Owls to Athens sam-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “I think so,” the Karian freedman replied. “I made money on it, and I gather you gentlemen did, too.” He raised his voice. “Ibanollis! The Rhodians are ready to look at the silk now. Bring the best we have.”

  “I do,” Ibanollis said. “You wait one little bit.”

  The silk was very good, some of the finest and most transparent Koan weavers made. But it could not match the eastern cloth Menedemos had got from Zakerbaal the Sidonian. Merchants always looked disappointed at the quality of goods they were offered: that was part of the role they played. Here, though, Menedemos and Sostratos had no trouble seeming unimpressed, and Menedemos knew they would have had a hard time acting blase about this silk if they hadn’t seen the other.

  Pixodaros sensed they weren’t putting on their indifference, too. He said, “You remind me of men going home to ugly wives from the house of a beautiful hetaira. Is this eastern silk really that splendid?”

  “I’m afraid it is, O best one,” Menedemos said soberly. “For its kind, though, what you have here is excellent.” He felt like a man praising an ugly wife for the way she managed a home.

  With a sigh, Pixodaros said, “Well, I can hope the eastern silk stays in the east for the rest of my life.” He suddenly looked anxious. “You do still want to make this bargain, don’t you?”

  “We wouldn’t have come here if we didn’t,” Sostratos reassured him. “For now, Koan silk is the finest cloth we can get, and it will have a ready market in Athens.”

  “For now,” the Karian muttered under his breath. Menedemos wished his cousin hadn’t tacked that on, even if it was true-perhaps especially because it was true. Pixodaros made himself straighten his shoulders, as a Hellene might have done. “I do still have the finest silk made around the Inner Sea.” He spoke as if reminding himself as well as the Rhodians.

  “Of course you do,” Menedemos said soothingly. “We’re always pleased to do business with you. Sostratos said it-that’s why we’re here.” Pixodaros smiled. Even so, he had to be wondering how long he and his could stay prosperous. Through his son’s lifetime? Through his own? Or only another year or two? Menedemos thought it would be longer than that, but he didn’t know. He wouldn’t have wanted to do business with that kind of risk hanging over him. By all the signs, neither did Pixodaros. But he didn’t have that worry, and the freedman did.

  When they left Pixodaros’ house, maybe that sense of relief was part of what made Menedemos look across the street. “You know what I’m going to do?” he said. “I’m going to have a go at the boy brothel there. Want to come along?”

  “No, thanks,” Sostratos said. “I don’t much fancy boys.”

  “Neither do I, usually,” Menedemos said. “I feel like it today, though.”

  “Have fun. I’ll see you back at the inn, then,” Sostratos said.

  The brothelkeeper was a fat Phoenician with a curled beard. His Greek held a guttural accent. “At your service, my master,” he said. “Take your pick.” He waved at the youths in the main room. Had they been women, they would have been spinning to earn him extra money. Some of them wore silk tunics, as women might have (Menedemos wondered if it was Pixodaros’ silk). Others were naked.

  Menedemos pointed to a youth of about fifteen with less paint on his face than most of the boys wore. “Him, I think.”

  “Hearkening and obedience,” the whoremaster said with a bow. “Sadyattes, go with the man.”

  A Lydian, Menedemos thought as the slave got to his feet. “Come with me,” the boy said, sounding more resigned than alluring. The room to which he led the Rhodian was small and gloomy, with no furniture but a bed, a stool with a small jar on it, and a chamber pot. It smelled of sweat. Sadyattes pulled his chiton off over his head. He was a little pudgier and a little hairier than Menedemos had expected. Perfection is for the gods, Menedemos thought. He’ll do. Still sounding resigned, Sadyattes asked, “What do you want?”

  “Nothing fancy-just the usual,” Menedemos said.

  “All right.” Instead of bending over straightaway, the slave reached for the jar. “Will you use some olive oil first? It’s… easier that way.”

  Menedemos pulled off his own chiton. “Well, why not?” he answered. “Go ahead-put some on me.” The brothel boy obeyed, gently pushing back his foreskin as he rose. Sadyattes’ fingers were skilled and knowing. “Now turn around,” Menedemos said after a little while. The boy did. Menedemos took his pleasure. Sadyattes gave no sign of taking any of his own, but boys seldom did. Menedemos patted him on the backside, then gave him an obolos. “Here. You don’t need to tell that fellow with the fancy beard you got this.”

  “I thank you, most noble one.” The slave put the little silver coin in his mouth.

  Whistling, Menedemos left the boy brothel, which was more than Sadyattes could do. When he got back to the inn, Sostratos asked, “How was it?”

  He thought a moment, then shrugged. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “Just the usual.”

  “Rhyppapai!” Diokles called. “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” The rowers bent their backs; some of them grunted with effort at each stroke. Sostratos looked toward the Anatolian mainland, which slowly crawled past to starboard. Then, deliberately, he looked to port again.

  A smooth horizon seemed to rise and fall less than a corrugated one. As if to show how much he approved of that, he said, “I don’t like the Ikarian Sea.”

  “No, eh?” Menedemos grinned at him. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Because it’s got some of the roughest water anywhere in the Inner Sea?” Sostratos suggested. He gulped and silently told his stomach to stay where it belonged. For the moment, it seemed willing to listen to him.

  His cousin chuckled. “And all the time I thought it was because you sympathized with Ikaros, who came crashing down somewhere around here.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do sympathize with Ikaros,” Sostratos said. “I sympathize with Daidalos, who after all made his son’s wings, even more. What’s wrong with pursuing knowledge, I’d like to know?”

  “People ought to pursue good sense first,” Menedemos said.

  “Really?” Sostratos raised an eyebrow. “And how can a man have any idea of what good sense is without knowledge? Suppose you tell me that.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Menedemos tossed his head. “You’re trying to lure me into a philosophical discussion. No thanks, my dear; I don’t want to play.”

  “Not even when you started it?” Sostratos made a reproachful clucking noise. “For shame. You remind me of a man who starts arguments in taverns and then ducks out before the fists fly.”

  “I’d rather talk about where we put in next,” Menedemos said. “That has money attached to it.”

  “So it does.” Sostratos pointed north. “We’re bound for Samos and then, I thought, for Khios. With the fine wine they make there…”

  “As a matter of fact, I was thinking of passing up Khios altogether and going straight on to Lesbos,” Menedemos said.

  “You were?” Sostratos gaped. That came like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. “By the dog of Egypt, why? We can bring Ariousian from Khios to Athens and make a splendid profit. There’s no better wine in the world than Ariousian.”

  “Yes, and don’t the Khians know it?” Menedemos replied. “With what they charge, we have to bump up our prices so high, hardly anyone can afford to buy from us.”

  “That’s the point of having an akatos,” Sostratos said. “For bulk goods, we could take out a round ship and not have to pay all our rowers.”

  “Lesbos makes good wines, too,” his cousin said. “Not quite up to Ariousian, I admit, but plenty good enough for the Aphrodite to carry. And Lesbos has something Khios doesn’t.”

  “What?” Sostratos demanded; he couldn’t think of anything.

  But Menedemos could: “Truffles. They grow close by Mytilene, and they’re always best in the springtime. Tell me the rich Athenians and the Macedonian officers in the garrison won’t want truffles.”

&
nbsp; Sostratos couldn’t, and he knew it. “Truffles,” he murmured, intrigued in spite of himself. “Isn’t that interesting? I have to hand it to you, my dear-they never would have occurred to me. Still… I hate to spend the extra time on the way.”

  “On account of the Greater Dionysia?” Menedemos asked, and Sostratos dipped his head. Menedemos took a hand off the steering-oar tiller to shake a reproachful finger. “Profit first, best one. Profit first, drama second.”

  “Normally, that’s a good rule,” Sostratos said. “But the Greater Dionysia is special.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s special,” Menedemos said. “The clink of the owls the Athenians’ll lay down for truffles and good Lesbian wine is special, that’s what.”

  “I know we have to make money.” Sostratos said it with more than a little shame in his voice. A kalos k’agathos, a proper Hellenic gentleman, lived off the land he owned and looked down his nose at trade. Damonax professed being that kind of gentleman. As Sostratos had seen, though, his brother-in-law didn’t despise the money from trade, especially when his family needed it-which they did a lot of the time.

  “Well, then, act like you enjoy it.” Menedemos didn’t mind being a merchant-or, if he did, he hid it well, perhaps even from himself. “If it weren’t for people like us, all the kaloi k’agathoi would be sitting around on bare floors scratching themselves, because who’d sell ‘em all the things that make life worth living? Nobody, that’s who.”

  “Getting the chance to see strange places is part of what makes being a merchant worthwhile,” Sostratos admitted. “And I’ve never been to Mytilene, so”-he dipped his head-”all right. If that’s what you want to do, we’ll do it. You know, that polis wouldn’t be here today if the Athenians hadn’t changed their minds during the Peloponnesian War. ”

  “When did the Athenians ever do anything but change their minds?” Menedemos asked, more than a little scornfully.

  “They would have massacred the city after it rose up against them, and they sent off a trireme with orders to do just that,” Sostratos said. “But then they had second thoughts, and they sent another ship after the first. The rowers on the first ship dawdled; they didn’t like what they were doing. The other ship hurried. Even though it started a day behind, it got there just in time to stop the slaughter. Mytilene’s worth seeing, just on account of that.”

  Menedemos laughed. “If that’s what interests you, all right. The other thing that makes me want to go to Lesbos is the word of mouth.” He leered. Diokles chuckled.

  Sostratos said, “Is it true, what they say about Lesbian women? Did they really invent that particular vice there? From what I’ve heard of Sappho ’s poetry, she doesn’t talk about it.”

  “With that funny Aiolic dialect they speak there, half the time it’s hard to tell what they’re talking about,” Menedemos answered. “But if you mean, did they invent sucking a man’s prong, well, Aristophanes sure thinks so.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s true,” Sostratos said. “ Aristophanes says all sorts of things that aren’t so.”

  His cousin ignored him. Menedemos seldom wasted a chance to quote from the comic poet, and proved no exception now: “ ‘You seem to me to be the lambda among the Lesbians,’ he says. And there’s that modern poet, what’s-his-name-Theopompos, that’s it-too:

  ‘Not to mention this old method, repeated Through our mouths Which the children of the Lesbians Found.’ “

  “That’s not proof-it’s only assertion,” Sostratos said.

  “You want proof, find a friendly girl on Mytilene,” Menedemos answered. “She’ll measure the hypotenuse on your triangle. See, I remember some geometry after all.”

  He and Diokles both found the joke very funny. For some reason Sostratos couldn’t fathom, he did, too. He tried to think rationally about a pretty girl from a brothel drawing triangles in the sand and talking in learned tones about the theory the godlike Pythagoras had proved-and the harder he tried, the harder he laughed.

  “You’re absurd,” he told his cousin.

  “Thank you,” Menedemos answered, which for some reason made them both laugh more than ever. At last, Menedemos said, “On to Lesbos, then.”

  “On to Lesbos,” Sostratos agreed. After a while, he asked, “What are truffles supposed to cost? Have you got any idea?”

  Menedemos tossed his head. “Whatever we have to pay, we charge more in Athens, that’s all. So far as I know, they don’t grow truffles there, so they’ll pay.”

  “Well, yes, certainly,” Sostratos said. “But I’ve never traded for them before. I’d like to have some idea of how to tell good ones from bad, and how much I ought to pay for each grade. The more I know beforehand, the better the bargains I can hope to make.”

  “Ask at some of our stops on the way up to Mytilene,” Menedemos suggested. “The closer we get to Lesbos, the more likely the merchants in the market squares are to have dealt in ‘em.”

  “That makes good sense,” Sostratos said. “Yes, that makes very good sense. How did you come up with it?”

  “Talent,” Menedemos said airily. “Pure talent.”

  Few things irked Sostratos more than having his cousin refuse to rise to one of his gibes. “There must be a rational explanation instead,” he said.

  Menedemos blew him a kiss. “You’re so sweet,” he purred. “Sweet as vinegar.”

  “Oh, lesbiaze,” Sostratos said. The verb, derived from the alleged proclivity of Lesbian women for such things, set him and Menedemos- and Diokles, and some of the rowers, too-laughing all over again.

  Menedemos steered the Aphrodite toward the harbor at Mytilene. Part of the polis sat on a little island in the middle of the harbor. The rest lay on Lesbos proper, to the north of the islet. A modern wall of gray stone protected the portion of Mytilene on the Lesbian mainland. Like Rhodes, that part of the city was built on a grid; a glance told Menedemos the streets on the little island, the older part of Mytilene, ran every which way.

  “I keep waiting for a war galley to come boiling out and ask what we’re doing here,” Sostratos said.

  “That happened at Samos, but not at Khios,” Menedemos said. “My guess is, we’re far enough inside Antigonos’ dominions that people don’t worry so much about a lone galley.”

  “People in Antigonos’ dominions don’t worry so much about whether we’re pirates, either,” Sostratos said. “They might want to hire us if we turn out to be raiders, but they don’t care about sinking us.”

  “From everything I’ve seen and heard, old One-Eye cares about himself first, last, and always, and to the crows with everything else,” Menedemos said. “If he can get some use out of pirates, he’s all for them. If he can’t, he doesn’t worry one way or the other.”

  Diokles pointed to a quay not far from the bridge joining the old part of Mytilene to the new. “There’s a good place to tie up, skipper,” he said.

  “Yes, I see it,” Menedemos agreed, and swung the merchant galley slightly to port. He eased her up alongside the jutting pier, then dipped his head to the oarmaster.

  “Back oars!” Diokles called. A couple of strokes killed the bit of forward momentum the Aphrodite had left. The keleustes grunted in satisfaction. “Oцp!” he said, and the rowers rested. “Ship oars!” he added. As they obeyed, sailors tossed lines to waiting longshoremen, who made the akatos fast to the pier.

  “What vessel? What cargo?” asked one of the men on the quay. In Aiolic fashion, he put the accent on each word as far forward as it could possibly go.

  “We’re the Aphrodite , out of Rhodes,” Menedemos answered. His Doric drawl seemed even more foreign here than it did in the Ionic-speaking towns the merchant galley had visited on her way north. “We’ve got Rhodian perfume, papyrus and ink, Koan silk, crimson dye and beeswax and balsam and embroidered linen from Phoenicia- things of that sort.”

  “And what are you looking for here?” the local asked.

  “Wine, of course,” Menedemos said, and the fellow dipped his
head.

  Sostratos added, “And truffles. Can you give us the names of a couple of dealers?”

  The Mytilenean looked elaborately blank. “By the gods, Hellenes are a greedy folk,” Sostratos muttered. He took an obolos out of his mouth and tossed it to the longshoreman.

  As soon as the fellow caught it, his manner changed. “I can give you one sip right now,” he said. A sip? Menedemos wondered, and then remembered that Aiolic used s instead of t in front of i. The longshoreman went on, “And that’s steer clear of Apollonides. He adulterates what he sells.”

  “Thanks, friend,” Sostratos said. “Knowing whom to stay away from is as important as knowing whom to go to.”

  “Try Onetor,” the local suggested, “and after him Neon. Onetor’s brother, Onesimos, sells wine. Neon and Onetor are both honest, more or less, but Onetor is more likely to have the best truffles than Neon is.”

  Now Menedemos gave him an obolos. The longshoreman was effusive in his thanks. In a low voice, Sostratos said, “We’ll do some more checking before we deal. This fellow may not know what he’s talking about, or else he may be Onetor’s cousin, or Neon’s, and get a cut of whatever business he brings in.”

  “I know that,” Menedemos answered, also quietly. “We’ll ask around in the agora. Still, we’ve got a place to start.”

  Like sparrows scattering when a jay fluttered down to peck at seeds, the longshoremen drew back as a swaggering soldier in a swirling red cape strode up the quay toward the Aphrodite . He was wide through the shoulders, at least as tall as Sostratos, and looked taller because of the crested and brightly polished bronze helm he wore. His eyes were gray; his close-cut beard had big red streaks in it. When he spoke, the Macedonian that poured from his lips made Aiolic dialect seem straightforward by comparison.

  Menedemos stood there dumbfounded, wondering how to tell him he was speaking gibberish. Sostratos undertook the job: “I’m very sorry, O best one, and I do not mean to offend you, but I cannot follow what you say.” He made his own speech as Attic as he could: that was the dialect people who learned Greek were most likely to follow, and to use.