Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"A drakhma and a half a day," Sostratos answered.

Leptines made a horrible face. "And you've got what, twenty-five rowers on a side?"

"Twenty."

"Even so. That's a lot of silver to have to lay out every day." Leptines chuckled. "I think about having to spend money like that and all of a sudden I stop caring so much that I don't get places in a hurry. Hail." He went back to his own ship.

"He's a piker," Menedemos said, but in a low voice so the other skipper wouldn't overhear. "He worries about money going out, but he doesn't think about how to bring lots of money in." He grinned. "All the better for us."

"I should say so," Sostratos answered. "And if this Pompaia place is even half as rich as he makes it out to be, we ought to do well for ourselves there."

"Worth a try," Menedemos said. "I don't expect it to reward us the way Aphrodite rewarded Paris, but worth a try."

"What would we do with Helen if we had her?" Sostratos pointed at Menedemos. "I know what you'd do, you satyr. But that's not profitable. Wouldn't you rather be rewarded as Kroisos the Lydian king rewarded Solon of Athens? He let Solon into his treasury to carry out as much gold as he could hold, and Solon went in wearing baggy boots and a tunic too big for him and even greased his hair with olive oil so gold dust would stick to it."

Menedemos laughed. "No, I wouldn't mind that. But I don't mind women, either. Why can't I want everything at once?"

"You can want everything at once," Sostratos said. "But you can't be too disappointed when you don't get it. How many men do?"

"Some must," Menedemos insisted.

"Some, maybe, but only a handful," Sostratos said. "When Kroisos asked Solon who the happiest man in the world was, he thought Solon would name him. But Solon picked Athenians who'd lived long and died well. Kroisos was offended, but Solon turned out to be right in the end, for the Lydian king first lost his son in a hunting accident and then lost his kingdom to the Persians. Was he happy at the last? Not likely."

"But he had plenty of good times before that last," his cousin said.

Sostratos sighed. "You're incorrigible." Menedemos gave him half a bow, as if at a compliment. Sostratos sighed again.

9

On the second day after leaving Laos, the Aphrodite sailed between the island of Kapreai and the Cape of the Sirennousai. As Menedemos swung the merchant galley east toward Pompaia, he pointed to an old, tumbledown temple on the headland of the cape and remarked, "They say Odysseus built that place. And they say some of the rocky islands off Kapreai are the ones where the Sirens lived."

"They say all sorts of strange things," Sostratos answered. "Do you believe them?"

"I don't know," Menedemos said. "I truly don't. There was the whirlpool off Messene, right where Skylle was supposed to be."

"Yes, there was the whirlpool," his cousin said, "but where was the horrible monster sucking in the water to make it? Did you see her? Has anyone since Odysseus heard the Sirens singing on those rocks off Kapreai?"

"I don't know any of that, either," Menedemos said, a little testily. "But if anyone did hear the Sirens singing, they'd lure him to his doom, so how could he come back and say what he heard?" He smiled a smug smile.

But Sostratos wouldn't let him get away with it. "Odysseus figured out a way to do it. With Homer known wherever Hellenes live, don't you suppose some other bold fellow would have put wax in his sailors' ears so he could listen to the song the hero heard?"

"Maybe." Menedemos gave Sostratos a sour look. "Sometimes when you take things to pieces, you take all the fun out of them."

"No." Sostratos tossed his head in emphatic disagreement. "Taking things to pieces is the fun. If you leave them sitting there the way they were when you found them, what have you learned? Nothing."

"Why do you have to learn something all the time?" Menedemos asked. "Why can't something be interesting just because it is what it is?"

"If everyone thought that way, we'd still be sailing pentekonters and swinging bronze swords, the way the men of the Iliad and Odyssey did," Sostratos said.

"How do you know that's what they did?" Menedemos said. "You call the Odyssey nonsense when it suits you, so why do you choose to believe that?"

Sostratos opened his mouth, then closed it again. When at last he did speak, it was in thoughtful tones: "Do you know, I never once wondered about it. The strange pieces are those that seem the hardest to believe, not the homely little details of the heroes' world. We know pentekonters and bronze - we don't know Sirens and Skylle."

"Well, then, you believe what you want to believe and I'll believe what I want to believe, and we'll both be happy," Menedemos said. Sostratos did not look happy about that, but Menedemos didn't worry about it. He'd distracted his cousin, which served almost as well as convincing him, especially since he could cut the conversation short right after that by adding, "I believe we're just about to Pompaia, and I'm going to pay attention to that."

He had to pay more attention to it than he'd expected, for Pompaia lay not on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, as Leptines had led him to believe, but a few stadia up the Sarnos River, on the northern side of the stream. Soldiers - presumably Samnites - peered down at him from the wall as his rowers guided the Aphrodite into place at one of the piers thrusting out into the stream.

As a couple of locals tied the akatos to it quay, Sostratos pointed north. "Look. That mountain there in back of the town has a good deal of the look of Aitne to it, doesn't it? It's not nearly so tall, of course, but it's got the same conical shape."

"So it does," said Menedemos, who, up to that moment, had had no chance to worry about the mountain.

"I wonder if it's a volcano, too," Sostratos said. "What did Leptines say its name was?"

"I don't think he did." Menedemos raised his voice to call out to one of the roustabouts: "Hey! Do you speak Greek?"

"Me?" The fellow pointed to himself. "Yes, I speak some. What do you want?"

"What's the name of that mountain north of your city here?"

"You must be from far away," the roustabout said, "not to know about Mount Ouesouion."

"Ouesouion?" Menedemos echoed, trying to imitate the local's pronunciation. "What an ugly name," he murmured in an aside to Sostratos, who dipped his head in agreement. Menedemos gave his attention back to the Pompaian: "We are from far away - we've sailed all the way from Rhodes."

"Rhodes?" The roustabout had almost as much trouble with the name as Menedemos had with Ouesouion. "Where's that at? Is it down by Taras, where so many of you Hellenes live?"

"It's farther away than that," Menedemos answered. "You have to cross the Ionian Sea to go from Taras to the mainland of Hellas, and then you have to cross the Aegean Sea to go from the mainland of Hellas to Rhodes."

"Do tell," the Pompaian said. "I went over to Neapolis once, I did. Had to walk two days to get there and two days back." Menedemos carefully held his face straight. Then he wondered how many people here had never gone two days' journey from their little town, if this fellow thought doing so was worth bragging about. The roustabout went on, "So what did you bring us from this Rhodes place, wherever it's at?"

Now Menedemos did smile, and launched into his sales pitch: "Fine wine from Khios, fine silk from Kos - "

"What's silk?" the local asked. "I don't know that word."

"It's a fabric, smoother and softer than linen," Menedemos answered. "And we have perfumes from Rhodian roses, and papyrus and ink" - not that we're likely to sell any of those here, he thought - "and . . . peafowl."

"What are peafowl?" the Pompaian said. "Don't know that word, neither."