When Sostratos got his boiled egg, he discovered a couple of other differences between it and a bird's egg. The white didn't coagulate to nearly the same degree as a bird's egg would have. And the yolk was a deeper, richer orange than that of any bird's egg he'd ever seen; even by firelight, he was sure of that. The egg tasted fine, though. Menedemos and Diokles told some men to serve as sentries through the night. “I don't think anyone on Telos will bother us,” Menedemos said, “but I don't want to wake up with my throat cut and find out I was wrong.” Sostratos was immune to such duties. He found a spot not too far from one of the fires and curled up by it. The sand wasn't so soft as a proper bed, but made a better mattress than the planking of the poop deck. The thick wool of his himation held the night chill at bay. He stared up at the stars, but not for long. When Menedemos woke in the predawn twilight, he needed a moment to remember that the Aphrodite wouldn't be leaving Telos as soon as her crew shoved her back into the Aegean. His yawn turned into a curse. “Miserable, polluted rock,” he muttered, and got to his feet to go over and inspect the damage to the steering oar. Most of the sailors were still snoring, but Menedemos found Euxenides of Phaselis already crouched by the oar examining it. “Hail,” he said coolly. “Oh. Hail,” Euxenides answered. “I should be able to give you something that will serve you pretty well, if you don't mind my taking a few hours to make it. Forgive my saying so, but next to catapults this isn't very fancy work.” “That's what you think,” Menedemos said. “If you don't get the shape of the blade exactly right, it won't cut the water the way it should. And if the weight isn't distributed the way it should be, it won't pivot properly, and the fellow steering the ship—me, I mean— will have to work a lot harder than he would otherwise.” “Yes, yes,” Euxenides said impatiently, as to a child that kept pointing out the obvious. “I expect I can take care of all that. Only drawback of doing it right here is that I'll be working with green timber. But. ..” He raised an eyebrow. “I'll work for free, and the shipwrights on Kos surely won't.” He was right about that. And he sounded so certain he could do what he said he could, he won Menedemos over. “All right,” Menedemos said. “We'll see what you come up with.” If Euxenides proved more wind than work, his crewmen would be able to improvise something that would serve till they got to Kos. But Euxenides quickly showed he knew what he was doing. After bread and wine for breakfast, he used one of the ship's hatchets to knock down a pine whose trunk was about the right size to shape into a steering oar. Once he'd lopped off the branches that grew from it, sailors dragged it to the beach with ropes. Using the sound steering oar as his model, Euxenides trimmed the trunk to the proper length with the hatchet, then set to work with the adze to give it the shape he wanted. Chips flew in all directions. Perhaps halfway through the work, he looked up and remarked, “I may not be as resourceful as long-suffering Odysseus was, but by the gods I know what to do with a piece of wood.” “So you do, best one,” Menedemos admitted. He made a tolerably good woodworker himself, good enough to recognize a master of the craft when he saw one. Euxenides shaped the pine with the same offhand brilliance a sculptor showed with marble. Watching him was an education. Watching him kept Menedemos too interested to look out to sea. He jumped when somebody shouted, “Sail ho!” A pirate couldn't hope to do better than to descend on a merchant galley beached. How was he supposed to fight back? “This is what happened to the Athenian fleet at the end of the Peloponnesian War,” Sostratos said. “The Spartans caught them ashore at Aigospotamoi and had their way with them.” Only after he'd finished was Menedemos sure their thoughts had gone in the same direction.
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