Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"Wrap yourself in your himation, as if you were an Egyptian mummy," Menedemos said. "Wrap your face up, too. That'll keep you dry."

"Of course it will - till the whole himation soaks through," Sostratos said.

"By then you'll be asleep, and you won't notice till morning." As Menedemos so often did, he spoke like a man with all the answers.

Since Sostratos had no answers of his own, he tried his cousin's. For a little while, he thought it would work: the thick wool of the himation did keep the rain off fairly well. He was just getting really sleepy when he noticed he was also getting really wet. That woke him up again, and he took a long, long time to fall asleep. From a couple of cubits away, Menedemos' snores effortlessly pierced the soft patter of the rain. That didn't help, either.

It was still raining when Sostratos woke up the next morning. He felt half suffocated in wet wool. He undid the mantle, sat up, and knuckled his eyes, trying to convince himself this was all some horrid dream. He couldn't do it, and resigned himself to a long day full of weariness.

Menedemos was already up and moving. Seeing Sostratos stir, he smile. "Good day. Isn't this a splendid morning?"

"No." Sostratos was often inclined to be grumpy before breakfast. A bad night and wet clothes didn't help.

His one-word answer made Menedemos' smile wider. "But just think, O best one - today you can drink watered wine without pouring in any water." Sostratos' suggestion as to what Menedemos could do with and to his wine only pulled a laugh from his cousin.

Wine, watered from a jar as well as by the rain, helped warm Sostratos and resign him to being awake. Olives were olives, whether eaten in the rain or under a bright, sunny sky. But he gulped down his bread in a hurry, before it could get soggy.

"Come on, boys," Menedemos called to the crew. "We'll have to put more work into it than I expected, and that's too bad, but if we do we'll sleep warm tonight." In a soft aside to Sostratos, he added, "If we make the mainland anywhere close to Kallipolis, that is."

For most of the day, Sostratos wondered if they would know they'd made the mainland before running aground. The rain kept splashing down, as if it were the middle of winter rather than a little before the equinox. A little past noon - or so Sostratos guessed, but he was too tired to have much confidence in the hour - a fishing boat came into sight. Menedemos hailed it: "Which way to Kallipolis from where we are?"

"That way, I think," the fisherman said, and pointed. "Wouldn't take oath to anything, though - not in this. Early in the year for so much rain."

"Isn't it?" Menedemos agreed. "Thanks, friend." To Sostratos, he said, "Unless my reckoning's off even more than I think, he pointed close to due east."

"Easy enough for us to come too far north with nothing much we could use to judge our course," Sostratos said.

"I suppose so." But Menedemos still sounded discontented. He took as much pride in his ship-handling as Sostratos did in his bits of historical lore. Trust Menedemos to be the one who's proud of something from which he can actually get some use, Sostratos thought.

Towards evening, the weather finally began to clear again. "Land ho!" Aristeidas sang out. "Land dead ahead, and also land to starboard."

Sostratos saw the land, too, as did everyone else aboard the Aphrodite. The akatos lay forty or fifty stadia offshore, in no danger of running aground. To Sostratos' surprise, the beach ahead and the curve of the coast looked familiar. He needed a moment to realize why. Then, turning to Menedemos, he said, "Isn't that where we got rid of Alexidamos after he tried to steal the peafowl eggs?"

"Why, I do believe you're right," Menedemos said after a little study of his own.

"I half expected to see him bearing down on us in Taras, spear in one hand, shield in the other, blazing for revenge because we threw him off the ship," Sostratos said.

"He must have fallen foul of the Samnites before he made it to the polis," Menedemos replied. "I can't say I'm sorry, either. The only thing worse than a thief on board is a man with a sickness that spreads."

"How far are we from Kallipolis?" Sostratos asked.

"A couple of hundred stadia, maybe a little more," his cousin answered. "If I have this stretch of coastline straight in my mind, it's about halfway between Taras and Kallipolis."

"Can we make Kallipolis by nightfall?"

"I doubt it." Menedemos didn't sound happy about having to doubt it. He swung his leg in a way that meant he would have kicked at the dirt had he not been aboard ship. "I hadn't planned on spending two nights in a row at sea, but I'm not going to beach the Aphrodite on this coast."

"I should hope not." Sostratos shuddered at the thought of losing all the silver they'd worked so long and hard to gather. Every crewman within earshot dipped his head to show he didn't want to ground the ship, either.

"It's the rain's fault," Menedemos said. "We'd have gone faster and I'd have navigated better without it."

"Maybe it'll work out for the best," Sostratos said. "We'll have a little chance to dry out, so we won't look like such ragamuffins when we do come into port."

"We haven't got much left to sell," his cousin said. "It isn't worth worrying about."

"We may come back there one of these days," Sostratos said. "People will remember. They always remember scandal." He didn't need to read any history to be sure of that, and was slightly scandalized when Menedemos only shrugged. He has no sense of anything but the moment, Sostratos thought sadly. Maybe that's why he ends up in trouble over women so often. It never occurred to him to wonder what Menedemos was thinking about him just then.

They didn't make Kallipolis before nightfall, and did anchor offshore. The men grumbled a little about that. Sostratos wondered at their logic. They'd just made it very clear that they didn't care to risk going ashore, but they still didn't want to stay at sea? What did that leave? He imagined the Aphrodite floating several hundred cubits up in the air. Daidalos and Ikaros might get to the ship then, but he didn't see how anyone else would.

Menedemos' imagination was of a more practical sort: "I hadn't planned to lay over a night in Kallipolis, but I think I'd better, to give the men a chance to drink and roister."

"Good idea, skipper," Diokles said. If the oarmaster thought it a good idea, Sostratos wouldn't argue with him.

When they reached Kallipolis the next morning, it proved to lie on an island just off the Italian mainland, as Ortygia lay just off the Sicilian coast. Kallipolis, though, had never expanded off its island the way Syracuse had. It remained what so many of the colonies of Great Hellas had been in their early days: a Hellenic outpost at the edge of a land full of barbarians.

Despite its name, it didn't strike Sostratos as a particularly beautiful city. When he said as much, Menedemos laughed at him. "What would you expect them to call it? Kakopolis?" his cousin asked. "They'd enjoy trying to lure settlers to a polis with a name like that, wouldn't they? Uglytown?"

"All right, I see your point," Sostratos said. "But if you found a land full of snow and ice, you wouldn't call it a green land, would you?"

"I would if I wanted to get anybody to live there with me," Menedemos replied. "But I'm a good Rhodian. I don't even want to think about snow and ice, let alone live with 'em."

"It did snow once when I was in Athens," Sostratos said. "It was beautiful, but Zeus! it was cold." He shivered at the memory.

"We won't need to worry about that here," Menedemos said. "We have some wine, and we have some silk. Let's see if we can unload them. And" - he wagged a finger at Sostratos - "we don't need to tell the Kallipolitans what we think of their polis."