After the anchors splashed into the sea, the sailors had hard barley-flour rolls as sitos, with salted olives and crumbly cheese for their opson. They washed supper down with cheap wine Sostratos had bought in Taras. On dry land, he would have turned up his nose at the stuff. Salt air and a gently rolling ship somehow improved it.
Diokles spat an olive pit over the rail and into the sea. "I don't think the wind will shift," he said.
"Neither do I," Menedemos answered. "If we were in an ordinary merchantman, we'd do a lot of waiting and a lot of tacking. As things are . . . well, this is why we pay the rowers."
The men at the oars grumbled a little the next morning; they'd had an easy time of it since leaving Taras, for the wind had been with them all the way. But Diokles' mallet and bronze square gave them the rhythm they needed. Menedemos set only ten men on each side to rowing: no point in wearing out the crew. The Aphrodite glided into Rhegion's harbor well before noon.
Because Menedemos intended to spend the day in the city, Sostratos went into the agora to let people know the merchant galley had come and to tell them what his cousin and he had for sale. Several men headed for the piers to buy chicks or wine or silk or perfume or some of the other goods the akatos had brought from the east.
And, being who he was, Sostratos also indulged his own curiosity. "Tell me," he said to a potter who looked reasonably bright, "why does this city have the name it does?"
"Well, stranger, I've heard a couple of stories about that, and I have to tell you I don't know which one's true myself."
"Go on," Sostratos said eagerly. "I'm always glad to meet someone who'll admit he doesn't know everything."
"Heh," the potter said. "I bet you it doesn't happen any too often, either." That made Sostratos laugh out loud. The local went on, "Anyway, one tale is that the name comes from the word that means to break, because we have a lot of earthquakes in these parts, and because it looks like Sicily broke off from Italy."
"That makes sense," Sostratos said; Rhegion could easily be derived from rhegnumi. "Aiskhylos says something similar, doesn't he?" he remarked. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, "What's the other story?"
"Some people say the name comes from one Italian language or another, because regium or some such word means royal in those tongues," the potter replied.
"Which do you think is true?" Sostratos asked.
"I'd sooner believe we Hellenes named the place ourselves than that we borrowed a word from the barbarians," the potter said. "I'd sooner believe that, mind you, but I can't prove it."
"Fair enough," Sostratos said. "Better than fair enough, in fact." He went off, hoping he would remember that when the day finally came for him to write his history.
That day wouldn't come if he didn't get back to letting the people of Rhegion know the Aphrodite had peafowl chicks for sale. Of course it won't, Sostratos thought: Menedemos will kill me if I don't do my job.
He went back to the merchant galley late in the afternoon. If the folk of Rhegion didn't know about the peafowl by then, it wasn't because he hadn't told them. "Any luck?" he called to Menedemos as he walked up the pier.
"I sold two," Menedemos answered. "Sold 'em to two different men, too, and it was almost like they were bidding against each other to see who could show what a rich fellow he was by paying more. I got close to five minai: you might have thought they each had to have the very last bird."
"That's splendid." Sostratos clapped his hands. "We sold two birds for the price of three, more or less, or earned a couple of extra days' wages for the whole crew."
"Tempts me to lay over here for one more day," his cousin said. "Maybe Rhegion holds some more rich fools - I mean, customers."
"Well, why not?" Sostratos said. "We can afford it now. And even if we only sell at the regular price, we still come out ahead."
"That's true." Menedemos dipped his head. "All right, then. I'll do it."
Sostratos went into the market square at first light the next morning. Not only did he talk about the Aphrodite's cargo, he called, "Men of Rhegion, two of your fellows have already bought peafowl chicks. Do you want them to be the only ones in this polis lucky enough to own these beautiful birds?"
Men rich enough to buy peafowl chicks might not come to the agora themselves, but their slaves surely would. And he'd found that making people jealous of their neighbors was one of the best ways to get them to part with their silver.
After plucking at his beard in thought, he added, "We also have fine perfume made from Rhodian roses. How many women in Rhegion want to make themselves smell sweet for their husbands?" How many want to make themselves smell sweet for somebody else's husband? went through his mind, too, as it surely wouldn't have done had his cousin had a different nature.
Again, women who might buy Rhodian perfume for themselves - whether respectable matrons or rich hetairai - didn't frequent the agora, but their slaves did. Sostratos pitched that call to the slave women there. He smiled to himself when a couple of them hurried out of the market square. For good measure, he put some extra emphasis on the Koan silk, too.
He returned to the merchant galley at sunset, as he had the day before. "How did we do?" he called to Menedemos as he walked down the gangplank into the ship.
"Didn't sell any more birds." But Menedemos seemed happy enough, and explained why a moment later: "We had a run on silk and perfume, though. One fancy hetaira came herself, veiled up like a rich man's wife. When she took off her veil to haggle . . ." His eyes went big and wide. "Aphrodite, she was gorgeous! If she'd given me some of what she had under her chiton, I'd've let her have the perfume for free."
"I believe that," Sostratos said tartly. "I also believe I'd have let you explain to your father how it came to be that we ended up not having this perfume and not getting any money for it."
His cousin's expression changed to one of horror. "You're a nasty fellow, do you know that?"
"Thank you," Sostratos said, which did nothing to improve Menedemos' temper.
They left Rhegion the next morning. Sostratos expected Menedemos to go up the Italian coast, but his cousin chose to cross the Strait of Sicily to Messene instead. "Why not?" Menedemos said when Sostratos shot him a curious look. "We did well in Rhegion. No reason we can't do it there as well."
"No, I suppose not," Sostratos said, but then he added, "so long as the war in Sicily hasn't come that far north."
"We would have heard in Rhegion," Menedemos replied, which was probably true. He couldn't resist a gibe: "You always fuss."
"If you'd listened to my fussing back in Taras, your ankle would be better off," Sostratos retorted, and Menedemos mimed taking a wound.
From his usual station in the bow, Aristeidas pointed to starboard and called, "Something funny there." A moment later, he found a word for it: "Whirlpool!"
A few sailors exclaimed in alarm. More who weren't rowing hurried to the rail to get a look for themselves. Diokles said, "You get 'em in these waters now and again. It's the current, I expect. Most of 'em don't amount to anything much."
"They can pull a ship down to the bottom of the sea in less time than it takes to tell," a young rower quavered.
"Sure, a big one can," the oarmaster said. "But that one there? Don't be silly. It's not much more than you get when you mix water and wine in the jug called a dinos." That eased the sailors' worries and made several of them smile; the very name of the vessel meant spinner. Sostratos admired Diokles' quick wits.
After Menedemos saw that it wouldn't alarm the men, he began reciting from the twelfth book of the Odyssey:
t" 'We sailed up the strait, lamenting.
For there was Skylle, and on the other side divine Kharybdis,
A wondrous thing, swallowed the water of the salt sea.
I assure you, when she vomited it forth, she made it boil
And stirred it up as if in a metal pot on a great fire.
The foam fell on the high crags to either side.
But when s
he gulped down the water of the salt sea
Every place where she troubled came into view: echoing rock
Appeared, a marvel, and the dark sandy earth - and green
fear seized them.' "t
The nervous young sailor pointed toward the whirlpool and asked, "Skipper, d'you think that's the real Kharybdis?"
Before Menedemos could speak, Sostratos did: "If it is, she's been washed in hot water once too often, because she's shrunk." That got a laugh from the men, and drew a grin and a wave from Menedemos. Sostratos mentally patted himself on the back for coming up with the right thing to say at the right time rather than two days too late. He prided himself on such moments, and wished they happened more often.
The Aphrodite passed within a couple of plethra of the whirlpool. Had it not been for Aristeidas' sharp eyes, nobody would have known it was there. An hour or so later, the merchant galley glided into the little sickle-shaped bay on whose south side the town of Messene sat.
Once the ship lay alongside a pier, Sostratos mentioned the whirlpool to one of the longshoremen who was making a rope fast. The fellow dipped his head. "You're lucky you came away with your lives," he said. "There's plenty of ships been sucked down to the bottom prow-first. They wash up, all broken to pieces, on the shore south of here."
Some of the sailors looked worried again. Sostratos said, "Sounds to me like a story to frighten strangers." The longshoreman gave him a sour stare. He concluded he was right.
As happened at any port around the Inner Sea, a small crowd of curious men gathered on the wharf by the Aphrodite. Menedemos began extolling the goods the akatos had brought to Messene. He also threw in tidbits of news from out of the east. In turn, the Messenians told him what they knew of the war raging farther south on the Sicilian coast. Unfortunately, they knew no more than the folk of Rhegion had.
Sostratos asked, "What will you do here if the Carthaginians do take Syracuse?"
That produced an unhappy silence in the crowd. At last, a skinny, gray-haired man said, "Hope they'll let us pay tribute and not put in a garrison."
"Not me!" a younger man said. "If it looks like the Carthaginians are going to take over all of Sicily, I'm getting out of here. I'm not taking any chances with those whoresons, not me. You know what happens when they sack a city?" He gave a melodramatic shudder.
Without a doubt, the Carthaginians did dreadful things when they took a city. So did Hellenes. Sostratos thought of what Alexander had done to Tyre not long after he was born. That story had been circulating for a generation now, and hadn't shrunk in the telling. Sostratos did a little discreet shuddering himself. Like every other Rhodian, he hoped none of Alexander's surviving generals would cast a covetous eye toward his polis.
As Hellenes had a way of doing, the Messenians standing on the pier divided into factions and started arguing with one another. Before long, they were paying hardly any attention to the Aphrodite: their own quarrel seemed more entertaining. Sostratos nudged Menedemos. "Why don't you run out the gangplank? I'll go into the agora and see if I can drum up some business."
"Good idea," his cousin said.
By the time Sostratos got up onto the pier, the locals were shouting insults at one another. A couple of them had hands on knife hilts, though nobody'd yet drawn a weapon. But with the shouts of "Traitor!" and "Liar!" flying back and forth, how long before someone did? Sostratos carefully picked his way around the edge of the crowd and headed up the pier toward dry land.
He hadn't been on that dry land more than a few heartbeats before he realized he'd have trouble finding the agora. Hippodamos and his ideas had never come to Messene. Streets and alleys and lanes didn't run in straight lines or intersect at right angles. They did exactly as they pleased, curving and twisting and doubling back on themselves. Had Sostratos gone out of sight of the harbor, he would have been lost in moments.
He was glad he figured that out before it happened. "How do I get to the agora?" he asked a man in a grimy chiton leading a donkey festooned with very plain clay pots.
The man didn't say anything. He just stopped in the middle of the street - incidentally blocking Sostratos' path - and waited. Sostratos wiggled his tongue to dislodge one of the oboloi he'd stashed between the inside of his cheek and his lower teeth. "Thanks, pal," the fellow with the donkey said as Sostratos handed him the wet, gleaming little coin. "What you do is, you . . ."
Sostratos made him go through it twice, then repeated the directions back to make sure he had them straight. "Is that right?" he asked when he was done.
"Sure is, pal," the Messenian said, and then added the words so often fatal to a stranger's hopes: "You can't miss it." Sostratos felt like spitting into his bosom to avert the omen. But that would have offended the local, who guided his donkey over by the mud-brick front of a house so Sostratos could squeeze past.
"Second right, third left, first right," Sostratos muttered, and, for a marvel, found the market square. He wondered if he could get back to the harbor again, and looked back into the alley from which he'd just emerged. "First left, third right, second left," he said, and then repeated it a couple of times so it would stick in his memory.
"Hail, stranger!" somebody called from behind a basket filled with dried chickpeas. "Where are you from, and what are you selling?"
Having sung his song in Rhegion the day before, Sostratos started singing it again. He traded news with the Messenians, though, as on the pier, they gave him none he hadn't already heard. Here, even more than in Rhegion and much more than in Taras, the people, while interested in what was going on in the east and in the struggles among Alexander's marshals, had other, more immediate, things on their minds. "D'you suppose there's a chance this Ptolemaios or Antigonos'd come west and put paid to the gods-detested Carthaginians once for all?" asked a fellow selling fried squid.
"I doubt it," Sostratos answered honestly. Everyone's face fell. He wished he'd been more diplomatic. Menedemos surely would have been.
A middle-aged man in a chiton of very fine, very soft wool came up to him and said, "Did I hear you say your ship had perfume on board?"
"You certainly did, perfume from the finest Rhodian roses." Sostratos studied the Messenian. The man had a sleek, prosperous look: just the sort of fellow to keep a mistress with expensive tastes. "If you like, you can tell your hetaira it came straight from Aphrodite. You don't have to say that's the name of my ship."
By the way the local started, Sostratos knew he'd made a good guess. "You're a clever chap, aren't you?" the Messenian said. "How much are you asking for this precious perfume?"
"For that, you need to go back to the harbor and talk to my cousin," Sostratos replied. "Menedemos is much more clever than I am." He didn't really think so, not when it came to most things, but Menedemos was at least as good a bargainer. And Sostratos had an ulterior motive: "Maybe she'd like a peafowl chick, too, or maybe you'd like to buy one for your own house to keep your wife happy even if you do give your hetaira a nice present."
The Messenian rubbed his chin, which was shaved very smooth: another sign of wealth, and also of fastidiousness. "You are clever," he said. "You look young to be married, so how do you know such things?"
"No, I'm not married," Sostratos agreed, "but I'm not wrong, either, am I?"
"No, though I wish you were. A peafowl chick, eh? That would keep Nossis quiet for a while."
Of course it will, Sostratos thought. Before long, the bird will make more noise, and worse, than even the most shrewish wife. He kept that to himself; the Messenian would find out soon enough if he bought. All Sostratos did say was, "Well, there you are, then," as if it were settled. By the way the Messenian strode out of the agora and off in the direction of the harbor, maybe it was.
Sostratos went right on extolling the goods aboard the Aphrodite till the sun sank toward the hills in back of Messene. Then he headed back toward the merchant galley. Trying to find his way through a strange polis in the dark was the last thing he wanted to do. He rememb
ered the turns the fellow in the ragged chiton had given him, and didn't get lost in a maze Minos might have envied.
There was the harbor, the wine-dark sea beyond dotted with fishing boats, almost all of them making for port now. There was the akatos, big and lean enough to frighten a fisherman out of his wits. And there, waving as Sostratos came down the pier toward the ship, was Menedemos. Sostratos waved back and asked, "How did it go?"
"Better than I expected," his cousin answered. "Sold a peafowl chick and some perfume and some Koan silk, all to a smooth fellow who wasn't too smooth to cough up more silver than he might have."
"If he's the man I think he is, he bought the perfume for a hetaira and the chick for his wife." Sostratos grinned. "I wonder who gets the silk."
"Not my worry - he can sort that out himself," Menedemos said. "I also sold some papyrus and ink to a skinny little man who told me he aimed to write an epic poem on the war between Syracuse and Carthage."
"Good luck to him," Sostratos said. "If the barbarians win and head north toward Messene here, he won't have much leisure for his hexameters. And if Agathokles somehow manages to beat back the Carthaginians, well, Syracuse isn't shy about throwing its weight around, either."
"True." Menedemos dipped his head. "But I can't think of anything much Agathokles could do. Can you?"
"No," Sostratos admitted. "Still, when Xerxes invaded Hellas, I don't suppose he thought the Hellenes could do anything against him, either."
"That's also true enough," Menedemos replied. "Just the same, I'm not sorry we'll be sailing north, and away from that war. Trying to fight off a four or a five with our little akatos is a losing bet." He spat into his bosom to avert the omen. Since Sostratos agreed completely, he did the same.
Over the Wine-Dark Sea Page 27
