Harry Turtledove - Salamis

“True. I wasn’t thinking of that just then. I was thinking of the old Cyclops when soldiers started slipping out of his camp and heading for Ptolemaios’ forts so they could collect their … their ….”

“Desertion bonus?” Menedemos suggested.

“ Euge! Desertion bonus, that’s perfect!” Sostratos dipped his head in agreement and admiration. “Antigonos put loyal men out between his lines and Ptolemaios’, and they caught some of the would-be deserters and brought them back for judgment, I suppose you’d call it.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, my dear,” Menedemos said. “Even among the Macedonians, the Antigonos doesn’t have a name for being a gentle fellow.”

Sostratos dipped his head again. “There are reasons he doesn’t, too. He assembled his army, then brought the deserters out before the men and turned his torturers loose on them.”

“That must have given the rest something to think about,” Menedemos observed.

“Antigonos hoped it would, anyhow. But his soldiers kept sneaking away, he couldn’t get past Ptolemaios’ strongpoints and into the Delta, and Demetrios’ fleet was having too much trouble with the weather to be any help. So he gave up in Egypt. The men he has left are marching up through Phoenicia and Syria now, probably on their way back to Anatolia. The fleet is going that way, too,” Sostratos said.

“Let me guess,” Menedemos said. “As soon as spring gets here, it’s our turn. We saw all this coming a while ago.”

“We did. What we didn’t see was any way to stop it. If Antigonos and Demetrios had both died trying to grab Egypt, that might have done the trick, but they didn’t. Our turn, sure enough. Either we bend the knee or we fight for our lives—that’s how it looks to me.”

“It looks the same way to me. I wish it didn’t, but it does. Aren’t these grand times to live in?” his cousin said.

“If we win, the poets will sing about our brave deeds the same way they sing about the fight for Troy. People hundreds of years from now will know Rhodes by her greatest hour.”

“How about if we lose?”

“If we lose, some historian will write, ‘Although Antigonos and Demetrios could not seize Egypt from Ptolemaios, they subjected Rhodes in the following year.’ And that little bit will be as boring as the rest of his work. No one will want to listen to it. The scribes won’t make new copies. And pretty soon mice will nibble holes in the papyrus of the last one left, and no one will know what he wrote anymore.”

Menedemos sent him a sly look. “You could do a better job than that with the story, my dear.”

“Maybe I could, but I wouldn’t want to write about Rhodes losing. Even if I did want to, chances are I’d get killed in the fighting or captured and sold as a slave. Hard to write history if that kind of thing happens to you.”

“I suppose it might be,” Menedemos admitted. “But wasn’t Aisop a slave?”

“So they say. For one thing, though, there are almost as many different stories about him as there are about Homer. For another, you don’t need to investigate and to travel and to ask questions of lots of important men to weigh all their answers to write stories about talking animals.”

“You don’t think your master—if you had a master, I mean—would trust you to go around the Inner Sea asking your questions when he didn’t need you, knowing you’d come back after you got done?”

Every once in a while, Sostratos found standing a couple of palms taller than his cousin a useful thing. As he looked down his nose at Menedemos now, he realized this was one of those times. “Don’t be more foolish than you can help, my dear. How far do you trust your family’s slaves not to run off?”

“Not very. And Rhodes is an island. They can’t go far unless they sail in a ship or steal a boat. They still want to be free, though.”

“They do,” Sostratos agreed. “It makes you wonder whether Aristoteles knew what he was talking about when he said some men were slaves by nature. Would they try so hard to escape if they were?”

“I don’t think so. But I also don’t think we’d get the work that needs doing done unless we made somebody do it. If we had to do all that ourselves, we wouldn’t have time to be proper men.”

“Something to that, I’m sure. You aren’t just talking about work around a household or in a shop or on a farm, either,” Sostratos said. “Can you imagine the Athenians sending free men to work the silver mines at Laureion?”

“Not unless you mean free men they wanted to get rid of,” his cousin replied. “How long does your ordinary slave last when he gets sent to the mines? A few months?”

“A few ten-days, more likely,” Sostratos said. “But that silver was important to Athens. The polis spent it to build the fleet that built the Persians at Salamis. Without it, without the triremes it paid for, there might be a Persian governor there right now. We might have one here, too.”

“So we might. That’s the other Salamis, of course, the one by Athens.”

“Yes, of course. That sea-fight has had almost two centuries of fame by now. I wonder whether, two centuries from now, our sea-fight at Cypriot Salamis will be remembered ahead of it.”

Menedemos winked. “I tell you what, my dear. If I’m around two hundred years from now, I’ll write you a note with the answer.”

“That means you think I’ll be around two centuries from now, too. Generous of you.”

“When it comes to words, I’m generosity itself,” Menedemos said.

“Many men are,” Sostratos said. But he couldn’t help laughing, no matter how much he wanted to. “I wonder how generous we’ll have to be for Rhodes in the coming year. Our silver, our lives …. If the polis needs them, how can we say no?”

“I’m better with spear and shield and sword than I was when I was a youth,” Menedemos said. “Those exercises were just for show then. Now they’re liable to keep me alive. Knowing that makes me work harder.”

“It’s the same with me. I still keep hoping we won’t need to use what we’ve practiced, but I don’t believe it anysmore.”

“There’s a baby in my house, too,” Menedemos said. “He can’t keep himself safe yet. We’ve got to do it for him.”

“Your half-brother,” Sostratos said. Menedemos dipped his head. Something went across his face as he did, but it was gone too fast for Sostratos to read it, so he went on as he would have anyhow: “My cousin. As you say, we’ll do what we can. That’s all we’re able to do.”

One of the things Menedemos hadn’t understood about babies was how fast they grew and changed. When he came home from Alexandria, Diodoros had been a little lump of a thing, unable to roll over or smile or do anything but nurse, make messes, and yowl. He’d had a perpetually startled expression. And why not? The world was very new to him.

Now he was almost half a year old. He could laugh and smile. He looked interested all the time, not amazed. He’d figured out how to roll over. He reached for things and stuck them in his mouth when his hand actually got them, which it sometimes did. He’d swallowed a tiny crawling beetle before Baukis could extract it. It didn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm.

He still cried when he was unhappy or wanted something, but he made more intriguing noises, too. They weren’t words yet, but some of them were starting to sound like things that could turn into words. In the same way, you could tell that he would turn into a person.

Baukis brought him down to the courtyard more often. In the coolness of winter, she didn’t need to worry about him baking. The plants in the little garden fascinated him. And she could put an old blanket on the ground and let him roll around on it. He enjoyed that.