Harry Turtledove - The Sacred Land

“He’ll make them sorry if they don’t,” Sostratos said.

“Of course he will,” Menedemos answered. “That’s his job.”

Diokles poised the mallet. Menedemos settled his hands on the steering-oar tillers. They weren’t so smooth as he would have liked, not polished by long, intimate contact with his callused flesh: the Aphrodite had lost both steering oars in separate accidents the year before, and the replacements still had a rough feel to them he didn’t care for. Time will fix it, he thought.

Clang! Diokles smote the square. At the same time, he called out, “Rhyppa pai! ” to help give the rowers the stroke. Clang! “Rhyppa pai! ” Clang! “Rhyppa pai! ”

The men at the oars did him proud. They pulled as if they were serving on a trireme or a five in the Rhodian navy. Indeed, a lot of them had pulled an oar in the Rhodian navy at one time or another. Slowly at first, then with building momentum, the Aphrodite glided away from the pier.

“Farewell!” Menedemos’ father called one last time. Menedemos lifted a hand from the tiller to wave to him but didn’t look back.

“Good luck!” Uncle Lysistratos said.

“Good fortune go with you!” Damonax added. With his olive oil aboard the akatos, he had reason to worry about good fortune.

Artificial moles protected the Great Harbor of Rhodes from wind and wave. The water inside the harbor was as smooth as the finest glazed pottery. A tower at the base of the eastern mole mounted dart- and stone-throwing catapults to hold enemy warships at bay. A soldier on the tower, tiny as a doll in the distance, waved toward the Aphrodite . Menedemos returned the greeting.

More soldiers in gleaming bronze corselets and helms marched along the mole toward the tip. The early-morning sun glinted from the iron heads of their spears. Thin across the water came the voice of the under-officer in charge of them: “Step it up, you sorry, sleepy bastards! You can sleep when you’re dead.”

“He sounds like Diokles,” Sostratos said in a low voice.

“So he does,” Menedemos agreed. “His job’s not much different, is it?”

Little fishing boats were sculling out of the harbor, too. They couldn’t move nearly so fast as the Aphrodite and made haste to get out of her way. None of their captains wanted the akatos’ sea-greened bronze ram crunching into his boat’s flank or stern. The fishermen and Menedemos waved to one another as the merchant galley slid toward the Great Harbor’s narrow outlet.

Also making for the outlet was a big, beamy round ship, deeply laden with wheat or wine or some other bulk commodity. Like any round ship, this one was made to travel by sail. Her handful of crewmen strained at the sweeps, but the fat ship only waddled along. Expecting her to move aside for the Aphrodite would have been absurd. Menedemos pulled in on one steering-oar tiller and pushed the other one away from him. Graceful as a dancer, the merchant galley swung to port. As she passed the round ship, Menedemos called out to the other captain: “What’s the name of your wallowing scow, the Sea Snail?”

“I’d sooner be aboard her than Poseidon’s Centipede there,” the other fellow retorted. They traded friendly insults till the Aphrodite ’s greater speed took her out of hailing range.

Another round ship, this one with her enormous square sail lowered from the yard and full of the breeze from out of the north, was just entering the harbor as the Aphrodite left. Again, his ship being far more maneuverable than the other, Menedemos gave her as wide a berth as he could, though the harbor mouth was only a couple of plethra across.

As soon as the akatos got out onto the open sea, her motion changed. That breeze pushed swells ahead of it; the merchant galley began to pitch and roll. Menedemos kept his balance without conscious thought. Sostratos gripped the rail to help steady himself. He gripped it till his knuckles whitened, as a matter of fact, for he needed a while at the start of each trading run to regain his sea legs-and his sea stomach.

Some of the rowers also looked a trifle green. Maybe that meant they’d done too much drinking the night before. But maybe they also had trouble with the ship’s motion. Most of them, like Sostratos, would soon master it. As for the ones who couldn’t, what business did they have going to sea?

Menedemos said, “I think we can take most of the men off the oars now.”

“Right you are, skipper,” Diokles answered. He called out, “Oцp!” The rowers rested at their oars. Menedemos kept the merchant galley’s bow pointing into the swells with the steering oars. Diokles asked him, “Eight men on a side suit you?”

“That should be fine.” Menedemos dipped his head. “We don’t want to wear them out,” The akatos used its full complement of rowers for swank, as when setting out at the start of each new trading run, and for emergency speed, as when escaping from pirates or turning to fight them. Otherwise, the crewmen took turns at the oars.

While the sailors being relieved brought their oars inboard and stowed them, Menedemos peered north toward the Karian coast. We’re off again, he thought, and the familiar excitement at being on his own coursed through him. And I’m away from Rhodes, and from my father, and from Baukis. That wasn’t excitement, exactly, but it would do.

Coming into Kaunos, on the Karian coast, Sostratos knew a certain surge of hope. So might a man coming back to a polis where he’d lived twenty years before have hoped a hetaira he’d kept company with then was still beautiful and still as glad to see him as she had been once upon a time. He’d been to Kaunos only the year before, but all the same…

“Do you suppose…?” he said to Menedemos.

Three words were plenty to let his cousin know what he was talking about. “No, my dear, I’m afraid I don’t suppose,” Menedemos answered. “What are the odds?”

Sostratos prided himself on being a rational man. He knew what the odds were-knew all too well, in fact. Yet, like someone hoping a long-dead love affair might miraculously revive, he did his best to look away from them rather than in their direction. “We found one gryphon’s skull in the market square here,” he said. “Why not another?”

“You’d do better to ask why we found one, wouldn’t you, when none was ever seen in these parts before?” Menedemos said.

“I suppose T would.” Sostratos heaved a melodramatic sigh. “After all the evils, hope came out of Pandora’s Box, and I’ll cling to it as long as I can.”

“However you like, of course,” his cousin answered, guiding the Aphrodite alongside a quay with fussy precision and minute adjustments of the steering oars. Satisfied at last, Menedemos dipped his head. “That ought to do it.”

“Back oars!” Diokles called to the rowers. After they’d used a couple of strokes to kill the merchant galley’s forward motion, the oarmaster held up his hand and said, “Oцp!”

The rowers rested. Some of them rubbed olive oil into their palms. Their hands had softened over the winter, and the first couple of days aboard ship had left them sore and blistered. And they’d rowed all the way up from Rhodes. They’d had no other choice, not with the wind dead in their faces all the way north.

A couple of soldiers strode up the pier toward the Aphrodite . “This seems just like last year,” Sostratos said.

“Are you trying to make an omen of it?” Menedemos asked. Suddenly shamefaced, Sostratos dipped his head. Menedemos laughed. “Omens are often where you find them, I admit, but do remember that last year the men who questioned us served Antigonos. Old One-Eye’s hoplites arc gone. Ptolemaios’ men threw ‘em out.”