Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"I've never had a merchant speak to me that way in all my life," the Kallipolitan said. Sostratos believed it. All he did was shrug. Menedemos matched him. The Kallipolitan spluttered wordlessly, then caught his stride. "Oh, very well. If you insist on being unreasonable, I suppose I can go to thirty drakhmai."

Normally, that would have been the start of a dicker. A dicker had started before Alexidamos interrupted things. Now, Sostratos just tossed his head. He said, "No," and not another word.

"Thirty-five, then." The local turned red. Anger or embarrassment?

Embarrassment, Sostratos judged. "My cousin told you sixty," he said. "Sixty it will be." He had, for once, the freedom of not caring whether or not he sold the wine. It felt exhilarating, as if he'd had a couple of quick nips from the amphora himself.

"You're not being reasonable," the Kallipolitan protested. "Here, now -  I'll give you forty drakhmai. That's more than your precious Khian is worth."

"No," Sostratos said again. "Our price is sixty. If you want the wine, you'll pay it."

And the man from Kallipolis did pay it. He took a while to talk himself into it, and tried to get the two Rhodians to agree to forty-five, fifty, and fifty-five drakhmai first. Sostratos yawned in his face. Menedemos, who could be the most engaging of men when he wanted to, turned his back. The Kallipolitan stomped away. When he returned, a slave behind him, he threw a leather sack full of drakhmai at Sostratos almost as hard as Sostratos had thrown the stone at Alexidamos. Sostratos carefully counted the coins before dipping his head to his cousin.

As the local had the slave carry the amphora back toward his house, Sostratos sighed and said, "Thus we bid farewell to our brief layover in Kallipolis, a small polis where nothing interesting ever happens."

Menedemos stared at him, then started to laugh. "If only it were so," he said.

"Now we just have to hope Alexidamos doesn't go after any of our tavern-crawling sailors tonight," Sostratos said.

"No." His cousin tossed his head. "If that gods-detested mercenary is in any shape to go after our boys tonight after what you did to his beak, he's tougher than Talos, the man made all of bronze."

Sostratos considered that. "Well, maybe you're right."

Diokles pounded his bronze square with his mallet hard enough to make a lot of the Aphrodite's sailors wince as the merchant galley left the harbor of Kallipolis. Menedemos leaned forward toward his crapulous crew and favored them with the smile of a man who'd stayed sober. "Next stop, boys, is Hellas," he said.

He got a few answering smiles. He also got a few answering groans. Diokles said, "Some of 'em don't want to live long enough to get to Hellas."

"But they all will by this afternoon," Menedemos replied. "Hangovers don't kill you. You just wish they would."

Sostratos mounted to the poop deck. "And how shall we go back to Rhodes?" he asked. "Around Cape Tainaron again, or by the diolkos across the Isthmus of Corinth?"

"I don't know yet," Menedemos answered. "We have a good notion of the risks at Cape Tainaron. But who knows what's happened in and around Corinth while we've been out here in Great Hellas? How can we guess whether we should use the diolkos till we know who controls the polis?"

"Hmmm," Sostratos said, and then, "You've got something there, no doubt about it."

"Nice of you to admit it," Menedemos said. His cousin made a face at him. Ignoring it, he went on, "We can put in at Korkyra and hear the news there before we decide what to do."

"You're not going to sail southeast toward Zakynthos and reverse the way we came?"

"No. It's getting late in the sailing season for me to want to chance so much time on the open sea," Menedemos answered. "The cranes will be flying south for the winter pretty soon, and not many people want to do much on the water after that. How did Aristophanes put it in the Birds?"

"I don't know. How did he put it?" Sostratos said. "If you remember it, it was probably foul."

"That's not fair," Menedemos said indignantly. "Aristophanes could write lovely verses about anything at all."

"Or sometimes about nothing at all," Sostratos said.

"Not here," Menedemos said. "It goes something like this:

'Time to sow when the croaking crane migrates to Libya Which tells the shipmaster to lie idle after hanging up his steering oar.' "

"Well, all right. That isn't bad," Sostratos allowed.

"Do you think you can stand being so generous?" Menedemos said. He loved Aristophanes both for his poetry and for his bawdy wit. Sostratos, he knew, admired some of the verse but wanted nothing to do with the lewdness that went hand in hand with it.

To his surprise, his cousin answered seriously: "Being generous to Aristophanes isn't easy for me, you know. If it weren't for the way he pictured Sokrates in the Clouds, the Athenians might not have decided to make him drink hemlock."

"He's been dead for a hundred years - " Menedemos began.

"Not quite ninety," Sostratos broke in.