Several sailors aboard the akatos laughed. Nobody from the ship’s boat did. Teleutas looked as if he were about to, but he changed his mind even without a scowl from Sostratos. After all the cheese went onto the Aphrodite , Sostratos and the sailors scrambled up over the rail and into the low waist of the ship.

His cousin waited till the two of them were-mostly-out of earshot of the crew before asking, “What’s wrong, my dear? You look ready to bite a belaying pin in two, but I see you came back with plenty of cheese.”

“Oh, the cheese is fine. The cheese is better than I expected it to be, in fact,” Sostratos said, still seething. “But that polluted Teleutas…” The story poured out of him; he finished, “I wish he never would have come aboard the Aphrodite in the first place.”

“Well, unless he does come right out and steal, we’re stuck with him till we get back to Rhodes,” Menedemos answered. “Next year, though, tell him to go howl when he asks to go with us again.”

“By the dog, I will,” Sostratos said. “I wish I had this spring. He’s nothing but trouble. Even when he doesn’t do anything wrong, he always makes it seem he’s just about to. You have to keep an eye on him every minute.”

“Many goodbyes to him, then,” Menedemos said. “We’ll pay him off when we get home, and that’ll be the end of it. When he comes around whining for work next spring, tell him to bend over and-”

“I understand you, thanks,” Sostratos said hastily.

“Good. That’s settled, then.” Menedemos liked things neat and tidy. He liked them that way so much, he sometimes assumed they were when they weren’t. Here, though, Sostratos agreed with his cousin. Menedemos asked, “Anything else we need to do here on Kythnos?”

“I don’t think there’s anything else to do on Kythnos,” Sostratos said.

“Ha! Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right. I know I don’t want their water; we’ve got enough, and I remember how nasty and brackish it was when we stopped here a couple of years ago with Polemaios aboard.” Menedemos turned to Diokles. “Everybody’s aboard and ready to row?”

“Everybody’s aboard, skipper,” the oarmaster answered. “A few of the boys are still nursing headaches from too much wine, but they can probably row.”

“Sweating’ll be good for ‘em,” Menedemos said with the airy confidence of a man who wasn’t hung over at the moment. “Let’s get out of here, then. I don’t think we can make Paros with the daylight we’ve got left, but we ought to get to Syros without much trouble.”

“Sounds about right,” Diokles agreed. He turned and started shouting at the crew. They hurried to take their places at the oars and by the lines that would lower the sail from the yard. “Rhyppapai!” Diokles called. “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” The men began to row. The Aphrodite made her way out of the harbor.

Sostratos was glad to go. To Menedemos, every trading run, every island, every town seemed a new adventure. Sostratos liked the travel for what he could learn, but there wasn’t much to learn about Kythnos. And the more he saw of other places (even Athens, and who could have imagined that?), the better Rhodes looked. Rhodes was home, and they were on their way.

Menedemos swung the Aphrodite to port. Kythnos was longer than it was wide; to go east from the island’s single town, one had to round a headland at either the northern or southern tip of the island. He’d chosen the latter. To catch the wind abeam, the sailors swung the yard from the port bow back. They’d started the motion only a heartbeat after he started the turn, and finished it at about the same time. He smiled to himself. He hadn’t even had to give an order.

“Pretty day,” Diokles remarked as they swung past the headland, and it was. The sun shone warm and bright in the blue, blue sky, though it no longer stood so high as it had at the start of summer. The Aegean was a deeper blue, or rather several deeper blues. Kythnos, on the merchant galley’s left hand, added variety: brown soil, gray rock, streaks of greenery amid sun-dried yellow.

Other islands of the Kyklades dotted the horizon: everything from black rocks with the sea foaming around them, good for nothing but tearing the bottom out of a ship that came upon them unawares, to Syros and Paros and Naxos in the east, Siphnos in the southeast, and rocky Seriphos and Melos beyond it due south.

Gulls and terns wheeled overhead, skrawking and mewing. They often attended ships; what was garbage to men was opson to them. An osprey folded its wings and plunged feet first into the sea two or three plethra from the merchant galley. It came up again a heartbeat later, flapping strongly to get back into the air. Its talons clutched a writhing fish.

“When terns dive in, gulls steal from them,” Sostratos said. “But who’s going to steal from an osprey?”

“No one in these waters, by Zeus,” Menedemos answered.

“I wonder what the fish was,” Sostratos said. “I wonder if the bird chose it because it likes that kind of fish, or just because it chanced to be swimming near enough to the surface to be seen.”

Menedemos laughed. “I wonder, O best one, if there’s any limit to how many questions you can dream up. If there is, you haven’t touched it yet.”

His cousin looked wounded. “What’s wrong with curiosity? Where would we be without it? We’d be living in mud huts and trying to knock hares over the head with rocks, that’s where.”

“Two more questions,” Menedemos said, “even if you did answer one of them.” He wondered how angry-and how entertaining-Sostratos would get at the tweaking. He didn’t tease his cousin as much as he had when they were younger; Sostratos had got better at holding his temper, and so offered less amusement now.

He held it this morning, saying, “I have one question more: what difference does it make to you?”

“None, really. I was just curious.” Menedemos made a face, realizing he’d delivered himself into Sostratos’ hands.

“Thank you, my dear. You just proved my point for me.” Sostratos could have said more and worse. That was small consolation to Menedemos. What his cousin had said was plenty: plenty to make his ears heat, plenty to make Diokles laugh softly. For the next little while, Menedemos gave exaggerated attention to steering the ship-which, at the moment, needed little steering. He’d lost the exchange; he knew he’d lost it; and he hated losing at anything. That he’d lost it through his own foolish choice of words only made losing more annoying.

But he couldn’t stay irked for long, not with the breeze filling the sail and thrumming in the rigging, not with the gentle motion of the ship and the soft splashing as the ram at her bow cut through the water, not with…

Thinking of the ram brought him up short. “Serve out helmets and weapons to the crew, Diokles,” he said. “More pirates in these waters, Furies take ‘em, than fleas on a scavenger dog. If they want us, we’d better make sure they get a hard fight.”

Since the akatos had had to fight off pirates each of the past two sailing seasons, Diokles couldn’t very well disagree. In fact, he dipped his head and said, “I was going to do that anyway pretty soon.”

Before long, with bronze pots on their heads and swords and spears and axes in their hands, the men on the Aphrodite looked piratical themselves. The merchant galley was beamier than a pentekonter or hemiolia, but the crews of fishing boats and round ships weren’t inclined to make such fine distinctions. They never had been. Now, though, they fled with as much haste as Menedemos had ever seen. Fishing boats smaller than the neat little craft the merchant galley towed behind her rowed away with the men in them pulling as hard as if they crewed a war galley charging into battle. Two different sailing ships heeled sharply to the south as soon as their sailors spied the Aphrodite . They wanted to get as far away from her as they could, as fast as they could.