Eurynasir

A small Jaddian freighter. Captained by DEMETRI ARELLO and co-owned by his wife JUNO.

—Their crew:

—BASSEM, a fellow Jaddian and the ship’s helmsman. A huge, broad-shouldered man with black skin and hair. Deep voice.

—SARRIC JUGO, a Tavrosi expatriate and the ship’s physician. A wax-faced mustachioed man with lank blond hair pulled back into a tail. Geometric pattern, diamonds and triangles intertangled, tatooed on his too-high forehead. Yellow teeth.

—SALTUS, a homunculus of inappropriate humor. Ash colored skin, no more than four feet tall, hairless scalp, huge hands and long arms, short legs, thick gray hair on his legs and on the backs of his hands, gray-black queue (pigtail) sprouting from the base of his skull. Improbably high voice.

—EMAR and IMANI, twins. A pair of pale women, faces streaked with grime. Speak Tavrosi.

—Their passengers:

—HADRIAN MARLOWE, a young palatine nobile running from his family and home on Delos and seeking the scholiast athenaeum at Teukros (A thirteen-year journey).

—Unknown Urban Farm Technician and His Husband (in fugue), Norman migrants headed for Siena.

Demetri had gone ahead of us, and so when we approached the low, dark lozenge of his ship where she squatted on the waves, he stumped out to greet us. He’d undone his orange-and-green robe, and the silk billowed about him. He raised a hand, waved. I acknowledged the gesture and hurried forward, ducking around two broad-chested sailors unloading their small freighter. I barely saw them, my attention entirely given over to the matte-black hull of the ship pressed against the surface of the bay.

The Jaddian ship reminded me of a catamaran, with two swollen runners making up each of her flanks, running a little to the fore and aft of her nearly forty-meter length. Between them, the body of the craft arched out of the water. An alumglass dome—like a hooded eye—peered from between those runners, and at her rear a slim conning spire rose between heavy air fins that doubled for rudders when the ship was down in water, as then. Every inch of her was dark as space, the hull a composite of adamant and high-impact ceramics with pieces of alumglass and exposed titanium here and there. Saying all this, perhaps it sounds glamorous, and if I were some backwater farm technician with barely two hurasams to rub together, perhaps it would’ve been. But to me—to the son of a landed archon—it was . . . worrying.

Hairline fractures veined the ceramic in places and were in places caulked or welded. A mural of two cupped hands peeled near the front of the craft, the fingers cupping the flowing Jaddian letters of a single word: Eurynasir.

Empire of Silence, Chpater 19: The Edge of the World

Potential Inspiration for the Ship's Name:

About 3,770 years ago, a disgruntled trader named Nanni fired off a litany of woes about a transaction gone awry, giving a piece of his mind to the allegedly unscrupulous merchant—a fellow Babylonian by the name of Ea-nāṣir.

...

Dating from 1750 B.C., the palm-sized tablet is inscribed in Akkadian, the language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia at the time.

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The letter, dictated by Nanni, slams Ea-nāṣir for promising “fine quality copper ingots,” then failing to follow through on the deal. Instead, Nanni complains, the merchant has sent low-grade copper, treated him and his messenger with contempt, and taken his money—seemingly because Nanni owes him “one (trifling) mina of silver.” (A mina was the equivalent of approximately one-fifth of an ounce.)

Sources: National Geographic, Wikipedia