The Sacred Land sam-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Don’t fret about it,” Menedemos said. “You did hit him, and that’s what counts. They lost enough time so they couldn’t turn into our stroke or turn away from it, either, and we hit ‘em good and square. The ram does a lot more damage that way.”

  “Do you think the other one will come after us?” Sostratos asked.

  “I don’t know for certain. We’ll just have to find out. I hope not,” Menedemos replied. “I promised Poseidon something nice if he brought us through. I’ll have to make good on that when we get back to Rhodes.”

  “Fair enough, my dear,” his cousin said. “The god earned it. And you earned praise, too, for your seamanship.” He called out to the sailors: “Another cheer for the skipper, boys!”

  “Euge!” they shouted.

  Menedemos grinned and raised one hand from a steering-oar tiller to wave. Then he looked over his shoulder again. Still no sign of the other pirate ship. Not only was the triakonter not pursuing, she’d disappeared

  The Sacred Land 343

  below the horizon. Menedemos didn’t say anything, though, not yet. Though he couldn’t see her from his place on the poop deck, her crew might still be able to make out the Aphrodite ’s mast and sail. He was content to sail on and see what happened.

  The breeze continued to freshen. At last, he took his men off the oars and went on under sail alone. He thought the pirates would have to do the same: either that or wear out their men altogether. He kept looking back in the direction from which the merchant galley had come. Still no sign of a sail.

  At last, he allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief. “I truly don’t think they’re coming after us,” he said.

  “Euge!” the sailors yelled again.

  “how does your leg feel, Kallianax?” Sostratos asked anxiously.

  “It’s still sore as can be, young sir,” the sailor answered. “It’ll stay sore a while longer, too, I reckon.” His Doric drawl was thicker than most. “You don’t get shot without having it hurt. By the gods, I wish you did.”

  “I understand that,” Sostratos said. “But is it hot? Is it inflamed? Is there any pus in it?”

  “No, none of that there stuff,” Kallianax said. “It just hurts.”

  “As long as it doesn’t swell or turn red or start oozing pus, though, it’s healing the way it should,” Sostratos told him. “You keep pouring wine on it, too.”

  Kallianax made a face. “That’s easy for you to say. It’s not your leg. Wine makes it burn like fire.”

  “Yes, I know,” Sostratos said. “But it does help make you better. Do you want to lose a long-term advantage because of some pain now? If a wound goes bad, it can kill. You’ve seen that-I know you have.”

  “Well, yes, but I don’t figure this here one would,” Kallianax said.

  “Please don’t take the chance,” Sostratos said. With obvious reluctance, the sailor dipped his head. Sostratos resolved to keep an eye on him to make sure he did as he was told. Some people did habitually place the short term ahead of the long. He knew that, knew it as a fact without altogether understanding it.

  Menedemos laughed when he said as much. “I can think of a couple of reasons why it’s so,” his cousin said.

  “Enlighten me, O best one,” Sostratos said.

  That only made Menedemos laugh more. “I know you, my dear. You can’t fool me. Whenever you get too polite for your own good, that means you don’t think I can enlighten you. Some people are fools, plain and simple. They wouldn’t care about month after next if you whacked them over the head with it.”

  “But are they fools by nature or only because they haven’t been educated to be anything else?” Sostratos asked.

  He expected a neat either-or answer. That was how he’d been educated. But Menedemos said, “Probably some of each. Some people are fools, like I said. They’ll act like idiots whether they’re educated or not. Others-who knows? Maybe you can show some people that folly is folly.”

  Sostratos grunted. His cousin’s reply wasn’t neat, but it made a good deal of sense. “Fair enough,” he said, and started to turn away.

  But Menedemos said, “Hold on. I wasn’t done.”

  “No?” Sostratos said. “Go on, then.”

  “Thank you so much.” An ironical Menedemos was a dangerous creature indeed. Go on he did: “If the reward you get now is big enough, you won’t care about trouble later on, either. After Alexandros chose Aphrodite above Hera and Athene, he got Helen to keep his bed warm. Do you think he worried about what might happen to Troy later on account of that? Not likely!”

  “There you go, making comparisons about women again,” Sostratos said. Menedemos didn’t let go of the steering-oar tillers, but he made as if to bow even so. But Sostratos, after a little thought, had to admit, “Yes, that’s probably true, too.”

  “Are you enlightened, then?” Menedemos asked.

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Good.” Menedemos grinned. “You have any more of these little problems, just bring them to me. I’ll set you straight.”

  “Go howl,” Sostratos said, which only made Menedemos laugh more.

  The Aphrodite put in at several towns along the Lykian coast, not so much to do business as because the coastal cities, held by Ptolemaios’ garrisons, were the only safe halting places in that stretch of the world. If none was near when the sun went down, the merchant galley spent the night well offshore.

  Another reason the Rhodians didn’t do much business in the Lykian towns was the hope they would get higher prices for their goods in the Aegean the following spring than they could hereabouts. Phoenician merchants sometimes brought their own goods this far west; few of them got to the poleis of Hellas proper.

  One of Ptolemaios’ officers in Myra bought a couple of amphorai of Byblian for a symposion he was planning to put on. “This will give the boys something to drink they haven’t had before,” he said.

  “I’d think so, yes,” Sostratos agreed. “How do you like being stationed here?”

  “How do I like it?” The soldier made a horrible face. “My dear sir, if the world needed an enema, they’d stick the syringe in right here.” That jerked a laugh from Sostratos and Menedemos both. The officer went on, “The Lykians are jackals, nothing else but. And if you killed every single one of them, you wouldn’t do yourself any good, because these mountains would just fill up with other human jackals in no time flat. This kind of country is made for bandits.”

  “And pirates,” Sostratos said, and he and Menedemos took turns telling of their fight out on the Inner Sea.

  “You were lucky,” Ptolemaios’ officer said when they finished. “Oh, I don’t doubt you’re good sailors and you have a good crew, but you were lucky all the same.”

  “I prefer to think we were skillful.” Menedemos had his share of faults, but modesty had never been among them.

  Dryly, Sostratos said, “I prefer to think we were skillful, too, but there’s no denying we were lucky-and we caught the pirates by surprise.”

  “We’re Rhodians,” Menedemos said. “If we can’t outdo a rabble like that, we hardly deserve our freedom. Our friend here”-he dipped his head to the soldier-”wishes he could scour the mountains clean. I wish we could do the same to the shore and burn every triakonter and pentekonter and hemiolia we find.”

  “That would be good,” Sostratos said.

  “That would be wonderful,” the officer said. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Menedemos puffed out his cheeks like a frog inflating its throat sac in springtime. Sostratos chuckled. So did the soldier who served Ptolemaios. Menedemos said, “Sadly, though, it’s no wonder most of this town is set back fifteen or twenty stadia from the sea. Everyone in these parts expects pirates, takes them for granted, and even plans cities taking them into account. And that’s wrong, don’t you see?” He spoke with unwonted earnestness.

  “No, it’s right, if you want to keep your city from getting sacked,” Ptolemaios’ officer said.

 
; “I understand what my cousin is saying,” Sostratos told him. “He means people should fight pirates instead of accepting them as part of life. I agree with him. I hate pirates.”

  “Oh, I agree with him, too, about what people should do,” the officer said. “What they will do, though-that’s liable to be another story.”

  Much as Sostratos would have liked to argue with him, he couldn’t.

  The rest of the trip along the Lykian coast went smoothly. One triakonter came dashing out from the mouth of a stream when the Aphrodite sailed past, but thought better of tangling with her: a single pirate ship, even if she carried a large boarding party along with her rowers, was anything but certain of seizing the merchant galley.

  “Cowards!” the sailors from the Aphrodite yelled as the triakonter turned about and headed back toward shore. “White-livered dogs! Spineless, stoneless eunuchs!”

  To Sostratos’ enormous relief, those shouts didn’t infuriate the pirates enough to make them turn back. Later, he asked Menedemos, “Why do they yell things like that? Do they really want a fight with the polluted Lykians?”

  “I don’t think so,” his cousin answered. “I certainly hope not, anyway. But wouldn’t you yell your scorn if a foe decided he didn’t care to have anything to do with you? Are you going to tell me you’ve never done anything like that in your life?”

  Thinking about it, Sostratos had to toss his head. “No, I can’t do that. But I can tell you I’ll try not to do it again. It just isn’t sensible.”

  “Well, maybe it isn’t,” Menedemos said. “But so what? People aren’t always sensible. They don’t always want to be sensible. You have trouble understanding that sometimes, if you want to know what I think.”

  “People should want to be sensible,” Sostratos said.

  “Ptolemaios’ officer had it straight, my dear: what people should want and what they do want are two different beasts.”

  Rhodes lay only a day’s sail-or a bit more, if the winds were bad-west of Patara. Sostratos and Menedemos picked up a few more hams there to sell at home. Menedemos said, “I was thinking of going up to Kaunos for a last stop, but to the crows with it. I want to get back to my own polis again.”

  “I won’t quarrel with you, my dear,” Sostratos answered. “We’ll have a nice profit to show, and it’ll get better still once we sell everything we’re bringing back from Phoenicia. No one can complain about what we did in the east.”

  “Ha!” Menedemos said darkly. “That only shows you don’t know my father as well as you think you do.”

  Sostratos had always thought Menedemos’ troubles with his father were partly his own fault. But he knew telling his cousin as much would do no good at all and would make Menedemos angry at him. So he sighed and shrugged and dipped his head, murmuring, “Maybe you’re right.”

  The sailors cheered when they learned Menedemos intended to sail straight for Rhodes. They wanted to go home, too. When the northerly breeze went fitful, they clamored to take a turn at the oars. Breeze or no, the Aphrodite cut through the waters of the Inner Sea like a knife through meat boiled tender.

  With his wounded leg, Kallianax still found rowing painful. Using a spearshaft as a stick, he’d taken his place on the foredeck as lookout. The merchant galley was only a couple of hours out of Patara when he called, “Sail ho! Sail ho, dead ahead!”

  “Better not be another gods-cursed pirate, not so close to Rhodes,” Menedemos growled. His hands tightened on the tillers till his knuckles whitened.

  That same thought had just crossed Sostratos’ mind. He stood on the poop deck, not far from Menedemos and Diokles. Like both of them, he peered toward the new ship. Having the sun at their backs helped. And… “She’s really closing the distance hand over fist, isn’t she?” Sostratos murmured a few minutes later.

  “She sure is.” His cousin sounded worried. “I’ve never seen anything honest move so fast.” He shouted, “Serve out the weapons, by the gods! Whoever she is, she won’t have an easy time with us.”

  But then, from the bow, Kallianax called, “She’s got a foresail, skipper!”

  “Belay the weapons!” Menedemos called. Any galley big enough to carry foresail as well as mainsail was also big enough to carry a crew that could overwhelm the Aphrodite ’s without breathing hard: was, in fact, almost surely a war galley, not a pirate ship.

  Shading his eyes with the palm of his hand, Sostratos said, “What’s that emblem painted on her sails? Isn’t it… isn’t it the Rhodian rose?” He hesitated for fear of being wrong.

  But Menedemos, whose eyes were probably sharper than his, dipped his head. “It is, by the gods!” He shouted again, this time in joyous relief: “She’s one of our own, boys!” The sailors whooped and clapped their hands. But after a moment, in more nearly normal tones, he went on, “But which one of our own is she? She’s not a regular trireme, or you’d see marines stomping around up on her decking, and her oarbox would be fully timbered to keep arrows and catapult bolts from tearing up the rowers. But she’s too big and too fast for anything else. What in the name of the gods could she be?”

  A lamp went on inside Sostratos’ head. “My dear, to the crows with me if she’s not your trihemiolia.”

  “Do you think so?” Menedemos rarely sounded awed, but this, Sostratos thought, was one of those times. “Do you really think so?”

  “What else could she be?” Sostratos asked. “She’s very new. Look how pale and unweathered her planking is.”

  Whatever she was, she was curious about the Aphrodite . As she drew near, Sostratos saw she did indeed have three banks of oars. Her crew had stowed the rear benches of the upper, thalamite, bank so she could lower mast, yard, and mainsail in a hurry, but those hadn’t come down yet. An officer at the bow called the inevitable challenge: “What ship are you?”

  “We’re the Aphrodite , out of Rhodes and bound for home from Phoenicia,” Menedemos yelled back. “And what ship are you? You’re a trihemiolia, aren’t you?”

  “You must be a Rhodian, or you wouldn’t know the name,” the officer answered. “Yes, we’re the Dikaiosyne.”

  “ ‘Justice,’ “ Sostratos murmured. “A good name for a pirate hunter.”

  The officer on the Dikaiosyne went on, “The Aphrodite , you say? Who’s your skipper there? Is that Menedemos son of Philodemos?”

  “That’s me,” Menedemos said proudly.

  “You’re the chap who had the idea for a ship like this, aren’t you? I heard Admiral Eudemos say so.”

  “That’s me,” Menedemos repeated, even more proudly than before. He grinned at Sostratos. “And now I know how it feels to look at my baby, and I didn’t even get a slave girl pregnant.” Sostratos snorted and grinned back.

  12

  Menedemos walked with Sostratos through a poor, quarter of Rhodes: the southwestern part of the polis, not far from the wall and not far from the cemetery south of it. With a sigh, Menedemos said, “This is the sort of duty I wish we didn’t have.”

  “I know,” Sostratos answered. “I feel the same way. But that only makes it more important we do a good job.”

  “I suppose so.” Menedemos sighed again.

  Skinny naked children played in the street. Even skinnier dogs squabbled over garbage. They eyed the children warily. Maybe they were afraid the children would throw rocks at them. Maybe they were afraid they would get caught and killed and thrown into a pot. In this part of town, they probably had reason to worry. A drunk staggered out of a wineshop. He stared at Menedemos and Sostratos, then turned his back on them, hiked up his tunic, and pissed against a wall.

  “O pat!” Menedemos called, pointing to one of the children. He would have said, Boy! to a slave just the same way.

  “What do you want?” the boy, who was about eight, asked suspiciously.

  “Where is the house of Aristaion son of Aristeas?”

  The boy assumed a look of congenital imbecility. Not knowing whether to sigh one more time or burst out laughing, Menedemos took
an obolos from between his cheek and his teeth and held out the small, wet silver coin in the palm of his hand. The boy rushed up and snatched it. He popped it into his own mouth. His friends howled with rage and jealousy. “Me! Me!” they clamored. “You should have asked me!”

  “You’ve got your money now,” Menedemos said in a friendly voice. “Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll wallop the stuffing out of you.”

  There was language the youngster understood. “Go over two blocks, then turn right. It’ll be on the left-hand side of the street, next door to the dyer’s place.”

  “Good. Thanks.” Menedemos turned to Sostratos. “Come on, my dear.

  And mind the dog turd there. We don’t want to step in it barefoot.”

  “No, indeed,” Sostratos agreed.

  They had no trouble identifying the dyer’s: the reek of stale urine gave it away. Next to it stood a small, neat house that, like a lot of homes in a neighborhood such as this, doubled as a shop. Several pots, nothing especially fancy but all sturdy and well shaped, stood on a counter. Menedemos wondered how much the stink from the dyeworks hurt the potter’s trade. It couldn’t help.

  “Help you gents?” the potter asked. He was a man of about fifty, balding, with what was left of his hair and his beard quite gray. Except for the beard, he looked like an older version of Aristeidas.

  To be sure, Menedemos asked, “Are you Aristaion son of Aristeas?”

  “That’s me,” the man replied. “I’m afraid you’ve got the edge on me, though, best one, for I don’t know you or your friend.” Menedemos and Sostratos introduced themselves. Aristaion’s work-worn face lit up. “Oh, of course! Aristeidas’ captain and toikharkhos! By the gods, my boy tells me more stories about the two of you and your doings! I didn’t know the Aphrodite ’d got home this year, for you’ve beaten him back here.”

  Menedemos winced. This was going to be even harder than he’d feared. He said, “I’m afraid that’s why we’ve come now, most noble one.” Sostratos dipped his head.

  “I don’t understand,” Aristaion said. But then, suddenly, his eyes filled with fear. He flinched, as if Menedemos had threatened him with a weapon. “Or are you going to tell me something’s happened to Aristeidas?”