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brought to sharpen my stylus is smeared with blood.

FIVE
    Our Ship
    THE EUROPA SAILED FROM SESTOS today, when the sun was already halfway down the sky. We could have gone much earlier. Our captain, Hypereides, found one thing wrong, then another, until at last the lame man who seems ill came aboard. Then there was no more such faultfinding.
    We rowed out of the harbor. It was hard work, but pleasant, too. Once we were well into Helle's Sea, we hoisted sail; with this blustering wind in the west, there is no need to row. The sailors say the eastern bank is the Great King's, and should the wind blow us too near it we will have to row again. As I began to write this, we passed three ships of the same kind as ours. They were returning to Sestos, or so it appeared, and had to row. With all their oars rising and falling, they seemed six-winged birds flying low over the wintery sea.
    Io came to speak with the black man and me. She warned me many times that this scroll will fall to bits if it becomes wet; I promised as many times to put it away in my chest as soon as I have finished writing. I asked about the man with the crutch. She said that his name is Hegesistratus, that the black man and I know him (the black man nodded to this), and that she has been nursing him. They have laid him aft beneath the storming deck, where he is out of the wind—he is asleep now. I asked what his illness is, but she would not tell me.
    The kybernetes has been going down the benches talking to the sailors. He is the oldest man aboard, older I think than the lame man or Hypereides, small and spare. Much of his hair is gone; what remains is gray. He came to our bench, smiled at Io, and said that it was good to have her on board again. She told me we once went around Redface Island on this ship, but I do not know where it lies. The kybernetes made the black man and me show him our hands. When he had felt them, he said they were not hard enough. Mine are very hard—I can see I have been doing a lot of manual work—but he said they must be harder than they are before I can row all day. We will have to row more, he said, so that we will be ready for it if ever we must row for our lives. Io told me he is an old sailor who knows more about ships and the sea than Hypereides, although Hypereides knows a great deal. Hypereides paid for this ship (because the Assembly of Thought made him); thus he is our captain. I said he seemed a clever man to me—perhaps too clever. She assured me that he is a very good man, though he knows a great deal about money.
    I should say here that the black man and I have the upper bench on the port side. It is an upper bench, Io says, so that we can sit together, and it is near the prow because the best rowers are at the stern, where all the others can see them and take the beat from them. The black man, who sits nearer to the sea, is a thranite—a "bench-man." I am a zygite— a "thwart-man." This is because the black man rows against the parodos, which is like a balcony hung from the side of the ship. I row against the thwart, or rather against a thick peg in it. When the ship is under sail, men can be stationed on the parodos to keep the ship from heeling too much; but when we row, anyone who walks along it must step over the looms of the thranites' oars.
    I should say also that the men below us are thalamites. It means "inside-men," I believe. Their oars pass through holes in the side of the ship, and there are greased-leather boots around their looms. One of the sailors was punished earlier (I do not know for what reason). The shield-men bound him to a thalamite bench with his head out the oar hole. He must have felt as if a bucket of cold seawater were being thrown in his face each time he drew breath. He looked repentant enough, and cowed enough, when they untied him.
    The black man was gone for a while. When he came back, I asked where he had been, but he would only shake his head. Now he sits staring at the waves.