The wind filled the ship's lone sail, driving it forward across the surface of the impossibly

blue a GNC.

Home was in sight now, a shapeless blur on the horizon, barely visible through the shimmering

sunlight reflecting off the water.

Of course, half a dozen on each side, dipped down and splashed, rising and falling, propelling

the craft onward.

Slowly at first, then faster, the smudged outline of Crete began to resolve into something

more solid.

The sailors straining at the ores and hauling on ropes could make out the hills and ridges

rising up out of the sea.

Then the limestone cliffs sheltering out of the way coves and larger harbors.

The men on the ship knew every beach and inland, every rocky headland, every accessible spring

where they might stop for water after this last leg of their long journey home.

They had spent months at sea.

From Crete, they traveled northeast through the Dodecanese Islands to the coast of Anatolia,

then hopped from inland to inland and harbor to harbor as they passed Cyprus and the Levant

before finally arriving at the muddy, reed-filled delta where the Nile used into the sea.

That was their destination, or at least one of them, where they had acquired the cargo

of hippopotamus ivory, stone funerary vases, and magical amulets that would bring them

in their patron great wealth and prestige.

There were other things, too.

Gold and silver jewelry acquired along the coast of Syria.

...