Over the Wine-Dark Sea

11

Menedemos sat in a tavern not far from the little Harbor, drinking wine of the best sort: wine he hadn't bought. Even now, half a month after the grain fleet came into Syracuse, its sailors had trouble buying their own drinks. The polis had been hungry; now it had sitos and to spare. Menedemos wondered how long the gratitude would last. He was a little surprised it had lasted this long.

He might have been able to get his wine free even if he hadn't brought grain into Syracuse. Like a lot of wineshops, this one gave sailors and merchants cups of the local vintage if they told what news they'd heard and so drew customers into the place. His tales of the wars of Alexander's generals could well have kept him as drunk as he wanted for as long as he wanted.

He was going on about Polemaios' defection from his uncle, Antigonos, when a panting Syracusan dashed into the tavern and gasped, "They've landed! They've burned their ships!" He looked around. "Am I the first?" he asked anxiously.

"That you are," the tavernkeeper said, and handed him a large cup of neat wine as the tavern exploded in excited chatter.

"Who's landed?" Menedemos asked.

"Why, Agathokles has, of course, not far from Carthage," the Syracusan replied. Menedemos started to ask, How do you know that? It was, he realized, the kind of question likelier to come from his cousin. Before it could pass his lips, the new arrival answered it: "My uncle's cousin is a clerk on Ortygia, and he was bringing Antandros some tax records when the messenger came in."

"Ahhh," went through the tavern. Men dipped their heads, accepting the authority of this source. Menedemos wondered what Sostratos would have thought of it. Less than most people here did, he suspected.

Another question occurred to him. Again, someone else anticipated him, asking, "Burned the ships, you say?"

"That's right." The fellow with news dipped his head. "It was six days from here to Africa, a long, slow trip around the north coast of our island, made slower by bad winds. Our ships were getting close to land when they spied the Carthaginian fleet right behind them - and the Carthaginians spied them, too."

He could tell a story. Menedemos found himself leaning toward him. So did half the other people in the tavern. "What happened then?" somebody breathed.

"Well, the Carthaginians came on with a great sprint, rowing as if their hearts would burst," the Syracusan said. He held out his cup to the tavernkeeper, who filled it to the brim without a word of protest. After a sip, the fellow went on, "They got so close, their lead ships were shooting at Agathokles' rearmost just before our fleet beached itself."

"Our men must have thought their hopes were eclipsed," the taverner said. People hadn't stopped talking about the uncanny events of the day after the grain fleet's arrival.

But the man with news tossed his head. "My uncle's cousin said Antandros asked about that. The way Agathokles read the omen, he found out, was by saying it foretold ill for the enemy because it happened after our fleet sailed. He said it would have been bad if it had happened before."

Menedemos wondered what a priest of Phoibos Apollo would have had to say about that. He was sure a ready-for-aught like Agathokles wouldn't have asked a priest, but would have put forward the interpretation that served him best. And the local still hadn't answered the question. Menedemos asked it again: "What happened to Agathokles' ships?"

"Well, we outshot the Carthaginians, because we had so many soldiers aboard our ships. That, I gather, was how we beached, with the barbarians staying out of bowshot. Agathokles held an assembly once we were ashore."

"Just like Agamemnon, under the walls of Troy," someone murmured.

"He said he'd prayed to Demeter and Persephone, the goddesses who watch over Sicily, when the lookouts first spied the Carthaginians," the local went on. "He said he'd promised them the fleet as a burnt offering if they let it come ashore safely. And they had, so he burned his own flagship, and all the other captains set fire to their ships with torches. The trumpeters sounded the call to battle, the men raised a cheer, and they all prayed for more good fortune."

And they can't come back to Sicily again, or not easily, Menedemos thought. If they don't win, they all die, as slowly and horribly as the Carthaginians can make them. Burning the fleet has to remind them of that, too. Sure enough, Agathokles knows how to make his men do what he wants of them.

A man with a short gray beard asked, "How did Agathokles' messenger get here, if he burned all his ships?" That was a question the precise Sostratos might have found.

"In a captured fishing boat," the man with news replied. He had all the answers. Whether they were true or not, Menedemos couldn't have said. But they were plausible.

It soon became clear that the Syracusans were much more interested in Agathokles' doings than in those of the generals in the east. The latter might have been exciting to hear about, but didn't affect them personally. No one from out of the east had come to Sicily with conquest on his mind since the Athenians a century before. But war with Carthage was a matter of freedom or slavery, life or death. A Carthaginian army remained outside the walls. If it ever broke into Syracuse . . . Menedemos wasn't sorry he'd be sailing soon.

He grabbed a couple of olives from a red earthenware bowl on the counter in front of the tavernkeeper. The fellow didn't charge for them, and he quickly discovered why: they were perhaps the saltiest he'd ever tasted. The extra wine the taverner sold on account of them was bound to make up, and more than make up, for the few khalkoi they cost.

Fortunately, his own cup was half full. He gulped it down to water the new desert in his throat, then left the tavern for the harbor not far away. As he got back to the Aphrodite, he saw her boat making the short pull from Ortygia. The rowers' strokes were so perfectly smooth and regular, they might have been serving one of the Athenian processional galleys, not an akatos' boat.

Sostratos sat near the stern of the boat. "I've got news," he called when he saw Menedemos. "Agathokles has landed in Africa!"

That was news to most of the sailors aboard the merchant galley; they exclaimed in surprise. But Menedemos only grinned and answered, "Yes, and he burned all his ships once he did it, too."

The sailors exclaimed again, even louder this time. Sostratos blinked. "How did you know that?" he asked. "I just heard it myself."

"I was wasting my time in a tavern - or that's what you would call it," Menedemos said as his cousin and the rowers came aboard at the stern. "A fellow came across from Ortygia practically on fire with the word, and earned himself some free wine to put the fire out."

"Oh." Sostratos gave the impression of an air-filled pig's bladder that had sprung a leak. Then he snapped his fingers, plainly remembering something, and brightened. "Well, I've got some other news, too."

"Tell me, O best one," Menedemos heard. "I haven't heard it all."

"Only the best parts of it," Sostratos said unhappily. "But I managed to sell all the papyrus and ink we had left, and I got a good price for them, too."

"Did you?" Menedemos clapped him on the back, glad to give credit where it was due. "You were right about that, then."

His cousin dipped his head. "Thanks to the war with Carthage, Agathokles' chancery was almost out of papyrus altogether. They were scraping the ink off old sheets and writing on boards and potsherds, the way people did in the old days. One of the chief clerks kissed me when I told him how much we had."

"He must have been excited," Menedemos murmured. Sostratos dipped his head again. Then, a moment too late, he glared. As a youth, Menedemos had had more than his fair share of older men as admirers; he'd quite enjoyed playing the heartbreaker. Sostratos, on the other hand, had been tall and skinny and angular, all shanks and knees and elbows and pointy nose. So far as Menedemos knew, nobody'd bothered pursuing his cousin, either in Rhodes or, later, in Athens. Changing the subject looked like a good idea: "Just how much did you get?"

Sostratos told him. Menedemos whistled and clapped him on the back again. Sostratos said, "It's not so much when you set it against what we made for hauling the grain and for the last of the peacocks, but it's a lot more than we would have got in Athens. That's where everyone with papyrus and ink goes."

"Bad for prices," Menedemos agreed. "And that's one less stop we'll have to make on the way back to Rhodes."

"What's wrong with stopping in Athens?" Sostratos asked. "I like Athens fine."

"I like Athens fine, too, when we've got time for it," Menedemos said. "But we're a long way from home, and it's starting to get late in the sailing season: we're less than a month from the fall equinox. Things get murky when the days go short; you can't tell your landmarks the way you should. And there's always the chance of a storm, too. Why take the extra risk?"

"All right." Sostratos threw his hands in the air. "If it's enough to make you careful, that's plenty to convince me." Before Menedemos could reply, Sostratos added, "If there were a woman in Athens, you'd stop no matter whose wife she was."

"Not if she were yours," Menedemos said. Sostratos gave him an ironic bow. As Menedemos returned it, he wondered if he'd just told the truth.

Sostratos hadn't seen much of Syracuse during his time in the polis. He couldn't have gone up onto the wall to walk around the town, not unless he wanted an arrow in his ribs. And he couldn't have ridden out to see the countryside, as he had up at Pompaia; the next sight he would have seen was the inside of a Carthaginian slave pen.

I wonder when I'll come back to Sicily, he thought. I wonder if I'll ever come back to Sicily. He shrugged. No way to know the future.

Menedemos stood at the Aphrodite's stern, his hands on the steering-oar tillers. He dipped his head to Diokles, saying, "Set the stroke."

"Right you are, skipper." The keletustes struck the bronze square with his mallet. To emphasize the rhythm as the merchant galley left port, he raised his voice, too: "Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!"

For swank, Menedemos had every oar manned as the Aphrodite left the Little Harbor. The rowers did him proud, their oars rising and falling in smooth unison. Of course, Sostratos thought, it's a lazyman's pace, nothing like what we did when we were running from that Roman trireme - or when we turned back towards it! What an adventure that was!

He paused in bemusement and some dismay. I'll be telling the story of that trireme for the rest of my life, and I'll sound more like a hero every time I do. He didn't care for men his father's age who bored dinner parties with tales of their swashbuckling youth, but he suddenly saw how they came to be the way they were. A historian is supposed to understand causes, he thought, but then he tossed his head. This was one of which he would sooner have stayed ignorant.

As Syracuse receded behind the merchant galley, Menedemos took more than half the sailors off the oars. The ship glided up the Sicilian coast toward the mainland of Italy. Dolphins leaped. Terns splashed into the sea, some only a few cubits from the Aphrodite. One came out with a fish in its beak.

"You'll have an easy trip home," Menedemos called to him from the stern. "No more peafowl to worry about."

"I'm so disappointed they're gone," Sostratos answered.

Not only his cousin but half the sailors laughed. Aristeidas the lookout said, "The foredeck still smells like birdshit."

"You're right - it does," Sostratos agreed. "It probably will for a while, too."

"So it will," Aristeidas said darkly. "Now that you don't have to take care of peafowl any more, you can go wherever you like on the ship. Me, I'm stuck up here most of the time."

You can go wherever you like. Aristeidas had said it without irony, and Sostratos took it the same way. Then he thought about what a landlubber would make of it. The Aphrodite was only forty or forty-five cubits long, and perhaps seven cubits wide at her beamiest. From the perspective of someone used to strolling through a polis or across his fields, that didn't give a man much room. A sailor, though, had a much more cramped view of what was roomy and what wasn't.

As if to prove as much, Sostratos went back to the poop deck, which to him felt as far from the smelly foredeck as Athens was from Rhodes. Menedemos asked him, "What have we got left to trade on the way home?"

"A little wine," Sostratos answered. "Some perfume. I'd like to get rid of that, if we see the chance - taking it back to Rhodes would be a shame, when it came from there. And we still have some silk." He sighed.

Menedemos took a hand off the steering oar to poke him in the ribs. "I know what you're thinking of: that copper-haired Keltic girl you were screwing in Taras."

Sostratos' ears heated; he had indeed been thinking of Maibia, in and especially out of the Koan silk tunic she wore. "Well, what if I was?" he asked roughly.

"It's all right with me." As usual when the talk rolled around to women, Menedemos sounded disgustingly cheerful. "I've got plenty to think about myself."

"If you'd do some thinking beforehand . . ." Sostratos said.

"That takes away half the fun. More than half," he cousin answered.

"I don't see it that way," Sostratos said with a shrug.

"I know you don't." Menedemos leaned forward and spoke in a low voice: "Just exactly how much silver are we carrying? In the name of the gods, don't yell out the answer. The last thing we want to do is give the sailors ideas." In something close to a whisper, Sostratos told him. Menedemos whistled softly. "That's even more than I figured. It's almost enough for ballast."

"On a ship this size?" Sostratos made the automatic mental calculation, then tossed his head. "Don't be silly."

"Mm, I suppose not." By the look of concentration on his face, Menedemos was making the same calculation. "But I'll tell you this: it's more silver than my father expected us to bring back. And I'll rub his nose in it, too."

"Why bother?" Sostratos asked. "Uncle Philodemos will be glad to see you home safe, and he'll be glad of the profit. Isn't that enough?"

"No, by Zeus." A hot eagerness thrummed in Menedemos' voice, like a following wind in the rigging. "Ever since I started toddling around and stopped making messes on the floor, he's always gone on and on about what a great trader he is and how I don't measure up. Let's see him talk like that now."

"I didn't come out here thinking to outdo my father," Sostratos said.

"You're toikharkhos. I'm captain," Menedemos said, that hot eagerness turning to something cold and hard for a moment. But he went on, "Uncle Lysistratos doesn't go around bragging and carping all the time; I will say that. And the two of you get along better than Father and I do. Anyone who saw us would say that."

"I suppose so," Sostratos said. "We'd have a hard time getting along worse than the two of you, wouldn't we?"

"You're as comfortable together as a foot and an old sandal, and you know it," Menedemos said. "The two of you fit like that. Do you have any idea how jealous it makes me?"

"No, I didn't, not till you just mentioned it." Sostratos studied his cousin with an avid curiosity of a small boy seeing an unexpected lizard emerge from under a chunk of bark. "I'm usually the one who holds things inside, but you've kept that secret for years. Forever, really."

By Menedemos' expression, he wished he hadn't told it now. He said, "I'm not sorry to get away from Rhodes for months at a time, I'll tell you that."

"I can see as much," Sostratos said judiciously. He set a hand on Menedemos' shoulder. "We won't be back for a little while yet. Nothing happens in a hurry on the sea. Even when we were fighting that Roman trireme, we seemed to be moving as slowly as if we were in a dream."

"Not to me," Menedemos said. "It all happened very fast, as far as I was concerned. I needed to gauge just the right moment to tug at the steering oars, and it all felt like it happened in a heartbeat. That's the sweetest sound I ever heard - our hull riding up and over that polluted whoreson's oars."

"If you think I'll argue, you're mad," Sostratos said. "That sound meant we stayed free men, and what could be sweeter than that?" He pointed ahead. "There's Cape Leukopetra, with Cape Herakleion just off to the east."

"I know, my dear. I saw them quite a while ago." Now Menedemos sounded acidulous, perhaps because he'd shown more of himself to Sostratos a little while before than he'd wanted to. "I don't have to change the way the ship is heading this very instant, you know."

"So you don't," Sostratos agreed. "Proves my point - nothing happens in a hurry on the sea."

Menedemos stuck out his tongue. They both laughed. Laughter came easy when they'd made a profit, when they were sailing away from danger and not into it, and - for Sostratos, at least - when they were homeward bound.

"That should just about do it," Menedemos said as the Aphrodite eased into place alongside a quay in Kroton's harbor.

"I think so, too, skipper," Diokles said. "Oöp!" he called in a louder voice, and the rowers rested at their oars. A couple of sailors tossed lines to men on the quay, who made the merchant galley fast.

"You were here earlier this summer, weren't you?" one of the roustabouts called.

"That's right," Menedemos answered. "We went up the west coast of Italy, and then down to Syracuse with the grain fleet from Rhegion. You've heard how Agathokles landed not far from Carthage?"

"Sure have," the roustabout said. "That took balls, that did."

From the bow, Sostratos asked, "Do you know what happened when the Roman fleet attacked Pompaia? We were up that way, and almost got caught."

"It came to grief, or that's what I heard," the Krotonite said. Several sailors clapped their hands together in grim delight. The roustabout went on, "The sailors and soldiers aboard scattered to plunder, and the folk from all the towns thereabouts - not just Pompaia, but Nole and Noukeria and Akherrai, too - gathered together and drove 'em back to their ships with heavy losses." More sailors clapped. Some of them cheered. The local added, "Some people say one Roman ship got wrecked by a merchantman, but you won't get me to swallow that."

"I wouldn't either, if I were you," Menedemos said gravely. The sailors who heard him sniggered and brought their hands up to their mouths to keep from laughing out loud. The roustabout gave them curious looks, but nobody said another word, so he shrugged and started to turn away.

Before he left, Sostratos asked him, "How does the marvelous Hipparinos like his peafowl chicks?"

"You're those fellows!" The Krotonite snapped his fingers in excitement. "I thought you were those fellows, but I wasn't sure, and I didn't like to take the chance. Do you know what happened there? Do you?"

"If we did, would we be asking?" Menedemos did his best to seem the very image of sweet reason.

"That's right, how could you? You're just a pack of polluted foreigners," the Krotonite said. For Menedemos, sweet reason dissolved in anger. But before he could show it, the local went on, "Hipparinos, he has this Kastorian hunting hound - you know, brought here all the way from Sparta - he's as proud of as his son. Prouder, probably, on account of all his son wants to do is drink neat wine and screw." He paused. "What exactly was I talking about?"

"Peafowl chicks," Menedemos and Sostratos said together.

"That's right. I sure was." The roustabout snapped his fingers again. "Anyway, like I said, he has this hound named Taxis." Hipparinos, Menedemos thought, would be just the man to name a dog Order. The Krotonite continued, "And Taxis, he got his first look at these chicks and he ate one up before anybody could tell him not to or grab him to keep him from doing it. You could've heard old Hipparinos screaming from the agora all the way to the guard towers on the wall."

"I believe that," Menedemos said. "His precious hound is even more precious now - it ate up a mina and a half of silver at one gulp."

"A mina and a half? Is that all?" the local said.

"Is that all?" Sostratos echoed, as if he couldn't believe his ears.

"That's what I said, and that's what I meant," the Krotonite told him. "Hipparinos has been saying that miserable little bird cost him five minai."

Menedemos started to tell how Hipparinos had tried to cheat him on the price he'd paid for the two peafowl chicks. Just then, Sostratos had a coughing fit. Menedemos let the story go untold. For a Krotonite to disparage a rich fellow citizen was one thing. For him, a foreigner, to disparage that same man might prove something else again.

After a little more chat, the roustabout did leave. Sostratos hurried back toward the stern and climbed up onto the poop deck. "I don't think we ought to spend much time here at all," he said. "Hipparinos wasn't happy with us when we came here last. Now, thanks to that accursed dog, he'll like us even less."

"And thanks to our giving him the lie about the price he paid," Menedemos added.

"Yes, thanks to that, too," Sostratos agreed. "Besides, we did sell what we could when we were here last. I think we should push on straight to Kallipolis tomorrow morning."

"You're probably right," Menedemos said with a sigh. "The wind's out of the north, though. That means either tacking or rowing, and a two-day trip across the gulf either way."

"Things would be simpler if we could put in at Taras," Sostratos pointed out.

Menedemos glared. "Things would be simpler if you'd keep your mouth shut, too. I'm getting tired of hearing about that."

Had Sostratos pushed it any further, Menedemos would have given him all he wanted and then some. But his cousin just shrugged and said, "We both may be glad not to see each other for a while once we get back to Rhodes." Sostratos pointed north. "What do you make of those clouds?"

After studying them, Menedemos shrugged. "Maybe rain, maybe not. I don't think they look too bad. How about you?"

"They seem the same way to me, too," Sostratos answered, "but I know you've got the better weather eye."

That was true, but it was one more thing Menedemos wouldn't have admitted so casually. He tasted the wind, trying to read the secrets it held. "I think we will get rain if it stays steady. No more than a little rain, though. It's still early in the year for one of those equinoctial storms - a bit early, anyhow."

"Good," Sostratos said. "I was hoping you'd tell me something like that. Because you're so weatherwise, of course I believe you." Menedemos felt proud of that till he remembered how fond of irony his cousin was.

Sostratos woke before sunrise. The eastern sky was just going from gray to pink. Dawn didn't become spectacularly red. That eased his mind; a red, red, sunrise often warned of bad weather ahead. His gaze swung to the north. The clouds covered more of the sky than they had the day before, but not a great deal more.

From behind him, Menedemos said, "I'd like the weather better if we weren't likely to have to spend a night at sea."

Sostratos started. "I didn't know you were awake."

"Well, I am." Menedemos looked up the pier toward the dark, jumbled mass of houses and shops and temples that made up Kroton.

"Expecting Hipparinos with an army of ruffians at his back?" Sostratos asked.

"An army of ruffians and a Kastorian hound with a taste for peafowl." Menedemos' tone was light, but Sostratos didn't think he he was joking. And, sure enough, he started shaking sailors awake. "Come on, boys," he said. "The sooner we're on the open sea again, the better."

"Says who?" a sleepy man asked around a yawn.

"Says your captain, that's who," Menedemos answered.

"And your toikharkhos," Sostratos added, throwing his obolos of authority after Menedemos' drakhma.

Diokles sat up straight on the rower's bench where he'd slept. "And your keleustes," he said. Formally, his rank was lower than Sostratos'. Among the sailors, though, his word carried more weight.

Hipparinos had not made an appearance, with or without bravos, by the time the Aphrodite left Kroton. "Many good-byes to the town, and to the crows with him and his hungry hound both," Menedemos said.

The wind kept backing and shifting, coming now from the north, now from the northwest. When it blew from the northwest, the Aphrodite could sail quite handily, but whenever it swung back toward the north Menedemos had to tack, zigzagging his course with the akatos taking the wind first on one bow and then swinging about to take it on the other. Grunting sailors heaved the yard round till it ran from bow to quarter and slanted toward the breeze. It was a slow business, and a miserably inexact one when it came to setting a course.

"Here's hoping we can find Kallipolis when we get in the neighborhood," Sostratos said.

"As long as I head northeast, I'll strike the mainland somewhere," Menedemos said. "Then we can feel our way along the coast till we come to the island."

"There ought to be a way to navigate more surely," Sostratos said. "The only trouble is, I don't know what it would be."

"If you did, you'd get rich enough to make Kroisos look like a piker," Menedemos said. "Every captain in the world would buy whatever you had."

"Buy it or try to steal it." Sostratos pointed north. "Here come those clouds."

"I think they're finally done fooling around," Menedemos said unhappily. "When they cover the sun, I'll have even less idea of just where we're going - one more drawback to sailing out of sight of land."

"That storm almost sank us the last time you did it," Sostratos said. "I wonder if you offended some god without knowing it."

He didn't mean it seriously. Even so, Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic. Diokles rubbed his apotropaic ring. "Shouldn't say things like that," he muttered, just loud enough for Sostratos to hear.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, rain started pattering down. When Sostratos looked in the direction he thought to be northeast, he couldn't see anything much. All of a sudden, he was glad to be well out of sight of land. Without much in the way of visibility, he had no desire to find land where he least expected it.

Menedemos must have had the same thought. He called, "Aristeidas, go forward. You've got the best eyes of anybody aboard."

"All right, skipper, but I don't think we're anywhere close to shore," the sailor said.

"I don't, either. But I don't care to get any nasty surprises," Menedemos answered. "Besides, you can look out for fishing boats, too, and merchantmen. In this weather, anything can loom up before we know it's there."

Aristeidas dipped his head. "Right you are." He headed up toward the foredeck.

Sostratos blinked as a raindrop got him right in the eye. For a moment, he couldn't see anything. Not seeing anything gave him an idea. "Shouldn't you have a man with the lead up there, too?" he asked Menedemos.

"You're right - I should," his cousin answered, and gave the necessary orders.

The lead splashed into the sea. A few minutes later, the sailor handling it called, "No bottom at a hundred cubits."

"We're still out in the middle of the gulf," Menedemos murmured. He raised his voice: "I thank you, Nikodromos." The sailor waved to show he'd heard and hauled in the line hand over hand.

Rain kept splashing down for the rest of the day. A sail that got a little wet worked better than a dry one: the water filled the spaces in the weave so the breeze couldn't sneak through. But a sail that got more than a little wet grew too heavy to belly and easily fill with air. It hung, almost limp, from the yard, as laundry did from olive branches ashore. Menedemos called men to the oars to keep the Aphrodite moving.

"Gauging your course by the breeze?" Sostratos asked.

"It's all I've got left right now," his cousin answered. "If I keep it on my left hand, not quite straight in my face, we can't go too far wrong."

"That seems to make sense," Sostratos said. But not everything that seemed to make sense was true. He wished he hadn't thought of that.

The sea never got more than a little choppy. This wasn't a real storm, only rain - an annoyance, and a reminder the sailing season wouldn't stretch too much longer. It was indeed time to be heading home.

Dusk fell rather earlier than Sostratos had expected it to. The rain kept falling, too, making the night even more miserable and uncomfortable than it would have been otherwise. "How are we supposed to sleep in this?" Sostratos said.

"Wrap yourself in your himation, as if you were an Egyptian mummy," Menedemos said. "Wrap your face up, too. That'll keep you dry."

"Of course it will - till the whole himation soaks through," Sostratos said.

"By then you'll be asleep, and you won't notice till morning." As Menedemos so often did, he spoke like a man with all the answers.

Since Sostratos had no answers of his own, he tried his cousin's. For a little while, he thought it would work: the thick wool of the himation did keep the rain off fairly well. He was just getting really sleepy when he noticed he was also getting really wet. That woke him up again, and he took a long, long time to fall asleep. From a couple of cubits away, Menedemos' snores effortlessly pierced the soft patter of the rain. That didn't help, either.

It was still raining when Sostratos woke up the next morning. He felt half suffocated in wet wool. He undid the mantle, sat up, and knuckled his eyes, trying to convince himself this was all some horrid dream. He couldn't do it, and resigned himself to a long day full of weariness.

Menedemos was already up and moving. Seeing Sostratos stir, he smile. "Good day. Isn't this a splendid morning?"

"No." Sostratos was often inclined to be grumpy before breakfast. A bad night and wet clothes didn't help.

His one-word answer made Menedemos' smile wider. "But just think, O best one - today you can drink watered wine without pouring in any water." Sostratos' suggestion as to what Menedemos could do with and to his wine only pulled a laugh from his cousin.

Wine, watered from a jar as well as by the rain, helped warm Sostratos and resign him to being awake. Olives were olives, whether eaten in the rain or under a bright, sunny sky. But he gulped down his bread in a hurry, before it could get soggy.

"Come on, boys," Menedemos called to the crew. "We'll have to put more work into it than I expected, and that's too bad, but if we do we'll sleep warm tonight." In a soft aside to Sostratos, he added, "If we make the mainland anywhere close to Kallipolis, that is."

For most of the day, Sostratos wondered if they would know they'd made the mainland before running aground. The rain kept splashing down, as if it were the middle of winter rather than a little before the equinox. A little past noon - or so Sostratos guessed, but he was too tired to have much confidence in the hour - a fishing boat came into sight. Menedemos hailed it: "Which way to Kallipolis from where we are?"

"That way, I think," the fisherman said, and pointed. "Wouldn't take oath to anything, though - not in this. Early in the year for so much rain."

"Isn't it?" Menedemos agreed. "Thanks, friend." To Sostratos, he said, "Unless my reckoning's off even more than I think, he pointed close to due east."

"Easy enough for us to come too far north with nothing much we could use to judge our course," Sostratos said.

"I suppose so." But Menedemos still sounded discontented. He took as much pride in his ship-handling as Sostratos did in his bits of historical lore. Trust Menedemos to be the one who's proud of something from which he can actually get some use, Sostratos thought.

Towards evening, the weather finally began to clear again. "Land ho!" Aristeidas sang out. "Land dead ahead, and also land to starboard."

Sostratos saw the land, too, as did everyone else aboard the Aphrodite. The akatos lay forty or fifty stadia offshore, in no danger of running aground. To Sostratos' surprise, the beach ahead and the curve of the coast looked familiar. He needed a moment to realize why. Then, turning to Menedemos, he said, "Isn't that where we got rid of Alexidamos after he tried to steal the peafowl eggs?"

"Why, I do believe you're right," Menedemos said after a little study of his own.

"I half expected to see him bearing down on us in Taras, spear in one hand, shield in the other, blazing for revenge because we threw him off the ship," Sostratos said.

"He must have fallen foul of the Samnites before he made it to the polis," Menedemos replied. "I can't say I'm sorry, either. The only thing worse than a thief on board is a man with a sickness that spreads."

"How far are we from Kallipolis?" Sostratos asked.

"A couple of hundred stadia, maybe a little more," his cousin answered. "If I have this stretch of coastline straight in my mind, it's about halfway between Taras and Kallipolis."

"Can we make Kallipolis by nightfall?"

"I doubt it." Menedemos didn't sound happy about having to doubt it. He swung his leg in a way that meant he would have kicked at the dirt had he not been aboard ship. "I hadn't planned on spending two nights in a row at sea, but I'm not going to beach the Aphrodite on this coast."

"I should hope not." Sostratos shuddered at the thought of losing all the silver they'd worked so long and hard to gather. Every crewman within earshot dipped his head to show he didn't want to ground the ship, either.

"It's the rain's fault," Menedemos said. "We'd have gone faster and I'd have navigated better without it."

"Maybe it'll work out for the best," Sostratos said. "We'll have a little chance to dry out, so we won't look like such ragamuffins when we do come into port."

"We haven't got much left to sell," his cousin said. "It isn't worth worrying about."

"We may come back there one of these days," Sostratos said. "People will remember. They always remember scandal." He didn't need to read any history to be sure of that, and was slightly scandalized when Menedemos only shrugged. He has no sense of anything but the moment, Sostratos thought sadly. Maybe that's why he ends up in trouble over women so often. It never occurred to him to wonder what Menedemos was thinking about him just then.

They didn't make Kallipolis before nightfall, and did anchor offshore. The men grumbled a little about that. Sostratos wondered at their logic. They'd just made it very clear that they didn't care to risk going ashore, but they still didn't want to stay at sea? What did that leave? He imagined the Aphrodite floating several hundred cubits up in the air. Daidalos and Ikaros might get to the ship then, but he didn't see how anyone else would.

Menedemos' imagination was of a more practical sort: "I hadn't planned to lay over a night in Kallipolis, but I think I'd better, to give the men a chance to drink and roister."

"Good idea, skipper," Diokles said. If the oarmaster thought it a good idea, Sostratos wouldn't argue with him.

When they reached Kallipolis the next morning, it proved to lie on an island just off the Italian mainland, as Ortygia lay just off the Sicilian coast. Kallipolis, though, had never expanded off its island the way Syracuse had. It remained what so many of the colonies of Great Hellas had been in their early days: a Hellenic outpost at the edge of a land full of barbarians.

Despite its name, it didn't strike Sostratos as a particularly beautiful city. When he said as much, Menedemos laughed at him. "What would you expect them to call it? Kakopolis?" his cousin asked. "They'd enjoy trying to lure settlers to a polis with a name like that, wouldn't they? Uglytown?"

"All right, I see your point," Sostratos said. "But if you found a land full of snow and ice, you wouldn't call it a green land, would you?"

"I would if I wanted to get anybody to live there with me," Menedemos replied. "But I'm a good Rhodian. I don't even want to think about snow and ice, let alone live with 'em."

"It did snow once when I was in Athens," Sostratos said. "It was beautiful, but Zeus! it was cold." He shivered at the memory.

"We won't need to worry about that here," Menedemos said. "We have some wine, and we have some silk. Let's see if we can unload them. And" - he wagged a finger at Sostratos - "we don't need to tell the Kallipolitans what we think of their polis."

"I understand," Sostratos said. "We'll tell them the land is green."

His cousin laughed. "Exactly. That's just what we'll do."

Seen from its narrow, winding streets, Kallipolis was even less prepossessing than when viewed from the streets. Because the island wasn't very big and had been settled for centuries, the locals used every digit of space they could. Many of their buildings were two and three stories high. They leaned toward one another above the streets, making them even closer and darker and smellier than they would have been otherwise.

That was one of the first things that struck Sostratos about the place. The second didn't take much longer. "Do you notice how nobody's smiling?" he said. "Everybody has a frown on his face."

"What is there to smile about?" Menedemos returned."If you lived in a miserable little town in the middle of nowhere, how happy would you be? They probably wonder whether the barbarians will snap them up tomorrow or the day after." Since he was bound to be right, Sostratos took that no further.

They had to ask their way to the agora. On their way there, they passed several parties of mercenary soldiers: some Hellenes, others Italians in ordinary enough helmets but wearing odd, almost triangular, cuirasses that, in Sostratos' view, didn't cover nearly enough of the chest. The mercenaries looked no more cheerful than the ordinary Kallipolitans.

Menedemos was never one to leave well enough alone. Pointed to the soldiers, he said, "You see?"

And Sostratos had to admit, "I see."

The market square looked as if it had been bigger than it was. Buildings encroached on it from all sides, like weeds growing at the edge of a field. People buying and selling huddled together in the shadows the buildings cast. By the way merchants and customers kept glancing over their shoulders, they might have thought more buildings would spring up while they weren't looking.

"Fine wine from Khios! Transparent silk from Kos! Fragrant Rhodian perfume!" Menedemos' voice rang through the agora, echoing from the buildings that seemed to lean toward him from all the edges of the square. People stared, as if wondering who this loud stranger was. He certainly made more noise than half a dozen locals. "By the dog of Egypt," he murmured, "I think they're all so many wraiths here, like the spirits of the dead in the Odyssey."

"Fine wine and transparent silk will liven anyone up, if he gives them half a chance," Sostratos observed.

Menedemos shot him a quizzical look. "You can say that, when you want to hit me over the head with something whenever I go out and have a good time?"

"Yes, I say that," Sostratos answered. "I also say there's a time and a place for everything, and you haven't got the faintest notion of when and where."

"I think you're just jealous and using fancy talk to hide it," Menedemos said, and went back to crying their wares before Sostratos could do anything but let out an indignant, incoherent protest. Sostratos spent the next little while wondering whether his cousin had slandered him. He thought so, but he wasn't sure, and that worried him.

He didn't have long to worry undisturbed. In that rather subdued agora, Menedemos' brash, raucous shouts drew people far more readily than they would have, say, back at Rhodes. A tailor and a brothelkeeper almost got into a brawl over the length of silk Sostratos had brought from the Aphrodite. Only when Sostratos said, "We have enough for both of you, best ones," did they leave off glaring and snarling at each other. The brothelkeeper ended up buying some perfume, too, as Sostratos had hoped he might.

When a man in a fine chiton said, "Will you let me taste some of this fine wine of yours?" both Sostratos and Menedemos paused in embarrassment. They hadn't hauled an amphora from the merchant galley to the market square. They'd talked about selling Ariousian in Kallipolis, but they hadn't really believed they would. And now their failure was hurting their chances.

Sostratos would have brushed off a ragged Kallipolitan, but this fellow looked as if he could afford the best. "If you'd be kind enough to stay here, sir, I'll bring a jar from the ship. I won't be long."

"You should have one ready to hand," the local said. Since that was true, Sostratos could only dip his head and hurry away.

Nobody aboard the Aphrodite looked enthusiastic about putting an amphora on a carrying pole and lugging it to the agora, but Aristeidas and Teleutas did. On the way to the market square, Teleutas stuck his foot in a hole in a muddy street. He stumbled. The pole slipped from his shoulder. Only a desperate grab by Sostratos kept the amphora from smashing.

"That was fast," Aristeidas said as Sostratos helped Teleutas reassume the burden.

"That was me thinking about what Menedemos would say if we got back to the agora with a few potsherds and told our customer there he was welcome to lick them," Sostratos replied. Aristeidas and Teleutas both laughed, but he hadn't been joking.

They stabbed the pointed end of the amphora down in the mud when they got to the square. Sostratos scraped the pitch away from the stopper and got it out. They had to borrow a cup from a potter in the agora. The same thing had happened in Pompaia. Sostratos made a mental note to do something about that, at the same time wondering if he would remember it when the Aphrodite sailed away from Kallipolis. The Kallipolitan sipped the wine. Try as he would, he couldn't keep his face straight. "This was worth waiting for, I must admit," he said. "How much for the jar?"

"Sixty drakhmai," Menedemos answered, as he had up in Pompaia.

This Hellene howled louder at that than any of the Pompaians had. He and Menedemos were throwing arguments back and forth when somebody yelled, "You whoresons! You wide-arsed, turdeating bastards!" a good deal louder than Menedemos had called out the virtues of his silk and wine and perfume - loud enough to drown out every other sound in the agora, in other words.

"Uh-oh," Sostratos said - quietly, but with great sincerity. He and Menedemos had idly wondered what had happened to Alexidamos the larcenous mercenary. Now they'd found out. Sostratos, for once, could have done without the enlightenment.

"Throw me off your stinking ship, will you?" Alexidamos shouted, even louder than before. "Leave me to be barbarians' meat, will you?" He carried no spear, but drew his sword and trotted toward the men from the Aphrodite.

Sostratos wore no sword. Neither did Menedemos. Neither did the other two sailors from the akatos. Few men did wear swords in a polis. If a man wasn't safe among his fellow Hellenes, where would he be? Nowhere, went through Sostratos' mind.

"Stop him!" someone exclaimed. But nobody seemed eager to stop Alexidamos. Who would want to try, unarmed, to stop a man with a sword in his hand and murder in his eyes? And, for all these people know, he really does have some good reason to want revenge against us. There were times when Sostratos wished he weren't so good at seeing the other fellow's point of view.

"Good day," said the Kallipolitan who'd been haggling with Menedemos. His departure showed a turn of speed that wouldn't have disgraced a sprinter at Olympos or any of the other Panhellenic festivals. When Sostratos looked around to ask for help from Aristeidas and Teleutas, he didn't see the latter, either. He cursed under his breath. He trips in the street and runs from trouble. Many good-byes to him!

"Whoresons!" Alexidamos shouted again. "Abandoned catamites!"

Aristeidas looked ready to take to his heels as the furious mercenary charged across the agora. So, for that matter, did Menedemos. Sostratos' cousin was a formidable sprinter in his own right. I wish I were, Sostratos thought. But if I run, he'll catch me from behind. What man wants his death-wound in the back?

Sostratos didn't want his death-wound at all. Since running would do him no good, he stooped, plucked a stone from the mud, and flung it at Alexidamos with all his strength. Had he missed, things would have gone hard for him - something he paused to think about only later. But, by then, Alexidamos was only three or four strides away; Sostratos had nearly waited too long to do anything at all. The stone struck the mercenary right in the nose.

The wet splat made Sostratos' stomach lurch. Blood splashed as Alexidamos' nose, already kinked by a scar, flattened and smashed. Alexidamos gave a great bellow of pain. He kept coming, but his hands - including the one with the sword - went to his face.

Menedemos jumped on him. Sostratos grabbed at his right arm and twisted the blade away from him. Aristeidas added his weight to the struggle. The three of them quickly subdued the mercenary.

As Sostratos helped hold Alexidamos down, he listened to the chatter of the Kallipolitans all around. "Should we seize them?" somebody asked.

"I don't see what for," someone else said. "They were only defending themselves. He attacked them for no reason I could see." The mutter of agreement that rose relieved Sostratos in no small measure.

A third local said, "If the soldier thinks they wronged him, better he should take them to law than slice them up." That produced more mutters of agreement. The fellow added, "He must think he's an Italian or a wild Kelt, to act the way he did."

Menedemos distracted Sostratos, saying, "I didn't know you could throw so straight."

"Neither did I," Sostratos answered, which made Menedemos laugh. Sostratos went on, "I did what I had to do. Out of necessity, throwing" - aparaphrase of Homer's out of necessity, fleeing.

"I understand." By his smile, Menedemos caught the allusion as well as the truth behind it. "Grab this lovely fellow's sword, Aristeidas. We don't want him getting his hands on it again."

"We sure don't," the lookout agreed. "But he'll never be lovely again, not with his nose looking like a beet you just stepped on."

"Too bad." Sostratos and Menedemos spoke together. Menedemos added, "Where did that cowardly wretch of a Teleutas disappear to? By the gods, I ought to pitch him off the ship."

Before Sostratos could answer that, there was a commotion in a nearby street. Teleutas reappeared in the agora, at the head of a dozen sailors carrying assorted implements of mayhem. When he paused to look around and find out what had happened, the expression on his face would have done credit to a comic mask. "You didn't even need me," he said indignantly.

"Well, now that you mention it, no," Sostratos answered. "But thanks for bringing help anyway."

"I still think he just ran off," Menedemos muttered. But he did no more than mutter, for Teleutas had returned promptly, and the reinforcements he brought might have been useful.

"What do we do with Alexidamos here?" Aristeidas asked.

"One of the useful things you might do would be to pluck that dagger from the sheath on his belt," Sostratos told him. After Aristeidas had done that, Sostratos said, "Listen to me, Alexidamos."

"To the crows with you, you stinking son of a whore." Alexidamos' voice didn't sound right. He probably couldn't breathe very well through that ruined nose. "You've maimed me. May the gods curse you forever."

"This is what you get for being a thief," Sostratos replied. "I told you once, you'd better listen to me. If we let you go, will you leave us alone after this?"

A considerable silence followed, punctuated by wet snuffling noises as the mercenary struggled for air. At last, he said, "How can I say no?"

Menedemos spoke before Sostratos could: "You'd better mean it when you say yes. Otherwise, we might as well cut your throat and offer you up for fair winds, the way Agamemnon did with his daughter before he sailed off to Troy."

Considering the misfortunes that befell Agamemnon after he sacrificed Iphigeneia, that didn't strike Sostratos as the wisest threat to make. But Alexidamos was not inclined toward literary criticism. "You're more trouble than you're worth," he growled. "You've shown me that twice over now."

Menedemos looked a question at Sostratos. Sostratos was mildly surprised to find his opinion sought. He shrugged and said, "I don't think we'll get any better promise out of him. It's either let him go, kill him, or stay here and go to law against him."

"May that not come to pass!" Menedemos exclaimed. "We might be stuck forever, and we haven't got the time to waste." He relaxed his grip on the mercenary. Sostratos and Aristeidas followed his lead. Menedemos said, "All right, Alexidamos. Count yourself lucky."

Gingerly, Alexidamos felt of his nose. He hissed in pain at the slightest touch, and cursed at the blood on his fingertips. It was running down his face, too, but he couldn't see that. "Lucky?" he said. "I'm going to be ugly for the rest of my days on account of you - " Remembering he didn't have the advantage, he swallowed a couple of choice epithets.

"You are lucky," Sostratos said. "You still have the rest of your life." Even though I did my best to knock your head right off your shoulders when I threw that stone. "You were ready to rob us of ours, the same way you tried to rob us of our peafowl eggs."

Alexidamos didn't answer. He staggered away, still dripping blood. "May we never see him again," Menedemos said.

"I thought we were rid of him when we put him on the beach," Sostratos said, "and then especially when we didn't see him in Taras."

"So did I," his cousin said. "We'll be gone tomorrow. We can keep enough men here till then to make sure he doesn't try anything. If we hadn't spent two nights in a row at sea, and if this weren't the last chance before we sail back to Hellas to let the men get their share of wine and women, I'd leave port now."

"You say that?" Sostratos demanded. "You say that after risking everything on the trip to Syracuse?"

With a shrug, Menedemos replied, "We made a lot of money in Syracuse. I don't see much chance for profit here, do you?"

"Nobody could make much of a profit in Kallipolis, and that includes the Kallipolitans." Sostratos spoke with great conviction. He also spoke quietly, lest any of those Kallipolitans hear him and think he slandered their city. He intended to, but he didn't want them to know it.

A moment later, Menedemos donned a wide, artificial smile. "Hail, best one," he said to the local who'd been dickering for fine Khian when Alexidamos made his unexpected appearance. "Good to see you again."

"Have things, ah, settled down?" the Kallipolitan asked. Then he answered his own question: "Yes, I see they have. Well and good. Where were we?"

"We were right here," Menedemos replied. And we stayed here, while you ran like a rabbit with a pack of Hipparinos' Kastorian hounds baying at your heels, Sostratos thought. He exhaled noisily through his nose in lieu of sighing. Doing business with a man too often meant you couldn't tell him what you thought of him. Smoothly, Menedemos went on, "Here, why don't you have another taste of a wine Dionysos himself must have specially blessed? The genuine Ariousian of Khios doesn't come to Kallipolis every day, or every year, either."

The cup they'd borrowed had got broken in the scuffle with Alexidamos. They had to pay for it and get another from the potter. When the local tasted the sweet, golden wine for a second time, his eyes got big. Sostratos smiled to himself; he'd seen that before. The Kallipolitan had to work to keep eagerness from his voice as he said, "Now, you named some ridiculous price before the ruction started."

"Sixty drakhmai the amphora," Menedemos repeated calmly.

"Yes," the local said. "I mean, no. I thought that's what you said, and I won't pay it. I'll give you twenty, and not a drakhma more."

"Good day, sir." Menedemos politely inclined his head. "It's been pleasant talking with you."

"Are you mad?" the Kallipolitan said. "You had to open the jar to give me a sample. It won't keep - wine never does, not after you broach the amphora. How much will you get for vinegar? You'd better take what I offer, and be thankful you're getting that much."

His smug smile said he'd played this game with merchants before. He'd probably got away with it with a few of them, too. Another small-town, small-time chiseler, Sostratos thought. Aloud, he said, "Good day to you, sir, as my cousin said. And to the crows with you, too." He didn't have to waste politeness on a cheat.

The Kallipolitan's eyes widened again, this time with a different sort of astonishment. "But . . . But . . .," he floundered. "You have to sell the stuff, and - "

Sostratos had enjoyed bedding some girls less than he enjoyed laughing in the local's face. "We don't have do do a cursed thing, O marvelous one." Not for the first time, he stole Sokrates' sardonic salutation. "We just ran the Carthaginians' blockade to get grain into Syracuse. We have more silver than we know what to do with, friend. If you don't want the Ariousian - and if you don't want to pay our price for it - we'll give the jar to our sailors to drink."

"I've never had a merchant speak to me that way in all my life," the Kallipolitan said. Sostratos believed it. All he did was shrug. Menedemos matched him. The Kallipolitan spluttered wordlessly, then caught his stride. "Oh, very well. If you insist on being unreasonable, I suppose I can go to thirty drakhmai."

Normally, that would have been the start of a dicker. A dicker had started before Alexidamos interrupted things. Now, Sostratos just tossed his head. He said, "No," and not another word.

"Thirty-five, then." The local turned red. Anger or embarrassment?

Embarrassment, Sostratos judged. "My cousin told you sixty," he said. "Sixty it will be." He had, for once, the freedom of not caring whether or not he sold the wine. It felt exhilarating, as if he'd had a couple of quick nips from the amphora himself.

"You're not being reasonable," the Kallipolitan protested. "Here, now - I'll give you forty drakhmai. That's more than your precious Khian is worth."

"No," Sostratos said again. "Our price is sixty. If you want the wine, you'll pay it."

And the man from Kallipolis did pay it. He took a while to talk himself into it, and tried to get the two Rhodians to agree to forty-five, fifty, and fifty-five drakhmai first. Sostratos yawned in his face. Menedemos, who could be the most engaging of men when he wanted to, turned his back. The Kallipolitan stomped away. When he returned, a slave behind him, he threw a leather sack full of drakhmai at Sostratos almost as hard as Sostratos had thrown the stone at Alexidamos. Sostratos carefully counted the coins before dipping his head to his cousin.

As the local had the slave carry the amphora back toward his house, Sostratos sighed and said, "Thus we bid farewell to our brief layover in Kallipolis, a small polis where nothing interesting ever happens."

Menedemos stared at him, then started to laugh. "If only it were so," he said.

"Now we just have to hope Alexidamos doesn't go after any of our tavern-crawling sailors tonight," Sostratos said.

"No." His cousin tossed his head. "If that gods-detested mercenary is in any shape to go after our boys tonight after what you did to his beak, he's tougher than Talos, the man made all of bronze."

Sostratos considered that. "Well, maybe you're right."

Diokles pounded his bronze square with his mallet hard enough to make a lot of the Aphrodite's sailors wince as the merchant galley left the harbor of Kallipolis. Menedemos leaned forward toward his crapulous crew and favored them with the smile of a man who'd stayed sober. "Next stop, boys, is Hellas," he said.

He got a few answering smiles. He also got a few answering groans. Diokles said, "Some of 'em don't want to live long enough to get to Hellas."

"But they all will by this afternoon," Menedemos replied. "Hangovers don't kill you. You just wish they would."

Sostratos mounted to the poop deck. "And how shall we go back to Rhodes?" he asked. "Around Cape Tainaron again, or by the diolkos across the Isthmus of Corinth?"

"I don't know yet," Menedemos answered. "We have a good notion of the risks at Cape Tainaron. But who knows what's happened in and around Corinth while we've been out here in Great Hellas? How can we guess whether we should use the diolkos till we know who controls the polis?"

"Hmmm," Sostratos said, and then, "You've got something there, no doubt about it."

"Nice of you to admit it," Menedemos said. His cousin made a face at him. Ignoring it, he went on, "We can put in at Korkyra and hear the news there before we decide what to do."

"You're not going to sail southeast toward Zakynthos and reverse the way we came?"

"No. It's getting late in the sailing season for me to want to chance so much time on the open sea," Menedemos answered. "The cranes will be flying south for the winter pretty soon, and not many people want to do much on the water after that. How did Aristophanes put it in the Birds?"

"I don't know. How did he put it?" Sostratos said. "If you remember it, it was probably foul."

"That's not fair," Menedemos said indignantly. "Aristophanes could write lovely verses about anything at all."

"Or sometimes about nothing at all," Sostratos said.

"Not here," Menedemos said. "It goes something like this:

'Time to sow when the croaking crane migrates to Libya Which tells the shipmaster to lie idle after hanging up his steering oar.' "

"Well, all right. That isn't bad," Sostratos allowed.

"Do you think you can stand being so generous?" Menedemos said. He loved Aristophanes both for his poetry and for his bawdy wit. Sostratos, he knew, admired some of the verse but wanted nothing to do with the lewdness that went hand in hand with it.

To his surprise, his cousin answered seriously: "Being generous to Aristophanes isn't easy for me, you know. If it weren't for the way he pictured Sokrates in the Clouds, the Athenians might not have decided to make him drink hemlock."

"He's been dead for a hundred years - " Menedemos began.

"Not quite ninety," Sostratos broke in.

"Not quite ninety, then. Fine. Why are you getting so exercised about it?"

"Because he was a great and good man," Sostratos answered. "That's reason enough - more than reason enough. They aren't so common that we can afford to lose them."

"From everything I've heard, he was an interfering old busybody," Menedemos said. "Even if Aristophanes hadn't said a word about him, plenty of people still would've wanted to get rid of him."

For a moment, Sostratos looked as shocked as if he'd said Zeus did not exist - more shocked than that, even, for some bright young men these days did dare doubt the gods. But his cousin, as usual, thought before he spoke. At last, he said, "There may be some truth to that. He never did worry much about what other people thought before he opened his mouth. Platon makes that very plain."

"There you are, then," Menedemos said. "If it was his own fault, why are you blaming Aristophanes?"

"I didn't say it was all his own fault."

"Ha! Now you're backing oars. You can go one way or the other, O best one, but you can't try to go both ways at once," Menedemos said.

"I think you're trying to be as difficult as you can," Sostratos said.

"I'd sooner talk philosophy - or gossip about philosophers, which isn't quite the same thing - than think about pirates," Menedemos said. "Since I don't usually care to do that, you'd best believe the pirates worry me."

"You could have decided to make for Zakynthos instead of taking the short way across the Ionian Sea," Sostratos said.

Menedemos tossed his head. "I told you, it's too close to craneflying season. Too much chance of a storm's blowing up for me to make the long journey across the open sea. But the pirates will be out. They'll know what honest skippers are thinking, the gods-detested bastards."

For once, though, the usually cautious Sostratos was the bolder of the two of them. "I still think you're worrying too much," he said. "If a pirate sees our hull, what will he think? He'll think the same thing half the fishermen in Great Hellas - and over in the Aegean, too - have already thought: that we're pirates ourselves. We don't look anything like a round ship, after all. And he'll leave us alone."

"Here's hoping you're right." Menedemos looked back over his shoulder toward the rocks of Cape Iapygia, the southeasternmost point of Italy. Soon it would disappear from view, and the Aphrodite would be out of sight of land till Korkyra or the mainland of Hellas or Macedonia crawled up over the eastern horizon. "But dogs eat dogs. Why shouldn't pirates eat pirates?"

"You've said it yourself: we've got enough men aboard to put up a good fight," Sostratos said.

Menedemos' laugh was less cheerful than he would have liked. "Well, maybe we'll find out if I'm as smart as I think I am."

They got their chance to find out sooner than he would have liked. It wasn't Aristeidas who sang out, "Sail ho!" but a sailor who was pissing from the Aphrodite's stern. Menedemos turned to look back over his shoulder, as he had for Cape lapygia. He had to follow the sailor's pointing finger to spot the sail, which wasn't much different in color from the sky or the sea. Whoever captained that ship didn't want it seen.

"Fast," Diokles remarked as the sail got bigger and the hull came into view. It too was painted greenish blue, so as not to stand out against waves and sky. "Almost bound to be a pirate, with that turn of speed and that paint job."

"I was thinking the same thing." Menedemos raised his voice: "Take your weapons, men. We may have a fight on our hands."

The skipper of that other ship was bound to be making calculations about the Aphrodite. Yes, she was a galley, but she didn't try to disguise herself and she was on the beamy side for a rowed vessel. That made her an akatos, not a pentekonter or hemiolia - probably not a pirate ship herself, but still a vessel with a formidable crew, one not to be taken lightly.

When Menedemos got a better look at the pirate ship, he saw she wasn't quite so long and low as he'd expected. She carried two banks of oars, though the rowers' benches of the upper deck aft of the mast could be taken out in a hurry to stow the mast and yard and sail. "Hemiolia," Sostratos remarked, coming up onto the poop deck: he'd noted the same thing.

"Which would mark her for a pirate even without her paint job," Menedemos said. "Not much use for hemioliai except to steal from slow ships and run away from fast ones."

"They might make naval auxiliaries," said Sostratos, who sometimes showed himself altogether too good at looking at all sides of a question to suit Menedemos.

But the hemiolia coming up behind the Aphrodite was without a doubt, without argument even from Sostratos, a pirate. Menedemos, who couldn't conveniently take down his own mast, could and did order the sail brailed up to the yard and put a full complement on the oars. As he'd done twice before, he swung his ship toward the pirate, showing he was ready for a fight if her skipper wanted one.

That skipper didn't run, as the other two had done. But he didn't attack the merchant galley, either. Instead, he shouted across a couple of plethra of seawater: "Ahoy! You coming from Italy? What news?" His Greek held a peculiar accent, perhaps Macedonian, more likely Epeirote.

"You have news of Hellas?" Menedemos shouted back. The pirate captain nodded, which proved him an Epeirote or something of the sort - Macedonians dipped their heads like proper Hellenes. Menedemos went on, "I'll trade what what I know for what you do. I won't give it away."

"All right," the other captain called. "I tell you, Polyperkhon still has Corinth and the isthmus and Sikyon to the west, and he's made friends with the Aitolians north of the Gulf of Corinth."

That was worth knowing. Menedemos spoke of Agathokles' dash to Africa, with the Carthaginian fleet on his heels. "I don't know how long he'll be fighting there, but the war between Carthage and Syracuse won't be the same any more."

"You're right about that, trader," the pirate agreed. "I tell you, too, Polyperkhon has from Pergamon the youngster called Herakles, the son of Alexander the Great and Barsine. He says he will make the youth king of Macedonia."

"He's not really Alexander's son," Sostratos said quietly. "He's just a pretender Antigonos raised up . . . I think."

"I know that - I've heard the same stories you have," Menedemos answered. "But whoever he really is, he's plenty to make Kassandros pitch a fit in Macedonia."

"Well, yes," Sostratos said. "When you think about what Kassandros did to Alexandros and Roxane, you know he doesn't want any heirs to the Macedonian throne running around loose. They hurt his own position."

"What's Polemaios doing?" Menedemos called to the pirate.

"He's still down in the south of the Peloponnesos," the fellow answered. "If that was me, I wouldn't go anyplace Antigonos could get his hands on me. If Old One-Eye caught his nephew now, I bet he'd keep him alive for months."

"You're probably right," Menedemos said. "Speaking of Antigonos, what do you know about the war between him and Ptolemaios?"

"Not a thing," the pirate said, shrugging. "Who gives a fart what happens way over in the east?" He seemed suddenly bored with talking instead of plundering, and shouted orders to his crew. The hemiolia glided south, looking for prey easier than the Aphrodite.

"Which way will you go?" Sostratos asked.

"Over in Corinth, Polyperkhon's got trouble with Kassandros and Polemaios both," Menedemos said. "That makes Cape Tainaron a better bet, I think." Sostratos clicked his tongue between his teeth, but didn't try to tell him he was wrong.