The Sacred Land

“And would we be any worse off if there weren’t?” Menedemos murmured. That horrified Sostratos no less than Teleutas had horrified Ptolemaios’ sailors. Menedemos had hoped it would.

But then Sostratos gave him a sour smile. “You’re trying to poke me again. I’m sorry, best one, but I don’t feel like being poked.”

“No, eh?” Menedemos used a finger to poke his cousin in the ribs. Sostratos yelped. Then he snapped at the finger as if he were a dog. Menedemos jerked it back in a hurry. They both laughed. Menedemos said, “If you think I look tasty, you haven’t been taking enough opson with your sitos. You need to eat better.”

“If I wanted to eat well all the time, I wouldn’t go to sea,” Sostratos answered. “Stale bread, cheese, olives, dried fish… Not your opsophagos’ feast. And what you can get in a portside tavern isn’t much better. You can’t catch enough fish from an akatos to make for much in the way of fancy opson, and, even if you could, you couldn’t cook it in any particularly interesting ways.”

“Nothing wrong with grilling a fish on a brazier,” Menedemos said. “These fancy chefs who want to smother everything in cheese aren’t half so smart as they think they are.”

“Don’t let your Sikon hear that,” Sostratos warned him. “He’ll throw you out of his kitchen on your ear.”

“Oh, no.” Menedemos tossed his head. “Sikon’s a good cook, but that doesn’t mean he’s always fancy. He says sometimes cooks use those complicated, spicy sauces because they don’t want you to know they’ve botched the cooking of the fish itself.”

“I wouldn’t want to argue with him.”

“Neither would I, by Zeus!” Menedemos said. “Nobody in his right mind would want to pick a quarrel with Sikon. He’s one of those slaves who’ve been there forever and think the place is really theirs. And that’s part of the trouble he’s having with Baukis.”

“She thinks he has to watch every obolos?”

“Partly that. And partly she’s my father’s second wife, so she doesn’t think she gets the respect she deserves.” Menedemos laughed. He could talk about, even think about, Baukis as long as he did so impersonally. He went on, “And, of course, Sikon doesn’t give anybody any more respect than he has to, and not as much as he should. That’s why they squabble all the time.”

“What does your father say?”

“As little as he can. He doesn’t want to make Baukis angry, but he doesn’t want to make Sikon angry, either.” Menedemos rolled his eyes. “If he were as mild with me as he is with them, we’d get along a lot better.”

“If he won’t do anything to end the bickering, isn’t ending the bickering your place?” Sostratos asked.

“Well, it might be, if I weren’t at sea half the year. And I don’t want to get stuck in the middle of the quarrel, either. Sikon’s a jewel. I don’t want him mad at me. And I don’t want to get my stepmother”-he chuckled at that; the idea still struck him as absurd-”upset, either. That might make my father give me an even harder time than he does already.”

What he wanted to do with Baukis, to Baukis, would make his father give him something worse than a hard time. So far, here as in few other places, his will had ruled his desires. That was what a man was supposed to do. Having desires was one thing, acting on them when they were foolish something else again. In the Iliad, both Agamemnon and Akhilleus had put their individual desires above what was good for the strong-greaved Akhaioi, and both had suffered because of it.

“You do make sense,” Sostratos said. “You make more sense than usual, as a matter of fact.” He reached out and set a hand on Menedemos’ forehead. “Are you feeling all right, my dear?”

“I was, till you started bothering me.” Menedemos shook the hand away.

His cousin laughed. “That sounds more like you. Are you enough like yourself to answer a question?”

“Depends on what it is,” Menedemos replied. More than once, Sostratos had asked why he seemed quieter and gloomier than usual. He’d given either evasive replies or none. He didn’t intend to tell Sostratos or anyone else what he thought about his father’s second wife, what he wanted to do with her.

But Sostratos had something else in mind; “From where along the coast do you want to sail for Cyprus?”

“Ah,” Menedemos beamed at his cousin. That was a completely legitimate question, and one he’d been thinking about himself. “I’d like to go a good deal farther east before I swing the ship south across the I

“Yes, I believe that’s about right,” Sostratos agreed. “My only reservation is, this whole southern coast of Anatolia-Lykia, Pamphylia, Kilikia-crawls with pirates. I was just wondering if you’d weighed the risk of a longer voyage over the open sea against that of an attack as we make our way east.”

“Not easy to do,” Menedemos said slowly. “There are always risks when you cross the open sea. You can’t avoid them. That’s why you stay within sight of land whenever you can-unless you’re going somewhere downhill, so to speak, the way Alexandria is from Cyprus, where you can really count on the wind wafting you along during the sailing season. Pirates, now, pirates are different. They might not bother us at all, and there’s no risk to sailing east if they don’t.”

“Of course there’s a risk,” Sostratos said. “They might attack. That’s what makes a. risk. If we knew they would attack, it wouldn’t be a risk any more. It would be a certainty.”

“Have it your way, then. I think we’re saying the same thing in different words. But I don’t know how to weigh the one risk against the other. Since it’s easier to gauge the risk of sailing across the open sea, that’s the one I want to cut out as far as I can.”

“All right,” Sostratos said. “I’m not sure I agree with you, but I’m not sure I don’t, either. You’re the captain.”

“Would k make you happier if I talk to Diokles before I finally make up my mind?” Menedemos asked.

Sostratos dipped his head. “I’m always happy when you talk to Diokles. He’s forgotten more in the way of seamanship than most people ever learn.”

“I’m not interested in what he’s forgotten, I’m interested in what he remembers.”

But the oarmaster proved less helpful than Menedemos had hoped. He scratched his chin as he thought it over. At last, he said, “I’ve seen skippers do both, matter of fact. Six oboloi to the drakhma either way.”

“Well, in that case, I’m going to keep sailing along the coast here, as I’d pla

“Most of them can,” Diokles agreed. “Of course, there’s always the odd bastard you can’t count on, like that fellow in the strait between Andros and Euboia last season.”

Menedemos relayed most of Diokles’ opinion to Sostratos. He didn’t mention the pirate who’d attacked them the previous sailing season. He knew what his cousin would do on hearing about that pirate and his crew: he would start cursing them for stealing the gryphon’s skull. Menedemos had heard those curses too many times to want to listen to them again.

Sostratos said, “It’s your choice to make, I hope it turns out well,”

“You’re not going to make doleful comments like that till we get to Cyprus, are you?” Menedemos asked. “They don’t make the crew very happy, you know.”

“Oh, yes. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I do know the difference between what I can say to you and what I can say when the sailors are listening, believe me.”

“I hope so.” But Menedemos didn’t press it. His cousin had always been good about keeping his opinions to himself when they might damage morale. To change the subject, Menedemos asked, “Shall we find the market square here? You never can tell what they might have.”