“First thing is, we’d better cast off,” Diokles said. “We’d look like proper fools if we tried to row away while we’re still tied up.” Lines snaked back aboard the Aphrodite . Sailors came back aboard down the gangplank, then stowed it at the stern. Diokles raised his voice: “At my order… back oars! Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” The merchant galley slid away from the pier.
“How does she feel?” Sostratos asked quietly.
“Heavy,” Menedemos answered as Diokles smote his little bronze square with his mallet to set the stroke. “It’s to be expected, when she’s been sitting here soaking up seawater for so long.” He pushed one tiller away and pulled the other one in. The Aphrodite spun in the sea till her bow faced west-northwest.
“At my order…,” Diokles said again, and the rowers, knowing what was coming, held their oars out of the water till he called, “Normal stroke!” They reversed the rhythm of what they’d been doing. Now when their oars dug in, they pushed the akatos forward instead of pulling her back.
Little by little, Sidon and the promontory on which the Phoenician city sat began to recede behind her. Menedemos adjusted her course, ever so slightly. He laughed at himself, knowing how inexact navigation was. “Cyprus,” he told Sostratos. He was confident he’d bring the Aphrodite to the island. Whereabouts on its east or south coast? That was a different question, and much harder to answer.
“Cyprus,” his cousin agreed.
Sostratos stood on the foredeck, feeling out of place and all too conscious of his own inadequacies as lookout. Aristeidas should have been here, he of the lynxlike eyes. Sostratos knew his own vision was average at best. But he still lived, while Aristeidas lay forever beneath boulders in Ioudaia. He had to do the best he could.
He peered ahead, looking for land rising up above the infinite smooth horizon of the Inner Sea. He knew Cyprus should come into sight any time, and he wanted to be the first to spy the island. Aristeidas surely would have been. If Sostratos was doing the dead man’s job, he wanted to do it as well as he could. Having some sailor spy Cyprus ahead of him would be a humiliation.
Above and behind him, the sail made strange sighing noises, now bellying full, now falling flat and limp in the fitful breeze from the northeast. The yard stretched back from the starboard bow to take best advantage of what wind there was. To keep the merchant galley going regardless of whether that wind blew hard or failed altogether, Menedemos kept eight men rowing on either side. He changed rowers fairly often so they would stay as fresh as they could if he needed them to flee from or fight pirates.
“Pirates,” Sostratos muttered. He had to keep watch for sails and hulls, too, not just for the jut of land out of the sea. Sailing west toward Cyprus, the Aphrodite had met a couple of ships bound for Sidon or the other Phoenician towns from Salamis. Everyone had been nervous till they passed each other by. Any stranger on the sea was too likely to prove a predator waiting only for his chance to strike.
He peered ahead again, then stiffened. Was that…? If he sang out and it wasn’t, he would feel a fool. If he didn’t sing out and somebody beat him to it, he would feel a worse fool. He took another, longer look.
“Land ho!” he shouted. “Land off the port bow!”
“I see it,” a sailor echoed. “I was going to sing out myself, but the young sir went and beat me to it.” That made Sostratos feel very fine indeed.
From his station at the stern, Menedemos said, “That’s got to be Cyprus. Now the only question is, where along the coast are we? See if you can spy a fishing boat, Sostratos. Fishermen will know.”
But they proved to need no fishermen. As they came closer to the shore, Sostratos said, “To the crows with me if this isn’t the very landscape we saw when we sailed out of Salamis for Sidon. You couldn’t have placed us any better if you’d been able to look across every stadion of sea. Euge, O best one!”
“Euge!” the sailors echoed.
Menedemos shuffled his feet on the poop deck like a shy schoolboy who had to recite. “Thank you, friends. I’d thank you more if we didn’t all know it was just luck that put us here and not two or three hundred stadia up or down the coast.”
“Modesty?” Sostratos asked. “Are you well, my dear?”
“I’ll gladly take credit where credit’s mine-or even when I can get away with claiming it,” his cousin answered. “Not here, though. If I say I can navigate from Sidon to Salamis every time straight as an arrow flies, you’ll expect me to do it again, and you’ll laugh at me when I don’t. I’m not fool enough to say anything of the sort, because I’d likely make myself a liar the next time we had to sail out of sight of land.”
Before long, a five flying Ptolemaios’ eagle pendant roared out of Salamis harbor’s narrow mouth and raced toward the Aphrodite . An officer cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted, “What ship are you?” across the water.
“The Aphrodite , out of Sidon, bound for Rhodes and home,” Sostratos yelled back, resigning himself to another long, suspicious interrogation.
But no. The officer on the war galley waved and said, “So you’re the Rhodians, are you? Pass on. We remember you from when you came here out of the west.”
“Thank you, most noble one!” Sostratos exclaimed in glad surprise. “Tell me, if you’d be so kind: is Menelaos still here in Salamis?”
“Yes, he is,” Ptolemaios’ officer replied. “Why do you want to know?”
“We found something at Sidon we hope he might be interested in buying,” Sostratos said.
“Ah. Well, I can’t say anything about that-you’ll have to find out for yourselves.” The naval officer waved once more. “Good fortune go with you.
“Thanks again,” Sostratos said. As the Aphrodite made for the harbor mouth, he went back to the poop deck. “That was easier than I expected,” he told Menedemos.
His cousin dipped his head. “It was, wasn’t it? Nice to have something go right for us, by the gods. And if Menelaos likes this fancy silk of ours…”
“Here’s hoping,” Sostratos said. “How can we even be sure he’ll look at it?”
“We’ll show some to his servants, to the highest-ranking steward they’ll let us see,” Menedemos answered. “If that’s not enough to get us brought before him, I don’t know what would be.”
Sostratos admired his confidence. A merchant needed it in full measure, and Sostratos knew he had less than his own fair share. “Here’s hoping you’re right,” he said.
With a shrug, Menedemos said, “If I’m not, we just don’t sell here, that’s all. I hope Menelaos will want what we’ve got. He’s someone who can afford to buy it. But if he doesn’t, well, I expect someone else will.” Yes, he had confidence and to spare.
And he and Sostratos also had that marvelous silk from the land beyond India. When they presented themselves at what had been the palace of the kings of Salamis and was now Menelaos’ residence, a supercilious servant declared, “The governor does not see tradesmen.”
“No?” Sostratos said. “Not even when we’ve got-this?” He waved to Menedemos. Like a conjurer, his cousin pulled a bolt of that transparent silk from the sack in which he carried it and displayed it for the servant.
That worthy immediately lost some of his hauteur. He reached out as if to touch the silk. Menedemos jerked it away. The servant asked, “Is that… Koan cloth? It can’t be-it’s too fine. But it can’t be anything else, either.”
“No, it’s not Koan silk,” Sostratos answered. “What it is isn’t any of your business, but it is Menelaos’.” To soften the sting of that, he slipped the servant a drakhma. In a lot of households, he would have overpaid; here, if anything, the bribe was barely enough.