added, 'If there were a woman in Athens, you'd stop no matter whose wife she was.' 'Not if she were yours,' Menedemos said. Sostratos gave him an ironic bow. As Menedemos returned it, he wondered if he'd just told the truth. Sostratos hadn't seen much of Syracuse during his time in the polis. He couldn't have gone up onto the wall to walk around the town, not unless he wanted an arrow in his ribs. And he couldn't have ridden out to see the countryside, as he had up at Pompaia; the next sight he would have seen was the inside of a Carthaginian slave pen. I wonder when I'll come back to Sicily, he thought. I wonder if I'll ever come back to Sicily. He shrugged. No way to know the future. Menedemos stood at the Aphrodite's stern, his hands on the steering-oar tillers. He dipped his head to Diokles, saying, 'Set the stroke.' 'Right you are, skipper.' The keletustes struck the bronze square with his mallet. To emphasize the rhythm as the merchant galley left port, he raised his voice, too: 'Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!' For swank, Menedemos had every oar manned as the Aphrodite left the Little Harbor. The rowers did him proud, their oars rising and falling in smooth unison. Of course, Sostratos thought, it's a lazyman's pace, nothing like what we did when we were running from that Roman trireme - or when we turned back towards it! What an adventure that was! He paused in bemusement and some dismay. I'll be telling the story of that trireme for the rest of my life, and I'll sound more like a hero every time I do. He didn't care for men his father's age who bored dinner parties with tales of their swashbuckling youth, but he suddenly saw how they came to be the way they were. A historian is supposed to understand causes, he thought, but then he tossed his head. This was one of which he would sooner have stayed ignorant. As Syracuse receded behind the merchant galley, Menedemos took more than half the sailors off the oars. The ship glided up the Sicilian coast toward the mainland of Italy. Dolphins leaped. Terns splashed into the sea, some only a few cubits from the Aphrodite. One came out with a fish in its beak. 'You'll have an easy trip home,' Menedemos called to him from the stern. 'No more peafowl to worry about.' 'I'm so disappointed they're gone,' Sostratos answered. Not only his cousin but half the sailors laughed. Aristeidas the lookout said, 'The foredeck still smells like birdshit.' 'You're right - it does,' Sostratos agreed. 'It probably will for a while, too.' 'So it will,' Aristeidas said darkly. 'Now that you don't have to take care of peafowl any more, you can go wherever you like on the ship. Me, I'm stuck up here most of the time.' You can go wherever you like. Aristeidas had said it without irony, and Sostratos took it the same way. Then he thought about what a landlubber would make of it. The Aphrodite was only forty or forty-five cubits long, and perhaps seven cubits wide at her
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