Nihmu nodded agreement.
Idomeneus raised an eyebrow. 'So? We go on a mission, I suppose.'
Coenus nodded.
Idomeneus laughed. 'You don't have to tell me. Cretans grow up with these games.' He shrugged.
'At sea,' Coenus said. To Melitta, he said, 'Say your goodbyes.'
Nihmu hugged Sappho. 'We will win,' she said simply.
Sappho nodded. 'I know.'
Pounding footsteps on the sand, and Phiale came up, running in cork-soled sandals, attended by Alcaea. 'Melitta!' she called.
'Phiale!' Melitta answered, hugging the other woman. 'What are you doing here?'
'I caught a rumour that you were slipping away!' Phiale said. 'Where are you going?'
'Massalia,' Melitta said. 'To be safe.'
'Oh!' Phiale said. 'I suppose it is a secret. I'm sorry to be so thoughtless! But I worry so much about – about all of you!'
Kallista was still light on her feet despite her advanced pregnancy, and she interposed herself between Melitta and Phiale. 'Let me get you a cup of wine, since you've joined our beach party,' she said brightly.
Something sparked behind Melitta's eyes. She turned to Sappho. 'Don't let her leave for a day or two,' she said quietly.
Recognition glittered in Sappho's fire-lit face. 'Of course!' she said. 'How blind of me not to have seen it. Curse her.'
Melitta clasped her aunt more closely. 'We don't know. But why else is she here?' Then she choked on a sob. 'Take care of him for me!' she said, unwilling at the last to leave her son.
Before she left, she went and held him again, though she'd promised herself that she would not. While she held him, Hama emerged from the darkness behind Phiale. He had a whispered exchange with Sappho and vanished into the mansion.
'She won't leave us for a while,' Sappho said with satisfaction. 'With a little luck, she can shit her treason out.' She showed her niece a papyrus packet of orange powder.
'Awful if we're wrong,' Melitta said.
'Too bad,' Sappho said, her eyes hard. 'Goodbye, honey bee.'
And then they were aboard with a smell of verdigris and old fish, and the rowers picked up the beat, and they were away into the first colour of dawn. They made Rhodos in six days, having come up the south coast of Cyprus. Melitta had been to Rhodos with her brother, but the City of Roses remained a place of mystery and intrigue to her. The helmsman went to report at the Temple of Poseidon and Coenus accompanied him. The two men returned, scratching their beards.
'The pirates are worse,' Coenus announced to the table of officers in a comfortable wine shop on the waterfront. 'So bad that Rhodos can no longer suppress them, and her trade is being choked. The worst of the bastards are around the town of Byzantium – in the Propontis.'
'Where we are going,' Melitta added. 'Why do Greeks call everything the Propontis? Assagatje have real names – the Strait of Fast Water, the Strait of Horses.'
Cardias shrugged. 'The Thracian Bosporus divides the lands of the Thracians in Asia and Europe – and is the entrance to the Euxine. That's the Great Propontis. The Cimmerian Bosporus divides-'
'Lands that the Cimmerians don't hold any more and the Bay of Salmon!' she said impatiently.
'That's right.' Cardias shook his head and looked at his master's wife. 'Mistress, I'm against this. Such a small ship? They'll bottle us up in the narrows and we'll be fishbait – and you'll decorate a brothel.'
Nihmu shrugged. 'No. That will not happen.'
Coenus shook his head. 'Lady, I've seen you in action, and you are deadly sure with a bow – and so were your winged words. But you yourself said that you lost your gift of prophecy with your marriage.'
Nihmu shrugged. 'No pirate will touch this vessel,' she pronounced. 'I have seen it.'
'Poseidon's member – your pardon, ladies. Very well. Listen, the Rhodians have a convoy for the Euxine in ten days. Can we wait and sail with it?' Cardias was pleading.
'Of course!' Nihmu said. 'You think that because I am sure I am also foolish?'
Coenus shook his head. 'I remember you like this,' he said, 'but I haven't missed it.' The convoy was ready in just eight days, and they were away, up the coast of Asia. They touched at Chios and Mytilene and then they were rowing north, right into the wind to make the mouth of the Hellespont before dark. The whole convoy passed Troy in the last light of the sun, Melitta and Coenus saying the verses to one another as the rowers carried them past the tomb of Achilles. They made the fishing town at Sigeion after dark, and suffered through the perils of camping on an open beach, lighting fires from fire pots in the dark and collecting wood from the driftwood piles at the high-water mark by touch and feel.
Melitta sank into her sheepskins thankfully and dreamed that she had lost her son and that spirits brought her his swaddling clothes, covered in blood, and she awoke screaming with Nihmu's arms around her.
In the morning she arose, feeling as if she'd been beaten with a stick, to watch the men load all their kit back aboard the pentekonter. The Rhodian convoy was slow to form in a contrary breeze, and the pair of triemioliai provided by the Rhodian navy as guards tacked back and forth like worried dogs with a herd of recalcitrant sheep, but before the sun was high they were rowing again to the curses of the oarsmen for the contrary wind and the bad luck.
Early afternoon and they were in the Propontis, the little sea in the midst of the Hellespont, and Parium was clear on their bow as they crept up the north coast. They made Rhaidestos with a freshening breeze that quieted some of the grumbling of the crew, and ate crabs on the beach and drank a terrible local wine sold off two-wheeled wagons by local farmers.
'We're in luck,' Coenus said, looking at Nihmu. 'The local pirates – the whole fleet – is on the opposite coast, making a grab at one of the cities, if you can believe it. They are strong – fifty warships, or so the farmers assure me.' He drank wine and made a face. 'Gods – who would want to be a colonist?'
'So Auntie Nihmu was right,' Melitta said.
'I'll sacrifice a new lamb to Poseidon when we're through the strait,' Coenus said. 'But yes – I think she's right.'
5
'what we need is wood,' Satyrus said.
It had taken a day to build a camp on the bluff behind the stone farmhouse, out of sight of the shore and well watered by the creek. Another day had been filled in cutting the boatsail mast free, floating the Falcon, jury-rigging a bow and pulling the hull up the creek to the new camp, so that he could receive the care he deserved, out of sight of cruising ships in the great bay.
By the third day, Satyrus was standing in Alexander's largest stone barn, eyeing the curved joists that held the main beams. 'What we need is wood,' he said again.
'I don't think that Alexander, however well disposed to us, would fancy our stripping his barns of their innards to rebuild the bow.' Theron was still tired, and still moved stiffly. Six men had died of their wounds, and Satyrus was beginning to wonder if he would ever run well again himself – his hip was not knitting well, and he had trouble sleeping because of the pain in his arm, but Theron was recovering his sense of humour, and Satyrus had begun to feel that he might yet survive this.
'T hose beams and joists came from somewhere,' Satyrus insisted.
'We could just ask him,' Theron said.
So Satyrus did.
'Sakje brought them – dragged them overland from up-country on sledges,' Alexander said. 'I traded them for wine – forty amphorae, good stuff from Mytilene.'
