Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  "Wait." That wasn't Xenophanes - it was Pixodaros. He put his head together with his master. Sostratos stayed where he was. Menedemos started to get closer to try to hear what they were saying, but checked himself at Sostratos' small gesture.

  "It's robbery, that's what it is!" Xenophanes spoke loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. Pixodaros didn't. The slave - the slave who might be a master himself one day - kept his voice low, but he kept talking, too. At last, Xenophanes threw his hands in the air and dipped his head to Sostratos and Menedemos. "All right," he said grudgingly. "A bargain. The Karian is right - we do need the dye. A hundred jars, for the bolts of silk you proposed last night."

  Slaves carried the silk to the Aphrodite and took the dye back to Xenophanes' shop. Watching them go with the last of the jars, Menedemos said, "Gods be praised, our fathers don't have to worry about passing on what they've spent a lifetime building up to a barbarian slave."

  "And here's hoping we never have to worry about it ourselves," Sostratos said, at which his cousin gave him a very peculiar look.

  Menedemos decided not to stop in Halikarnassos, even though it lay close by Kos. For one thing, he wanted to press north to Khios, to get some of the island's famous wine to take west. And, for another, he'd left an outraged husband behind on his last visit to the former capital of Karia, and he didn't care to appear there before things had more of a chance to settle down.

  Instead, traveling under oars into the breeze, the Aphrodite went up the channel between the mainland and the island of Kalymnos, and beached itself for the night on Leros, the next island farther north. Sostratos quoted a fragment of verse:

  t" 'The Lerians are wicked - not just one, but every one

  Except Proklees - and Proklees is a Lerian, too.' "t

  "Who said that?" Menedemos asked.

  "Phokylides," his cousin answered. "Is it true?"

  "I hope not," Menedemos told him. "Leros and Kalymnos are supposed to be the Kalydian isles Homer speaks of in the Iliad."

  "If they are, they've changed hands since," Sostratos said, "for the Lerians nowadays are Ionians, colonists from Miletos on the Asian mainland."

  The peacock started screeching. Menedemos winced. "You don't know how sick I am of that polluted bird," he said.

  "Oh, I think I may," Sostratos replied. "I may even be sicker of it than you are, because you get to stay back at the steering oars most of the day, while I have to play peacockherd."

  Before Menedemos could point out that his staying at the steering oars did have a certain importance to the journey, someone hailed them from the brush beyond the beach. " 'Ere, what's making that 'orrible noise?"

  "Ionians, you see," Sostratos said smugly. "No rough breathings."

  He didn't say it very loud. In similarly soft tones, Menedemos answered, "Oh, shut up." He raised his voice and called, "Come and see for yourself," to the stranger.

  "You'll not seize me for a slave and 'aul me off to foreign parts?" the Lerian asked anxiously.

  "No, by the gods," Menedemos promised. "We're traders from Rhodes, not pirates." In another soft aside to Sostratos, he added, "Some withered old herdsman wouldn't be worth our while grabbing, anyhow."

  "True enough," Sostratos said. "And it wouldn't be sporting, not after you've promised to leave him alone."

  Menedemos cared little for what was sporting and what wasn't. But the rustic who emerged from the scrubby brush was middle-aged and scrawny. He wore only a goatskin tunic, hairy side out. That by itself made Menedemos' lip curl; country bumpkins were the only ones who preferred leather to cloth. And, when the Lerian got closer, Menedemos' nostrils curled, too: the fellow hadn't bathed in a long time, if ever.

  "All right," he said. " 'Ere I am. What was that screeching like it was being turned into a eunuch?"

  "A peacock," Menedemos answered. "For a khalkos, you can go aboard and see it for yourself." He didn't think he would be able to get two bronze coins out of the local; even one might be pushing it.

  As things were, the fellow in goatskins made no move to produce a khalkos. He just stared at Menedemos. "A what?" he said. "You're 'aving me on. You think because I live on a little no-account island you can tell me anything and I'll swallow it. Can't fool me, though. I know there's no such beasts, not for true. Next thing is, you'll be telling me you've got 'Ades' three-'eaded dog Kerberos on your ship, or else a tree nymph out of 'er tree. Well, you must think I'm out of mine, and I'm 'ere to tell you I ain't." He stomped off, his nose in the air.

  "No, you can't fool him," Sostratos said gravely. As if to prove the Lerian couldn't be fooled, the peacock let out another screech.

  "Sure can't," Menedemos agreed. "He knows what's what, and he's not about to let anybody tell him anything different."

  "He would have voted to make Sokrates drink the hemlock," Sostratos said.

  "How does that follow?" Menedemos asked.

  "You said it yourself," his cousin answered. "He already knows everything he wants to know. That means anyone who tries to tell him anything else must be wrong - and must be dangerous, too, for wanting to tell him wrong things."

  "I suppose so," Menedemos said with a shrug. "Sounds like philosophy to me, though."

  "Maybe you don't want to know anything more, either," Sostratos said, which left Menedemos feeling obscurely punctured.

  When the sun rose the next morning, he shouted his men awake. "Let's get the Aphrodite back into the sea," he called. "If we push hard, we make Samos tonight. Wouldn't you sooner do that than sleep on the sand again?"

  "After that Koan inn, I think I'd just as soon stay on the beach," Sostratos said. "Fewer bugs."

  "Don't think about bugs," Menedemos said. "Think about wineshops. Think about pretty girls." He lowered his voice. "Think about making the men want to work hard, not about giving them reasons to take it easy."

  "Oh." Sostratos had the grace to sound abashed. "I'm sorry." He made a splendid toikharkhos. He always knew where everything was and what everything was worth. He'd done well in the dicker with Xenophanes. When the old coot got mulish, he'd picked the right time to get mulish in return. But ask him to be a man among men, to understand how an ordinary fellow thought . . . Menedemos tossed his head. His cousin didn't have it in him, any more than a team of donkeys had it in them to win the chariot race at Olympos.

  With men in the boat pulling and men on land pushing, the Aphrodite went back into the Aegean more readily than she had after beaching on Syme. Menedemos steered the akatos north and a little east, toward Samos. He wished the wind would swing round and come out of the south so he could lower the sail, but it didn't. Through most of the sailing season, winds in the Aegean would stay boreal.

  "Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!" Diokles called, amplifying the stroke he gave with mallet and bronze. Menedemos had ten men on the oars on each side of the galley. He planned on shifting rowers when the sun swung past noon, and on putting the whole crew on the oars if he was close to making Samos in the late afternoon. If not . . .

  Sostratos asked, "What will you do if we come up short?"

  "We have choices," Menedemos replied. "We could head for Priene, on the mainland. Or we could beach ourselves again. Or I might spend a night at sea, just to remind the men there will be times when they need to work hard."

  "You didn't want to do that before," Sostratos remarked.

  Patiently, Menedemos explained, "Before, it would have just annoyed them. If I can turn it into a lesson, though, that would be worthwhile."

  "Ah," his cousin said, and stepped over to the rail: not to ease himself but to think about what Menedemos had told him. Sostratos was anything but stupid; Menedemos knew that. But he had a lot less feel for what made people work than Menedemos did. Once things were set out before him, though, as if at the highfalutin Lykeion at Athens, he could grasp them and figure out how to use them.

  After a bit, Menedemos interrupted his musing, saying, "Why don't you give the peafowl some exercise?"

  "Oh." So
stratos blinked his way out of contemplation and back to the real world. "I'll do that. I'm sorry. I forgot."

  "The ship won't sink," Menedemos said as his cousin headed for the bow. And you'll be too busy to do any philosophizing for a while.

  Except when Sostratos' antics were funny or his curses got frantic, Menedemos put him out of his mind for a while. He took in the Aphrodite's motion through the soles of his feet and through the steering-oar tillers in the palms of his hands. It was almost as if he were peering out through the eyes painted at the merchant galley's bow, so much did he feel himself a part of the ship.

  More ships were on the sea than had been true even when the Aphrodite set out from Rhodes a few days before. Fishing boats bobbed in the light chop. Some were hardly bigger than the akatos' boat. Others, with many more men dangling lines over the side or trailing nets behind them, were almost half the size of the Aphrodite herself. Menedemos saw most of them at a rapidly increasing distance, as he had the day before. The merchant galley really was beamier and slower than any proper pirate ship, but few skippers conning fishing boats cared to wait around till such details grew obvious.

  Larger merchantmen - merchantmen big enough to dwarf the akatos - also spread their sails and scudded away, sometimes fast enough to kick up a creamy white wake at the bow. Their captains commanded bigger ships than Menedemos did, but he had more men aboard his. Like the men in charge of the more numerous fishing boats, they weren't inclined to take chances.

  And then, not long before midday, Menedemos felt like scurrying aside himself when he spotted a five majestically making its way south under sails and oars. Instead of Ptolemaios' eagle, this war galley bore the Macedonian royal sunburst on foresail and mainsail both. "Ptolemaios and Antigonos are liable to start going nose to nose here along with their squabbles in Kilikia," Menedemos said.

  "I wouldn't be surprised," Diokles answered. "And what can a free polis like Rhodes do if they start?"

  "Duck," Menedemos said, which startled a laugh out of the keleustes.

  Unlike the Eutykhes, Antigonos' five didn't change course to look over the Aphrodite. Menedemos watched the big ship glide over the waves in the direction of Kos with nothing but relief. Ptolemaios' crew hadn't turned robber. Maybe Antigonos' wouldn't have, either. Maybe. Menedemos was just as well pleased not to have to find out.

  Little by little, the mountains of Samos and of Ikaria slightly to the southwest rose up out of the sea. Those of Samos, especially Mount Kerkis in the western part of the island, were taller than their Ikarian neighbors. Menedemos had noticed that every time he approached Samos - Ikaria, inhabited mostly by herdsmen, was hardly worth visiting - but hadn't wondered about it till now.

  Diokles just gave him a blank look when he mentioned it. "Why, skipper?" the oarmaster said. "Because that's how the gods made 'em, that's why."

  He might well have been right. Right or not, though, the answer wasn't interesting. Menedemos waited till Sostratos came up onto the poop deck and asked the question again. He might joke about philosophy, but it did sometimes lead to lively conversation.

  "They are, aren't they?" Sostratos said, looking from the peaks of Samos over to those of Ikaria and back again. Then he did something Menedemos hadn't done: he looked to the Asian mainland east of Samos. "There's Mount Latmos, back of Miletos, and I'd say it's taller than anything on Samos."

  "I . . . think you're right," Menedemos said; Mount Latmos was also farther away, which made its height hard to judge. "Even if you are, though, so what?"

  "I don't know for certain, but it looks to me as if the islands carry the mountains of the mainland out into the sea," his cousin answered. "If that's so, it would stand to reason that the peaks would get lower the farther out into the sea the islands went. After a while, no more peaks - and no more islands, either."

  Menedemos considered, dipped his head, and sent Sostratos an admiring glance. "That would make sense, wouldn't it?"

  "It seems to me that it would," Sostratos answered. "I don't know whether it's true, mind you - that isn't the same as being logical."

  "Close enough for me," Menedemos said. His cousin raised an eyebrow, but didn't rise to the bait.

  Samos rose ever higher out of the sea, while the sun sank ever closer to the water. "Looks to me like we'll make it, skipper," Diokles said.

  "We will if the boys put their backs into it," Menedemos replied. Actually, he was pretty sure the keleustes was right, but he wanted to get the rowers working as a team. "Call everyone to the oars and give them a sprint, why don't you? Let's pretend we've got a hemiolia full of Tyrrhenians on our trail."

  Diokles stroked the ring with the image of Herakles Alexikakos on it to turn aside the evil omen. "That could happen, you know, even here in the Aegean. Those polluted whoresons don't stay in the Adriatic any more. They're like cockroaches or mice - they're all over the stinking place."

  Like any merchant sailor, Menedemos knew that entirely too well. He dipped his head, but said, "They've got more teeth than mice, worse luck. Come on - get the men to the oars and up the stroke. We'll see what kind of crew we've got."

  "Right you are." The oarmaster shouted the whole crew to their benches and kept right on shouting once they were in their places: "We're going to push it to get to port before sundown - and so we know what we can do if pirates come after us. Give it everything you've got, boys. Rhyppapai! Rhyppai!"

  Mallet met bronze in an ever-quicker rhythm. Diokles hit the bronze harder, too, so each clang seemed more urgent. The rowers didn't spare themselves. Panting, their bodies glistening with oil and sweat, their muscular arms working as if belonging to Hephaistos' automata from the Iliad, they worked like men possessed.

  And the Aphrodite fairly seemed to leap ahead. She arrowed through the deep-blue water; a creamy wake streamed from her bow. After a very short time, Menedemos grew sure they would make Samos.

  Diokles held the oarsmen to the sprint as long as he could, and eased off as slowly as he could. "Not too bad, captain," he said. "No, not too bad at all. And the rowing's smooth as that silk you bought. We knew we had some good men here, and this proves it."

  "You're right," Menedemos answered. "I wouldn't quarrel with a single word you said. But tell me, would we have got away from a pirate ship?"

  "Well . . ." The keleustes looked unhappy. "We'd've needed some luck, wouldn't we? They did get her up as fast as she'll go."

  "I know they did," Menedemos said. "The trouble is, she won't quite go fast enough." The Aphrodite carried cargo, not just rowers who doubled as fighting men. She was beamier than a hemiolia or a pentekonter, too, which meant there was more of her to resist the sea than held true for their lean, deadly shapes. And she rode deeper in the water, because of her cargo and because her timbers were more waterlogged and heavier than those of pampered pirate ships, which dried out on the beach every night. Because of all that, odds were a ship full of pirates could overhaul them from behind.

  "We're all right if we've got a friendly port we can run for," Diokles said.

  "Of course we are. But if we don't, we're going to have to fight." Menedemos drummed his fingers on the steering-oar tiller. "I'd sooner do it ship against ship, not man against man. They'll have bigger crews than we do."

  "Pirate crews mostly aren't disciplined," the keleustes observed. "They don't want to fight unless they have to. They're out to rob and kidnap, either for ransom or for slaves."

  "We've got a lot of men who've put in time aboard war galleys," Menedemos said. "Once we sail west from Khios - maybe even sooner - we will work hard."

  "Good," Diokles replied.

  Though the sun was not far from setting when the Aphrodite glided into Samos' harbor, Menedemos had enough light to reach the quays and tie up without any trouble. A temple dedicated to Hera lay to the left, where the Imbrasos River ran down into the sea from the mountains in the island's interior. To the right was a shrine for Poseidon that looked across a seven-stadia strait to the mainland.

&n
bsp; As longshoremen made the akatos fast to the wharf, the rowers rested at their oars, still worn with the effort they'd put forth in the sprint. One of them said the worst thing he could think of: "I'm liable to be too tired to want to go into town and screw."

  "Well, if you are, I hear there are girls up in Khios, too," Menedemos said.

  "Likely there are," the sailor agreed, "but I hate to waste a chance." Since Menedemos hated to waste a chance, too, he just laughed and dipped his head.

  As kos lay under Ptolemaios' thumb, so Samos belonged to Antigonos. Sostratos wasn't surprised when a couple of officers in gleaming armor tramped up to the quay to inquire about the Aphrodite and where she'd been before coming to Samos. He was surprised when they started asking their questions: he could hardly follow a word they said.

  "What is that gibberish?" Menedemos asked out of the side of his mouth.

  "Macedonian dialect, thick enough to slice," Sostratos replied, also in a whisper. He raised his voice: "Please speak slowly, O best ones. I will gladly answer all I can understand." That might have been a lie, but the Macedonians didn't have to know it.

  "Who . . . art tha?" one of them asked, his brow furrowed in concentration, his accent both rustic and archaic. Homer might have spoken like that, had he been an ignorant peasant and not a poet, Sostratos thought. The Macedonian went on, "Whence . . . art tha from?"

  "This is the Aphrodite, owned by Philodemos and Lysistratos of Rhodes," Sostratos said. The officer dipped his head; he could follow good Greek even if he couldn't speak it himself. Sostratos continued, "We're for Khios, and we've stopped at Syme, at Knidos, and at Kos."

  "Did you have to tell him that?" Menedemos murmured.

  "I think so," Sostratos said. "Someone else may come in who saw us in port or rowing up from the island."