Satyrus nodded a few times, considering. ‘Then carry on,’ Satyrus said.
‘It’s only that it is open water all the way. No landfalls and no refuge.’ Peleus raised a shaggy eyebrow.
‘For one day? Are we sailors or not?’ Satyrus asked rhetorically. ‘What’s the heading?’
‘Years since I did it.’ Peleus squinted at the sun and the sky. ‘South and east. No – more south. I like that. Hold that course.’ He looked at the wake for long enough that Satyrus thought he might have changed his mind. ‘Deep-water sailing is where we find out if you can mind your helm or not,’ he said. ‘No landmarks. No seamarks. Your wake is straight, or he ain’t. Hear me, lad?’
Satyrus was growing weary of a life that seemed to consist of nothing but an endless series of tests – but he bit back on his first answer and managed a grin. ‘Do my best,’ he said.
‘Notch in your wake when you talk,’ Peleus said.
When the sun was high in the sky, Melitta walked down the raised deck between the rowers. Most of them were sitting comfortably, and a dozen of them were busy rigging a long awning on the port side against the sun, while the sailors did the climbing.
Wherever she walked, silence followed, and stares, and some quiet comments. Life on shipboard had brought home to Melitta how very stupid men were. Her body was capable of ending argument, discussion, religious affirmation – really, it was a wonder that men managed to do any work at all.
Whereas, by contrast, there were naked men all around her, and none of them moved her by so much as an iota. Some had fine bodies – her brother, for instance, or old Peleus, in his way. Xenophon, if you ignored the pimples on his face, had the physique of Herakles. The marine captain was exercising naked, gleaming with oil and obviously trying to attract her attention. It was a fine body, but, as Melitta had already commented to Dorcus, there wasn’t much inside it.
She swept her Ionic chiton under her with one arm and gathered her chlamys with the other before sinking on to a bale of sheepskins that acted as the stern-seat for the helmsman’s visitors.
‘I’m tired of being stared at,’ Melitta said to her brother.
‘I’m tired of being tested. Trade you!’ Satyrus said with a wry smile.
‘Deal!’ she said, and spat in her hand. They shook without his unwrapping his arms from the steering oar.
‘Now you’ve put a notch in my wake,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘You’re pretending to be a sailor while I pretend to be a Greek woman,’ she said. ‘When do we get to stop pretending?’
Satyrus watched the horizon over the stern for a long minute. ‘I remember when I thought that you were so much older than me,’ he said. ‘Now I think maybe I’ve passed you – for a while. Because I learned something last year, and I learned it again after I kissed Amastris.’
‘You kissed Amastris? Not some slave girl in her clothes?’ Melitta leaned forward.
‘Was she chewing cinnamon just before she summoned me?’ Satyrus asked.
Melitta gave an enigmatic smile. ‘So – you kissed her. Was it beautiful? ’
Satyrus sighed. ‘It was beautiful, Lita. That’s what I mean. It wasn’t like kissing Phiale at all. Kissing Phiale made my member stiff. Kissing Amastris made me soften.’
‘You’re killing me. My brother has a poetic soul? While I’m left with all this chaff?’ She waved around her at the men on deck. Then, seeing that Peleus was coming up the central deck, she leaned close. ‘Tell me what you learned.’
‘We’re always pretending.’ He looked at her, eye to eye, so close that he could see the flecks of colour in her iris, and she could see her own reflection in his. She could feel his breath on her face. ‘I pretend to be brave when I’m afraid. I pretend to be interested in sex when I’m interested in impressing my peers, I pretend to be religious when I go to temple. I pretend to be obedient when I steer the ship.’
She cast a glance at Peleus and he grabbed her arm. ‘Listen, Melitta. Because that’s what every ephebe knows. But what I know is that the pretending becomes the reality.’
Melitta looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. ‘But-’ She made a face. ‘Satyrus, why can’t you be like this all the time?’
Satyrus furrowed his eyebrows. ‘What?’
Melitta raised her arms as if supplicating the gods. ‘At sea, you are – as wise as Philokles. As subtle as Diodorus. On land, you’re often – well, my not-quite-a-man brother.’
‘Thanks. I think,’ Satyrus said. After a second, he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. At sea I’m in command – at least this trip. Command – well, it’s like a dose of cold water when you’re asleep. And I keep seeing people do things I know that I do. Xeno does stuff that makes me tremble, and so help me-’ He laughed, and Melitta joined him.
‘If you two was sailors, I’d expect a mutiny,’ Peleus said. He spared Melitta a smile. ‘May I offer the despoina an apology for my rude ways when we was running from pirates?’
Melitta gave him the full weight of her smile – eyes flashing, teeth, a hand sweeping back her hair. If these were all the weapons she had to use as a ‘Greek’ woman, she’d wield them ruthlessly. ‘Were you rude, helmsman? I thought that you were doing your duty.’ She swept by him down the deck, heading for her own awning with Dorcus under the boatsail mast.
She heard his grunt as she moved away, and smiled again in satisfaction. They weren’t her weapons of choice, but they did cut.
Well past midday, and the sea rose, blue and blue, out to the rim of the horizon’s bowl. The sun rode the sky above them, heading west, and the handful of fleecy clouds were more ornament than threat.
‘Nothing more frightening except a storm,’ Kalos muttered. He squatted in the stern, out of the wind. He kept his eyes forward, as if he didn’t want to see the empty rim of the bowl, unmarked by even the hint of land in any direction.
‘Don’t be a woman,’ Peleus said. ‘The boys do as you do.’
‘I hate not seeing a coast,’ Kalos said. He got to his feet, stretched like a big, ugly cat and glided forward, light on his feet and unaffected by the roll.
‘I hate it too,’ Peleus said. He gave Satyrus his secret smile. ‘But cutting across the empty sea is what makes us better sailors, lad. And you have to look like you know your way – like there’s a path of gold hammered into the surface of the water for you and only you.’
Satyrus thought of his advice to his sister. ‘I pretend I’m not afraid all the time,’ he said.
‘We have a name for that, lad,’ Peleus said, slapping his shoulder. ‘We call that courage.’
‘Do you know where we are?’ Satyrus asked.
Peleus looked around. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But give or take a thousand stades, we’re west of Cyprus. I draw some hope from that bank of low cloud that just came up under the bow. See it?’
Satyrus stretched his neck to see under the mainsail. ‘I think I do.’
‘I’ll go forward and look – slowly, so it doesn’t look bad. Notch in your wake, lad.’ Peleus went forward, adjusting sheets and cursing the oarsmen, most of whom hadn’t touched an oar since mid-morning and were so much human cargo.
Satyrus watched him go and stood looking at his sister and thinking of Amastris. Thinking that, like the flower of the lotus, Amastris was probably something that would be bad for him in the long run. What if he endangered their chance at revenge? At having their own kingdom? In his mind’s eye he could see Ataelus – just to name one man – the small Sakje had been with his mother when she died. He’d escaped to raise his clan in revolt, and he had worked tirelessly at rallying the former coalition of the Eastern Assagatje to fight against the Sauromatae and against Eumeles, supported by Leon. Or Lykeles, who spoke against Heron every day in the assembly in Olbia.
What if he incurred her father’s real displeasure? Or Ptolemy’s?
He watched his wake. Life, he thought, is too complicated. He enjoyed being a helmsman. He enjoyed the simple, yet endless, task – he enjoyed the trust and the responsibility and the palpable success at the end of the day. If you piloted a ship well, it came to port. Task complete. Kingship seemed to be much worse.
His thoughts wandered off to the moment when she slipped into his arms, the surrender of her mouth, the quickness of her tongue ‘Planning to sail back to Rhodos, lad?’ Peleus said. He pointed at the long curve of the wake.
‘Oh – ugh!’ Satyrus brought the ship back on course with a perceptible turn that made heads come up all along the deck. He was irrationally angry – at himself, at Peleus – at always being tested. Again.
‘Girl?’ Peleus asked.
