Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

To starboard, the Italian coast baked brown under the summer sun. Menedemos wore a broad-brimmed hat to help keep himself from baking likewise. Even so, sweat ran down his face. More sweat trickled down his torso, and down his arms to leave wet, dark patches where he gripped the steering-oar tillers.

He steered the Aphrodite farther out to sea, till the coastline receded to a brown blur low on the horizon. That would make him harder to spot. Some of the fishing boats bobbing in the chop between the merchant galley and the shore didn't notice him: his sail was brailed up tight against the yard as the galley traveled north under oars. If I were a pirate and I wanted you, you'd be mine, he thought. A few boats did spot the Aphrodite and got away from what they thought to be danger as fast as they could.

He was swinging northeast toward the harbor of Hipponion - not a splendid anchorage, but the best he could hope to find - when Aristeidas called out, "Sail ho! Sail ho to port!"

Shading his eyes against the late-afternoon sun, Menedemos peered out to sea. With more and more sailors pointing, he soon spotted the sail. It was of a good size, which warned him it might belong to a pirate. And it was of a color somewhere between sky blue and sea green, which argued that the captain of the ship to whom it belonged did not much want it seen.

"I'll show him, the son of a whore," Menedemos muttered to himself. He raised his voice to a shout: "All hands, grab your weapons and then to your oars!" As soon as the rowers had swords and knives and clubs ready to hand, he swung the Aphrodite toward the strange ship and told Diokles, "Up the stroke."

"Right you are, skipper," the keleustes replied. "You going to try and run him off, the way you did with that pirate back in the Aegean?"

"That's just what I'm going to do," Menedemos said. "And if he wants a fight, well, by the gods, we'll give him one."

Before long, he could see the pirate's hull as well as his sail. That the sail always came into sight before the hull made some people think the world was round. Menedemos had his doubts about that. If it were round, wouldn't all the water run off? He'd never found an answer to satisfy him there.

The question didn't worry him for long. Taking the measure of the enemy was much more urgent. "He's a pentekonter!" Sostratos called from the waist.

Menedemos dipped his head. "I see," he answered. The pirate had fifty rowers, then, to his own forty, and a hull shark-long and wolf-lean. The other ship sliced through the water like a knife. Menedemos saw at once that it had a better turn of speed than the Aphrodite.

But does he have the stones for a fight? Menedemos was betting his ship, his cargo, his freedom, his life, that the pirate didn't. Most sea raiders wanted nothing more than to rob victims who couldn't resist. What was better than profit without risk? If this pirate turned out to be an exception, though, he might end up naked and chained in a slave market in Carthage . . . or down at the bottom of the sea, with little crabs crawling in through the eyeholes of his skull to feast on whatever they could find inside.

Over in the pirate ship, men shouted and shook their fists at the oncoming Aphrodite. Some of the shouts were in Greek, others in one local language or another. The Aphrodite's sailors shouted curses and obscenities in return. A naked pirate stood up on his bench and flapped his private parts at the Aphrodite's crew, as if he were a man in the agora making himself disgusting to the slave women and poor farmers' wives who came there to shop and gossip.

"I've seen bigger pricks on a mouse!" Diokles yelled, not missing a stroke with mallet and bronze. The exhibitionist pirate sat down abruptly; he must have understood enough Greek for that shaft to strike home.

And then all the Aphrodite's crew erupted in cheers: just out of bowshot, the pirate ship heeled hard to starboard as it turned away from the merchant galley. It headed north in a hurry, the sail coming up to lie against the yard. "Ease back on the men," Menedemos told Diokles. "Not a chance we'll be able to catch 'em. We saw that back in the Aegean, too."

"Right again," the oarmaster said. "The way he's running, you'd think he had a five on his tail."

"The way he's running, a five wouldn't catch him, either," Menedemos said. "A hemiolia might, or a trireme. But a five's too beamy and heavy and slow, just like us." He shook his fist at the receding pentekonter.

"I'd like to see everybody aboard there nailed to a cross," Diokles said. "Come to that, I'd like to see every pirate everywhere nailed to a cross."

"So would I, but I don't think it's going to happen," Menedemos answered. "For one thing, you'd run out of trees before you made enough crosses to put all the pirates on."

The oarmaster grunted and spat into the sea. "Heh. That'd be funny if only it was funny, you know what I mean?"

"Don't I just?" Menedemos raised his voice to call out to all the rowers: "Well done, men! We scared off another vulture. Now - portside back oars, starboard side forward." Almost in her own length, the Aphrodite spun to port. When her bow pointed back toward Hipponion, Menedemos took half the rowers from each side off the oars and headed toward the harbor, now a few stadia more distant than it had been when Aristeidas first spotted the pentekonter.

"Never a dull moment," Sostratos said, mounting the steps that led up from the waist to the poop deck.

"Did you expect there would be?" Menedemos asked. "If you wanted things dull, you should have stayed back in Rhodes."

"They're liable not to be dull even there," Sostratos said. "Who knows what the Macedonians are up to while we're out here in the west?"

"You're right," Menedemos said after a moment. "I could wish you were wrong, but you're right."

"I hope the generals aren't doing anything," his cousin said. "If they are doing something, I hope they're doing it to one another, not to Rhodes. But when you live in a polis in an age full of marshals, you can't help worrying."

"No, you can't." Menedemos thought about coming back to a Rhodes garrisoned by Antigonos' soldiers, or Ptolemaios'. He imagined mercenaries swaggering through the streets, with rich families hostages for the good behavior of the city as a whole. His own family was far from poor. Not for the first time, he wished Sostratos hadn't made him think so much.

Looking ahead to the Italian coastline bathed in the rays of the setting sun helped him not think about what might be happening far away to the east. Maybe Sostratos was doing his best not to think about that, too, for he pointed toward the shore and said, "It's greener by the town than it is most other places."

"Some people say Persephone used to come over there from Sicily to gather flowers," Menedemos answered. "I don't know whether that's true or not, but the girls from Hipponion go out to those meadows and make themselves flower garlands for festivals and such."

"How do you know that?" Sostratos asked. "You've never been here before."

"Tavern talk," Menedemos told him. "You miss a lot of things like that, because you don't like sitting around and chatting with sailors."

"I don't like going through a talent's weight of talk for half an obolos' worth of something interesting," Sostratos said tartly.

"But you never know ahead of time what will turn out to be interesting," Menedemos said.

Sostratos tossed his head. "No. You never know if anything will turn out to be interesting. Usually, nothing is. Most tavern talk is people lying about fish they say they caught and men they say they killed and women they say they had. I don't know how Persephone's name ever came up in a tavern, unless you were drinking with Hades."

That jerked a laugh from Menedemos. "I wasn't talking about Persephone, exactly. I was talking about Hipponion, and what the anchorage is like." He pointed ahead. "It's nothing much, is it?"