"I wonder who's dying," Sostratos repeated. "Delos is sacred ground, you know - too sacred to be polluted by death. If somebody's in a bad way there, they take him across the channel to Rheneia to finish the job. They do the same for women in childbirth, too."
"Childbirth's just about as bad as dying when it comes to pollution," Diokles said.
Menedemos dipped his head. "Women's things are a strange business. I thank the gods every day for making me a man." Neither Sostratos nor the oarmaster disagreed with him.
A tubby sailing ship approaching Delos from the northwest sheered off sharply when her crew spied the long, lean shape of the Aphrodite. Diokles grunted laughter. "If we were pirates, we'd have them for supper," he said.
Sostratos' cousin steered the merchant galley south past Rheneia's western coast, which held a town even smaller and less prepossessing than Mykonos' Panormos. Menedemos clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Poor Rheneia," he said, "always running second behind its little neighbor. That must be hard."
You wouldn't know, would you? Sostratos thought. He almost said it out loud, but ended up keeping quiet. What was the use? Menedemos might not even realize what he was talking about.
Far to the south, beyond Rheneia, clouds swirled above Paros, twisting into all sorts of improbable patterns. Sostratos merely admired their beauty. To Diokles, the view of the island helped define the Aphrodite's route. "One nice thing about the Kyklades," the keleustes said. "There's always an island or two on the horizon somewhere, so you can figure out where you are."
"It's a lot easier than navigating out of sight of land," Menedemos agreed.
He had lynx-eyed Aristeidas at the bow as a lookout, but it was one of the sailors one the starboard side who sang out, "Sail ho!" and pointed west.
As Sostratos had when Aristeidas sighted Mykonos, he peered in the direction in which the sailor pointed. This time, he scratched his head and said, "I don't see anything."
"It's there," the man insisted. After a moment, a couple of other sailors added loud - and alarmed - agreement. Sostratos kept peering. He knuckled his eyes, for he kept on seeing nothing.
From the poop, Menedemos shouted, "All men to the oars! Diokles, give us a lively beat. We'll see if we can't show the polluted robbers our heels."
Sailors rushed to their benches. A couple of them trod on Sostratos' toes as they hurried past. He cursed, not from pain but from frustration: he still couldn't see the sail that had everyone else jumping like chickpeas on a hot griddle. He rubbed his eyes again. People said reading could make you shortsighted. Sostratos had never believed that. His vision, if not of the very best like Aristeidas', had always been good enough. Now he began to wonder.
And then, just as the Aphrodite, propelled now by sail and oars, seemed to gather herself and leap forward over the wine-dark water of the Aegean, he did spy the sail and understood at once why he hadn't seen it earlier. He'd been looking for a white square of linen against the blue sky. This sail, though, was blue itself, making it harder to see at any distance.
Now he pointed."There's the pirate," he called back to Menedemos.
"There's a pirate, anyhow," his cousin agreed. "Whether that's the pirate or not, the one the fellow on Mykonos talked about, I don't know and I don't care. But no honest skipper makes his sail into a chameleon."
"Not just his sail." Now that Sostratos knew where to look, he had much less trouble spying the other ship. "His hull's painted the color of the sea, too."
"If you're going to do those things, you don't usually do them by halves," Menedemos said. He turned to Diokles. "Up the stroke, keleustes. They're gaining on us."
"Skipper, we can't row any harder than what we're doing," the oarmaster answered. "In fact, we won't be able to hold this sprint very long."
Menedemos cursed. So did Sostratos, all over again. Sure enough, the pirate ship was visibly bigger than when he'd first spotted it. As did those of the Aphrodite, its oars rose and fell, rose and fell, in smooth rhythm, digging into the water and then breaking free once more. The pirates were stroking no more rapidly than the Aphrodite's crew, but they had a faster ship: they didn't have to worry about hauling cargo, only fighting men.
It hardly seemed fair, Sostratos thought as he counted the oars on the pirate's port side, which he could see better than the starboard as her captain steered on a course that converged with the Aphrodite's. He counted the oars, muttered to himself, and then counted them again. "Menedemos!" he called, his voice rising nearly to a shout. "Menedemos!"
"What is it?" His cousin, understandably, sounded harried. "By the gods, it had better be something good, if you're bothering me at a time like this."
