men shouted and shook their fists at the oncoming Aphrodite. Some of the shouts were in Greek, others in one local language or another. The Aphrodite's sailors shouted curses and obscenities in return. A naked pirate stood up on his bench and flapped his private parts at the Aphrodite's crew, as if he were a man in the agora making himself disgusting to the slave women and poor farmers' wives who came there to shop and gossip. 'I've seen bigger pricks on a mouse!' Diokles yelled, not missing a stroke with mallet and bronze. The exhibitionist pirate sat down abruptly; he must have understood enough Greek for that shaft to strike home. And then all the Aphrodite's crew erupted in cheers: just out of bowshot, the pirate ship heeled hard to starboard as it turned away from the merchant galley. It headed north in a hurry, the sail coming up to lie against the yard. 'Ease back on the men,' Menedemos told Diokles. 'Not a chance we'll be able to catch 'em. We saw that back in the Aegean, too.' 'Right again,' the oarmaster said. 'The way he's running, you'd think he had a five on his tail.' 'The way he's running, a five wouldn't catch him, either,' Menedemos said. 'A hemiolia might, or a trireme. But a five's too beamy and heavy and slow, just like us.' He shook his fist at the receding pentekonter. 'I'd like to see everybody aboard there nailed to a cross,' Diokles said. 'Come to that, I'd like to see every pirate everywhere nailed to a cross.' 'So would I, but I don't think it's going to happen,' Menedemos answered. 'For one thing, you'd run out of trees before you made enough crosses to put all the pirates on.' The oarmaster grunted and spat into the sea. 'Heh. That'd be funny if only it was funny, you know what I mean?' 'Don't I just?' Menedemos raised his voice to call out to all the rowers: 'Well done, men! We scared off another vulture. Now - portside back oars, starboard side forward.' Almost in her own length, the Aphrodite spun to port. When her bow pointed back toward Hipponion, Menedemos took half the rowers from each side off the oars and headed toward the harbor, now a few stadia more distant than it had been when Aristeidas first spotted the pentekonter. 'Never a dull moment,' Sostratos said, mounting the steps that led up from the waist to the poop deck. 'Did you expect there would be?' Menedemos asked. 'If you wanted things dull, you should have stayed back in Rhodes.' 'They're liable not to be dull even there,' Sostratos said. 'Who knows what the Macedonians are up to while we're out here in the west?' 'You're right,' Menedemos said after a moment. 'I could wish you were wrong, but you're right.' 'I hope the generals aren't doing anything,' his cousin said. 'If they are doing something, I hope they're doing it to one another, not to Rhodes. But when you live in a polis in an age full of marshals, you can't help worrying.' 'No, you
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