Owls to Athens

by Harry Turtledove

  He’d thought that safe enough. No matter what he’d thought, he proved wrong. Without warning, Menedemos’ face turned into a slammed door. Sostratos’ cousin suddenly started talking in monosyllables—when he talked at all. For most of the next two or three hours, he just kept quiet. Sostratos didn’t think Menedemos was angry at him again, but Menedemos was plainly angry about something.

  Partway through that unnerving silence, Sostratos asked, “What did I say that was wrong? Tell me what it is, and I’ll apologize for it.”

  “It isn’t anything,” Menedemos said tightly. “It isn’t anything at all.”

  He wasn’t telling the truth. He didn’t even come close to telling the truth. That couldn’t have been more obvious. Just as obvious, though, was that he didn’t want Sostratos poking and prodding at whatever he hid. Most of the time, Sostratos would have kept on poking and prodding anyhow. Being who and what he was, he might not even have noticed that Menedemos was holding something back. After the quarrel with his cousin, though, he found himself more alert to Menedemos’ moods, and pushed it no further.

  He did send an inquiring glance Diokles’ way. Maybe the oarmaster had some notion of what was troubling Menedemos. But Diokles, after making sure Menedemos wasn’t looking at him, only shrugged a tiny shrug. Maybe he knew and couldn’t say with Menedemos listening. More likely, Sostratos judged, he wasn’t sure what troubled him, either.

  Little by little, as Menedemos realized Sostratos wasn’t going to pry any more, he came out of the shell into which he’d retreated. He smiled. He laughed. He cracked jokes. But he gave no hint of why he’d gone into the shell in the first place.

  Paros and Naxos, which lay side by side, were the two largest and wealthiest islands in the southern Kyklades. They were both much better watered than the barren, rocky islands farther west in the chain. Vineyards, olive groves, and fields of wheat and barley—fallow at this season—flourished on them. And they both enjoyed great mineral wealth, too. Parian marble was famous all around the Inner Sea. The stone of Naxos had a smaller reputation, but it was also quarried on the western slopes of the mountains that jutted up at the heart of the island.

  Menedemos brought the in at the polis of Naxos, on the northwestern coast. The crew moored the merchant galley next to a round ship that was taking on blocks of marble bigger and heavier than a man could carry. A wooden crane was carefully swaying them aboard the ship. Menedemos watched in fascination; if the fellow in charge of the crane made a mistake, or if a rope broke, one of those blocks would tear right through the ship’s bottom. It would end up on the floor of the harbor and the round ship would end up sunk.

  “Easy! Easy!” the boss called to the workers—probably slaves— straining at the capstan. “Lower away! A little more ... A little more . . . Hold on! Now once more, a quarter of a turn . . . There!”

  The block went down into the round ship’s hold. Sailors down below there must have freed it from the securing lines, for one of them called up something to a man on deck, who waved to the crane operator. At his command, the crane swung back to another block waiting on the quay. Its crew made the block fast. Before going any further, the boss carefully checked the rope that would lift the chunks of marble. That block could wreck the quay if it fell, too, or smash a man to a red rag.

  Only after the last block had swung into the hold did Menedemos call, “Euge!” to the man in charge of the crane.

  “Thanks, friend,” the fellow replied. His shoulders sagged for a moment as he allowed himself a sigh of relief. Then, straightening, he went on, “And thanks even more for not bothering me when I was busy there.”

  “You’re welcome,” Menedemos said. “I could see you needed to pay attention to what you were doing.”

  “Some people don’t care. By the dog, a lot of the whipworthy rascals don’t care.” Anger blazed in the boss’ voice. “They’ve seen you, and that matters to them, so of course the thick-heads think it must matter to you, too. And if something goes wrong and you wreck a ship or crush a man, what do they do? They point and they gape and they laugh, that’s what. To Tartaros with all of them!” He spat on the quay.

  More fire to him than I thought. Menedemos asked, “How did you get into your line of work?”

  “About how you’d expect: I learned it from my father, same as he learned it from his,” the Naxian answered. “Some of the things Grandpa did, and his father ...” He tossed his head. “We know a lot more about pulleys now than we did a long time ago, I’ll tell you that.”

  “You’re right.” Menedemos’ gaze went to the top of the s mast, where a pulley block helped sailors raise and lower the yard. Little fishing boats, still made the way they had been from time out of mind, offered no such advantages. Aboard them, raw muscle power was the only thing that counted.

  “Good talking to you, friend. Safe trip to wherever you’re going.” With a wave to the Rhodian, the crane boss turned back to his crew. At his shouted directions, they broke the crane down into lengths of lumber and ropes and carried the pieces back into the polis of Naxos. Menedemos hadn’t realized the big, impressive device was so easily portable.

  “I wonder how much a crane could lift,” Sostratos said.

  “Why didn’t you ask the man in charge of that one?” Menedemos said.

  “You seemed more curious than I was,” his cousin answered.

  Menedemos thought nothing much of that till he remembered how his complaints about Sostratos’ unending curiosity had helped spark their quarrel. He supposed he could have started another one if he’d risen to the remark. Instead, he answered, “Watching somebody who really knows what he’s doing—no matter what it is—is always a pleasure.”

  “Yes, I think so, too,” Sostratos agreed. “Are you planning to stay and do business here in Naxos?”

  “It would only be luck if we found anything worth hauling back to Rhodes,” Menedemos answered. “I do want to refill our water jars, though. This is the place to do it. What we’ve got is hot and stale and hardly worth drinking, and I’ve never heard of anybody coming down with a bad flux from drinking the water here.”

  The sailors he sent into town with the water jars laughed—giggled, in fact—as they went. Some of them patted at their hair or dragged wood or bone combs through it. Carrying water was usually women’s work. That accounted for the sailors’ silliness. Hoping they’d meet pretty women at the wellhead accounted for their primping.

  In due course, the sailors came back with fresh water. “Hail, girls!” someone called from the waist of the . Menedemos thought it was Teleutas, but he wasn’t sure. Whoever it was, he infuriated the men with the jars. They didn’t seem sure who’d called out to them, either, which was probably lucky for him.

  One of the water-carriers said, “Go ahead and laugh, you polluted catamite. We saw real women, honest women, women who aren’t whores. We didn’t just see ‘em, either. We talked with ‘em, and they answered back.”

  The other sailors with jars up on their shoulders dipped their heads in agreement. Menedemos didn’t know how the jeering sailor felt about that. As for him, he was inclined to be jealous. Hellenes didn’t get many chances to meet honest women to whom they weren’t related. By the way the sailors acted, they’d made the most of this one.

  “Where will we pass the night tomorrow?” Sostratos asked.

  Menedemos shrugged. “I was thinking of spending it at sea. There’s no good stopping place halfway between Naxos and Rhodes. We’ve been this way before. You know the choices as well as I do—some really miserable little islands.”

  He waited for his cousin to grumble and complain, but Sostratos only shrugged. “All right with me. I don’t mind a night on the planks, especially when we’ll probably be home for good the next night.”

  “Oh.” Menedemos knew he sounded almost disappointed. Am I looking for another quarrel with Sostratos? he wondered, I hope not. “Home for good.” He tasted the words, finding them not altogether to his liking. “I won’t be sor
ry to sail away when spring comes back.”

  “I don’t suppose I will, either.” Sostratos looked west and a little north—back in the direction of Athens. “And yet...” He sighed. “Visiting Athens, seeing it again, after I had to leave, reminds me that Rhodes really is my home. Too late to make a philosopher out of me; I’ve been chasing profit too long.”

  “Nothing wrong with profit,” Menedemos said. “Without it, merchants couldn’t operate. And without merchants, where are philosophers? Squatting there straining to take a shit, that’s where.” He wasn’t sure whether had said that about men who loved wisdom, but it was something the comic poet might have said.

  “Oh, yes. I had that same thought in Athens, though I didn’t put it so ... elegantly,” Sostratos said.

  Was that praise, or was he being snide? Menedemos couldn’t tell. He wondered whether his cousin was sure. With a shrug, he clapped Sostratos on the shoulder. “Stuck with being a trader, eh? And stuck with being a Rhodian? Well, I suppose there are worse fates.” He could think of plenty of them. What he didn’t know was if any were better.

  Sailors who hadn’t hauled water began clamoring to go into Naxos. Unlike Kythnos and Syros, this was a real city, with plenty of taverns and plenty of brothels to choose from. Like an indulgent father—not a breed with which he was personally familiar—he waved them away from the .

  “Some of them will come back to without an obolos to put in their mouths,” Sostratos said.

  “Shall I tell them not to drink and roister?” Menedemos asked. “Would they listen if I did?”

  “I can think of more than one family back home that would thank you if you did.” But Sostratos sighed. That wasn’t what Menedemos had asked, and he knew it. With another sigh, he went on, “No, they wouldn’t heed you. That’s too bad.”

  “No doubt, but I don’t know what to do about it,” Menedemos said. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking of going into a tavern myself tonight.”

  “You were?” Sostratos sounded as if he were confessing to some particularly nasty vice. “By the dog, why?”

  “Always a good idea to pick up some news of what lies ahead,” Menedemos replied. “If pirates are out in force in the waters east of here, I’d sooner find out in a wineshop than the hard way. And besides”—he grinned at Sostratos—”I’m sick and tired of the wine we’ve got on board.”

  “Your second reason’s a disgraceful excuse, and I hope you know it,” his cousin said severely. “Your first one, on the other hand . . . I’ll come with you. Two sets of ears might pick up something one misses.”

  They set out just before the sun dipped below the western horizon. The twelve daylight hours shrank every day as summer waned, while those of the nighttime stretched. The wineshop they chose lay only a couple of streets in from the harbor. A dried grape vine hung over the door said what kind of place it was. So did the raised voices and discordant snatches of song floating out through the doorway. Some men hadn’t gone to the tavern for gossip. They’d gone to squeeze what merriment they could from wine.

  Menedemos and Sostratos both coughed when they went inside. Torches filled the room with smoke. Soot stained the mud brick of the walls and the rafters above those torches. Olive-oil lamps on a few tables and on the stone-topped counter at the back of the room added the stink of hot grease to the smoke. And—Menedemos wrinkled his nose—someone in the not too distant past had given back his wine. That stink wasn’t strong enough to drive the Rhodians out of the tavern, but it was there.

  “Hail, friends!” The man who ran the place had the falsely jovial air so many tavernkeepers assumed. He was a scrawny little fellow with enormous ears. When he didn’t remember to smile and be cheerful, his narrow face relaxed into what looked like a permanently sour expression. Menedemos had seen the like on other taverners, on men who ran brothels, and on those who made their living overseeing slaves. This fellow put the smile back on and asked, “Where are you boys from?”

  “,” Menedemos answered.

  “We’re on our way back there now from Athens,” Sostratos added.

  “Wine?” the tavernkeeper said. Menedemos and Sostratos both dipped their heads. The Naxian set two big, deep mugs on the counter. A round opening cut in the gray stone let him plunge his long-handled dipper into the amphora waiting below. He filled the cups, then held out his hand. “Two oboloi each.”

  The Rhodians paid. Menedemos sloshed out a small libation. When he drank, he sighed. As far as the wine went, he could have done better staying aboard the . He felt Sostratos’ ironic gaze on him, but refused to acknowledge it.

  “Out of Athens, are you?” a gray-haired man with a big nose said. “What’s really going on there? We heard was out, and then we heard was in. Somebody doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that’s plain.”

  “There are two different Demetrioi,” Menedemos said.

  “That’s right.” Sostratos dipped his head. “Demetrios of Phaleron is out; he’s fled to Kassandros. And Demetrios son of Antigonos is in. He’s knocked down the fortress of Mounykhia that Kassandros’ men were using, and he’s given back—he says he’s given back—the Athenians’ old constitution.”

  “Is that what’s happened? No wonder I was confused,” the gray-haired man said. Menedemos was ready to take him for a fool, but then a shrewd look crossed his face and he asked, “What have the Athenians given him, if he’s given them their old laws?”

  Now Sostratos was the one who didn’t want to go into detail. “They’ve voted him many honors,” he said, and would have let it go at that.

  Even here in the middle of the Aegean, he doesn’t want to embarrass Athens, Menedemos thought with amusement. He didn’t care if he made the polis they’d left look bad. Since he didn’t, he told the men in the tavern some of the sycophantic degrees the Athenian Assembly had passed.

  Some of them laughed. The gray-haired man with the big nose said, “You’re making that up. They’d never sink so low. This is Athens we’re talking about, not some miserable little polis in the middle of nowhere.”

  “By , by , by , I’m telling you the truth,” Menedemos said.

  “He is.” The melancholy in Sostratos’ voice made him sound all the more convincing. “We were in the Assembly with the Rhodian proxenos when many of these decrees were proposed, and we saw and heard them passed. I wish I could tell you otherwise, O men of Naxos, but to do so would be a lie.”

  Menedemos thought such philosophical-sounding language would put the Naxians’ backs up. Instead, it seemed to impress them. “Who would’ve reckoned the Athenians, of all people, would turn out to be wide-arsed?” the tavernkeeper muttered—an epitaph for the polis if ever there was one.

  The gray-haired man dipped his head. “That’s right. We didn’t wiggle our backsides at Antigonos like that when he brought is into his Island League. Sure, there’s a cult for him on Delos now, but that’s only polite these days. The rest of the nonsense the Athenians did . . . Pheu!” He turned away in disgust.

  Sostratos started to say something in response to that, then visibly checked himself. What could he say? The Naxian hadn’t said anything he hadn’t thought himself. Instead, he gulped down his wine and shoved the cup across the counter to the taverner. That worthy held out his hand. Not till Sostratos paid him did he refill the cup.

  “Hearing news like that out of Athens makes me want to pour it down, too,” the tavernkeeper said. “Not that and Antigonos are bad,” he added hastily (after all, they still ruled Naxos), “but it’s a shame to see a city that was so great grovel like a cur dog.”

  “Grovel like a cur dog,” Sostratos echoed bitterly, and took a long pull at the wine he’d just bought.

  “He’s trying to make you want to get drunk,” Menedemos said in a low voice.

  “He’s doing a good job of it, too,” Sostratos said. But he didn’t upend the cup to drain it as fast as he could. Every so often, his natural urge toward moderation served him well.

  Menedemos’ natural urg
es did not run in that direction. As the captain of a merchant galley, though, he had to be prudent regardless of his natural urges. He asked, “Has anyone come into Naxos from the east in the past few days? What are things like between here and ? Is it quiet, or are pirates prowling the seas?”

  The gray-haired man spoke up again: “It’s been pretty quiet, from what I’ve heard. My brother-in-law’s a fisherman, and he’s headed that way lately hoping for tunny. He hasn’t had a whole lot of luck with the fish, but he’s never said anything about spotting trouble on the sea.”

  “Thank you, friend,” Menedemos said. “I’ll gladly fill your cup for you again, if you like.” The Naxian dipped his head. Menedemos gave the taverner two oboloi. The fellow plied his dipper. The gray-haired man lifted the newly full cup in salute. Menedemos politely returned the gesture. They both drank. Menedemos knew he wasn’t sure to be safe on the way back to , not till he came within sight of the polis. But he was also glad to be sailing with good news and not into the teeth of bad.

  Peering east from the foredeck, looking for the first sight of Rhodes, Sostratos jerked as if stung. “Ship ho!” he called urgently. “Ship ho, dead ahead! I just see a hull and rowers—no sail!”

  That meant, or could mean, trouble. Sostratos waved toward the stern to make sure Menedemos had heard him. Menedemos waved back to show he had. He ordered a full complement to the oars.

  Sostratos stared out to sea. Whatever the other ship was, she was drawing closer in a hurry. She’d probably spied the Aphrodite’s sail— which sailors were now brailing up—before anyone aboard the akatos noticed her. That she was some sort of a galley had been plain from the moment Sostratos set eyes on her. The question now was, what sort? A hungry pirate ship would come bounding across the waves like that. So would a Rhodian war galley, patrolling against pirates. The Aphrodite’s lean lines didn’t fool only fishing boats and round ships, which sometimes proved embarrassing.