Actually, the streets of Rhodes weren’t so very silent after all. Though morning’s gray light was just coming into the eastern sky, the sounds of drunken song floated up from the direction of the temple of Apollo in the southwest. Those were surely symposiasts reeling home after a night-a long night-of debauchery. Menedemos smiled and chuckled. He’d come home at this hour once or twice, and roused the whole household with his songs. He laughed again, remembering how splutteringly furious his father had been.
A night watchman with a torch patrolled the naval harbor. “Excuse me, O best one, but which shipshed houses the Dikaiosyne?” Menedemos asked.
“Who wants to know?” the watchman asked. Menedemos smelled wine on his breath, too, though he hadn’t passed the night in revelry.
“I’m Menedemos son of Philodemos, and I’m her captain this trip out.” The pride he’d felt when Eudemos named him captain rang in his voice.
The night watchman pointed to one of the sheds on the western side of the harbor. Those were the narrow buildings that housed triremes and now trihemioliai as well. The shipsheds on the southern side of the harbor were broader, to accommodate fives and other bigger, beamier war galleys. A galley with dry timbers was lighter and therefore faster than a waterlogged ship, and so the naval vessels spent as much time as possible dragged up out of the sea and into the sheds.
Three or four men carrying oars and pillows made their way toward that shed without bothering to ask the watchman. Menedemos trotted after the rowers. He didn’t have to be the first one there, but he wanted to get there ahead of most of the crew.
He got his wish. Only a couple of dozen men had boarded the Dikaiosyne. That would have been a big part of the Aphrodite’s complement, but was only a fraction of the trihemiolia’s. Like a trireme, she carried 170 rowers plus a squad of marines, although her oarsmen in the rear part of the thalamite bank would join the marine contingent once their benches were stowed.
A burly man with a bald pate came up to Menedemos. “You’re going to be the captain on this run?” he asked. When Menedemos dipped his head, the bald man went on, “Pleased to meet you. I’m Philokrates son of Timokrates, and I’m your keleustes. Is it true you were the one who had the idea for this class of ship?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Menedemos answered.
Philokrates stuck out his hand. Menedemos clasped it. The oarmaster said, “Some god must have put the notion into your head, for she’s smooth and sweet as piggy.” His grin showed a missing front tooth. Menedemos smiled back; Philokrates reminded him of Diokles. The older man asked, “You ever skipper anything this big before?”
“No. The past few years I’ve captained the Aphrodite : twenty oars on a side.”
“Oh, sure. I know her.” Philokrates banged himself on the side of the head with the heel of his hand, annoyed at forgetting. “Well, all right. Big difference between this ship and that one is that not everybody on the Dikaiosyne may hear you when you yell-she’s too big, and a lot of her rowers are down below. We’ll use pipes and drums to set the stroke, and you’ll want to rely on your mates to pass orders. Remember ‘em and count on ‘em. They’re both good men.”
Menedemos met them moments later. Xenagoras was tall and thin, with a broken nose. Menedemos turned out to know the second mate, Nikandros, already: they’d run against each other, Menedemos usually having the better of it.
By then, the rowers crowded the shipshed and spilled out onto the walkway on either side. Real dawn had come. Before long, the rising sun would shine into the mouth of the shed. Philokrates said, “Looks like we’re ready.” Menedemos dipped his head. The oarmaster waited, then snapped his fingers. “That’s right-you haven’t done this before. The command you give is, ‘Take her down!’“
“Take her down!” Menedemos shouted, and waited to see what happened next.
With a roar, the rowers and marines pushed the Dikaiosyne down the sloping ramp of the shipshed and into the water. The Aphrodite’s crew had trouble manhandling her. The swarm of sailors on the trihemiolia made it seem easy. Down the way she went, into the water of the naval harbor. They scrambled aboard her. The mates, the keleustes, and Menedemos were not behindhand.
The Dikaiosyne had a higher freeboard than the merchant galley. Standing at the stern, steering-oar tillers in hand, Menedemos felt able to see as far as a god. “You’ll handle her yourself?” Philokrates asked.
“Yes, by the dog,” Menedemos answered. “1 want to find out how she feels. I’m not some gilded popinjay-I know how to steer.”
“All right. Let’s go, then.” Philokrates beat out the stroke. The rowers began to pull. The Dikaiosyne glided across the harbor toward the outlet in the north.
A fresh breeze in his face, Menedemos grinned enormously. He felt like a man who’d been riding donkeys all his life and suddenly found himself on the back of a Nisaian charger. This ship moved. She was made for speed, and delivered it.
Once they cleared the mouth of the harbor, he swung the trihemiolia east, intending to cruise along the Karian coast looking for pirates-or for ships that could be pirates. “This is the first time I’ve skippered one of these patrols,” he said to Philokrates. “What are the rules if we spy a pentekonter or a hemiolia going along minding her own business?”
“About what you’d expect,” the oarmaster replied. “We go up to her, we question her crew, and we sink her if we don’t like the answers we get. A captain or an owner who thinks we made a mistake can complain to the Rhodian government.”
“If he hasn’t drowned, of course,” Menedemos said.
Philokrates dipped his head. “Well, yes. There is that.”
Right away, Menedemos noticed one difference between the Aphrodite and the Dikaiosyne. Fishing boats and round ships fought shy of the akatos, fearing she might be a pirate ship. But sailors of all sorts waved toward the trihemiolia. A three-banked oar-powered ship had to be a war galley, a hound dedicated to hunting down the wolves of the sea.
“You don’t want to get too close to land and let the wide-arsed catamites playing watchman for the pirate crews get a good look at you,” Philokrates said.
“I understand,” Menedemos answered. “You know what, O best one? It might be fun to send a round ship or a merchant galley close enough to the coast to be easy to spot, with the Dikaiosyne out far enough to see the decoy, but too far out to be seen from shore. Then, when the pirates come out for the nearer ship, this one could dash in and swoop down on them.”
The oarmaster contemplated the scheme. A slow grin spread over his leathery features. “Fun, you say, do you? By Poseidon ’s trident, I like your notion of fun. You ought to talk with Admiral Eudemos when we get back to Rhodes. He’s the one who’d have to give the orders to bring off something like that. Don’t forget, now, because I think it could work.”
“I won’t forget,” Menedemos said. “Even if I did, you could tell the admiral.”
“You thought of it. You deserve the credit,” Philokrates said, which went a long way toward making him a friend for life. He added, “You are a clever fellow, aren’t you? First the notion for this class of ship, and now a pretty trap? Not bad. Not bad at all.”
Menedemos was much more used to hearing Sostratos called clever than to having the word applied to him. He almost denied it-almost, but not quite. He had thought of trihemioliai, and he had come up with the decoying scheme. He would have praised anyone else who’d done such things. Didn’t it follow that he deserved praise, too? He liked it as much as anybody else: more than some people he could think of. His father was sparing of praise, but that didn’t mean other people had to be.