Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"Good day, sir." Menedemos politely inclined his head. "It's been pleasant talking with you."

"Are you mad?" the Kallipolitan said. "You had to open the jar to give me a sample. It won't keep - wine never does, not after you broach the amphora. How much will you get for vinegar? You'd better take what I offer, and be thankful you're getting that much."

His smug smile said he'd played this game with merchants before. He'd probably got away with it with a few of them, too. Another small-town, small-time chiseler, Sostratos thought. Aloud, he said, "Good day to you, sir, as my cousin said. And to the crows with you, too." He didn't have to waste politeness on a cheat.

The Kallipolitan's eyes widened again, this time with a different sort of astonishment. "But . . . But . . .," he floundered. "You have to sell the stuff, and - "

Sostratos had enjoyed bedding some girls less than he enjoyed laughing in the local's face. "We don't have do do a cursed thing, O marvelous one." Not for the first time, he stole Sokrates' sardonic salutation. "We just ran the Carthaginians' blockade to get grain into Syracuse. We have more silver than we know what to do with, friend. If you don't want the Ariousian - and if you don't want to pay our price for it - we'll give the jar to our sailors to drink."

"I've never had a merchant speak to me that way in all my life," the Kallipolitan said. Sostratos believed it. All he did was shrug. Menedemos matched him. The Kallipolitan spluttered wordlessly, then caught his stride. "Oh, very well. If you insist on being unreasonable, I suppose I can go to thirty drakhmai."

Normally, that would have been the start of a dicker. A dicker had started before Alexidamos interrupted things. Now, Sostratos just tossed his head. He said, "No," and not another word.

"Thirty-five, then." The local turned red. Anger or embarrassment?

Embarrassment, Sostratos judged. "My cousin told you sixty," he said. "Sixty it will be." He had, for once, the freedom of not caring whether or not he sold the wine. It felt exhilarating, as if he'd had a couple of quick nips from the amphora himself.

"You're not being reasonable," the Kallipolitan protested. "Here, now - I'll give you forty drakhmai. That's more than your precious Khian is worth."

"No," Sostratos said again. "Our price is sixty. If you want the wine, you'll pay it."

And the man from Kallipolis did pay it. He took a while to talk himself into it, and tried to get the two Rhodians to agree to forty-five, fifty, and fifty-five drakhmai first. Sostratos yawned in his face. Menedemos, who could be the most engaging of men when he wanted to, turned his back. The Kallipolitan stomped away. When he returned, a slave behind him, he threw a leather sack full of drakhmai at Sostratos almost as hard as Sostratos had thrown the stone at Alexidamos. Sostratos carefully counted the coins before dipping his head to his cousin.

As the local had the slave carry the amphora back toward his house, Sostratos sighed and said, "Thus we bid farewell to our brief layover in Kallipolis, a small polis where nothing interesting ever happens."

Menedemos stared at him, then started to laugh. "If only it were so," he said.

"Now we just have to hope Alexidamos doesn't go after any of our tavern-crawling sailors tonight," Sostratos said.

"No." His cousin tossed his head. "If that gods-detested mercenary is in any shape to go after our boys tonight after what you did to his beak, he's tougher than Talos, the man made all of bronze."

Sostratos considered that. "Well, maybe you're right."

Diokles pounded his bronze square with his mallet hard enough to make a lot of the Aphrodite's sailors wince as the merchant galley left the harbor of Kallipolis. Menedemos leaned forward toward his crapulous crew and favored them with the smile of a man who'd stayed sober. "Next stop, boys, is Hellas," he said.

He got a few answering smiles. He also got a few answering groans. Diokles said, "Some of 'em don't want to live long enough to get to Hellas."

"But they all will by this afternoon," Menedemos replied. "Hangovers don't kill you. You just wish they would."

Sostratos mounted to the poop deck. "And how shall we go back to Rhodes?" he asked. "Around Cape Tainaron again, or by the diolkos across the Isthmus of Corinth?"

"I don't know yet," Menedemos answered. "We have a good notion of the risks at Cape Tainaron. But who knows what's happened in and around Corinth while we've been out here in Great Hellas? How can we guess whether we should use the diolkos till we know who controls the polis?"

"Hmmm," Sostratos said, and then, "You've got something there, no doubt about it."

"Nice of you to admit it," Menedemos said. His cousin made a face at him. Ignoring it, he went on, "We can put in at Korkyra and hear the news there before we decide what to do."

"You're not going to sail southeast toward Zakynthos and reverse the way we came?"

"No. It's getting late in the sailing season for me to want to chance so much time on the open sea," Menedemos answered. "The cranes will be flying south for the winter pretty soon, and not many people want to do much on the water after that. How did Aristophanes put it in the Birds?"

"I don't know. How did he put it?" Sostratos said. "If you remember it, it was probably foul."

"That's not fair," Menedemos said indignantly. "Aristophanes could write lovely verses about anything at all."

"Or sometimes about nothing at all," Sostratos said.

"Not here," Menedemos said. "It goes something like this:

'Time to sow when the croaking crane migrates to Libya Which tells the shipmaster to lie idle after hanging up his steering oar.' "

"Well, all right. That isn't bad," Sostratos allowed.

"Do you think you can stand being so generous?" Menedemos said. He loved Aristophanes both for his poetry and for his bawdy wit. Sostratos, he knew, admired some of the verse but wanted nothing to do with the lewdness that went hand in hand with it.

To his surprise, his cousin answered seriously: "Being generous to Aristophanes isn't easy for me, you know. If it weren't for the way he pictured Sokrates in the Clouds, the Athenians might not have decided to make him drink hemlock."

"He's been dead for a hundred years - " Menedemos began.

"Not quite ninety," Sostratos broke in.

"Not quite ninety, then. Fine. Why are you getting so exercised about it?"

"Because he was a great and good man," Sostratos answered. "That's reason enough - more than reason enough. They aren't so common that we can afford to lose them."

"From everything I've heard, he was an interfering old busybody," Menedemos said. "Even if Aristophanes hadn't said a word about him, plenty of people still would've wanted to get rid of him."

For a moment, Sostratos looked as shocked as if he'd said Zeus did not exist - more shocked than that, even, for some bright young men these days did dare doubt the gods. But his cousin, as usual, thought before he spoke. At last, he said, "There may be some truth to that. He never did worry much about what other people thought before he opened his mouth. Platon makes that very plain."

"There you are, then," Menedemos said. "If it was his own fault, why are you blaming Aristophanes?"

"I didn't say it was all his own fault."

"Ha! Now you're backing oars. You can go one way or the other, O best one, but you can't try to go both ways at once," Menedemos said.

"I think you're trying to be as difficult as you can," Sostratos said.

"I'd sooner talk philosophy - or gossip about philosophers, which isn't quite the same thing - than think about pirates," Menedemos said. "Since I don't usually care to do that, you'd best believe the pirates worry me."

"You could have decided to make for Zakynthos instead of taking the short way across the Ionian Sea," Sostratos said.