Perversely, that made Sostratos want to defend the boy. “You don’t know the first thing about him,” he said.

“No, but I know the type,” Menedemos answered. “Some people go through their beauty like that”-he snapped his fingers again-”because they’ve nothing else to spend.”

“Heh,” Sostratos said.

“What? Do you think I’m joking?” Menedemos asked.

“No, my dear, not at all,” Sostratos answered. When they were both youths, when Menedemos was swimming in attention while he had none, Sostratos had told himself his cousin had only beauty to go through and would be worthless by the time he grew up. He’d been wrong, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t consoled himself so.

They walked back to the Aphrodite . One of those enormous bats flew overhead. Menedemos said, “It’s got a pointy nose, just like the pretty boy I saw. Do you suppose bats call one another beautiful?”

Sostratos contemplated that, then tossed his head. “What I suppose is, you’re very peculiar, to come up with a question like that.”

“Why, thank you!” Menedemos said, as if Sostratos had praised him. They both laughed.

Some of the sailors went into Kourion to get drunk. Diokles had no trouble rounding them up, though. “I didn’t figure I would,” he said when the job was done. “Nobody wants to get stuck in a miserable little place like this.”

That perfectly summarized Sostratos’ view of Kourion. He was glad when the merchant galley left the town early the next morning. Of course, she would stop for the night at some other small Cypriot city, perhaps one even less prepossessing than Kourion, but he chose not to dwell on that.

Diokles was clanging out a slow, lazy stroke for the men at the oars- there was no breeze to speak of-when a sailor pointed toward the shore a few plethra away and said, “What are they doing there?”

Sostratos looked in the direction of the bluffs west of Kourion. A procession marched along the heights. No-not everybody marched, for one man, bound, went stiffly and unwillingly, dragged toward the cliff-edge. Ice ran through Sostratos. His voice shook when he called, “Do you see, Menedemos?”

His cousin dipped his head. “I see.” He sounded thoroughly grim, continuing, “Well, now we know how seriously the priests of Apollo Hylates take the game of touching their altar.”

“Yes. Don’t we?” Sostratos watched-couldn’t stop watching, much as he wanted to turn away-the procession reach the place where land gave way to air. The akatos lay far enough out to sea that everything on the shore happened not only in miniature but also in eerie silence. Only the sound of waves slapping against the ship’s hull and the regular splash of oars going into and out of the water came to Sostratos’ ears.

What were they saying, there at the top of the bluffs? Were they cursing the bound man for profaning the god’s altar? Or were they-worse- commiserating with him, saying it was too bad he’d got caught, but now he had to pay the price? As with Thoukydides, who’d written down speeches he hadn’t heard, Sostratos had to decide what was most plausible, most appropriate to the occasion.

Then, suddenly, without Sostratos’ quite seeing how it happened, the bound man went over the cliff. For a heartbeat, the scene there ashore wasn’t silent any more. The man’s shriek of terror and despair reached the Aphrodite across a stadion of seawater. It cut off with horrid abruptness. At the foot of the cliffs, his broken body lay as still as if it had never held life. Pleased with a job well done, the men of Kourion who’d put him to death went back toward the temple to attend to whatever other important business they had that day.

Sailors muttered among themselves. Even if some of them thought the man had brought it on himself by profaning the god’s altar, watching him die wasn’t easy and couldn’t possibly have been a good omen. Diokles fingered the amulet of Herakles Alexikakos he wore to turn aside evil.

Sostratos walked back to the stern and up onto the poop deck. In a low voice, he said, “I’m glad we didn’t buy anything in the agora at Kourion,”

Menedemos had to look back over his shoulder now to see the corpse lying there under the bluffs, close by the sea. After a moment, his gaze swung toward Sostratos once more. He slowly dipped his head. “Yes,” he said. “So am I.”

Ahead of the Aphrodite , the Anatolian mainland slowly rose above the horizon. Behind her, Cyprus sank into the sea. Between the one and the other, she was alone in the midst of immensity. Menedemos had sailed for the mainland from Paphos, on the west coast of the island. That made for a longer journey over the open sea than if he’d crawled up to the north coast of Cyprus, but it also shaved several days off the journey back to Rhodes.

“Euge,” Sostratos told him. “Everything seems to be going well.” “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” Menedemos said. “But I can already hear my father complaining I took a chance going this way.” He sighed. Now that they were well on the way to Rhodes, the things of home crowded forward in his mind once more. He didn’t look forward to dealing with his father. Part of him didn’t look forward to dealing with his father’s second wife, either. But part of him was eager, ever so eager, to see Baukis again. And he knew exactly which part that was, too.

Sostratos came up onto the poop deck. He pointed dead ahead. “Nicely sailed,” he said. “With the headland of Lykia there, you’ve skipped a lot of the waters that pirates haunt.”

“I wish I could have skipped them all,” Menedemos answered. “If I thought I could have got away with sailing straight across the sea from Cyprus to Rhodes, I’d have done it. Then we wouldn’t have had to worry about pirates at all.”

“Maybe not,” Sostratos said. “But if you were able to cross the open sea like that, easy as you please, don’t you think pirates would be, too?”

Menedemos hadn’t thought of that. He wished his cousin hadn’t thought of it, either. “There are times, my dear, when you make seeing both sides of the picture seem a vice, not a virtue.”

“What is the world coming to, when I can’t even tell a plain truth without getting carping criticism back?” Sostratos looked up to the heavens, as if expecting Zeus or Athena to descend and declare that he was right.

Neither Zeus nor Athena did any such thing. Maybe that proved Sostratos was wrong. Maybe it proved the gods were busy elsewhere, on some business more important than Sostratos’. Or maybe it proved nothing at… Menedemos shied away from that speculation before it fully formed. Still, he wished that just once he would see a god, any god, manifest himself on earth or openly answer a prayer. That would make his own piety, which while sincere didn’t run especially deep, much easier to maintain.

Still not quite letting that question take shape in his mind, Menedemos asked, “What was the name of the wicked fellow who said priests invented the gods to frighten people into behaving the way they should?”

“Kritias,” Sostratos answered at once. “He’s ninety years dead now, but you’re right-he was as wicked as they come, and not just on account of that.”

“He was one of Sokrates’ little pals, wasn’t he?” Menedemos said.

His cousin flinched. “He did study with Sokrates for a while, yes,” he admitted. “But they broke when he did something shameless and Sokrates called him on it in public.”

“Oh.” Menedemos hadn’t known that. He enjoyed teasing Sostratos about Sokrates, but the answer he’d just got killed his chances for the time being. He watched Sostratos eyeing him, too. His cousin knew the games he played, which meant he would be wiser not to play this one right now. Half the sport disappeared when the other fellow knew the barbs were coming.

Menedemos concentrated on sailing the Aphrodite instead. He took his hand off a steering-oar tiller to point, as Sostratos had, at the Lykian highlands that rose so steeply from the sea. “They make a lovely landmark, but I wish they weren’t there.”