Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  Cape Pelorias, above Messene, marked the northeasternmost point of Sicily. With it falling astern and to port of the Aphrodite, Menedemos gave all his attention to the Tyrrhenian Sea ahead. Just because he'd escaped the war between Syracuse and Carthage didn't mean he or his ship was home free. He probably wouldn't fall foul of great war galleys here. But the Tyrrhenian Sea, not least because no great naval power lay anywhere near, swarmed with pirates.

  "Keep your eye peeled," he called to the lynx-eyed Aristeidas at the bow. "Sing out if you spy any sail or mast." The sailor waved to show he understood. Menedemos turned to Sostratos, who was doing lookout duty at the stern. "The same goes for you."

  "I know," his cousin said in injured tones.

  "Well, see that you remember," Menedemos said. "Don't let your wits go wandering, the way you . . . do when you start thinking about history." He'd started to say, The way you did when the peahen jumped into the sea, but checked himself. If he hadn't thrown that in Sostratos' face when it happened, doing so now hardly seemed fair. By the sour look his cousin sent him, Sostratos had a pretty good notion of what he hadn't said.

  To starboard, the Italian coast baked brown under the summer sun. Menedemos wore a broad-brimmed hat to help keep himself from baking likewise. Even so, sweat ran down his face. More sweat trickled down his torso, and down his arms to leave wet, dark patches where he gripped the steering-oar tillers.

  He steered the Aphrodite farther out to sea, till the coastline receded to a brown blur low on the horizon. That would make him harder to spot. Some of the fishing boats bobbing in the chop between the merchant galley and the shore didn't notice him: his sail was brailed up tight against the yard as the galley traveled north under oars. If I were a pirate and I wanted you, you'd be mine, he thought. A few boats did spot the Aphrodite and got away from what they thought to be danger as fast as they could.

  He was swinging northeast toward the harbor of Hipponion - not a splendid anchorage, but the best he could hope to find - when Aristeidas called out, "Sail ho! Sail ho to port!"

  Shading his eyes against the late-afternoon sun, Menedemos peered out to sea. With more and more sailors pointing, he soon spotted the sail. It was of a good size, which warned him it might belong to a pirate. And it was of a color somewhere between sky blue and sea green, which argued that the captain of the ship to whom it belonged did not much want it seen.

  "I'll show him, the son of a whore," Menedemos muttered to himself. He raised his voice to a shout: "All hands, grab your weapons and then to your oars!" As soon as the rowers had swords and knives and clubs ready to hand, he swung the Aphrodite toward the strange ship and told Diokles, "Up the stroke."

  "Right you are, skipper," the keleustes replied. "You going to try and run him off, the way you did with that pirate back in the Aegean?"

  "That's just what I'm going to do," Menedemos said. "And if he wants a fight, well, by the gods, we'll give him one."

  Before long, he could see the pirate's hull as well as his sail. That the sail always came into sight before the hull made some people think the world was round. Menedemos had his doubts about that. If it were round, wouldn't all the water run off? He'd never found an answer to satisfy him there.

  The question didn't worry him for long. Taking the measure of the enemy was much more urgent. "He's a pentekonter!" Sostratos called from the waist.

  Menedemos dipped his head. "I see," he answered. The pirate had fifty rowers, then, to his own forty, and a hull shark-long and wolf-lean. The other ship sliced through the water like a knife. Menedemos saw at once that it had a better turn of speed than the Aphrodite.

  But does he have the stones for a fight? Menedemos was betting his ship, his cargo, his freedom, his life, that the pirate didn't. Most sea raiders wanted nothing more than to rob victims who couldn't resist. What was better than profit without risk? If this pirate turned out to be an exception, though, he might end up naked and chained in a slave market in Carthage . . . or down at the bottom of the sea, with little crabs crawling in through the eyeholes of his skull to feast on whatever they could find inside.

  Over in the pirate ship, men shouted and shook their fists at the oncoming Aphrodite. Some of the shouts were in Greek, others in one local language or another. The Aphrodite's sailors shouted curses and obscenities in return. A naked pirate stood up on his bench and flapped his private parts at the Aphrodite's crew, as if he were a man in the agora making himself disgusting to the slave women and poor farmers' wives who came there to shop and gossip.

  "I've seen bigger pricks on a mouse!" Diokles yelled, not missing a stroke with mallet and bronze. The exhibitionist pirate sat down abruptly; he must have understood enough Greek for that shaft to strike home.

  And then all the Aphrodite's crew erupted in cheers: just out of bowshot, the pirate ship heeled hard to starboard as it turned away from the merchant galley. It headed north in a hurry, the sail coming up to lie against the yard. "Ease back on the men," Menedemos told Diokles. "Not a chance we'll be able to catch 'em. We saw that back in the Aegean, too."

  "Right again," the oarmaster said. "The way he's running, you'd think he had a five on his tail."

  "The way he's running, a five wouldn't catch him, either," Menedemos said. "A hemiolia might, or a trireme. But a five's too beamy and heavy and slow, just like us." He shook his fist at the receding pentekonter.

  "I'd like to see everybody aboard there nailed to a cross," Diokles said. "Come to that, I'd like to see every pirate everywhere nailed to a cross."

  "So would I, but I don't think it's going to happen," Menedemos answered. "For one thing, you'd run out of trees before you made enough crosses to put all the pirates on."

  The oarmaster grunted and spat into the sea. "Heh. That'd be funny if only it was funny, you know what I mean?"

  "Don't I just?" Menedemos raised his voice to call out to all the rowers: "Well done, men! We scared off another vulture. Now - portside back oars, starboard side forward." Almost in her own length, the Aphrodite spun to port. When her bow pointed back toward Hipponion, Menedemos took half the rowers from each side off the oars and headed toward the harbor, now a few stadia more distant than it had been when Aristeidas first spotted the pentekonter.

  "Never a dull moment," Sostratos said, mounting the steps that led up from the waist to the poop deck.

  "Did you expect there would be?" Menedemos asked. "If you wanted things dull, you should have stayed back in Rhodes."

  "They're liable not to be dull even there," Sostratos said. "Who knows what the Macedonians are up to while we're out here in the west?"

  "You're right," Menedemos said after a moment. "I could wish you were wrong, but you're right."

  "I hope the generals aren't doing anything," his cousin said. "If they are doing something, I hope they're doing it to one another, not to Rhodes. But when you live in a polis in an age full of marshals, you can't help worrying."

  "No, you can't." Menedemos thought about coming back to a Rhodes garrisoned by Antigonos' soldiers, or Ptolemaios'. He imagined mercenaries swaggering through the streets, with rich families hostages for the good behavior of the city as a whole. His own family was far from poor. Not for the first time, he wished Sostratos hadn't made him think so much.

  Looking ahead to the Italian coastline bathed in the rays of the setting sun helped him not think about what might be happening far away to the east. Maybe Sostratos was doing his best not to think about that, too, for he pointed toward the shore and said, "It's greener by the town than it is most other places."

  "Some people say Persephone used to come over there from Sicily to gather flowers," Menedemos answered. "I don't know whether that's true or not, but the girls from Hipponion go out to those meadows and make themselves flower garlands for festivals and such."

  "How do you know that?" Sostratos asked. "You've never been here before."

  "Tavern talk," Menedemos told him. "You miss a lot of things like that, because you don't like sitting around
and chatting with sailors."

  "I don't like going through a talent's weight of talk for half an obolos' worth of something interesting," Sostratos said tartly.

  "But you never know ahead of time what will turn out to be interesting," Menedemos said.

  Sostratos tossed his head. "No. You never know if anything will turn out to be interesting. Usually, nothing is. Most tavern talk is people lying about fish they say they caught and men they say they killed and women they say they had. I don't know how Persephone's name ever came up in a tavern, unless you were drinking with Hades."

  That jerked a laugh from Menedemos. "I wasn't talking about Persephone, exactly. I was talking about Hipponion, and what the anchorage is like." He pointed ahead. "It's nothing much, is it?"

  "No." Sostratos tossed his head again. "You almost wonder why anyone ever decided to build a polis here."

  "You do. You really do," Menedemos agreed. "No proper bay to shelter a ship - just a long, straight stretch of coastline. The Hipponians haven't done anything to improve what they found here, either, have they? No mole to protect ships from waves and weather, hardly any quays. If Odysseus did sail up this way, he'd still feel right at home nowadays."

  "If Odysseus did sail up this way, he did it in a pentekonter," Sostratos said. "Most of the Danaans who sailed to Troy went in pentekonters, if the Catalogue of Ships is right. To the Trojans, they were probably nothing but the biggest pirate fleet in the world."

  Menedemos stared at his cousin. "Do you know something?" he said at last. "I care for Homer more than you do, I think."

  "I'm sure you're right," Sostratos said. "He's a great poet, but he's not the man I turn to first."

  "I know that," Menedemos said. "Still and all, though, you just made me look at the Iliad in a way I never did before. Who would have thought of trying to see things from the Trojans' point of view?"

  He kept right on marveling as Diokles brought the Aphrodite to a stop not far offshore and the anchors at the bow splashed into the deep-blue water of the Tyrrhenian Sea. When Priamos and Hektor peered out from the windswept walls of Troy, how did they look at Agamemnon and Menelaos and Akhilleus and Odysseus? As a pack of gods-detested bandits who all deserved to be crucified? Menedemos wouldn't have been a bit surprised.

  Sostratos might have been thinking along with him. He said, "I wonder how the Iliad would sound if Troy hadn't fallen."

  "Different," Menedemos said, and they both laughed. Menedemos went on, "I'm sure it's better the way it really is." The effort holding that other perspective too quickly became too much for him. Sostratos didn't disagree. When morning comes, Menedemos thought as he stretched himself out on the poop deck, my mind will work the way a proper Hellene's ought to again.

  When morning came, Sostratos' mind was still buzzing with the notion he and Menedemos had had the night before. "When Alexander invaded Persia," he said, "Dareios probably thought the Macedonians were a horde of barbarians, too. And from what I've seen of Macedonians since, he probably had a point."

  To his disappointment, Menedemos didn't feel like exploring the idea any further. "The Persians had it coming to them," was all he said.

  Sostratos dipped a barley roll into olive oil. "I suppose you'll say the Trojans had it coming to them, too," he said, and took a bite.

  "Well, of course they did," Menedemos answered with his mouth full; his breakfast was the same as Sostratos'.

  "Why is that, O best one?" Sostratos asked with honey-sweet venom. "Because Paris ran off with Menelaos' wife?"

  "Why else?" Menedemos answered. Then he must have realized Sostratos hadn't been talking only about the Trojan War. Sostratos enjoyed the dirty look his cousin gave him. "Funny," Menedemos said. "Very funny. If I see Gylippos in a fast pentekonter, then I'll start to worry."

  "When we're going back toward Rhodes, do you plan on putting in at Taras?" Sostratos asked.

  Menedemos gave him another dirty look. Sostratos didn't enjoy this one nearly so much, because his cousin looked harried, too. "Don't ask me things like that right now," Menedemos said. "It depends on how much we've still got to get rid of by the time we're heading back from Neapolis. I suppose it also depends on just how angry with me Gylippos really is."

  "How many toughs did he send after you?" Sostratos asked. "Nine?"

  "Only seven," Menedemos told him.

  "Excuse me," Sostratos said. "I do like to have the details straight. I would say that sending even seven toughs after you is a pretty good sign you won't be welcome in Taras again any time soon."

  "I'd have to be careful in Taras, no doubt," Menedemos said . . . carefully. "No way to tell yet if things will be as bad there as they are in Halikarnassos. I hope they won't."

  "They'd better not be," Sostratos said. "I'm not sure you could bring a ship into the harbor at Halikarnassos without getting it burned to the waterline - which is a shame, because the family's done a lot of business there over the years."

  Menedemos walked over to the rail, hiked up his tunic, and pissed into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Looking back over his shoulder, he answered, "Believe me, I've had this conversation with my father a good many times."

  Then why didn't you listen to him? Sostratos wondered. Why didn't you try to look at things from the point of view of the man whose wife you were enjoying? He knew the answer well enough. Because when your lance stood, that was all you cared about. Some men were naturally bestial, and needed no Kirke to turn them into swine. But Menedemos wasn't really like that. He could think, and think quite well. Sometimes, though, he didn't bother.

  He did handle the Aphrodite with his usual competence, sending her north up the coast. "No good anchorage tonight," he told the crew. "No proper harbor, I mean. Plenty of beaches, but do you really want to risk putting her ashore?"

  Almost as one man, the sailors tossed their heads. Italy was a populous land, swarming with Samnites and other barbarians. Nobody was eager to give robbers a chance to swoop down on the ship.

  "Sensible fellows," Menedemos said. Sostratos wondered what he would have said had the sailors wanted to beach the Aphrodite. Something interesting and memorable: of that Sostratos had no doubt. As things were, his cousin continued, "Since we don't have to hurry to make a port tonight, we're going to spend some more time pretending we're a war galley."

  That didn't produce unanimous agreement from the crew. Sostratos hadn't thought it would. Practicing naval maneuvers was hard work, much harder than just sailing the akatos north would have been. And, of course, there was no guarantee the sailors would need what they were practicing. If they didn't, they would have put in all that effort for nothing.

  Of course, if they didn't practice and ended up needing to fight, that would carry its own penalty, too: a penalty worse than blistered hands and weary backs. Sostratos could see that as plainly as he could look down and see his feet on the deck. He wondered why it wasn't obvious to everyone.

  But the grumbling wasn't too bad. Before long, the Aphrodite zigged first one way, then the other. She spun in her own length, moving much faster than she had when turning back toward Hipponion after the pentekonter sheered off. "Starboard oars - in!" Diokles shouted, and the rowers on that side of the ship pulled their oars inboard at the same time.

  The oarmaster glanced at Menedemos, who grinned back at him. "I've seen triremes where they didn't do it so smoothly," Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head.

  "Same here." Diokles turned back to the rowers. "Resume!" The starboard oars went back into the water in the same unison with which they'd left it. The keleustes let the men row for a few strokes, then shouted, "Portside oars - in!" This time, the maneuver proved less successful; a couple of oars came in slower than they might have.

  "That's not so good." Sostratos and Menedemos spoke together.

  "I know it isn't." The oarmaster sounded angry and chagrined. When he yelled, "Resume!" this time, he didn't try to hide that annoyance. He went right on at an irate bellow: "Now listen to me, you worthless lugs - if we
ever need that command, we'll need it bad. If you're late, it's your arms that'll get wrenched out of their shoulder sockets. We're going to keep working on this till we get it right - right, do you hear me?"

  All the portside rowers were, of course, looking straight back toward the keleustes on the poop deck. Like Epimetheus in the myth, rowers had a perfect view of where they'd been and none of where they were going. Sostratos eyed their sweaty faces more openly than he could have most of the time, because they were paying him no attention at all, but were listening to Diokles' tirade. Most of them, especially the ones who'd been slow, looked embarrassed and angry - not at the oarmaster, but at themselves for failing him.

  To Menedemos, Sostratos murmured, "If I talked to them like that, they'd throw me over the side."

  "They'd do the same to me," his cousin answered. "They'll obey me; sure enough, but a skipper shouldn't scream at his sailors. That's what makes mutinies happen: they think you're a gods-detested whoreson. But they respect a tough keleustes - the fellow in that job's supposed to have a hide thick as leather."

  Sostratos pondered that. Menedemos had the knack for getting men to do what he wanted because they liked him. Diokles was ready to outroar anyone who presumed to stand against him. And what about me? Sostratos wondered. Neither of those ways seemed open to him. When people did what he wanted, it was because he'd persuaded them that that was the right thing to do under the circumstances. Such persuasion had its uses, but not, he feared, in emergencies.

  Again and again, Diokles shouted, "Portside oars - in!" After a while, Sostratos thought the rowers had the maneuver down cold, but the keleustes kept drilling them. When at last he relented, it was with a growled warning: "We'll do it again tomorrow, too. We're talking about saving your necks, remember."

  At sunset, the anchors splashed into the sea. The Aphrodite bobbed in light chop, well off the Italian coast. Even if a storm blew up, the ship had plenty of leeway - and galleys were far less vulnerable to being driven ashore by hostile wind and wave than were ships that relied on sails alone.