Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"Passage to Italy," Menedemos answered. "We're bound for Taras. Always something lively going on in Great Hellas." He used the common name for the colonies the Hellenes had planted in southern Italy and Sicily.

"That's so." The second mercenary dipped his head. "How much for the trip?" He sounded like an Athenian - his dialect wasn't far removed from Ionian, but preserved rough breathings.

Menedemos turned to Sostratos. As toikharkhos, he set fares. "Twelve drakhmai," he said.

Both mercenaries winced. "You won't find many who'll pay you that much," said the one who spoke Attic.

"We can't take many," Sostratos answered. "We've got a full crew and not a lot of room for passengers. But you'll get where you're going if you travel with us. We don't have to stay in the harbor for half a month if the winds are against us, and we won't get blown to Carthage if a storm comes up at sea."

"Even if all that's true, it's still robbery," the mercenary said.

He looked as if he knew plenty about robbery. How many men have you murdered? Sostratos wondered. How many women and boys have you forced? He didn't let any of what he was thinking show on his face. If he had, the mercenary probably would have yanked out that sword on his belt and gone after him with it. Instead, he just shrugged. "No one says you have to pay it if you don't want to."

Grumbling, both mercenaries walked on. Menedemos said, "Don't take such a hard line that you turn away business."

"I won't," Sostratos answered. "I think we can get five or six passengers at twelve drakhmai, and we don't want any more than that. If it turns out I'm wrong, I'll come down a little. But I don't want to do that too soon."

"No, I suppose not," Menedemos said. "You'd get a reputation like a girl who's easy with her virtue."

"That's right." The comparison was apt. Several others might have been, too, but Sostratos wasn't surprised that that one had occurred to his cousin.

Along with huts and tents, the mercenaries' encampment at Tainaron did boast taverns and cookshops and armorers' shops and swordsellers' establishments. Sostratos and Menedemos stopped at several of them, letting the proprietors know the Aphrodite lay offshore and where she was bound. Word would spread fast.

When one of the taverners heard they were coming from Khios, he surprised Sostratos by asking if they carried wine, and surprised him more by paying twenty-five drakhmai an amphora for some of the Ariousian without so much as a whimper. "I'll get it back," he said. "You bet I will. Some of these fellows won't take anything but the best, and they don't care what they have to pay to get it, either."

To celebrate the bargain, he poured cups of wine a long way from the best for Sostratos and Menedemos. Sostratos had taken one sip from his own when the ground jerked beneath his stool. The flimsy walls of the tavern rattled for a moment, then were still. "Earthquake!" he exclaimed, as a nearby dog barked. "Just a little one, though."

"Gods be praised," the tavernkeeper said, and everybody else in the place, Sostratos and Menedemos included, dipped his head in agreement. Even though the quake had been small, Sostratos' heart still thudded in his chest. When the earth started to shudder, you couldn't tell ahead of time whether it would stop again right away - as it had here, as it did most of the time - or go on and get worse, sometimes bad enough to level a city. Everyone living around the Inner Sea knew that too well.

Menedemos said, "Let me have another cup of wine." When the taverner gave it to him, he poured a small libation onto the dirt floor. "That's for the Earthshaker, for not shaking too hard this time." Then he drained the cup. "And that's for me."

"It's the Spartans' curse, that's what it is," the tavernkeeper said.

"The what?" Menedemos asked.

Sostratos spoke before the taverner could: "A long time ago, back before the Peloponnesian War, some helots took refuge in Poseidon's temple here. The Spartans hauled them out and killed them. Not long afterwards, a big earthquake almost knocked Sparta flat. Plenty of people claimed it was Poseidon's vengeance."

"How did you know that?" The tavernkeeper stared at him. "You said you were a Rhodian."

"I am," Sostratos said.

"He must have read it in a book," Menedemos said. "He reads all sorts of things in books." Sostratos had trouble gauging his cousin's smile: was it proud or mocking? Some of each, he thought. Menedemos asked, "Is that your pal Herodotos again?"

"No, it's in Thoukydides' history," Sostratos replied.

"A book," the tavernkeeper said. "A book. Well, ain't that something? Don't have my letters myself, nor much want 'em, neither, but ain't that something?"

"Ain't that something?" Menedemos echoed wickedly as Sostratos and he headed for a cookshop not far away.

"Oh, shut up," Sostratos said, which made his cousin laugh out loud. Irked, he went on, "Natural philosophers say that earthquakes aren't Poseidon's fault at all, that they're as much a natural phenomenon as waves stirred up by wind."

"I don't know that I can believe that," Menedemos said. "What could cause them, if they're natural?"

"No one knows for sure," Sostratos replied, "but I've heard people suggest it's the motion of gas through subterranean caverns pushing the ground now this way, now that."

He'd always thought that seemed not only probable but sober and logical to boot. Menedemos, however, took it another way. His whoop of delight made several passing mercenaries whirl to gape at him. "Earthfarts!" he said. "Instead of Poseidon Earthshaker, we've got Kyamos Earthfarter. Bow down!" He stuck out his backside.

"No one ever made a bean into a god until you did just now," Sostratos said severely, resisting the urge to kick the proffered part. "You complain about the way I think sometimes, but you're more blasphemous than I'd ever be. If you ask me, all that Aristophanes has curdled your wits."

His cousin tossed his head. "No, and I'll tell you why not. Aristophanes has fun mocking the gods, and so do I. When you say you don't believe, you mean it."

Sostratos grunted. That held more truth than he cared to admit. Instead of admitting it, he said, "Come on, let's tell this fellow we're looking for passengers."

"All right." Menedemos made a very rude noise. "Earthfarts!" He giggled. Sostratos wished he'd never started talking about the natural causes of earthquakes.

To get a measure of revenge - and perhaps expiation as well - he all but dragged Menedemos to Poseidon's temple. Sure enough, there among the offerings stood the statue of Arion astride the dolphin. Sostratos clicked his tongue between his teeth. "It's not so fine a piece of work as I thought it would be. See how stiff and old-fashioned it looks?"

"Arion jumped into the sea a long time ago," Menedemos said reasonably. "You can't expect the statue to look as if the sculptor set it there yesterday."

"I suppose not," Sostratos said, "but even so - "

"No. But me no buts," Menedemos said. "If you laid Aphrodite, you'd complain she wasn't as good in bed as you expected."

If I laid Aphrodite, she'd complain I wasn't as good in bed as she expected, Sostratos thought, and then, Or would she? She being a goddess, wouldn't she know ahead of time what I was like in bed? He scratched his head. After pondering that for a little while, he said, "The problem of how much the gods can see of the future is a complicated one, don't you think?"

"What I think is, I haven't got the faintest idea of what you're talking about," Menedemos answered, and Sostratos realized he'd assumed his cousin could follow along in a conversation he'd had with himself. While he was still feeling foolish, Menedemos went on, "Let's get back to the boat and see if we've got any passengers looking to go west."