Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  He'd come up twice now, and without even being asked. Would Aristagoras move at all? If he didn't, would Menedemos give him every obolos he demanded? Sostratos had the dreadful feeling his cousin would. If they bought wine, even Ariousian, at twenty drakhmai the amphora, could they sell enough of it in Italy at a high enough price to make it worthwhile? He doubted it.

  "Your expenses aren't my worry," Aristagoras said, and Sostratos' heart sank.

  "I know that, sir," Menedemos said. Suddenly, Sostratos' hopes began to rise. Whenever his cousin sounded that earnest, good things followed - good things for Menedemos, that is. This was the tone he used to sweet-talk other men's wives into bed with him. He went on, "I do so want to do business with you, but twenty seems the tiniest bit high. You'll have met my father, I expect. You know what he's like. Old-fashioned? I should say so!" He rolled his eyes. "I just don't think he could stay reasonable if he heard a number like that."

  Sostratos waited. Had he haggled like that, Aristagoras would have thrown him out onto the street on his backside. He was sure of it. With Menedemos . . . With Menedemos, the wine seller said, "Well, you've gone up a couple of drakhmai. I don't suppose the Persian Empire will come back to life if I drop one."

  They settled at sixteen drakhmai the amphora. Sostratos would have been happier at fifteen, but he hadn't been able to make Aristagoras move at all. Menedemos, now, Menedemos had Aristagoras eating out of the palm of his hand. "Have the slaves bring the jars to my ship tomorrow morning," he said.

  "I'll do that," Aristagoras said. "Meanwhile, you and your cousin are welcome to take supper with me and to spend the night here if you care to."

  "We'll do that, and thank you kindly for it," Menedemos said.

  Sostratos added, "Would you send one of your slaves by the Aphrodite now, to let our men know where we'll be in case of trouble?"

  "I suppose so, though you seem to worry about every little thing," the wine merchant said. The comment made Sostratos feel like breaking an amphora over Aristagoras' head, but he refrained.

  As Aristagoras was instructing the slave, Sostratos managed to murmur a few words to Menedemos. "I'm glad you came along when you did. I managed to get him angry at me, and we wouldn't have had a bargain."

  "Don't let it trouble you," Menedemos replied. "I almost queered the deal with Xenophanes, down on Kos. As long as things work out one way or another, who cares how?"

  More often than not, Menedemos wouldn't say any such thing. More often than not, he would grab all the credit and leave all the blame for Sostratos. He might do that yet, on this very journey. For now, maybe the thanks-offering to Poseidon had left him feeling more charitable than usual. Sostratos could think of nothing else to account for it. Whatever the reason, he was glad his cousin answered lightly.

  Supper included some splendid tuna steaks, enough to warm the heart of the most jaded opsophagos. Supper also included a very pretty serving-girl, with whom Menedemos wasted no time in coming to an arrangement. Aristagoras chuckled. "I'll make sure the two of you have separate rooms. Do you want a girl for yourself tonight, Master Sostratos?"

  "No, thank you," Sostratos said. Menedemos looked at him as if he were daft. Aristagoras shrugged. Sostratos didn't regret his choice. The wine seller probably wouldn't have another girl as good-looking as this one, and a slave ordered to go to bed with him wouldn't show much enthusiasm, while the serving-girl seemed about ready to climb up onto the couch with Menedemos and ravish him on the spot.

  That all made good sense to Sostratos till he and Menedemos went to bed. Whether from efficiency or cruelty, Aristagoras put them in adjoining rooms. The wall wasn't very thick. Sostratos got to listen to the fun Menedemos was having next door. By the noises he and the girl made, they were having lots of fun. Sostratos wrapped his chiton around his head. That did next to nothing to block the amorous racket. Eventually, he fell asleep in spite of it.

  The clear poo-poo-poo call of a hoopoe woke Menedemos somewhere around sunrise. He started to sit up, and discovered he couldn't: the serving-girl's warm, bare body was draped over his. He smiled to himself as he patted her backside. It had been quite a night.

  Her eyes came open. "Good day, Leuke," Menedemos said.

  For a moment, she looked confused. He wondered how many of Aristagoras' guests she'd slept with. Better not to wonder something like that, he thought. Leuke didn't stay confused long. "Good day," she purred, and stretched languorously.

  "One more before I have to go?" Menedemos asked. She hesitated. Menedemos gave her a silver coin, a half-drakhma. "For you either which way," he said, "whether you decide to or not."

  "Not just a sweet lover but a generous lover, too," Leuke exclaimed, and rode him as if she were a jockey. He would have had to pay a lot more than three oboloi for that at a brothel; courtesans charged more for it than any other way. After the sweaty exertions of the night before, being ridden suited him fine.

  He was whistling when he ate barley porridge and drank wine for breakfast. Sostratos wasn't whistling; he looked glum. "It's your own fault," Menedemos told him. "You could have had a good time, too."

  "Maybe another time," Sostratos said, as he usually did when Menedemos asked him why he wasn't enjoying himself now. He ate porridge and drank wine with a concentration that said he didn't want to be disturbed.

  But Menedemos said, "Don't spend all day over breakfast. I want us back at the Aphrodite before Aristagoras' slaves fetch the wine. I don't think he'd try to palm off anything but what we agreed to on us, but I don't want to find out I'm wrong the hard way, either."

  "You won't really be able to tell unless you open an amphora or two and taste what's in them," Sostratos said.

  "Don't remind me." Menedemos got down to the bottom of his bowl of porridge in a hurry. He sat there drumming his fingers till his cousin finished, too. They said their good-byes to Alyattes - Aristagoras was sleeping late, since the sun was well up - and hurried down toward the harbor.

  "Where shall we head next?" Sostratos asked as they threaded their way along Khios' narrow, winding, grimy streets.

  "West," Menedemos answered.

  His cousin paused to give him a mocking bow. "Many thanks, O best one. I never should have guessed. I expected we'd go on to Italy by sailing north."

  "I was afraid you might have," Menedemos said with a chuckle.

  "Let me ask you some different questions, then." Sostratos was at his most formal, which meant at his most irritating. "Do you plan to put in at Athens? If you do, it's a good market for our papyrus and ink; they probably do more writing there than anywhere else in the world, except maybe Alexandria."

  "I hadn't intended to, no," Menedemos said. "The more we sell in the far west, the better the prices we'll get for it. Or do you think I'm wrong?"

  "No, probably not - if we can sell the stuff," Sostratos said. "If we can't, we might think about stopping at Athens on the way back to Rhodes." That made good sense. In such matters, Sostratos usually did. But before Menedemos could do more than begin to dip his head, his cousin went on, "How do you plan on getting to the west? Will you go over the Isthmus of Corinth on the diolkos, or do you intend to sail around the Peloponnesos?"

  "That's a good question. I wish I had a good answer for it," Menedemos said unhappily. "Most times, I'd sooner have my ship dragged across the tramway from the Saronic Gulf to the Gulf of Corinth, but with Polyperkhon kicking up his heels in the Peloponnesos, who knows if some Macedonian army isn't going to come rampaging through Corinth?"

  "Of course, rounding the Peloponnesos is no bargain, either, especially not with that mercenary hiring camp that's sprung up at the end of Cape Tainaron," Sostratos said. "Crete's not very far away, either, and pirates swarm out of Crete the way bugs swarm out from under flat rocks."

  "I wish I could say you were wrong," Menedemos answered.

  "What will you do, then?" his cousin demanded.

  "Sail west," he said with a grin. Sostratos' scowl grew fiercer than ever, which only mad
e Menedemos grin more widely.

  Menedemos had wondered if Aristagoras would let Alyattes take charge of delivering the wine and collecting the money for it, but the merchant showed up in person. Menedemos decided he couldn't blame him. Aristagoras was getting more than a quarter of a talent of silver; that much money could easily tempt a slave into striking out on his own, especially with only a few stadia of water separating him from his native Lydia.

  Sostratos gave the wine merchant his money, each mina in its own leather sack. "Thank you, young fellow," Aristagoras said, smugly dipping his head as he accepted the last pound of silver. "All I can say is, it's a good thing your cousin came along when he did, or you'd be sailing without my fine Ariousian."

  "No doubt, sir," Sostratos replied, as ostentatiously polite as a Phoenician. "And, in that case, you'd be sitting in your house without our fine Rhodian drakhmai."

  "Is that a joke?" Aristagoras demanded. "Are you trying to be funny with me?"

  "Not at all," Sostratos said. If Menedemos was any judge, his cousin was trying not to kill the wine seller. "All I'm trying to do is tell the truth."

  "You'll never make a trader that way," Aristagoras said. "Hail." He turned his back and walked down the wharf and into Khios. Menedemos could hear the silver clinking in the sacks almost until the wine merchant reached solid ground.

  "May Athana turn him into a spider, as she did with Arakhne," Sostratos ground out. "She'd have an easier time of it with Aristagoras, because he's already halfway there." He was quivering with fury; Menedemos didn't think he'd ever seen his cousin so angry. He'd even let his dialect slip, calling the goddess Athana in broad Doric rather than speaking in the half-Attic style he usually used.

  "Easy, there," Menedemos said, and reached up to put a hand on Sostratos' shoulder. Sostratos shook him off. Menedemos' cousin was bigger than he, but Menedemos could usually count on his strength and grace to give him an edge. Not this time. In Sostratos' fury, he might lash out wildly at the least little thing, and might not care about consequences till much too late. "Easy there," Menedemos repeated, as if gentling a spooked horse. "If you let him get under your skin, he's won."

  In a deadly voice, Sostratos said, "I shall bind Aristagoras and his possessions and his thoughts. May he become hateful to his friends. I bind him under empty Tartaros in cruel bonds, and with the aide of Hekate under the earth and the Furies who drive men mad. So may it be."

  Menedemos stared at his cousin as if he'd never seen him before. Calm, rational, mild-mannered Sostratos, ripping loose with a curse that would have chilled a Thessalian witch? All the sailors were staring at him, too. Several of the men closest to him edged away. They'd thought Sostratos mild-mannered, too, mild-mannered and ineffectual. But if he could call a curse like that down on a merchant's head, who was to say he couldn't also call its like down on one of them?

  Rather nervously, Diokles said, "That was quite . . . something." He fingered his ring.

  Sostratos blinked. The flush of fury faded from his cheeks. He looked like a man whose fierce fever had just broken. And when he laughed, he sounded like himself, not the savage stranger who seemed to have seized him for a moment. "It was, wasn't it?" he said.

  "Are you . . . all right now?" Menedemos asked, and heard the caution in his own voice.

  Sostratos considered that with his usual gravity. At last, he tossed his head. "All right? No. I won't be all right till Khios goes down under the horizon - and if it went down under the waves, I wouldn't shed a tear. But I'm . . . not mad any more, I don't think." He plucked at his beard, the picture of bemusement. "That was very strange. If he'd stayed here even another moment, I would have killed him."

  "I noticed," Menedemos said dryly.

  "I have to think about that," Sostratos said.

  Diokles nudged Menedemos. Lost in thought, Sostratos didn't notice. The oarmaster said, "What we have to do is get out of here, skipper. I don't think anybody but us heard him, but I could be wrong."

  "That's . . . probably not the worst idea I ever heard," Menedemos agreed. He raised his voice: "Bring in the lines. Bring in the gangplank. Man the oars. We've got what we came for, and we don't need to hang around any more."

  None of the sailors argued with him. By the way they leaped to obey, they might have been thinking along with Diokles and wanted to get out of Khios while they still had the chance. The Aphrodite left the harbor in a hurry, almost as if several of Antigonos' war galleys were in hot pursuit. But the war galleys stayed snug and dry in their sheds, as they usually did when not on patrol.

  Once out in the channel between Khios and the mainland, Menedemos swung the akatos south. "Lower the sail," he said. Again, the sailors hurried to follow his order. This time, escape wasn't on their minds. They'd rowed every digit of the way from Knidos up to Khios. Now the wind would do the work for them. The northerly breeze filled the sail. Running before it, the Aphrodite scudded over the waves. Her motion was different, smoother, now that she no longer fought them.

  But that motion wasn't quite what it might have been. "Sostratos!" Menedemos called.

  His cousin was making sure one of the peahens didn't do anything more than usually birdbrained. Not taking his eyes off the peafowl for a moment, he answered, "Yes? What is it?"

  "Get the bird back in its cage," Menedemos said. "Then I'm going to ask you to shift those amphorai we got from Aristagoras farther toward the stern. I don't like her trim - she's down by the bow just a bit." He held his thumb and forefinger together to show he didn't mean much.

  "Seems all right to me," Sostratos said, but then, before Menedemos could get angry, he went on, "You're the skipper, so it will be however it suits you." He chivvied the peahen forward and actually succeeded in chasing it into its cage without having to net it first.

  That done, he told off several sailors to move the heavy jars of wine back toward the poop deck. He had plenty from whom to choose; with the sail sweeping the Aphrodite along, the oars went unmanned. Even so, the sailors grumbled. "Aristagoras had slaves lugging these miserable jars," one of them said, "and now we've got to do it."

  "If you want to bring your slave along, Leontiskos, he can fetch and carry for you," Menedemos said sweetly.

  "If I had one, I would bring him," Leontiskos said. But, seeing that his comrades were laughing at him, he settled down and helped do what needed doing.

  "That's much better," Menedemos said when the work was finished. "My thanks to you all." It wasn't much better, but he could feel the difference; the Aphrodite responded to the sail and to the steering oars more readily than she had before.

  Sostratos ascended to the poop deck and asked, "Now will you tell me what you plan to do?"

  Menedemos considered. "I'll make you a bargain," he said at last. "I will tell you - if you answer a question of mine first."

  "Go ahead," Sostratos said. Menedemos noticed that he hadn't promised to answer - he wanted to hear the question first.

  Well, if he won't give, he won't get, Menedemos thought. Picking his words with care, he said, "Why did you let Aristagoras make you so angry?"

  His cousin's face closed like a slamming door. "Why?" Sostratos echoed. "Isn't that obvious?" His voice showed nothing, either.

  "If it were, I wouldn't ask," Menedemos told him.

  "No?" Sostratos rolled his eyes, as if to call Menedemos an idiot without saying a word. Remembering how frayed his cousin's temper was, Menedemos fought to hold on to his own. When he didn't rise to the bait, Sostratos clicked his tongue between his teeth and said, "All right, I'll go through it like a mother teaching her little boy to count on his fingers."

  There was another slap, another one Menedemos pretended not to notice. All he said was, "Thank you."

  Sostratos stared out into the Aegean, as if that were easier than looking at Menedemos. In a voice Menedemos could barely hear, his cousin said, "That polluted whoremonger told me I'd never make a trader. He told me you were the only reason we made the bargain. He told me I told the
truth too much, if you can believe the hubris in that."

  "And he was trying to make you angry, and you let him," Menedemos said. "You still haven't told me why."

  "Are you deaf? Are you blind?" Sostratos blazed. "Why? Because I was afraid he was right, that's why."

  "Oh," Menedemos said. "Listen to me, O cousin of mine: if you let somebody like that get your goat, you're the fool." But Sostratos still stood there looking out to sea, his back as stiff as if he'd been cast from bronze. Menedemos knew he'd spoken the truth, but it wasn't the kind of truth his cousin needed to hear. He tried again: "It's like I told you after we finished the dicker: yes, I was the one who jollied Aristagoras into a deal, but you got Xenophanes moving when he turned stubborn on me. Sometimes one man's way works, sometimes another's."

  That was better. Menedemos saw as much at once. Sostratos eased into a more nearly human posture. He actually looked back toward Menedemos as he said, "I suppose so."

  "Of course!" Menedemos said heartily - but not too heartily, lest Sostratos see that he was jollying him and get angry again. Someone like Aristagoras was easy to manipulate, because he took flattery as no less than his due. Sostratos didn't. He examined everything to see how it worked, to see where the truth lay. And so, still choosing his words one by one, Menedemos went on, "You'd better believe it - and you'd better come out of your shell - because I'm going to need you every stop we make between here and Italy."

  "Out of my shell, eh?" Sostratos hunched up his shoulders and forced his mouth into a tight, narrow line and otherwise did such an excellent imitation of a pond turtle that Menedemos' laughter came altogether unforced. His cousin said, "Now you have to keep your side of the bargain, too."

  "Who, me?" Menedemos said. "What bargain?" He saw he'd almost been a better actor than he'd intended; his cousin looked ready to fling him over the rail. He pointed to Sostratos. "Before I answer, tell me what you would do if you were me."