Harry Turtledove - The Sacred Land

“That he was very nearsighted?” Menedemos suggested.

“Oh, go howl!” Sostratos exclaimed. Diokles laughed out loud. He wasn’t beating out the stroke now; with a good breeze from out of the north, the Aphrodite made for Patara by sail alone. Sostratos visibly gathered himself. “He knew Sokrates was ugly. Everybody knew Sokrates was ugly. So what did he see in him, if not the beauty of his soul?”

“But it wasn’t his soul Alkibiades was after,” Menedemos pointed out. “It was his-”

“Go howl,” his cousin said again. “That’s the point of the Symposion: how love of the beautiful body leads to love of the beautiful soul, and how love of the soul is a higher thing, a better thing, than love of the body.”

Menedemos lifted a hand from a steering-oar tiller to scratch his head. “Love of the beautiful body, yes. But you just got done admitting Sokrates’ body wasn’t beautiful, or anything close to it.”

“You’re being difficult on purpose, aren’t you?” Sostratos said.

“Not this time.” Menedemos tossed his head.

“A likely story,” Sostratos said darkly. “Well, look at it like this: Sokrates’ soul was so beautiful, Alkibiades wanted to take him to bed even though his body was ugly. That’s quite something, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” Menedemos said. Sostratos looked as if he would have brained him with an amphora of olive oil had he said anything else. Of course he looks that way, Menedemos thought. If somebody handsome could fall in love with ugly Sokrates for the sake of his beautiful soul, why couldn’t someone do the same with plain Sostratos for the sake of his soul? No wonder he takes that story to heart.

He wasn’t used to such insights. It was as if, for a moment, a god had let him look out from Sostratos’ eyes instead of into them. He also realized he couldn’t say anything to his cousin about what he’d seen, or thought he’d seen.

The sun set. Sailors ate barley bread and olives and onions and cheese. Menedemos washed his frugal supper down with a rough red Rhodian wine: good enough to drink, but not to sell anywhere off the island. He stepped to the rail and pissed into the sea. Some of the sailors settled down on rower’s benches and went straight to sleep. Menedemos couldn’t. He sat down on the planks of the poop deck-he’d been standing all day- and watched the stars come out.

The moon, a waxing crescent, hung low in the west. It wasn’t big enough to shed much light, though its reflection danced on the sea behind the Aphrodite . Ares’ wandering star, red as blood but not so bright as it sometimes got, stood high in the southeast.

Sostratos pointed east. “There’s Zeus ’ wandering star, just coming up over the horizon.”

“Yes, I see it,” Menedemos said. “Brightest star in the sky, with Ares’ fading and Aphrodite ’s too close to the sun to spy for a while.”

“I wonder why a few stars wander like the moon but most of them stay in one place in the sky forever,” Sostratos said.

“How can you hope to know that?” Menedemos said. “They do what they do, that’s all, and there’s an end to it.”

“Oh, I can hope to know why,” his cousin answered. “I don’t expect to, mind you, but I can hope. Knowing why something happens is even more important than knowing what happens. If you know why, you really understand. Sokrates and Herodotos and Thoukydides all say the same thing there,”

“And that must make it so.” Menedemos gave his voice a fine sardonic edge.

But Sostratos refused to rise to the bait. All he said was, “ Homer says the same thing, too, you know.”

“What?” Menedemos sat up straighter, so abruptly that something in his back crackled. Unlike his cousin, he had no great use for philosophers and historians. They breathed too rarefied an atmosphere for him. Homer was another matter. Like most Hellenes, he looked to the Iliad and Odyssey first, everywhere else only afterwards. “How do you mean?” he demanded.

“Think about how the Iliad starts,” Sostratos said. The Aphrodite bobbed up and down in light chop, the motion just enough to remind men they weren’t on land any more. Sostratos went on, “What’s the poet talking about there? Why, the anger of Akhilleus. That’s what causes the Akhaioi so much trouble. Homer ’s not just talking about the siege of Troy, don’t you see? He’s talking about why it turned out the way it did.”

Menedemos did think about that famous opening. After a moment, he dipped his head. “Well, my dear, when you’re right, you’re right, and you’re right this time. Do try not to let it go to your head.”

“Why don’t you go to the crows?” Sostratos said, but he was laughing.

“I’ve got a better idea: I’m going to bed.” Menedemos got to his feet, pulled his chiton off over his head, wadded up the tunic, and laid it on the planks for a pillow. Then he wrapped himself in his himation. Like most sailors, he made do with chiton alone in almost any weather. But the thick wool mantle, though he didn’t wear it over his tunic, made a perfect blanket. “Good night.”

Sostratos lay down beside him, also snug in his himation. “See you in the morning,” he said around a yawn.

“Yes.” Menedemos’ voice was blurry, too. He stretched, wriggled… slept.

Patara stood near the mouth of the Xanthos River. The hills above the city put Sostratos in mind of those above Kaunos, which the Aphrodite had just left. Red and yellow pine, cedar, and storax grew in those hills. “Plenty of good timber there,” Sostratos remarked.

“Hurrah,” Menedemos said sourly. “More for the polluted Lykians to turn into pirate ships.”

A couple of fives patrolled outside Patara’s harbor. The big war galleys had two rowers on each oar on the thranite and zeugite banks; only the bottom, or thalamite, oars were pulled by a single man. All those rowers made the ships speedy despite their heavy decking and the planks of the oarbox that protected the rowers from flying arrows. One of them, displaying Ptolemaios’ eagle on mainsail and small foresail, made for the Aphrodite .

“I don’t mind Ptolemaios drawing timber from this country,” Sostratos said.

“Better him than the Lykians, that’s for sure,” Menedemos agreed. “And the trees he turns into triremes and fours and fives, they can’t use forhemioliai and pentekonters.”

“Ahoy!” The call from Ptolemaios’ war galley wafted across the water, “What ship are you?”

Menedemos’ chuckle had barbs in it. “Sometimes it’s funny when round ships and fishing boats think we’re a pirate. It’s not so funny when a five does: this bastard can sink us by mistake.”

“Let’s make sure she doesn’t, eh?” Sostratos cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted back: “We’re the Aphrodite , out of Rhodes.”

“A Rhodian, are you?” the officer at the how of the war galley said. “You don’t sound like a Rhodian to me.”

Sostratos cursed under his breath. He’d grown up using the same Doric drawl as anyone else from Rhodes. But he’d cultivated an Attic accent ever since studying at the Lykeion. More often than not, that marked him as an educated sophisticate. Every once in a while, though, it proved a nuisance. “Well, I am a Rhodian, by Athana,” he said, deliberately pronouncing the goddess’ name in the Doric style, “and this is a Rhodian merchant galley.”

“What’s your cargo?” the officer demanded. His ship came up alongside the Aphrodite . He scowled down at Sostratos; the five had twice as much freeboard as the akatos, and its deck had to rise six or seven cubits above the water.