Harry Turtledove - Owls to Athens

“Ship ho off the port bow!” the lookout bawled.

Menedemos swung the trihemiolia to the north. He told Philokrates, “Up the stroke, if you please. Let’s see what she can do if the men put their backs into it.”

The keleustes dipped his head. “Right you are, skipper.” The tempo of the drumbeats he gave the rowers picked up. “Rhyppa pai! Rhyppa pai! ” he shouted, using his voice to emphasize the change. The piper matched his piercing note to the one Philokrates played on the drum.

And how the Dikaiosyne responded! The galley seemed to bound across the Aegean toward the other ship. And that other ship didn’t hang around waiting to be questioned. She turned and fled toward the shore as fast as she could go. “Pentekonter!” the lookout said. “Probably full of cutthroats right to the gunwales.”

“Not full enough, by the gods,” Philokrates said. “No pentekonter ever made could outrun this ship. We outrun triremes. We run down hemioliai, by Zeus! A pentekonter? This for a stinking pentekonter!” He spat on the deck.

Sure enough, the Dikaiosyne ate up the distance between the two ships, plethron by plethron, stadion by stadion. But the Karian coast also drew closer with every surge from the oars. “Marine archers forward!” Menedemos shouted. When they didn’t seem to hear him, he sent Xenagoras up to them, adding, “Tell ‘em to shoot as fast as they can. The more rowers we hurt, the better our chance of catching them before they can beach.”

Philokrates grinned. “You know your business. A lot of first-time skippers, you have to hold their hands and show ‘em what to do. Not you.”

“You and the mates know this ship better than I do,” Menedemos answered. “But I’ve fought pirates before, too. Then they had more men and faster ships than I did. I’ve got the edge now, and it feels good-you’d best believe it does.”

As the marine archers hurried forward, they put the trihemiolia down by the bow and slowed her just a touch. Menedemos ordered other men back toward the stern, restoring her trim. The archers began to shoot.

A couple of pirates went to the pentekonter’s stern to shoot back, but her poop deck was even smaller and more crowded than, say, the Aphrodites; it would hold no more. One of the bowmen on the pirate ship reeled back, clutching at his chest, as a shaft from the Dikaiosyne went home. Another man took his place. Then a rower on the pentekonter took an arrow in the shoulder and fouled the man in front of him. Again, another pirate pulled him away, but the pentekonter needed some little while to straighten out her stroke.

Even so, the pirate ship made the beach. Menedemos had known she would. She rode half her length up onto the soft, golden sand. Rowers jumped off her and ran inland as fast as they could. “Do you want to go after them?” Nikandros asked. “We’ve got a lot more men. We could catch some of the rogues.”

Menedemos had had time to think about that on the chase. Regretfully, he tossed his head and told the mate, “No. No telling how many pals the abandoned villains have back in the hills. We’ll burn their ship. That’ll put them out of business for a while.”

Burn her they did. And the pentekonter made such a pyre, it was plain her timbers had been kept dry as carefully as a war galley’s. Black smoke rose high into the sky. “Good riddance,” Philokrates said. “Pity they weren’t all in her.”

“Oh, yes.” Menedemos dipped his head. “But let’s keep pushing east a little while longer now.”

Before answering, the oarmaster glanced toward the sun. Menedemos did the same. It was somewhere right around noon. Philokrates said, “If we go much farther east, most noble one, we won’t get back to Rhodes before sundown.”

“I know that,” Menedemos said. “But don’t you think pirate crews know it, too? Wouldn’t they be likely to base their ships out a little farther from Rhodes than our patrols usually go? They’d think they were likely to be safe. Maybe we can give them a surprise. And if we have to, we can find our way home by the stars or spend a night at sea. I’ve done it plenty of times in my akatos.”

“An akatos isn’t such a crowded ship as a trihemiolia,” Philokrates pointed out. That was true. The war galley was bigger than the Aphrodite , but she wasn’t four times as big, and she carried four times the crew-that was why she could go so fast. Menedemos wondered how real his command of the Dikaiosyne was: if he gave an order Philokrates didn’t fancy, would the keleustes and the crew obey him or ignore him? He didn’t find out here, for Philokrates grinned and said, “Let’s try it. You make a good point, and we’d have a lot to be proud of if we came back to Rhodes after we’d skinned a pair of pirates.”

The rowers dug in without a grumble. Catching and burning the pentekonter left them in a good mood. Catching pirates was why they went out on patrol in the first place, and Menedemos knew they didn’t score even one triumph every time out. Far from it. The oars rose and fell, rose and fell, in smooth unison. If Rhodians weren’t the best oarsmen around the Inner Sea, Menedemos had no idea who would be. So many of them made their living from the sea, they all had a good idea of what they were doing. From what Sostratos said, a hundred years before the same thing had been true in Athens. No more. If the Athenians ever built and tried to man the triremes for which Demetrios had said he would provide the timber, they’d have to pay foreigners to pull most of the oars. And a lot of the foreigners they paid would be Rhodians. Menedemos’ countrymen also served in every Macedonian marshal’s fleet.

By the time Menedemos ordered the Dikaiosyne to turn around, she was well into Lykian waters. He saw plenty of fishing boats and more than a few round ships, but none of the lean, vicious galleys he sought. He kicked at the timbers of the deck. He wanted that second pirate ship, wanted her bad enough to taste it. He wanted to show Admiral Eudemos and the rest of Rhodes ’ high naval officials that he could make something out of a command even if he wasn’t rich enough to serve aboard a war galley all through a sailing season. And commanding a trihemiolia, a type that had sprung from his imagination as Athena sprang from Zeus’ forehead, made this patrol all the sweeter.

But the gods gave what they chose to give, not what any mortal wanted. As the sun sank in the west, the Dikaiosyne glided back toward Rhodes. Menedemos kept looking over his right shoulder toward the rugged coast, hoping to spy a hemiolia, perhaps painted sea-green or sky-blue to make her harder to spot while on the prowl. But all he saw were golden sands rising swiftly to rugged, forested hills: perfect places for pirates to take refuge.

And then, only a couple of hundred stadia from Rhodes, the lookout cried, “Ship ho!”

Menedemos lifted a hand off the steering-oar tiller to wave to Philokrates to increase the stroke. The oarmaster waved back. The drum beat faster. The piper matched the rhythm. The rowers responded magnificently. They’d been at the oars all day, to push the Dikaiosyne out as far from Rhodes as they could. Menedemos would never have worked the crew of a merchant galley so hard, not without a pirate on his heels. But they upped the stroke when Philokrates ordered it. Menedemos showed his teeth in a fierce grin. He didn’t have a pirate on his heels this time. He was on the pirate’s heels now, or hoped he was.

That other ship certainly behaved like a pirate. When the crew spotted the trihemiolia, they didn’t stop and wait to be questioned. Instead, they sped north toward the Karian coast as fast as they could go. A long, creamy wake streamed out behind their ship-a hemiolia, for she had two banks of oars. She was fast-but the Dikaiosyne was faster.