Halfway between Sounion and Keos, the Aphrodite slid past a becalmed round ship. Sailors on the tubby merchantman shouted in alarm when they spied the merchant galley. Had she been a pirate ship, they couldn't possibly have escaped. The sailors on the round ship shouted again, this time in relief, when the akatos didn't turn toward them. Well before noon, Menedemos decided to put in at Keos. “We'll fill up our water jars and hope for wind tomorrow,” he told Sostratos. “I know we've only come about a hundred stadia, but even so. ...” To his relief, his cousin didn't feel like arguing. “We wouldn't have made Kythnos by sundown, anyhow, and we need the fresh water.” “That's right.” Menedemos dipped his head. “And the water here is better than the nasty stuff they have on Kythnos.” Keos did look greener and more inviting than its southern neighbor, though the savage sun was baking it, too. As the Aphrodite came into the harbor at Koressia, one of the little island's four poleis, Sostratos remarked, “This was the place where, in the old days, they made people drink hemlock when they turned sixty—they didn't want any useless mouths to feed.” Menedemos snapped his fingers. “I knew that was one of the Kyklades, but you could have given me to a Persian torturer and he wouldn't have squeezed which one out of me.” Sostratos said, “I remember useless things—you know that. It's also where Simonides the poet came from.” “ 'Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.' “ Menedemos quoted the epitaph for the men who'd died at Thermopylai. “He wrote a lot of other verses besides that one,” Sostratos said. “I know, but it's the one everybody recalls,” Menedemos said. “I'm not like you, my dear—I don't come up with the strange things at the drop of a hat.” Sostratos took off his hat. Menedemos wondered if he would drop it, but he only fanned himself with it and put it back on. One of his eyebrows rose. He studied Menedemos the same way he'd examined the gryphon's skull— analyzing him, classifying him, finding a place for him in the bigger scheme of things. Menedemos didn't know that he cared for the place to which his cousin had assigned him. It would be higher on the scheme of things than the gryphon, surely, but how much higher? Before Sostratos could give him the answer there—in greater detail than he would like, he guessed—Dionysios came back to the stern. “Considering the price I'm paying, I hoped to get closer to Kos my first day out than one miserable little hop,” the dapper man said. “I hoped to get closer, too,” Menedemos answered, “but there was no wind, and I don't intend to kill my rowers. Maybe we'll do better tomorrow.” “We'd better,” Dionysios said darkly. With a smile even cooler and nastier than the one he'd just bestowed on Menedemos, Sostratos said, “Well, O marvelous one, if our pace doesn't suit you, I'll give you back all but five drakhmai of your fare, and you're welcome to find another eastbound ship here.”
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