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Naval battles with fours and fives and sixes were a different busi¬ness from those involving triremes. Triremes fought with lizard-quick maneuver; the ram at the bow was their main weapon, though they also carried a few archers. Along with the swarms of rowers, the bigger war galleys had far more marines on them. They would lay alongside an enemy ship, board it, overwhelm its fighters, and then slaughter the men at the oars. For all practical purposes, it was land warfare on the ocean.
Menedemos wanted no part of it. The Aphrodite would be at an even worse disadvantage against such seagoing monsters than a trireme would. Hoping his new recruits felt the same way, he said, “Come along with me. You can meet the men you’ll be rowing with.” He eyed the Egyptian. “You do speak Greek, don’t you?”
“Fornicating right, I do,” the brown man answered.
“All right.” Menedemos laughed. “Let’s go, everybody.” As he led the rowers toward the inn where the Aphrodite’s men were quartered, he wondered just where Blepyros would get his replacements. He guessed they’d come from the fishermen and merchant seamen who used the Harbor of Happy Return, on the other side of the long mole from the Great Harbor. Some of them would want to pull an oar for Ptolemaios, or at least for his silver. Others might prove less ea¬ger, which, Menedemos suspected, wouldn’t matter one bit to the war galley’s skipper.
As Menedemos and the akatos’ new crewmen neared the inn, Sostratos came out the front door. Seeing the miniature procession, he stopped in glad surprise. “You got them!” he exclaimed.
“I figured I would,” Menedemos answered. Then he spoke to the new rowers: “This is my cousin, Sostratos. He’s toikharkhos on the Aphrodite.” He remembered the title meant something different on a merchant ship from what it did aboard a naval vessel. “That means he’s the supercargo and the purser, not a petty officer. He’ll write down your names, and you’ll draw your pay from him.”
That made Sostratos the object of the new rowers’ interested at¬tention. He took from his belt pouch a stylus and a small, three-faced wooden tablet whose leaves were coated with wax. “I’ll take your names now, if that’s all right.” When he got to the Egyptian, he asked, as Menedemos had, “You do speak Greek?”
“No, not me. Not a fornicating word of it, not even a little bit,” the man answered.
Sostratos blinked. “He did the same thing to me,” Menedemos told him.
“Did he?” Sostratos said, and then, to the Egyptian, “All right, tell me your name.” He poised the sharp end of the stylus above the wax.
“I’m Attinos son of Thonis,” the fellow said.
Sostratos asked him to repeat it, then set it down in Greek let¬ters as best he could. “The real register is on papyrus, which isn’t so easy to alter without leaving a trace,” he said, holding the stylus with the blunt end, the end that rubbed out, uppermost to show what he meant. “I’ll enter all of you properly as soon as I can, but I have what I need for now.”
“Go on in. Meet our Rhodians—they’ve pretty much taken over the place since we got here,” Menedemos told the new men. “They’ll be glad to see you. Nobody wants to start a trip with empty benches.”
In went the rowers. The inn had its own wineshop; Menedemos hoped no brawls would start right away. When things inside the place stayed quiet, he breathed easier. To Sostratos, he said, “They’re warm bodies, anyhow, and at least they know what to do with an oar.”
“My dear, I wasn’t complaining—not a bit of it,” his cousin an¬swered. “I’m more impressed than I can tell you. I didn’t think you’d be able to fother our leak so fast.”
“Thank you!” Menedemos said, and then, “Thank you very much.” Sostratos was more in the habit of calling him a thickskull than of singing his praises. That thought led to another: “Do you know what the Ptolemaios said about you while he was, ah, hiring the Aphrodite?”
“No. What?” Sostratos asked. Menedemos told him, imitating the lord of Egypt’s gruff voice and manner as best he could. Sostratos dug his toes into the dirt in embarrassed pleasure, like a girl hearing someone say she’s pretty for the first time. “Did he really say that? It won’t be easy to live up to.”
“Let’s see if we can get back to Rhodes in one piece, and without Demetrios only half a bowshot behind us. If we manage that, you can worry about everything else later,” Menedemos said.
“You say the sweetest things,” Sostratos murmured. Menedemos laughed and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cousin’s cheek. Yes, when you laughed you could pretend for a little while that the things you laughed about didn’t really matter, and that they had no chance at all of happening.
