Over the Wine-Dark Sea

by Harry Turtledove

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that, Father," Menedemos answered blandly. "She got very sweaty by the time we were through."

  His father rolled his eyes. "I've got a cockhound for a son. Everything I've work so hard to get will end up in some hetaira's hands when I'm dead."

  "With what I brought home from Great Hellas, I could keep three of the greediest hetairai in the world happy for a long time, and the family would still be ahead," Menedemos said.

  "That's what you think," Philodemos said. "You have no idea how greedy and grasping a woman can be."

  "What I have no idea of right now is why I bothered coming home," Menedemos snapped. "It seems everything I've ever done is wrong."

  "You said it. I didn't." Philodemos stalked out of the andron, his spine stiff with triumph. Menedemos made a face at him behind his back. Then he headed off to the kitchen; satisfying one appetite in his room had left him with another unslaked.

  He took some olives and cheese. The cook warned him, "If you touch one scale - even one scale, mind you - on the mullet I've got there for supper, I'll snatch you baldheaded. I mean it. This is my domain, by the gods."

  Laughing, Menedemos said, "All right, Sikon. Till you work your magic on that mullet, I don't want it anyway. Maybe a starving man would eat a raw fish, but I wouldn't."

  He stood in the doorway, out of the rain, while he ate his snack. Sikon kept railing at him with the license a skilled and privileged slave enjoyed. Menedemos laughed. With Sikon yelling, he could afford to laugh. The cook's barbs didn't get under his skin and rankle, the way his father's did. He spat an olive pit out into the courtyard. It landed in a puddle with a splash. He ate another olive and spat again, seeing if he could make this pit go farther than the one before. When he spat a third pit, he wanted it to go farther than either of the other two.

  I wish Sostratos were here, he thought. We could bet oboloi. I'd beat him, too, even if I had to make silly faces so he'd laugh and spit badly. If he got into any kind of contest, he wanted to win it. Imagining how furious Sostratos would be if his antics ruined a spit made him smile. The next time they ate olives together . . .

  His good mood quite restored, he looked across the courtyard. He could probably go back to his room without running into his father. Probably. He hung around in the kitchen, enduring Sikon's insults, for a while longer. He didn't want to risk that better mood, and it wouldn't survive another meeting with Philodemos.

  What do I do when I get to my room? he wondered. Play the lyre, maybe? He shrugged. He was no marvelous musician. The lyre had hardly come off its pegs on the wall since his school days; the kitharist who'd taught him had been too free with the switch to give him any love for the instrument.

  After a while, he squelched across the courtyard and started up the stairs. At the same time, someone else started down them. He cursed under his breath. If that was his father . . . But it wasn't; the voice that said, "Hail, Menedemos," was thin, light, and feminine.

  "Oh," Menedemos said. "Good day, Baukis." He hoped his father's wife hadn't heard the curse; she might think it was aimed at her. He probably should have said, Good day, stepmother, but that seemed ridiculous when he was ten years older than she. He didn't have anything in particular against her. If she had children by his father, that might be a different story, for his own inheritance would shrink, but for now she was only a girl learning what being a wife was about.

  Baukis came down the stairs towards him. She was young, her figure still almost boyish though she wore a woman's long chiton. She said, "It's not a very good day, is it?" Then she paused, as if waiting for him to contradict her. When he didn't, she went on in a rush: "I'm awfully tired of the rain."

  "So am I," Menedemos answered. "I want to go out into the polis, to stroll in the agora, to exercise in the gymnasion, to see my friends and chat with them . . .."

  "I just want the sun to shine again, to lighten up the women's quarters and dry out the courtyard, and to let me see farther than Lysistratos' house from my window." As a proper wife, especially one wed to an older, more conservative man like Philodemos, Baukis wouldn't get out of the house much. Being a man, Menedemos could go where he would. This little space was Baukis' world.

  He hadn't thought about that before complaining of being shut up here. He changed the subject in a hurry: "Sikon has a fine mullet in the kitchen."

  Her expression sharpened. She wasn't particularly pretty - she had buck teeth like a hare's, and pimples splashed her cheeks - but no one who spoke with her for even a moment would ever have thought her a fool. "A mullet? What did he pay for it?" she asked.

  "I don't know," Menedemos said. "I didn't even think to find out."

  "I'll have to," Baukis said fretfully. "Too much, unless I miss my guess. Sikon spends silver as if it grew on trees."

  "What with the profit the Aphrodite made, we have plenty," Menedemos said.

  "We do now," she said. "But how long will it last if we throw it to the winds?"

  "You sound like Sostratos." Menedemos didn't mean it altogether as a compliment. With luck, Baukis wouldn't know that.

  She just sniffed. "I don't think any man really knows, really cares, about money." Menedemos let out an indignant yelp, but Baukis went on, "Men don't have to manage a household, but wives do. Money and children. We'd better be good with those. We don't get much chance to deal with anything else."

  "Well, of course," Menedemos said, and didn't stop to wonder if it felt like of course to Baukis. He'd heard similar things from the bored wives he'd seduced. That was probably why some of them had let him bed them, in fact - to get something out of the cramped and ordinary into their lives.

  "I'd better go talk to him," Baukis said. "A mullet? That can't have been cheap. Excuse me, Menedemos." She slipped down the stairs past him and walked across the courtyard, raising a hand to her face to keep the rain out of her eyes.

  Menedemos turned to watch her go. Her breasts weren't much more than a maiden might have had, but her hips and her walk were a woman's after all. What does she think about such things, being married to my sour graybeard of a father? Menedemos wondered. Is she bored already? I wouldn't be surprised.

  He went up the stairs in a hurry, taking most of them two at a time. He trotted down the hall to his room, then went inside and closed the door behind him. For good measure, he barred it, too, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd done that. But what he ran from was in the room with him.

  So was a good deal of darkness. The slave girl had wanted the shutters kept closed, and he'd humored her. He opened them, which turned things gray. He stared blindly out at the rain. Now he had another reason to wish it would stop. He wanted to flee the house as he'd fled up the stairs to this refuge that wasn't. He wondered if going out would do any good. He doubted it. Wouldn't he take his troubles with him, as he'd brought them here?

  And then he started to laugh. It wasn't really funny - not to him, though a comic poet might have disagreed - but he didn't know what else to do. My father would kill me if he knew what went through my mind. He laughed again, more bitterly than before. He'd had that thought many times, ever since he was a little boy, when things went wrong. His shiver had nothing to do with the chilly, nasty weather. This time, it might be literally true.

  But oh, wouldn't that pay him back for everything?

  "No," Menedemos said aloud. He kept talking, too, in a soft voice no one in the hall could have heard: "This once, my dear, you're going to have to be like your cousin and use your head. It's not always the best part of you, but it's the only one that will do right now."

  Next spring, I'll sail away and not have to worry about it for half a year. Meanwhile, I've got plenty of silver. I can have as good a time as I please. Even my father won't complain too much more than he usually does. That should cure me. It has before, plenty of times.

  He heard Baukis on the stairs. After she'd returned to the women's rooms, he went downstairs for some wine. Dionysos' gift brought ease from all cares.

/>   Even so, Menedemos could hardly wait for spring.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Over the Wine-Dark Sea is set in 310 B.C. The Roman attack on Pompaia (the Greek spelling for Pompeii) is described in Book IX of Livy. The journey of the grain fleet from Rhegion to Syracuse, and Agathokles' use of the opportunity it gave him to escape from Syracuse and invade Africa, are told in Book XX of Diodorus Siculus. The solar eclipse described here took place on August 15, 310 B.C. Diodorus is also the main surviving source for the machinations of Alexander's marshals, which form much of the background for this novel.

  Of the characters actually on stage, only Menedemos himself and Agathokles' brother, Antandros, are historical figures. Historical figures alluded to but not visible include Agathokles, Ptolemaios, Antigonos, his sons Demetrios and Philippos, his nephew Polemaios (also known as Ptolemaios, but given the former spelling here to distinguish him from Antigonos' rival), Kassandros, Lysimakhos, Polyperkhon, Seleukos, Alexander's son Alexandros, Alexandros' mother, Roxane, Alexander's son (or suppositious son) Herakles, and Herakles' mother, Barsine.

  I have for the most part spelled names of places and people as a Greek would have: thus Rhegion, not Rhegium; Lysimakhos, not Lysimachus. Taras was known to the Romans as Tarentum, and is the modern Taranto. I have broken this rule for a few place names that have well-established English spellings: Rhodes, Athens, Syracuse, the Aegean Sea, and the like. I have also broken it for Alexander the Great, whose shadow dominates this period even though he had been dead for about thirteen years when the story opens.

  All translations from the Greek are my own. I claim no particular literary merit for them, only that they convey what the original says.

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