Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  "Fair enough," his cousin said. "All things considered, the stop was worthwhile - we did make money here."

  "Well, so we did." Menedemos gruffly allowed Sostratos to let him down easy.

  Later, he sometimes wondered what would have happened had Sostratos chosen that afternoon to squabble. His life, and his cousin's, would have been very different. He was sure of that, if of nothing else.

  In Pompaia, the taverns and brothels lay close by the river. After returning to the Aphrodite, Menedemos sent Diokles and a double handful of sober sailors through them, making sure his crew would be in place and ready to go at dawn. "Tell 'em they can stay with the barbarians here if they don't want to come with you," he instructed the oarmaster.

  "Don't you worry about a thing, skipper," Diokles said. "I'll take care of it."

  And he did, too, with his usual unfussy competence. He had every sailor back aboard the merchant galley before the night could have been more than two hours old. That was a performance even Menedemos hadn't expected. "By the dog of Egypt, how did you manage?" he asked when Diokles returned with the last two sodden Hellenes.

  "Not so hard," the keleustes answered. "All I had to do was listen for real Greek. It would've been a lot tougher job down in one of the towns of Great Hellas."

  "All right. Good. You've done everything we've asked of you since we went out from Rhodes, Diokles, and you've done most things better than Sostratos or I would have hoped," Menedemos said. "When we get home, you'll find I haven't forgotten."

  "That's mighty kind of you, captain," the oarmaster said. "Me, I'm just doing my job."

  "And very well, too." Menedemos looked up to the flickering stars and yawned. "And now you'd better get some sleep. No matter how good a job you were doing, I'd bet you had maybe a cup of wine or two yourself while you were tracking down the boys who'd sooner drink or screw than row."

  "Who, me?" Diokles was the picture of innocence. "I don't know what you're talking about." He and Menedemos both laughed. Then he went to perch on a rower's bench and leaned against the planking of the ship, while Menedemos spread his himation on the poop deck and, the night being fine and mild, slept on it rather than under it.

  As he usually did, he woke with morning twilight in the air. When he went over to the rail to piss into the Sarnos River, he found Sostratos already standing there. "Good day," his cousin said.

  "Good day," Menedemos answered. Having made up his mind to leave, he was already starting to look ahead: "We should squeeze more silver out of Neapolis than we got here - a lot more, with luck."

  "Let's hope so," Sostratos said. "We should be there today, shouldn't we?"

  "Oh, yes, by Zeus," Menedemos said. "We should be there by noon, or not much later. We'll probably have to row most of the way, though - the breeze feels like it'll be blowing right in our face."

  "Maybe it'll swing round a bit once we get out onto the sea," Sostratos said.

  "May it be so," Menedemos said. "Come on, let's get the men up. The more we can do before the sun gets hot, the happier we'll all be. One thing - " He chuckled. "We've got all the fresh water we'll need for the trip."

  "There is that," his cousin agreed.

  As they got ready to disembark, Menedemos instructed the crew: "When I give the order to back oars, I want you to row hard. Our boat has to be clear of the next wharf farther downstream before the current pushes us into it. This business of moving is more complicated than it would be if we were moored in an ordinary seaside harbor."

  With Diokles calling the stroke, the Aphrodite did get out into the middle of the Sarnos without any trouble. Menedemos swung the ship's bow toward the mouth of the river. He took most of the men off the oars, but kept half a dozen on either side busy to add speed and precise direction to the current pushing the akatos out toward the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  A little naked herdboy watering his sheep at the riverbank waved to the Aphrodite as she glided past. Menedemos lifted a hand from the steering oars to wave back. Diokles said, "This is pretty settled country. A lot of places, he'd run from a ship for fear we'd grab him and sell him somewhere."

  "That's true. He'd bring two, three minai, even scrawny as he is." Menedemos shrugged. "More trouble than he's worth." He wondered if he would have said the same thing had the voyage not been turning a profit.

  At the bow, Aristeidas pointed ahead and called, "Thalassa! Thalassa!"

  "The sea! The sea!" The rest of the sailors took up the cry.

  Sostratos, on the other hand, started to laugh. "What's so funny?" Menedemos asked.

  "That's what Xenophon's Ten Thousand, or however many of them were left alive by then, called out when they came to the sea after they got away from the Persians," Sostratos answered.

  "Xenophon was an Athenian, wasn't he?" Menedemos said. When Sostratos dipped his head, Menedemos went on, "I'm surprised he didn't write, 'Thalatta! Thalatta!' instead." He pointed at his cousin. "Some of that Attic dialect has rubbed off on you - I've heard you say glotta for glossa and things like that."

  Hearing his tongue mentioned, Sostratos stuck it out. Menedemos returned the gesture. Sostratos said, "As a matter of fact, if I remember rightly, Xenophon did write, 'Thalattta!' "

  "Ha!" Menedemos felt vindicated. "I bet his soldiers, or most of them, said it the way Aristeidas just did."

  "You're probably right," Sostratos said. "But if you expect an Athenian to give up his dialect just because it doesn't match the way someone actually said something, you're asking too much."

  "I never expect anything from Athenians," Menedemos said. "They'll come up with better excuses for cheating you than . . ." His voice trailed away. His cousin's face had gone hard and cold. A few words too late, Menedemos remembered just how much Sostratos had enjoyed his time at Athens, and just how gloomy he'd been when he first came back to Rhodes. Doing his best to sound casual, Menedemos continued, "Well, I'd better keep my mind on sailing the ship."

  "Yes, that would be good." Sostratos sounded like a man holding in anger, too. Menedemos sighed. Sooner or later, he would have to make it up to his cousin.

  The Aphrodite wouldn't give him a hard time, not on a fine bright day like today, with only a lazy breeze and the lightest of chop ruffling the blue, blue surface of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Even so, he steered away from land; he wanted a few stadia of leeway between the merchant galley and the shore. You never can tell, he thought. Ashore, with just his own neck to worry about, he took chances that horrified the cautious Sostratos. At sea, with everything at stake . . . He tossed his head. Not usually.

  And so when, some time later that morning, Aristeidas called out, "Sail ho! Sail off the starboard bow!" Menedemos smiled and dipped his head. He wouldn't have to change course - that other ship, whatever it was, would pass well to leeward of him.

  But then Aristeidas called out again: "Sails to starboard, skipper! That's not just a ship - that's a regular fleet."

  Menedemos' eyes snapped toward the direction in which the lookout was pointing from the foredeck. He needed only a moment to spot the sails himself, and only another to recognize them for what they were. "All men to the oars!" he shouted. "That's a fleet of triremes, and they can have us for lunch if they want us!"

  Sailors ran to their places on the benches. Oars bit into the sea. Without waiting for an order from Menedemos, Diokles picked up the stroke. Menedemos swung the Aphrodite away from those low, lean, menacing shapes.

  They couldn't be anything but triremes: they sported foresails as well as mainsails, which smaller galleys like pentekonters and hemioliai never did. Looking back over his shoulder, Menedemos did his best to count them. He'd got to eighteen when Sostratos said, "There are twenty."

  "Twenty triremes!" Menedemos said. "That's not a pirate's outfit - that's a war fleet. But whose?"

  "Let's hope we don't find out," Sostratos said. "They're traveling under sail, and they look as if they know just where they want to go. May they keep right on going."

  "May it be so," Menedemo
s said. "They look like they're heading straight for the mouth of the Sarnos. Maybe they aim to raid Pompaia." He spoke before his cousin could: "If they do, it's a good thing we got out of there this morning. If they'd caught us tied up at the pier, they could have done whatever they pleased with us."

  "That's true, and I'm glad we're away, too," Sostratos said - as close as he came to I told you so, and not close enough to be annoying. Then he grunted, as if someone had hit him in the belly. "The trireme closest to us just brought out its oars. It's . . . swinging this way."

  Menedemos looked back over his shoulder. "Oh, a pestilence," he said softly. Sostratos was right, not that he'd really expected his cousin to be wrong. And when a full crew rowed a trireme, she fairly leaped through the water - she had a hundred seventy men at her three banks of oars, compared to the Aphrodite's forty on a single level. "Pick up the stroke," Menedemos told Diokles.

  "We're doing everything we can now, captain," the keleustes answered. "She's faster than we are, that's all." Menedemos cursed. He knew that. He knew it much too well. And if he hadn't known it, the way the trireme got bigger every time he looked at it would have told him.

  Sostratos was peering aft with a fascination somewhat less horrified and more curious. "There's a wolf painted on the mainsail," he remarked. "Who uses the wolf for an emblem?"

  "Who cares?" Menedemos snarled.

  To his surprise, Diokles said, "The Romans do - those Italians who're fighting the Samnites."

  "How do you know that?" Sostratos asked, as if discussing philosophy at the Lykeion in Athens.

  "Tavern talk," the oarmaster answered, as Menedemos had a few days before. "You hear all sorts of things sitting around soaking up wine."

  "How interesting," Sostratos said.

  "How interesting that we know who's going to sell us for slaves or knock us over the head and pitch us into the drink," Menedemos said. The trireme was gaining on the Aphrodite at a truly frightening rate. As he watched, the Romans - if they were Romans - brailed up the sails and stowed the mast and foremast. Like Hellenes, they would make their attack run under oar power alone.

  They weren't the best crew in the world, nor anything close to it. Every so often, a couple of oars would bang together or a rower would catch a crab. Their keleustes was probably yelling himself hoarse, trying to get more out of them. But they had so many men at the oars, their little mistakes hardly mattered. Against another trireme, they might have, but against an akatos with fewer than a quarter as many rowers? Not likely.

  Not likely if we keep running, anyhow - they'll just run us down, Menedemos thought. His men were rowing as if possessed, sweat streaming down their bare torsos. They couldn't hold such a pace much longer, and even this pace wasn't doing anything but putting off the inevitable.

  If we keep running, they catch us. But what can we do except keep running? All of a sudden, Menedemos laughed out loud. It was a slightly crazed laugh, or perhaps more than slightly - both Sostratos and Diokles sent him sharp looks. He knew just what it was: the laugh of a man with nothing to lose.

  "Port side!" he called, and the heads of the rowers on that side of the ship swung toward him. "Port side!" he sang out again, so they would be ready for whatever command he gave them. Then he shouted once more, and this time he gave the order: "Port side - back oars!"

  He felt like cheering at the way the men on the oars obeyed him. He had a good, tight crew, one of which he could be proud. Most of the men had pulled an oar on a Rhodian warship at one time or another, and his work and Diokles' had, as the saying went, beaten them into a solid, steady unit. The Romans behind them, he was sure, would have made a hash of the maneuver.

  He hauled back on one steering-oar tiller and forward on the other, aiding the Aphrodite's turn back toward her pursuer. As she spun on the surface of the Tyrrhenian Sea, he called out to the handful of sailors not on the oars, "Get the sail brailed up to the yard!" They too leaped to do his bidding.

  It was a godlike feeling, sure enough - and would have been even more so had he not known just how bad the odds against him still were. Sostratos said, "You're not going to attack them?" His voice broke like a youth's on the word he had trouble believing.

  "They'll run us down and ram us if we flee," Menedemos answered. "That's certain sure. This way, we have a chance."

  "A small chance," Sostratos said, which reflected Menedemos' thoughts altogether too well.

  He bared his teeth in what only looked like a smile. "Have you got a better idea, O cousin of mine?" After a long moment, Sostratos tossed his head.

  No sooner had he done so than Menedemos forgot about him. All his attention focused on the Roman trireme and on the rapidly narrowing stretch of water between them - down to a few stadia now. He raised his eyes from the trireme for an instant to look at the rest of the Roman fleet. The other ships were unconcernedly sailing on toward the mouth of the Sarnos. Their captains thought one trireme was plenty to chase down a merchant galley.

  They're liable to be right, Menedemos thought. No, by the gods - they're likely to be right.

  But then he tossed his head. He couldn't afford doubt now, not if he was to have even a small chance against that much larger ship. If Sostratos were at the steering oars now, would doubt paralyze him? Menedemos tossed his head again. He didn't have time to wonder, either.

  He watched the Roman trireme. It was cataphract - fully decked - as a bigger ship, a four or a five, would have been. Marines in bronze helms and corselets and nearly naked sailors ran about on the deck. Some of them pointed toward the Aphrodite. Faint across the water, he heard their shouts.

  They wonder what in Tartaros I'm up to. Maybe they think I've lost my mind. I wonder, too. Maybe I have.

  On came the trireme, looking bigger and fiercer with every heartbeat. Its ram, aimed straight at Menedemos' ship, sliced through the sea as smoothly as a shark's snout. Its oars rose and fell, rose and fell, with almost hypnotic unity. Almost - sure enough, that crew either hadn't been together long or wasn't well trained. Menedemos' rowers were much more professional - but, again, he measured forty men against the Roman captain's one hundred seventy. That gave the barbarian a lot of room for error . . . and Menedemos none whatever.

  More Roman marines came up on deck. The two ships were close enough now for Menedemos to see they carried bows. They were as jumpy as anyone else on either galley - they started shooting well before the ships were in range. One after another, their arrows splashed into the sea in front of the Aphrodite.

  But that wouldn't last, and Menedemos knew it. "Anyone who's wounded," he called, "get up from your oar if you're too badly hurt to keep rowing. You men who aren't at the oars, jump in as fast as you can. And everyone, by the gods! Listen for my commands and obey them the instant you hear them. If you do, we can beat that big, ugly, clumsy trireme. We can!"

  The rowers raised a cheer. Before Sostratos said anything, he came up close to Menedemos, which showed better sense than he sometimes used. In a low voice, he asked, "How can we beat that big, ugly, clumsy trireme?"

  "You'll see." Menedemos did his best to show the confidence he was also doing his best to feel. He patted his cousin on the arm. "Now do get out of the way, best one, if you'd be so kind. I have to be able to see straight ahead." For another wonder, Sostratos moved aside without argument.

  Arrows started thudding into the Aphrodite's planking. The two ships were only about three plethra apart now, and closing fast. Menedemos wished he had a catapult up on the foredeck, not cages full of peafowl chicks. A few of those darts would give the Romans something to think about! Of course, the catapult would also make the akatos bow-heavy as could be; not even a trireme could afford the weight of such an engine. A rower howled with pain. He sprang up from his bench, an arrow transfixing his right arm. Another sailor took his place. The Aphrodite scarcely faltered. Menedemos let out a silent sigh of relief.

  Each heartbeat felt as if it came about an hour after the one just past. Menedemos' gaze fixed on
the Roman trireme's ram. He could read the other captain's mind. If these mad merchants want a head-on collision. I'll give them one, the barbarian had to be thinking. My bigger ship will roll right over theirs and capsize it, sure as sure.

  Menedemos didn't want a head-on collision: that was, in fact, the last thing he wanted. But he had to make the Roman captain think he did up till the last possible instant, which was just about . . . now.

  Another wounded rower screamed, and another. Menedemos ignored them. He ignored everything, in fact, but the onrushing bulk of the enemy trireme and the feel of the steering-oar tillers in his hands.

  He tugged on the tillers ever so slightly, swinging the Aphrodite to port just before she and the trireme would have smashed together. At the same time, he cried out in a great voice: "Starboard oars - in!"

  As smoothly as they had in practice farther south, the rowers brought their oars inboard. Instead of ramming the Roman trireme, the Aphrodite glided along beside her, close enough to spit from one ship to the other. And the merchant galley's hull rode over the trireme's starboard oars and broke them as a man's descending foot would break the twigs of a child's toy house.

  Rowers aboard the Roman ship screamed as the butt ends of the oars, suddenly propelled by forces much greater than they could generate, belabored them. Menedemos heard two splashes in quick succession as Roman marines fell into the sea. Their armor would drag them down to a watery grave. His smile was fierce as a wolf's. He wanted to wave good-bye to them, but couldn't take his hands off the tillers.

  The Aphrodite slid past the crippled trireme. "Starboard oars - out!" Menedemos shouted, and his ship, undamaged, pulled away from the Roman vessel. He looked east. The rest of the Roman fleet had headed up the Sarnos. He was all alone with this ship that had tried to sink him. Now he did turn and wave to the man at the trireme's steering oars. The fellow was staring back over his shoulder at the merchant galley, his eyes as wide as any man's Menedemos had ever seen.