Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

Menedemos took a hand off the steering oar to poke him in the ribs. "I know what you're thinking of: that copper-haired Keltic girl you were screwing in Taras."

Sostratos' ears heated; he had indeed been thinking of Maibia, in and especially out of the Koan silk tunic she wore. "Well, what if I was?" he asked roughly.

"It's all right with me." As usual when the talk rolled around to women, Menedemos sounded disgustingly cheerful. "I've got plenty to think about myself."

"If you'd do some thinking beforehand . . ." Sostratos said.

"That takes away half the fun. More than half," he cousin answered.

"I don't see it that way," Sostratos said with a shrug.

"I know you don't." Menedemos leaned forward and spoke in a low voice: "Just exactly how much silver are we carrying? In the name of the gods, don't yell out the answer. The last thing we want to do is give the sailors ideas." In something close to a whisper, Sostratos told him. Menedemos whistled softly. "That's even more than I figured. It's almost enough for ballast."

"On a ship this size?" Sostratos made the automatic mental calculation, then tossed his head. "Don't be silly."

"Mm, I suppose not." By the look of concentration on his face, Menedemos was making the same calculation. "But I'll tell you this: it's more silver than my father expected us to bring back. And I'll rub his nose in it, too."

"Why bother?" Sostratos asked. "Uncle Philodemos will be glad to see you home safe, and he'll be glad of the profit. Isn't that enough?"

"No, by Zeus." A hot eagerness thrummed in Menedemos' voice, like a following wind in the rigging. "Ever since I started toddling around and stopped making messes on the floor, he's always gone on and on about what a great trader he is and how I don't measure up. Let's see him talk like that now."

"I didn't come out here thinking to outdo my father," Sostratos said.

"You're toikharkhos. I'm captain," Menedemos said, that hot eagerness turning to something cold and hard for a moment. But he went on, "Uncle Lysistratos doesn't go around bragging and carping all the time; I will say that. And the two of you get along better than Father and I do. Anyone who saw us would say that."

"I suppose so," Sostratos said. "We'd have a hard time getting along worse than the two of you, wouldn't we?"

"You're as comfortable together as a foot and an old sandal, and you know it," Menedemos said. "The two of you fit like that. Do you have any idea how jealous it makes me?"

"No, I didn't, not till you just mentioned it." Sostratos studied his cousin with an avid curiosity of a small boy seeing an unexpected lizard emerge from under a chunk of bark. "I'm usually the one who holds things inside, but you've kept that secret for years. Forever, really."

By Menedemos' expression, he wished he hadn't told it now. He said, "I'm not sorry to get away from Rhodes for months at a time, I'll tell you that."

"I can see as much," Sostratos said judiciously. He set a hand on Menedemos' shoulder. "We won't be back for a little while yet. Nothing happens in a hurry on the sea. Even when we were fighting that Roman trireme, we seemed to be moving as slowly as if we were in a dream."

"Not to me," Menedemos said. "It all happened very fast, as far as I was concerned. I needed to gauge just the right moment to tug at the steering oars, and it all felt like it happened in a heartbeat. That's the sweetest sound I ever heard - our hull riding up and over that polluted whoreson's oars."

"If you think I'll argue, you're mad," Sostratos said. "That sound meant we stayed free men, and what could be sweeter than that?" He pointed ahead. "There's Cape Leukopetra, with Cape Herakleion just off to the east."

"I know, my dear. I saw them quite a while ago." Now Menedemos sounded acidulous, perhaps because he'd shown more of himself to Sostratos a little while before than he'd wanted to. "I don't have to change the way the ship is heading this very instant, you know."

"So you don't," Sostratos agreed. "Proves my point - nothing happens in a hurry on the sea."

Menedemos stuck out his tongue. They both laughed. Laughter came easy when they'd made a profit, when they were sailing away from danger and not into it, and - for Sostratos, at least - when they were homeward bound.

"That should just about do it," Menedemos said as the Aphrodite eased into place alongside a quay in Kroton's harbor.

"I think so, too, skipper," Diokles said. "Oöp!" he called in a louder voice, and the rowers rested at their oars. A couple of sailors tossed lines to men on the quay, who made the merchant galley fast.

"You were here earlier this summer, weren't you?" one of the roustabouts called.

"That's right," Menedemos answered. "We went up the west coast of Italy, and then down to Syracuse with the grain fleet from Rhegion. You've heard how Agathokles landed not far from Carthage?"

"Sure have," the roustabout said. "That took balls, that did."

From the bow, Sostratos asked, "Do you know what happened when the Roman fleet attacked Pompaia? We were up that way, and almost got caught."

"It came to grief, or that's what I heard," the Krotonite said. Several sailors clapped their hands together in grim delight. The roustabout went on, "The sailors and soldiers aboard scattered to plunder, and the folk from all the towns thereabouts - not just Pompaia, but Nole and Noukeria and Akherrai, too - gathered together and drove 'em back to their ships with heavy losses." More sailors clapped. Some of them cheered. The local added, "Some people say one Roman ship got wrecked by a merchantman, but you won't get me to swallow that."

"I wouldn't either, if I were you," Menedemos said gravely. The sailors who heard him sniggered and brought their hands up to their mouths to keep from laughing out loud. The roustabout gave them curious looks, but nobody said another word, so he shrugged and started to turn away.

Before he left, Sostratos asked him, "How does the marvelous Hipparinos like his peafowl chicks?"

"You're those fellows!" The Krotonite snapped his fingers in excitement. "I thought you were those fellows, but I wasn't sure, and I didn't like to take the chance. Do you know what happened there? Do you?"

"If we did, would we be asking?" Menedemos did his best to seem the very image of sweet reason.

"That's right, how could you? You're just a pack of polluted foreigners," the Krotonite said. For Menedemos, sweet reason dissolved in anger. But before he could show it, the local went on, "Hipparinos, he has this Kastorian hunting hound - you know, brought here all the way from Sparta - he's as proud of as his son. Prouder, probably, on account of all his son wants to do is drink neat wine and screw." He paused. "What exactly was I talking about?"

"Peafowl chicks," Menedemos and Sostratos said together.

"That's right. I sure was." The roustabout snapped his fingers again. "Anyway, like I said, he has this hound named Taxis." Hipparinos, Menedemos thought, would be just the man to name a dog Order. The Krotonite continued, "And Taxis, he got his first look at these chicks and he ate one up before anybody could tell him not to or grab him to keep him from doing it. You could've heard old Hipparinos screaming from the agora all the way to the guard towers on the wall."

"I believe that," Menedemos said. "His precious hound is even more precious now - it ate up a mina and a half of silver at one gulp."

"A mina and a half? Is that all?" the local said.

"Is that all?" Sostratos echoed, as if he couldn't believe his ears.

"That's what I said, and that's what I meant," the Krotonite told him. "Hipparinos has been saying that miserable little bird cost him five minai."

Menedemos started to tell how Hipparinos had tried to cheat him on the price he'd paid for the two peafowl chicks. Just then, Sostratos had a coughing fit. Menedemos let the story go untold. For a Krotonite to disparage a rich fellow citizen was one thing. For him, a foreigner, to disparage that same man might prove something else again.