Owl to Athens

by H. N. Turteltaub

  “You’re too cursed soft on them, skipper,” Diokles growled as he lowered his bronze square and mallet. He looked back toward Menedemos so the sailors couldn’t see his face; as he did so, he winked. Menedemos couldn’t smile back, not without giving the game away to the men. Instead, he glared at Diokles, much more severely than the remark really warranted. The keleustes winked again, to show he understood what Menedemos was doing.

  Salamis and the crowded waters where Great King Xerxes’ fleet had come to grief more than a hundred seventy years before lay to starboard. Only a few fishing boats bobbed in the channel between the island and the mainland of Attica today. Menedemos had no trouble filling it with triremes in his mind’s eye, though. Neither Xerxes’ sailors nor the Hellenes they faced knew how to build anything bigger and stronger back in those distant days. What a few fives and sixes might have done! Menedemos thought.

  Had he wanted to know more about Salamis than he did, he could have asked Sostratos, who was doing lookout duty up on the tiny fore-deck. His cousin would have quoted from Herodotos, and probably from Aiskhylos’ Persians as well. Not feeling like being overwhelmed, Menedemos didn’t ask.

  Aigina, a larger island, rose from the water almost dead ahead. The Aphrodite had stopped at the polis there a couple of years before. Having seen it, and having seen what sort of business merchants did there, Menedemos didn’t care to pay a second visit. Beyond Aigina, blued and blurred by haze and distance, lay the northeastern corner of the Peloponnesos. Menedemos was content—more than content—to let it stay in the distance.

  He pulled the steering-oar tiller in his left hand toward him and pushed the one in his right hand away. The Aphrodite swung gently to port, heading along parallel to the coast of Attica, which ran generally south and east toward Cape Sounion.

  Mild chop in the Saronic Gulf made the merchant galley roll a bit. Menedemos wondered if his cousin would lose his breakfast after a long spell ashore, but Sostratos seemed fine. A handful of sailors did lean over the rail to feed the fish, including one of the newly hired Athenians. The rest of the rowers ribbed the men with touchy stomachs. There were always some in every crew.

  Menedemos enjoyed the motion. He’d had enough of steady ground under his feet. He wanted to be reminded he was aboard a ship. Going out to sea again felt good. He drew in a great lungful of fine salt air. “Wonderful to get the city stink out of my nose,” he said,

  “That’s the truth,” Diokles agreed. “I’m sick of smelling shit.”

  The breeze freshened. The sail thrummed, taut with wind. The Aphrodite skimmed over the sea; a long creamy wake trailed out behind her and behind the boat she towed. Menedemos took the last rowers off the oars. When the wind pushed her along like this, he didn’t have to worry about anything more. With a wind like this at her back, even a round ship performed . . . respectably.

  Of course, a round ship trying to make her way up to Athens had to tack against the wind, and had a sorry time of it. The long, sleek merchant galley arrowed past a couple of those unfortunates, who had to make reach after sideways reach to go a little distance forward.

  “Even if we were heading the other way, we could fight through the wind,” Menedemos said.

  “For a while, anyhow,” Diokles said. “You go straight into the teeth of a stiff breeze for too long, though, and you’ll break your rowers’ hearts.”

  Menedemos dipped his head. The keleustes was right. An akatos could do things a round ship couldn’t hope to. All the same, a captain who thought the men at the oars were made of bronze like the legendary Talos, and so would never tire, was doomed to disappointment if not to danger.

  The sun slid across the sky. The wind never slackened. Glancing now and then toward the coast of Attica to port, Menedemos marveled at how fast it slid by. Ahead, the Saronic Gulf opened out into the broader waters of the Aegean. The three westernmost islands of the Kyklades lay to the east: Keos, Kythnos south of it, and Seriphos farther south still.

  A sailor took Sostratos’ place on the foredeck. Menedemos’ cousin came back toward the stern. He climbed the steps up to the poop and stood a couple of cubits away from Diokles. “Where do you aim to stop tonight?” he asked Menedemos.

  “Normally, I’d say Keos or Kythnos,” Menedemos answered. “With this wind . .. With this wind, I’m tempted to see if I can’t make Seriphos. That wouldn’t be a bad day’s run, would it?”

  “No.” But Sostratos sounded less than happy.

  “What’s the matter?” Menedemos asked.

  “If we put in at Kythnos, we might pick up some cheese there,” Sostratos said. “We could sell it for a profit in Rhodes—Kythnian cheese is famous all over Hellas.”

  “Hmm.” Menedemos considered. “Well, all right, my dear, we’ll do that, then,” he said. “We’re not in any enormous rush to get home. And Seriphos isn’t anything much. It’s so rocky, people say the Gorgon looked at it.”

  “That’s because it’s connected with Perseus,” Sostratos replied. “It’s supposed to be where he and his mother Danae washed up after Akrisios, her father, put them in a big chest and set them afloat. And he’s supposed to have shown the Gorgon’s head there, too, and turned the people to stone.”

  “It’s also supposed to be a place where the frogs don’t croak,” Menedemos said.

  “We wouldn’t have heard them at this season of the year, anyhow,” Sostratos said, which was true. He went on, “And we can’t sell frogs, croaking or otherwise, or chunks of rock. Good cheese, on the other hand...”

  “I already said yes,” Menedemos reminded him. He changed course a little, till the stempost covered the island of Kythnos from where he stood. “Now I’m aimed straight for it. Are you happy?”

  “I’m positively orgiastic, O best one,” Sostratos answered.

  “You’re positively sarcastic, is what you are,” Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head; that was something he could hardly deny.

  The wind held all day. The Aphrodite raced past the tiny islet of Belbina, which lay eighty or a hundred stadia south of Cape Sounion. A few sheep ambled over Belbina’s steep, meager fields; except for a shepherd or two, the island was uninhabited, Kythnos still lay dead ahead.

  In weather like this, sailing was joy, not drudgery. Rowers hung fishing lines over the side of the ship, some of their hooks baited with bits of cheese—cheap cheese. Every so often, one of them would let out a yip of triumph and haul in a flying fish or a sea bream or a goby: something he could cook over a charcoal brazier and enjoy for his opson,

  Kythnos swelled ahead. It was greener than Seriphos to the south, but not much. Sheep and goats wandered the hills in back of the island’s one small town, which faced west, back toward Attica and the Peloponnesos—toward civilization, Menedemos thought unkindly.

  Kythnos the town boasted no developed harbor. A visiting ship could either beach herself nearby or anchor in front of the town. At Menedemos’ order, the anchors splashed into the sea. After so long immersed, the Aphrodite wouldn’t gain much from a night or two out of the water. Once back in Rhodes, she would come out of the sea till spring.

  “All yours,” Menedemos told his cousin. “Here’s to cheese.”

  When Sostratos listened to the people of Kythnos talk the next morning, he felt as if he’d somehow traveled back through time. They spoke Attic Greek, but a very old-fashioned Attic, saying es for eis (into), xyn for syn (with), and any number of other things that had vanished from the speech of Athens itself more than a hundred years before. Hearing them, he might have been listening to Aiskhylos . . . had Aiskhylos chosen to talk about cheese and the sheep and goats from whose milk it was made.

  He supposed the Kythmans spoke that way because, even though they were only a day’s sail from Athens, not many ships bothered coming into the harbor here. The locals were isolated from the wider world. If change came, it came only slowly.

  A breeze from off the mainland—not so strong as the one that had driven the Aphrodite here but still bris
k enough—ruffled Sostratos’ hair as he made his way toward the agora. After Athens, Kythnos seemed ludicrously small; it might have been a toy town, made for children to play with. That didn’t keep him from getting lost once. There were enough houses to box him in to where he wasn’t sure whether he needed to go right or left to find the market square, and he guessed wrong. He had to give a man with several missing front teeth an obolos for directions, and then had to ask him to repeat himself, for his dialect and the missing teeth made him hard to understand.

  In the agora, people displayed fish and woolen cloth and cheeses. The fish were for other Kythnians. The cloth struck Sostratos as nothing special. The cheeses . . . The cheeses were as fine as Kythnos’ reputation would have led him to believe, than which there was little higher praise.

  And the prices proved amazingly low. Sostratos had to work to keep astonishment off his face when a fellow who’d piled wedge after wedge of delicate, creamy goat’s-milk cheese on a little table behind him asked no more than a Rhodian cheesemaker would have for something only a quarter as good. The local, an anxious-looking man with large, rabbity eyes and a wen on one cheek, took his surprise for anger rather than delight. “I can come down a little, best one,” the man said hastily, even before Sostratos made a counteroffer. “Don’t go away, please.”

  Sostratos collected himself. “Well, all right,” he said, as if he didn’t really want to stay. “Maybe I won’t, as long as you’re reasonable.”

  “I can be very reasonable, sir, very reasonable indeed,” the cheese-maker replied.

  He meant it, too. Sostratos was almost embarrassed to haggle with him. It felt like stealing from a helpless child. Sostratos knew he could have forced the Kythnian lower than he finally did. He didn’t have the heart to do it. He consoled himself by thinking he would still make a good profit on the cheese, even if he bought it at this slightly higher price.

  Another man two stalls over sold a sharp, crumbly sheep’s-milk cheese for prices similarly small. Again, Sostratos could have bargained harder. He knew Menedemos would have squeezed every obo-los possible from these men, scorning them for fools because they didn’t understand how splendid their cheeses were.

  Dickering with some merchants, even most merchants, Sostratos bargained as ferociously as he knew how. Phoenicians, Athenians, that truffle-seller up in Mytilene—they were all out for themselves, just as he was. These men, though . . . They seemed pathetically grateful that he would give them any silver for their cheeses.

  “Owls,” the man with the crumbly cheese murmured, almost in awe, when Sostratos paid him. “Aren’t they pretty? Most of the time, you know, we just swap stuff back and forth amongst ourselves. I get me a few owls, though, and who knows? I may even go across to Attica”—he didn’t say to Athens, which might have been beyond his mental horizon—”and, and buy things.”

  “That’s what money is for,” Sostratos agreed.

  “It is, isn’t it?” To the Kythnian, it seemed a new idea. A Karian farmer a hundred stadia from the nearest tiny town could hardly have been more distant from the kind of trading Sostratos did than was this fellow Hellene only a long day’s sail from Athens, the beating heart of the civilized world.

  Suppressing several sighs, Sostratos went on through the agora. His only problem was choosing the best of the best. One man gave him a sample of a hard yellow cheese that made him raise his eyebrows. “I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything quite like this,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, O stranger,” the Kythnian said with modest pride—no one here seemed to display more than modest pride. “It’s made from cow’s milk.”

  “Really?” Sostratos said, and the cheesemaker dipped his head. “How ... unusual.” Few Hellenes, especially south of Boiotia (whose very name was associated with cattle), kept cows. Sheep and goats were far more common, for they were valuable for their wool as well as for their milk,

  “Do you like it?” the local asked.

  “It’s not bad,” Sostratos answered; no matter how pitiful he thought the Kythnians, he couldn’t make himself sound too enthusiastic. “What do you want for a wedge?”

  He wasn’t surprised when the cheesemaker named a price higher than any of the others had given him. Another reason few cows dwelt in this part of Hellas was that they took more fodder for the amount of milk they yielded. Despite that, for an exotic cheese like this what the Kythnian wanted wasn’t bad at all. Sostratos haggled a little harder than he had with the other men, but only a little. Before long, he and the cheesemaker clasped hands to seal the bargain.

  “I thank you very much,” the fellow said. “Some of my neighbors think I’m daft for keeping a cow, but I guess I’ve shown them.”

  “Maybe you have.” Sostratos would never have let one relatively small sale go to his head like that, but he was a Rhodian, used to dealing all over the Inner Sea. To a Kythnian, for whom a major journey meant walking from his farm to this little town—it surely didn’t deserve to be called a polis—showing some drakhmai to his neighbors might be a triumph of sorts.

  Sailors from the Aphrodite helped Sostratos carry the cheeses back to the akatos. One of them was Teleutas. With a sidelong glance Sostratos’ way, he said, “You’d better get us back to Rhodes in a hurry. If you don’t, we’ll eat up your profits.”

  The other sailors laughed. Sostratos didn’t. He knew Teleutas better than he wanted to. “By the dog of Egypt, if even a crumb of cheese goes missing before we get home, you’ll swim back to Rhodes,” he ground out. “Do you understand me?”

  “Easy, young sir,” one of the other sailors said. “He was only joking.”

  Teleutas’ grin didn’t quite reach his eyes. “That’s right,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen to them.”

  “It had better not,” Sostratos told him. “Because I’m not joking.”

  An oppressive silence cloaked the working party till they got down to the beach. Even the men who rowed them and the cheeses back to the Aphrodite noticed it. “Somebody fart in somebody else’s face?” one of the rowers asked when no one said a word as the boat glided toward the merchant galley.

  “You might say so, Moskhion,” Teleutas answered. “Yes, you just might say so.” He eyed Sostratos again, smirking slightly.

  Sostratos glared back. “If we need another sailor in a hurry, I expect we can find one even in a gods-forsaken place like this,” he said.

  Moskhion looked horrified. He said, “I wouldn’t maroon anybody in this miserable dump.”

  “If we had a thief aboard, I’d maroon him anywhere,” Sostratos replied. Moskhion shut up and started rowing again. He’d gone with Sostratos into Ioudaia the year before. He couldn’t very well forget the gold ring Teleutas had stolen from a local there. No one had ever proved—no one had ever even claimed—Teleutas stole while aboard ship. Had that been proved, or even claimed, Teleutas wouldn’t have sailed with the Aphrodite this spring.

  He gave no more smirks now. He looked out at the sea and at the akatos and said not a thing. Without a doubt, that was the best thing he could have done. Had he given Sostratos any more lip, he would have gone out of the boat and into the water of the harbor. Sostratos had no idea whether Teleutas could swim. At the moment, he was too angry to care.

  When they came alongside the Aphrodite, the sailors in the boat passed chunks of cheese to the men in the merchant galley. “Here, we’ll put them in leather sacks,” Menedemos said. “We’ve got a good many left from the trip up to Athens, and they’ll keep out salt water and vermin.” He grinned. “All the vermin that don’t walk on two legs, anyhow.”

  Several sailors aboard the akatos laughed. Nobody from the ship’s boat did. Teleutas looked as if he were about to, but he changed his mind even without a scowl from Sostratos. After all the cheese went onto the Aphrodite, Sostratos and the sailors scrambled up over the rail and into the low waist of the ship.

  His cousin waited till the two of them were—mostly—out of earshot of the crew befo
re asking, “What’s wrong, my dear? You look ready to bite a belaying pin in two, but I see you came back with plenty of cheese.”

  “Oh, the cheese is fine. The cheese is better than I expected it to be, in fact,” Sostratos said, still seething. “But that polluted Teleutas . . .” The story poured out of him; he finished, “I wish he never would have come aboard the Aphrodite in the first place.”

  “Well, unless he does come right out and steal, we’re stuck with him till we get back to Rhodes,” Menedemos answered. “Next year, though, tell him to go howl when he asks to go with us again.”

  “By the dog, I will,” Sostratos said. “I wish I had this spring. He’s nothing but trouble. Even when he doesn’t do anything wrong, he always makes it seem he’s just about to. You have to keep an eye on him every minute.”

  “Many goodbyes to him, then,” Menedemos said. “We’ll pay him off when we get home, and that’ll be the end of it. When he comes around whining for work next spring, tell him to bend over and—”

  “I understand you, thanks,” Sostratos said hastily.

  “Good. That’s settled, then.” Menedemos liked things neat and tidy. He liked them that way so much, he sometimes assumed they were when they weren’t. Here, though, Sostratos agreed with his cousin. Menedemos asked, “Anything else we need to do here on Kythnos?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything else to do on Kythnos,” Sostratos said.

  “Ha! Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right. I know I don’t want their water; we’ve got enough, and I remember how nasty and brackish it was when we stopped here a couple of years ago with Polemaios aboard.” Menedemos turned to Diokles. “Everybody’s aboard and ready to row?”