The motion gave Sostratos a headache. A couple of sailors reacted more strongly than that, leaning out over the gunwale to puke into the Aegean. Maybe they'd taken on too much wine the night before. Maybe they just had weak stomachs, as some men did. As some men did, Menedemos had a quotation from Homer for everything: ' 'The assembly was stirred like great waves of the sea, The open sea by Ikaria, which the east wind and the south wind Stir up from Father Zeus' clouds.' ' 'What about the north wind?' Sostratos asked. 'That's the one troubling us now.' His cousin shrugged. 'You can't expect the poet to be perfect all the time. Isn't it marvel enough that he's so good so much of the time?' 'I suppose so,' Sostratos said. 'But it's not good to lean on him the way an old man like Xenophanes leans on a stick. That keeps you from thinking for yourself.' 'If Homer's already said it as well as it can be said, what's the point to trying to say it better?' Menedemos asked. 'If you're quoting him for the sake of poetry, that's one thing,' Sostratos said. 'If you're quoting him to settle what's right and wrong, the way too many people do, that's something else.' 'Well, maybe,' Menedemos said, with the air of a man making a great concession. At least he's not sneering at using philosophers' ideas to judge what's right and wrong, the way he sometimes does, Sostratos thought. That is something. He soon discovered why Menedemos showed no interest in twitting him: his cousin's thought turned in a different direction. Setting a hand on Diokles' shoulder, Menedemos said, 'It's two days to Khios no matter what we do. Shall we start putting them through their paces?' 'Not a bad notion,' the keleustes replied. 'The more work we get in, the better the odds it'll pay off when we really need it.' 'With luck, we won't need it at all,' Sostratos said. Both Diokles and Menedemos looked at him. He felt he had to add, 'Of course, we'd better not take the chance.' His cousin and the oarmaster relaxed. 'Enough trouble comes all by itself, even when you don't borrow any,' Menedemos said. He raised his voice. 'All rowers to the oars. We're going to practice fighting pirates - or whatever else we happen to run into on the western seas.' Sostratos had wondered if the men would grumble at having to work harder than they would have done if they'd rowed straight for Khios. A few of them did, but it was grumbling for the sake of grumbling, not real anger. And so, on the rough sea north of Samos and Ikaria, the akatos practiced darting to the right and to the left, spinning in her own length, and suddenly bringing inboard all the oars now on one side of the ship, now on the other. They worked on that last maneuver over and over again.
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