Over the Wine-Dark Sea

I wonder when I'll come back to Sicily, he thought. I wonder if I'll ever come back to Sicily. He shrugged. No way to know the future.

Menedemos stood at the Aphrodite's stern, his hands on the steering-oar tillers. He dipped his head to Diokles, saying, "Set the stroke."

"Right you are, skipper." The keletustes struck the bronze square with his mallet. To emphasize the rhythm as the merchant galley left port, he raised his voice, too: "Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!"

For swank, Menedemos had every oar manned as the Aphrodite left the Little Harbor. The rowers did him proud, their oars rising and falling in smooth unison. Of course, Sostratos thought, it's a lazyman's pace, nothing like what we did when we were running from that Roman trireme -  or when we turned back towards it! What an adventure that was!

He paused in bemusement and some dismay. I'll be telling the story of that trireme for the rest of my life, and I'll sound more like a hero every time I do. He didn't care for men his father's age who bored dinner parties with tales of their swashbuckling youth, but he suddenly saw how they came to be the way they were. A historian is supposed to understand causes, he thought, but then he tossed his head. This was one of which he would sooner have stayed ignorant.

As Syracuse receded behind the merchant galley, Menedemos took more than half the sailors off the oars. The ship glided up the Sicilian coast toward the mainland of Italy. Dolphins leaped. Terns splashed into the sea, some only a few cubits from the Aphrodite. One came out with a fish in its beak.

"You'll have an easy trip home," Menedemos called to him from the stern. "No more peafowl to worry about."

"I'm so disappointed they're gone," Sostratos answered.

Not only his cousin but half the sailors laughed. Aristeidas the lookout said, "The foredeck still smells like birdshit."

"You're right -  it does," Sostratos agreed. "It probably will for a while, too."

"So it will," Aristeidas said darkly. "Now that you don't have to take care of peafowl any more, you can go wherever you like on the ship. Me, I'm stuck up here most of the time."

You can go wherever you like. Aristeidas had said it without irony, and Sostratos took it the same way. Then he thought about what a landlubber would make of it. The Aphrodite was only forty or forty-five cubits long, and perhaps seven cubits wide at her beamiest. From the perspective of someone used to strolling through a polis or across his fields, that didn't give a man much room. A sailor, though, had a much more cramped view of what was roomy and what wasn't.

As if to prove as much, Sostratos went back to the poop deck, which to him felt as far from the smelly foredeck as Athens was from Rhodes. Menedemos asked him, "What have we got left to trade on the way home?"

"A little wine," Sostratos answered. "Some perfume. I'd like to get rid of that, if we see the chance -  taking it back to Rhodes would be a shame, when it came from there. And we still have some silk." He sighed.

Menedemos took a hand off the steering oar to poke him in the ribs. "I know what you're thinking of: that copper-haired Keltic girl you were screwing in Taras."

Sostratos' ears heated; he had indeed been thinking of Maibia, in and especially out of the Koan silk tunic she wore. "Well, what if I was?" he asked roughly.

"It's all right with me." As usual when the talk rolled around to women, Menedemos sounded disgustingly cheerful. "I've got plenty to think about myself."

"If you'd do some thinking beforehand . . ." Sostratos said.

"That takes away half the fun. More than half," he cousin answered.

"I don't see it that way," Sostratos said with a shrug.

"I know you don't." Menedemos leaned forward and spoke in a low voice: "Just exactly how much silver are we carrying? In the name of the gods, don't yell out the answer. The last thing we want to do is give the sailors ideas." In something close to a whisper, Sostratos told him. Menedemos whistled softly. "That's even more than I figured. It's almost enough for ballast."

"On a ship this size?" Sostratos made the automatic mental calculation, then tossed his head. "Don't be silly."

"Mm, I suppose not." By the look of concentration on his face, Menedemos was making the same calculation. "But I'll tell you this: it's more silver than my father expected us to bring back. And I'll rub his nose in it, too."

"Why bother?" Sostratos asked. "Uncle Philodemos will be glad to see you home safe, and he'll be glad of the profit. Isn't that enough?"

"No, by Zeus." A hot eagerness thrummed in Menedemos' voice, like a following wind in the rigging. "Ever since I started toddling around and stopped making messes on the floor, he's always gone on and on about what a great trader he is and how I don't measure up. Let's see him talk like that now."

"I didn't come out here thinking to outdo my father," Sostratos said.