Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

But, though the dancing dwarf had made his gibe to amuse the symposiasts, it also made Sostratos think. Most people reckoned dwarfs less intelligent than normal men, but this fellow sounded bright enough. How did he feel, when he was able to make his living only by showing himself off for others to laugh at?

Sostratos thought about asking the little man. He thought about it, but not even his own sharp curiosity gave him the nerve to do it. After all, what was he but one more fellow who reminded the dwarf of his freakishness?

Instead, he got very drunk, even with his father's well-watered wine and shallow drinking cups. Maybe some of the symposiasts did end up rumpling the flutegirls. If they did, Sostratos didn't see it. They might have taken the girls out into the dark courtyard, or the symposion might just have stayed on the decorous side. After a while, he was dozing on his half of the couch.

What roused him was Menedemos's talent for quoting Homer. His cousin started to recite the section from the Iliad where lame Hephaistos bustled around serving wine to the other gods, who laughed at him despite his labor. "No," Sostratos said. "Find some other lines. Leave the little man here alone."

Menedemos gaped. "That's why he's here: to be the butt of our jokes. Look at the silly capers he's cutting." Sure enough, the dwarf was waggling his backside like a coy courtesan, and he was funny.

But despite, or perhaps because of, the wine he'd drunk, Sostratos found the distinction he wanted to make: "Laugh at what he does, not at what he is."

"Why?" Menedemos said. "What he does isn't always worth laughing at. What he is, is."

Sostratos ran out of logical arguments. That was the wine. "If you can't find any other reason, don't mock him as a favor to me."

"All right, best one," Menedemos said, and kissed him on the cheek. "You're my cousin, and you're my host, and as a favor to you I will keep quiet. You see? I deny you nothing tonight."

"Thank you, my dear. You've made our homecoming perfect." Sostratos yawned. That was the last he remembered of the symposion, for he really did fall asleep then.

After the symposion at his uncle and cousin's house, several days of rain kept Menedemos close to home. What point to going to the gymnasion to try to run through mud or, worse, wrestle in it? What point to going to the agora when hardly anyone would be buying or selling or gossiping?

He wouldn't have minded so much being cooped up if he and his father could have walked past each other without growling. But they didn't get along, and being at close quarters only made things worse. Menedemos tried to stay out of Philodemos' way by taking one of the slave women into his bedroom and not coming out for most of a day, but that didn't work, either. When he and the slave did emerge, Philodemos grumbled, "She didn't do any work at all yesterday, thanks to you."

"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."