Harry Turtledove - Salamis

He chuckled. “What’s funny?” Baukis asked.

“Nothing, really.” He didn’t care to tell that one to her—and to Lyke—even if he left Diodoros out of it. But he chuckled again.

Clouds rolled by overhead, traveling from northwest to southeast. Sostratos eyed them with mingled suspicion and relief: they were bigger and thicker and darker than the puffy little white ones that drifted across the sky at high summer. The rainy season wasn’t here yet, but he literally could see it coming. Like every other sailor ever born, he prided himself on reading the weather.

Before very long, the rain would come. The wind would blow up storms. Sailing would probably shut down for the winter, though fishing boats would keep going out. Sostratos looked north. The Anatolian mainland wasn’t far away at all. A bold man, an intrepid man—a man like, say, Demetrios son of Antigonos—might chance leading a fleet across that narrow stretch of sea and catching the Rhodians off guard.

He might, yes. But Sostratos didn’t think he would. The risk seemed larger than the reward he might gain from it.

Every day the peace held between Rhodes on the one hand and Demetrios and Antigonos on the other felt like a day won, almost a day stolen. The walls were in better shape now than they ever had been in the century-long history of the polis. They’d been raised, they’d been strengthened, all the brush had been cleared away from their bases, and the ditch outside them had been deepened and studded with pointed stakes. More of that kind of work could go on through the winter.

Men who’d never had to play the hoplite could go on training, too. Sostratos practiced in his cuirass and helmet these days. He was starting to get used to the extra weight and the way the helmet’s cheek pieces and nasal cut down his vision. He was getting used to the feel of a spearshaft and a sword—at least a wooden practice sword—in his hand, too.

Every once in a while, he would do something that made one of the Cretans who trained the locals look at him thoughtfully. His cousin had bragged about that kind of thing. He understood why, too. A couple of times, he got home with rag-tipped spear or oaken blade when the man he was working against didn’t think he could.

“ Papai! ” one of them exclaimed, opening and closing his hand to make sure it wasn’t broken after Sostratos rapped him smartly on the knuckles. “You dirty son of a mad dog, you think left-handed!”

“Thank you!” Sostratos said. The mercenary, who hadn’t meant it as praise, swore at him some more. Sostratos went on, “Won’t it help me stay alive if the foe doesn’t know ahead of time what I’m likely to do?”

“Not if I get my hands around your neck.” The Cretan stared down at his hand. “Bugger me! That’s swelling up like a puff adder just before it strikes.”

“Soaking it in cold water may help a bit.” Yes, Sostratos did fancy himself as at least something of a physician.

“Thanks a lot, Asklepios!” the mercenary jeered. Ears afire, Sostratos mumbled some kind of farewell and went off to shed his kit and scrape away the sweat and oil on his body. He knew he’d never practice with that particular soldier again. He wondered if he’d practice at all after this. Getting killed later seemed better than getting humiliated now.

That made no sense. The rational part of him understood as much. But the rational part of him was also coming to recognize that it didn’t rule all the time. Philosophers insisted that it should. Maybe it did for some of them. Sostratos wished it would for him. He couldn’t make it do any such thing, though, try as he would.

And, the older he got, the more he suspected it didn’t even for others who called themselves lovers of wisdom. Philosophers quarreled with one another no less than ordinary men did—they were just more eloquent about it.

They fell in love—and out of it—no less than ordinary men did, too. Even Sokrates, probably the wisest of them all, had stayed married to Xanthippe till the Athenians made him drink hemlock. She’d also cared for him in her own fashion. As he waited to take the poison, she’d wailed, “I don’t want you killed for something you didn’t even do!”

To which he’d replied, “Would you want me killed if I had done it?”

Neither Platon, Xenophon, nor anyone else had recorded her response to that. Sostratos imagined a comic playwright’s crack: something like, The only time a man ever got the last word!

He put on his chiton and left the gymnasion with his kit in his arms. That was the kind of thing Menedemos should come up with. Menedemos didn’t even pretend to be rational all the time.

As if thinking of his cousin conjured up the man himself, Sostratos ran into him before he got halfway home. “Hail!” Menedemos said. “What have you been up to?”

Sostratos hefted his corselet and helm. “What you’d expect—working out in the gymnasion, trying to learn how not to get killed.”

“How not to get killed? There’s a noble ambition! How did you do?”

Sostratos let out a horrible noise, one that would do for a death rattle, and made as if to slump to the ground. Straightening, he said, “Not too well, I’m afraid.”

His joke worked better than he dreamt it would. Menedemos laughed till tears ran down his face, laughed and laughed and had trouble stopping. At last, wiping his face with his forearm, he choked out, “Oh, my dear, you’ve gone and flattened me. You should tell stories in the taverns, the way some men who fancy themselves for their wits do. You’d run them all out of business, and make more money than you do on trading runs.”

“Did you bring home some poppy juice from Egypt?” Sostratos asked, less rhetorically than he’d intended. “You sound like a man who’s taken too much of it—you’re all full of hallucinations and phantasms.”

“I don’t think so,” his cousin said. “I’ve never laughed so hard for them as I did for you just now.”

Sostratos didn’t think tavern comics were funny, either—certainly not so funny as they thought they were. “Have you made some kind of special comparison lately?” he enquired.

Menedemos tossed his head. “Not me. I haven’t laughed much about anything lately. There doesn’t seem to be much to laugh at, for Rhodes or for the family. Or there didn’t, till you slew me just now.” He started giggling again.

“We made a fine profit coming back from Alexandria, even without selling Ptolemaios’ weapons to the polis,” Sostratos said. “As long as Rhodes does all right, the family should, too.”

Only a moment before, he’d wondered how to get Menedemos to quit laughing. Now he’d gone and done it, without even knowing just what he’d done. His cousin suddenly seemed as serious, even as somber, as if someone had jammed a stopper into the amphora that held his mirth. In a voice like winter, he replied, “Well, you don’t know everything there is to know, do you?”

“Plainly not, O best one,” Sostratos said, bewildered at the sudden mood swing. “How can I, though, if you won’t tell me anything?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Menedemos said: such an obvious lie that Sostratos just looked at him. Even under his seafarer’s tan, Menedemos flushed. “There isn’t, curse it!” he insisted.

“There may not be anything you care to tell,” Sostratos said, “but that’s not the same thing, is it?”

Menedemos stalked away. Sostratos took a step after him, then stopped. He could—sometimes—tell when something wouldn’t do any good. This was one of those times.

Menedemos had just bought some bread with fried cheese on it in the agora when a man strolling by told his companion, “Well, he’s gone and done it.”