Salamis, p.11
Salamis, page 11
After a little while, the Macedonian came back. An officer with a red cape to show his rank strode behind him. “Let’s see this letter,” he said brusquely. He had a Macedonian accent, too, but one with an Attic overlay that made Menedemos think of Sostratos. Sure enough, anyone who talked like that would be able to read.
“Here you are.” Menedemos gave him the square of papyrus. He held it out at arm’s length; he was old enough for his sight to have started lengthening. But he could make sense of it—his lips moved as he sounded out the words.
When he finished, he gave the letter back to Menedemos. “He is who he says he is,” he told the sentry. That was what Menedemos thought he said, anyhow. When he spoke to a countryman, he sounded much less like an Athenian and much more like a Macedonian.
“So he can go wherever he wants and see whatever he pleases?” The sentry sounded scandalized.
But the officer dipped his head. Macedonians might be half barbarous, but they weren’t barbarous enough to nod. “That’s right. The Rhodians aren’t friends with old One-eye. They like us better—we make them money.”
That mixed truth and scorn in almost equal measure. Menedemos wasn’t inclined to complain. Neither was the sentry, who said, “Sorry I bothered you, O best one.”
“It’s all right. If you aren’t sure what you need to do, you should always ask someone.” The officer gave Menedemos the ghost of a wave. “Hail,” he said, and walked off.
“Go on. You can do what you want,” the sentry said. “I’m just glad Philippos there didn’t break something over my head.”
Whenever you had to get someone who could give you orders to do something, you ran the risk that he might take it out on you for interrupting whatever he was already up to. Menedemos faced that problem, among others, with his father.
He ambled along as if he had not a care in the world, seeing what he could see. He didn’t seen any of Ptolemaios’ war galleys, the fours and fives and even gibber ships that were all the rage with Alexander’s jumped-up generals. He could see the sheds that housed them and kept them dry till they had to put to sea. Most of those were longer and quite a bit wider than the ones that sheltered Rhodes’ triremes. He reminded himself to ask Ptolemaios to get the Aphrodite into a shed. Then he counted the sheds, but he didn’t check to see how many actually had vessels inside them. Even with Ptolemaios’ letter, that would have looked too much like spying.
No one put freighters in shipsheds. Freighters would always be slow. If they were a little slower with their planking waterlogged, so what? Menedemos took off his hat to scratch his head when he didn’t see many tied up at the quays. Then he spied men carrying sacks and crates and jars into a shipshed. That made him pull his hat brim down lower over his eyes so he could pretend he didn’t care what was going on there.
Ptolemaios would need supplies for his fleet and for his soldiers. Grain, beans, oil, wine …. Armies fed off the countryside as much as they could, but they needed some rations to supplement what they stole. If all those things didn’t go aboard the usual freighters, where would they go? On galleys that could keep up with the rest of the fleet? If you had the rowers to power them, why not? It would make you fast, for sure.
He didn’t see any meat animals or horses. That told him the fleet wouldn’t sail right away. Cows and sheep and horses for the cavalry wouldn’t board ship till the last minute. They’d be easier to care for while still on land.
Like the staples that fed warriors, weapons didn’t need much care. Some workers carried sheaves of arrows for the archers and the larger, fatter bolts some catapults flung. Others had lumpy leather sacks: bigger catapults threw round stones about the size of a head at the works that protected poleis. If Demetrios had so quickly moved down from Karpaseia, where he’d landed, and besieged Salamis, he would have such artillery himself, and Ptolemaios had better not be behindhand.
Spears, helmets, shields, swords—an army also needed more than the ones the soldiers carried or wore. Some would get lost, some would get smashed, some would get thrown away when a man ran for his life. Centuries before, Arkhilokhos had written a lyric poem about that, telling how the Thracian who had his shield was welcome to it, and he’d get another, better, one when he found the chance.
Throwing away your armor to flee the faster was still a serious business. Back then, it had been a mark of complete cowardice and disgrace, a slave’s brand on a reputation. It had till the poet laughed at it, anyhow. Arkhilokhos helped change the way the Greek-speaking world looked at such things.
A man with a stack of round shields for hoplites in his arms walked through a door in the back of a shipshed. Those shields, like everything else going into the ships, would get stacked somewhere aboard a four or a five that wasn’t along to fight. Another man with shields followed the first, and another, and another yet. Soldiers had something to say about how the world looked at things, too.
VII
“Here we is.” Pasos’ Greek, though understandable, was far from perfect. The barge skipper pointed south. “We just about out from what Greeks call Delta. Last two big branches come together soon. After that, just … Nile … for … long, long way.” He threw his arms wide, as if to say that explaining how long the Nile was exceeded his powers.
“Memphis lies not far from the joining? And the Pyramids? And the Sphinx?” Sostratos thought he understood that, but wanted to reassure himself. Egypt wasn’t just another land. Egypt was another world.
But, to his relief, Pasos nodded. “That right. You no worry—we gets there. Maybe not fast, but we do.”
“I could swim faster than this tub crawls,” Thersandros muttered. “It makes one of our freighters look like a pentekonter.”
“It isn’t the stadion sprint at the Olympic Games,” Sostratos answered. “As long as we get there, just when doesn’t matter much.” There was more room on the barge than there had been with the Aphrodite crossing the Inner Sea, but he and the rowers had less to do. He was as bored as Thersandros, even if he tried not to let on.
Pasos mostly ignored the Hellenes when they talked among themselves. Maybe that was his notion of politeness. Or maybe his Greek wasn’t up to following conversations not aimed at him.
A town called Kerkasoros lay at the place where the Nile went from two streams to one. Sostratos didn’t realize right away that that had happened, for a low-lying island in the middle of the river fooled him into thinking it was still divided. Once the barge fought past the island, though, he understood what had happened.
He whistled softly under his breath. He’d seen rivers before, of course. But the Nile might have been the mother of all rivers. How many stadia wide was that mighty, muddy stream?
And he saw a change in the landscape. In the Delta, everything had been lush and green and growing. Even mud bricks sometimes had weeds sprouting from them. Everything alongside the Nile’s single channel was also green and lush … as far as the river’s lifegiving water could be made to flow, and not a digit farther. Beyond that, it abruptly went a sun-blasted yellow-brown.
The Egyptians called everything west of the Nile Libya, everything east of it Arabia. Except for where they lay, Sostratos couldn’t see any difference between the two sides. Desert and desolation were desert and desolation. Hellenes built poleis on the Libyan coast, a long way west of Alexandria. They sold silphium from them, a spice obtainable nowhere else in the world.
One of these days, he thought, we ought to take the Aphrodite there and load up with as much as we can carry. We’d make a fortune. That would have to wait till something more like peace came back to Rhodes, and perhaps to the whole of the Inner Sea, to the whole of the vastly extended Hellenic world, as well.
As they had on the Nile’s branches in the Delta, fishing boats also bobbed in the single channel. Most ships pushed south by the wind stayed on the right hand of the river; most of those letting the current take them north used the other half. That improved traffic without perfecting it. Everyone still had to dodge the little fishing boats, which often didn’t move at all. And crewmen on faster vessels shouted unpleasantries at slower ones while swinging wide to pass them.
Because it was so big and slow, the barge got passed a lot. And a lot of abuse rained down on Pasos and his Egyptians. After a while, the skipper came over to Sostratos and said, “Next time boat go by, maybe you and other Hellenes go to side with spears and show selves.”
Sostratos grinned at him. “I think we can do that.” He relayed the word to the rowers. They grinned, too, and dipped their heads.
Half an hour or so later, they got their chance. A river galley not much smaller than the Aphrodite glided past, using oars as well as sails to get more speed. Sostratos couldn’t understand what the crew shouted at the bargemen, but he recognized the tone. He and his comrades took their places by the rail, spears shown in fine martial array.
Then Pasos and his men started yelling back. It was in Egyptian, of course, so Sostratos followed not a word of it. But, by the way the bargemen pointed at him and his fellow Hellenes, he guessed they were telling the galley’s crew something like You’d better not mess with us! We’ve got the new overlords of the Two Lands on our side!
And the men in the river galley had to take it. They put on a burst of speed to get out of earshot of the barge as quickly as they could, but they didn’t dare answer back. Egypt had been a conquered province for most of the past two centuries. Whatever pride the people here had had in long-gone days was as dead now as one of their mummified corpses.
Sostratos wondered what would have happened if Dareios or Xerxes had led the Persians to victory over Hellas. Would the freedom-loving, free-speaking folk he knew have turned servile like this under foreign domination? He didn’t know—how could you know anything about something that didn’t happen? But he didn’t like the guesses he made.
Pasos’ smile stretched from ear to ear as he clapped Sostratos on the back. “Ha! We show them wide-arsed sons of hippopotamoi a thing or three!” He had a decent—or rather, an indecent—grasp of Greek obscenity, but what he did to the irregular verb to show was a caution.
“Glad to help.” Sostratos even mostly meant it. The rowers were laughing and smiling, too. They understood Pasos’ joke. They’d mocked merchantmen as they glided past them on the Inner Sea. Most of the time, the sailors who manned them had to take the abuse. Today, Pasos had turned the tables on his tormentors.
The Egyptian said, “Pretty quick we come to Pyramids. Just before Memphis, you know. You want I should point for you?” He jabbed an index finger toward the Nile’s western, or Libyan, bank.
“Please!” Sostratos knew he sounded eager. Nothing in Egypt could be more famous or more ancient than the Pyramids. Hellenes with all the silver and time they needed came here just to see them. Herodotos had done it. Now I will, too, Sostratos thought.
“I do, then,” Pasos said. He saw the Pyramids every time he went up and down the Nile. They were just part of the landscape to him. He took them as much for granted as Sostratos did fried squid. Sostratos didn’t know whether to pity or envy him.
For the first time in some little while, Sostratos noticed how very slowly the barge made headway against the titanic flow of the river on which it floated. An Egyptian peasant dipping water out of the Nile with a pot mounted on a pivoted pole might have been nailed in place. After a while, though, the barge did put him behind it. Sostratos laughed at himself. Having a goal just ahead made him notice the journey once more.
The sun had passed the zenith—this far south, almost literally—and was sliding down the western half of the sky when Pasos nudged him, pointed southwest, and said, “You look hard, you see them now.”
Shading his eyes with his hand and wishing again he’d bought a hat like Menedemos’, Sostratos did look hard. Sure enough, three pointed bumps sticking up from the desert could only be …. Looking at the desert and the fertile land between the Pyramids and him, Sostratos whistled softly. “By the gods, they’re huge!” he murmured. Then he laughed again. How many travelers before him would have said the same thing?
“We keep going, they look more bigger,” Pasos said.
“I’m sure they will. Memphis lies beyond them, is that right?”
“Malista.” Pasos used a Greek word and a barbarous nod.
“How far beyond?”
The Egyptian said something in his own language: a distance, presumably. Sostratos spread his hands to show he didn’t know what that distance was. Pasos thought for a moment, then offered, “Two parasangs. Little less, maybe.”
“Ah.” Sostratos dipped his head. The parasang was a Persian measure. It meant how far someone could travel in an hour. It stretched or shrank depending on territory, but was usually about thirty stadia. So the Pyramids lay only a couple of hours’ journey outside Memphis. “I’ll have to visit them while I’m here.”
“You take care. Take water or beer or wine with you,” Pasos said. “You Hellenes, you not know how to live here. Sun bake you dead, you no watch out.”
“Hellas isn’t an oven,” Sostratos said with dignity. Yes, Rhodes got hot weather as summer wore along, but not the kind of relentless heat Egypt saw. He tried to imagine how Pasos would react to snow. He’d seen it only two or three times himself, but he knew what it was. When he did his best to explain it to the Egyptian, he ran headlong into a wall of blank incomprehension.
“Water is … water,” Pasos said. “Not turn to flakes like gods got—” He brushed at his hair; Sostratos realized he meant dandruff. “You Hellenes, you tell funny stories. Or you tell lies, laugh when people believe.”
Hellenes had that reputation among many different kinds of barbarians. Sostratos briefly wondered whether that reflected on them or on his own folk. Only briefly—he needed to answer, and he did: “By the gods, O best one, I’m telling the truth here. In northern lands, snow is real. Water can freeze there, too, the way liquid copper does when it cools. Frozen water—ice, it’s called—is very cold. It’s slippery to walk on. Sometimes, you can see through it. When the weather gets warmer, it turns back into ordinary water again. It melts, we say.”
Pasos laughed at him. The Egyptian had never seen anything like that, so he didn’t believe it could possibly be real. None of Sostratos’ protests or oaths would persuade him. Neither did the way the rowers agreed with Sostratos. “You all Hellenes,” Pasos insisted. “Of course you all say same thing.”
After a while, Sostratos gave up. “Think whatever you want to think,” he growled, and turned away. It was either quit or pitch Pasos into the Nile. That would have meant an all-out brawl between Hellenes and Egyptians, and the barge crew outnumbered his men. He wasn’t even sure he could pitch the barge captain into the river. Pasos might be short, but he had a solid frame and didn’t seem like someone who shrank from trouble.
Slowly, slowly, the barge crawled past the Pyramids and the ramp or causeway that led up to them from the Nile. The closer the look Sostratos got, the more tremendous they seemed. He couldn’t see all of the famous Sphinx nearby, only the upper part. What he could see made him want to see more.
The sun was just about to set when they reached the riverside wharves at Memphis. The city was bigger than Sostratos had expected: not so big as Alexandria, but bigger than any polis in Hellas save possibly Athens. Temples of antiquity unimaginable stood not far from the Nile.
At Egyptian Thebes, farther south yet, the almost-historian Hekataios had told the priests he was sixteen generations removed from a god. They’d laughed at him and shown him the statues of 341 generations of high priest, each of purely human origin. Next to the Egyptians, what were Hellenes but a pack of noisy children?
The sun went down. Aphrodite’s wandering star blazed in the western sky. Pasos said, “We unload with day tomorrow. You all right your cargo stay aboard this night?”
“I think so. That may even work out better for us.” Sostratos did his best not to show how relieved he was. He didn’t want to take the olive oil off the barge till he knew where he could store it.
None of the rowers complained. “Don’t mind a good night’s sleep before I go back to work,” Thersandros said.
“Been sleeping aboard so much this trip, I may buy me a little fishing boat and live on her when we get back to Rhodes,” Leskhaios added.
They had beer and cheap wine on the barge. They hadn’t been aboard it so long, they felt an urgent need to go whoring. It was less comfortable than a bed ashore, but not much less. And they were used to living rough anyhow. If they hadn’t been, they never would have signed on with the Aphrodite.
Sostratos had an easier life ashore than the other Hellenes did. Money shaded you from misfortune the way a roofed colonnade shaded you from the sun. As long as you had some silver and you kept your health, life looked good.
He curled up on the planking like an Egyptian cat, closed his eyes, and soon fell asleep. Even a straw pallet would have been softer, but he didn’t worry about it. He had more room to toss and turn here than he did in the cramped confines of the akatos.
He was awakened in the night to do his turn as watchman. When it ended, he pissed into the Nile and slept again. Next thing he knew, twilight turned the eastern sky a red that soon brightened to gold. Some of the bargemen were already awake. One gave him a chunk of barley bread and a mug of beer. They had no words in common, but Sostratos let the fellow know he was glad to have breakfast.
When Pasos got up soon after, Sostratos asked him, “What god does that temple near the river serve?”
