He had his own morning duties to attend to. He gave the peafowl barley and water for their breakfast. The birds ate with good appetite. He'd seen they ate better in harbor than while the Aphrodite moved across the open sea. That was nothing remarkable. A lot of people went off their feed on the open sea, too.
"How many men are we missing, Diokles?" Menedemos asked.
"Not a one, captain, if you can believe it." The keleustes shook his head in amazement. "I wonder about these fellows, I truly do. You're hardly a man at all if you can't go out and make a night of it."
"They want the Khian, too," Menedemos said. "Even a sailor can afford it when he buys it where they make it."
Sostratos said, "The dealers won't be so generous as the tavernkeepers will. They'll be selling their best, not the cheap stuff you get in taverns, and they'll squeeze us till our eyes pop."
Menedemos grinned at him. "That's why you're along. You're not supposed to let them squeeze us."
"Ha," Sostratos said. "Ha, ha." He brought out the syllables just like that, as if they were dialogue in a comedy. "I can't keep them from squeezing us, and you'd better know it. With a little luck, I can keep them from squeezing us quite so much."
"All right." Menedemos dipped his head. He seemed in a good mood this morning, likely because the Aphrodite wouldn't have to sit in the harbor while Diokles hunted down men who gave more thought to roistering than to how they earned the money to roister. He pointed to Sostratos. "Grab yourself some bread and oil and wine. I want to get out into the open sea as soon as I can."
"All right." Sostratos drummed his fingers on the gunwale. "We'll have to lay in some more supplies when we got to Khios. We're using them faster than I thought we would."
"Take care of it." Menedemos was already eating and spoke with his mouth full. Sostratos tried to resent his cousin's peremptory tone, but couldn't quite. He was the toikharkhos; taking care of such things was his job. As he came back to the poop, Menedemos added, "The sooner I can get out of this port, the better I'll like it."
"Those Macedonians?" Sostratos asked.
"Sure enough," Menedemos agreed. "I didn't like the way they asked questions - like they were demigods looking down their noses at ordinary mortals." He dipped a piece of bread into olive oil and took a big bite. As he swallowed, his lip curled. "Demigods would speak better Greek, though."
"Khios won't be any better when it comes to that," Sostratos predicted. "It bends the knee to Antigonos, too."
"Well, yes, but it's not sitting over Kos, the way Samos is," his cousin answered. "The officers up there won't be so . . . eager to squeeze everything we know out of us. I can hope they won't, anyhow."
"It makes sense," Sostratos said. "You have a pretty good idea of the way the politics work."
"For which I thank you." Menedemos sounded as if he meant it. Then he added, "I may not know everything that's happened everywhere since before the Trojan War, but I do all right."
"I don't pretend to know everything that's happened everywhere since before the Trojan War," Sostratos spluttered. Only after he was done spluttering did he realize Menedemos had been hoping he would. He shut up with a snap. That also amused his cousin, which only annoyed him more.
"Come on!" Menedemos called to his men. "Let's cast off and get going. Like I told you, we're two days away from the best wine in the world." That got the men working. It got the Aphrodite away from the harbor ahead of many of the little fishing boats that sailed out of Kos. And it got the akatos through the narrow channel between the island and the mainland of Asia in fine fashion.
Sostratos hadn't really thought about just how narrow the channel was. "If you had stone-throwers on both sides of it," he remarked to Menedemos, "you could make this passage very hard and dangerous."
"I daresay you're right," Menedemos answered. "It may happen one of these days, too, though I hope none of Antigonos' generals is as sneaky as you are."
Half her oars manned, the Aphrodite fought her way north. The broad stretch of sea between Samos and Ikaria on the one hand and Khios on the other was one of the roughest parts of the Aegean: neither the mainland nor any islands shielded the water from the wind blowing out of the north. The merchant galley pitched choppily as wave after wave slammed into her bow.
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:
