Harry Turtledove: Salamis

I have, as best I could, used in this novel the weights, measures, and coinages my characters would have used and encountered in their journey. Here are some approximate equivalents (precise values would have varied from city to city, further complicating things):

1 digit = ¾ inch

12 khalkoi = 1 obolos

4 digits = 1 palm

6 oboloi = 1 drakhma

6 palms = 1 cubit

100 drakhmai = 1 mina (about 1 pound)

1 cubit = 1 ½ feet

60 minai = 1 talent

1 plethron = 100 feet

1 stadion = 600 feet

As noted, these are all approximate. As a measure of how widely they could vary, the talent in Athens was about 57 pounds, while that of Aigina, less than thirty miles away, was about 83 pounds.

The helmet sat heavy on Menedemos’ head. The cheekpieces covered his ears, too, so that he felt as if he had his fingers stuffed in them. Together, the cheekpieces and the nasal squeezed his vision. So did the upper rim of his big, round, bronze-faced hoplite’s shield. The shield was also heavy; keeping it up so it warded the lower half of his face took work.

His right hand closed tighter on the spearshaft. The spear was as long as he was tall, and not a weapon he was used to using. He knew what to do with the sword on his belt, but in this kind of fighting, swords were for emergencies, when you’d lost or broken your spear.

“Come on, you cowardly cur!” his foe shouted, capering in front of him. The Cretan mercenary, equipped much like him, was a lean, tanned, leathery, much-scarred man with a mouthful of broken teeth. His Doric dialect was broader and harsher than the one Rhodians spoke.

“To the crows with you, Heragoras!” Menedemos answered, and thrust at him. The mercenary easily blocked the spear, and went low with his own. Menedemos thought the strike was aimed at his right leg, which was partly protected by a bronze greave. He swung his shield that way to make sure the blow didn’t land home.

That was a mistake. Fast as a striking viper, Heragoras switched the direction of his thrust so the speartip smote Menedemos’ unarmored left shin, not his right. Like Menedemos’, that tip was a bundle of rags, bound on with a rawhide cord, but it still hit hard enough to hurt.

“ Papai! ” Menedemos exclaimed, more from anger at being bested than from the pain. He hated to lose at anything he did.

Heragoras’ snaggle-toothed grin said he knew that. He was a professional fighting man, Menedemos very much an amateur. “You know how you buggered it up, right?” he asked.

Glumly, Menedemos dipped his head to show he did. “My shield—” he began.

“That’s right.” Heragoras dipped his head, too. “You’ve got that greave there for a reason. You don’t have one on the other side ’cause your shield’s supposed to cover that leg. Next time, let the greave do its proper job.”

“It’s an honor to have a panoply,” Menedemos said, by which he meant, My family is rich enough to let me kit myself out . He wasn’t even wearing his corselet. Even on cool spring days like this, you started baking in it after a quarter of an hour.

“It’s an honor to use a panoply,” Heragoras retorted. Gods only knew where he’d got his gear. Stolen it or taken it from men he’d killed, most likely. “So use it. Let’s have another go.”

They did. This time, Heragoras bruised Menedemos’ spear arm. “In a phalanx, my side man’s shield would have blocked that,” Menedemos said, rubbing where he’d got hit.

“Maybe. More likely, you’d be screaming and bleeding.” Heragoras sounded cold as a Phoenician reckoning accounts. That made him more frightening, not less. Letting some of his scorn show, he went on, “You Rhodians are soft. You haven’t had to do any fighting for a while, so you forget how.”

“We’re learning again.” Menedemos waved around the gymnasion. Hardly any of the men there were running or wrestling or working with weights, as they would have in less troubled times. They were throwing javelins or shooting arrows at targets fastened to bales of hay or hacking at one another with wooden swords. Menedemos’ cousin Sostratos, who was tall but ungainly, had just taken a wooden blade in the ribs. Had it been iron, it would have let the air out of him for good.

“Fighting’s not something you pick up when you think it might be handy,” Heragoras said. “Not that you won’t get better, but you won’t get good enough. Fighting’s a trade, like potter or stonecarver or anything else. You do it all the gods-cursed time, till you don’t need to think while you’re doing it.”

“We’re like that on the sea,” Menedemos said. Skipper of his family’s merchant galley in times of peace, he captained a Rhodian trihemiolia—a shark-swift pirate hunter—when he wasn’t buying and selling or when danger threatened.

Heragoras raised his right eyebrow. A vertical scar bisected it; how he hadn’t lost the eye to that wound, Menedemos had no idea. “Reckon you can keep the Demetrios from landing on your island here if he sets his mind to it?” he asked.

“We’re at peace with the Antigonos and his son,” Menedemos said stiffly. “We’re at peace with the Ptolemaios down in Egypt, too. We’re at peace with everyone.”

“For now, y’are.” The Cretan mercenary hawked and spat. “But Egypt is a kakodaimon of a long ways away. Demetrios and Antigonos, they can practically piss on you.” He pointed northeast, across the strait separating Rhodes from the Anatolian mainland.

“Sostratos and I were in Athens last year, when Demetrios … restored the democracy.” Menedemos heard the catch in his own voice. The democracy in Athens, once restored, fell all over itself allying with the young, handsome, personable Demetrios and his old, wily father and voting them ridiculously exaggerated honors.

Heragoras’ leer said he knew all about that. “You figure Rhodes’ll point its backside towards ’em the same way Athens did? I sure don’t. You wouldn’t be makin’ ready for a scrap if you aimed to do that.”

“We want to stay at peace,” Menedemos repeated.

“Sure you do. Sisyphos wants to get that cursed stone all the way up the hill. Tantalos wants hisself”—yes, Heragoras’ Doric drawl was thick, and getting thicker as he warmed to his subject—“a drink o’ water and a bite to eat. What d’you suppose the chances are?”

“If you feel that way, O best one”—Menedemos hoped to make the polite formula sting—“why are you here? Why didn’t you join up with old One-eye and Demetrios instead?”

Antigonos was less lucky than Heragoras here; he’d lost an eye in battle. People sometimes called him Cyclops, but not to his face. No matter how old he was (and he had to be past seventy), he remained large and powerful in lands, in armies and fleets, and in his person.

The Cretan spat again. “He’s just another one o’ them whoresons who want to tell everybody what to do. This here, this is a nice town. Things’re looser here than they would be across the water. Not as loose as they are back home, mind you, but back home a fella can’t hardly make hisself a living.”

Menedemos dipped his head once more. A lot of mercenaries left Crete because the island had nothing for them. And a lot of Cretans who didn’t sell their spears to one of Alexander the Great’s squabbling successors or another turned pirate instead. To Menedemos, that was worse. Mercenaries followed their paymasters’ orders … most of the time, anyhow. Pirates were at war with the world, and especially with Rhodes.