’t know my father as well as you think you do.”
Sostratos had always thought Menedemos’ troubles with his father were partly his own fault. But he knew telling his cousin as much would do no good at all and would make Menedemos angry at him. So he sighed and shrugged and dipped his head, murmuring, “Maybe you’re right.”
The sailors cheered when they learned Menedemos intended to sail straight for Rhodes. They wanted to go home, too. When the northerly breeze went fitful, they clamored to take a turn at the oars. Breeze or no, the Aphrodite cut through the waters of the Inner Sea like a knife through meat boiled tender.
With his wounded leg, Kallianax still found rowing painful. Using a spearshaft as a stick, he’d taken his place on the foredeck as lookout. The merchant galley was only a couple of hours out of Patara when he called, “Sail ho! Sail ho, dead ahead!”
“Better not be another gods-cursed pirate, not so close to Rhodes,” Menedemos growled. His hands tightened on the tillers till his knuckles whitened.
That same thought had just crossed Sostratos’ mind. He stood on the poop deck, not far from Menedemos and Diokles. Like both of them, he peered toward the new ship. Having the sun at their backs helped. And… “She’s really closing the distance hand over fist, isn’t she?” Sostratos murmured a few minutes later.
“She sure is.” His cousin sounded worried. “I’ve never seen anything honest move so fast.” He shouted, “Serve out the weapons, by the gods! Whoever she is, she won’t have an easy time with us.”
But then, from the bow, Kallianax called, “She’s got a foresail, skipper!”
“Belay the weapons!” Menedemos called. Any galley big enough to carry foresail as well as mainsail was also big enough to carry a crew that could overwhelm the Aphrodite ’s without breathing hard: was, in fact, almost surely a war galley, not a pirate ship.
Shading his eyes with the palm of his hand, Sostratos said, “What’s that emblem painted on her sails? Isn’t it… isn’t it the Rhodian rose?” He hesitated for fear of being wrong.
But Menedemos, whose eyes were probably sharper than his, dipped his head. “It is, by the gods!” He shouted again, this time in joyous relief: “She’s one of our own, boys!” The sailors whooped and clapped their hands. But after a moment, in more nearly normal tones, he went on, “But which one of our own is she? She’s not a regular trireme, or you’d see marines stomping around up on her decking, and her oarbox would be fully timbered to keep arrows and catapult bolts from tearing up the rowers. But she’s too big and too fast for anything else. What in the name of the gods could she be?”
A lamp went on inside Sostratos’ head. “My dear, to the crows with me if she’s not your trihemiolia.”
“Do you think so?” Menedemos rarely sounded awed, but this, Sostratos thought, was one of those times. “Do you really think so?”
“What else could she be?” Sostratos asked. “She’s very new. Look how pale and unweathered her planking is.”
Whatever she was, she was curious about the Aphrodite . As she drew near, Sostratos saw she did indeed have three banks of oars. Her crew had stowed the rear benches of the upper, thalamite, bank so she could lower mast, yard, and mainsail in a hurry, but those hadn’t come down yet. An officer at the bow called the inevitable challenge: “What ship are you?”
“We’re the Aphrodite , out of Rhodes and bound for home from Phoenicia,” Menedemos yelled back. “And what ship are you? You’re a trihemiolia, aren’t you?”
“You must be a Rhodian, or you wouldn’t know the name,” the officer answered. “Yes, we’re the Dikaiosyne.”
“ ‘Justice,’ “ Sostratos murmured. “A good name for a pirate hunter.”
The officer on the Dikaiosyne went on, “The Aphrodite , you say? Who’s your skipper there? Is that Menedemos son of Philodemos?”
“That’s me,” Menedemos said proudly.
“You’re the chap who had the idea for a ship like this, aren’t you? I heard Admiral Eudemos say so.”
“That’s me,” Menedemos repeated, even more proudly than before. He grinned at Sostratos. “And now I know how it feels to look at my baby, and I didn’t even get a slave girl pregnant.” Sostratos snorted and grinned back.
12
Menedemos walked with Sostratos through a poor, quarter of Rhodes: the southwestern part of the polis, not far from the wall and not far from the cemetery south of it. With a sigh, Menedemos said, “This is the sort of duty I wish we didn’t have.”
“I know,” Sostratos answered. “I feel the same way. But that only makes it more important we do a good job.”
“I suppose so.” Menedemos sighed again.
Skinny naked children played in the street. Even skinnier dogs squabbled over garbage. They eyed the children warily. Maybe they were afraid the children would throw rocks at them. Maybe they were afraid they would get caught and killed and thrown into a pot. In this part of town, they probably had reason to worry. A drunk staggered out of a wineshop. He stared at Menedemos and Sostratos, then turned his back on them, hiked up his tunic, and pissed against a wall.
“O pat!” Menedemos called, pointing to one of the children. He would have said, Boy! to a slave just the same way.
“What do you want?” the boy, who was about eight, asked suspiciously.
“Where is the house of Aristaion son of Aristeas?”
The boy assumed a look of congenital imbecility. Not knowing whether to sigh one more time or burst out laughing, Menedemos took an obolos from between his cheek and his teeth and held out the small, wet silver coin in the palm of his hand. The boy rushed up and snatched it. He popped it into his own mouth. His friends howled with rage and jealousy. “Me! Me!” they clamored. “You should have asked me!”
“You’ve got your money now,” Menedemos said in a friendly voice. “Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll wallop the stuffing out of you.”