Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"One more before I have to go?" Menedemos asked. She hesitated. Menedemos gave her a silver coin, a half-drakhma. "For you either which way," he said, "whether you decide to or not."

"Not just a sweet lover but a generous lover, too," Leuke exclaimed, and rode him as if she were a jockey. He would have had to pay a lot more than three oboloi for that at a brothel; courtesans charged more for it than any other way. After the sweaty exertions of the night before, being ridden suited him fine.

He was whistling when he ate barley porridge and drank wine for breakfast. Sostratos wasn't whistling; he looked glum. "It's your own fault," Menedemos told him. "You could have had a good time, too."

"Maybe another time," Sostratos said, as he usually did when Menedemos asked him why he wasn't enjoying himself now. He ate porridge and drank wine with a concentration that said he didn't want to be disturbed.

But Menedemos said, "Don't spend all day over breakfast. I want us back at the Aphrodite before Aristagoras' slaves fetch the wine. I don't think he'd try to palm off anything but what we agreed to on us, but I don't want to find out I'm wrong the hard way, either."

"You won't really be able to tell unless you open an amphora or two and taste what's in them," Sostratos said.

"Don't remind me." Menedemos got down to the bottom of his bowl of porridge in a hurry. He sat there drumming his fingers till his cousin finished, too. They said their good-byes to Alyattes - Aristagoras was sleeping late, since the sun was well up - and hurried down toward the harbor.

"Where shall we head next?" Sostratos asked as they threaded their way along Khios' narrow, winding, grimy streets.

"West," Menedemos answered.

His cousin paused to give him a mocking bow. "Many thanks, O best one. I never should have guessed. I expected we'd go on to Italy by sailing north."

"I was afraid you might have," Menedemos said with a chuckle.

"Let me ask you some different questions, then." Sostratos was at his most formal, which meant at his most irritating. "Do you plan to put in at Athens? If you do, it's a good market for our papyrus and ink; they probably do more writing there than anywhere else in the world, except maybe Alexandria."

"I hadn't intended to, no," Menedemos said. "The more we sell in the far west, the better the prices we'll get for it. Or do you think I'm wrong?"

"No, probably not - if we can sell the stuff," Sostratos said. "If we can't, we might think about stopping at Athens on the way back to Rhodes." That made good sense. In such matters, Sostratos usually did. But before Menedemos could do more than begin to dip his head, his cousin went on, "How do you plan on getting to the west? Will you go over the Isthmus of Corinth on the diolkos, or do you intend to sail around the Peloponnesos?"

"That's a good question. I wish I had a good answer for it," Menedemos said unhappily. "Most times, I'd sooner have my ship dragged across the tramway from the Saronic Gulf to the Gulf of Corinth, but with Polyperkhon kicking up his heels in the Peloponnesos, who knows if some Macedonian army isn't going to come rampaging through Corinth?"

"Of course, rounding the Peloponnesos is no bargain, either, especially not with that mercenary hiring camp that's sprung up at the end of Cape Tainaron," Sostratos said. "Crete's not very far away, either, and pirates swarm out of Crete the way bugs swarm out from under flat rocks."

"I wish I could say you were wrong," Menedemos answered.

"What will you do, then?" his cousin demanded.

"Sail west," he said with a grin. Sostratos' scowl grew fiercer than ever, which only made Menedemos grin more widely.

Menedemos had wondered if Aristagoras would let Alyattes take charge of delivering the wine and collecting the money for it, but the merchant showed up in person. Menedemos decided he couldn't blame him. Aristagoras was getting more than a quarter of a talent of silver; that much money could easily tempt a slave into striking out on his own, especially with only a few stadia of water separating him from his native Lydia.

Sostratos gave the wine merchant his money, each mina in its own leather sack. "Thank you, young fellow," Aristagoras said, smugly dipping his head as he accepted the last pound of silver. "All I can say is, it's a good thing your cousin came along when he did, or you'd be sailing without my fine Ariousian."

"No doubt, sir," Sostratos replied, as ostentatiously polite as a Phoenician. "And, in that case, you'd be sitting in your house without our fine Rhodian drakhmai."

"Is that a joke?" Aristagoras demanded. "Are you trying to be funny with me?"

"Not at all," Sostratos said. If Menedemos was any judge, his cousin was trying not to kill the wine seller. "All I'm trying to do is tell the truth."

"You'll never make a trader that way," Aristagoras said. "Hail." He turned his back and walked down the wharf and into Khios. Menedemos could hear the silver clinking in the sacks almost until the wine merchant reached solid ground.

"May Athana turn him into a spider, as she did with Arakhne," Sostratos ground out. "She'd have an easier time of it with Aristagoras, because he's already halfway there." He was quivering with fury; Menedemos didn't think he'd ever seen his cousin so angry. He'd even let his dialect slip, calling the goddess Athana in broad Doric rather than speaking in the half-Attic style he usually used.

"Easy, there," Menedemos said, and reached up to put a hand on Sostratos' shoulder. Sostratos shook him off. Menedemos' cousin was bigger than he, but Menedemos could usually count on his strength and grace to give him an edge. Not this time. In Sostratos' fury, he might lash out wildly at the least little thing, and might not care about consequences till much too late. "Easy there," Menedemos repeated, as if gentling a spooked horse. "If you let him get under your skin, he's won."

In a deadly voice, Sostratos said, "I shall bind Aristagoras and his possessions and his thoughts. May he become hateful to his friends. I bind him under empty Tartaros in cruel bonds, and with the aide of Hekate under the earth and the Furies who drive men mad. So may it be."

Menedemos stared at his cousin as if he'd never seen him before. Calm, rational, mild-mannered Sostratos, ripping loose with a curse that would have chilled a Thessalian witch? All the sailors were staring at him, too. Several of the men closest to him edged away. They'd thought Sostratos mild-mannered, too, mild-mannered and ineffectual. But if he could call a curse like that down on a merchant's head, who was to say he couldn't also call its like down on one of them?

Rather nervously, Diokles said, "That was quite . . . something." He fingered his ring.

Sostratos blinked. The flush of fury faded from his cheeks. He looked like a man whose fierce fever had just broken. And when he laughed, he sounded like himself, not the savage stranger who seemed to have seized him for a moment. "It was, wasn't it?" he said.

"Are you . . . all right now?" Menedemos asked, and heard the caution in his own voice.

Sostratos considered that with his usual gravity. At last, he tossed his head. "All right? No. I won't be all right till Khios goes down under the horizon - and if it went down under the waves, I wouldn't shed a tear. But I'm . . . not mad any more, I don't think." He plucked at his beard, the picture of bemusement. "That was very strange. If he'd stayed here even another moment, I would have killed him."

"I noticed," Menedemos said dryly.

"I have to think about that," Sostratos said.

Diokles nudged Menedemos. Lost in thought, Sostratos didn't notice. The oarmaster said, "What we have to do is get out of here, skipper. I don't think anybody but us heard him, but I could be wrong."