Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

His cousin shrugged. "So what?"

"Don't you care about knowing things for the sake of knowing them?" Sostratos demanded. He and Menedemos had had this argument a good many times before. He knew about how it would go, just as he knew about what Menedemos would try when they wrestled in the gymnasion. In the gymnasion, Menedemos almost always threw him despite that. When they wrestled with ideas, he had a better chance.

Sure enough, Menedemos said, "If knowing something will get me money or get me laid, I care about that. Otherwise . . ." He shrugged again.

Before Sostratos could tear him limb from rhetorical limb, one of the sailors at the bow yelped and made as if to kick the peafowl chick that had just pecked his ankle. "Oimoi!" Sostratos shouted. "Don't do that, Teleutas! You hurt that bird, it'll cost you just about all the wages you make on this cruise."

"Fine the stinking bird for hurting me, then," Teleutas said sulkily. "I'm bleeding."

"You'll live," Sostratos said. "Bind some cloth around it if it's really hurt. I doubt it is. I've had the grown birds get me more times than I care to remember, and the chicks don't peck anywhere near so hard." More sulkily still, Teleutas went back to whatever he'd been doing before he was wounded.

My, I sounded heartless, Sostratos thought, listening in his mind to the brief conversation. As Menedemos had, he shrugged. Rowers were easy to come by and cost a drakhma and a half a day. The peafowl chick, on the other hand, would bring in a mina and a half of silver, maybe even two minai.

It had other uses, too. One of the sailors near Teleutas said, "Look - it just ate a scorpion. That would have hurt you worse than the bird did." Teleutas grunted. But he didn't try to kick the chick again.

Sostratos thought about returning to the argument with Menedemos. In the end, he decided not to bother. He made his way up to the foredeck instead, and peered out past the forepost at Mount Aitne. It was blue with distance and pale near the summit, where snow still clung despite the season. No smoke rose from it; no stones and molten rock belched from it, as had happened many times in the past. Sostratos would not have cared to live in the shadow of a mountain that might let loose catastrophe without so much as a warning.

He made his way back to the poop, where Menedemos was turning the Aphrodite's course from southwest to due west to approach the Strait of Sicily. Instead of resuming the argument the peafowl chick had interrupted, Sostratos asked, "Do you really think Polyphemos the Cyclops lived on the slopes of Aitne?"

That question interested Menedemos, even if it didn't involve money or girls. Sostratos had thought it would; his cousin truly cherished Homer. Menedemos answered, "It could well be so, I suppose. People have always put Skylle and Kharybdis in the Sicilian strait, so the Cyclops would have been somewhere nearby."

"But do you think people ought to put the monsters from the Odyssey in the real world?" Sostratos persisted. "No one but Odysseus and his comrades ever saw them."

"Egypt is in the real world, and Odysseus went there, or says he did," Menedemos said stoutly. "Ithake is in the real world, and you know he went there."

"But he doesn't talk about monsters in Egypt or Ithake," Sostratos said. "I think you'll find out where he saw the monsters when you find the cobbler who sewed up his sack of winds."

"I'd like to," Menedemos answered. "If I could pull out a south wind when we sent up the Strait, things'd be easier. As is, we'll have to row."

"Tomorrow," Sostratos said, eyeing the sun as it slid down toward Mount Aitne.

"More likely the day after, or even a day or two after that," Menedemos said. "I intend to put in at Rhegion, too, on the Italian side of the Strait. We may get rid of a couple of baby peafowl there."

Getting rid of peafowl chicks appealed to Sostratos, so he dipped his head. Sunset found the Aphrodite off Cape Leukopetra, which marked the Italian side of the entrance to the Sicilian Strait: the white stones of the bluffs just above the sea had given the cape its name. Menedemos chose to spend the night at sea, and neither Sostratos nor anyone else chose to argue with him, for beaching the akatos here would invite every bandit for tens of stadia around to swoop down on her.

After the anchors splashed into the sea, the sailors had hard barley-flour rolls as sitos, with salted olives and crumbly cheese for their opson. They washed supper down with cheap wine Sostratos had bought in Taras. On dry land, he would have turned up his nose at the stuff. Salt air and a gently rolling ship somehow improved it.

Diokles spat an olive pit over the rail and into the sea. "I don't think the wind will shift," he said.

"Neither do I," Menedemos answered. "If we were in an ordinary merchantman, we'd do a lot of waiting and a lot of tacking. As things are . . . well, this is why we pay the rowers."

The men at the oars grumbled a little the next morning; they'd had an easy time of it since leaving Taras, for the wind had been with them all the way. But Diokles' mallet and bronze square gave them the rhythm they needed. Menedemos set only ten men on each side to rowing: no point in wearing out the crew. The Aphrodite glided into Rhegion's harbor well before noon.

Because Menedemos intended to spend the day in the city, Sostratos went into the agora to let people know the merchant galley had come and to tell them what his cousin and he had for sale. Several men headed for the piers to buy chicks or wine or silk or perfume or some of the other goods the akatos had brought from the east.

And, being who he was, Sostratos also indulged his own curiosity. "Tell me," he said to a potter who looked reasonably bright, "why does this city have the name it does?"

"Well, stranger, I've heard a couple of stories about that, and I have to tell you I don't know which one's true myself."

"Go on," Sostratos said eagerly. "I'm always glad to meet someone who'll admit he doesn't know everything."

"Heh," the potter said. "I bet you it doesn't happen any too often, either." That made Sostratos laugh out loud. The local went on, "Anyway, one tale is that the name comes from the word that means to break, because we have a lot of earthquakes in these parts, and because it looks like Sicily broke off from Italy."

"That makes sense," Sostratos said; Rhegion could easily be derived from rhegnumi. "Aiskhylos says something similar, doesn't he?" he remarked. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, "What's the other story?"

"Some people say the name comes from one Italian language or another, because regium or some such word means royal in those tongues," the potter replied.

"Which do you think is true?" Sostratos asked.

"I'd sooner believe we Hellenes named the place ourselves than that we borrowed a word from the barbarians," the potter said. "I'd sooner believe that, mind you, but I can't prove it."

"Fair enough," Sostratos said. "Better than fair enough, in fact." He went off, hoping he would remember that when the day finally came for him to write his history.

That day wouldn't come if he didn't get back to letting the people of Rhegion know the Aphrodite had peafowl chicks for sale. Of course it won't, Sostratos thought: Menedemos will kill me if I don't do my job.

He went back to the merchant galley late in the afternoon. If the folk of Rhegion didn't know about the peafowl by then, it wasn't because he hadn't told them. "Any luck?" he called to Menedemos as he walked up the pier.

"I sold two," Menedemos answered. "Sold 'em to two different men, too, and it was almost like they were bidding against each other to see who could show what a rich fellow he was by paying more. I got close to five minai: you might have thought they each had to have the very last bird."