Regretfully, Sostratos tossed his head. “No, I suppose not. He hasn’t done anything to a Hellene that I can prove-though the way he offered to cut Aristeidas’ throat for me chilled my blood. He said he’d had practice, and I believe him. But I think we should take him back to Rhodes. Whether I want him sailing with us next spring… That’s liable to be a different question.”
“All right. I suppose you have a point,” Menedemos said. “If he gives us trouble on the way home, we can always put him ashore in Pamphylia or Lykia.”
“Yes, and do you know what will happen if we do?” Sostratos said. “He’ll turn pirate, sure as we’re standing here talking. One of these days, we’ll sail east again, and there he’ll be, swarming out of a hemiolia with a knife clamped between his teeth.”
“I’d like to go east in a trihemiolia,” Menedemos said. “Let’s see the Lykians come after one of those in their miserable, polluted pirate ships, by the gods.”
“That would be pretty fine,” Sostratos agreed. “It could happen, you know. They’re building one now-probably have built it by this time.”
“I know,” Menedemos said. “But even so, even if it was my idea, they probably won’t name me skipper. How can they, when I have to sail away every spring to make a living? No, it’ll be some kalos k’agathos who can afford to spend his time serving the polis like that.”
“Not fair,” Sostratos said.
“In one sense of the word, no, for I do deserve it,” Menedemos replied. “In another sense, though… Well, who can say? A rich man is able to give his time in a way that I’m not, so why shouldn’t he have the chance?” He muttered under his breath, not wanting to think about whether it was fair or not. To keep from having to ponder it, he called, “Diokles!”
“What do you need, skipper?” asked the keleustes, who’d hung back to let Menedemos and Sostratos talk by themselves.
Menedemos grinned at him. “What do I need? I need the whole crew back aboard as fast as we can get ‘em here. Now that Sostratos is back, we’ve got no reason to stay in Sidon anymore.”
“Ah,” Diokles dipped his head. “I thought you were going to say that. I hoped you were going to say that, as a matter of fact. Time for me to go hunting-is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s just what I’m telling you,” Menedemos said. “The sailors know they can’t hide from you-or if they don’t by now, they’d better.”
Now the oarmaster grinned, too. “That’s right, skipper. I’ll bring ‘em in, never you fear. Shouldn’t even be that hard. It’s not like this was a Hellenic polis-they can’t just disappear in amongst the people.”
He was, as usual, as good as his word. A lot of sailors came back to the Aphrodite of their own accord once they heard the merchant galley would head back to Rhodes. “Be nice to find more than a handful of people who speak Greek,” was a comment Menedemos heard several times.
A few others were less eager to go home. One man they didn’t get back; he’d taken service with Antigonos. “Many goodbyes to him,” Menedemos remarked when he found out about that. “Anyone who wants to eat the food Andronikos’ cooks serve up…” He tossed his head.
Another sailor had taken up with a courtesan. Diokles came back to Menedemos empty-handed. “Philon says he’d sooner stay here, skipper,” the oarmaster reported. “Says he’s in love, and he doesn’t want to leave the woman.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” Menedemos said. “Does the woman speak any Greek?”
“Some. I don’t know how much,” Diokles answered.
“All right. Go back there. Make sure you find ‘em both together,” Menedemos said. “Then tell him his pay’s cut off, as of now. Tell him he gets not another obolos from me. If the woman doesn’t throw him out on his ear after that, maybe they really are in love. In that case, you ask me, they deserve each other.”
Philon came back aboard the Aphrodite the next day. He looked ashamed of himself. No one chaffed him very hard, though. How many sailors kept from falling in love, or imagining they were in love, at some port or another around the Inner Sea? Not many.
The day after that, Menedemos had his crew back again but for the one fool who thought Antigonos a better paymaster. A good many men looked wan, having thrown away their silver on a last carouse, but they were there. Sostratos grumbled about the price he’d got for the two animals he’d taken to Engedi, but the difference between that and what he’d paid was still less than what hiring them for the journey would have cost.
Menedemos, steering-oar tillers in his hands once more, grinned at the sailors and called, “Well, boys, are you about ready to see your home polis again?” They dipped their heads as they looked back at him from the rowers’ benches. “Good,” he told them. “Do you think you still remember what to do with your oars?” They dipped their heads again. Some of them managed smiles of their own. He waved to Diokles. “Then I’ll give you to the keleustes, and he’ll find out if you’re right.”
“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.
It didn’t suffice to get the Rhodians an audience with Ptolemaios’ brother. But it did get them to his chief steward, who blinked when he saw the silk they displayed. “Yes, the master had better have a look at this himself,” the steward murmured. A few minutes later, Sostratos and Menedemos stood before Menelaos son of Lagos.
“Hail, Rhodians,” Menelaos said. He not only looked like his older brother, he sounded like him, too, which was, in Sostratos’ experience, much more unusual. “Simias says you’ve got something interesting for me to see, so let’s have a look, eh?”
Ptolemaios also had that way of coming straight to the point. Sostratos said, “Certainly, sir,” and showed him the silk as he and Menedemos had shown it to Simias.
Menelaos whistled. “By the dog, that’s something!” he said, and dipped his head. “Yes, indeed, that’s really something. It’s not Koan. It can’t be Koan. The Koans couldn’t match this if their lives depended on it. Where’s it come from? You got it in Sidon, but you can’t tell me the Phoenicians made it.”
“No, sir.” This was Menedemos’ story, and he told it: “Zakerbaal, the cloth merchant who sold it to me, says it comes from a country beyond India-he doesn’t know whether to the east or to the north. He knows Koan silk, too, and said the same thing you did.”
“Next question is, how much do you want for it?” Yes, Menelaos did cut to the chase.
“Zakerbaal said it was worth its weight in gold,” Menedemos answered. “But it’s worth more than that, just because it’s so very light and filmy. I paid him in Koan silk, at five times its weight for the weight of each bolt of this.” Sostratos sent him a sharp look; he’d really paid only about half that. Of course, how would Menelaos know?
And Menedemos knew what he was doing, too, for Ptolemaios’ brother said, “So you’re telling me each bolt of this is worth five times as much as a bolt of Koan silk? That seems fair enough, I think.”
Sostratos and Menedemos both tossed their heads at the same time, an almost identical motion that looked odd because Sostratos was so much taller than his cousin. Sostratos said, “Not quite, O most noble one. We’re telling you that’s what we paid.”
“Ah.” Menelaos’ grin displayed strong yellow teeth. “And you’re telling me you want a profit, are you?”
Some Hellenes-usually those who didn’t have to worry about it- looked down their noses at the mere idea of profit. Menelaos didn’t sound as if he was one of those. Sostratos hoped he wasn’t, anyhow. Menedemos said, “Sir, that silk didn’t swim across the sea to Salamis by itself. We have to pay our crew. We have to take care of our ship. We have to live, too.”
“And you’re thinking, Besides, Menelaos has all the money in the world, aren’t you?” Menelaos rolled his eyes. “That’s because you don’t know what a skinflint my brother is.”
“As a matter of fact, we do,” Sostratos said. “We dealt with him last year on Kos.”
“If you were to give him some of this silk, he might not worry so much about what you spend on it,” Menedemos said, his voice sly.
“How much have you got?” Menelaos asked.
“A dozen bolts, all of size and quality like this, dyed several different colors,” Menedemos replied.
Menelaos rubbed his chin. “You’re a sneaky one, aren’t you, Rhodian? Yes, that might do the trick.” He raised his voice:
“Simias!”
The steward appeared on the instant. “Yes, your Excellency?”
“What would a bolt of good Koan silk cost?”
“About a mina, sir.”
Menelaos looked to Sostratos and Menedemos. “Is he right?”
They glanced at each other. Sostratos answered, “I’d say it might cost a little more, but he’s not far wrong, though.”
“So you paid five minai, more or less, for each bolt of this eastern silk?”
The Rhodians looked at each other again. “Probably be closer to six, best one,” Menedemos said.
“And how much more than that would it take to make it worth your while to sell the silk to me?” Menelaos asked.
“Twice as much,” Sostratos said.
“What? You’d want a dozen minai, by your reckoning, per bolt? By Zeus, Rhodian, that’s too much! I’ll give you half again as much, not a drakhma more.”
Counting on his fingers, Sostratos worked out how much that would be. “Nine minai the bolt. We have twelve bolts in all, so you’d pay”-he muttered to himself as he did the arithmetic-”one hundred eight minai all told?” Almost two talents of silver-10,800 drakhmai. That was, by anybody’s standards, a lot of money.
Menelaos turned to his steward. “Is that what it would come to, Simias? My head turns to mush when I try to figure things without a counting board.”
“Yes, sir. He calculated it correctly,” Simias answered. “Whether you want to pay the price is a different question, of course.”
“Isn’t it just?” Menelaos agreed. “Still, if I share the silk with Ptolemaios, he can’t very well complain about it.” He dipped his head in sudden decision. “All right, Rhodians-a bargain. Your fancy eastern silk, all twelve bolts, for one hundred eight minai of silver-or would you rather have it in gold? Gold would be a lot easier for you to carry.”
Egypt was a land rich in gold, where most Hellenes used silver as their main monetary metal. “What rate of exchange would you give?” Sostratos asked. “That makes a difference, you know.”
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