Over the Wine-Dark Sea

The wind kept backing and shifting, coming now from the north, now from the northwest. When it blew from the northwest, the Aphrodite could sail quite handily, but whenever it swung back toward the north Menedemos had to tack, zigzagging his course with the akatos taking the wind first on one bow and then swinging about to take it on the other. Grunting sailors heaved the yard round till it ran from bow to quarter and slanted toward the breeze. It was a slow business, and a miserably inexact one when it came to setting a course.

"Here's hoping we can find Kallipolis when we get in the neighborhood," Sostratos said.

"As long as I head northeast, I'll strike the mainland somewhere," Menedemos said. "Then we can feel our way along the coast till we come to the island."

"There ought to be a way to navigate more surely," Sostratos said. "The only trouble is, I don't know what it would be."

"If you did, you'd get rich enough to make Kroisos look like a piker," Menedemos said. "Every captain in the world would buy whatever you had."

"Buy it or try to steal it." Sostratos pointed north. "Here come those clouds."

"I think they're finally done fooling around," Menedemos said unhappily. "When they cover the sun, I'll have even less idea of just where we're going -  one more drawback to sailing out of sight of land."

"That storm almost sank us the last time you did it," Sostratos said. "I wonder if you offended some god without knowing it."

He didn't mean it seriously. Even so, Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic. Diokles rubbed his apotropaic ring. "Shouldn't say things like that," he muttered, just loud enough for Sostratos to hear.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, rain started pattering down. When Sostratos looked in the direction he thought to be northeast, he couldn't see anything much. All of a sudden, he was glad to be well out of sight of land. Without much in the way of visibility, he had no desire to find land where he least expected it.

Menedemos must have had the same thought. He called, "Aristeidas, go forward. You've got the best eyes of anybody aboard."

"All right, skipper, but I don't think we're anywhere close to shore," the sailor said.

"I don't, either. But I don't care to get any nasty surprises," Menedemos answered. "Besides, you can look out for fishing boats, too, and merchantmen. In this weather, anything can loom up before we know it's there."

Aristeidas dipped his head. "Right you are." He headed up toward the foredeck.

Sostratos blinked as a raindrop got him right in the eye. For a moment, he couldn't see anything. Not seeing anything gave him an idea. "Shouldn't you have a man with the lead up there, too?" he asked Menedemos.

"You're right -  I should," his cousin answered, and gave the necessary orders.

The lead splashed into the sea. A few minutes later, the sailor handling it called, "No bottom at a hundred cubits."

"We're still out in the middle of the gulf," Menedemos murmured. He raised his voice: "I thank you, Nikodromos." The sailor waved to show he'd heard and hauled in the line hand over hand.

Rain kept splashing down for the rest of the day. A sail that got a little wet worked better than a dry one: the water filled the spaces in the weave so the breeze couldn't sneak through. But a sail that got more than a little wet grew too heavy to belly and easily fill with air. It hung, almost limp, from the yard, as laundry did from olive branches ashore. Menedemos called men to the oars to keep the Aphrodite moving.

"Gauging your course by the breeze?" Sostratos asked.

"It's all I've got left right now," his cousin answered. "If I keep it on my left hand, not quite straight in my face, we can't go too far wrong."

"That seems to make sense," Sostratos said. But not everything that seemed to make sense was true. He wished he hadn't thought of that.

The sea never got more than a little choppy. This wasn't a real storm, only rain -  an annoyance, and a reminder the sailing season wouldn't stretch too much longer. It was indeed time to be heading home.

Dusk fell rather earlier than Sostratos had expected it to. The rain kept falling, too, making the night even more miserable and uncomfortable than it would have been otherwise. "How are we supposed to sleep in this?" Sostratos said.

"Wrap yourself in your himation, as if you were an Egyptian mummy," Menedemos said. "Wrap your face up, too. That'll keep you dry."

"Of course it will -  till the whole himation soaks through," Sostratos said.

"By then you'll be asleep, and you won't notice till morning." As Menedemos so often did, he spoke like a man with all the answers.