Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  "Agathokles' sally, of course," he said now. "It all fits together, don't you see? Agathokles had to use something to break the Carthaginians' blockade if he was going to get his own fleet loose. What would be more likely to make the Carthaginians move than a gaggle of nice, fat grain ships?"

  Menedemos stared. It did fit together, provided . . .. "That Agathokles must be one sneaky rogue." He held up a hand; this time, he was running even with Sostratos. "We already know he is, from the way he treated his enemies."

  "We can't prove any of this, you know," Sostratos said. "I wonder if Antandros would tell us."

  "If you ask him, I'll hit you over the head with the biggest pot I can pick up," Menedemos said. "How can you be clever enough to see plots and schemes and foolish enough to want to get in trouble sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong, both at the same time?"

  "Hmm." Sostratos pondered again. "Well, maybe you're right."

  "I should hope so!" Menedemos said. "Are you going to stay aboard the Aphrodite tonight?"

  "I think so," Sostratos replied. "Why?"

  Menedemos grinned. That was the answer he'd wanted to hear. "Why? Because, O best one, I intend to go into Syracuse and celebrate getting here without getting sunk the way such things ought to be celebrated."

  "You're going to have a couple of girls and you're going to get so drunk you won't remember having them," Sostratos said with distaste.

  "Right!" Menedemos said. His cousin rolled his eyes. Menedemos couldn't have cared less about his cousin's opinion.

  * * *

  As the oarsmen rowed the Aphrodite's boat across the narrow channel separating the Sicilian mainland from the island of Ortygia, Sostratos took a certain somber satisfaction in Menedemos' condition. His cousin's eyes were red, his face sallow. He shaded his eyes from the sun with the palm of his hand. Even though the sea in the Little Harbor was calm as could be, he kept gulping as if he were about to lean over the gunwale and feed the fish.

  "I hope you had a good time last night," Sostratos said sweetly.

  "I certainly did," Menedemos answered - not too loud. "This one girl - by the gods, she could suck the pit right out of an olive. But . . ." He grimaced. "Now I'm paying the price. If my head fell off, it'd do me a favor."

  Sostratos hadn't had the pleasure, but he didn't have the pain, either. As he usually did, he thought that a good bargain. The boat slid up to one of the quays on Ortygia. The fellow standing on the quay looked more like a majordomo than the usual harborside roustabout, but he made the boat fast. As he did so, he asked, "And you are . . .?"

  "I'm Menedemos son of Philodemos, captain of the merchant galley Aphrodite," Menedemos told him, still speaking softly. He pointed to Sostratos. "This is my toikharkhos, Sostratos son of Lysistratos."

  "You will be here for payment, I expect?" the Syracusan servitor said.

  Menedemos dipped his head, then winced. Carefully not smiling, Sostratos said, "That's right."

  "Come with me, then," the servitor said, and walked off toward a small, metal-faced gate in the frowning wall of gray stone that warded the rulers of Syracuse from their enemies. Over the past hundred years, those rulers had had a good many foes from whom they needed protection. Not only had the Athenians and Carthaginians besieged the city, but it had also gone through endless rounds of civil strife. I don't always remember how lucky I am to live in a place like Rhodes, Sostratos thought. Coming to a polis that's seen the worst of what its own people can do to one another ought to remind me.

  Inside the grim wall, Ortygia proved surprisingly lush. Fruit trees grew on grassy swards that sheep cropped close. The shade was welcome. So were the perfumes of oleander and arbutus and lavender. Sostratos breathed deeply and sighed with pleasure.

  So did Menedemos. "I'm glad to be here," he said. "The light doesn't hurt my eyes nearly so much as it did before."

  "That's because you're in the shade now," Sostratos said: only tiny patches of sunlight dappled the path along which they were walking.

  "No, I don't think so," Menedemos replied. "I guess my hangover is going away faster than I thought it would."

  Sostratos scarcely heard him. He was staring at those little sundapples, the places where light slid through gaps in the leaves above. They should have been round. They should have been, but they weren't. They were so many narrow crescents, as if the early moon had broken into hundreds or thousands or myriads of pieces, each shaped like the original.

  He looked into the morning sky. It did seem dimmer than it should have, and more so by the moment. Alarm and something greater than alarm, something he belatedly recognized as awe, prickled through him. "I don't think it's your hangover," he said in a voice hardly above a whisper. "I think it's an eclipse."

  The sky kept getting darker, as if dusk were falling. The chatter of wagtails and chaffinches died away. The breeze caressing Sostratos' cheek felt cooler than it had. But his shiver when he peered up toward the sun had nothing to do with that. Like the shadows, it too had been pared to a skinny crescent.

  "By the gods!" Menedemos was whispering, too. "You can see some of the brighter stars."

  So Sostratos could. And seeing them, oddly, touched a chord of memory in him. Speaking a little louder than he had before, he said, " 'In the same summer, at the time of the new moon - since, indeed, it seems to be possible only then - the sun was eclipsed after noon and was restored to its former size once more: it became crescent-shaped, and certain stars appeared.' "

  "It's not after noon," the Syracusan servitor said, his voice raucous in the sudden, uncanny gloom. "It's only about the third hour of the morning."

  Menedemos knew his cousin far better than the stranger did. He asked, "What are you quoting from?"

  "Thoukydides' history, the second book," Sostratos answered. "That eclipse happened the year the Peloponnesian War broke out, more than a hundred and twenty years ago. The world didn't end then, so I don't suppose it will now." He shivered, hoping he was right. In the face of something like this, rationality came hard, hard.

  Screams - from women and men both - showed that a lot of people weren't making the least effort to stay rational. "A horrible monster is eating the sun!" someone howled in accented Greek.

  "Is he right?" the servitor with Sostratos and Menedemos asked anxiously. "You fellows sound like you know something about it."

  Sostratos tossed his head. "No, he's mistaken. It's a natural phenomenon. And look - it's one that doesn't last long. See? It's already getting lighter."

  "Gods be praised!" the servitor said.

  "I can't make out the stars any more." Menedemos sounded sad.

  Birds started singing again. The clamor that had echoed through Ortygia - and, no doubt, through all of Syracuse - ebbed. The small speckles of sunlight on the ground and walls remained crescent-shaped rather than round, but the crescents seemed wider to Sostratos than they had when the eclipse was at its height.

  "Well, that's something I can tell my grandchildren about, if I live to have any." Agathokles' man - Antandros' now - recovered his aplomb quickly.

  So did Menedemos. "Lead on, if you would," he told the fellow.

  Following them both, Sostratos thought, I should be making notes, or at least standing still and remembering all I can. When will I see another eclipse? Never, probably. But he kept on after his cousin and the servitor. With a sigh, he strode into the palace from which Agathokles had ruled Syracuse and in which his brother now held sway for him.

  Before they came into Antandros' presence, more servitors patted them most thoroughly to make sure they carried to weapons. Sostratos thought himself more likely to want to kill someone after that sort of indignity than before it, but kept quiet.

  Antandros sat on what wasn't quite a throne. He was older than Sostratos had expected; he'd lost much of his hair, and gray streaked what remained. When a steward murmured to him who Sostratos and Menedemos were, he leaned toward the man with a hand cupped behind his ear. "What was that?" he asked. The st
eward repeated himself, louder this time. "Oh," Antandros said. "The chaps from the akatos." He turned his gaze on the two Rhodians. "Well, young men, between the Carthaginians and the eclipse, I'd bet you've had more excitement the past couple of days than you really wanted."

  We certainly have! Sostratos thought. But before he could speak, Menedemos said, "I always thought a quiet life was a boring life, sir."

  Antandros held his hand behind his ear again. "What was that?" As the steward had, Menedemos repeated himself. Antandros said, "My little brother would agree with you. Me, I don't mind sleeping soft in my own bed with a full belly every now and again, and that's the truth."

  I'm with you, Sostratos thought. But Antandros' homely desires went a long way toward explaining why Agathokles ruled Syracuse and his older brother served him.

  "How many sacks of grain did you bring into the polis?" Antandros asked.

  Menedemos looked to Sostratos, trusting him to have the number at his fingertips. And he did: "It was 791, sir," he replied, loud enough to let the man in charge of Syracuse hear him the first time.

  Antandros' smile showed a missing front tooth. "Paying you won't even hurt. A merchant galley doesn't hold much next to a round ship, does she?"

  "She wasn't built to haul grain, sir," Sostratos agreed, "but we were glad to help your polis as best we could." Menedemos was, anyhow.

  Amusement sparked in Antandros' eyes. Sostratos got the feeling Agathokles' brother knew he was lying. But all Antandros said was, "You'll be glad to get paid, too, won't you?"

  "Yes, sir." Sostratos wouldn't deny the obvious.

  "You will be," Antandros said. "No, you aren't made for hauling grain, sure enough. What other cargo have you got aboard?"

  "Rhodian perfume, Koan silk, Ariousian from Khios, papyrus and ink - and peafowl chicks," Sostratos answered.

  "What was that last?" Hearing something unfamiliar, Antandros hadn't got it.

  "Peafowl chicks," Sostratos said again. "We sold the grown peacock and peahens earlier, mostly in Taras."

  "Can't let the polluted Tarentines get ahead of Syracuse," Antandros exclaimed. "Now we have plenty of grain to feed birds, too - plenty of grain to feed everyone. We went from hungry to fat in one fell swoop when the fleet got in. What do you want for these chicks? And how many have you got?"

  "We have seven left, sir." Sostratos flicked a glance toward Menedemos. His cousin's lips silently shaped a word. Sostratos fought back the urge to whistle in astonishment. Menedemos didn't do things by halves. But Sostratos had, in a way, asked, and the gamble struck him as good, too. In a calm voice, he went on, "We want three minai apiece."

  The steward looked horrified. Privately, Sostratos didn't blame him a bit. "I'll take all of them," Antandros said. "To the crows - no, to the peafowl - with the Tarentines. As soon as I get the chance, I'll send one on to my little brother in Africa."

  "Ahh!" With the pleasure of curiosity satisfied and a guess confirmed, Sostratos forgot about the dismayed steward. "So that's what Agathokles was up to! He is sailing around the north side of Sicily, then?"

  "That's right." Antandros dipped his head. "Up till now, all the fighting in this war has been here in Sicily. But my brother decided it was time for the Carthaginians to see how they like war among their wheatfields and olive trees. No one has ever invaded their homeland - till now."

  "May he give them a good kick in the ballocks, then," Menedemos said. Sostratos thought the same thing. The Macedonian marshals littering the landscape in the east of the Hellenic world were bad enough. Having barbarians overrunning poleis in Great Hellas struck him as even worse.

  A moment later, he wondered why. What could the Carthaginians have visited on Syracuse that Hellenes hadn't already inflicted on other Hellenes? The question struck him as no great compliment to Carthage, but rather a judgment on what Hellenes had visited on one another.

  Antandros spoke to the steward: "Take them to the treasury. Pay them for the grain and for these birds."

  "Yes, sir," the steward replied, though he looked as if he would have said something else had he dared. He turned to Sostratos and Menedemos. "Come with me, O best ones." He didn't sound as if he meant that, either.

  Can it be this simple? Sostratos wondered as he followed the steward out of what would have been the throne room had Agathokles called himself a king. Will Antandros really just pay us for the grain and the peafowl and send us on our way? Nothing this whole voyage has been that simple.

  Seeing the treasury did nothing to reassure him. Ortygia was a fortress. The rulers of Syracuse stored their silver and gold in a fortress within a fortress, behind massive stone walls, gates whose valves seemed to Sostratos as thick as his own body, and a veritable phalanx of soldiers: some Hellenes, others Italians and Kelts. Sostratos tried to imagine what those soldiers would have done had he and Menedemos approached them without the steward's protective company. He wasn't sorry to find himself failing.

  But the steward, whatever he thought, did not dare disobey Antandros. The clerk to whom he spoke looked surprised, but asked no questions. How long would a man who asked questions last in Syracuse? Sostratos couldn't have gauged it by the water clock, but thought he knew the answer nonetheless: not long.

  Instead of asking those dangerous questions, the clerk started bringing out leather sacks. When Sostratos hefted one, he asked the fellow, "A mina?" The clerk dipped his head and went back for more silver. By the time he was done, what seemed like a small mountain of sacks stood on the broad stone counter that separated him from the two Rhodians.

  Solemnly, Menedemos said, "We have just made a profit."

  "So we have," Sostratos said. "I ought to count the drakhmai in a few of these sacks." Cheating by one part in twenty, maybe even one part in ten, would be easy if the treasury clerk didn't offer the use of a set of scales to weight the silver, something he showed no sign of doing.

  The silence that came crashing down was so very frigid, it put Sostratos in mind of snow: only a word to most Rhodians, since none had fallen on his island in all the days of his life, or, for that matter, his father's, but he'd seen the stuff in a hard winter in Athens. Now Menedemos spoke quickly: "I think we're all right."

  "But - " Sostratos was the sort of man who liked to see everything pegged down tight, so there could be no possible doubt about where it lay.

  "I said, I think we're all right." As if trying to get something across to Antandros, Menedemos spoke louder than he had to. He spoke so loud, in fact, that his voice echoed from the stone walls and ceiling of the treasury.

  Hearing those echoes reminded Sostratos of exactly where he was. It also reminded him of his earlier thought about what happened to Syracusans who asked questions. That thought led to another: what would happen to a stranger who asked questions in Syracuse? Sostratos decided he didn't really want to find out the answer to that one.

  "Well, I suppose we are, too," he said, with what he hoped wasn't too sheepish a smile. Menedemos' sigh of relief was loud enough to raise echoes, too. The steward and the treasury clerk relaxed.

  Menedemos said, "Could we have two large leather sacks and a couple of guards to take us back to the Aphrodite's boat? This is a lot of silver, and all of Ortygia knows by now that we're getting it."

  When the steward hesitated, Sostratos said, "If you like, they could come across to the akatos with us, and bring the peafowl chicks and their cages back for Antandros."

  "All right." The steward dipped his head. "That does make sense."

  Sostratos felt like cheering. The peafowl had been a weight on his back like the world on Atlas' ever since he first heard the peacock screech in the Great Harbor at Rhodes. Now, at last, after spring and most of summer, he would be free of it. He hadn't known just how heavy it was till he faced the prospect of having it lifted from him.

  And he gave a sigh of relief of his own when the guards the steward summoned proved to be Hellenes. Had he had a couple of tall, beefy Kelts for an escort, he would have worri
ed that they might set on Menedemos and him. Of course, Hellenes could be light-fingered and murderous, too, but he chose not to dwell on that.

  "How much money have you got there?" one of these fellows asked in interested tones.

  "As much as Antandros wanted us to have," Menedemos answered before Sostratos could come up with a reply to a question with so many implications. He admired the one his cousin had found.

  From somewhere or other, the rowers in the Aphrodite's boat had got hold of a jar of wine. When they took the Syracusan soldiers across the narrow channel to the merchant galley's berth in the Little Harbor, their stroke suggested that this was the first time they'd ever handled oars in their lives. Sostratos was embarrassed. Menedemos, plainly, was mortified. He couldn't even yell at the men without making them all look even worse to the Syracusans than they did already.

  Menedemos cursed in a low voice as he boarded the Aphrodite. But Sostratos' exasperation melted away as sailors loaded the peafowl chicks and their cages into the boat. He even tossed the two Syracusans a drakhma each, more in sympathy with them for having to deal with the birds than as a tip for getting him and Menedemos back to the akatos unrobbed.

  "Thank you kindly, O best one," one soldier said. The other waved and grinned. The boat's crew took them back to Ortygia. The channel between mainland and island was narrow enough to let them escape misfortune.

  As the crew returned - still rowing most erratically - Sostratos said, "It's a good thing they didn't have to do anything difficult."

  "What's so good about it?" Menedemos growled. He screamed at the men in the boat: "You idiots! If you're on your own polluted time, I don't care what you do, you whipworthy rogues. I'll do it right alongside you, as a matter of fact. But you've got no business - none, not a dust speck's worth - getting drunk when you know you're going to have to do something important in a little while. Suppose Sostratos and I had been running for our lives. Could you have got us away safe? Not likely!"

  The rowers wore wide, wine-filled, placating smiles, like so many dogs that had somehow angered the leader of their pack. One of them said, "Sorry, skipper. That eclipse knocked us for a loop, it did. And everything worked out all right." His grin got wider and more foolish.