Harry Turtledove - Owls to Athens

“I’m not sorry to be gone,” Menedemos said. “I suppose I even owe your brother-in-law a vote of thanks.”

“For what?” Sostratos said, and then, “Oh! You mean for nagging our fathers?”

“I sure do. If he hadn’t got my father good and mad, we’d still be stuck in Rhodes, playing knucklebones and twiddling our thumbs. The biggest reason we got to sail so soon is that our fathers wanted him to shut up and go away.”

“I know,” Sostratos said. “And I’ll give you another reason to be grateful to good old thick-headed Damonax. Without him, we wouldn’t have had a chance to get up to Athens soon enough to catch the Greater Dionysia, and now we do. I tell you, my dear, you haven’t lived till you’ve seen the theater in Athens. There’s nothing like it in any other polis in the world.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Menedemos said. “That is one of the reasons I wanted to sail-not the only reason, mind you, but one of them.”

“The tragedies will probably be revivals,” Sostratos said, “but I keep telling you there are some good comic poets still writing.”

As usual, his cousin said, “Give me Aristophanes any day. I’ll believe anybody can match him when I see it, and not till then.”

That could have started another argument, had Sostratos let it.

Instead, he only smiled and shrugged. Menedemos was loyal to Aristophanes as he was loyal to Homer. Argument wouldn’t change that. In both poetry and drama, Sostratos had more modern tastes. Argument wasn’t likely to change that, either.

Once well clear of the northern tip of Rhodes, Menedemos swung the Aphrodite to port, so that she headed west. Sostratos peered north, toward the haze-shrouded Karian coast. As with Rhodes, the rains of fall and winter had left it bright with greenery. When the merchant galley came back at the end of summer, the sun would have baked it sere and brown. Minor islands-Syme, Khalke, Telos-lay ahead. They too looked green and inviting. Sostratos had trouble imagining duller places to live, though.

“Think this breeze will hold, Diokles?” Menedemos asked.

“Reckon it ought to, skipper, for a while, anyway,” the oarmaster replied.

“Well, let’s get some use out of the sail, then.” Menedemos raised his voice to call out to the crew: “Lower the sail from the yard.”

The men hurried to obey. Using the brails-lines that ran from the top of the merchant galley’s square sail to the bottom-they quickly spread it, then swung the yard from the starboard bow back to the stern at the port side to take best advantage of the wind. The sail, sewn together from small pieces of linen, filled with air. The mast creaked a little as it took the force of the wind. The Aphrodite’s bronze ram, greened from all its time in the sea, dug deeper into the water.

“Seeing all the squares the brails and the seams make on the sail always makes me think of geometry lessons,” Sostratos said. “What can we prove from the figure before us? What is the area of this rectangle or that one?”

“Geometry lessons.” Menedemos shuddered. “All I remember when I think of them is the schoolmaster with his stick. He drew blood sometimes, the polluted rogue.”

“I didn’t get hit all that often,” Sostratos said.

“No-you were the one who always had his lessons straight,” Menedemos said. “The other boys in the class didn’t love you for it.”

“I know.” Sostratos sighed. “I’ve never had any trouble understanding being disliked for doing things wrong. Who wants a bungler around? But having people hate you for doing what’s right, doing what you’re supposed to-that always seemed unfair to me.”

“You made the rest of us look bad,” his cousin said.

“You should have paid attention, too, then,” Sostratos said. “Those lessons weren’t that hard.”

“Not to you, maybe,” Menedemos said. “As far as I was concerned, the master might have been speaking Aramaic. Perimeter and hypotenuse and isosceles and I don’t know what all else.” He took a hand off the tiller and held it up. “And don’t you start explaining them to me, either. I don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

Sostratos’ ears burned. He had been on the point of launching into a geometry lesson. Like most of what he’d studied, mathematics had come easy for him. That it hadn’t for Menedemos and the other boys still perplexed him. But if it wasn’t a matter of their not studying, not paying attention, what was it?

He’d hardly posed the question in his own mind before Menedemos said, “Some of us are good at some things, others at others. You soaked up lessons the way a soft cloth soaks up water. But you won’t claim you’re better than I am at figuring out how people work, I hope.”

“Oh, I might claim it, but it wouldn’t be true,” Sostratos said. “You have the edge on me there.” He plucked at his beard. “I wonder why that should be.”

“People would be boring if everybody were just like everybody else,” Menedemos said. “We’d all go around like this” -he looked very severe and stiffened his body till he almost seemed cast from bronze-”as if we were so many Spartan hoplites all in a line in the phalanx.”

Laughing, Sostratos said, “Why couldn’t you make us all into pretty girls? But if we were all pretty girls, what would be the point of chasing one?”

“There’s always a point to chasing pretty girls.” Menedemos spoke with great conviction. But even joking with Sostratos hadn’t made him stop paying attention to the Aphrodite and the breeze. “Swing the yard forward a little more,” he called to the sailors.

As the men made the adjustment and the stays creaked, Sostratos asked, “Do you think we can go all the way to Knidos today?”

His cousin looked ahead. Knidos lay at the end of a long spit of land jutting west into the sea from the coast of Karia. At last, regretfully, Menedemos tossed his head. “If we’d put to sea earlier in the day, I do believe I’d try it, and sail on by the stars if we weren’t there by sunset.

As things are, though, it’s too much to ask of the sailors on their first day out. We’ll put in at Syme.”

“All right.” Sostratos would have done the same himself. Sometimes, though, Menedemos liked to push things. Sostratos pointed to the little island ahead. “Will you use that bay in the south where we put in a few years ago?”

“No, I was thinking of anchoring at the town on the north coast,” Menedemos answered. “It’s not much of a town, I know, but in a way that’s all the better. The men can go into a tavern without being tempted to run off and desert.”

“Gods know that’s true,” Sostratos agreed. “Nobody in his right mind would want to desert at Syme. No matter what you were trying to escape, what could be worse than staying there the rest of your days?”

Menedemos considered that. He didn’t need long to shudder. “Nothing I can think of,” he replied.

Little fishing boats coming back from their day’s work bobbed around the Aphrodite as her bow anchors went into the sea in front of the town of Syme. The town lay on a sheltered bay of the island with which it shared a name. Most of the fishing boats beached themselves, the men aboard them hauling them farther out of the water than oars could drive them. Menedemos had beached the merchant galley in the sheltered bay of which Sostratos had spoken. He didn’t feel like doing it here. If trouble came, he wanted to be able to get away in a hurry. He couldn’t very well do that with a beached ship.

“These folks are probably all right,” Diokles said, bearing down just a little on the word probably.

“I know,” Menedemos said. “If two or three other ships were here with us, I think I’d run her up onto the sand. This way… no. When fall came and we didn’t get back to Rhodes, somebody could come after us, and they might say, ‘The Aphrodite? Oh, no, she didn’t put in here. She must have come to grief somewhere else.’ Who could give ‘em the lie? I don’t think they’d do that, mind you, but why tempt ‘em?”