Whatever he hoped, he was disappointed. The agora held fewer interesting things of any note than it had the year before. He spent an obolos for a handful of dried figs and ate them as he walked around. Had they been especially good, he might have thought about getting more to put aboard the Aphrodite . But they were ordinary- Rhodes grew far better. He finished the ones he’d bought and didn’t go back to the man who was selling them.
After Menedemos handed the Kaunian with the lion skin a sack of silver coins, Sostratos was glad to go back with him to the akatos. “This hide is better cured than the ones we got last year,” he remarked. “You can’t smell it halfway across a room.”
“I know. I noticed that, too. It’s one reason I wanted to pick it up.” Menedemos cocked his head to one side. “I am sorry you didn’t sniff out a gryphon’s skull, my dear.”
Sostratos sighed, “So am I, but I can’t do anything about it. I’ll keep looking, I suppose. Maybe, one of these days, I’ll get lucky again.” Maybe, he thought. But maybe I won’t, too.
“Rhyppapai!” Diokles called as the Aphrodite sailed east and south out of Kaunos. “Rhyppapai!” The merchant galley’s oars rose and fell, rose and fell. Before long, the keleustes stopped calling the stroke and contented himself with beating it out with his hammer and bronze square. That let him ask Menedemos, “Skipper, are you going to serve out weapons to the men?”
“I should hope so!” Menedemos exclaimed. “We’d look like fools, wouldn’t we, going into Lykian waters without weapons to hand?”
The Lykian coast harbored pirates as a filthy man harbored lice. It was rocky and jagged, full of headlands and little inlets in which a pentekonter or a hemiolia might hide, and from which the pirate ship might rush out against a passing merchantman. And the Lykians themselves seemed to take the attitude that anyone not of their blood was fair game.
Not that Lykians are the only ones manning these pirate ships, Menedemos thought. Some of the sea raiders in these parts came from other Anatolian folk: Lydians, Karians, Pamphylians, Kappadokians, and the like. And some-too many-were Hellenes. Like Kaunos, the towns on the Lykian coast were half, maybe more than half, hellenized. But Greek pirates came to these parts no less than honest settlers.
Sailors passed out swords and hatchets and pikes and bronze helmets. Menedemos called, “Aristeidas!”
“Yes, skipper?” replied a young man at one of the oars.
“Get somebody to take your place there and go on up to the foredeck,” Menedemos told him. “You’ve got the best eyes of anybody on this ship, I want you seeing where we’re going, not where we’ve been.”
“All right,” Aristeidas said agreeably. “Come on, Moskhion, will you pull for me?”
A lot of sailors would have been angry to be bidden to hard work. Moskhion only dipped his head and sat down on the rower’s bench as Aristeidas rose. “Why not?” he answered. “I’d sooner be doing this than diving for sponges any day.”
Up on the foredeck, Aristeidas took hold of the stempost with one hand and shielded his eyes with the other as he peered first dead ahead, then to port, and then to starboard. Sostratos chuckled. “Not only are his eyes better than ours, he’s showing us how much better they are. He ought to be a lookout in a play-say, in Aiskhylos’ Agamemnon.”
“I don’t care how showy he is,” Menedemos said. “As long as he spots trouble soon enough for us to do something about it, that’s what matters.”
“Oh, certainly,” his cousin said. “I wasn’t complaining about the job he does, only saying he’s got a fancier way of doing it than he did a couple of years ago.”
“Not a thing wrong with that,” Menedemos said again,
Sostratos looked at him. “Are we both speaking Greek?”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Menedemos asked. Sostratos didn’t answer, annoying him further. He knew his cousin didn’t think he was as bright as he might have been. More often than not, that amused him, for he thought Sostratos got less pleasure from life than he might have. Every so often, though, supercilious Sostratos struck a nerve, and this was one of those times, “What’s that supposed to mean?” Menedemos repeated, more sharply than before.
“If you can’t figure it out for yourself, I don’t see much point to explaining it,” Sostratos retorted.
Menedemos fumed. An ordinary sailor who spoke to him so insolently might have found himself paid off and let go at their next stop. He couldn’t do that to his cousin, however tempting it was.
Before he could snarl at Sostratos, Aristeidas sang out: “Sail ho! Sail ho to starboard!”
Along with everyone else’s, Menedemos’ eyes swung to the right. He needed a moment to spy the little pale rectangle; Aristeidas did have sharper eyes than the usual run of men. Having spotted it, Menedemos struggled to make out the hull to which it was attached. Did it belong to a plodding round ship or to a wolf of the sea on the prowl for prey?
Sostratos said, “I don’t think that’s a pirate.”
“Oh? How can you be so sure?” Menedemos snapped. “Your eyes aren’t even as good as mine.”
“I know that, but I also pay attention to what I see,” his cousin replied. “Most pirates dye their sails and paint their hulls to look like sky and sea, so they’re as hard to spot as possible. That ship has a sail of plain, undyed linen, and so she probably isn’t a pirate.”
He spoke as if to a halfwitted child. What really stung was that he was right. Menedemos hadn’t thought of that, and it was true. Furies take me if I’ll admit it, though, he thought.
A couple of minutes later, Aristeidas said, “Looks like she’s turning away-maybe she thinks we’re pirates and doesn’t want any part of us.”
“We see that every year,” Menedemos said.
“We see it every year even though we’re still close to Rhodes,” Sostratos said. “That’s what really makes me sad, because our navy does everything it can to put pirates down.”
“Ptolemaios’ captains seem to go after them pretty hard, too,” Menedemos said. “That’s one reason to like him better than Antigonos: they say old One-Eye hires pirates to eke out his own warships. To the crows with that, as far as I’m concerned.”
Sostratos dipped his head. There the two cousins agreed completely. “It’s all one to Antigonos,” Sostratos said. “To him, pirate fleets on the sea are the same as mercenary regiments on land.”
Menedemos shuddered. Any trader would have done the same. “Mercenary regiments can turn bandit-everybody knows that’s so. But pirates are bandits, right from the beginning. They live by robbery and plunder and kidnapping for ransom.”
“Robbery. Plunder.” Sostratos spoke the words as if they were even viler than was in fact the case. A heartbeat later, he explained why: “The gryphon’s skull.”
“Yes, the gryphon’s skull,” Menedemos said impatiently. “But you seem to forget: if those gods-detested, polluted whoresons had had their way, they wouldn’t just have taken your precious skull. They’d have gone off with everything the Aphrodite carried, and they’ve have murdered us or held us for a ransom that would have ruined the family, or else sold us into slavery.”
“That’s true,” Sostratos said in thoughtful tones. “You’re right-I don’t usually remember it as well as I ought to.” More readily than anyone else Menedemos knew, his cousin was willing to admit he was wrong. He went on, “All the more reason to crucify every pirate ever born, I’d nail ‘em to the cross myself.” That carried more weight from him than it would have from another man, for he normally had little taste for blood.
Diokles said, “Begging your pardon, young sir, but I’d have to ask you to wait your turn there. I’ve been going to sea longer than you have, and so I’ve got first claim.”