“There's no such thing as too much Aristophanes,” Menedemos said. Before Sostratos could rise to that—and he would have, as surely as a tunny would rise to the anchovy impaled on a fisherman's hook—Kissidas called back to the poop in plaintive tones: “Excuse me, gentlemen, but does this boat always jerk and sway so?” He followed the question with a gulp audible all the way from the fore-deck. “He hasn't got any stomach at all, has he?” Menedemos muttered. “No,” Sostratos said. He sometimes got sick in what most sailors reckoned moderate seas, but this light pitching didn't bother him in the least. “Good thing it is only a day's journey.” To a seasick man, of course, only was the wrong word; the voyage would seem to last forever. His cousin must have been thinking along the same lines, for he spoke up urgently: “If you have to heave, O best one, in the name of the gods lean out over the rail before you do.” “Good thing we've got a following breeze,” Diokles said with wry amusement. “Otherwise, you'd have to explain the difference between leeward and windward—if he didn't find out by getting it blown back into his face.” Menedemos laughed the callous laugh of a man with a bronze stomach. “One lesson like that and you remember forever.” Well before noon, Kissidas and one of the women of his household bent over the rail, puking. From his post at the steering oars, Menedemos avidly stared forward. “Trying to see what she looks like without her veil?” Sostratos asked, his voice dry. “Well, of course,” his cousin answered. “How often do you get the chance to look at a respectable woman unveiled? Unwrapped, you might say?” “You might,” Sostratos said as another spasm of vomiting wracked the woman. “Tell me, though, my dear—if she came back here right now and wanted to give you a kiss, how would you like that?” Menedemos started to say something, then checked himself. “Mm, maybe not right now.” But he kept looking ahead. After a moment, he gave a dismissive shrug. “Besides, she's not very pretty. She must have brought a fat dowry.” The familiar bulk of the island of Rhodes swelled in the south, dead ahead. Sostratos said, “We will get in not long after noon.” “So we will,” Menedemos replied. Sostratos gave him a curious look. “Aren't you glad to be able to spend a couple of extra days at home?” “No,” Menedemos said. Goodness, Sostratos thought as his cousin steered the akatos south without another word and with his face as set and hard as iron. His quarrel with his father must he worse than I thought. “OoP!”
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