still clung despite the season. No smoke rose from it; no stones and molten rock belched from it, as had happened many times in the past. Sostratos would not have cared to live in the shadow of a mountain that might let loose catastrophe without so much as a warning. He made his way back to the poop, where Menedemos was turning the Aphrodite's course from southwest to due west to approach the Strait of Sicily. Instead of resuming the argument the peafowl chick had interrupted, Sostratos asked, 'Do you really think Polyphemos the Cyclops lived on the slopes of Aitne?' That question interested Menedemos, even if it didn't involve money or girls. Sostratos had thought it would; his cousin truly cherished Homer. Menedemos answered, 'It could well be so, I suppose. People have always put Skylle and Kharybdis in the Sicilian strait, so the Cyclops would have been somewhere nearby.' 'But do you think people ought to put the monsters from the Odyssey in the real world?' Sostratos persisted. 'No one but Odysseus and his comrades ever saw them.' 'Egypt is in the real world, and Odysseus went there, or says he did,' Menedemos said stoutly. 'Ithake is in the real world, and you know he went there.' 'But he doesn't talk about monsters in Egypt or Ithake,' Sostratos said. 'I think you'll find out where he saw the monsters when you find the cobbler who sewed up his sack of winds.' 'I'd like to,' Menedemos answered. 'If I could pull out a south wind when we sent up the Strait, things'd be easier. As is, we'll have to row.' 'Tomorrow,' Sostratos said, eyeing the sun as it slid down toward Mount Aitne. 'More likely the day after, or even a day or two after that,' Menedemos said. 'I intend to put in at Rhegion, too, on the Italian side of the Strait. We may get rid of a couple of baby peafowl there.' Getting rid of peafowl chicks appealed to Sostratos, so he dipped his head. Sunset found the Aphrodite off Cape Leukopetra, which marked the Italian side of the entrance to the Sicilian Strait: the white stones of the bluffs just above the sea had given the cape its name. Menedemos chose to spend the night at sea, and neither Sostratos nor anyone else chose to argue with him, for beaching the akatos here would invite every bandit for tens of stadia around to swoop down on her. After the anchors splashed into the sea, the sailors had hard barley-flour rolls as sitos, with salted olives and crumbly cheese for their opson. They washed supper down with cheap wine Sostratos had bought in Taras. On dry land, he would have turned up his nose at the stuff. Salt air and a gently rolling ship somehow improved it. Diokles spat an olive pit over the rail and into the sea. 'I don't think the wind will shift,' he said. 'Neither do I,' Menedemos answered. 'If we were in an ordinary merchantman, we'd do a lot of waiting and a lot of tacking. As things are . . . well, this is why we pay the rowers.' The men at the oars grumbled a little the next morning; they'd had an easy time of it since leaving Taras, for the wind had been with them all the way. But Diokles' mallet and bronze square gave them the rhythm they needed. Menedemos set only ten men on each side to rowing: no point in wearing out the crew. The Aphrodite glided into Rhegion's harbor well before noon.
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