Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

To Menedemos, Sostratos murmured, "If I talked to them like that, they'd throw me over the side."

"They'd do the same to me," his cousin answered. "They'll obey me; sure enough, but a skipper shouldn't scream at his sailors. That's what makes mutinies happen: they think you're a gods-detested whoreson. But they respect a tough keleustes - the fellow in that job's supposed to have a hide thick as leather."

Sostratos pondered that. Menedemos had the knack for getting men to do what he wanted because they liked him. Diokles was ready to outroar anyone who presumed to stand against him. And what about me? Sostratos wondered. Neither of those ways seemed open to him. When people did what he wanted, it was because he'd persuaded them that that was the right thing to do under the circumstances. Such persuasion had its uses, but not, he feared, in emergencies.

Again and again, Diokles shouted, "Portside oars - in!" After a while, Sostratos thought the rowers had the maneuver down cold, but the keleustes kept drilling them. When at last he relented, it was with a growled warning: "We'll do it again tomorrow, too. We're talking about saving your necks, remember."

At sunset, the anchors splashed into the sea. The Aphrodite bobbed in light chop, well off the Italian coast. Even if a storm blew up, the ship had plenty of leeway - and galleys were far less vulnerable to being driven ashore by hostile wind and wave than were ships that relied on sails alone.

The evening meal was about as frugal as breakfast had been. Sostratos ate bread and oil and olives and cheese. Menedemos bit into an onion pungent enough to make Sostratos' eyes water from three cubits away. He washed it down with a sip of wine. Catching Sostratos' eye, he said, "It's not what we got at Gylippos' supper, but it fills the belly."

"What you got at Gylippos' supper was trouble," Sostratos replied. "How's your ankle today?"

He'd meant that as a gibe, but Menedemos answered seriously: "Standing at the steering oars all day long doesn't do it any good, but it's healing. It would be worse if I had to run around a lot."

"You did that back in Taras," Sostratos pointed out.

"Yes, O most beloved cousin of mine," Menedemos said, so poisonously that Sostratos decided he'd pushed things about as far as he could go.

On the second evening out from Hipponion, the Aphrodite reached the town of Laos, which lay at the mouth of a river of the same name. Laos' harbor was rather better than that of Hipponion, and the merchant galley tied up at one of the piers. Hardly any of the longshoremen and loafers spoke more than a few words of Greek: they talked among themselves in one Italic language or another.

Across the pier was a sailing ship from Rhegion. Her skipper, a tubby, gray-haired fellow who gave his name as Leptines, ambled by to look over the Aphrodite. "I envy you your oars," he said. "I've been crawling up the coast - crawling, I tell you - tacking all the way. I'll be a month getting to Neapolis, maybe more. How am I supposed to make ends meet if I can't get from here to there?"

Sostratos poured him some of the same wine he was drinking himself and asked, "Why didn't you sail south, to take advantage of the winds?"

"I usually do." Leptines gulped the wine. "Ahh, that's good. I usually do, like I said, but not this year. Too big a chance of somebody's navy snapping me up if I went along the Sicilian coast."

Sostratos dipped his head. The Aphrodite hadn't tried sailing down to Syracuse, either. Menedemos gave Leptines an engaging smile. "Any special ports we should know about on the way up the coast?"

Leptines didn't directly answer that. Instead, he returned a question for a question: "What are you carrying?"

"Peafowl chicks and perfume, papyrus and ink, fine Khian wine, Koan silk, perfumes - things like that," Menedemos replied. "How about you?"

"Wool and timber and wheat and leather," Leptines said. "I should've known a merchant galley from out of the east would only come here for the luxury trade. If we were competing, I wouldn't give you the hour of the day, but you won't do my business any harm even if you will get up north ahead of me."

"Well, then?" Menedemos asked in his most ingratiating voice. Sostratos hoped his winecup hid his own snicker. His cousin sounded as if he were trying to talk a girl into bed. Had he sounded that way with Phyllis? Sostratos wouldn't have been surprised.

His tone certainly worked on Leptines. "There's one place by the coast south of Neapolis where there's more to it than you'd think," the trader from Rhegion said, "provided you don't mind doing business with Samnites, that is."

Menedemos glanced at Sostratos. Sostratos shrugged. Menedemos said, "When we were in Taras, we sold our peacock to a Samnite. He paid what he said he would. I'd do it again."

"What is this town?" Sostratos asked.

"It's on the Sarnos River," Leptines answered. "You can go a ways farther up the river, too, if you're really feeling bold. But this place I have in mind does duty as the port town for Nole and Noukeria and Akherrhai, too. Those places are all fat, fat, fat - some of the richest farming country in the world in those parts."

"Sounds promising," Sostratos agreed. "But you still haven't told us the name of this place."

Leptines snapped his fingers in annoyance at himself. "You're right, I haven't. It's called Pompaia."

"I never heard of it," Sostratos said. "What about you, Menedemos? You know more about Italy than I do."

"I think the name sounds familiar," Menedemos said. "I've never been there, though, and I don't know anyone who has."

Leptines tapped his own chest with a forefinger. "You do now. I'm telling you, the place is worth a visit. And the Pompaians are mad for anything from Hellas, too. They've got a Doric-style temple there that's kind of old-fashioned nowadays, but you wouldn't be surprised to see it in a real polis even so."

Sostratos eyed Menedemos. "What do you think?" Such decisions, in the end, were up to his cousin.

"I don't know." Menedemos rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped under his fingers; with the Aphrodite at sea the past two days, he'd had no chance to shave. "I hadn't planned to put in there; I was just thinking of heading on up to Neapolis."

"Don't listen to me, then - it'll be your loss," Leptines said. "I'm telling you, with the farms they've got up there, the rich men make a nice pile of silver. They'd be able to afford whatever you've got, and a lot of them speak Greek."

"That's good," Sostratos said. "We certainly don't speak Oscan, or whatever language they use there."

"Oscan, sure enough," Leptines said. "No, you wouldn't need to, not coming out from Rhodes the way you do. I've learned some over the years. It comes in handy now and again, if you do a deal of trading in Italian waters."

"Yes, I can see that it would," Sostratos agreed, and looked toward Menedemos again.

His cousin rubbed his chin once more. Then he reached out to Leptines. "Let me have your cup." He poured it full, and refilled his and Sostratos' as well. Then he raised his in salute. "To Pompaia!"

"To Pompaia!" Sostratos and Leptines echoed. Sostratos drank. Menedemos had watered the wine only a very little.

Leptines noticed that, too: the trader from Rhegion appreciatively smacked his lips. "Glad to help my fellow Hellenes," he said, "especially when I don't have to hurt myself to do it. If you boys were carrying wheat and wood, too, you couldn't pull the name out of me if you gave me to a Carthaginian torturer."

"Back in Rhodes, we'd speak of a Persian torturer," Sostratos said.

"All boils down to the same thing." Leptines tipped his head and his cup back. "Obliged to you boys for your hospitality. If you hang around in Pompaia for a bit, you'll eventually see me there. How much do you pay your rowers, anyway?"