“Strouthoi,” Menedemos and Sostratos replied together. They both started to laugh, for in Hellas the more common meaning for the word that also meant ostrich was sparrow. Menedemos said, “I can just see the first fellow who went down to Egypt and got a good look at one of them. He’d turn to his friend and he’d say, ‘By Herakles, that’s the biggest sparrow I ever saw.’ “

“I think Egypt did that to the first Hellenes who went there,” Sostratos said. “We made up names that kept us from showing how impressed we were. Why else would we have called those tall stone monuments obeliskoi? “

“Well, they do look like skewers, don’t they?” Menedemos said. “We could have called them phalloi instead, easy enough.”

“You’re right,” Sostratos said, “I hadn’t thought of that.” His grin was lopsided and wry. “Maybe it’s just as well they have the name they do.”

The sun didn’t come out. The clouds didn’t go away. Every so often, the Aphrodite made her way through mist or drizzle. Even when Menedemos wasn’t trying to peer through the spatters of moisture, visibility stayed bad. He sent a lookout to the foredeck, doing all he could do avoid unpleasant surprises.

“I wish we still had Aristeidas,” Sostratos said.

“So do I,” Menedemos said. “It’s not your fault we don’t, you know.”

“Whom would you blame, then?” his cousin asked.

“How about the polluted Ioudaioi who tried to rob you?” Menedemos suggested.

“I didn’t shoot enough of them,” Sostratos said morosely.

“My dear, you couldn’t have shot more than you did, not unless you were twins-and maybe not then. If you hadn’t shot as many of them as you did, you and Moskhion and Teleutas would have got killed, too. Would that have made you happier? “

“I didn’t shoot enough of them,” Sostratos said again, and then, very low, “Teleutas.” He looked disgusted.

Menedemos suspected his cousin wouldn’t have been nearly so upset if Teleutas hadn’t come back from the trip to Ioudaia. He’d liked Aristeidas much better than the other sailor himself, too. He couldn’t hash that out with his cousin now, not with Teleutas pulling an oar less than ten cubits away. What he did say was, “You did the best you could. You did the best anyone could. You have no blood-guilt on your head. You committed no sin. You weren’t Oidipous, slaying his father at a crossroads. You should stop tormenting yourself about it.”

Sostratos started to answer, then checked himself. At last, after a long pause, he said, “That makes good logical sense. I try to be a logical man. Therefore, it should make me feel better. Somehow, though, it doesn’t, or not very much.”

“You mind if I say something, young sir?” Diokles asked, not missing a beat as he gave out the stroke.

“Please,” Sostratos said.

“I’m no philosopher, so maybe I’ve got it all wrong,” the oarmaster said. “If I do, I expect you’ll tell me. But it seems to me this logic stuff is only good for what you’ve got in your head, if you know what I mean. When it comes to what’s in your heart and your belly and your balls, logic goes out the window like a full pisspot.”

“Much truth in that,” Menedemos said.

“Some truth in it, certainly-but only some, I think,” Sostratos said. “If we don’t use reason to rule our passions, though, what are we but so many wild beasts?” He didn’t add, or so many adulterers, as he probably would have before meeting that Ioudaian innkeeper’s wife. That’s something, Menedemos thought.

“No doubt you’re right,” Diokles said. “But I don’t reckon we can rule everything all the time. We wouldn’t be people if we could.”

“We should be able to,” Sostratos said stubbornly.

“That’s not what Diokles said, and you know it,” Menedemos said.

His cousin sighed. “So it isn’t.” Sostratos looked out to sea, as if he’d had enough of the argument.

Menedemos looked out to sea, too, for different reasons. With the overcast and the spatters of rain, all he had to gauge direction were the waves and the breeze. He couldn’t find the sun, and neither Lesbos nor Psyra rose above his contracted horizon. He hated sailing under conditions like these. Navigation was somewhere between a guess and a bad joke. If the sea had been calm, he could have sailed in circles and never known it. He wasn’t doing that now-he was pretty sure he wasn’t, anyhow-but he hoped he wasn’t veering too far to the west or south. The one would only take him out of his way. The other might cause a meeting he didn’t want with Psyra or even Khios.

“What do you think of our course?” he asked Diokles.

The oarmaster checked the breeze with a spit-wet finger, then looked over the side-the sea, reflecting the gray of the sky, was anything but wine-dark today-to eye the waves. “Feels about right to me, skipper,” he replied at last. “Can’t say much more than that, not with the weather the way it is. Soon as it clears out, or soon as we get close to land, we’ll know where we’re at.”

“That’s true,” Menedemos said. “What I don’t want is to get too close to land too soon, if you follow me.”

“Oh, yes.” Diokles dipped his head. “Grounding a galley to dry out her timbers is all very well, if she’s not too heavily laden to get her afloat again afterwards. But going aground when you don’t want to, or ripping out her belly on a rock you never saw-that’s a whole different business.”

“Yes.” Menedemos wondered what his father would say if he wrecked the Aphrodite. Actually, he didn’t wonder-he knew, at least in broad outline. In something like that, the small details were unlikely to matter.

He tried to look every which way at once: dead ahead; to port and to starboard; astern past the boat, which bobbed in the chop behind the akatos. No suddenly looming land. No piratical pentekonter driving out of the mist and straight toward the Aphrodite. No trouble anywhere. He worried all the same.

When he said that out loud, Diokles dipped his head again. “A good thing you do, too. You’re the skipper. Worrying’s your job. Gods protect me from a captain who doesn’t.”

Sostratos spent a lot of time doing lookout duty up on the Aphrodite’s cramped foredeck. Part of that was expiation for Aristeidas, the best lookout he’d ever known. Part of it was a sensible desire to keep the merchant galley safe, combined with the knowledge that a toikharkhos was just cargo-or, more likely, ballast-as long as she sailed on the open sea. And part of it was the chance to watch birds and fish and other creatures at the same time as he was doing something useful.

Flying fishes leaped from the water and glided through the air before returning to their proper element. A black-capped tern folded its wings, dove into the Aegean, and came out with a silvery fish writhing in its beak. The flying fishes had most likely gone from water to air to keep from becoming prey. The tern had gone from air to water to turn fish into prey.

It didn’t get to enjoy its catch. A gull chased it and made it drop the sprat before it could gulp it down. Moskhion had come up to the fore-deck to check the forestay. He pointed at the gull, which grabbed the stunned fish from the surface of the sea and greedily gobbled it up. “Might as well be a Macedonian.”

“Why?” Sostratos said. “Because he’d sooner live off the work of others than work himself? Me, I was thinking of him as a pirate.”

“Six oboloi to the drakhma either way, young sir,” Moskhion answered. Dolphins leaped from the water and then dove back in with hardly a splash. The former sponge diver’s face showed unalloyed pleasure as he pointed to them. “I love dolphins. I think they’re the most beautiful fish there are.”

“I love dolphins, too. What seafaring man doesn’t?” Sostratos said. “And they are beautiful, no doubt about it. But they’re not fish.”