Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  "And the Athenians fed him hemlock, too - even I know that much," Menedemos said. "So maybe he should have found something else to talk about."

  For some reason - Menedemos couldn't fathom why - that seemed to wound his cousin, who subsided into sulky silence. Menedemos gave his full attention back to the Aphrodite. Getting the most from both sails and oars was a subtle art, one most merchant captains with their tubby roundships didn't have to worry about. He let the wind on the quarter drive the akatos westward, while using half the rowers - the others rested at their oars - to head the ram at her bow north as well, toward the little island of Syme.

  As the island seemed to rise up out of the sea. Diokles pointed toward it and said, "Miserable little place. Not enough water, not enough decent land for it to amount to anything."

  "Well, you're not wrong," Menedemos said. "If it weren't for sponges, nobody would remember the place was here."

  That brought Sostratos out of his funk. He tossed his head, saying, "Thoukydides talks about the sea-fight between the Athenians and the Spartans off Syme and the trophy the Spartans set up there in the last book of his history. That makes the island, like the history itself, a possession for all time." He slid from Doric to old-fashioned Attic for the last few words; Menedemos presumed he was quoting his pet historian.

  Hearing Sostratos quote Thoukydides, though, jogged his own memory, and he quoted, too, from Homer:

  t" 'Nireus led three ships from Syme -

  Nireus son of King Kharopoios by Aglaie,

  Nireus, who was the handsomest man who came under Ilion

  Of the other Danaans except the illustrious son of Peleus,

  But he was not a powerful man, and only a small host followed him.'t

  So even in those days, Syme was nothing much."

  "You know the Iliad even better than I thought you did, if you can recite from the Catalogue of Ships in Book Two," Sostratos said.

  "Homer to sink my teeth into, Aristophanes to laugh at," Menedemos replied. "To the crows with everybody else."

  Before Sostratos could come back with something indignant, Diokles asked, "Whereabouts on the island will you want to beach her tonight?"

  "You know the gnarled finger of land that sticks out to the south, the one that points to the islet called Tetlousa?" Menedemos said. "There's a small inlet there, on the western side of it, with the best and softest beach on Syme. That's where I want to put us."

  "I do know that inlet, captain, and I do know that beach." The oarmaster dipped his head. "I asked because I was going to speak of them if you didn't."

  "And the town on the island is at the north end, isn't it?" Sostratos said. "We'll be as far away from a lot of people as we can - though on Syme, that's not very far."

  If Sostratos was talking about practical matters again, and not about literature, that suited Menedemos fine. He said, "You're right. We haven't got that many choices on Syme, anyhow, not when most of the coast is rocky cliffs."

  Before long, he ordered the sail brailed up again, for the Aphrodite swung almost due north once it got past Tetlousa - straight into the teeth of the breeze. He put more men back on the oars. The sun was sinking in the west, and he didn't want to have to feel his way into that inlet in the dark. He was all too liable to misjudge things and run the Aphrodite up against the rocks. Sooner than risking that, he would have spent a night anchored at sea, with the rowers sleeping on their benches. They wouldn't be happy about that. They'd have to do it a few times, especially on the journey across the Ionian Sea from Hellas to Italy, but it would be a bad omen the first night out.

  But he had plenty of daylight left when Aristeidas sang out from the bow. "There's the inlet, captain!" The lookout pointed to starboard. A moment later, he let out a yelp. "Papail! That stinking peacock got me on the leg!"

  Now you've got to watch yourself," Menedemos said. He leaned on the tillers to the steering oars and swung the akatos into the tiny bay.

  At the bow, Aristeidas cast a lead-weighted line into the sea to gauge its depth. "Ten cubits," he called. Menedemos waved to show he'd heard. That was enough water and to spare.

  At Diokles' shouted orders, the portside rowers backed water while those to starboard pulled with the usual stroke, so that the Aphrodite spun through half a circle in very little more than her own length. When her stern faced the beach, the keleustes cried, "Oö!" and the rowers rested at their oars. "Now," Diokles said, "back water all - at the beat, mind - and bring her up onto the sand." He smote the bronze square with his mallet.

  After a few strokes, the Aphrodite's false keel - of sturdy beech, to protect the true keel beneath it - scraped sand as the rowers grounded her. "Oöp!" the oarmaster cried again. Sailors sprang out onto the beach to drag the galley farther from the sea.

  Menedemos dipped his head, more than a little pleased with the way things had gone. "This was a good first day," he said to anyone who would listen.

  Fires crackled on the beach. Sailors sat around them, eating bread and olives and oil and drinking rough wine. Some of them rubbed their bodies, and especially their sore hands, with more olive oil. A few small fish from the bay and a couple of rabbits sailors had knocked over with rocks sizzled above the flames, adding savory smells to the air and a little opson to the sitos and wine.

  Sostratos spotted his cousin over by the biggest, brightest fire. Menedemos spat out an olive pit and drank wine from the same sort of mug he'd called for at the symposion. Sitting there on the sand among the rowers, Menedemos seemed as much in his element as in the fanciest andron. Sostratos sighed. Save perhaps for the Lykeion, he'd never found anywhere he truly felt he belonged.

  But he had to do what he had to do. "Hail, cousin," Menedemos called as he came over. "What have you been up to?"

  "Checking on the peafowl," Sostratos answered. "I have to tell you, I don't like what I'm seeing."

  "What's wrong?" Menedemos asked sharply. Then he checked himself and asked the question a different way. "What do you think is wrong?"

  The change angered Sostratos. If his cousin didn't like what he heard, he'd just given himself an excuse to do nothing about it. Trying to keep the ire out of his voice, Sostratos said, "They're looking peaked. I don't think they like staying cooped up in those cages. I don't think it's healthy for them."

  Sure enough, Menedemos tossed his head. "Tell it to Aristeidas," he answered. "The peacock drew blood when it pecked him there a little before we landed."

  "I don't care," Sostratos said. "Remember how unhappy the birds were when we brought them from Himilkon's warehouse to our houses? Remember how they perked up when they got to run around the courtyards? They like to run around. My sister ran herself ragged trying to keep them out of her herb garden. Now they're caged up again, and they're starting to droop again, too."

  "They'll be fine." But Menedemos spoke without so much conviction.

  "Three minai, twenty-four drakhmai, three oboloi," Sostratos said. "We want to keep them healthy, you know."

  Talking about the birds hadn't got through to his cousin. Reminding Menedemos how much the peafowl had cost did. Wincing, Sostratos' cousin said, "What do you think we ought to do?"

  Serious as usual, Sostratos began, "Well, my prescription would be - "

  Menedemos burst out laughing. "What have we got here, Hippokrates for peafowl? You've already come halfway toward talking Attic. Will you start spouting Ionian dialect when you go on about doctoring them? ' 'E 'opped on 'is 'orse and 'ammered the 'ide off it with 'is whip.' " He dropped the rough breathings at the beginnings of words, as Ionian Hellenes were wont to do.

  The sailors sitting around the fire laughed and poked one another in the ribs; Menedemos had laid on the dialect with a shovel. Sostratos fought to hold on to his patience. "My prescription would be," he repeated in tones threatening enough to make his cousin keep quiet and hear him out, "to let the birds run free whenever we possibly can."

  "What? Now?" Menedemos' eyebrows flew upwards. "They'd run off and
get away, and a fox would never know what an expensive supper it had."

  "You ask me, any fox that tried to catch a peafowl would be sorry a heartbeat later." Sostratos kicked at the golden sand. Now he was annoyed at himself. Theophrastos would have had something sharp to say about irrelevance. Of course, Theophrastos had something sharp to say about almost everything. Sostratos went on, "I don't mean here, especially not at night. But they ought to have the chance to get some exercise while we're at sea, where they couldn't possibly escape."

  "No, they can't escape at sea, that's true - not unless they jump into the drink," Menedemos allowed. "But they're pretty stupid, so they might do just that. And I'll tell you something else they'd do: they'd drive the rowers mad. Or do you think I'm wrong; O best one?"

  His withering sarcasm failed to wither Sostratos, who answered, "Most of the time, we haven't got a full crew on the oars, nor anything close to one. The men who aren't at the benches could fend them off the ones who are."

  "Maybe." But Menedemos sounded anything but convinced.

  Sostratos shrugged. "You're the captain. It's up to you. But if the birds do come down sick, that's in your lap, too."

  "No. That's in the lap of the gods." Menedemos gulped his wine and glowered at Sostratos. "Are you sure about all this?"

  "No, of course I'm not sure," Sostratos answered, more than a little exasperated. "Unless you break your leg or something, a proper physician isn't sure what's wrong with you nine times out of ten. But I'm telling you what I've noticed."

  If Menedemos was drunk enough or cruel enough to tell him where to head in, he could walk across Syme to the little town at the north end of the island and hire a fishing boat to take him back to Rhodes. He could . . . but he couldn't. The Aphrodite carried his family's wealth no less than Menedemos'. If he abandoned that investment while fearing Menedemos would make a hash of things with it, neither his own father nor Uncle Philodemos would ever forgive him. And how could he blame them for that? He couldn't.

  But how could he stand Menedemos' berating him for doing what he was supposed to be doing and doing it as well as he could? He was every bit as much a free Hellene as his cousin. Slaves had to take abuse; that was one of the reasons no man wanted to be a slave. He waited, grinding his teeth from nerves.

  By the look on Menedemos' face, he was about to let fly. But then, eyeing Sostratos, he choked back whatever he'd been on the point of saying. He took another swig of wine from his mug instead. When he did speak, he had himself under control again: "All right. I suppose we can try it, at least when the weather's good and we're in waters where we don't have to worry about pirates. But the birds go back in their cages the instant anything even starts to smell like trouble."

  "A bargain," Sostratos said - a great gust of relief. "Thank you."

  His cousin shrugged. "Every now and then, I'm tempted to forget why you come along when I take a ship out." His grin was on the nasty side. He'd given Sostratos what he wanted; now he would try to make Sostratos pay for it. And Sostratos, having won the point he had to win, was willing to put up with more than he would have otherwise. Then Menedemos surprised him by adding, "Even if I am tempted, I'd make a mistake if I did it."

  Sostratos stared, Menedemos usually amused himself by giving him a hard time, not by paying him compliments. He did that so seldom, in fact, that Sostratos concluded he had to mean this one. He bowed. "Thank you, cousin."

  "You're welcome." Menedemos' eyes glinted. Maybe it was just the firelight, but Sostratos didn't think so. And, sure enough, his cousin went on, "See how much you thank me when you're trying to round up the peafowl in a hurry because it's starting to blow a gale."

  That didn't sound like anything Sostratos much wanted to do. Still . . . "I'd sooner chase them than throw them over the side with rocks tied to their feet so they'll sink."

  "Oh, you're right, no doubt about it." But that glint remained in Menedemos' eyes. "Remember what you just said. It's the sort of thing the gods like to listen for."

  Several sailors dipped their heads in agreement. Sostratos thought of himself as a modern, well-educated man. Unlike the sailors - even unlike his own cousin - he didn't get most of his ideas about the gods from the Iliad and the Odyssey. But what Menedemos said had a horrid feeling of probability to him, too. He spat in the bosom of his tunic to turn aside the omen.

  "You don't do that very often," Menedemos remarked.

  Sostratos answered with a shrug: "We're on the sea now. Diokles said it - things are different here."

  "I know that," Menedemos said. "I'm surprised you're willing to admit it."

  "We're on the sea," Sostratos repeated. "And we're on the sea with peafowl. If that doesn't make things different, I don't know what would." He plucked at his beard. Since he'd got what he wanted from his cousin, changing the subject looked like a good idea. And so he did, asking, "Do you plan on putting in at Knidos tomorrow?"

  "I planned to, yes," Menedemos answered. "It's a good harbor, and a good day's journey from here, too. A couple of hundred stadia - we'll be able to use the sail some, I expect, as long as the breeze holds, but the boys will do some rowing, too. We can put some fresh water aboard, buy some food . . .. Why? Did you have some different scheme in mind?"

  "No." Sostratos tossed his head. "I was just wondering if you intended to lay over for a day and do some business there."

  "Not unless you find something that drives you wild," Menedemos said. "My thinking is, it's too close to home. What's the point to taking all our expensive goods for a short haul when we're bound to get a lot more for them farther west?"

  "Good. We're sailing in the same direction," Sostratos said.

  One of the sailors by the fire, a skinny bald man named Alexion, nudged Menedemos and said, "Once we're in the harbor at Knidos, skipper, you ought to charge folks a khalkos apiece, say, to watch master Sostratos here go chasing after all those peafowl." He laughed. So did the other sailors in earshot. So did Menedemos.

  And so did Sostratos: if he found the joke funny, they weren't laughing at him . . . were they? But then he grew thoughtful. "Himilkon got half a drakhma from you for just a tail feather, cousin. If we charged people a khalkos or two to come to the edge of the quay and look down into the Aphrodite while the peacock was out of his cage - well, we wouldn't get rich doing it, but I bet we'd make a drakhma, maybe a couple of drakhmai, whenever we did it."

  Menedemos looked thoughtful, too. "You're right. We probably would." He turned and slapped Alexion on the back. "Whatever we bring in the first day we try it, it's yours, for having the idea."

  The rower's grin showed a broken front tooth. "Thanks, skipper. You treat a fellow right, no two ways about it."

  "Fair's fair," Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head, wondering if he would have thought of the same thing himself. He hoped so, but he wasn't altogether sure.

  The fires died down to embers. Sostratos wrapped himself in his mantle and lay down on the beach with his cloak under his head for a pillow. A nightjar's froglike call came from not far away. The sky was clear, a blue almost black. Only a faint gleam from the Milky Way lightened it near the southern horizon. Zeus' wandering star blazed brilliant, high in the southern sky; that of Ares, duller and redder, hung farther west. Sostratos stared up at them for a little while, then yawned, rolled over on his side, and fell asleep.

  "Rosy-fingered dawn!" Menedemos shouted to wake the Aphrodite's crew. The tag from Homer had never seemed more apt. He wondered how the blind poet had been able to describe things so exactly. Beams of pinkish light in the east foretold the arrival of the sun, which couldn't be more than a quarter of an hour away. Even as he watched, the pink began to turn gold.

  Sailors groaned and grunted and sat up, rubbing their eyes. Some of them kept right on snoring. Sostratos often did that. To Menedemos' disappointment, his cousin's eyes were open. Sostratos got to his feet and went off behind a bush to piss.

  "Get some bread. Get some oil. Get some wine," Menedemos called as
the men woke their sleepy comrades. "No slaves here - we've all got to work once we eat."

  "What other cheery news have you got for us?" Sostratos asked around a yawn as he came back from behind that bush.

  "Once we get the Aphrodite in the water, you can let the peafowl out - one or two at a time, mind, and the peacock by himself - to get whatever exercise they can," Menedemos answered. "Tell off as many sailors as you need to keep them from fouling the men who stay at the oars and mind the sail."

  His cousin dipped his head. "Thanks again," he said. "I really do think the birds will be better for it."

  "I hope so," Menedemos said, which was true; he didn't want to have to explain to his father that he hadn't been able to sell the peafowl because they'd all died before he got to Italy. "But there's one thing even more important," he added, and watched Sostratos raise a dubious eyebrow. But that was also true: "I hope the ship will be better for it."

  "It will be all right," Sostratos said confidently. Menedemos clicked his tongue between his teeth and didn't answer. His cousin was a clever fellow - cleverer than I am, Menedemos thought, without rancor or envy - and a first-rate toikharkhos. But Sostratos had never had to give orders to a crew; he'd never been responsible for a whole ship and everybody in it. He could say things would turn out all right, but Menedemos was the one who had to make them turn out all right.

  Just getting that akatos back into the sea was harder work than it would have been with a trireme or even a piratical pentekonter. The Aphrodite had fewer men and, because of the cargo she carried, was heavier in proportion to her size than a vessel meant solely for fighting. Menedemos put half a dozen oarsmen into the ship's boat, and ran a line from its stern to the Aphrodite's stempost. While they rowed with all their might to help pull the beached ship forward, he and the rest of the crew pushed against her stern and sides.

  She didn't want to move. Wiping sweat from his forehead with his hand, Diokles said, "We may have to lighten her before she'll get back where she belongs."