His cousin was doing all the little things he needed to do to succeed. He had sharp-eyed Aristeidas in the bow as lookout. And, some time past noon, Aristeidas called, 'Ship ho! Ship ho dead ahead!' He pointed south, toward Syracuse. There was the city on the mainland. There was the small island of Ortygia, a few plethra offshore and also heavily built up. And there, worse luck, was the Carthaginian fleet blockading the Little Harbor north of Ortygia and the Great Harbor south of the island. Aristeidas had spoken with the precision a good lookout needed: he'd called, Ship ho! and not, Sail ho! The Carthaginian war galleys had their masts down; as warships on active duty did, they moved with oars alone, ready to fight at any moment. Only specks in the distance now, they would look bigger all too soon. Sostratos knew that better than he wanted to. 'What do we do now?' he called to Menedemos. 'Hold our course,' his cousin answered. 'What else can we do?' Run sprang to Sostratos' mind again. But Menedemos went on, 'I still think we've got a pretty good chance of sneaking into the Little Harbor. The Carthaginians will go after the round ships before they bother us.' 'And how do you know that, O sage of age?' Sostratos demanded. 'For one thing, all the round ships carry a lot more grain than we do,' Menedemos answered with surprising patience. 'That's what the Carthaginians want to keep from getting into Syracuse. And, for another, we can fight a little bit, and the round ships can't. Why should the Carthaginians make things harder on themselves than they have to?' All that made a certain amount of sense to Sostratos, but only a certain amount. He pointed toward the oncoming war galleys, which were closing with the fleet of grain carriers at a frightening clip - it certainly frightened him. 'Do you really think we can fight those even a little bit?' Some of the galleys had two banks of oars - those would be fours. Others had three banks - those would be fives. All of them dwarfed the Roman trireme the Aphrodite had crippled. And Sostratos could see how smoothly the rowers handled the oars. These weren't half-trained crews, like the one in that trireme. 'Of course we can,' Menedemos said, so heartily that Sostratos knew he was lying in his teeth. Sostratos couldn't even call his cousin on it, not without disheartening the crew. The Carthaginian galleys scurried toward the round ships like so many scorpions. The sternposts that curved up and forward over their poops like upraised stings added to the blance. But the galleys carried their stings at the bow, in their rams. White water foamed from the three horizontal flukes of those rams. Sostratos could see it much more clearly than he would have liked. But then Aristeidas proved he was indeed a first-rate lookout. 'Ships ho!' he sang out. 'Ships ho off the port bow!' He'd kept looking around while everyone else thought of nothing but the Carthaginian war galleys, and pointed southeast, where another fleet of warships was rounding Ortygia, heading north as fast as their rowers could take them. 'Are those the Carthaginians who'd been patrolling outside the Great Harbor?' Sostratos asked. 'If they are, why aren't they coming after us?' 'How should I know?' Menedemos, for the first time, sounded harassed. He'd seemed ready to deal with one fleet. Two . . . Sostratos hadn't been
Вы читаете Over the Wine Dark Sea
