Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"That's right. I sure was." The roustabout snapped his fingers again. "Anyway, like I said, he has this hound named Taxis." Hipparinos, Menedemos thought, would be just the man to name a dog Order. The Krotonite continued, "And Taxis, he got his first look at these chicks and he ate one up before anybody could tell him not to or grab him to keep him from doing it. You could've heard old Hipparinos screaming from the agora all the way to the guard towers on the wall."

"I believe that," Menedemos said. "His precious hound is even more precious now -  it ate up a mina and a half of silver at one gulp."

"A mina and a half? Is that all?" the local said.

"Is that all?" Sostratos echoed, as if he couldn't believe his ears.

"That's what I said, and that's what I meant," the Krotonite told him. "Hipparinos has been saying that miserable little bird cost him five minai."

Menedemos started to tell how Hipparinos had tried to cheat him on the price he'd paid for the two peafowl chicks. Just then, Sostratos had a coughing fit. Menedemos let the story go untold. For a Krotonite to disparage a rich fellow citizen was one thing. For him, a foreigner, to disparage that same man might prove something else again.

After a little more chat, the roustabout did leave. Sostratos hurried back toward the stern and climbed up onto the poop deck. "I don't think we ought to spend much time here at all," he said. "Hipparinos wasn't happy with us when we came here last. Now, thanks to that accursed dog, he'll like us even less."

"And thanks to our giving him the lie about the price he paid," Menedemos added.

"Yes, thanks to that, too," Sostratos agreed. "Besides, we did sell what we could when we were here last. I think we should push on straight to Kallipolis tomorrow morning."

"You're probably right," Menedemos said with a sigh. "The wind's out of the north, though. That means either tacking or rowing, and a two-day trip across the gulf either way."

"Things would be simpler if we could put in at Taras," Sostratos pointed out.

Menedemos glared. "Things would be simpler if you'd keep your mouth shut, too. I'm getting tired of hearing about that."

Had Sostratos pushed it any further, Menedemos would have given him all he wanted and then some. But his cousin just shrugged and said, "We both may be glad not to see each other for a while once we get back to Rhodes." Sostratos pointed north. "What do you make of those clouds?"

After studying them, Menedemos shrugged. "Maybe rain, maybe not. I don't think they look too bad. How about you?"

"They seem the same way to me, too," Sostratos answered, "but I know you've got the better weather eye."

That was true, but it was one more thing Menedemos wouldn't have admitted so casually. He tasted the wind, trying to read the secrets it held. "I think we will get rain if it stays steady. No more than a little rain, though. It's still early in the year for one of those equinoctial storms -  a bit early, anyhow."

"Good," Sostratos said. "I was hoping you'd tell me something like that. Because you're so weatherwise, of course I believe you." Menedemos felt proud of that till he remembered how fond of irony his cousin was.

Sostratos woke before sunrise. The eastern sky was just going from gray to pink. Dawn didn't become spectacularly red. That eased his mind; a red, red, sunrise often warned of bad weather ahead. His gaze swung to the north. The clouds covered more of the sky than they had the day before, but not a great deal more.

From behind him, Menedemos said, "I'd like the weather better if we weren't likely to have to spend a night at sea."

Sostratos started. "I didn't know you were awake."

"Well, I am." Menedemos looked up the pier toward the dark, jumbled mass of houses and shops and temples that made up Kroton.

"Expecting Hipparinos with an army of ruffians at his back?" Sostratos asked.

"An army of ruffians and a Kastorian hound with a taste for peafowl." Menedemos' tone was light, but Sostratos didn't think he he was joking. And, sure enough, he started shaking sailors awake. "Come on, boys," he said. "The sooner we're on the open sea again, the better."

"Says who?" a sleepy man asked around a yawn.

"Says your captain, that's who," Menedemos answered.

"And your toikharkhos," Sostratos added, throwing his obolos of authority after Menedemos' drakhma.

Diokles sat up straight on the rower's bench where he'd slept. "And your keleustes," he said. Formally, his rank was lower than Sostratos'. Among the sailors, though, his word carried more weight.

Hipparinos had not made an appearance, with or without bravos, by the time the Aphrodite left Kroton. "Many good-byes to the town, and to the crows with him and his hungry hound both," Menedemos said.