Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  "That's true." Sostratos hesitated, then added, "I know that's true. I didn't know if you'd know it."

  "Well, I do." Menedemos looked back toward the shore. "I don't see Alexidamos. He must have got loose. Too bad." Then he looked toward the westering sun. "And we won't make Taras by nightfall, either. That's too bad, too."

  "I don't suppose you intend to beach us for the night?" Sostratos said.

  "Not likely!" Menedemos exclaimed. "Do you think I'm mad, or just stupid? These Italian barbarians would land on us like a fox on a rabbit." Only when one corner of his cousin's mouth curled up ever so slightly did Menedemos realize he'd been had. He stabbed out an accusing finger. "You set me up for that."

  "I don't know what you're talking about." Sostratos might have convinced a jury, but he didn't convince Menedemos.

  Here close to the mainland, the wind didn't blow steadily out of the northwest any more. Menedemos ordered the sail lowered from the yard. The sailors sprang to obey. They'd spent a lot of time taking turn and turn again at the oars, and were glad to let the breeze push the akatos along for a while. The Aphrodite probably would have gone faster had Menedemos kept the men rowing, but he didn't worry about it. They wouldn't have made Taras before sundown if he'd tried a sprint with a man at every oar. That being so, he was content to loaf along with the fickle breeze.

  "Sail ho!" Aristeidas called, and pointed out to sea.

  "Maybe we'll see what all that rowing practice got us," Diokles said.

  "Maybe," Menedemos said. The lookout's call had been plenty to bring the crew back to full alertness. He liked that.

  But the sail, when they got closer, proved to belong to a little fishing boat. Menedemos relaxed. So did his crew. The fishermen tried to flee, as fishermen usually did on spotting the Aphrodite. The wind, though, chose that moment to fail. Menedemos put some men on the oars and easily overhauled the boat.

  When the frightened fishermen found out he aimed to trade and not to rob, they were so relieved, they gave him enough squid to feed the whole crew to the point of gluttony in exchange for a couple of jars of wine - not golden Ariousian, but the rough red the men drank at sea. Fried in olive oil on little charcoal-burning braziers, the squid smelled wonderful. Menedemos' mouth watered. His belly rumbled.

  "Sitos is all very well," he said, "but we can be opsophagoi to our hearts' content tonight."

  "I'll eat bread with my squid," Sostratos protested.

  But Menedemos pounced. "Ha! From your own mouth you stand convicted. If you weren't going to be an opsophagos, you'd eat squid with your bread."

  Sostratos considered that, then dipped his head. "Guilty, sure enough." He grinned. "Why not? We've got plenty." He popped a little one into his mouth.

  The sun was still low in the east the next morning when the Aphrodite came to Taras. Plenty of ships were on the water there: fishing boats like the one whose crew they'd frightened, beamy merchantmen, and a couple of patrolling fives. One of the war galleys came up to give the akatos a closer inspection.

  "We're the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes," Menedemos said in some annoyance as an officer shouted questions. "We're not fornicating pirates, and I'm getting tired of being taken for one." He cupped a hand behind his hear. "What's that? Cargo? We've got fine Khian wine - the best - and papyrus and ink, and Rhodian perfume and Koan silk for your ladies. And we've got peafowl and peafowl eggs, the likes of which you've never seen here in Great Hellas."

  "We hope they've never seen them," Sostratos said softly.

  By the way the Tarentine officer exclaimed in astonishment, that hope looked like coming true. "Go ahead, Aphrodite," the fellow called when he'd regained his composure. "Pass on into the Little Sea and tie up where it suits you. Good trading."

  "Thanks." Menedemos let himself be mollified. And he had a question of his own: "What's the news in the war between Syracuse and Carthage?"

  "Not good for the Hellenes," the Tarentine answered. "From what we hear, Carthage may be able to lay siege to Syracuse, maybe even by land and sea at once. I don't know what Agathokles can do to save his polis this time."

  "That's not good," Menedemos said, to which the officer aboard the five dipped his head. Menedemos turned to the mercenaries he'd brought west from Cape Tainaron. "If you want to go on to Syracuse, you'll have to get there on your own. Doesn't look like we'll be sailing to Sicily this season."

  "Not if you're smart, you won't," the Tarentine officer agreed. "If Syracuse falls, that will give Carthage rule over the whole island, and then she's liable to come after us next. I wish Alexander hadn't died before he could head west and smash up the Carthaginians the way he did the Persians."

  Like any Rhodian, Menedemos worried more about Macedonian marshals left over from Alexander's day. But he politely said, "That is too bad," and added, "What are things like in the Hellenic cities along the west coast of Italy? The war between Syracuse and Carthage isn't troubling them, is it?"

  "Not very much - they're too far away," the Tarentine answered. "The Samnites and the Romans are still brawling up in those parts, though. But that's a land war, and shouldn't trouble you - neither set of barbarians has much in the way of a fleet."

  "Thanks," Menedemos said. The Tarentine didn't even think of pirates. In a five, he didn't need to unless he was hunting them. But any trader who sailed into Italian waters - any trader who ventured far from Rhodes, for that matter - had to keep them in mind.

  Her three banks of oars working in smooth unison, the five glided away from the Aphrodite. Menedemos waved to Diokles. The oarmaster struck his bronze square with his mallet. The merchant galley's rowers, who'd rested while their captain talked with the Tarentine officer, began to stroke once more. Menedemos guided the ship through the narrow entranceway into the Little Sea, the enclosed lagoon that gave Taras perhaps the finest natural harbor in all of Great Hellas.

  Taras itself lay on the eastern spit of land forming the mouth of the lagoon. Small boats, some of them close enough to let Menedemos see the nets they trailed in the water, dotted the calm surface of the Little Sea. "Do you suppose they actually catch anything?" Sostratos asked as he came up onto the poop deck. "Is there anything left to catch, after they've been fishing here so long and so hard?"

  "There must be something, or they wouldn't try," Menedemos said.

  His cousin pondered that, then slowly dipped his head. "I suppose you're right, but none of them will get rich."

  "When did any fisherman anywhere ever get rich?" Menedemos returned. "Hang of a way to make a living." Sostratos agreed with that much more quickly than he had with Menedemos' earlier opinion.

  Diokles pointed. "Look, skipper - there's a pier where we can tie up. See it? The one not far from the shipsheds where they keep their galleys dry, I mean."

  "Yes, I see." Menedemos' eyes swept the harbor. "Looks good, and nobody else seems to be making for it, either." He pulled one steering-oar tiller forward, the other back, and guided the akatos toward the pier.

  "Easy there - easy," Diokles told the rowers as the Aphrodite came alongside. "Back oars . . . a couple more strokes, stop her nice and smooth. One more . . . Oöp!" The rowers rested. Longshoremen trotted up the pier toward the Aphrodite. Sailors near the bow and stern tossed them lines. They made the akatos fast.

  "What are you carrying?" one of them asked in the broad Doric spoken through most of Great Hellas.

  "We have papyrus and ink," Menedemos answered in a loud voice: not only the longshoremen but also the usual gaggle of spectators were listening. "We have the finest perfume, made from Rhodian roses. We have fine Koan silks and fine Khian wine - not just Khian, mind you, but Ariousian." That sent a hum through the Tarentines, though Menedemos doubted whether any of the people standing on the wharf could afford the splendid wine. He struck a dramatic pose. "And, for the very first time ever in this part of the world, we have for sale a peacock, five - uh, four - peahens, and eggs to yield more peafowl."

  That produced another buzz, but less than he'd
hoped for and expected. A moment later, somebody's question explained why the buzz was subdued: "Just exactly what kind of a thing is a peacock, anyways?"

  Before Menedemos could answer, the thing in question let out one of its horrible, raucous screeches. Smiling, he said, "That's a peacock."

  "You're selling it for its pretty song, right?" a wag in the crowd asked, and got a laugh from the Tarentines.

  Menedemos laughed, too. He said, "I'll show you why we're selling it. Sostratos . . ." He waved to his cousin, who'd already gone up onto the foredeck. This would be a free show, unlike the ones they'd put on at other stops. They hoped to do business here.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Sostratos said, fumbling with the hooks and eyes on the cage, "behold - the peacock!" He threw open the door. The bird, however, declined to come forth. That drew more laughter. Sostratos muttered something uncomplimentary to every bird ever hatched. Having cared for the peafowl all through the voyage, having finally failed to keep one of them from leaping into the sea, he loathed them with a pure, clean loathing that far outdid Menedemos' dislike for them. "Behold the peacock!" he repeated, and got ready to drag out the bird by main force.

  But, perverse as usual, it chose that moment to emerge on its own. And then, instead of running around and making a nuisance of itself as it often did, it peered up at the people on the pier like an actor looking up at the crowd in a theater - and, like an actor taking his cue, spread its tail feathers as wide as they would go.

  "Ahhhh!" That was the sound Menedemos had hoped to hear when he announced they had peafowl for sale. It was a little late, but it would do.

  "That's a pretty bird, sure enough, but what good is it?" somebody asked.

  "If you're pretty enough, you don't have to be anything else," Menedemos replied. "What good is a beautiful hetaira?"

  The wag spoke up again: "I'm not doing that with a peacock!"

  He got another laugh. Menedemos didn't have a comeback ready. But Sostratos said, "A polis with a peacock is surely more splendid than one without. You'll be the envy of all the other cities of Great Hellas, and of the local barbarians, too." Menedemos feared the response was too serious, but it seemed to go over well.

  "How much do you want for that creature?" asked a fellow whose threadbare chiton made him a most unlikely candidate to buy.

  "Ah, that would be telling," Menedemos said slyly. "Suppose you ask the man who buys him, and see if you get a straight answer."

  "Fat chance," the Tarentine said mournfully. Menedemos smiled. That's just what it is, he thought: a chance to get fat. And I intend to make the most of it.

  Taras' central district had the streets laid out in a neat Hippodamian grid. Farther west, they ran every which way, as they had throughout the city in the old days. Sostratos rented a house right on the border between the grid and the alleyways. But for the peafowl, he would have sold from the ship or from a stall in the agora, but he didn't want to keep them caged up any more than he had to. They could also be displayed to better advantage strutting around the central courtyard than huddled behind wooden slats.

  "And," Menedemos said, "this is a much more comfortable arrangement for us."

  "That's not why I did it," Sostratos said.

  "I know." Menedemos grinned at him. "That doesn't make it any less true."

  Sostratos started to get huffy. Before he launched into a lecture, though, he checked himself - that was just what his cousin wanted him to do. "All right," he said mildly, and Menedemos looked disappointed.

  "Maybe we should have got a stall, too," Menedemos said.

  "If our goods don't move so well as we'd like, I'll get one," Sostratos said. "But for now, I think going through the agora and letting people know where we are and what we've got for sale will work well enough. We've already moved a lot of the Ariousian - and all that papyrus, too."

  Menedemos laughed out loud. "Didn't that Smikrines say he was going to write a history? You should have made him promise to have a copy made for you when he finished."

  "If I'd thought he'd do it, I would have," Sostratos answered.

  "If you thought he'd do which?" Menedemos asked. "Finish the work, or have a copy made once he did?"

  "Either one," Sostratos said. "Writers are an unreliable lot." He knew that was true. How much writing had he done himself, after all? What he wanted to do was leave behind a work to rival those of Herodotos and Thoukydides, but what was he doing? Selling wine and silk and peafowl and papyrus and perfume.

  You're traveling, he told himself. Herodotos traveled all over the world so he could learn things at first hand, and Thoukydides went all over Hellas and got to know men on both sides of the Peloponnesian War. If you don't see things and come to know about people, your history can't possibly be any good.

  That was some consolation, but only some. To keep Menedemos from knowing what was in his mind - and perhaps to keep himself from dwelling on it, too - Sostratos said, "I'm going over to the market square myself."

  "You just want to make me keep an eye on the peafowl for a while," Menedemos said, which also held some truth. But Sostratos' cousin slapped him on the back. "Go on, then. I don't blame you. You had charge of them all the way from Rhodes to here."

  Taras' agora lay a few blocks south of the rented house, close by the Ionian Sea - the Tarentines called it the Big Sea, in contrast to the Little Sea that was their sheltered harbor lagoon. Fishermen sold their wares there. So did potters and weavers and cobblers and netmakers and all the other sorts of craftsmen who worked in the city. And so did merchants from other Hellenic poleis and Italians from the interior with wool and tanned hides and honey and other products of the countryside.

  Some of the customers were Italians, too. A good many of them wore tunics and mantles like Hellenes, and couldn't be told from Tarentines till they opened their mouths and spoke Greek with an accent. Others, though . . . In the midst of calling out the wares the Aphrodite had brought from Rhodes, Sostratos broke off and asked one of them, "Excuse me, sir, but what do you call that garment you're wearing over your chiton?"

  "It is called a toga," the Italian answered in good Greek. "I am a freeborn citizen, so I have the right to wear it."

  "I see. Thank you," Sostratos said. "Do you mind my asking how you wear it?"

  "You Hellenes are always curious, and about the strangest things, too." The Italian's eyes twinkled. "Well, why not? You ask politely enough, I must say." He pulled off the toga and displayed it for Sostratos in his outstretched arms.

  "What an unusual shape for a piece of cloth," Sostratos exclaimed. "We Hellenes just use rectangles, which are simple. This is . . . a broad octagon, except that two of the sides are curved instead of straight. Now I have another question: why do you wear such an oddly shaped mantle?"

  "It's our custom," the stranger replied with a shrug. "Many people here in Italy wear the toga. We Samnites do, and so do the Lucanians, and even our enemies the Romans farther north. As for how we wear it . . ."

  He folded the toga in half at its broadest point, then draped it over his left shoulder so that one corner was level with his left foot. He wrapped the rest of the garment over his back under his right arm, and back over his left shoulder again, then slowly turned so Sostratos could see how the enormous mantle covered him.

  "Thank you very much," Sostratos told him. "I hope you will not mind if I say a himation seems much less . . . cumbersome."

  "No, I don't mind," the Samnite answered. "I often wear a himation myself. But I am Herennius Egnatius, a man of some importance among my people, and so I sometimes wear the toga to show who and what I am."

  To Sostratos' way of thinking, a barbarian coming into a Hellenic city should have wanted to make himself look as much like a Hellene as he could. He gave his own name, and clasped the Italian's hand. Then he stroked his beard in thought. If this Samnite with the cumbersome name was important, he might well be rich. And if he was rich . . . "Sir, as I've been saying all through the agora, among the things my cous
in and I have brought from the east are fine Khian wine - Ariousian, in fact; the best of the best - and several peafowl. I am sure no Samnite today is lucky enough to own a peacock. In fact, the birds we brought are the first of their kind in Great Hellas." He wasn't absolutely sure that was true, but he thought so - and no one in Taras seemed to have seen one before.

  "I know something of good wine," Herennius Egnatius said. "But what sort of a bird is a peacock?" He pronounced the unfamiliar name with care. "If I have one of these birds, will it show I am a man not of the common sort?"

  "That it will, O best one - it will indeed." Sostratos coughed delicately. "Because these birds are rare, you will understand that we do not sell them for a few oboloi."

  "Of course," the Samnite said. "One of the marks of a man's distinction is what he can afford. Is your ship in the harbor on the Little Sea?"

  "Yes, but Menedemos - my cousin - and I have taken a house here in Taras, the better to show off the peafowl to men who might want to buy them," Sostratos said.

  Herennius Egnatius drew himself up very straight. He was at least a palm shorter than Sostratos, but, like Menedemos, acted as if he were taller. "Take me there," he said. "My toga made you curious. Your . . . peafowl do the same for me."

  Sostratos thought about going through the agora for a while longer, but then wondered why. He'd been trying to drum up customers, and here he . . . might have one. Worth finding out, he decided and dipped his head to the Samnite. "Come with me."

  Aristeidas looked surprised when he knocked on the door to the rented house. "I didn't expect you back so soon, sir," he said.

  "This foreign gentleman" - Sostratos nodded to Herennius Egnatius - "is interested in peafowl."

  Just then, the peacock started screaming. Herennius Egnatius' eyes widened. "What is that appalling racket?" he asked.

  "Those are the noises peafowl make." Sostratos wished he hadn't had to admit it quite so soon. He also wished Menedemos hadn't chosen that precise moment to shout, "Oh, shut up, you miserable, polluted thing!"

  Herennius Egnatius smiled a thin smile. As the funny man at the harbor had, he said, "I take it you do not sell them for the beauty of their song?"