The Sacred Land

“All right.” Sostratos sighed. “I’d have liked a chance to practice my Aramaic before we got there, though.”

“Well, when you were picking a girl in that brothel in Olbia, you should have asked if any of them could make those fu

Sostratos stared at his cousin in astonishment. “By the dog of Egypt, you’re right. I should have. Slaves come from all over the place. One of them probably did speak it. I never would have thought of that.”

“To be fair, my dear, you didn’t go there to talk,” Menedemos said.

Diokles laughed. He sent Menedemos a reproachful look. “Confound it, skipper, you made me mess up the rowers’ stroke.”

“Too bad,” Menedemos said with a grin.

“Why didn’t that occur to me, though?” Sostratos asked himself, ignoring both of them. “We could have screwed and talked.”

“And talked, and talked,” Menedemos said. “If you’d found a woman who spoke Aramaic, you probably wouldn’t have bothered getting her clothes off.”

“Not likely!” Sostratos said what he had to say, though Menedemos might have been right. Would he have been too interested in talking with a woman to bother bedding her? It wasn’t certain, but he knew it wasn’t impossible, either.

While Sostratos pondered that, his cousin pulled one of the Aphrodite’s steering-oar tillers in toward him and pushed the other away. The akatos swung toward the south, away from the Kilikian coast and toward the island ahead. The yard had run from the port bow back toward the stern on the starboard side, to take best advantage of the northerly breeze as the Aphrodite sailed east. Now, with the ship ru

We have a good crew, Sostratos thought. They know their business.

He looked back past the akatos’ sternpost. The stretch of sea between the ship and the mainland grew wider and wider. In most circumstances, that would have filled him with foreboding. Not here, not when every stadion farther from Kilikia meant a stadion closer to Cyprus.

The sun shone brightly from a blue sky dotted by only a handful of puffy white clouds. A storm seemed unimaginable. Sostratos resolutely refused to imagine one and tried not to remember the squall off the Lykian coast. Instead, he turned to Menedemos and said, “We ought to make the island by nightfall tomorrow.”

“Yes, that seems about right,” his cousin said. “If I’d turned south earlier today, I’d sail on after nightfall tonight, steering by the stars. But we’ll be at sea all night either way, so I don’t see much point to it.”

“One night at sea shouldn’t be bad.” Sostratos pointed down to the blue, blue water. “Look! Isn’t that a turtle?”

“I didn’t see it,” Menedemos answered. “But I’ve heard they lay eggs on that eastern promontory. Hardly anybody lives there, though, so I don’t know for sure. Here-take the tillers for a minute, will you? I’ve got to piss.”

When Sostratos did take hold of the tillers, he felt rather like Herakles taking the weight of the world so Atlas could go after the golden apples of the Hesperides. Menedemos handled the steering oars from dawn till dusk every day. The only difference was, Atlas had intended to walk away from the job for good. Menedemos would take it back in a moment.

Sostratos felt the Aphrodite’?, motion much more intimately through the tillers than he did with the soles of his feet. The slightest swing of the steering oars made the ship change direction; they were strong enough to control the akatos’ course despite the best efforts of the rowers. She could have got along perfectly well with only one, though the second did make her easier to handle.

“No rain today,” Sostratos said to Menedemos’ back as his cousin eased himself over the side. “No gods-detested round ships coming out of the rain, either.”

“There’d better not be,” Menedemos said with a laugh.

“That wasn’t my fault!” Sostratos exclaimed. He’d been steering a year before when a merchantman loomed out of the rain and struck the Aphrodite a glancing blow, carrying away one steering oar and staving in some portside timbers. She’d had to limp back to Kos and wait for repairs, which took much longer than anyone had expected.

Menedemos shook himself off and let his chiton fall. “Well, so it wasn’t,” he said. Had he tried to say anything else, Sostratos would have given him all the argument he wanted and then a little more besides.

As things were, Sostratos just said, “May I steer a little while longer?” He sca

“All right, go ahead.” Menedemos made as if to bow. “I’ll stand around being useless.”

“If you’re saying that’s what I do when I’m not steering, I’ll have something to say to you, too,” Sostratos replied. Menedemos only laughed.

A tern flew out from the direction of the mainland and perched on the yard. The black-capped bird cocked its head now this way, now that, as it peered down into the sea. Laughing still, Menedemos said, “All right, O best of toikharkhoi-what fare do we charge for taking him to Cyprus?”

“If he pays us a sprat, we’re ahead of the game,” Sostratos answered. “If he shits in a sailor’s hair, we’re behind, and we tell him we’ll never take him anywhere else.”

After perhaps a quarter of an hour, the tern took off and plunged headfirst into the water of the I

“There, you see?” he told Menedemos. “I wish some of the people we deal with would pay us so promptly.”

“Well, that’s the truth, and I can’t tell you otherwise,” his cousin said.

Menedemos let him steer for about an hour, then took back the tillers. As Sostratos stepped away from them, he did feel useless. Most of what you do on a trading run, you do ashore, he reminded himself. He knew that was true, but it made him feel no more useful at this moment. He looked back past the stern again, hack past the ship’s boat that followed the Aphrodite almost as the Great Dog and the Little Dog followed Orion through the night sky of winter.

Not long after Menedemos took the tillers, Aristeidas spotted a sail off to starboard. Sostratos peered east himself. He might have got a glimpse of a pale sail right at the edge of the horizon, or he might have imagined it. He couldn’t tell. Did he really see it, or did he imagine he saw it because sharp-sighted Aristeidas said it was there? Plenty of men believed things for no better reason than that someone they respected- whether rightly or wrongly-said it was so. Am I one of the herd? Maybe I am.

Then the lynx-eyed lookout said, “Gone now-under the horizon. Must have seen us and not wanted to find out what we were.”

“If we were pirates, they wouldn’t get free of us so easy,” Menedemos said. “We’d be after them like a hound after a hare. And we’d catch them, too. No place to hide on the sea-they couldn’t duck into a hole or under a thorn bush, the way a hare can.”

Cyprus was visibly closer than the Anatolian mainland when, with the setting of the sun, the Aphrodite ’s anchors splashed into the I

“An opsophagos who goes to sea for the fish is going to be disappointed most of the time,” Menedemos answered. “Yes, he’s right above all those beauties, but how often does he ever see them?”

“Somebody caught a lovely mullet last year-remember?” Sostratos said.