Harry Turtledove: Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"Some business I want to tell Father first," Sostratos said. "Other than that, I didn't hear much. The Aphrodite will be ready to sail whenever we decide the weather's good enough."

Erinna sighed. "And then you and Menedemos will be gone till fall." She was eighteen; she'd been married for three years, but had returned to her father's household after her husband died. The dark, curly hair she'd cut short in mourning had finally grown out to close to its proper length.

With a sly smile, Sostratos said, "You know we're only leaving to annoy you."

"I believe it," Erinna said, and went back to watering the herbs. "Well, go on and tell Father whatever you've got to tell him. I suppose I'll hear about it eventually." She made a point of looking put-upon.

If Father reacts the way I'm afraid he will, you'll hear about it right away, when he starts bellowing, Sostratos thought. Taking a deep breath, he went into the andron.

Lysistratos was sitting in a chair, flicking pebbles back and forth on a counting board and muttering to himself. Sostratos' father looked up when the light changed as the younger man came in. Lysistratos was more than a palm shorter than his gangling son, but otherwise looked much like him. His hair had been darker brown than Sostratos' - almost black, in fact - but gray streaked it these days, for he'd seen more than fifty years.

He smiled. His teeth were still good, which helped give him the appearance of a younger man despite the gray. "Hail, son," he said, and waved Sostratos to another chair. "I have news."

"Erinna said you might," Sostratos answered. "So do I, as a matter of fact."

"You go first." They said it together, and both laughed.

"Go on, Father," Sostratos insisted. That was both respect for his father's years and genuine liking; Lysistratos hadn't beaten him more than he deserved when he was a boy, and more than once hadn't beaten him at all when he knew he deserved it.

His father dipped his head in assent. "Xanthos was here a little while ago," he began.

"Yes, I know - Gyges told me when I came in," Sostratos said.

"All right, then. You know how Xanthos is. You have to hear about the state of his bowels, and the speech he made in the last Assembly meeting - which must have been as boring as all the rest he's ever made - and how much worse we are these days than the heroes of the Trojan War." Lysistratos rolled his eyes. "But there's usually a little wheat mixed in with all the chaff, and there was today, too."

"Tell me," Sostratos urged.

"I will. You know the town of Amphipolis, next door to Macedonia?"

"Oh, yes." Sostratos dipped his head. "The historian Thoukydides talks about the place in his fifth book. Brasidas the Spartan beat Kleon of Athens there, though they both died in the battle."

His father looked impatient. "I don't mean Amphipolis in the old days, son. I'm talking about now. You know how Kassandros, the commander in Europe, has been holding Roxane and Alexandros, her son by Alexander the Great, in the fortress there."

"Oh, yes," Sostratos repeated. "Alexandros would be - what, twelve now? I know he was born after Alexander died. He'll be old enough to make a proper king of Macedonia before too long."

Lysistratos tossed his head. "Oh, no, he won't. That was Xanthos' news: some time this past winter, when word would travel slow, Kassandros killed Alexandros - and Roxane, too, for good measure."

Sostratos whistled softly and shivered, as if the andron had suddenly got colder. "Then it's just the generals now, to quarrel over the bones of Alexander's empire. Kassandros in Macedonia, Lysimakhos in Thrace, Antigonos in Anatolia and farther Asia, and Ptolemaios down in Egypt."

"And Polyperkhon over in the Pelopennesos, and that Seleukos fellow who's squabbling with Antigonos in inner Asia," Lysistratos said. "I wonder how long the peace your four made last summer will last. No longer than one of them sees an advantage in breaking it, or I miss my guess."

"You're bound to be right." Sostratos shivered again. He wondered what Thoukydides would have thought of the world as it was nowadays. Nothing good; he was sure of that. In the historian's day, each polis in Hellas had been free to go its own way. Now almost all the Greek city-states danced to the tune of one Macedonian warlord or another. Rhodes remained free and independent, but even his own polis had had to throw out a Macedonian garrison after Alexander died.

Lysistratos might have been thinking along similar lines, for he said, "Being a polis these days is a lot like being a sardine in a school of tunny. But what's your news, son? I hope it's cheerier than mine."

"So do I," Sostratos said, wondering how his father would react. Well, he'd soon know. He brought it out in a rush: "Menedemos and I bought a peacock and five peahens from Himilkon the Phoenician, to take to Italy in the Aphrodite."

"A peacock!" Lysistratos exclaimed. "Do you know, I've never seen a peacock in all my life. I don't blame you and your cousin one bit. If I haven't seen a peacock, you can bet none of the Hellenes in Italy has, either. They'll pay through the nose." His gaze sharpened. "And what did you pay?"

Sostratos told him. He waited for his father to burst like a lidded pot left too long on the fire, to thunder like Zeus of the aegis.

But Lysistratos only stroked his gray beard, a gesture Sostratos had copied from him. "Truth to tell, I haven't the faintest idea what a peacock's worth, or a peahen, either," he confessed. "I suspect nobody else does, either. What you lads paid doesn't sound too bad, not unless the birds die on the way and you have to throw them into the sea - the peacock especially."

"That's what we thought, too," Sostratos said. "It's one of the reasons we were able to beat Himilkon down as far as we did."

"He's a man to be reckoned with in a dicker." Lysistratos stroked his beard again. "Tell me . . . Is the peacock as splendid as everyone imagines?"

"He's more splendid than I imagined," Sostratos answered, almost stammering in his relief that things had gone so much smoother than he'd expected. "When he spread his tail to show off for the peahen, I'd never seen anything like it."

"All right," his father said. "When we go next door to supper tonight, we'll find out what your uncle Philodemos has to say about it."

"Yes, that will tell the tale," Sostratos agreed. Philodemos was Lysistratos' older brother, and the senior partner in their trading operation. He was also a man of less certain temper than Lysistratos, just as Menedemos was touchier than Sostratos. Now Sostratos dipped his head to his father. "If you'll excuse me . . ."

He went up the wooden stairs to his bedroom on the second story. One of the house slaves, a redheaded girl about Erinna's age called Threissa, was coming downstairs. By her looks and the name she'd been given - it simply meant the Thracian - she'd probably been captured not too far from Amphipolis. Sostratos smiled at her. He'd summoned her to his bed a couple of times. As a bachelor, he could get away with such things, where his father would have had trouble: keeping a wife and a mistress under the same roof was a recipe for trouble and scandal.

Threissa nodded back, polite but no more than that. She'd pleased him; he feared the reverse wasn't so true. Of course, he had to worry about her opinion only if he chose to.

The bedroom was sparsely furnished: a bedstead with a woolstuffed mattress, a chamber pot under it, a chair beside it, and two cypresswood chests, a smaller atop a larger. The larger one held Sostratos' tunics and mantles. The smaller held his books. While in Athens, he'd had complete sets of Herodotos and Thoukydides copied out for him.

When he opened the smaller chest, he smiled at the spicy scent of cypress. Like the more expensive cedar, it helped keep insects away from wool and linen and papyrus. He went through the rolls of papyrus till he found the one that held the fifth book of Thoukydides' masterful narrative of the Peloponnesian War. The battle of Amphipolis began the book.